Where Worlds Collide

There’s been a lot of anger and frustration expressed on various web forums over the drastically shortened slot for Mostly Autumn at the Cambridge Rock Festival, when what had been planned as a 90 minute set got shortened to just 40. Various rumours have been circulating, some blaming things on Marillion, others on Radio Caroline, with the most likely culprit being Andy Fairweather Low’s organisation.

The festival organiser, Dave Roberts, posted this on the Rockingbeerfest Feedback Forum which lays at least some of the conspiracies to rest.

My apologies that the Mostly Autumn set was cut short, my stage crew are unable to explain it - the secondhand information I had initially was just via the onstage announcement by the band, that they were coming off early and comments from one of the sound engineers that there was a problem with the guitar pedal board (which caused the delay at start of set). Since speaking to Bryan it seems my original understanding that there was a technical issue with some of the bands kit was not the reason for the early close of the set. Radio Caroline were ready to go with the following set whenever it started and did not interfere in any way with the running times. CRFs stage crew were having a short break at the time so were not at all ready to do a change over when MA unexpectedly came off, the upshot is that we are not aware of who spoke to the band to cut the set. However this has occurred and I am as disappointed as you that we did not get the full set from MA .

Only that just opens some new cans of worms. Exactly who was it that ordered the Mostlies off stage? Was it some junior member of the RBF crew who had no authorisation to do such a thing? Or someone else entirely? I think the following band owe us all an explanation.

All is not lost. Dave Roberts continues:

I have spoken with Bryan today and have arranged a special gig for Mostly Autumn to perform at the Junction on Thursday 11th December - with no support band so we can provide a full double set with the Junction’s new state of the art digital sound system, I hope this will go some way towards lessening our shared disappointment.

It’s a Thursday, and it’s midweek, so I’m not sure what the finances and annual leave situation will be that late in the year. We’ll have to see if I can make it.

The Cambridge Rock Festival (formerly the Rock and Beer Festival) took place in the unlikely venue of the Wood Green Animal Shelter in Godmanchester, just outside Huntingdon. Given the vagaries of the British excuse for a summer, this one took place in an indoor arena. That turned out to be a large cow-shed like building, whose acoustics were actually a lot better than you’d expect.

With both Mostly Autumn and Breathing Space on Sunday’s bill, along with The Reasoning, whose fan base has a big overlap, the festival saw the biggest gathering of Mostly Autumn fans since the convention last March; an awful lot of familiar faces there, far too many to name, and apologies to anyone I didn’t get the chance to say hello to. Add to that a bar with an extremely large selection of real ales, most of which I’d never heard of, so ordering a beer was a matter of choosing something at random.

Local blues band Taildragger opened the proceedings; competent and tight but rather generic; as a friend of mine remarked, blues bands all tend to sound the same. Bijoumiyo were rather better; a mix of funk and reggae basslines with psychedelic guitar, quite unlike anything else on the bill.

The first two acts played to a largely empty hall; clearly the prog fans had time their arrival to get there in time for Touchstone’s set. I’d seen them a year and a bit ago supporting The Reasoning; frontwoman Kim Seviour’s first ever gig, and that was a somewhat nervous performance. Today they played a confident and energetic set, mostly drawn from their album Discordant Dreams. Probably the proggiest band of the day, but with a hard-rock edge. You could tell they were clearly enjoying their time on stage, and went down well with the growing crowd. I think this performance probably earned them quite a few new fans.

Breathing Space played an absolute blinder. For the biggest gig of their career so far, they rose to the occasion with a superbly tight set, the best band of the first half of the day, helped by having just about the best sound of any band at the festival. There’s little I can say about Breathing Space I haven’t said before; a bit poppy for some tastes, perhaps, showcasing Livvy Sparnenn’s fantastic lead vocals, but there’s still enough instrumental depth to keep prog fans interested. Aside from Livvy, the rest of the band shone too, especially guitarist Mark Rowan. Livvy’s striking mermaid costume was definitely the stage outfit of the day.

