Jodrell Bank Transmission 002 June 23rd 2012 featuring Elbow & Guests

As a kid in the late 60s I grew up about forty minutes' drive from the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. It was the biggest movable radio telescope in the world when constructed in 1957 and still is third biggest. At the time of the Apollo moon landings its visitor centre boasted a planetarium and extensive permanent displays which reflected the worldwide fascination with astronomy provoked by NASA'a endeavours. Sadly, a fickle public lost interest just as quickly and the space programme went from a source of justified American pride to white elephant almost as soon as Neil Armstrong got dust on his boot. Likewise Jodrell Bank's status has declined from national must-see visitor attraction to eccentric nerd-magnet. The planetarium has gone and the remaining visitor centre is a fragment of former glory. I used to love visiting Jodrell Bank, with my primary school, Sunday School, Cub scouts and on my birthday, so to see it downgraded in this way is a source of some sadness. Of course, its research continues and its scientific importance is undiminished, but Joe Public has largely forgotten about it.

Anyway, last year someone had the bright idea of organising a music festival in the shadow of the telescope, in tandem with a popular science exhibition featuring lectures and displays based around the visitor centre. Flaming Lips headlined above British Sea Power and others and despite some teething problems (insufficient catering and toilets seem to have been the main gripe, along with the car park exit queues that are pretty much guaranteed at such events), it was deemed a success.

This year two consecutive one-day concerts featuring Elbow on the Saturday and Paul Weller on Sunday were announced, the former selling out at once. In retrospect, making such arrangements for what would normally be Glastonbury weekend and therefore notoriously tempting to the Rain Gods may seem a little foolhardy, but at the time the chance to see Elbow do a full set (they only had an hour at Glastonbury last year) was too tempting. Furthermore, Elbow are one of the few acts that all four family members would willingly travel to see.

Unless you live in another country or have been sedated and/or detained for the last couple of months, you will know that the British summer of 2012 has been characterised by severe precipitation. It has chucked it down across the nation so that pockets of flooding have cropped up in almost every corner. By the time we set off from Gloucester on Friday afternoon we were armed with weather forecasts that were, as Guy Garvey remarked the following evening, positively biblical. By the time we were settled in our Premier Inn (Lenny Henry's absence duly noted), it was pouring and it continued to do so for much of the night. On Saturday morning brief but heavy showers continued and so by the time we pulled into the concert car park, normally a dairy field, at 2 p.m. it was already pretty soggy.

The concert took place in an adjacent, gently sloping field, itself next to the Lovell telescope. A short path led to the "Science Arena", the permanent visitor centre with temporary exhibition stands and a few catering outlets set up around it, everything dwarfed by the dish which occsionally twitched and swivelled, as if to show it was paying attention. One wag had fixed a sign to the fence warning of a £10,000 fine for mobile phone use, which is normally banned, but the restriction had been lifted for the weekend. We met at least one person who had been fooled, however! Having checked out the bar (Robinson's Build A Rocket Boys bitter, produced in collaboration with Elbow, was the primary tipple on offer), we went to visit the exhibition area. Unfortunately, in doing so we missed opening act Willy Mason. This was not intentional, although I'd have to admit that research the previous day had led me to believe that his was the set I was least bothered about. No disrespect to his material, but having been underwhelmed by various earnest troubadours with acoustic guitars trying to attract the attention of a fieldful of apathy, it seemed least likely to work in the context. Those we spoke to who did catch his performance said it was good but sad (as in depressing songs). Perhaps not an ideal opener. Anyway, the same research had led me to expect better things of  the bill's next offering,

LIANNE LA HAVAS

I'd have to admit that I was pretty much oblivious to Ms. La Havas' work until I knew I was going to see her, at which point I checked out some video and downloaded a couple of singles. The publicity made much of a newspaper quote describing her voice as the best to have emerged since Adele, but I'm not sure the comparison is fair or accurate. You have to do something remarkable as a singer these days to get noticed amidst the crushing volume of competent but forgettable warblers who spring out of the woodwork to appear on T.V. talent competitions at the annual drop of a hat. The voice matters; Amy Winehouse and Florence Welch are two which are unlikely to be mistaken for anyone else, however what both those ladies, and Adele owe their success to is a combination of pipework and material. Lianne La Havas is blessed with a very good voice, which I'm reluctant to compare to another for fear of misleading, but it's probably her material that will get her noticed. There are some break-up songs, which perhaps invite the Adele comparison, but her style has more of a  blues edge, enhanced by her plucking away at the deeper end of an electric guitar for much of the time, both with and without her unobtrusive backing band. One song was a duet with, and co-written by the aforementioned Willy Mason, but for the most-part she relied purely on her own charm, talent and tunes to win over the majority of those paying attention. I hope most of us have heard of her by Xmas - her album "Is Your Love Big Enough?" is released on July 9th.

