No One Came - DPAS Editor Simon's PageThere is life outside worshipping Deep Purple 1968-1976 (and bits since). So here's a few bits to prove I do sometimes stop fondling the Fireball sleeve and working on the next magazine long enough to get out... .........
It was here that stainless steel was first manufactured into cutlery. It is listed Grade 2 star. The owners want to evict all the small steel manufacturers (and close the band rehearsal rooms as well - these sort of sites have provided many a group with a start in life as no-one can hear them over the noise of the steel working!) and turn it into yet more cheap flats. You can read more about the campaign and history of the place at www.portlandworks.co.uk ......... Hey ho, another day, another bank manager trying to shut my bank account down. I mean, what difference does it make to them what my credit limit is? But by unilaterally reducing it by three quarters, it makes the account almost useless. And my crime? I don't use it enough and when we did we paid it off each month. Big mistake. The same mob did shut one of my cheque accounts down last month without telling me because it had been overdrawn by 89p for four weeks (despite this being well within our agreed overdraft!). I did notice that they had cleared this debt from their own coffers before shutting it, so that's 89p of the £5,000 every tax payer in this country has coughed up to support the banking 'industry' clawed back then. It's enough to... well as a similarly exasperated customer of another bank said today when he called to order a CD, it's a toss up whether he or his credit card expires first these days! .........
A percentage of the profits will be donated to the charity. You can find out more at Neil's web site. ......... Universally Challenged They managed to get the starter for ten, Queen, but then stumbled over Dave Gilmour, Mark Knopfler and... Ritchie Blackmore, after Paxman played them a nice burst of Highway Star. Yet asked about some obscure polymer formula and they were on the button. Tsoch. Mind you it did mean that for the first time ever my and Ann's combined score was higher than the winning team this week..! Having actually been offered a place on a University MA course this autumn though, it did seem on my induction day as if us 'mature' part- timers were there just to make up the numbers. One guy's folio was so poor and his grasp of English so weak you wondered how he was going to make it through lectures, while they were still hoping to have a Senegali student join us as soon as they could get him to understand what the word 'folio' meant. Very disappointed, I made my excuses and left before any money changed hands. .......... We don't often have any cash spare, but on those odd occasions when we do, a trip out to the David Mellor cutlery factory - which is only about 9 miles from where we live - often suggests itself. It's no good me chuntering about the crappy foreign made cutlery which has decimated the local industry if I don't try and buck the trend, and slowly assembling a couple of place settings of Mellor cutlery to replace our ragbag assortment of second hand vintage Sheffield knives and forks has been a real joy. And while you may not know his cutlery, if you have waited at traffic lights, put your rubbish in a litter bin, sat at a bus stop or used an Eclipse fretsaw, you may well have seen his work, as he had a hand in designs for all of these. David Mellor's death has not made huge waves except within design circles (you can read a touching obituary here:) http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/may/08/obituary-david- mellor-designer but his life's work will outlast that of just about every supposed celebrity you care to mention. He lived long enough to see a smart
permanent exhibition of his designs built next to the factory, and if
you're in the Peak District on holiday this is well worth a look.