John Otway’s pub-rock meets standup comedy shtick isn’t really my cup of tea, I’m afraid, and I missed part of his set in search of food. But I have to say his set closer of The Osmond’s “Crazy Horses” with the theramin solo was entertaining.

The Reasoning’s set was one of the most eagerly awaited of the day’s lineup, their first gig with their new guitarist Owain Roberts. They played strong hard rocking set, mixing favourites from “Awakening”, a great version of the Karnataka oldie “Talk to Me” with several songs from the forthcoming “Dark Angel”, including the prog-metal masterpiece of the title track, and the live debut of one called ‘Call Me God?’. Marillion’s Steve Rothery guested with them for “Within Cold Glass”. They did suffer from more than a few technical glitches and sound mix problems, which took the edge off things slightly, which meant they didn’t quite top Breathing Space’s earlier set.

I felt sorry for Jim and Geoffrey. As an acoustic duo (guitar and violin) they struggled to hold the attention of an audience that had been rocked out by the previous band, and despite being quite good, they died horribly. I’d love to see them in a small club venue, where might make more of an impression.

If the number of t-shirts was anything to go by, Mostly Autumn had the greatest fan support of any band on the bill. So many people were seriously annoyed when they got half-an-hour lopped off their set because the following band apparently insisted on having a whole hour to set up rather than the half-hour everyone else had. To make matters worse, problems with Bryan’s guitar setup delayed the start, so the band ended up playing for just 40 minutes or so, to the intense disappointment of both the band and their legion of fans. But for that short set the band were absolutely on fire; a storming ‘Fading Colours’, a really intense ‘Unoriginal Sin’ and a fantastic ‘Heroes’. Heather’s stage outfit certainly caused one or two jaws to drop; wearing a catsuit when seven month’s pregnant took some courage. Had they had the opportunity to play their originally planned setlist they would have been the band of the day without question.

In contrast, Andy Fairweather Low was the nadir of the day. As someone who’s had a few hits aeons ago, and had since been an anonymous sidesman of other people, he had neither the charisma nor the material to play such a long set this high on the bill. His interminably long set seemed to consist mainly of 50s and 60s covers, with perfunctory takes on his few hits. As someone it’s probably better not to name said “Who wants to listen to this wank? Just because he’s been on Later with Jools Holland”. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Music for chin-stroking Mojo readers perhaps, not not music for the sort of Rock fans who made up this audience.

And so, headliners Marillion. A band I’ve been a fan of for longer than members of some bands lower down the bill have been alive, playing a 90-minute festival set. To be truthful this wasn’t in the same league as the two awe-inspiring shows I saw in 2007; still good, but lacking the sort of intensity I’ve seen in past gigs. H was on fine form despite evident lack of sleep due to being the father of a five week old baby. “Sleepless nights, very rock and roll”, as he said. I’d love to have seen Heather’s and Ian’s reaction to that line! They played what amounted to a greatest hits set of the post-Fish era, favourites like ‘Easter’, their recent hit ‘She’s Gone’, ‘Afraid of Sunlight’, ‘King’ and the encore ‘Neverland’. Still very good, but for me at least failed to top the Mostlies, despite their truncated set.

While what happened to the Mostlies put a bit of a damper on an otherwise great day, in the end the event was bigger than any individual band. The whole festival had a relaxed air, members of many of the bands mingling with fans throughout the day, helped by the fact that there was no backstage bar. And there seemed to be no egos involved, with one possible exception. That laid-back approach probably would not have worked at a bigger festival, but here it added to atmosphere; the whole thing felt like a fan convention of sorts. It made me wish I’d camped and made a weekend of it.

Mermaid Kiss explain their concept behind their current work-in-progress album American Images. Yes, they’re a prog band - an album’s got to have a concept.

Although I have never been to America, I have a good idea of what it’s like. In my head are cities, deserts, buttes, mountains, canyons, houses, cars, people, lakes, rivers, lots of empty space. And roads. Especially roads.