CHERRY GHOST

were next up. They are one of those bands who seemingly exist as a vehicle for one member, in this case Simon Aldred, whose Lancastrian twang was a bit of Garvey-lite for those awaiting the headliners with growing impatience. The weather was mostly behaving itself at this stage and I watched the set from one side of the stage from which I could only see Aldred and the keyboard player, but I'm not sure it mattered. Although I had liked a couple of the tunes I'd downloaded, the performance was subdued and lacked any movement or excitement. The crowd approved for the most part, and in isolation each song was worth hearing. Unfortunately it was difficult to pick stand-out tunes, however and the tempo barely varied. O.K., I was bored.
I had the chance to see Cherry Ghost in the considerably more intimate setting of Gloucester Guildhall not long ago but missed it. I might go next time, as although I was underwhelmed in a field with several thousand people in it, a more intense context might bring greater rapport between artist and audience, and this member of the audience and the material. The Mrs.and I agreed that Cherry Ghost sounded "almost there" but needed a tweek to cross the line. As mentioned before, I'm reluctant to dismiss professional musicians who are clearly having some success and devoting their lives to its pursuit, just because I'm not that blown away, so as before, I'd just wish them luck...

FIELD MUSIC

Now this lot I had heard a bit, what with spending a fair amount of time listening to BBC 6Music. I'd even downloaded the whole of their most recent album and was looking forward to hearing what they sounded like live. Unfortunately, as the final support they were doomed to perform in front of a swelling crowd that was getting excited about seeing Elbow and all too indifferent to whatever they had to offer. Short of disembowelling a large mammal onstage or employing a troupe of naked dancing girls, they were going to face an uphill struggle just getting noticed. Polite applause was about the limit of what they received in the way of encouragement and I was far too busy containing my desire to throttle the drunken fools directly in front of me to catch every nuance of their show. It crossed my mind that were you to flick through their record collections you'd probably find some early XTC and a bit of Talking Heads. It proved difficult to concentrate on the lyrics, which I suspect are important to their work and while I enjoyed what I heard, for much of the time I was hearing but not listening due to the growing distraction of the aforementioned inebriate imbeciles. Hey-ho. Suffice to say that offered the chance to see them again I would take it, as the performance had a bit of raw energy as well as musical intrigue.

ELBOW

As I mentioned, I had seen Elbow at Glastonbury last year,and they were probably the highpoint for me, which is no criticism of several other acts, but reflects the fact that their style and songs suit a big venue. Compared to the Pyramid field at Glastonbury, the 10,000 capacity at Jodrell Bank may be a mere bagatelle, but it's still an awful lot of people spread over a large area of land. To make those people feel engaged, when to some you're just a bloke in the distance, blurred by the rain falling in the way, takes some doing. Yes, there were giant video screens integrated into the stage, but these alone can sometimes devalue a concert into a mass telly-viewing, in which you realise that you are watching the screen more than the people you paid to see. One special touch at Jodrell Bank was that the set opened with singer Guy Garvey instructing the telescope operator to face the dish at the audience and, as night fell, images including the live feed of the concert were projected onto its white surface. Still, a projected image alone still amounts to watching television, and Elbow managed a lot more than that.

From the outset it was apparent that the sound was going to be top notch, despite the additional challenges presented by the elements. The bass in particular had that diaphragm-rattling quality which challenges you to try and ignore it, but across the spectrum the music was clear as a bell. Visually significant was a runway out from centre stage which went maybe half way to the sound/light tower that lay at the midfield point. Within a few seconds of taking the stage, Garvey was down this runway, encouraging waving and singing and effectively shrinking the gulf between stage and crowd. Later on the other band members joined him, under umbrellas, to perform one song. "Electric instruments and rain - what could possibly go wrong?", he asked. Nothing, happily!

