Authentic or what?

I dropped into O'Flaherty's Irish pub tonight. On a Sunday, we have the particularly silly experience of an "Irish" band.


I've seen the band vary from around eight people, to the three they had tonight. One thing remains constant though, the music seems as fake as you can imagine. I'm sure these people have good intentions, but you'd need to have never been within a thousand miles of Ireland to think that the noise these people make was anything to do with Ireland.

Real pubs in Ireland have so much atmosphere you could stick it in a bucket and sell it. Obviously it doesn't travel well though, as the inside of my refrigerator has more atmosphere than this place. And the Stella is over priced and flat.

Friendly advice to Americans - if you want to go to an Irish bar, go to Ireland.


"Reasons to love the Mission Ale House" - the biggest reason is not on this poster. That's the reason that is that it's not trying to be Irish. It's just trying to be a good bar, and that makes it the best bar in San Jose.

Pain in the Neck

I suffer from chronic neck pain. When I was first told that it was really scary. I thought the phrase "chronic pain" meant that you would have it all the time. But like most things, the words really mean something different. "Chronic" in this context just means a pain that happens for no immediate reason, like being hit or anything. No physical reason. That's a good thing too, as I doubt if I could handle the maximum pain levels I suffer with this all the time.

I found these pictures on the internet tonight. It must be one of these bastards that's causing the problems. Saturday of this weekend was really wiped out due to an attack of neck pain. Happily today it seems all over again.


If you are employed in the USA and have good health insurance, the health care here is massively better than the UK. However I think the doctors here have some kind of deal with the drugs companies, as you can't get out of the doctors without a piece of paper to take the the pharmacy for some drug or other. I did a cull of the pills that didn't work a few weeks ago, but that left the above that I've been prescribed for neck pain over the past two years. Even with chucking the most useless ones out, I'm not convinced that any of the above do any good. I don't think Americans can leave the doctors without some magic pills that they believe may solve their problems.

Redwood City Blues Jam

I haven't been here for ages. This is the Wednesday blues jam at the Little Fox Theatre in Redwood City. The last time was the day before I was supposed to be flying back to the UK for Christmas. I said goodbye to my friends in America, then got stuck in the US due to the fog at Heathrow, so I had to say hello to everyone again. It was just as well, if I had to chose between being in a bar in San Francisco or stuck sleeping on the floor at Heathrow, I know what I'd chose.


We had sushi in a Japanese restaurant down the road. I saw these sushi rolls in the vegetarian section of the menu. They were called "Cats Eyes" rolls, as they had mushrooms and olives in them. I asked the waitress if they were vegetarian or did they really have cats eyes in them, and she didn't understand that was supposed to be a joke. Two of our party had lived in Japan for a while, although they didn't know each other before, they lived in Japan at the same time. I learnt some interesting cultural things from them about Japan.


I took a number of very dodgy photos. This is "Amy Lou's Blues", Amy Lou herself was very lively, if a little scary at times.


One of our party was also singing with one of the bands, she was very good. They did a version of "Take me to the River".


When I left they were playing "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" on a big outdoor screen in the town hall square opposite the Little Fox.

End of the Great American Stella Shortage

I'm pleased to report that the great American Stella shortage seems to be over, as evidenced by the beer taps of the Mission Ale House on Friday.

Not this even now

When you do a Google search of "Even Now Lyric" you just get pages of Barry Mannilow. Now this is truly scary:

Barry Manilow - Even Now Lyric

Even Now
When there's someone else who cares
When there's someone home who's waiting just for me
Even now I think about you as I'm climbing up the stairs
And I wonder what to do so she won't see
That even now
When I know it wasn't right
And I found a better life than what we had
Even now I wakeup crying in the middle of the night
And I can't believe it still could hurt so bad

Even now when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it's still so hard without you
Even now when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And how I wish you knew
Even now

Even now
When I never hear your name
And the world has changed so much since you been gone
Even now I still remember and the feeling's still the same
And the pain inside of me goes on and on
Even now

