Talk Porty ~ Portobello

Dave had married an American woman in the second half of the 80’s and went on to forge a fantastically successful career for himself. In passing, his brother-in-law is one of the most affable and earnest blokes you could ever hope to meet - of course he shares Dave’s wife’s maiden name, Krutsch - bu...

The key jazz album for me – in fact maybe any type of album – became Art Pepper’s Blues for the Fisherman. After my first degree in Liverpool I’d started on a one year postgraduate teacher training course in York. I shared a house with a guy called Simon with Rabelaisian locks doing a Philosophy PhD...

Back in 1980 in the sixth form, life at school seemed a lot less regimented – it didn’t even seem too much of a problem if you didn’t turn up sometimes. I spent a lot of time round at the house of my girlfriend, where the singer songwriter flame was still burning fiercely. Our favourite tracks were ...

By 1981 I was at Liverpool University and there were loads of gigs by combinations of Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mighty Wah and Teardrop Explodes. The last lot did a 5 night residency in a derelict warehouse going under the name of the Pyramid Club. We went every night and had requests played for us...

Around the same time as punk and new wave I perhaps ought to record for completeness that I did have a (very) brief flirtation with the New Romantics around 1980. I’m not convinced anything much of worth came out of that little movement except perhaps Heaven 17’s (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove ...

With Zeppelin I always loved that no matter how big the stage was, you never ever saw them standing more than a few feet away from each other. None of your Jagger and Richards stuff at the end of their own personal catwalks thirty feet out into the crowd. Dave, Andy and I decided that when we finall...

Back in Summer 1979 we’d finished our O grades and just about everyone had fallen off the end the conveyor belt with sackfulls of grade A’s. The next 2 years of sixth form were to be very different – it was up to us to organise our own approach to study. Some found this liberating and drove themselv...

Dylan loomed large of course, first with Desolation Row then Blood on the Tracks. I’ve always loved narrative songs - Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts perhaps going up against Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning for top spot. And I loved You’re Gonna Make me Lonesome When You Go on ...

Another revelation for me was Roy Harper’s When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease – I later spent a good few afternoons in the Headingley stands at county games revising for my exams because of it. And of course there was Neil Young. I was too slow and missed the Edinburgh tickets a couple of years...

An odd time I suppose to get into singer songwriters in my mid teens... But in hindsight in fact it wasn’t all prog followed by punk. I vividly remember seeing Bruce Springsteen the first time on an Old Grey Whistle Test ‘Pick of the Year’ - video footage of him doing Rosalita live and getting dragg...

There are plenty of other long track contenders of course – Can’s Yoo Doo Right (edited down from a six-hour improvisation to a mere twenty minutes), Eno’s Evening Star, or maybe Dark Star from Live Dead - even the gothic broom cupboard that is Van der Graaf Generator’s Plague of Lighthouse Keepers....

For the solipsistic teenager is there anything better than 15 serious, concentrated minutes alone in your bedroom with ‘the long track on the album’? - anticipating the thickness of the ring in the vinyl which announces 10 minutes plus rather than the normal 4 minutes - knowing that your parents and...

And how about the great Viv Stanshall sessions only ever broadcast on Peel shows across the Seventies, although thankfully some of the material later appearing on his Rawlinson End CD. Writing rarely matched from then up until today - my 12 year old son’s as impressed now by ‘His eyebrows were like ...

I particularly looked forward each issue of Sounds to John Peel’s weekly column, which featured a photo of him sat in front of an incredibly scantily clad woman and seemed to me to be riskily unreconstructed even then. As well as the column, I’d just tracked town his Radio 1 show too and at the end ...

Motorhead were the warm up for Lemmy’s old bandmates in Hawkwind. The main thing I can remember is that they made the loudest noise I’d ever heard. Hawkwind followed – just as loud but with added giant glowing mushrooms brought out onto the stage in the interval, possibly by Wilhelm Reich. Then Stac...

I can’t remember every detail of the night – but it was clear none of us could make much of what was going on at all. We’d heard nothing before like the wailing vocals, doomy organ and freeform parping and squeaking they were doing at the time – and in fact occasionally still do now. I spent a good ...

Three of us hung around together back then; Dave, Andy and me. A couple of other characters drifted in and out but mainly it was the 3 of us. We’d all passed the 11+ and ended up at a typical northern grammar school; the last intake as it happened before the comprehensive education system was introd...

I am inspired to create a bit of a blog thread as a small tribute to the fantastic Rathbone’s Ramblin’. Like many occasional visitors to Talk Porty I look forward to reading through every single post Mr Rathbone makes. I thought ‘Remember the days of the old school yard’ was hard to beat – but Mr Ra...

Dadaist wrote:Megadom - have just picked up your disc and am skiffling slightly in my swivel seat as I type this as I am previewing it on my phones.

"OoOoOoOo - I ain't got no home"

thanks - will schedule presently

Cheers Dada
check out fish heads also - it rocks - eat them up yum

Hi all and thanks for the kind remarks on my set it was just just something I threw together in a few moments last week after 30 years' worth of preparation of course I wouldn't have bothered at all were it not for the staggering quality of your own stuff and thanks a million for the avatar Dadaist ...