Politicians hide themselves away, They only started the war

Friday 20 November - Yes, I know I'm a bit late blogging, but there's a woman in my life who is keeping me occupied in the very best way possible, so I'm not sorry at all. Anyway up, we were out on Wednesday and, frankly, I can't do better than let The Druid tell you all about it.

So on Friday it was a case of covers all around so Andy and I plumped for Dufflegoat (and on FaceSpace) at The Roman Bath. We've seen them twice before and enjoyed them on previous occasions. Formed in 1994, Dufflegoat are a three piece rock covers band hailing from York, consisting of Roger Newton (guitar, backing vocals), Tony Gilpin (bass, lead vocals), and Paul Marshall (drums). Even on a chill winter's evening, Paul was drumming bare-chested. Brave man. The Goat do covers, but they don't go for note-by-note perfection. Rather, they take the essence of the original and turn it into something of their own. It works very well indeed.

Being the light-weight drinker that I am, my brain is a bit foggy after two pint of John Smith's finest but I distinct remember a whole medley of Led Zeppelin The Song Remains The Same, Good Times Bad Times, Rock and Roll, Cream White Room and Sunshine of My Love, Black Sabbath War Pigs, Deep Purple Black Night, The Who Won't Get Fooled Again, Jimi Hendrix Foxy Lady and Purple Haze, QOTSA No One Knows, Fleetwood Mac The Green Manalishi With the Two Pronged Crown, and they even threw in a couple of their own songs. Sadly The Goat are not back in York for the rest of this year but they can be caught on Saturday 5 December at The Bridge Tavern, Bradford, Friday 11 December at The Axe, Boston and Saturday 12 December at The Victoria Bikers Bar, Coalville. Recommended.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?

Friday 13 November - Severe weather warning! Torrential rain! Storm force winds! Well not in York matey. We are the eye of the storm. Quite mild for a November evening, and just right for a genteel stroll into town, to The Roman Bath to watch classic rock covers band Stealer. Now the Bath can get a bit crowded but tonight it was exceptionally so, with a constant stream of tattooed ladies and baldy blokes in leather jackets. Even a guy with a shoulder bag big enough to carry a small child in. He knocked everyone flying.

Anyway, Stealer are a four-piece from York consisting of Mick, Nick, Andy and Tivvy (on drums). Tonight they played the following and more (I can't remember much after two pints of John Smith's, such a light-weight); The Kinks You Really Got Me, Lynyrd Skynyrd Sweet Home Alabama and Freebird, The Who Won't Get Fooled Again, AC/DC High Voltage Rock And Roll, Let There Be Rock and Whole Lotta Rosie, Neil Young Rocking In The Free World, UFO Too Hot to Handle, The Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter, The Doors Roadhouse Blues, The Undertones Teenage Kicks, Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited and Like A Rolling Stone, and Deep Purple Black Night. All competently played and making for a very enjoyable evening. Thanks guys.

p-Pod roulette

Let's play shuffle on the old p-pod and see what comes up:

• El Salvador. Lead track from 2003 debut album Vehicles and Animals by Athlete. Released 24 March 2004, it was the fourth single from the album and charted at number 31.


• Today The World Stopped Turning. You gotta love Thunder. This version was track 6 from the 2003 album Thunder Ballads. Thunder announced a decision to split on 28 January 2009 via their website, boo hiss. The band toured Europe and Japan before returning home for the British leg of their farewell tour in July 2009. Their very final appearance took place on 1 August 2009 at around 11pm at the Sonisphere Festival, Knebworth where, thanks to another band pulling out, they were able to arrange a place on the bill at late notice and played a short final set to a packed Bohemia tent.


• Strange Kind Of Woman. Released as a follow up single after Black Night in early 1971 by rock legends Deep Purple. Originally called Prostitute, vocalist Ian Gillan said "It was about a friend of ours who got mixed up with a very evil woman and it was a sad story. They got married in the end. And a few days after they got married, the lady died." The track peaked at number 8 in the UK singles chart and appeared on the 1971 album Fireball.


• Terminal Crash Fear. Blimey, this was a blast from the past. Specifically it was track 12 from the 1996 album The Big 3 by the 60ft Dolls. The Dolls were a Welsh rock trio active in the 1990s. The album featured four singles that had been previously released and was described by the NME as "grunge mod...proto-pub metal blues of the first order". The band toured extensively in the UK, Japan and Europe, including several summer festival appearances as well as opening for The Sex Pistols at their 1996 Finsbury Park reunion gig. But they were dogged by alcohol problems, and after an exhaustive three tours of the USA in 1997, never toured again. They released their second album, Joya Magica, in late 1998 and split soon after.


• Further On (Up The Road). One of Johnny Cash's final collaborations with producer Rick Rubin, the album American V: A Hundred Highways, was released posthumously on 4 July 2006. This was track 5, actually a cover, originally recorded by Bruce Springsteen on his 2002 album The Rising.


• Liberty In Reality. Sam Brown, daughter of Joe. This was track 6 from her superb 1997 solo offering Box. Never heard of her? Bet you have. Sam provided some backing vocals for Pink Floyd on their 1994 album, The Division Bell, and accompanied them on tour to promote the release.