Even now when I have come so far
I wonder where you are
I wonder why it's still so hard without you
Even now when I come shining through
I swear I think of you
And God I wish you knew
Some how
Even now

What is this? A lost classic from the band that never was - The Uppermost

Four years after the real heyday of the Kirkcaldy Bands, or my involvement with them, I formed a band with Steve Ellis and Jim Macdonald. Steve called it "The Uppermost" I thought that was a great name, very 1960's. I later found out it was was inspired by the name of a shoe shop that was up the road from no 1 Downfield Place where I lived at the time, and where Steve is pictured above. He also thought "Hair by Alphie" would be a good name too, that was a barbers shop in Fleshmarket Close.

Steve was an amazing guy at this time. We had been mates since school and he introduced me to tons of good music that I still love today. Artists and bands such as Robyn Hitchcock, The Television Personalities, The Velvet Underground and The Only Ones, to name only a few. Steve was in the year below me at college and his best mate from that class was Jim Macdonald.

Jim often spoke about being a guitarist, but I never heard him play until 1990 which is when we decided to form the band. I can't remember why it would have taken the three is so long to think about this, Steve and Jim had known each other since the Autumn of 1984. Could be that we had the collective lack of self confidence in ourselves as musicians and performers that can be in bred at school in Scotland.

However we did get together around March of 1990. Jim on guitar and backing vocals, Steve on vocals and me on rhythm guitar and bass. We worked out the beginnings of a set list and had a few practices in Niddrie Street in Edinburgh. The rehearsal spaces in Niddrie Street were quite an experience. They were in a kind of cellar complex. Water continually leaked in and I had my amp sitting in a puddle for the whole of one practice, I was convinced I would die for my art. If you needed to go to the toilet you had to go to the nearest pub, which was Bannermans in the Cowgate. I always found it difficult to go to the toilet there and not want to stay in the pub.

As ever, our set list was an uneasy compromise between the different band members musical tastes. As I recall, I didn't contribute many ideas to the song selection, so that may have also lead to some unhappiness from me over what we were playing. I can remember doing a version of Nick Cave's "City of Refuge" from his, then current album. I liked "Mercy Seat" from that album better. Though I did love our version of Altered Images "Insects". I liked the thought that I doubted that anyone else would have thought of doing an Altered Images cover. I also nicked, or "was inspired by", the chords in it's verse for "This is Radio Poohead", two years later. I don't think anyone noticed. Actually, there is a Robyn Hitchcock "inspired" lyric in that song too.

The real highlight of the set was the one almost original thing that we did. It was a version of "Wanted Man", which had been recorded by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. They lyric lists all the places where an outlaw is wanted:

"Wanted man in Kansas City, wanted man in Ohio,
Wanted man in Mississippi, wanted man in old Cheyenne" etc.

And it ends with the lovely lyric that goes something like: "The only place I'm not wanted is that place inside your heart":

But Steve re-wrote the lyric to give is a Scottish theme:

"Wanted man in costal Dysart, they want me in Kirkcaldy too" etc.

I thought this was great, Steve at his creative best. As this version of the song never saw the light of day, I felt I owed it to the world to write a song on a similar theme that became one of Ian's least favorite Pooheads songs, "Johnny Fife", my fife folk tale:

"Johnny went out traveling across the field of Burntisland
Traveling through Kirkcaldy to find his magic wand" etc.

We had the problem that we had with bands before though, no drummer. Our Niddrie Street practices were therefore drummerless, which made the whole thing less exciting. Tom's New Shoes had just got started at the time and in the fragments of audio tape I have of the Uppermost, you can hear the sound of them rehearsing in the space next door. They had a drummer so were a lot louder than us! I used to play guitar and bass on different songs, which lead to us sounding even more funny. By that time I had got rather bored with bass and the guitar seemed more exciting. Also I never thought I was any good at the bass, which most people seemed to agree with.