Evelyn’s never to been to America either. I harbor a desire to sling a couple of guitars in the back of a beat up Buick (it wouldn’t have to be a Buick, anything distinctly American would do) and play our way across the USA, taking our time, stopping off whenever and wherever we feel - staying as much as possible on the back roads where we believe the real heartland of America lies.

This fantasy, is, of course, fueled by watching far too many US road movies with evocative soundtracks… As we planned our imaginary journey from picturesque Boston to the bright lights of New York, down via the Appalachian Mountains where time stands still, and on to the steamy South (ours is to be no straight ‘coast to coast’ trip), it dawned on us that the America we were driving through is the America of films and of music - an America uncorrupted by reality.

They’ll be telling me they’ve never actually been to Etalis next.

I’ve only been to America on business trips to Atlanta, GA, back in the days before George Bush and the War on Terror. I have no desire to go there now. To me, America resembles a gigantic version of Milton Keynes. Not quite sure if that’s quite what Mermaid Kiss are after.

On the other hand, what about the HO-scale Americas built by various Americanophile railway modellers in Britain? I’m thinking of things like the small crumbling small prairie town of Godinez, Iowa, featured in the July issue of Continental Modeller. Or all those grain elevators (every layout seems to have one).

It’s only July, and gigs for October and November are getting seriously silly.

October sees a bad crunch of gigs; I’d planned to catch two of The Reasoning’s dates, Crewe and either Cardiff or London. Now I find that the Saturday night London show clashes with Karnataka in Rotherham, which is the only one of their short tour that I can easily get to. And to end an exhausting weekend, Breathing Space play Crewe Limelight on the Sunday. It could theoretically mean four gigs in four days.

And to cap it all, Panic Room will be touring in October, but have yet to announce any dates.

November sees Marillion, Fish (with The Reasoning as support), Uriah Heep, Opeth and Mostly Autumn all on the road in the same two-week period - there are already two bad clashes

4 days to go to the Cambridge Rock Festival, where Sunday night’s bill stars Marillion, Mostly Autumn, The Reasoning and Breathing Space, of whom I have said a lot in this blog, along with Andy Fairweather Low, “Jim and Bob from Caravan”, John Otway, Touchstone and a couple of other bands of which I know little.

Should be a truly progtastic day.

Did I also mention there are a lot of good beers (none of this nothing but overpriced Carling nonsense)?

Taking a holiday in the Euro zone, that is.

I’ve confirmed my booking for a holiday split between St.Goar-am-Rhein in Germany and Namur in the Belgian Ardennes. Both places I passed through on my way to Switzerland last year.

With the pound doing so badly that British model railway manufacturers can actually think about exporting stuff, going to a Euro country isn’t exactly the cheap option. But nothing in Britain really appeals to me this year (you can have scenery or trains, but not both), and going somewhere outside the Euro zone means going somewhere further away than can easily be reached by train. With the current levels of security theatre at airports I’m not willing to fly and have the airline lose my baggage.

Still, Germany and especially Belgium are renowned for good beer. Provided I can actually afford any…

I’ve followed Carl Cravens over to the dark side, and set up a twitter account - my username is “Kalyr”. Time will tell if it’s any use - depends how many people I know are on it.

I’ve lost count of the number of Stabcons I’ve been to now. I missed the first part of this one due to the charity concert in York, but managed to get there by about lunchtime to find a large room filled with a great many familar faces.

Getting there late meant that many games in which I’d liked to have played were already filled up - I noticed Mike Cule was running Vincent Baker’s “In A Wicked Age” on the Sunday, which would have been fun. Fortunately there was a slot in Mark Baker’s marathon Unknown Armies game running from 5pm until late on Saturday, so I signed up for that.

It turned out to involve time travel; what started as a tube journey early on a Sunday morning turned out as a trudge through the Fleet sewer, in which we emerged in 1829. Out attempts to get back home lead us to various times which increasingly diverged from our own timeline; at various points we killed the vampire Jack the Ripper and encountered Princess Elizabeth as a member of the British Resistance in the abandoned tube tunnels beneath Nazi-occupied London. Eventually we managed to fix the timeline, and get back to what would have been our own time but for some very bad dice rolling; everything was as it should have been except that both our London tube train and the Virgin Pendolinos at Euston appeared to be powered by Stirling Engines.

