The Gonzo Daily - Friday
Being the editor of a weekly music magazine is a
strange position to be in. I stopped reading Q magazine over ten years ago as I
found it getting stodgy, self congratulatory and irritating as well as
concentrating less and less on the sort of music that I personally liked and
more on bands like Oasis and Kasabian that I found mildly irritating. The Word
was much better, but was beginning to become smug when it ceased publishing some
years back, and I never forgave them for their Tony Blair interview. I have been
reading Mojo pretty much since it started, but this month I found myself
wondering whether their editorial team and mine were actually living in the same
universe. There are two recently released albums - Yusuf Islam, and Steve
Ignorant's Slice of Life - which I think are not only magnificent but worth
serious discussion. I have given them extended essays in the forthcoming issue
of Gonzo Weekly, whereas Mojo dismissed them with three stars and a cursory
paragraph. A third, Neil Young's latest was also dismissed fairly peremptorily
this issue whereas, I believe that considering its historical importance both
stylistically and lyrically within Young's canon of work, and for its
eco-concerns, deserves a bit more than the brief review it got in Mojo.
Hmmmmmmmm.
It has Steve Hillage on the cover, and features an
interview with him inside. But there's more! There is news about Daevid Allen,
Doug Harr critiques the Supertramp live DVD, and people make wild speculations
about a new Galahad side project. Xtul are still in the deep woods, and Corinna
finds a brilliant board game from the Swinging Sixties. Jon muses on Peter
Hook's recollections of Joy Division, and we send Carl 'Blue' Wise to a desert
island and Jon is very rude about the third album by The Ting Tings. 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!
* 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?
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