• Abyssyn. Track 5 from the 2009 album Stranger Inside by Richard Barbieri. Barbieri was the former synth programmer with Japan but he has been working for the last 16 years alongside Steve Wilson in Porcupine Tree.

I'm tired of being what you want me to be, feeling so faithless, lost under the surface

Friday 6 November - there's an old saying (I say it and I'm old) that sometimes you have to listen to rubbish music otherwise you don't appreciate the good stuff. Tonight, at Fibbers, I gained a good deal of appreciation for the good stuff. However, not included in that sweeping statement was the first of tonight's bands, Astrae. We've seen them before, but I'm sure they've lost a lady violinist somewhere along the way. A York-based band, they consist of James A Hutchinson (Guitar / Vocals), Jack Beavers (Guitar / Synth / Vocals), Ali Thyne (Drums / Percussion), Rio (Keyboard / Synth), and T-Bone Malogus (Bass and pineapple knot hair do). I like their music. It's alt-rock with a healthy dash of keyboards, and somewhere in the mix was the superb Outlander, and the tracks Something for Now, and L'Ost. Each song is longer than the bog-standard three-minute as the band concentrate on lengthier, crafted tunes that convince, me at least, that real thought goes into each composition.

It's downhill from there I'm afraid. Second support came from Thatcher's Bush.Again, we've seen these before and, on the strength of tonight's performance, I've no reason to change my opinion that these are basically a formulaic pub-rock band veering on the side of ska-punk. OK, I will admit that they might make a reasonable Clash covers band.

There was slight improvement (it would have been difficult to get worse) with headliners Sons Of Albion, a London-based outfit consisting of Logan Plant (vocals and famous dad), Nuno Miguel (guitars), Gones (bass) and Francisco de Sousa (drums). They are likened to Soundgarden, Audioslave and Stone Temple Pilots but, frankly, their dark and intense music doesn't really go anywhere. It just sits in a corner making a noise while Plant hops about on stage weaving his hands around like a Bollywood princess. Of course, I may have been a bit cheesed off by this time, and therefore a bit negative. Certainly, if I had to chuck my money at any band it would have been Astrae.

We were hoping for a lift to the end of the evening by finishing off in The Roman Bath. Unfortunately there was a different band playing than had been previously advertised, and whoever it was played some dismal covers with an inappropriate ska edge. All a bit rubbish really.

You sit in your big house baby, you drive your fancy car

Friday 30 October - before I get down to the nitty-gritty of music, I'm afraid I'm going to have to drag out my soap-box and indulge in a bit of a rant. On Friday 30 October the news broke that Professor David Nutt had been asked to resign as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs after claiming in a paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. The paper was based on a lecture he gave in the summer and had been published by one of the UK's leading university departments of criminology.

So, bad enough then that the government are not interested in listening to scientific advice, but to sack the man for criticising their policy, in a land that prides itself on freedom of speech, is surely a step too far. But, I was appalled when watching The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday 1 November, when Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson said, "Well I think to find yourself in a situation like this is very controversial. These things are best sorted out behind the scenes [my italics], so that the government and their advisers can go to the public with a united front." (Courtesy of the BBC website). In fact Mr Marr asked Mr Donaldson twice if the professor was accurate in his claim, and Mr Donaldson avoided answering on both occasions. Clearly the CMO wasn't prepared to put his job on the line and admit anything. It seems that our government would rather the public weren't aware of these anti-establishment views. Personally, I'm not in favour of re-classifying ecstasy from class A to class B (essentially, one of the thrusts of Nutt's paper), but I would rather I had all the facts on which to base my opinions. I don't want government controlling my opinions by feeding me only information they want me to have. This is 2009 not Nineteen Eighty-Four.

OK, rant over, here the music stuff. We had a full turn out of The Friday-Nighters as we were in the Roman Bath to watch our favourite artist, Chantel McGregor and her band; Martin Rushworth on drums and Alex Jeffrey on bass guitar. Regular readers will know that I've run out of superlatives to describe the awesome guitar playing prowess of this pocket-sized dynamo. You won't believe me when I tell you that she plays like Hendrix, unless you're actually seen her. But she doesn't just play covers of all the guitar greats; she elevates these covers and makes them better than the originals. She is simply stunning. I'm normally pretty good at playing "spot the song" but I struggle with identifying some of them. Of those that I did recognise were; Bridge To Better Days and Mountain Time (Joe Bonamassa), Help Me (Sonny Boy Williamson), Up In The Sky (Joe Satriani), Voodoo Chile, Red House, and Purple Haze (Jimi Hendrix), Daydream (Robin Trower), One Of These Days (Ten Years After), Had to Cry Today (Blind Faith), Lenny (Stevie Ray Vaughan), High (Richie Kotzen), and New Day Yesterday (Jethro Tull). You can check out videos of her performing on YouTube. Please do it. Maybe I'll see you down the Bath on 18 December 2009, that's the next time she'll be playing in York.

After the gig we stood chatting outside the Bath. Andy had finally decided to make his way home and had unlocked his fold-up bike, ready to set off. Just then, Chantel and her parents emerged from the pub and Chantel wanted to have a go on his bike. Unable to resist a pretty face, Andy relinquished his bike to her and she hitched up her skirts and began wobbling around St Samson's Square. The early morning air was filled with her laughter as she shrieked, "Mum, Dad, can I have one for Christmas?" What a lovely lass.