As usual, I taped more or less everything we did on my faithful old Marantz mono cassette recorder (bought in 1982 to record the audio of Blake's Seven off the telly, we had a video by this time, but tapes were horrendously expensive!), but we had the normal problem of tapes going missing. Steve lent one to an ex girlfriend of mine, although she wasn't a girlfriend of mine until 1995. I think Steve was into her at the time, he may be trying to impress her. I don't think she was impressed and we never got that tape back. May be a good thing, as my memory of it was that it was not very good. There was only one rehearsal tape that survived and I made a compilation of the bits of that that were reasonably ('reasonably" being a relative term) presentable and that was the only record of this band I had for years until I found the original tape when I was preparing to move to the states and I realised that I had indeed preserved the only bits worth preserving. The complication is only about 20 minutes long as well.

The same girl that Steve was trying to impress with our Uppermost tape had a friend who was much more impressed at the time with Steve and they ended up getting married and having five children together. They got together at the same time as The Uppermost were trying to get off the ground, so I think Steve's mind began to be elsewhere. The girl became known by Jim as "the Yoko Ono of the Uppermost", I thought he seemed to be taking the whole thing to seriously. My interest waned at the same time too, for not as good a reason as Steve's. I think I missed working with Ian, I think we understood each other better. We must do, we have been making music on and off now for 22 years. So The Uppermost fell to bits leaving only a great Scottish version of "Wanted Man" and some chords and ideas I stole for Pooheads songs.

Actually, the Pooheads were born around 18 months after the end off the Uppermost, it seemed that there was a longer gap between the two at the time. I suppose time goes slower when you are in your early '20's.

So why was I thinking about The Uppermost this weekend? Well I found a fragment of a demo tape of ideas that Jim Macdonald made and gave to me to try to get some ideas going for songs we could do. I was not immediately taken with many of the ideas. This is always awkward as it's difficult to say to someone that you don't know too well that you don't like something they've done. I think there were loads of versions of a Scottish folks song called "Wild Mountain Time" and maybe a Johnny Cash song or two.

But one song really stuck in my head and has grown on me over the years. For reasons I can't recall, this was one of the first songs I digitised in 2000, when I first got the equipment. This is a good thing, as I struggled in vain to find the original tape in 2005, so I may never hear Jim's version of "Wild Mountain Time" again.

The song that survived is called "Even Now" and over the years I've been fascinated to know if it was a Jim Macdonald original or a cover. The last time I saw Jim was at Steve's stag do in 1991, so we have been out of touch for a long time. I find the song fascinating though. It has all these strange jazz chords in it. Actually, the same jazz chords that prevented the Pooheads from doing their own version of it, probably a good thing. But the lyric. What a lyric. Weirdly compelling, strange, disturbing and slightly sick. Like some tragic art movie in song. In truth, Jim had a better voice than Steve and his performance on this demo was just right. I can just imagine listening this on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Scotland watching the rain slide down the windows. It's chilling in a spooky kind of way.

One of my theories is that this could have been a poem that Jim set to music, it sounds like the words could stand up on their own right without the music.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the song is posted here:

http://www.andrewcrescent.com/page6/page8/page8.html

The level is quite low, so if you listen please turn up your computers. It's also pretty hissy as the MP3 was made from a second generation analogue copy and was probably originally recorded on basic equipment.

I'd love to find out if anyone knows what this song actually is. Or maybe it is indeed a lost potential Uppermost classic? From a quick check of the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, it states that "Even Now" was Barry Manilow's second album. I don't suppose it was the title track of that.

Talking of Edinburgh bands of the early '90's, my next web project is a Tom's New Shoes tribute site. Well somebody's gotta do it. Andy J, the guitarist of the band that was named after me, has dug up a ton of material so we got a lot to use to put a site together. I have obviously forgiven them for having a dummer and being louder than the Uppermost in Niddrie Street.

So maybe if "Even Now" is a lost classic, all that standing about in puddles in Niddrie Street in 1990 will have been worth it.

Friends of Europe Sunday

I was at the Friends of Europe meeting on Sunday. I've been going here around once a month since November 2005. The organisation started just at the right time for me, when I was looking for ways to meet new people.