Sunday’s game was very different - Pete Crowther’s game of Toon. Which was very, very silly indeed. I wrote up a Toon version of Bug, from the Guardians of Dimension games from Gypsycon. Other characters included a 50′ high robot and a squirrel. The plot was probably impossible to summarise, but included live-action Space Invaders, a fight in a tea-room, aeroplanes getting coated in cottage pie, the Welsh village of Llandofmyfathers, and an arch-villains base in the volcanic crater in Mt Snowdon.

Next Stabcon is from the 2nd to 4th January - see you there!

I’ve never been a unadvertised private invite-only gig before.

Although I’ve already seen Breathing Space four times this year, and it meant missing the first day of Stabcon, I felt this benefit show for the brain tumour charity Andrea’s Gift was something I just had to go to. Especially when I’d been personally invited.

It had a very different feel to a regular gig; I guessing everyone there knew Howard Sparnenn; a lot of family friends, although there were quite a big group of Breathing Space fans, with just about all the regulars present. Two big screens either side of the stage shows a series of pictures of Howard, ranging from recent gig photos to holiday snaps from years ago, which served to remind us of why we were here.

I estimated there were about two hundred people there, I’m told they sold all the tickets, and raised more than £3000 for charity. The downside was the with a lot of people there not being fans of the music, the gig was marred slightly by a lot of talking when the band were playing - Livvy Sparnenn actually had to ask people to be quiet at one point. I’m sorry to say that two individuals I won’t name but were both firmly in the ‘stoat eyed acolyte’ camp were among the worst offenders.

Breathing Space played two sets, with much the same setlist as they’d been playing this year, with the addition of the cover of “Autumn Leaves”, specially requested by Livvy’s mum Jeanette. Between the two sets we saw a one-off reunion of Howard’s 70′s band Flight, a blues-rock four-piece playing a mix of originals and covers, including some of Howard’s songs.

I’d noticed the whole of Mostly Autumn were present in the audience; in fact Heather Findlay was sitting right next to me during Breathing Space’s second set, making me wonder if I should really have worn that Marillion t-shirt to the gig. I wasn’t expecting The Mostlies to take to the stage for a couple of numbers, the very appropriate “Faerytale” and “Heroes”.

Finally Breathing Space returned for their now-traditional encore of “The Gap Is Too Wide”. When I first heard this live, I wondered whether they could really do the song justice without the choir for the end section, but they’ve made it work with the (very prog) big walls of Mellotron.

Musically this was definitely Livvy’s night, a very emotional performance which must have been very difficult to do, especially songs like “Belief” and “On the Blue Horizon”. One of the band spoke to me afterwards telling me how much he agreed with my Amy Winehouse post. While I didn’t name any names in that post, we both knew who I meant.

The final part of the SFX Book Meme, the top third of the list, a higher proportion of which I’ve actually read.

33. China Mieville
Drags fantasy kicking and screaming into the 21st century; and rejects the idea that fantasy worlds have to be pre-industrial; he combines high-fantasy magic with steampunk technology, and throws in a good dollop of horror into the mix, giving something that feels truly exotic. His biggest fault is that he gets a bit preachy at times, which can get annoying if you don’t share his hard-left politics.

32. Raymond E. Feist
Another writer of ‘Extruded Fantasy Product’ - I’ve only read a couple of his books, but they’re so D&D that you can even work out when characters went up levels.

30. Roger Zelazny
The man responsible for the Amber cult. Actually I thought his “Lord of Light” was a better book, although the whole ‘god-like characters who lord it over mere mortals’ genre doesn’t do a lot to me; it’s too munchkiny. I prefer to see such characters as the villians of the story.

27. William Gibson
One of the few science fiction authors who’s writing has changed the real world. Had he not written “Neuromancer”, you might not be reading this.

25. CS Lewis
The first two of his “grownup” SF novels, “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra” still hold up as theology-based fantasies, although I have to say the final volume, “That Hideous Strength” is rather silly.

