'An Orchestrated Songbook' CD/LP by Paul Weller with Jules Buckley & the BBC Symphony Orchestra - out on 3rd December

 

Introducing… An Orchestrated Songbook. Music from right across Paul’s exceptional career, reworked & redefined alongside The BBC Symphony Orchestra & acclaimed conductor Jules Buckley. 

17 special tracks, including The Jam’s ‘English Rose’ accompanied by sweeping strings, ‘Wild Wood’ with guest vocals from Celeste, Style Council hit ‘You’re The Best Thing’ featuring Boy George, ‘Broken Stones’ with James Morrison, and indisputable classic ‘You Do Something To Me’ taken to all-new heights. 

Available to pre-order now on deluxe or standard CD, with deluxe vinyl pre-order launching next Friday June 25th. Release date December 3rd. Classic Weller in a brand new light 🎻🎸 https://PaulWeller.lnk.to/OrchestratedSongbookSo

Bad Manners to play Christmas shows at The Garage and Under The Bridge in London

 

Bad Manners are appearing live at The Garage and Under The Bridge this Christmas performing hits such as 'Lip Up Fatty', 'Special Brew', 'Walking In The Sunshine', 'Lorraine', 'Can Can', 'Sally Brown', 'Just A Feeling' and more.

THE SKIDS & THE VAPORS join together for a special one-off concert.

 

The Skids formed in 1977 in their home town of Dunfermline, Scotland by Richard Jobson, Stuart Adamson, Bill Simpson, & Tom Kellichan. After releasing an independent single the band were played by John Peel, supported The Clash in concert and then were signed to Virgin Records in 1978. Their first singles were Sweet Surburbia, The Saints are Coming and Into the Valley - the latter reaching the UK Top Ten in early 1979.

 

Their seminal debut album Scared to Dance came out in 1979 which was quickly followed by two chart singles - Masquerade and Working for the Yankee Dollar. Both singles were taken from the Bill Nelson produced second album Days in Europa. The album also featured new member Rusty Egan of Rich Kids & Visage fame after the departure of Tom Kellichan. The band released two more albums The Absolute Game (1980) and Joy (1981) before splitting.

 

The Vapors are a new wave band who formed in 1978. Discovered by Bruce Foxton of The Jam (who went on to be their co-manager with John Weller), The Vapors released the classic singles Turning Japanese, News At Ten, Jimmie Jones, Prisoners, Waiting for the Weekend, Spiders and two LP's Magnets and New Clear Days before splitting in 1982.

SECRET AFFAIR - 'Behind Closed Doors' on BLACK VINYL via Heavy Soul! Records

 

SECRET AFFAIR

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Heavy Soul Records, under license from Sony

ROR121

**OUT NOW **

Wow - Heavy Soul has been awarded the prestigious award of officially reissuing, with full approval of the band, the classic second LP from the original 'Glory Boys' SECRET AFFAIR On heavyweight BLACK vinyl with TWO extra tracks added (the B-sides to the two singles from the LP - "So Cool" and "Take It Or Leave It"), this limited to 300 copies BLACK vinyl is a welcome repress of what was a transitional album from the band. Spawning two hits with 'Sound Of Confusion' and the anthemic 'My World', this took the band from the height of the Mod Revival to a widely accepted set of musicians who proved that the scene wasn't a total fad.

Essential LP by this fantastic band

£14.99 

The Spitfires - Southend & Milton Keynes Shows Rescheduled Again

 

'I was too arrogant and angry': Paul Weller admits he appreciates his success even more than his younger years - but rules out any hopes of a greatest hits show

 

He shot to fame as the lead singer of The Jam in the 1970s.

But Paul Weller has revealed he appreciates his job more now than ever, admitting he was 'too arrogant and too angry' when he was younger. 

In an interview with Radio Times, the musician, 63, touched upon his pre-gig jitters and also shut down any fans hopes of a greatest hits tour.  

Touching on how growing older has changed his outlook, the music legend said: 'I realise that the older I get – how lucky and fortunate I am to be able to do what I do.

'It’s never really a chore. I mean, it is work sometimes, you’ve got to get stuck in. But the older I get, the more I love it, and the more appreciative I am of it. 

'When I was younger I was too arrogant or too angry or whatever.'

But, despite his long and successful career, Weller admitted he still suffers from nerves before shows. 

His latest interview comes as he prepares for a new role of grandfather after it was revealed by Richard Eden that Weller's daughter, Leah, 29, is expecting her first child.  

'We are over the moon,' says Leah, who shared the photograph of her bump alongside her husband, fellow model Tomo Kurata. Leah's mother is The Style Council singer Dee C. Lee. 

Weller, 63, welcomed his eighth child four years ago. The baby was his third with his second wife, Hannah Andrews, giving him as many children as rock knights Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger.

Speaking candidly with Mary McCartney in an interview in British GQ's July issue earlier this month, Weller revealed that he gets stage fright. 