Click here to check out
The Bay Area Friends of Europe!

This is run by a guy from England called Geoff and he has put together a website to publicise the group - www.bafoe.org

I took a load of photos, which Geoff has uploaded, you can see them here:

http://euro.meetup.com/80/photos/?photoAlbumId=175085&photoId=1567419

This was the biggest, in terms of the number of people we had there, ever. Loads of people from different countries.

New Challenge and 100th Post

As I reach my 100th post in the blog, I've given myself a new challenge. Due to the CONTINUAL crashing of the Rapidfrustration web creation tool, I have taken Mike's advice and decided to re-do the kirkcaldybands.comn website using a much more basic HTML web creation tool, and to stop messing about with these horrible GUI tools that just crash all the time. I just got the above book, and from a quick scan it actually does not look too difficult. All that funny code put me off before, I'm not a computer programmer after all. But the code I've read so far seems pretty easy to understand , so here goes - a new project for this weekend. I think I'll be staying here in the apartment most of the weekend as it's bloody hot out there and it's making me feel sleepy.

I need to be able to re-do the site soon though, as the Kirkcaldy Bands Treasure Hunt has uncovered it's most interesting find to date. More of that in the news section of that site. Some audio of a legendary Kirkcaldy punk hand has been found, they were the godfathers of them all!

The Stix

After a degree of diary co-ordination and planning, we manged to make it to our regular lunch spot again. Since we moved campuses as part of Sun's real estate consolidation, we haven't made it here much, but we managed it today and it was great to be back. There seems to be a lot of entries about food this week.

Spent the afternoon at the Sun Santa Clara campus where I worked from May 2005 to November 2006. It is a really beautiful campus, it was built in the grounds of a former mental hospital and some of the original buildings are still there, including the clock tower in the picture. It was hell for a while to try to get hold of a flexible office, but things seem to have settled down now, which is nice to know as I only live 10-15 minutes drive from here.

Made it to the really nice Santa Clara gym today, but I am really sore after overdoing it at the stability ball exercise class at Sun Menlo Park yesterday. The gym is part of the restaurant complex above, it is big and free for all employees, but the washing machine is knackered so there were no towels for showering, yuk. Good thing I live near here.

The temperature is rising. I was trying to just open the windows and avoid trying to use the aircon, but you know when you need to use the aircon when you open the windows and it gets hotter inside and you open the fridge door and want to climb in.

Being a Vegan at Happy Bamboo

I was here for tea tonight, despite being late due to an accident on the I101. It is a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant in south San Jose, I went with the Bay Area Vegetarian group. It was great because when I normally go to Asian restaurants everyone wants to order lots of dishes and share, but the vegetarians normally only have one or two dishes to choose from so it's not much use for us.

So it was great to go with a bunch of vegetarians, as we could do the dish sharing thing as this place has no meat for sale. They also had these really cute t shits that I wish I got a picture of, they had cute animals on the t shirts, drawn like a child would have drawn them, the t shirts said "Don't eat them, love them".

We had vegan food, very imaginatively done. Now I think about it, I had Chinese for lunch, which was vegan too (not deliberately). So, apart from the milk in the tea, I've had a vegan day. I don' think I've had one of them before. I eat too much dairy anyway.

Why does anyone pay for software?

I found this really cool free open source web creation tool today. I wish I'd found it before I spent $65 on Rapidweaver. Can't wait to play with it.

http://www.nvu.com/index.php

Rat in a box

I've had these lines of dialogue from Blakes Seven rattling round my head all day. They are from "Shadow", which was episode 2 of the second series. It has some great Chris Boucher written lines:

"Villa - Orac, Orac are you in there Orac?
Orac - Am I in where? What exactly do you imagine I am, some kind of tame rodent in a cage?
Villa - That's precisely what I imagine you are, a rat in a box"

Well, I suppose they only got Orac on the last episode of the first season, so Villa wasn't really to be expected to know how he worked. I've lived here for 2 years and a month now, and I'm still not sure how the air conditioning controller works, and Orac was a talking super computer with cool flashing lights.