Unsurprisingly the setlist was based around the two most recent and successful albums, The Seldom Seen Kid and Build A Rocket Boys, although earlier work was represented and indeed the title track to Leaders of the Free World, for which Garvey briefly strapped on a guitar, was one of the many highlights for me. Notable by its absence was the long awaited tune written for the BBC's Olympic coverage, making me wonder if it's been scrapped as we have already been "treated" to the Muse offering to be played at Olympic events. (N.B. The day after this was originally posted the BBC used a minute of the theme in the middle of the European Football Final, with the full debut promised for 7.30 p.m. June 3rd).

As a band, especially live, it is hard to fault Elbow on musicality. They are tight as you might hope for a group that have played together for over two decades, yet where for some bands longevity seems to require that members are showcased during a protracted solo or some other diversion from collective effort, this is not so here. Garvey is the frontman, but the strength of the playing behind him prevents it turning into a Guy Garvey and sidekicks show, or the nightmare noodle-fest of soloing which proficient musicianship sometimes spawns elsewhere. His voice belies his stature - from such a figure you might expect a Tom Jones bellow, but the subtlety and range, even in the context of a rain swept singalong, is outstanding.

The songs, many of them literally anthemic and therefore suited to the mass singing that took place, are also poignant and personal in a way that more traditional rock anthems (We Will Rock You and its ilk) are not. Indeed, they deserve to be sung, not chanted as if from the terraces

Garvey continued to jog down the runway regularly throughout the performance which started with the heavens zipped shut, but not for long. Less than half an hour in, they were duly opened and while the deluge that followed may not have been as apocalyptic as the one that lasted the duration of U2's 2011 Glastonbury appearance, it was plenty heavy enough! The songs came thick and fast, but there were a couple of devices that allowed the band a brief rest. Garvey explained that his cat is named Jocelyn Bell-Burnell in honour of the woman who discovered pulsars but inexplicably failed to receive Nobel recognition for it, and showed off a picture of said moggy, duly projected onto the telescope. As at Glastonbury, a toast was made, this time to a band member's new baby. Every now and again the singer would stick his head out from under the shelter of the stage to check if it was still raining (it was, mostly) and to show solidarity with his audience, as he put it. Fireworks drew the main set to a close before predictable encores of The Birds and One Day Like This, both sung robustly by the band and a crowd which was long past minding how wet it was. I can't remember audience participation being invited to not only be louder but to include "more harmonies" before, but it duly obliged, even if some of those harmonies were a little speculative. More fireworks and that was that.

 Jodrell Bank was Elbow's "home game" of the summer, closest to their origin in Bury. They may have made a special effort because of the homecoming element,or indeed to compensate for the weather, but whatever the reason, at the risk of stating the obvious, One Gig Like This A Year Would See Me Right.
This weekend's hot ticket is for one of three 70,000 head sell-outs for the historic (i.e. lucrative) Stone Roses  reunion gigs in Manchester. I would have no hesitation in giving up my ticket, if I had one, for a repeat of Elbow at Jodrell Bank. Remarkably, that goes for the two teenagers (13 &15) who came with me, as well as the long suffering better half.

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We trotted back to the car to find ourselves surrounded and made precious little progress for half an hour before suddenly being directed out via the coach-park, a lucky break which may have spared us another couple of hours in the field according to some later online comments. Of course the organisers couldn't be blamed for the weather, but the car-park marshalling took a while to take control, and it might have been worth blowing a bit more cash on metal tracking to reduce the number of vehicles that got stuck. Unfortunately the site is adjacent to only one main road and therefore doomed to bottlenecking. Good intentions led to plenty of buses being laid on, but at a prohibitive cost. If another event occurs (the following day was cancelled through health and safety concerns and the sheer impracticality of getting cars onto a car park already pock-marked by previous sinkings), it must surely be planned on the basis that the worst will happen rather than the hope that it will not.

My personal gripe has to do with the security people on the entry gate, who denied access to my camera on the basis that it has a detachable lens. You may have seen such cameras in the shops. They are aimed at amateurs and owned by them. The pre-concert rules issued by the promoters contained a ban on professional equipment, but no serious professional would use my camera. In the meantime our crack security jobsworths let through numerous high resolution smart phones and concealed cameras (my error was honestly displaying it on the way in, apparently). Hence I must apologise for some slightly ropey images here. There are plenty of good ones to be found online, though, and the promoters claim that a DVD of the event will be released, although this has yet to be confirmed elsewhere. Again you can see quite a few clips on YouTube should you wish. I refused to let the killjoys spoil my day, but do allow myself the vindictive hope that they all contracted trench-foot in the mud over the next day or so...

