No Summertime Blues!

Ain’t this weather great! If you’re abroad or whatever I should explain that September is ending & October opening with a heatwave in Sunny Southsea.

I’d like to thank people for kind replies about my music studies. I have a one-to-one booked next Thursday which I think may well be just what I need – but I’ll check other things too.

Now – two comments about the book. I reckon we need to sell between 600-700 to cover all costs and we’re printing 1000 so IF (no assumptions, but IF) things go well there will be a bit of dosh over and I have a couple of ideas:

1. As promised I’m responding to Mick’s thought about a trip to the Flamingo reunion. Saving a journey,  I reckon we might replicate such an event in Pompey, booking one of those classic 60s club bands (Dowliners Sect?) and reforming a local supergroup (I’m thinking Dynamos/J Crow/Strollers or whatever) to appear with them. We could use the extra money to book the gig (JR will help I’m sure – maybe at the Dockyard Club?) and IF POSSIBLE I’d love to charge five bob to get in and call it the Pompey Pop RENDEZVOUS!! We’ll see …

2. You’ll be used to my love of cricket. There’s a Pompey company developing a version for the kids called Cage Cricket. Ian Botham is ‘on board’ and they are looking to set up facilities at local schools and on the seafront. I’d love a Pompey Pop sponsored version especially as I’m very keen to do something for Pompey teenagers who are these days the same age we were back in the golden days.

Let me know what you think, buy an ice cream and slap on the suncream! – Dave

TV Blues (2)

Here’s the link to the Andy Broad ‘Live at 5’ Show

http://www.portsmouthlive.tv/live-at-five/601-pompy-pop-dave-allen-with-andy-broad.html

As I suggested it’s the last one in the series

“That’s All Folks!”

TV Blues

I’m back on the telly tonight (that is the computer screen via Portsmouth Live TV) with Pompey’s ‘Mr Blues’ Andy Broad. Live at 5 and then on their archive.

Sadly the show’s days are numbered as the station is being re-vamped. Still we have some good stuff there on the archive!

When were the 60s?

Here’s an interesting little message from Geoff French – given the FZ reference I expect a full and frank disclosure from Jimmy the Mook. Geoff says

“I was listening to an interview with Frank Zappa’s ex-secretary (a very straight English lady would you believe) on the BBC world service and she observed “if one lived in the provinces the 1960s didn’t really arrive till the 1970s”.

PS

I went searching for this and found a report – it was actually the suburbs so I couldn’t possibly comment .. Here’s an extract

Frank Zappa’s image may have suggested he was one of the wild men of rock but a new memoir by his assistant Pauline Butcher paints quite a different picture of the American musician, who died in 1993.

When in 1967 Pauline Butcher met Frank Zappa in London she didn’t even know who he was. But she spent much of the next five years working for him in California and got to observe the rock-star lifestyle at first hand. In the summer of 1967 Butcher was living with her family in the London suburbs and working in a secretarial agency in town.

The year may trigger images of swinging, psychedelic London but Butcher says life in her early 20s was nothing like that. “I wasn’t a 1960s Dolly Bird at all. I lived in Twickenham with my parents and my sisters – and our parents were very strict. I knew people in swinging London but I was on the fringes of it. The 60s didn’t really hit the suburbs until the 70s: people were still very prim.”

PPS Jimmy the Mook wasn’t “very prim” in the 60s. Twickenham? Hah! Try  Eastney, honey ….

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15082153

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9596000/9596226.stm

Super Thursday

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“SUPER THURSDAY” is the name given to today by the publishing industry because they launch all their big BIG titles prior to Christmas (feels more like mid-summer in Pompey this morning!)

So in anticipation of our launch which is just a few weeks away here’s more info about

Dave & Mick’s POMPEY POP PIX

Launch is planned for the weekend of 12/13 November: Saturday night at a gig with Danny Raven & the Renegades at Waverley Bowling Club Southsea. You’ll need a ticket to get in but there will be Pix and Licks all night long! On Sunday lunchtime I’ll also be taking copies to the (free) gig with my band Reet Petite & Gone at the RMA Eastney (opposite the Cellars/RM Barracks)

On the following Friday there will be a bit of a ‘do’ at Blackwell’s University Bookshop (Cambridge Road) as well from around 3.30pm

Otherwise you can get the book at Blackwells, the City Museum shop (Museum Road) and the Southsea Gallery in Albert Road (almost opposite the King’s) and that’s probably it, apart from by post via a Paypal we’ll set up on the Website (details to follow)

The RRP is £14.95 but at the launch weekend it’ll be £10 for cash (both days).