He explained he gets 'so nervous' he feels he doesn't 'want to be there' but said it disappears once he starts performing.

Mary asked how he feels when he goes out in front of a big crowd he reflected: 'It's almost a weird thing, because just prior to going on stage, especially in the hour before, I'm in bits. 

'I'm so nervous and so don't want to be there and want to go home, and then within minutes of actually being on stage, as soon as that first tune strikes up, I automatically feel as though this is completely where I'm supposed to be.

'It feels like the most natural, most comfortable, Zen-like place you could possibly be, it's so weird.'

Roger Daltrey on how Jimi Hendrix "completely copied" The Who by Far Out Magazine

Roger Daltrey is never one to ever talk down his group, rarely ever showing signs of self-deprecation. Therefore, with that in mind, it’s no surprise that he once claimed that Jimi Hendrix “completely copied” The Who.

Hendrix arrived in London during 1966 and, by that time, The Who had already graduated from the club scene, and it wasn’t until America’s finest export had become a household name that Roger Daltrey would witness him live. With The Who beginning to taste the highs of fame, their career had gone on a wildly different trajectory when Hendrix arrived on British shores, but it didn’t take him long to catch up with them.

The Who had built up a fierce reputation for being a formidable live act, one capable of blowing the roof off any building. If there was one act you didn’t want to follow, it was them. However, when Hendrix came along, everything changed, and he suddenly stole their crown. His rise was much to the irritation of Daltrey, who thought that he wasn’t reinventing the wheel and just copying Pete Townshend’s schtick.

“When Pete used to break those guitars, it was like a ritual slaughter of some mythological animal,” The Who frontman told AC/DC’s Brian Johnson on the singer’s programme, Life On The Road. “The thing used to scream. Every whack of it somewhere would create a different noise, and that never got written up. It was all about, ‘Oh, he smashed his guitar’. ‘Sorry mate, but you missed the point.’ What I never ever talked about was the noise it was making.”

Hendrix didn’t just smash guitars, although he did have a penchant for pulling out that trick on occasion, and even went one step further at Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 when he burned two guitars during his now-legendary performance.

He shared a bill with The Who that evening, and the two acts had a jam-off backstage to decide who were to go on first. Neither artist wanted to play last and follow the other, so they had to result to an old-fashioned coin-flip. Hendrix lost the toss and had to take to the stage after The Who had ripped everything to smithereens — the stakes couldn’t have been higher. 

“Monterey was the first one, the first pop festival, and Monterey was extraordinary,” Daltrey remembered about that day. “We drove down there all of us in one car, we turned up in this field, and it was all these strange-looking people, bells, bubbles.”

Although the festival impressed him, the plaudits that Hendrix received had a different effect on Daltrey. “All that stage act that Hendrix did, with the speakers and the guitar up against the microphone stand, all of that came from Townshend,” he declared. “Hendrix copied that completely. We all must understand that history, Hendrix saw Townshend doing that and, ‘Oh, I’m gonna grab that.'”

Conversely, Townshend has nothing but admiration on the subject of Hendrix. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019, he dotingly said: “He was a wonderful player,” Townshend uncharacteristically noted. “He wasn’t a great singer but he had a beautiful voice. A smokey voice, a really sexy voice… When you saw him in the live arena he was like a shaman.”

Adding: “It’s the only word I can use. I don’t know if it’s the right term. Light seemed to come out of him. He would walk onstage and suddenly he would explode into light. He was very graceful.”

Hendrix only destroyed instruments on a handful of occasions throughout his career, and it’s no coincidence that he did this at Monterey following The Who’s set. He needed to prove himself as the headliner, and Hendrix couldn’t let Townshend steal the limelight.

This act is a compliment to Townshend and shows how highly he was rated by his peer. Otherwise, Hendrix wouldn’t have bothered to bring out all the stops to make sure the attention was firmly on him.

Lincoln City in 1966: When The Who and The Kinks headlined a Bank Holiday festival at Sincil Bank

 

In 1966, heroes of the British rock n roll scene came together to help raise money for Lincoln City Football Club

The Bands

It's 1966.

In just two months - on July 30 at Wembley - England would lift the world cup for the first and so far, only time, after defeating the Germans.

All the people of Lincoln know on that May Bank Holiday is that a great summer is about to begin, with this concert a wonderful starting gun.

Music lovers flocked to the Sincil Bank stadium, desperate to see bands like The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds and The Small Faces play The Lincoln Pop Festival.

Tickets were priced at £1 for an entire day of music, and that included a programme too.

In it, you could find out about the bands playing.

They were (in alphabetical order) The Barron Knights, Crispian St Peters and the Puppets, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, Georgie Flame and the Blue Flames, The Ivy League and Division One, The Kinks, The Koobas, Screamin' Lord Sutch, The Small Faces, The Who and The Yardbirds.