Dancing About Architecture - a digression

That last piece about ELP was about as negative as I've managed so far. This would be unusual for professional music journalism.

I mostly read the glossy monthly mags, Uncut, Mojo, Q, The Word, that sort of thing, these days, but not regularly. They're expensive so I pick and choose according to content - a feature on Frank Zappa or Pink Floyd may enhance your circulation in this corner of Gloucester by 1, while extensive naval-gazing about Britpop will keep the shelf full. Throughout the late seventies, however, I bought the weekly New Musical Express - then a newspaper rather than the mag. it is now - religiously. Much of the writing was witty and, by the standards of the day, a little risque, which was and remains a selling point for spotty teenagers. While I was in the sixth form punk rock arrived and changed the content, attitude and staff of the publication. Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill were drafted in as revolutionary young guns with attitude, an attitude which was sometimes downright obnoxious. When Pete Townshend's Empty Glass solo album arrived in 1980 one track, Jules and Jim, was a blunt attack on the pair referencing their view that Keith Moon's death two years earlier didn't matter. Ironically it was Townshend, or at least The Who, who indirectly broke my allegiance to what had been my bible for the past 5 years.

Following Moon's death in September 1978 it was announced with almost undignified speed, that The Who would continue with Kenney Jones, formerly of the Faces, on the drumstool. Eventually, on 18th August 1979, I travelled down from Chester with my sister and A.R. to The Who And Friends Roar In, their first major concert (bar a couple of low-key warm-ups) since the enforced change in personnel, an 80,000 ticket sell-out at Wembley Stadium. Sometime I'll get round to writing a full account of the show, but for now let's just say that while Jones was no Moon and the Greater London Council shut down the much anticipated laser show, the vast majority of the 80,000 enjoyed themselves. They sang along with every song (there was no new material) and cheered as loudly as any crowd I've been in. Strange then, that the following Thursday the N.M.E. carried a review which was disparaging to say the least. The writer may have been at the gig, but the impression given was that he was way too cool to admit that these dinosaurs had any validity in 1979 and so might as well have saved himself the bother. 79,999 paying Who fans had a great time, but the clown from N.M.E., with his free ticket, probably adorned with a coveted access-all-areas pass, felt obliged to write the band's obituary. It was not a great show, but nor was it the abomination described. With Chester a relative backwater for music, we did rely on John Peel and music journalism to tell us what was new and worth hearing. If The Who had lost their street credibility, while the one-dimensional now-you-hear-them-now-you-don't likes of Sham 69 were somehow overflowing with it, I don't need to stay cool, I thought. And I stopped reading N.M.E.

The monthly glossies are written by many of the people who once worked on N.M.E., although Parsons is now a novelist and Burchill is what the profession calls a "commentator", although I could suggest a few other words. The magazines deal extensively in nostalgia, covering the endless re-issues, "newly discovered " archives (stuff deemed unworthy of release when it was recorded) and live reformations that generate a chunky portion of music industry revenue. Of course, they also endeavour to be down-with-the-kids by featuring this month's bright young things, of whom some will turn out to be the revered dinosaurs of 2040! Overall, though, the tone is largely positive with negativity mostly reserved for reviews of recordings which may or may not warrant it. Still, if you believe reviews of any kind, caveat emptor! A couple of years ago I bought an album (British Sea Power) solely on the strength of rave reviews. Never again.

This isn't to say that I'd deny anyone an opinion, nor expressing that opinion in writing for money, but the pinch of salt once taken has become larger over the years. I had always thought the line "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" was coined by Frank Zappa. FZ certainly used it, however a snuffle around the internet suggests not only that others including Elvis Costello have used it, but that similar expressions have been knocking about since 1918. Have a look at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/   for a fascinating bit of research.

