Happy New Year

The fixed grins and lipgloss don't fool us - we know no-one does Nordic heartbreak like ABBA.

Happy New Year everyone.

So Good, So Good...

James Brown: May 3rd 1933 - December 25th 2006.

He's miming, but the dancing is real.

And they don't make shoes like that no more...

RIP the Godfather Of Soul.

Searching For The Dolphins In The Sea

For Robbie in particular, all Buckley fans in general. The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1974.

Johnny Rotten Was Right

The Ghost is back!

No thanks to the muppets at our Internet 'Service' Provider but because, rather than waiting another week on their 'procedures', we took Johnny Rotten's advice ("f***ing ignore the system, use it when it suits you'') got off our rapidly-expanding pre-Christmas arses and bought a new modem from PC World.

Did you miss us at all?

Post to come, dear readers.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the season, may we direct you to the superb Christmas music zip put together by the lovely people at 'I Am Fuel, You Are Friends' ?

God it's good to be back on t'interweb....

Lost In Space

The Ghost has been unable to post.... since lightning struck our internet connection last week in a storm at the tail end of the North London Tornado (!).

As we speak, a crack team of highly-trained engineers are working round the clock to resolve the problem/a few muppets from BT are thinking about getting round to it (delete as applicable).

Meanwhile this comes commando-like from 'the field' (well, a public library PC).

Morale is not good. No music downloads, no email, no blogging. Isolation.

We hope normal service will be resumed soon, but we're not counting on it.

Wishing you Merry Christmas now, just in case....

Your Life Becomes A Travelogue Of Picture Postcard Charms

23 years ago (I find that very hard to compute; but as my Mother always said, and I never believed, 'The older you get, the quicker the time goes') - 23 YEARS AGO!! Joni Mitchell played Wembley, London, England.

The BBC screened it - and I plugged my crappy Tandy cassette recorder into my parents' telly with my separately purchased crappy Tandy grey 'jack plug'.... and taped it.

I had heard and liked 'Big Yellow Taxi' and I had read that she was a Very Important Artist Of The Kind I Might Appreciate.

I played the (badly recorded) C90 tape over and over and over again; I tracked down the songs to the original albums; I bought them one by one, as my pocket money would allow..... and I became A Major Fan.

Here's a clip from that very show.

Gawd bless the glories of You Tube.

And Gawd Bless Joni.

It was far from a false alarm.