I appreciate it has been a while but life ‘n’ stuff keeps getting in the way of the fun stuff like writing for progarchy and whatnot. Plus my laptop dumped all my saved settings so whereas before I had a single button click to get here I’ve had to try to find the dashboard by trial and error (aka google). Anyhoo, not a  lengthy piece first time up but a few words on my most prized possession, a gadget called a Brennan JB7. A shameless plug I know but I am very fond of it. I get in from work, press one button (one button solutions always work well for me) and it begins to shuffle through about 1500 albums, allowing me to hear stuff I haven’t heard for years or, as has happened tonight, stuff that I grew up with. In this case it is 2112 from All The World’s A Stage, the first ‘proper’ album I ever owned. Imagine a freckly teenage boy in grim, grimy industrial northern England in late 1977/early 1978. You have that image? Good, then I’ll begin. Spitting, snarly school friends had taken to sticking safety pins through parts of themselves and calling themselves punks. They listened to music in the common room that involved people shouting, swearing and clanging away on what sounded like pots and pans. I, on the other hand, ‘wished it might come to pass’, and it did. In the form of Rush. Rush, thanks to my friend Robert Hudson (who had an older brother) begat Yes, who begat Genesis who begat ELP et al. Blue Oyster Cult I discovered all by my self but that’s another story for another time.

And now all that accumulated loveliness from the past 35 years or so is now stored on a box about the size of a hardback book. And not a very thick one at that. Thus far this evening it has already thrown Strangefish, Manning, The Watch, Kaipa and Blue Oyster Cult out at me. It was when 2112 came on, however,  that I felt compelled to write something, to get back on the horse so to speak. I have a huge pile of new CDs from the likes of The Tangent, Thumpermonkey, Shineback, Be Bop Deluxe to name but a few to load onto the beast, so shall try to convert some of my evenings doing so into witty and erudite passages for the good folks at Progarchy. Now that I’ve discovered out how to log onto the site again, that is.

Until then I shall bid you all a fond evening.