Having been a tremendously indoorsy child, I hated the pressure to go out and do something I didn't want to do, like playing football, and I've found that in adulthood, and particularly since the wonderweb really got going, you can disappear into cyberspace sometimes. Add to that, working from home over the wonderweb too, and you can just spend too, too much time in the apartment. I really feel good about leaving the car sitting doing nothing and not contributing to global warming by making journeys I don't need to, but being stuck in one place all the time has it's downsides too.


So, having had enough of the apartment, I just made my first visit to the outside world since Saturday and I'm really pleased to say there is a wonderful world of California out there still. I'm going to go in the office tomorrow even though I don't really have to. This rat is released.

Rapidfrustration version 3.6

A short protest note. I'm experiencing a sensation that I haven't felt for a while. Whilst trying to identify it, I'm recalling that I'm experiencing levels of computer type frustration that I haven't felt since the dark terrible days of Windows 98.

I try not to be a Mac fanatic. The important thing to remember is that quality is always relative. In deciding how good a product is, you always have to compare it with something else. So my general view is that all computers should really have been as good as Macs and the problem is that 90 odd percent of computer users only experience of computing is Windows, and that seems to set the standard that other computers are judged by. Windows has got a lot better since Windows 98, but the fact that any software company felt that such a dreadfully unreliable operating system was ready to go to market in 1998 is proof of Microsoft's distorting market dominance. A true "market failure" if I ever saw one. I have a Windows machine, a cheap Dell laptop, I bought it for the very rare task that a Mac can't do because the software is not available. XP is much more stable than '98, but I still find the user interface unnecessarily fussy and busy. I don't enjoy using it.

So I moved to the world of Mac in 2003 and never looked back. Having suffered around three or four system crashes a day on my old Windows 98 machine I really fancied taking it to the back garden and smashing it to pieces, but I thought better of it and finally sold it on eBay in 2005 for around 50 quid.

It's been pretty plain sailing when compared to the days of Win 98 ever since. No computer is ever perfect, but I use computers a lot and I suppose I really test them to destruction, and the Macs generally stand up well.

But of course a computer is only as good as it's software and it's the above software that's causing the Win 98 levels of frustration.

Rapidweaver is a website creation tool for Mac. I actually just paid $25 for the new release (V 3.6) in the hopes that this thing would improve, but no joy. I think the problem is that Rapidweaver lumps all the website content into one file. So every time you save a file the computer is handling a file the size of the whole website, so any system may be challenged by trying to save a 2 gig file for example. This bloody thing has crashed so often whilst saving today that I'm lost count, but I'd estimate it to be around fourteen times.

I'm just managed to update www.kirkcaldybands.com, but its taken forwever. I think this'll be the last update I'll do using Rapidweaver. There is nothing worse than hitting "save" not knowing if you will lose all the work you just did or not.

One of the guys from the Twist, featured on the Kirkcaldybands pages is a website designer and he's recommended Dreamweaver from Adobe. It was only it's $400 price tag and the thought of learning new software that put me off switching to it before now. Oh and of course, it'll be a bloody pain to have to recreate the website in new software. All that cutting and pasting of content and dragging and dropping image and sound files is not very interesting work and time is precious.

It's taken me four years of Mac use to find software written for that platform that is truly useless. There are loads of good free software out there for Macs, and Realmac actually charge money for this rubbish. "We make nice things for Apple Macs". Hmmm, I wonder what that is?

I'm off to watch "The Prestige" on DVD to cheer myself up, I heard David Bowie's accent in it is a laugh.

Once upon a time in Iran

I stayed in the apartment last night and watched some real quality television on the iMac. Staying in to watch TV on a Saturday night would have seemed like sacrilege to me in my younger years. But this was really good stuff. One of the benefits I have it that my sister puts stuff I may like on DVD and sends it to me, so I get the best of British TV and can avoid all the crap. I don't really have time to watch much TV anyway.

