Leaky, Full Moon

Drawing down the moon
Raking the radiant ripples
On a leaky pond

Timeless by Goldie

UK people of a certain vintage will associate the name “Goldie” as belonging to one of the iconic Blue Peter kids tv pets of the 1970s, which is why I was slightly surprised to find today that Mr Goldie was the same age as me so would have presumably grown up watching the show as well. Maybe he just likes Golden Retrievers?

Anyhoo, this album is a wildly ambitious debut that mostly lands. Mostly. Drum ‘n’ bass is something of an acquired musical taste, with a lot of similarities with the complex mathematical patterns of Steve Reich or the manic high energy drumming of hard bop jazz. Goldie (with production by Rob Playford) also layers in some lush electronica and vocals from Diane Charlemagne and Lorna Harris.

The overall effect ranges from hypnotic to being overwhelming in places, but always intriguing.

Dappled, First Blossom

Beneath the old oak
Basking in dappled sunlight
Their first love blossoms

Bright Flight by Silver Jews

The only problem with an ambiguous and/or jokey band name is the expectations that it sets. For this album I thought it might be some sort of Weird Al style polka or maybe arty New York hip-hop, but it actually turned out to be a low key country album recorded in Nashville.

It took a song or two to get its hooks into me, but lines like “A kitten from Great Britain sleeps behind the drapes” and the idea of moving to Nashville to make a living out of writing sad songs and getting paid by the tear are strong images. I think this is the sort of album that will really repay repeated listens.

Finally, just to be on the safe side, I checked their Wikipedia page and front man David Berman is actually Jewish, so the band name is ok after all. Phew!

Mazel-tastic!

Horse Tail

I once cried over
A dead video game horse
Red Dead’s bitter twist

The Man Who by Travis

Hey 1001Albums! Can you recommend me a very specific sort of album? It should be post-Britpop, low energy and unthreatening. The sort of thing that a BBC 6 Music DJ could play on a loop while they nip out for a cup of tea and a smoke, and no one would notice or complain. It should also sound a bit like the Beatles ‘Across the Universe’ by way of Oasis, but not close enough to be accused of plagiarism.

The lyrics don’t need to be super clever or original but there must be one absolute ear-worm of a hit single that would go down perfectly on a wet afternoon at Glastonbury when everyone is hung over and covered in mud. I want a guaranteed two stars or maybe three if I’m being charitable for some of the interesting twiddly bits in the background.

1001Albums: Have I got an album for you!

First Storm, Frog

Froglet finds her feet
Leaps on to a lily pad
To enjoy the storm

Like a Prayer by Madonna

Madonna may have started the 80s as a carefree material girl but as the decade closed, she was thinking about faith and family. The title track, and the accompanying video in particular, caused a huge fuss at the time, but looking back on this now shows that this is actually from the (small c) conservative viewpoint of someone raised in the catholic faith with all of the associated iconography.

The rest of the album has songs musing about Madonna’s mother and father, and one about the importance of her siblings, showing her to have maybe reached a settled place in her life. Musically, it’s pure pop with touches of soul and gospel, but it doesn’t quite reach the heights of her 90’s reinvention with Ray of Light.

I would have given this four stars, but I’d forgotten just how toe-curlingly awful the final track Act of Contrition was. What was she thinking?

Madge-tastic!

Owlbear & Wizards Staff 2026

Leamington Spa in early September is always a glorious time of year, not least for the annual Owlbear & Wizard’s Staff convention, ably organised as always by Matt Broome. It benefits from a very friendly venue in St Patrick’s Irish Centre that overlooks the river and is in easy walking distance of local hotels and pubs, a good selection of games that all of the volunteer GMs put a lot of thought into, and some unique touches like the legendary lunch time samosas provided as part of the ticket price.

After a trouble free journey, (with many thanks to Susan for driving) and a swift half in the Cricketers Pub, I settled down for my first game of the weekend.

Cy-Borg : Johnny Bubonic

I think I prefer the various spin off Borg-like games to the original, especially Pirate Borg and Cy-Borg as they combine simple rules with a lot of setting specific flavour in the form of different character archetypes and random tables. In this scenario, our rag tag crew of heavily indebted hackers, nanomancers and corp killers were tasked with extracting an upstart punk star called Johnny Bubonic from the middle of a gig because reasons. They were paying us, so we didn’t ask too many questions. Unusually for this sort of setup, we actually spent a considerable amount of time scoping the venue and planning the heist, and it all went fine until a fumble meant that the flashbangs went off in the middle of the crowd with hilarious consequences. We recovered the situation with some judicious sniping, a knife fight with some irate kitchen staff and a pre-stolen getaway van on standby. Thanks to Sue Savage for running!

I wasn’t gaming on Friday night, so there was the usual delight of seeing much loved familiar faces at the Pug before a stealth curry organised by Orlanth Rex taking some of the admin hassle away from Matt. Yum. I was stuffed and called it a night after that.

MERP : Far Harad Ahoy!

Saturday’s game was a session of the famously convoluted Middle Earth Role Playing game, expertly GM’d by all round lovely guy Dave Patterson. The rules involve a D100 roll, adding in an offensive bonus, looking up the result on a table cross referencing weapon and armour type, then (more often than not) rolling on another table for a fumble or critical with a variety of entertaining outcomes - simple! We each had a couple of the tables to check results on and got into the swing of things quite quickly, making short work of the baddies. A particularly satisfying series of rolls saw my camel kicking a sand dragon in the face before a hobbit finished the job by shooting an arrow through both its ears. Sorry Dave!

