CRYPTOZOOLOGY ONLINE: Still on the Track: HOORAY FOR THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN

The Gonzo Daily - Monday

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So it has arrived. The final Pink Floyd album is up on Spotify, and I made it my business to listen to it whilst doing the blogs this morning. It is exactly what they claimed of it; a collection of instrumental jams from The Division Bell sessions twenty years ago, that Messrs Gilmour and Mason have added a few bits and bobs to. Some of the reviews that I have completely missed the point, somehow expecting it to be a 'proper' Pink Floyd album, high concept and all, and somehow feeling cheated that it isn't. In its own way it is the most high concept of Pink Floyd albums; the one which shows that together the band are more than equal to the sum of the individual parts, which is how - of course - it should be, and is what everyone who has ever been in a band aspires to.

The reviews had mainly inferred that this was three sides of instrumental noodling (using the word 'ambient' more often than I would have liked) with one Pink Floyd song 'tacked onto the end'. In fact I found it to be almost exactly the opposite. This is not ambient or new age music in any shape or form. Neither (with the exception of two rather rough and ready pieces on the end) are they jams. They are seventeen very well structured pieces of Floydian instrumental music which would not have seemed out of place on any Floyd album of the past four decades, and one slightly lacklustre song on which Polly Samson tries to shoehorn her view of the zeitgeist of the band (which is probably pretty much correct) into one final song to wrap things up neatly. But you can't wrap things up nicely: Syd is dead, Rick is dead, Rog is nowhere to be seen.

In a piece which turned up in a Zig Zag anthology in the mid 1970s Roger Waters admitted that the band were always at their best when they didn't try to be too clever. And so it is here. The percussion workout on 'Skins' for example doesn't really work. And it is not, as he has claimed on various occasions recently, because Nick Mason is a substandard drummer. Not at all. But when they did things like this earlier in their career it was innocent experimentation, whereas now, being played by two pensioners, it sounds like the delicate sound of cynicism.

But on the whole this is a successful collection of music released for exactly the right reasons, and if it doesn't tick the right boxes for you it is your problem not theirs. Shine on you crazy wassnames!

GONZO TRACK OF THE DAY: Faster than life - Kevin Peek
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/gonzo-track-of-day-faster-than-life.html
THOM THE WORLD POET: The Daily Poemhttp://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/thom-world-poet-daily-poem_10.html
Live Review: Steve Hackett – Genesis Extended
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/live-review-steve-hackett-genesis.html
The Deviants: US reviews
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-deviants-us-reviews.html
Chris Squire (Yes) interview - 1995: Why Chris is always in the band
http://gonzo-multimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/chris-squire-yes-interview-1995-why.html

The Gonzo Weekly #103
www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/about.html

Jack Bruce, Corky Laing, Mountain, Tony Palmer, Steve Hillage, Erasure, Keith Levene, Jon Anderson, Yes, Nick Redfern, Cat Stevens, Steve Ignorant, Hawkwind, and Daevid Allen fans had better look out! The latest issue of Gonzo Weekly (#103) IS available to read at www.gonzoweekly.com, and to download at http://www.gonzoweekly.com/pdf/.

It has Jack Bruce on the cover, and features an interview with Corky Laing about his erstwhile bandmate inside. We also have a tribute to Jack Bruce from Tony Palmer, and another from Rob Ayling together with an unpublished photoshoot of Bruce and Pete Brown. But there's more! There is news about Daevid Allen, Doug Harr goes to see Erasure, Jon waxes lyrical about Steve Ignorant's new album, and critiques Yusuf Islam's and comes to the conclusion that Cat Stephens is a very brave man. Xtul are still in the deep woods, and Corinna finds some real Beatles tat. There is news and unpublished pictures from Keith Levene in Prague, and we send Steve Hillahe to a desert island. 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 turtles having a snooze (OK, no soporific chelonians, 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 55 who - together with an infantile orange cat 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 infantile orange cat?

Monday, November 10, 2014

HOORAY FOR THE GONZO BLOG DOO-DAH MAN

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