Anyway, whoever started it, they were right in the sense that music is an emotional experience and while D.H.Lawrence may have come close, emotions really elude verbal description. Now, that kind of argues for making myself redundant from this endeavour, "a music blog from Gloucester U.K." as it says in the title. However, going back to the beginning of this entry, what I'm after presenting myself is a largely positive and (subjectively) truthful account of what music has meant and does mean to me, rather than any kind of point scoring arrangement. As an amateur, for a start, I only really get to see shows and listen to records properly that I have chosen to pay for. I could "review" stuff on the radio or from Spotify, I suppose, but that's not a prospect that excites me, nor you, I dare say. Consequently what appears here is biased, but in the opposite direction to what you'd expect from many of the professionals, in that I like some aspect of the act I go to see or I wouldn't go to see them (support bands excepted). So if I tell you that I really like the recent Richard Hawley record, Standing At The Sky's Edge, that's because I do, but you might not. If I say his next record sucks, though, it will be because I thought it would be good on the strength of this one and as a fan I am disappointed. Similarly, if I can't hear the words at a gig because there's a chimp running the sound-desk, I'll moan because I was looking forward to hearing something I know I like already.

I suppose my point is that I really don't see the benefit in music journalism which, like that review of The Who in 1979, is written from a pre-conceived perspective, unless that perspective is also pre-declared. The pretension of objectivity cultivated by the music press which relies on the patronage of record companies and promoters for advertising, review copies (which regularly find their way to the capital's second-hand record shops) and free tickets for their existence, renders the content suspect. That's not to say that it's corrupt, but open to question, certainly.

A footnote to the N.M.E. tale is that the paper and others like it would regularly set up a band as the next big thing, only to knock it down with a "backlash" to coincide with the next tour, the second album or whatever. They would even joke about the impending backlash before it happened. At least, that's how I remember it. Sometimes the backlash may have been deserved. Often the records and/or gigs referred to remained unheard in the depths of Cheshire so we just had to take their word for it. Happily that is no longer the case. Aside from the proliferation of broadcast media that make new music and its authors more accessible in 2012 (6Music, web radio, numerous T.V. channels), there are ways of listening to many new releases legally (Spotify), partially (iTunes preview button) or illegally (naughty downloads). Artists also promote new material while avoiding the established system altogether, by posting on YouTube, MySpace and others so that the influence of printed words has diminished significantly. Maybe that's why the tone seems gentler than it was 35 years ago?

Welcome Back My Friends - A History Part 6

O.K. so where was I? Ah yes, a gibbering mass of hormones in search of a purpose, banging his head to Status Quo. As I mentioned, in a prehistoric version of file-sharing, my peers and I were in the habit of lending and borrowing L.P.s, often just for the one night needed to make a cassette recording. By the end of the decade the record industry was spending plenty of money advertising the slogan "Home taping is killing live music", but it wasn't. In fact, had it not been for home taping, we wouldn't have heard half the records we did at the time, and so would not have been so keen to go and see the artists responsible in concert. And any guilt I may have felt at the time (can't recall much, to be honest) has since been assuaged by the purchase of any of those recordings that were worth the bother, on at least one legitimate format, sometimes two or three.                          

Of course, not every record I heard made a positive impression and more than once I would be put off a band I later came to like by an unrepresentative sample. Being introduced to Yes by the sprawling and incomprehensible pretension of their Tales From Topographic Oceans double album made pretty sure that I avoided them like the plague and consequently missed out on their spectacular mid-seventies live shows, Roger Dean sets and all. This was remedied at the N.E.C. in 2004, but I was converted more than twenty-five years earlier by the Yesterdays collection which features more digestible early songs and a stonking cover of Paul Simon's America. Since then I've grown to enjoy much of their back catalogue, even segments of Topographic Oceans, but I'd have to plead guilty to a mistaken first impression. Likewise Genesis. I heard a snippet from The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, not their best effort, and spurned them until a Radio One broadcast of an edited Lamb Lies Down On Broadway show, one of the last with Peter Gabriel. Thus I never did see a "proper" Genesis gig, although I saw Genesis Lite with Phil Collins singing a couple of times.