This programme was fascinating. It was about a bunch of Iranian people going on a pilgrimage to Iraq. What was fascinating about it is that it is the first television I have ever seen that portrays Iranian culture from their point of view.

Of course, for a person from the North of Scotland, some of the things they say seem pretty weird. But I felt I was able to really empathise with these people and understand the beauty and importance of their culture and why it seems so different from ours.

I have met many people from the middle east since I've been here. They are amongst the funniest,kindest, friendliest and most energising people I have ever met. It's so sad that there has been so much war and destruction there. If only the internal combustion engine had never been invented, or it had ran on something else, the history of the world may have been very different.

Eurocircle Wenesday

I was at Eurocircle on Wednesday. I don't really have a huge desire to meet other people from the UK, but it's nice to meet people from other parts of Europe. I met people from Albania, Sweden, Germany, Turkey and loads of Persians. I always find it a bit of a struggle to get out of the house on a weekday evening, work being what it is. Of course, not having the old Celtic drinking habit in the US, you have more chance of making it into work the next day, as an American night out is not always a drinking competition in the way that nights out in the UK can be. I'm glad I made it out though, must do it more often.

Ogre Battle

Spotted on opposite the bar where a singles event I went to in SOMA in San Francisco was held on Tuesday. Seemed vaguely appropriate in in my twisted sense of humour. There is a whole singles industry developing. I'm yet to be convinced that most of it is not a lot of bollocks, just a way for people to make money, but it's good fun to meet new people if you are, relatively new to an area. SOMA (South of Market Area) is build on land reclaimed from the Bay. In the 1906 earthquake, most of it liquified. I couldn't help but remember that when I was there. I didn't wish that the earth would swallow me up at any time on Tuesday night, but if I had I'd have been in the right place for it.

The other side of shopping

I've been putting off going to Safeways for three weeks now. I really hate Safeways. So today, having finally completely finished the butter and being on my emergency toothpaste, I could put it off no longer. The food situation is actually even worse than it looks. Some of what little food is here is well over its use by date. I suppose I don't hate Safeways that much. But I do hate the parking lot outside Safeways. In America they seem never to paint lines or make it clear in any way in parking lots who is supposed to give way to who. As Safeway is always very crowded on a Saturday, the parking lot is always very busy and the lack of obvious logic about how it works, as far as traffic flows are concerned, just makes it all the more stressful. Worse, and this is something about America I'm still struggling to understand, why do Americans plant themselves opposite a car that's pulling out of a space, blocking all the other traffic whilst doing so, so they can have the space that the car is vacating. Why not just drive around until you see a free space, thus avoiding all the congestion that the sitting and waiting in the parking lot with no obvious traffic flow causes? When I write my list about what I like and don't like about America, the American attitude to cars will, I'm sure, come pretty near my list of dislikes.
Americans are also notoriously litigious, so the above sign is obviously Safeways being mega careful. I didn't even hear any noise of construction. Also, where are you supposed to get the ear plugs from? As most people that go to Safeways seem to wander round with cellphones permanently stuck to their ears, how are they supposed to do that with ear plugs in? I'm sure they'd find a way.

Seen in the "Foreign foods" section today, which is where I can buy decent tea. I wondered if Safeways decided they had to stick the label with "dressing" onto the bottle in case Americans think Salad Creme is for external use only, like hand creme. Maybe it should be. Do any Americans really buy salad creme?

The shopping cart (as they say in America, and now probably all over the world thanks to to popularisation of the term by Amazon.com, etc) was very full today. I needed two trips back from the car to get the stuff up to the apartment. You will see that I managed to find some HP Sauce in the foreign foods section today.

