With easy and relatively cheap access to London, we manged to see most of these bands at various venues, from Hammersmith Odean to the Rainbow and Dingwalls to the Electric Ballroom. We were there for Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow infamous gig at Wembley Arena (29 February 1980) when the support act failed to show up and the gig started very late with Samsom filling-in – I think they just happened to be at the gig. This was in the days of Thunderstick, the masked drummer (whose real name was Barry Purkis) and Bruce Bruce, who went on to fame and fortune as Bruce Dickenson in Iron Maiden. I have a feeling it might have been just a trio (guitar, bass, drums) that played that night.
Then Rainbow came on, played six songs over 70 minutes (20+ minutes of which was taken up by guitar, keyboard and drum solos), and disappeared. The safety curtain came down and 17,000 people suddenly realised that the gig was over. No encore for their £4.50 ticket price. The crowd was not happy and the chairs were not nailed down, so they soon started flying towards the curtained-off stage.
Most gigs were quiet by comparison, even Motorhead supported by Girlschool.
On Wednesday and Thursday I spent quite a while ripping old CDs to iTunes so that I could listen to them again. They had been stuck in two large boxes hidden away in a cupboard because I've had nowhere else to keep them. The CD rack in my office is tucked away in an inaccessible corner, so I'll shortly be ripping those, too.
Most of the bands I listened to, I listened to on vinyl, and ten years ago I bought a record player that could be plugged into my computer and recorded all my LPs, then sold them at auction. A couple of months later, the hard drive all the mp3s were on crashed catastrophically and I thought I'd lost the lot. Thankfully, a friend managed to recover the files on the drive. (A second drive had failed within days was lost for good, taking with it all the text and pics. that were used in the Sci-Fi Art book that came out in 2009. Thank Dog it crashed after I'd finished the book and submitted everything!)
I've been watching the new DCU series Doom Patrol. There may be spoilers in the review below, so avoid scrolling past these pics if you want you life to be spoiler free. But do go look at the posters at the end.
The original comic book team of Robotman, Elasti-Woman and Negative Man are the core of the new TV show, with references to other early favourites like Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man thrown in for fans. Crazy Jane (from Grant Morrison's 1989 Doom Patrol revamp) and Cyborg (from Teen Titans, but not see in The Titans) complete the team under Niles Caulder (aka The Chief).
When we are introduced, the team (bar Cyborg) have been living together for years at Doom Manor. The characters' back stories are told in flashbacks over a number of episodes: a Nazi in Paraguay turns Eric Morden (Alan Tudyk) into the meta-human Mr. Nobody; Cliff Steele (Brendan Fraser/Riley Shanahan), a narcissistic racing driver, has his brain transferred into a robot body after being involved in a car crash that kills his wife; a self-obsessed actress, Rita Farr (April Bowlby), is exposed to a strange liquid that causes her flesh to melt and stretch; Larry Trainor (Matt Bomer) is a married with kids test pilot, distracted by his fears that his secret gay affair will be discovered, who crashes a plane into a negative energy field and now wears bandages to hide his burnt body; and Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton) is revealed to have been a member of the Bureau of Oddities who is saved by a primitive woman, Slava, whom he falls in love with over a period of years, only leaving her in order to save her.
Caulder's former employers have now become the Bureau of Normalcy and, rather than study and protect meta-humans, they now exploit their potential as weapons. Larry Trainor has been a victim, unwilling to aid the escape of his neighbour in captivity, 722 (who will be revealed to be another Grant Morrison-created character), and, by the present time, he wants nothing more than to leave Doom Manor and the negative energy being inside him behind.
And he, perhaps, is the least flawed of the five. Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero) has 64 personalities lurking in The Underground inside her, each of whom can surface to take control of her body; Cliff has a number of issues involving loss, grief and anger that coalesce when he discovers that his daughter, who he believed dead, is alive; and Victor Stone/Cyborg (Joivan Wade) has daddy issues over his controlling father, Silas (Phil Morris), that end violently.
These are not your normal superheroes, and the storylines are not your normal superhero tales. The moment you discover that a donkey is, in fact, a doorway, you know that you're about to head down the rabbit hole... some kind of a hole, anyway. Along the way you'll meet Willoughby Kipling, The Cult of the Unwritten Book, the Decreator, Danny the Street, Admiral Whiskers, The Beard Hunter and the denizens of The Ant Farm.
With engaging characters and the right mixture of weird humour and pathos as we learn more about the characters, Doom Patrol has been a winner right across the board. Going in, I was wondering how the show was going to deal with having two characters with no facial expression (Robotman, Negative Man), as we pick up so many cues from reading people's faces, but that worry was very quickly laid to rest. I'm thirteen episodes in and have only two more to go before the season ends. The good news is that season two has already been confirmed and should be broadcast in 2020.
The producer released a series of posters based on the show's characters, which I'm using as this week's random scans... enjoy!
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