Almost inexplicably, the next step in my musical obsession came with Emerson Lake and Palmer. O.K., you can stop laughing now. Hindsight has not been kind to ELP. While they pop up to milk the cash-cow of former glory now and again, to all intents and purposes their career as a band was already facing death when I first took an interest in them. This must have been just after the release of Brain Salad Surgery, their fifth album, blessed with an H.R.Giger (he of "Alien" fame) cover and an opening track in the hymn Jerusalem that barely qualifies as rock, pop, or anything modern. Again my initial impression was less than favourable, having been lent their live version of Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition. It wasn't all bad, but it did feature an interlude in which Keith Emerson's melodramatic performance might have made for visual entertainment, but in purely aural terms resulted in simple cacophony. He was given to throwing his Hammond organ around and making sqealing noises on a Moog synthesizer with a gadget called a ribbon controller (as heard on the Osmonds' Crazy Horses). All quite amusing to watch but on a record...nope.

Anyway, my misgivings were largely dispelled when I heard Tarkus, partially a concept album about an amphibious mechanical armadillo with canon that encounters other mythical beasts. These included the Manticore, a fusion of lion and scorpion, that was to become the trademark of ELP's own record label. Re-reading that description, I do have to wonder what they were on to come up with the idea, what the record company were on to let them record it, and what I and plenty of others were on to give it a second glance. Well, I wasn't on anything in 1973 when I first heard it, but it was, in its way, intriguing. Leaving the silly story aside, the music was a lot more complex than anything I had heard at that point. Greg Lake's voice, which the press would like or, more often, loathe for its choral purity, did sound like what I had been brought up (taught, in the case of the church choir) to think of as proper singing, and you couldn't argue that they were less than very  accomplished musicians. In retrospect they were pompous, pretentious and even ridiculous, but I managed to find plenty of reasons to like them, some of which I might still defend.

I do theorise that to a degree I liked them because I thought there was a chance of my father approving more of them, with their pseudo-classical flourishes, than he ever had the Beatles let alone the Quo. This was sophisticated music played by a college trained keyboard player with his technically outstanding drummer (percussionist if that sounds better) and refined vocalist. My father, old before his time, would have no truck with them, though, nor any other contemporary music style, although he did grudgingly acknowledge that Carl Palmer could play the drums. This was handy, as I was beginning to aspire to a spot of drumming myself, and that wasn't something that was going to come cheap.

For my 14th birthday (May 1974) I received Trilogy, ELP's 4th album released in 1972 and as a special treat was allowed to listen to it (once) on the "stereogram" in the living room rather than on the "Black Box" (an ancient wood-encased dansette-style turntable) that I shared with my sister. As mentioned in an earlier entry, the stereogram had its two speakers fixed so close together that no real stereo effect was achievable, but I remember the excitement of hearing what  was to me a new recording. It ends with Abaddon's Bolero, an eight minute instrumental  that builds from virtual silence to a screaming racket of synthesized noise which ensured the disc was removed promptly and not allowed near the living room again!

That summer I bought the Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Ladies And Gentlemen - Emerson, Lake and Palmer triple live album on the day of release (August 19th according to Wikipedia). It contains live versions of virtually all of Brain Salad Surgey and Tarkus and a few other tracks, and released at a budget price (£4.99 was the cheapest I could find), it was a tidy way of getting a large chunk of the back catalogue for myself on a shoestring. The main drawback was the sleeve. The previous year Yes released the Yessongs package, another live triple but adorned with Roger Dean artwork which I was already accumulating on my bedroom wall. You didn't have to like the record to like the sleeve. All summer, since "Ladies and Gentlemen" was announced, I had imagined an equally lavish production, hopefully with lots of (preferably colour) photographs of the band AND THEIR EQUIPMENT. I had seen glimpses of Carl Palmer's custom built two-ton drum kit in magazines but wanted more detail. The stainless steel drums had been extensively engraved with artwork while the reverse of the two gongs that hung behind him (!) had  a dragon painted across them. I knew this because he'd described in an interview how the whole thing revolved during his drum solo and strobe lighting focussed on the dragon. This I had to see! Well, if you've ever seen the package on CD or even in its original vinyl, you'll know I was disappointed. Cheap and particularly nasty. Naff typeface, cheesy die-cut interior and just one dark, blurry photograph of the whole stage set up as seen from the back of an arena. No poster (even Status Quo gave away a poster with "Hello") or booklet. Shoddy crap, in fact. It remains my nomination for worst album cover of all time, and every time I see it I'm reminded of how let down I felt. Of course I played the records to death, especially the extended Aquatarkus on Side Three and Carl Palmer's drum solo on Karn Evil 9 but there was a lesson there.