To me it always seems a peculiar form of torture to put these terrible magazines next to the checkouts. My eyes always end up drawn to them, even though I can't stand them, in the same way that my eyes are always drawn to the American sports on the big tellys in the bars here, even though I have no clue about American sports. People even ask me the scores sometimes, I have no idea. If I was a pessimist, which I'm not, these magazines would convince me there is little hope for society. I just can't imagine why anyone would want to read about some "celebrity's" cellulite. I believe, although I don't have one, there is much more of this kind of thing on American telly. I suppose I was never much good at popular culture.

Smelling the records at Streetlight. Memories of buying records on a Saturday morning

My parents used to get to the weekly shopping every Saturday morning, they liked to catch the shops before they got busy. Around 1973 I got 50p pocket money a week, and that was just enough to buy a single. Having just been entrusted with the huge responsibility of being able to spend 50p of my own money each week, the only thing I ever wanted to buy was records.

When I started buying records on a Saturday morning, they looked like the one above. I remember they went up to 53p a week due to the high 1970's inflation rates and I had to wait two weeks before getting one single, very annoying. So Saturday morning shopping time began to be associated with record buying around 1973 and it continued to be so, for a large number of years. I'd buy the record in the morning, gaze at it in the car on the way home, then rush upstairs to play it when I got home.

I love the 1970's record sleeves. I searched high and low through images on the internet of my favorite cover. It was the RCA paper cover that they had before they started using the one above. I remember it was very psychedelic, actually probably a little out of date by the time the early-mid 1970's came along, so I guess that's why they replaced it with this swirly design. But I loved the earlier one. I associate it with the incredible excitement of buying my first single, which was "Teenage Rampage" by "The Sweet". "Teenage Rampage" indeed, I was only 6! I dropped it just before I bought it, I can still picture it rolling on the floor, so it always had a crack in it that I had to smooth out before I played it. I can still hear in my mind, the beginning of Teenage Rampage with the little "click" that the crack in the record caused.

I used to buy my singles in Boots in Inverness. This is me outside of Boots in Inverness the last time I was in the city, although the photo is a bit of a cheat, the original was pulled down at the end of the 1970's. This is the new Boots which is part of the indoor shopping centre that was built on top of the old one.

Record Rendevous was just down the road from Boots, in Castle Street Inverness. I don't remember buying much here in the '70's, apart from "Whispering Grass" by "Don Estelle and Windsor Davis". Not as cool as "Teenage Rampage" ("I will not have gossip in this Jungle...."). I remember pronouncing "Record Rendevous" exactly as it was spelt, I had no idea it was a French word. There were always loads of Gaelic and Scottish country dancing records there. I remember being told that the local Gaelic community used to hang around there, I never saw them. This is poor old "Record Rendevous", obviously in it's last days in 2006. I'm glad I caught it on camera just before it went for good.


For reasons I'm not really sure about, I bought less records in the late 1970's and very early 1980's, I was probably too obsessed with science fiction at that time. But as the early '80's rolled on, the shop above became my Saturday morning ritual. I just found out actually that one of the guys in one of the bands I featured in www.kirkcaldybands.com, the Receiving End, worked here. This is Sleeves record store in kirkcaldy. I think it was called "Bruces Records" before it was called "Sleeves", I remember the bin outside still said "Bruces Bin". It was part of a little chain of record shops. I think there were three of them, I remember another was in Falkirk, I can't remember where the third one was. Towards the end of my school days, carrying around a bag with a vinyl album in it in a Sleeves bag, was almost compulsory, if you wanted to be cool. I remember being told off my one of my peers for carrying around a record in Boots bag, seems the Boots habit hadn't quite died.

Towards the middle of the 1980's I remember getting as much as 5 pounds pocket money a week, so one, or maybe depending how cheap they were, two records a week was possible. And as I could now afford albums, I didn't have to listen to the same thing over and over again on a Saturday afternoon. I bought loads of records here. I used to go in and browse and dream that one day I'd have enough money to buy as many records as I wanted. Although looking back I'm glad in a way that I didn't. Some of my musical taste is the same now as it was in the 1980's, some is very different. I'm not sure I really needed to spend money buying every Barclay James Harvest and Moody Blues records.

