Engine Punk

Two great gigs in a week this week - after The Specials on Bonfire night, Ash played at The Hippo the following Sunday. (Photo from Ash website) Ash originally came out of nowhere into a chart devoid of much guitar and drum and Tim Wheeler's paper thin vocals and garagey guitars was such a welcome change from the soulless over produced rubbish they couldn't be anything else except a success. Mind you, so many other worthy performers never get the recognition they deserve but I'm glad to say that it happened for Ash. And they've stayed the course since and seem to be bigger and better than ever (although there are now only three of them). The time is ripe for Ash to blow us a way again. And they did. For this gig I was re-united, not only with The Usual Suspects (see earlier posts on my punk rock friends) but also with Chas'n'Shaz who I last saw in a night club in Truro about ten years ago. They are great fans of Ash and were also at The Specials gig...

Reggae doesn't do anything for me but Ska definitely does. It gets me up on my feet. It's so damned infectious. And if it hadn't been for The Specials the UK probably wouldn't know what it does about Ska. Note the capitals. I remember hearing Gangsters for the first time and thinking "What's this? Reggae that I like?" and all those kids at school who liked raggae turned their noses up at The Specials. (Working for the) Rat Race came out in the middle of my A level courses and Ghost town was a hit during inner city riots. The Specials had an infectious beat and prescient timing. I have neither of those and went to Coventry Poly in 1982 when everything Two Tone had died down. (Although I did spot a subway where Banalarama (mis-spelling intentional) sang with The Fun Boy Three.) When the word went round that The Specials were playing in Plymouth I got my ticket that day. This was potentially a once in a lifetime's experience. There'd been a ...

This Leyland felt like an old friend Whilst travelling the country to acquire even more Vintage Things, I was passing by Lincoln and had time to stop at the pioneering transport museum. Many years ago, when I was but a lad, I received a Blandford book of buses as a Christmas present and it contained illustrations of several vehicles owned or preserved by members of the Lincoln Vintage Vehicle Society . I read this tome frequently - well, looking at the colour pictures was more like it - and it seemed to me that something special was happening up at Lincoln. The Lincoln Vintage Vehicle Society, or LVVS, had a special aura about it. It was the benchmark for other enthusiasts whose enthusiasm also got the better of them. From what I could make out, nearly everyone in Lincoln had a Leyland Lion parked beside their bungalow or a Guy Arab in pieces. Over the years, those self same vehicles occasionally popped up on my radar to reinforce the pioneering status of the LVVS. Visiting the LV...

Aloha from the Himalayas I was entranced by film footage of the Darjeeling and Himalaya Railways many years ago and a preserved locomotive from the DHR visited the Launceston Steam Railway over the summer. It didn't come all the way from India for it now lives a life of restful ease in the UK. What captivated me from then start was an aerial view that must have been filmed by a helicopter of a small but big-hearted little train struggling up the sort of scenery a fantasy writer would like to have imagined. It was obviously working hard but seemed to have lost its way slightly for it went round and round in circles while climbing all the time. It looped around conical hills with an abyss in every direction and sometimes gave up climbing and went backwards - except it didn't go down the hill but lost its way again and, in a cruel trick of fate for a train that must have wanted to freewheel downhill so much, it went up the hill backwards (just like the David Bowie song). Ho...

We received an exemplary service from The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth and hope you will, too Is this the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth the nicest bookshop in the west? My mother and aunt recently celebrated their joint 80th birthday on a visit to this fine town and wanted to revisit this bookshop because it had once been owned by none other than Christopher Robin Milne. They had spent some years of their childhoods living in Ashdown Forest and we were all brought up on Winnie-ther-Pooh so it was encouraging to see the shop was apparently thriving in these hard times. A birthday shopping spree was inevitable and when my mum enquired if they had the recent biography of the Queen Mum the staff took the time to check the shelves and then opened up the boxes of the latest deliveries to find one. We mentioned our intention to visit Agatha Christie's house and the lady behind the desk (who looked about 21 but assured us she daughters of that age) suggested we left our books behin...

Ideal holiday reading? Both The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb enjoyed a small burst of popularity over the summer and I recently received these photos from Mr Graham Poyntz who chose The Wormton Lamb as his holiday read. Here it is on a balcony overlooking the Amalfi coast. Having been to Amalfi myself, I know what competition there is for one's attention from the scenery so I'm very pleased that Graham managed to drag his eyes away from the view to look at what I've written. Now that the evenings are drawing in, I feel more inclined to write again, although before I do that I have to do an awful lot of planning. And I know that I haven't publicised my existing books as much as I would like. Regular readers of the old Anarchadia blog will knmow what an uphill struggle this is, especially if you do the obvious things. It seems everyone is doing those and it's easy to get lost in the noise. So I'm thinking about the less obvious ways to do this, ...

Just before anyone says anything, there's a Ferris wheel behind the screen of this Velocette Vogue There was a good variety of machinery in the motorcycle ring at the Great Dorset Steam Fair this year and among some very interesting bikes was this Velocette Vogue. I'd never seen one before and afterwards had the chance to look it over outside the marquee as the owner made some adjustments to it. I really have to hand it to the Goodman family, the people behind Velocette. If I had to choose just one bike as an example of the archetypal British single it would be the Velocette Thruxton but there is a subtle irony here because this archetypal British motorbike has a name that sounds French and owed its existence to the the Goodman family who were comparatively recent German immigrants and had changed their name from Gutemann. Which only goes to show that national stereotypes are dangerous things. The Goodmans they'd done a good job on their 350 and 500cc singles but ...