24. Diana Wynne Jones
The only book of hers I’ve read is the satirical non-fiction “Tough Guide to Fantasyland”, which parodies all the clichés of Extruded Fantasy Product.

23. John Wyndham
“Triffids!”. I have a feeling I read that at school, which would make him one of the first SF author I ever read.

20. Stephen King
I’ve only read “The Shining”, and liked the way it was deliberately vague as to whether or not the place was really haunted, or whether it was all in the minds of the characters. I really need to read “The Stand”, see as I played in David “Amadán” Edelstein’s online game

19. Ray Bradbury
Not read much of him, but what I have read was good.

18. Arthur C. Clarke
An author I first encountered in an English lesson at school, with the short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” - with one of the most memorable final lines in fiction, Of the writers of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of SF, I think he was the greatest.

17. Robert Jordan
I suppose I have to count him as an author I’ve read, even though I only lasted 150 pages into the first volume of his interminable (and never finished) Extruded Fantasy Product “Wheel of Time” saga.

15. Robert Heinlein
The one and only author who’s caused me to hurl one of his books across the room in disgust. The reason I loved Paul Verhoeven’s film of “Starship Troopers” is that it mercilessly satirised the dreadful politics of that book, and managed to piss off all those noxious right-wing geeks that worship Heinlein in the process.

14. Frank Herbert
“Dune” is an absolute classic every SF fan must read. The sequels are not so good; “God Awful of Dune” is so-called for a very good reason.

13. Peter F. Hamilton
I read the “Reality Dysfunction”, the first of his series that started off as space opera then turned into supernatural horror. Although entertaining, I never got round to reading the rest of the series.

11. Ursula K. LeGuin
“The Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand of Darkness” are two of the best soft-SF novels ever written.

9. HG Wells
I used to work in Woking, a town whose main claim to fame was that the place got trashed in “War of the Worlds”. There’s even a full-sized model of a Martian tripod in the shopping centre. I wish someone would finally make a big-budget film that actually set the story in the 1890s Britain of Wells’ novel rather than insisting on relocating the thing to present-day America.

8. Philip K. Dick
I’m guessing a lot of people know Dick through the Hollywood adaptations like “Blade Runner” and “Total Recall”. But do go and read some the original books; there’s far more in there than can be fitted into a two hour action movie.

7. Iain M. Banks
Anyone else think the opening chapters of the first Culture novel, “Consider Phlebas” reads like a Traveller adventure with a particularly sadistic GM? Banks, more than anyone else, is responsible for reviving the genre of space opera, which had become more or less moribund. Most of his non-SF novels (the non-M ones) are worth reading too.

6. Isaac Asimov
Another author I first encountered at school, with his first novel “Pebble in the Sky”, very much one of his lesser works. Like a lot of “Golden Age” SF, a lot of his 40s and 50s writing is rather dated now. Personally I think “The End of Eternity” is his best book.

5. George R.R. Martin
Many people rave about his “Fire and Ice” saga, but I’m afraid the first volume rather left me cold, and I didn’t go on to read any more. It’s a series allegedly based on the English wars of the roses, but all the characters seem to be lifted straight out of American soap opera. Ugh.

4. Douglas Adams
I thought the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series consisted of two great books, one ok-ish one, and two pretty terrible ones you can tell he didn’t really want to write. The Dirk Gently books were rather better.

3. Neil Gaiman
Only read two-and-a-half books of his, the half being “Good Omens” co-written by Terry Pratchett. The other two were “Neverwhere”, which was the novelisation of the TV script, and American Gods, which has been slated by two bloggers I know as anti-American, and grossly sexist.

2. J.R.R. Tolkien
Difficult to find anything to say about Tolkien that hasn’t already been said, except that he cannot be blamed for the Extruded Fantasy Product that followed in his wake.

1. Terry Pratchett
After nearly 30 books, the most recent Diskworld novels are still far better than anything that far into a series have any right to be. Personally, I don’t care for the Rincewind novels myself, and consider the Witches and Guards books to be my favourites.