More info? The publisher says there are exactly 444 colour & B&W pix and I reckon very few local musicians of note from the 50s and 60s are missing. There are stars too including a Nigel Grundy section from the Pier etc and a few more unseen Rod Stewart in Pompey pix. About 70 pix are posters/tickets, there are folk, jazz, skiffle & dance band sections and well over 200 of pop/beat/rock acts. It’s organised in sections, chronologically with a central colour section and each section has a single page of introductory text but it’s mostly just pictures. I hope you’ll like it

Learning to Play (Help?)

Over the past four weeks I’ve been talking to a College in the region about spending some of my retirement studying music. I was neither averse to nor desperate to study music theory, what I wanted in particular was to spend one/two etc years (part time) developing my reasonable skills as a singer, trying new stuff (especially jazz) and working on my pretty mediocre skills as a guitarist.

I thought the college was the answer but it’s been a poor experience and I’m not going. I won’t reveal the name of the place (but it’s in the region not Pompey) and I don’t wish to discuss the issues further but I’m very disappointed, SO I’m after some advice and I figure this might be the place

I’d like to hear suggestions about how and where an old white ‘blues’ singer with a ponderous guitar style but a deep love of music can study on a regular basis and get better – individually or in a class. I’m prepared to pay and prepared to work (I play my guitar and sing every day). The internet is a good resource but it’s not enough on its own. So send me some ideas please

Hi There Pop-Pickers

10pm tonight on BBC Radio 2 is a one-hour programme about Pick of the Pops which began on the Light Programme in 1955. If you’re not back from the footy in time (or overseas) I’m sure it will be available on line afterwards

Shopping for ….

No not clothes this time but guitars, keyboards, drums.

Those of us  of a certain age who played music will remember fondly Bennett’s  music shops in Frastton Road and New Road. I’ve had this enquiry in and I’ve passed Julie immediately to  Mick Cooper who is the fount of all such knowledge but if anyone else has messages or memories (not necessarily of the 1920s incidentally!) please add a comment. I know Pete White has that lovely pale blue Strat still because I have a picture…

Here’s Julie:

“Hello, I just wondered if you knew if there were any Bennetts left in Portsmouth descended from the Bennetts Musical Shop which was based in Portsmouth in around 1920? My Grandfather Robert Bennett was a brother and I am trying to find any of my relatives who might still be around. I have found a Bennetts music shop in Southampton but not in Portsmouth”.

PS Not sure whether I told this story before but I once went into Bennett’s in Fratton Road (maybe 12/13) looked carefully at an electric guitar on the wall and asked the man “is that a rhythm guitar or a lead guitar?”

Unexpected Connections

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(Sorry Dave G – it’s another Lord Snooty moment).

The weather is so good I’m back in cricket mode. There’s a lovely Comment below from Barry Stone, a relative of organist Eric Copsey. When Mick gave me the picture I mentioned to him that Copsey was an unusual name but I’d been at school with one (Tim Copsey) who I was sure came from a family of market-gardeners – Barry’s unexpected Comment confirms that he must have been part of that same family. I’m sitting in the middle above (yep, I was captain) and as you look at it Tim Copsey is on my left but I’m also interested in a couple of matches in that season of 1963 when we played the Portsmouth Schools Cricket Association sides which came from other local schools. I made a few runs before I was bowled by Stokes – I’d bet that was footballer Bobby – and other Pompey Schools players (surnames only of course) included Saunders, Pannel, Wickham, Smith, Glover, Peach, Gosney, Deacon, Hill, Wedge, Olding, Passingham, Tann, Brown, Johns and Best (probably not George). Ring any bells?

Great Music (2)

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So this is why I asked that question (below) – last week the Government unveiled a new poster campaign to persuade people (overseas visitors? us?) that Britain is (still?) Great. Now I have plenty of opinions about all sorts of things but I never will get into anything contentious on this site so I’m simply interested in what the design company (Mother) and the Government together came up with. The 10 images are above and one of the 10 is Music (there’s also Richard Branson of Virgin plc as an Entrepreneur). The Music picture is from the stage of the crowd at the Reading Festival and the Text reads

“From Glastonbury to Glyndourne, Adele to the Beatles, Britain is home to the world’s greatest music” – well the Beatles is completely 1960s and Glastonbury started just after but what do you think? And how – in the field of popular music – might the Americans feel? There’s a longer report on this at

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2040364/GREAT-Britain-David-Camerons-tourism-poster-campaign-delivers-mixed-messages.html