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!
* 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?
The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper-column inches than any other cryptozoological subject. 