Lastly it's a long shot, but if anyone comes across the plastic
disposable cutlery set Mellor designed in the sixties for sale
anywhere, grab it for me... .......... Following up on my rather dispirited words on record shops, some figures gleaned from recent articles suggest that 540 indie stores have closed in the last four years. According to the boss of Proper Music (who are one of the UKs indie CD and LP distributors), this means that there will be none left at all in three years. Anyhow, some of the stores, led by Rough Trade in London, and others are having the first Record Store Day on Saturday 18 April, to encourage people to visit a store near them. Figures printed in The Guardian supplied by the Entertainment Retailers Association show that record stores had their heyday in the 1980s when there were 2,200 indie stores; by 1994 there were 1,200. Today only 305 remain. I'm not sure how reliable these figures are, or how far back they go, but that's newspapers for you. For example for fun, I've been collecting old 78rpm sleeves from long lost Sheffield shops. Back before LPs, and album covers, 78s were sold in card covers, overprinted with details of the shop they came from. So far I've found over 40 different ones, many with more than one branch listed. If this were repeated over the whole country, I suspect the total number of record outlets would far outstrip 1980s 2,200! Sadly I've been unable to persuade Ann how fabulous all these old covers would look framed on a wall though... .......... Ticketmaster paid out $350,000 in compensation in February 2009 after Bruce Springsteen took action against the company last year. Ticketmaster have set up a new site - Ticketexchange or Ticketnow - on which people with spare tickets can resell them officially through Ticketmaster. At whatever price they want! And there's no way to stop touts just using this new site themselves. Many Bruce fans trying to buy tickets off the agency found themselves instead put through to this new reselling site, with prices many times higher. The company have promised to stop this happening in future. But they still see no problem in letting touts buy loads of tickets and then flog them on at vast profits. Only this way they get another cut. You couldn't make it up........... Another Indie Record Store Closes: Depressing news on the record shop front continues with the news that Selectadisc in Nottingham closes at the end of March 2009. This large indie store, close to the Royal Centre and Rock City and always a handy place to hang out for an hour or so when in town for a concert, began life as a market stall way back in 1966, before opening as a shop proper on the edge of town and then moving into town. What was always good about the place was the sheer depth of the stock. You wouldn't just get one or two titles by an act, but half a dozen or more. They were always keen stockists of RPM and Purple Records titles too, and it was always nice to see our releases in the racks when we popped by (and it was something we did a couple of times a year at least). The shop, which expanded to three floors, was also a big supporter of vinyl, hassling majors for titles to reissue when they felt there was a market. It seems that the opening close-by of bargain bucket store Fopp took a lot of student business away from them, and as the Nottingham Fopp was one of the select few branches HMV have taken over (the chain closed last year), it made Selectadisc less and less viable. In a week which saw Sheffield's branch of Zavvi shut, leaving the country's fourth biggest city with just HMV by way of major record shops, it's dismal news for people who like to browse. Selectadisc did have a London store, now called Sister Ray.
Yet this archive release, titled Hot City, is fascinating. Singer Alex Harvey has been really mixed up, so you can marvel at his delivery, and while some of the tracks do sound like demos compared to the proper album, it's great to hear this early version. It also contains a blistering version of The Tomahawk Kid, which is worth the price of admission alone. Anyway, if you're new to the band look for their regular albums, but if you're already a fan, well worth investigating. And if you like some of the live pictures in the packaging, then these were taken in Sheffield way back when, and it's great to see them used (even if the sleeve design does look a bit Poundstretcher to me!). PURPLE CONNECTIONS? SAHB supported DP Mk 3 and Ritchie joined them on stage for a jam one night. On bass! Plus Chris and Ted were in Ian Gillan's band for a tour during his absence from the reunion. .......... Easy On The Eye : the name I now use to do artwork jobs any much else besides. It arose from an exhibition of easy listening record sleeve art we put on in Blackpool in 1999. It has now developed into a website and publishing venture centred on pop and popular culture with the first books due out any time. www.easyontheeye.net Humour : bargain of the month has turned out to be two volumes of writer and acerbic TV reviewer Charlie Brooker's outpourings which turned up in the overstock bin at HMV in town (yes we still have a record shop) for £3 each. As the writer of Father Ted put it, we should be grateful to Brooker for watching all this crap on TV so we don't have to. It's made me laugh out loud throughout, something I've not had from a book since I finished Thackery's Vanity Fair. Genius. Wrong : they've sold Bob Marley. You can now license his likeness to sell / slap on just about anything you care to produce. I thought we'd reached a new low with John Lydon advertising butter on TV and vintage film of Edith Piaf being used to flog spectacles. But I was wrong. It's so tempting to dream up a number of disgusting products and apply and see just how low Marley's estate's agents will sink. |
Just doing my bit to try and spread the word. The Portland Works
(round the corner from Bramall Lane football ground) is now the last
surviving complete set of small cutlery manufacturing works in the
city of Sheffield where people still operate in the metal trade.
Congraters to Neil Cutler, a long-standing DPAS member, who is one of nine artists chosen to design a t-shirt for the charity Fundación Artículo 1, whose aim is to spread the message of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through art.
The
Sensational Alex Harvey Band:home page