I don’t like Swedes, I don’t like any root vegetable

I hate Ikea, no that’s not right, I really fucking hate Ikea, it makes me angry.
Today’s Ikean adventure began before we even entered the sodding shop, driving around the car park for twenty minutes with a pissed off two year old in the back, me saying “look just park the car in B&Q and we can walk”, but no we have to park here.
Then we have the fourteen people and four pushchairs in the lift experience before the final dash to find what we want and pay for it. When I say final dash I am using a certain amount of license, an hour and a half just to find a frigging notice board and then get out.
I reckon that Ikea is Swedish for wanker.

Shocking

It's amazing what crap turns up when you are having a sort out, check out this suplement that came with Kerrang 358 in september '91

Could you imagine Ozzy naked now? ..............shudder

family outings

All metal heads want to be rock stars, it’s a given. I now formally pass my torch on to my children.
I do this for two reasons;1) I am getting to old and 2) I am absolutely talentless.

Why is this relevant? Even the coolest Hendrix/Cobain/Vicious wannabe has family; mums and dads can be such a drag on your street cred. How can you form the new Iron Maiden when your dad keeps telling you to cut your hair or you have to collect your little sister from the local catholic junior school, or worse still your mother is on your back about getting a job?

Before I got a full time job my mum insisted on dragging me shopping every Monday(it may have been Tuesday) to Asda’s in Tilbury, this I could handle and even after I started working I would still sometimes go with her just to try and be an embarrassment and to take the piss out of her friends. Family outings however where something different.

Only a few spring to mind though there must have been many more. There was a trip to Clacton organised by mum’s church, she made me dress fairly respectably (jeans and plain t-shirt) and I had to behave. After sitting on the beach for about half an hour I made my excuses(find a toilet) and left, my brother found me about two hours later wearing a sleeveless guns’n’roses t-shirt with “shit happens” stamped across it, some itsybitsy sunglasses and three and a half empty newky brown bottles. I had found a market stall that supplied the essentials and a shop selling bottle openers, what more do you need?
Needless to say I don’t think mum was impressed.
Another one was a trip to London zoo with my dad, brother and sisters. My dad was the last person I wanted to spend the day with but felt I had a duty to go(something to do with him paying for a tickets and us begging him to take us, seems to have forgotten we had asked him about two years earlier), my brother and I snuck off and spent ages trying to convince the lady in the shop to sell me some fags, I went all day with out a smoke, fucking great, nearly 19 and the bitch refused me, this after a lecture about not becoming a hippy and the usual haircut routine, stomping around a blazing hot stinking zoo, trying to be interested in a bunch of animals that I couldn’t give a toss about, and this was on a Saturday which I rarely got off work, I could have been somewhere else with beer.
Ditto a trip to the Southend air show, though on this occasion I bumped into my mates, left dad with the siblings (he can be quite understanding at times) and off we went to the cliffs pavilion to pay extortionate amounts of money for warm beer, seemed all the metallers had the same idea, it had an almost gig like atmosphere.

Its my turn now, I have the moody disinterested child in tow, though she has yet to discover alcohol, and it probably wont be long before child number two joins her.

Love/Hate

Remember Love/Hate?
I was never a big fan though I absolutely loved Black Out In The Red Room and Wasted In America, both of which I have on vinyl but would not bother to buy on cd just for two songs, but hey, you can download the whole lot of love/hate for free on their website plus they have great stories.

