Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

Love Song
Is It Only The Moonlight?
Falling
There Stands The Glass

An eclectic night. Some great live music for music fans. Acapella virtuosity, down & dirty blues, sweet melodies - the lot!
HERE STANDS HIS GLASS...

No smoke without fire...

Arson probe at Gateshead bar Buffalo Joe's

by Joanne Butcher, Evening Chronicle Oct 17 2011

A FORMER Tyneside bar has been severely damaged in a suspected arson attack.

The fire at Buffalo Joe's on Pipewellgate, Gateshead, was discovered by a passing police officer at 4.14am yesterday.

The roof of the two-storey building was well alight, leading to fears that the chimney stack might collapse.

Six fire crews from Newcastle South, Gateshead East and South Tyneside West stations were called to the scene and it took 30 firefighters to bring the blaze under control.

Smoke and flames spread through the building from the roof, causing damage to the first floor. One of the problems the firefighters faced was the height of the building.

Watch manager Jeff Murphy from Gateshead East station said: “It’s one of the biggest fires we’ve had recently. Any time you’re working at height it’s an added problem. We initially had three appliances with the aerial ladder platform so we could attack the fire from a height, then it went to five appliances, with a command support unit.

“We had to force entry into the building to attack it from inside, but also attacked it from outside with the aerial ladder platform and a couple of main jets.”

Pipewellgate side road was closed as a safety precaution, but premises in the surrounding area did not have to be evacuated. A structural engineer from Gateshead Council was called to the scene to assess the building’s stability.

Police have arrested a 19-year-old man in connection with the fire and are appealing for any information.

A police spokesman said: “A passing police officer discovered a fire at Buffalo Joe's at Pipewellgate in Gateshead. The roof of the premises was found to be on fire and six fire appliances attended the scene”

Buffalo Joe’s was opened in 2001 by Harry Costigan, then operations director for Hartlepool-based chain Pubmaster.

Costing £2m to build and furnish, it was the first quayside bar to be open until midnight Monday to Saturday with no admission charge.

The Wild West-themed club was famous for its bucking broncos, cowboy hats and saloon-style bar.

Mr Costigan shut down the original Buffalo Joe’s earlier this year.*

Any witnesses, or anyone with information about the fire, can call police on 03456 043 043 ext 69191, or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/evening-chronicle-news/2011/10/17/arson-probe-at-gateshead-bar-buffalo-joe-s-72703-29608672/

*Because it was shit and no-one was going there.
Yet another empty property on the Quayside damaged by a mysterious fire. Just saying...

Cookin' with Da.

Men on the Wine

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #127

The SMiLE shop

Apparently, not the original, but close...

Raymond Chandler - The Little Sister

Saturday Play - Classic Chandler - 7. The Little Sister

A small, neat girl walks into Philip Marlowe's office. Orfamay Quest is looking for her brother Orrin. She gives Marlowe twenty dollars and lots of moral disapproval. Marlowe takes the case and finds himself drawn into the glamorous world of the Hollywood film studios. Toby Stephens plays Philip Marlowe in a landmark series bringing all Raymond Chandler's Marlowe novels to Radio 4.

Philip Marlowe...Toby Stephens
Orfamay Quest...Kelly Burke
Mavis...Fenella Woolgar
Clausen...Peter Polycarpou
Dolores...Ginita Jimenez
Lagardie...John Guerrasio
Hicks...Jonathan Forbes

Dramatised by Stephen Wyatt Directed by Claire Grove

This series brings all the Philip Marlowe novels to Radio 4's Saturday Play. The Big Sleep 1939, Farewell My Lovely 1940, The High Window 1942, The Lady in the Lake 1943, The Little Sister 1949 and The Long Goodbye 1953, and two lesser known novels, Playback 1958 and Poodle Springs, unfinished at the time of his death in 1959.

Listen to it on BBC iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b015yf3n/

Tom Adams

Friday Night Horror Movie

Happy Birthday, Paul Simon

Paul Simon: A quiet icon at 70

By Ben Walsh

Thursday 13 October 2011

“Can you imagine us years from today/ Sharing a park bench quietly/ How terribly strange to be 70,” laments Paul Simon on his enduring ode to companionship “Old Friends/Bookends”, and the insightful singer reaches a ripe 70 today.