Clearly the band, comprising three egotists who were as likely to compete with each other as with any force outside their association, had very little interest in the packaging of their product or the punters who might invest in it. As I said, as a band they were already on their way out, their next project being a collection of solo material with a small garnish of band tracks. "Works" as it was titled with typical immodesty had some good stuff on it, but in truth would have been better released as solo albums, and the tour-with-orchestra that followed it went down as one of the great follies of the late seventies. It did include a couple of earlier solo singles - a straightforward piano boogie cover, Honky Tonk Train Blues from Emerson and the Christmas single I Believe In Father Christmas by Greg Lake, which remains one of my favourite seasonal efforts.

While Ladies and Gentlemen didn't make me give up on ELP (that accolade goes to their dreadful Love Beach record, released in 1978 in a misguided last ditch stab at mainstream success, which even the group members slagged off as a contractual obligation) it did leave a bad taste. Music fans are spared the obligation to lifelong allegiance with which most sports fans consider themselves saddled. Eventually I got hold of a pretty cool (I thought) picture of The Drum-Kit from their record company, but in the year (!) it took them to reply, I had largely lost interest and moved on.

I would still defend ELP as musicians who, despite the faults of pretension and maybe over-ambition, produced some exciting innovative work. Much of that work sounds dated, but back in the day Emerson was one of the first keyboard players to push the use of synthesisers as far as he could, while Palmer's synthesized percussion on Brain Salad Surgery was surely ground-breaking.

I suppose that they were a progression for me, as the "Progressive rock" genre was for rock music, in that they weaned me off "straightforward" pop songs onto the possibility of more complicated constructs. Of course, I was a bit slow to spot the deceit in the notion that complication automatically implies quality. Given the choice of saving Tarkus or Never Mind The Bollocks for posterity, it would have to be the latter. Yet before I encountered ELP, I had heard very little jazz (almost none of it modern) and pretty much assumed that popular music genres, pop, rock, folk or whatever were duty bound to conform to the verse-chorus-4/4 time convention. Focus had suggested otherwise but they were too easily dismissed as an aberration or novelty act rather than indicators of evolution.

 Age has withered the tone of Lake's voice and having stumbled accidentally on a broadcast of a show recorded a couple of years ago, I harbour no residual desire to see them collectively, although I would still pay to see Carl Palmer show off. According to Wikipedia, both he and Emerson have suffered physical problems related to their music (back pain and repetitive strain respectively) so perhaps even there, I would be better leaving it an unfulfilled aspiration. I would have to acknowledge the many hours I spent listening to them with pleasure before I realised that it should be guilty pleasure. Ironically, some time before the punks were to decry the folly of prog rock, I was ready for my own reaction, which was to go In Search of Space...

Half Man Half Biscuit Live - They Built Their Village on A Trad. Arr. Tune!

One way or another I've been lucky enough to see a lot of the acts whose music I admire(d) in the flesh. A few notable exceptions: Talking Heads, Led Zeppelin, The Clash for a start and all those (The Doors, Hendrix etc.) who simply pre-date my being let out onto the streets. For a while it was looking like Half Man Half Biscuit, who have been around for most of the last 27 years, might number amongst those exceptions. They did come to Gloucester once, but small children and financial embarrassment conspired to keep me away, and as they barely play half a dozen dates a year, there seemed every chance that our paths would fail to cross. Most recently they were within relative spitting distance, near Wolverhampton, but my recent hip replacement thwarted me. Not very rock'n'roll, that. Still, happily a few months back they announced a booking at the Oxford O2 barn on the Cowley Road in Oxford and the tickets were booked pronto.

The O2 Academy in Oxford is just round the corner from the terrace (37 Randolph Street - no blue plaque as yet) in which I lived my last year at university, a period about which I nurse mixed feelings and indeed any visit to the Dreaming Spires has to be well justified for me to countenance it. Fortunately, once inside you could be in any malodorous dump full of sweaty overweight middle-aged ne'er-do-wells, so what's to grumble about, really?!

My trusty companion and I missed all but the last song performed by the first support act Ragged Claw, who were barely out of short trousers (gymslip in the case of the singer), but they had chosen to cover a HMHB song (She's In Broadstairs) which showed some business acumen, I thought.