The ritual was pretty much the same though. Buy the record (always now an album) on a Saturday morning and listen to it on a Saturday afternoon. I don't have my 1980's diaries here, but I recall a diary entry made around May 1984 that said "bought and listened to for most of the day, Pavlov's Dog's "At the sound of the bell"". Now that's one I still listen to.

The above moody black and white shot was taken for the "Kirkcaldy Gallery" page of the original Kirkcaldy Bands website. It was taken in 2000.

Sadly, when I walked down from the train station towards the High Street in May 2004, I noticed Sleeves was empty and looked like it would soon be no more. So I took this shot with my then camera phone. It's obvious why I needed a new camera phone!


My first paying job in September 1986 was in an office block in a place called "Apex House", Leith Walk, Edinburgh. Opposite and up the road slightly was "Vinyl Villains" one of Edinburgh's premier second hand record stores. I think my first pay check was around 200 pounds. When I got it I went straight over to Vinyl Villans and bought 70 pounds worth of records. Thirteen years on from buying my first record, I obviously still thought money was just for buying records with. Vinyl Vllains was great, I hope it's still there. I bought tons of records there. Because it was a second hand place you were never sure what you were going to find there. I remember the excitement as I used to find, what was then, rare Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator albums. One seemed so rare to me that I remember asking the guy to go and hide it behind the counter so that no one bought it when I went off to get money to buy it.


As the '80's turned into the '90's I still bought records, although I switched manly to CDs in the '90's. I still frequented music stores, mainly HMV and Virgin in Edinburgh's Princes St and HMV in Swindon's Regent St.

I got into online music buying very early. One of the constant frustrations of having musical taste that is not the average, was the lack of availability of material I liked in the regular music stores. So, having discovered "CD Now" which was one of the earliest on line stores and realising that you could just search for anything you wanted, I pretty much gave up on record stores after that, especially as the '2000's got going and I saw how amazingly cheap second hand CDs were on eBay and Amazon. The above pic is actually eBay's corporate headquarters, which is just down the road.

One of the huge problems of being a music fan in the '70's, '80's and '90's was the comparatively huge cost of music. No wonder illegal downloading for free got so popular. But with all these second hand CD's around, it seemed a lifetime away from being only able to afford one single every two weeks because they had gone up to 53p.

Having watched "24 hour party people" on the plane over to the UK last time I was there, and with the Ian Curtis biopic due out, I wanted to buy some Joy Division music. I was just about to reach for the iBook to buy them from Amazon, when I decided that I wanted to hear them today.

So then a radical idea struck me, why not go to a record store? And how more appropriate, I could buy then on a Saturday morning 34 years after I had first done this, and listen to them on a Saturday afternoon. So this is where I was today, Streetlight Records in Bascom Avenue in San Jose.

I remember first seeing that in America they put the CDs in these funny plastic holders to stack them in the racks in the stores on our many rummages through the record stores of Manhattan when we were in New York in 1990. I still have no idea why they do that.

Streetlight of course has tons of vinyl. I don't even have a record player at the moment, it's in storage in Edinburgh, so I didn't buy any. But they look great in the rack, much better than the CDs. I even picked up a second hand record and smelled it, took me right back to Vinyl Villains in 1986, somehow the old cardboard of the record covers smells great to me. Must be nostalgia.

I always used to straight to the "V" section in record stores, being a huge Van der Graaf Generator, Violent Femmes and Velvet Underground fan. I used to have to push past all the Eddie Van Halen to find the decent stuff.

Like often, and this is why I went so overboard on on line buying when I could, there was not even a Van der Graaf Generator section, but there was one old friend here today.




I didn't even know that they made vinyl records any more, other than the sort that DJ's use for "scratching", if that's the right hip term. So I was amazed to see this. I wish I had a record player now. This will probably explain where Marketa's songs are that are in the Movie but not "Swell Season".

So having bought the three Joy Division and one Ramones CD in Streetlight records this morning I have spent all this afternoon listening to what I bought this morning. Just like before, it's yesterday once more.