While contemporaries such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, are all – quite rightly – lauded for their groundbreaking songwriting, the diminutive genius from Newark, New Jersey never seems to get quite enough due. He is slammed, in some quarters, for being too successful, too commercial, and too mainstream. When, in fact, Paul Simon’s nimble, idiosyncratic, experimental and habitually droll (“Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia/ Up in my bedroom [making love]/ I got up to wash my face/ When I come back to bed/ Someone’s taken my place on “Cecilia”) lyrics have always been a cut above the ordinary; his storytelling songs are full of smart, adroit observations in the vain of American authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Carson McCullers and Sinclair Lewis.

His voice has also been accused of being too weedy, and lacking Art Garfunkel’s powerful, high-register, soulful oomph, but that argument’s never felt convincing. Simon’s soft, lilting intelligent voice invests lines such as “He said Dolores, I live in fear/ My love for you’s so overpowering, I’m afraid that I will disappear” in “Slip Sliding Away” with unmatchable sense of melancholy and tenderness. Unfortunately, the gorgeous “Slip Sliding Away”, along with a great many of his most exquisite songs (“Me And Julio Down by The Schoolyard”, “El Condor Pasa” and the heart-rending “I Do It for Your Love”) do not feature on the upcoming Songwriter, a new two-disc, 32-song collection (released 24 October) chronicling five decades of Simon’s songs. But the album does include a live performance of “The Sound of Silence”, live at New York’s Webster Hall this year, a performance of “The Boxer” in Central Park and the sumptuous “Something So Right”, from 1976’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.

Although a lot of Simon’s best songs focus on his beloved New York City – “The Boxer” (“Where the New York City winters aren’t bleeding me/ Bleeding me, going home”) and “The Only Living Boy in New York” - his material, which spans 50 years, actually embraces all of America: the melancholic rambling through the nation’s heartlands on “Homeward Bound” and the sassiness and sexiness of the American South in “Come on Take Me to the Mardi Gras”.

For many (me included) the easiest entry point into Paul Simon’s music is through Simon and Garfunkel’s pop gems and Radio 2 staples such “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, “The Boxer”, plus “The Sound of Silence” and “Mrs Robinson”, which both enhanced Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. Or his staggeringly successful, Grammy-award winning Graceland album, which was recorded in South Africa in 1986, and featured exiled South Africans Hugh Masakela and Miriam Makeba and the wondrous male choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It also included the hits “Cal Me Al”, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” and the witty “I Know What I Know”.

But a solo Paul Simon, free of Garfunkel’s mournful warble, really came into his own in the early and mid Seventies with some sensational material, and his first dabblings with world music - starting with the stirring, Jamaican-inspired, reggae-drenched “Mother and Child Reunion”, from his eponymous 1972 album Paul Simon. This was swiftly followed by the sublime “Me and Julio by the Schoolyard” from the same album, and the gospel-flavoured “Loves Me Like a Rock” from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. The artist perhaps, though, reached his songwriting zenith with the exquisite “Still Crazy After All These Years” (1975) where he plaintively pleads: “I’m not the kind of man/ Who tends to socialise/ I seem to lean on/ Old familiar ways.” In truth, this ever-changing, ever-challenging artist has done anything but “lean on old familiar ways”, and the recently “re-discovered” 1983 album Hearts and Bones, featuring the perky “Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War” (which features on Songwriter), is yet another example of his full, vigorous engagement with music. Happy birthday, Paul.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/paul-simon-a-quiet-icon-at-70-2369444.html

Forgetful Heart. Bob in Manchester on Monday.

The Traveling Tynebillies

Third World Man

Good old reliable Nathan...

The Second Arrangement... live!

LITTLE DYLAN IN MANCHESTER LAST NIGHT

EURO LOTTERY WINNERS... They'll Never Go Hungry

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #126

Jim seeing the funny side.