Friday, October 03, 2014

THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN EMULATES THE OOZELUM BIRD

The Gonzo Daily - Friday
We have a house guest at the moment; Jools the Cornish ghost hunter moved house recently with her partner Dougie, but the new house is so noisy that she can't get any sleep. So for a couple of nights at a time she will be kipping at Casa CFZ. All very good in theory, but when in practise we stayed up until gone five chatting about cabbages and kings, she had less sleep than one would have hoped.
The new Marianne Faithfull album is a little odd. `Give my Love to London` opens with the title track which is ragged as hell and comes over like a stoned bunch of folkies playing 'Waiting for the Man'. On first listen, such a rag tag opener does not set the scene well for the rest of the album, but it soon tightens up and tracks like 'Late Victorian Holocaust' which was written by Nick Cave are magnificent. The whole album has a peculiarly unfinished feel to it with count ins left in and fragments of studio noise. However, when you go back to the beginning and start again the title track now does not sound out of place at all. In context with the rest of the album it makes perfect sense.
Against a peculiar amalgam of Waterboys and Velvet Underground she sings:
"The river's running bloody, the Tower is coming down
I'm singing Pirate Jenny, while the black ship#s bearing down"
and one wonders whether she has read the Alan Moore novella of a few years ago when characters from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen universe live out their own drama to the interactive soundtrack of Seeräuberjenny. We are living in strange and disturbing times, and thiws paranoid and unsettling album provides rather a good soundtrack to them.

Ageing Hipsters, rock and roll historians, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Gong fans and all sorts of other people, had better look out! The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#97) will soon be available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/.
It has me being totally seld indulgent with a picture of my first grand-daughter (born a few days ago) on the cover, but features an interview with the legendary Freddy Bannister, promoter of festivals at Bath and Knebworth amongst others. He talks about Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd amongst others. Doug Harr goes to see Tears for Fears, and Jon is surprisingly reassuring about the future of the music business. There are also new shows from the multi-talented Neil Nixon at Strange Fruit and from M Destiny at Friday Night Progressive, and the massively talented Jaki and Tim are back with their submarine and Maisie the cow. There is also a collection of more news, reviews, views, interviews and Mollucan palm cockatoos (OK, no weird pink parrots, but I got carried away with things that rhymed with OOOOS) than you can shake a stick at. And the best part is IT's ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
Read the previous few issues of Gonzo Weekly:

All issues from #70 can be downloaded at www.gonzoweekly.com if you prefer. If you have problems downloading, just email me and I will add you to the Gonzo Weekly dropbox. The first 69 issues are archived there as well. Information is power chaps, we have to share it!
You can download the magazine in pdf form HERE:
http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/
*  The Gonzo Daily is a two way process. If you have any news or want to write for us, please contact me at  jon@eclipse.co.uk. If you are an artist and want to showcase your work, or even just say hello please write to me at gonzo@cfz.org.uk. Please copy, paste and spread the word about this magazine as widely as possible. We need people to read us in order to grow, and as soon as it is viable we shall be invading more traditional magaziney areas. Join in the fun, spread the word, and maybe if we all chant loud enough we CAN stop it raining. See you tomorrow...

*  The Gonzo Daily is - as the name implies - a daily online magazine (mostly) about artists connected to the Gonzo Multimedia group of companies. But it also has other stuff as and when the editor feels like it. The same team also do a weekly newsletter called - imaginatively - The Gonzo Weekly. Find out about it at this link: www.gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.com/2012/11/all-gonzo-news-wots-fit-to-print.html

* We should probably mention here, that some of our posts are links to things we have found on the internet that we think are of interest. We are not responsible for spelling or factual errors in other people's websites. Honest guv!

*  Jon Downes, the Editor of all these ventures (and several others) is an old hippy of 54 who - together with an orange kitten named after a song by Frank Zappa puts it all together from a converted potato shed in a tumbledown cottage deep in rural Devon which he shares with various fish, and sometimes a small Indian frog. He is ably assisted by his lovely wife Corinna, his bulldog/boxer Prudence, his elderly mother-in-law, and a motley collection of social malcontents. Plus.. did we mention the orange kitten?
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