AD&D : Temple of the Sea Demon

I’d not played AD&D for well over forty years but fortunately GM Mitch Hyde reminded us of the rules in all of their Gygaxian splendor. We planned a series of raids into the titular temple with military precision, fighting cultists and demons and escaping with enough treasure to pay for my unfortunately deceased halfling thief to be resurrected. Great old school nostalgic fun, including miniatures and Games Workshop dungeon floor plans!

Saturday night saw me and Susan enjoying our now traditional large G&T and noodles at Wagamamas and comparing war stories of our games so far, before I headed up to the White Horse for more beer and conversation with lovely people. I fear that we are all getting old though, and my voice was very croaky by the end of the night.

Tales of The Old West : The Devil Sent Me to Laredo

The final game of the weekend was one of my favourites of recent years, with Andy Horton presenting us with a classic spaghetti western style setup of a town where life seemed just too good, a mysterious Spanish mission, and an armoured train with a villainous governor and his white hatted goons. Much heroic gunplay and some lucky escapes for my disillusioned preacher turned gunslinger, and a great showdown at the end.

Roll on next year!

Cascade

Resonance cascade
A bad day for Black Mesa labs
They're waiting for you

Planet Rock: The Album by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force

Let’s start with the good stuff. This is a genre defining album that takes the icy electronic music of Kraftwerk (reproduced in the studio rather than sampled) and melds it with a danceable beat to create something genuinely new and exciting. It’s good to see that the members of Kraftwerk get individual writing credits on this, which earns this album a star.

The bad is that Bambaataa was not only a sexual predator of the very worst kind for many years, but that his crimes were ‘hip-hop’s best kept secret’ and covered up, with whistle blowers and victims being silenced by the rich and powerful. Enough is enough.

Wings, Constellation

Ten bright stars twinkling
Ptolomy saw an eagle
Soaring in heaven

Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake by Small Faces

I’m still not entirely sure how Small Faces went from being a well regarded mod band playing R&B and Soul covers, to producing one of the strangest and most psychedelic concept albums ever recorded, but I’m glad they did. The record was originally released in a circular metal tin but that had to be abandoned because it was expensive and they kept rolling off the shelves in record shops!

The first side opens with the title track, featuring a Hammond organ and string session, moving on to a varied selection of styles including hard rock, soul and a proper blinky-blimey-cockernee singalong that anticipated the Britpop of Blur et al by a good thirty years. Side two is even stranger, with a surreal concept story narrated by comedian Professor Stanley Unwin, famed for inventing his own mangled version of English.

I can imagine a sixties hippie, having rolled up a giant Camberwell carrot on the back of their record tin being transported by this tale of Happiness Stan, a giant fly and a quest for the missing half of the moon.

Genuinely enchanting and Engly Twenty Fido-tastic!

Pampas Grass, Nirvana

Suburban swingers
Subtle signposts softly sway
Seeking Nirvana

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit

Oh dear. As well as the usual embarrassing spectacle of white people rapping, this album features an overload of puerile swearing, as if Beavis and Butthead decided to copy the Beastie Boys with a side order of Nine Inch Nails. They even tried to get Rick Rubin to produce this, but he lasted a week before sensibly quitting.

The end result is simply tiresome, with mother-effin this and sniggering references to rude bits of anatomy-that. Even Apple Music thought that the name of this album was beyond the pale and asterisked it out. After listening to a couple of tracks, I looked up Fred Durst’s Wikipedia bio and it confirmed that he is, indeed, a massive arsehole who supports Vladimir Putin. Yikes.

I prefer my biscuits crunchy.

Waning Moon, Wild Rose

On the lone prairie
A wild rose grows free beneath
The pale waning moon

Hejira by Joni Mitchell

Imagine walking into a mid-western diner sometime in the mid 70s. There’s a woman by the counter with a red wig and sunglasses, who says her name is Joan Black, or was it Charlene Latimer? She tenses up every time a cop car cruises past, and then lets out a sigh of relief when it doesn’t stop. You get talking to her while the waitress is fetching your coffee, and she pulls out a dozen gas station road maps of different states from her purse.

She tells you about every stop on the journey, old lovers who let her down, and the ones that got away, and meeting an old blues musician on Beale Street in Memphis, and the sad details of his life. She’s looking for something that she can’t quite explain, and it’s like that famous aviator Amelia who went missing and nobody knew what had happened to her.

Somewhere in the background you can hear a band, noodling some jazz and setting her words to music that evokes wandering and wondering on an endless exodus - a Hejira if you will.

That’s what listening to this album is like. Your road trip mileage may vary.

Morning, Warbler

Deep in the wild reeds
A warbler greets the morning
With a merry tune

Zombie by Fela Kuti

This album is unique on this list in the effect that it had. The title track is an excoriating attack on the Nigerian military, effectively calling them mindless zombies for blindly following orders. The government junta was so threatened by this that they sent a force of 1000 soldiers to attack Kuti. They brutally murdered his elderly mother, razed his studio and the commune where he lived, and Kuti himself was lucky to escape with his life.

This experience didn’t deter him from his political activism (he stood for president and spent time in jail on trumped up charges), releasing a mind boggling number of albums (16 in 1976 and 1977 alone) and marrying 27 women at the same time. Wowzers - where did he find the time?

The music here is pure Afrobeat, taking traditional rhythms and reclaiming Western jazz and funk sounds, bringing them back to their African roots. The result is infectious, danceable and politically charged in all the right ways, and it’s easy to see why a performance of Zombie in Accra sparked a riot.

An easy five stars from me!

Sparrow, Ivy

Ivy creeps and climbs
Ancient walls concealed by green
A lone sparrow sings