Sadly, we were in time for the whole of a mercifully short set by Sonnenberg, a trio comprising a German on guitar and vocals, a scouser on tablas and an Irishman. The consensus amongst those known to me was that they were tedious, but they have their second album out this month which is more than I can claim, so we'll just say that they weren't really my cup of tea, and wish them luck.

My expectations for HMHB were a bit confused. I own every recording they've made, I think. Certainly everything currently available. Their major selling point is lyrics which catalogue what it has been to be British for the last quarter century, with particular emphasis on the ways of the music industry and the social minutiae that bug many of us but are normally ignored by songwriters in favour of a broad-brush approach to romance and/or politics. The first of their records I bought was the vinyl single Dickie Davies Eyes, the title of which referred to a contemporary sports presenter while parodying Betty Davies Eyes by Kim Carnes. The lyric mentions the Lord of the Rings, Michael Moorcock & Roger Dean, all of whom played a part in my adolescence and I was hooked by the shared familiarity, even if my view was less cynical! The next single, Trumpton Riots, spoofed the right-on socio-political commentary that punk had introduced a few years earlier, while again using nostalgic references that are identifiably British. The "B" Side, All I Want For Xmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit, records the recognisable "joy" of playing Scalextric and Subbuteo at your mate's house when young with pin-point accuracy.

Since then a steady if infrequent stream of albums has recorded similar slivers of life with equal precision and consistent wit. There are moments which would qualify as poetic,although I'm not sure that their author, Nigel Blackwell, would warm to being described as a poet. Nevertheless, for example, National Shite Day from 2008's CSI:Ambleside explains how the annoyance of the crowded town centre is briefly offset by considering the worse plight of those living under Mugabe and the children of Calcutta before the horror of Primark FM returns the narrator to his own situation. "Overhead a rainbow appears - in black and white." Here is an ordinary bloke recording what it's like to be an ordinary bloke for posterity and doing it very well, I'd say.

But, while the lyrics are full of  treasure, on record the music has taken a back seat. That's not to say that they're incapable of writing a catchy tune (despite one of their songs being called Look Dad, No Tunes!), but it's those words, normally intoned in a gruff world-weary scouse that are the main point. Consequently some of the albums, particularly the early ones that were probably done on a negligible budget, suffer from weak sound quality, the music sometimes little more than a background to a spoken - sometimes shouted - rant. I had been assured by a veteran of the Wolverhampton gig that the band were really tight, but the questions remained. Could they really play their instruments and would the words be audible? I had visions of a shambolic if entertaining background noise with a vigorous tirade over the top. So, happily and not for the first time, I was wrong...

They launched into a  version of Sealclubbing from the debut Back in the DHSS album which at once indicated that the live sound was to be more musical than the record had led me to expect. It was uncomfortably loud once or twice, with some initial feedback problems, but after the settling-down period that's a feature of almost all gigs, the mix was good enough to allow at least most of the words to get through, although it probably helped to be familiar with the material. Musically more than competent and able to remember (nearly) all the words without recourse to the autocue now beloved by many a megastar, they breezed their way through a selection of nearly thirty songs, many of them accompanied by a raucous singalong from the c.500 predominantly male audience. One peculiarity was the (over)enthusiastic moshing by a substantial element, several of whom I estimate to have been the wrong side of sixty years old. So it's not just me trying not to grow up, then.

Several of my favourites were included in addition to the aforementioned Dukla Prague and National Shite Day. Running Order Squabble Fest and For What Is Chatteris? stood out, although they missed the seasonal opportunity for Asparagus Next Left.

24 Hour Garage People is a tale that allows some improvisation which it duly received, and along the way Blackwell clearly appreciated the erroneous suggestion from the audience that he was in some way associated with the vast Oxford bookstore of that name. As with any veteran band, it is clearly impossible to fit in every song that you want to hear, so there was no time for Them's The Vagaries, Four Skinny Indie Kids or Irk The Purists but inspection of the setlists on the website indicates that they do shuffle the deck a bit between appearances, a fact confirmed by m'learned friend TB.

HMHB have a devoted following of which I am one, so this is not the most dispassionate review you might find, but to the converted they offer an excellent live rock performance, elevated beyond the mundane by lyrics recognised by folk more eminent than I as socially significant - and very funny. I can't make it to Leeds next week, but September in Bath is looking a distinct possibility. In the meantime, if you haven't sampled the charms of HMHB, get on with it!