Rainbows All Over My Blues



I finally got around to listening to an album from 1968 that I have had in my possession for a while: Bobby Callender's 'Rainbow'.


It has been well worth the wait. Also I have been shaking to Clover' s self ttiled 1st album from 1970 also welldoubleplusgood.

Wifi Not Wii


I had a problem attending a Wifi seminar at the Holiday Inn, Glasgow Airport. I always have trouble with the airport security cameras, because of the pro-palestinian, pro Scottish stickers on my car.


I needent worry this time as the garage keep my car on this slow maintenance schedule.

I hired a renault laguna. Sheer luxury, no keys, only a smart card, no instructions & lots of push button technolgy. Those French car manufactures have got it well-sussed!

Sometimes You Smoke the Salmon & othertimes You get Smoked



Credit crunch finally hits my family as I walk across an excedingly empty driveway to barter with my neighbour over an exchange of food goods.


He gave me some tasty poached salmon, but I had to part with some superb carrot cake. An interesting 21st century way of living

Favourites Album Titles of the Day: fourth part of the trilogy

The recent sad death of Lux Interior has made me realise how ‘far out there’ their album titles were.

e.g. ‘Look Mom No Head’ or ‘Fiends of Dope Island’ or ‘Beat from Badsville’.

However my current no. 1 has got to be:

Sunburned Hand of the Man’s ‘The Trickle Down Theory of Lord Knows What’

Ethiopiques

This morning as I sipped my Ethiopean coffee, I had one of those Marcel Proust ‘madelein’ moments.

As I grow older, I have more of these, as more of my life is behind me now, rather than in front.

It sometimes happens as I groove to Mulatu Astlakte. I am taken back to an Eritrean meal in the Middle East, as one of my Welsh colleagues had married an Eritrean refugee.

The bread was not very pleasant to my tastes, it was like a large wet muffin. The main dish a very hot, African meat curry called ‘zigny’.

I did enjoy the coffee however, as it was laced with fresh ginger.

A Series of Remarkable Coincidences

The woman that works in the library in the evenings keeps telling me of all the people, who have known me from other libraries in the past. She has jigged my memory back a long way.

At night one of the readers, whose face seemed oddly familiar, is the father of someone I used to work with in Motherwell, a long time ago & who lives in the same town as myself.

On Friday, 2 of the girls at work, phoned in sick (a rare enough occurrence!) on the same day.

The Ticket That Exploded the Soft Machine



The Burroughs Primer in 'The Wire' brought it all flooding back. How we would bunk off essential classes in school like 'How to be a success in life & stay clear of all that wild craziness' & we would end up lost in libraries speed reading everything we could find on the Beast, Ginsberg, Kesey, Kerouac.

I always was a bit obsessed by this period & the letter 'K' as my neighbour can verify & testify.


Seeing Ginsberg perform live in Blythswood Square was life changing.

However, Burroughs was also so inspirational over the years. Like Ginsberg, he was fiercely independent, like my own father, (maybe me?) & hopefully my sons are blest with this spirit too.

Shooting his wife was a trifle extreme, but his writings on junk, the Mayans, number 23, virus, power, usa, cut ups arab culture, drones, sufism, hassan I Sabbah, Assassins......etc are awe inspiring.


He taught me how to mean what i say & say what I mean, no matter the consequences & to be true to my heart. Although I suspect I may have lifted the latter advice from Ginsberg.

Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack, pt 56



Perhaps because you have copies of Man - Live @ the Patti
& Fire - Magic Shoemaker on vinyl you think you are so special.

From Steve Peregrine Took to Jocelyn Pook, Poppy Nogood Wrote the Soundtrack



If you thought Hurricane Katrina had wiped out all the Voodoo priests that had your name & address tatooed on their eyelids, think again.

The location of all the safe houses has been encrypted & you have absolutely no chance of cracking the code, given the timeframe.

Thought for the Day




Today will start whether you wake up or not

Crop Circles of the Inner Mind



Sometimes do you feel sluggish as if someone has been building crop circles in your head & then they start playing Scandinavian Death Metal at full beam!

Nature’s Hymn

I was rather excited when I eventually got a copy of Rose Kemp’s Unholy Majesty. I had only ever heard ‘Nature’s Hymn’ that I loved to bits, so I was expecting great things.

Instead I got some fusion of Black Metal folk with a few good tunes thrown in. Luckily the next album I played lifted me out of this despair. So Quiet’s (a great name for a band if you are a librarian!) ‘Summer & Winter’ is a marvellous piece of folktronica that pushes my buttons.

Magic Bus

I had a wonderful opportunity to drive a 9 seater Ford Transit around the streets of Glasgow & the southern, northern & western borderlands.

I wonder how it would be in the streets of Mumbai?

Lest We Forget, R.I.P.

Librarians Live Life on the Edge

Up on the Holy Mountain: Advice on how to lose those winter blues for the over 55s.

1. Lock yourself in a well-lit, warm sitting room perhaps with the Merzbow – Merzbox 50 cd magnum opus

2. Focus on the beautiful, winter effects on the brief sunlight, especially if you live or work on the riverside

3. Dig deep into the crates of freak folk that you have diligently acquired & wait for spring.

Genre Bending

It goes with the territory, putting things in boxes. Librarians cannot help this classifying items, keeping similar bits together.

Drum & bass or jungle it did not matter in the long term as it was a passing fancy for me. I soon grew tired of it, even when it mutated into grime or dubstep.

Ditto dance & techno.

Where did I come in? Psychedelia still lives with me & perhaps this explains the current obsession with the freakfolkery at the moment.

It is such a rich area & how it is branching off in various directions reminds me of how varied much of the psychedelia or ‘progressive’ or underground music of the 60s early 70s actually was at the time.

Favourite Album Titles, Part 91

Growing – The Soul of the Rainbow & the Harmony

Empty Quarter

I decided I needed a camping holiday in the desert. I went up to B & Q & filled the boot of the car with sand. I also bought some tarpaulin.

As soon as I got home I emptied the sand over our Bokhara rugs & stretched the tarpaulin around the room. I switched the electricity off, except for the heating that I cranked up full.

As soon as I had finished building my Bedouin tent, I built a small wood fire on the floor to roast my coffee beans.