Comic Cuts — 10 February 2023

Reading Festival, August 1983. l-r: Simon, Sue, Anita, Andy (bottom of frame), Mark and Spencer

We had a nasty shock mid-week which has rather thrown us for a loop. It's not my story to tell, but I'll get to it once the news is out.

Until then I was having quite a jolly week, doing a bit of research and writing on Monday for the fifth Steel Claw volume from Dolmen before switching to cleaning up artwork for the third Mytek book. A bit of back and forth with editors at The Guardian meant that we signed off on the David Sutherland obituary on Sunday and it appeared online on Monday.

I was having a bit of a new music week, which I do every now and then to see if I can expand my horizons rather than listen to the same bands day in, day out. I usually do this by looking through music news sites and listening to podcasts. There was one called The European Perspective which covered non-US prog bands where I first heard current favourites Big Big Train and Frost*.

I'm not surrounded by people influencing me in the way I was at school. Friends had favourite bands that I latched onto, mostly heavy rock or prog rock. Our little group of pals included Judas Priest & Genesis fan Mark Hinkly, Deep Purple & Rainbow (basically Ritchie Blackmore) fan Mick Jones and UFO fan Fred Weeds; Mark Sedgwick got me into Hawkwind, Gong, Here & Now and others; I went out briefly with someone who was into Jimi Hendrix; and I brought Rush to the mix, thanks to hearing them on Tommy Vance's Friday Night Rock Show.

It was under a tenner to get up to London, so we went to a lot of gigs, seeing a lot of heavy metal bands (Motorhead, Girlschool, Iron Maiden, Diamond Head, Saxon, Samson and a lot of NWOHM bands), and prog bands (Marillion, Magnum, Pallas and others during the prog revival of the early 1980s).

Going to watch bands all but disappeared when everyone split up and went to university; I started going to festivals – Donnington, Reading, Knebworth – when we got together during the summer, which meant I got to see Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, and dozens of other bands. People disappeared into jobs and were no longer around; I was working during the day and tapping away at a typewriter in evenings, and eventually I stopped going to gigs.

Which brings me back to this week. I was looking for some music to listen to while I'm writing introductions, writing my blog, doing bits of research. Podcasts are great, but not while I need to concentrate – you use the same bit of your brain to decode what someone is saying that you use when you are creating your own sentences, so you either tune out people talking while you're writing, or you're not writing!

So I poked around and have come up with three (actually four) bands that I'm trying out. First is an old prog band that was around in the early days of Marillion and the likes: Solstice. As well as the usual keyboards and guitars (lead guitarist Andy Glass is excellent), they also have a violinist and a very good female lead singer in Jess Holland (no relation). The band have had quite a few ups and downs, and I've picked up their latest two albums, Sia and Light Up. Both are at the folkier end of the prog scale, but have the musical complexity you would expect of a prog band. The latter album has only just come out and I've only heard it once, but Sia I've now listened to a few times, and it's a delight. There are also a few videos of them performing songs from both albums available on Youtube if you want to give them a try.

I'm waiting on the first album (The Architect, reviewed here) from a band called eMolecule, who have released a couple of singles that I liked. I didn't know anything about them, but it turns out that the two members, Simon Collins and Kelly Nordstrom, are both ex-members of a band called Sound of Contact. I managed to track down their album Dimensionaut and it's great... a bit of Genesis, a bit of Pink Floyd. It was only later that I discovered that Simon Collins is the son of Phil Collins and I'd actually seen him playing only recently when I watched the final Genesis gig that was posted to Youtube.

The last band I've picked up on is Crown Lands, their name a bit of a clue to the indigenous Canadian background of lead vocalist and drummer Cody Bowles. You can hear Geddy Lee and Robert Plant in his voice. Guitars, keyboards and pedals are provided by Kevin Comeau, who doesn't need anybody else to fill out the sound. I'm still getting to grips with them... there are two albums plus a live album and some EPs and their latest single – Fearless Part II – sounds like a Rush epic.

I'm adding these three to my playlist alongside Pure Reason Revolution, a discovery from last year. We shall see who survives as the switchover to my laptop from my PC (yes, that's still going on!) will mean that all my music will have to be stored on external hard drives and I'll have to relink everything in iTunes. I probably won't... I'll probably let Windows Media Player take care of the music and leave iTunes to deal with podcasts. First world problems, eh?