I always saw them as a sort of pregrunge anti-glam, as sort of scuzzy Motley Crue, another band my friends thought was a complete waste of time, but my tastes always seemed slightly out of tune.

go punk

Every body and I mean everybody must go to this site.
It should be law
punk-o-matic

play list

My current stack of cd’s by my stereo is:
Little of the past-little angels (newest purchase so obviously it’s going to be there)
Down fall all the good guys-wolfsbane (oldest cd in the pile)
Black holes and revelations-muse (brilliant (actually my daughters but im bigger than her))
Costello music- the fratellis (when my daughter hasn’t stolen it)
Edward the great-iron maiden
The very best of Nina simone-nina Simone (sooo cool)
Mix cd-inc. quireboys, dogs d’amour, black crows and the almighty (and to my shame some g’n’r)

What you up to?

a little of the present

All hail eBay!
I have just received (and listened too) Little Of The Past by Little Angels, fantastic.
Released on the 11th April 1994, it covers most of the stuff they did (as far as I know) though I was disappointed to see DoYouWanna Riot was not on the CD (though I downloaded this from kazaa a few years ago so that doesn’t matter too much).
I also read that their first headline at Hammersmith sold out on 25th may 1991 so I checked my old ticket stub, and hey guess what? Rick and I must have bought a couple of the last few tickets if not the last. I remember hanging around the box office until it opened and being told that they only had tickets left with a restricted view, when we asked what this meant we were told there was probably a pillar or something in the way, turned out it was front row next to a stack of speakers. I still have problems hearing people to this day but that may have more to do with a short attention span and a don’t really give a fuck attitude.

Still a good listen, not sure how I got from this to Rammstein though.

name the year

when was this picture taken?

Wow, Bruce Dickinson does a radio show for BBC 6, I was searching for The Almighty (the band not THE ALMIGHTY) when I found it, and I am listening to it as I type.
This almost started as a piece about Sarah Jane Honeywell from tikkabilla (I am watching far too much cbeebies at the moment, its hard having a stroppy two year old).
Back to The Almighty, according to kerrang they are about to release a sort of greatest hits cd covering the last god knows how many years, I don’t think I’ll buy it, I would rather try and get the original albums. Thank god for eBay.

I will soon be able to give you views on Trivium as my daughter has decided that this is the latest band she is into, from what I’ve heard so far they sound a bit like Metallica or Helloween with screaming. Her birthday is soon and she has put an album on her prezzy list.

Back to Q magazine, I bought this for my wife because it had a 28 page article on U2, it contains an interview on the band from none other than chief toss pot Tony Blair (wanker), and I think that says it all for Bono.

voice of rock

I have stumbled across(ok I got the web address from q magazine) a John Peel blogsite that gives loads of downloads for sessions by all sorts of artists, the site in turn links to shit loads of others dedicated to the late prince of alternative and obscure music. With John Peel and Tommy Vance now both gone, who do we have left as the voice of rock?

Well Lauren Laverne works for me.

the next generation

So the next bunch of rock fans is with us. Last weekend was my mums 60th birthday, it involved a small gathering of family who though all live locally rarely see each other (we are very close). To my amusement it seems all the kids between 12 and 16 are EMO . My daughter, my cousins two kids and my youngest cousin were all dressed the part, converse shoes, fall out boy wrist bands, skulls and whatnot every where. What’s really funny is that none of them talked to each other, all related , all into the same music and each to their own misery bubble, one for each corner of the room so to speak.

I discovered my cousin(of the two kids) was also not so square as I had believed, I thought his closest relationship to rock was listening to queen or dire straits but he surprised me by gloating he is of to see muse later this year and saw green day last year. Bastard.

I like muse, or at least I like their latest album, it’s like the bastard lovechild of black Sabbath and queen doing the sound track to a spaghetti western set on mars. In fact I would say it’s my most listened to CD at the moment.

Just before Christmas I managed to get hold of another Wolfsbane CD, massive noise injection is one fucking funny live album, as a rule I don’t normally do live albums but Blaze Bailey’s dialogue with the crowd is just brilliant, who else can threaten to kill members of the audience if they don’t start dancing?

Getting back to my daughter, almost 13 and developing into quite the rock fan, she came down stairs on Christmas day in a Nirvana t-shirt, black converse and a tatty pair of jeans; it was like 1992 all over again. This week she has been trying to dye her hair purple or red, instead she just managed to make a mess of the bathroom, she has also started to buy kerrang (which saves me from having to do it) and is now stealing some of my more contempory CD’s (funny enough not the Wolfsbane though).