Comperes DJ Keith Fordyce (of Ready, Steady, Go! fame) and the now disgraced Top of the Pops presenter Jimmy Savile introduced bands to the stage that many from Lincoln had never before had the chance to see.

https://www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/news/history/lincoln-city-1966-who-kinks-5455120

Viva Vespa! Celebrating 75 years of the scooter that changed two wheels forever

 

Seventy-five years ago this spring, motorcycling – or, to be precise, powered two-wheelers – changed forever when the very first scooter was launched.

Spawned from the rubble of post-WW2 Italy, produced by an aircraft company banned from making planes, designed famously by a motorcycle-hating helicopter engineer and intended to mobilise a population with a devastated transport network, that scooter was the very first Vespa.

And, despite a slightly stuttering start, it proved so successful that within a handful of years it was being produced in its tens of thousands around the globe.

By the 1960s it was a cultural icon in movies and fashion. By the ’80s it was a stand-alone brand reigning over the whole scooter sector and today is one of the most recognisable two-wheelers of all with almost 20 million sold.

Not bad for an initially misunderstood utility vehicle whose prototype’s ‘pinched waist’ step-thru’ design prompted company boss Enrico Piaggio to exclaim: "It looks like a wasp!" (Vespa being Italian for wasp). Little did he know then how it would transform the world...

That first Vespa owes its creation – like many other motorcycle firms launched in the post-WW2 era – to a unique set of circumstances. Until 1939, Italian company Piaggio was a diverse transportation manufacturer with no history of powered two-wheelers.

Founded in Genoa in 1884 by Rinaldo Piaggio, it initially undertook ship fitting before going on to produce rail carriages and trams. World War One saw it start to make aircraft.

By WW2, Piaggio was one of Italy’s largest aeroplane manufacturers which is exactly why its plants became targets and were destroyed during the war.

With Italy signing an armistice in September 1943, however, Italian business could begin looking to the future. Rinaldo’s successors, sons Enrico and Armando, started restructuring Piaggio and Enrico, being responsible for the destroyed aeronautic plant but with aeroplane manufacture banned, decided to use the company’s aircraft manufacturing facilities to instead create low cost personal transport for the masses.

A first prototype known as the MP5 surfaced in 1944, featuring small wheels and bodywork enclosing the central engine. However, Piaggio was unconvinced by its awkward, tall central section and the machine gained the unflattering nickname ‘Paperino’ (Italian for Donald Duck) due to its ungainly form.

Around the same time another Italian industrial giant was thinking along similar lines. Innocenti, based in Milan’s Lambrate suburb which specialized in seamless tubular steel, was also looking to affordable two-wheelers.

Founder Ferdinando Innocenti had noticed the US Army’s military Cushman machines during the war and was inspired to create his own utility vehicle. Innocenti hired Corradino D’Ascanio, a highly experienced aeronautical designer, and asked him to design a powered two-wheeler that would be easy to ride for both men and women, able to carry a passenger and not get its rider’s clothes dirty.

Read the full article at: -

https://www.motorcyclenews.com/advice/inspiration/weekend-reads/the-history-of-vespa/

Best knitted polo shirts for injecting some mod energy into your wardrobe according to GQ Magazine

 

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/fashion/gallery/best-knitted-polo-shirts

Paul Weller to become a granddad for the first time as daughter Leah announces pregnancy reports The Metro

 

Paul Weller is set to become a grandfather as daughter Leah Weller-Kurata has revealed she is expecting her first child.

The musician known as the Modfather, 63, will be a granddad for the first time just four years after welcoming his youngest child.

Leah, 29, and her husband Tomo Kurata, 31, announced the happy news on Instagram, sharing an artistic photo of them cradling her bump, with Tomo covering the topless Leah’s chest with a bunch of white flowers as he kissed her on the cheek.

The pair simply captioned the snap ‘Mum & Dad,’ leading fans to share messages of congratulations under the photo.

Leah added to the Daily Mail that she and Tomo, who married in 2018, were ‘over the moon’ to be expecting their first baby together.

Leah is oldest of The Jam star Paul’s eight children, with him and ex-wife Dee C. Lee, also sharing a son, Nathaniel, together.

Paul also has daughter Dylan with make-up artist Lucy Halperin, as well as two children – Jesamine and Stevie Mac, with Samantha Stock.

Following their break-up, he went on to marry backing singer Hannah Andrews in 2010, having twin sons John-Paul and Bowie in 2012 as well as daughter Nova in 2017.

After the birth of his twins, and before Nova, Paul told the Mirror in 2012: ‘You get certain people who go “Ooh, seven children with four women” and all that.

‘But I don’t care, man. I love all my kids. They’re all special and I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

Paul also recently opened up about how grateful he is to be able to do what he loves for a living, which he was ‘too arrogant and angry’ to appreciate in his youth.

He told the Radio Times magazine this week: ‘I realise that the older I get – how lucky and fortunate I am to be able to do what I do.

‘It’s never really a chore. I mean, it is work sometimes, you’ve got to get stuck in. But the older I get, the more I love it, and the more appreciative I am of it. When I was younger I was too arrogant or too angry or whatever.’