Tring Canal Festival

It usually rains over the May Bank Holiday for the Tring Canal Festival, but this year the weather played a blinder. The main events are held in a field, but I was only interested in seeing all the narrow bots moored along the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal. The photo above is taken from Little Tring Bridge on my walk from the reservoirs at Marsworth.

Jackson Browne at The Royal Albert Hall

Possibly my only concert this year. This was my fourth time to see Jackson Browne. He always puts on a great show, this time with no support, starting ten minutes after the publicised start of 8 o'clock and, with one interval, playing until just before eleven. I was way up in the circle, not that far away, but very high. Although I was pleased with this photo using the zoom and wide angle lens on my brand new Panasonic camera.

I was glad he did so much of his old stuff, including Late for the Sky, The Pretender, Doctor my Eyes, Running on Empty, Fountain of Sorrow and my two favourites, For a Dancer and Before the Deluge. But the highlight of the evening for me was when he said "We don't play this one very often" and went into Take it Easy. I certainly had never seen him perform it, even though he wrote the song and gave it to The Eagles. His friend Glen Frey is credited with the co-writing, but he only added some lyrics to the odd verse, Jackson had written the song a couple of years before. Anyway, we all cheered like mad.

He ends like always with Load Out and Stay. A terrific concert, maybe this will be the last time .

Kensington Revisited

On Thursday, as I had a ticket for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in the evening, I decided to make use of the journey to Kensington by going in the afternoon to look up some of the family's old haunts from when we lived there from 1953 to 1959. I parked the car at West Ruislip and took the Central Line to Holland Park. I entered the park from the unfamiliar entrance in the north. It was only when I arrived at the southern end did I recognise the surroundings. The sports field where we used to play football is still there. Where there is now a marquee, there were cricket nets where we tried to improve our batting and bowling.

Leaving Holland Park at Kensington High Street, I walked past Earls Court Road to try to identify where Dad managed a large grocers called John Buckle. The next photo shows the only original block from the fifties that is still there today.

This block is situated between Abingdon Road ( previously Newland Street) and what was Allen Terrace. The map below is described at www.british-history.ac.uk/.

It is not as far down the High Street from Earls Court Road as I had remembered, but that was when I was a boy. Thanks to Graham Carruthers, I now know that John Buckle is now Trailfinders, the shop to the left of the white van in the photo above. See posting of 7th February 2012.

There is a reference to John Buckle on the Internet as being No 1 Newland Terrace. And now today (18th February 2015), I have found an old photo which confirms this.

Walking on down Kensington High Street, I came to St Mary Abbotts Church where we had the occasional church parade, and in the fairly new quiet gardens at the back, near the infant school that Paul attended.

Then it was on to Kensington Gardens. I had never been inside Kensington Palace, so this was a good time to take a look round. A distinctly plain looking ground floor gave way to the fabulous King's Staircase and the fine state apartments.

Leaving the Palace, I had to stop by The Round Pond where we spent many hours sailing our toy yachts.

Finally, a walk towards Lancaster Gate took me to the fountains at the end of the Serpentine, where I crossed into Hyde Park and found myself on Buck Hill. This was where we used to play footbal for the cubs on Saturday afternoons. We would meet Dad at the shop after lunch, where he would pick up the poles we used as goalposts, and catch the bus to Alexandra Gate. Buck Hill would have a number of games as there were a lot of cub packs in Kensington. But all are home games were sited on the same spot at the southern end. The hill (more pronounced than the photo might indicate) made for interesting matches.

Leaving the Park at Lancaster Gate meant I was back on the Central Line to pick up my car at West Ruislip to drive back and park near the Albert Hall for the concert after the congestion charge and parking restrictions were over. I had time to grab something to eat before Jackson Browne started at 8pm.

State of Play, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and Coraline 3D

One of the best films this year, State of Play is a political thriller that presses all the right buttons. The writing and directing are superb, and the movie rattles along. But the biggest success is Russell Crowe. I cannot think of any other actor who could come close to his interpretation of the grizzly newspaper hack who wont let go. His slightly subdued performance only enhances the character. The rest of the cast is almost as good, Helen Mirren especially. Even Ben Affleck is almost believable. I somehow missed the original six hour BBC TV version written by Paul Abbott (who rightly attracts a big credit for this film), so I look forward to watching a repeat.

Once in a while a like to see a romcom, but they rarely hit the heights of something like 27 Dresses. Ghosts of Girlfriend Past seemed a missed opportunity. I guess that when you introduce ghosts, a real life story goes for a Burton. So this was more of a comedy/fantasy without many laughs. So it fell a bit flat. And it doesn't help when a ghost says to the main character, "lets have a look at some past events to a montage of Cindy Lauper's Time After Time". There were entertaining moments, and Jennifer Garner was good. But Mathew McConaughey was hopelessly miscast in the lead.

I went to see Coraline 3D on the back of some rave reviews. I have to say I was fairly disappointed. But I am probably not a good judge of animated films. Apart from Wallace and Gromit, they normally leave me cold. I did like WALL.E, and Shrek is just about OK, but I never got Toy Story. So an animated feature has to be funny and warm to have any chance with me. And Coraline was neither. Yes, it was visually stunning, but it was far too long. The repeated use of the same sets was frankly boring. And it was a good cautionary tale for children. But not for me.

The 18th Penalty

MK Dons played Scunthorpe United in the second leg of the Division One play-off semi-final on Friday evening to see who would meet Millwall at Wembley to see who would be promoted to the Championship. The first half was played in a steady, light drizzle, and this effected the standard of the football. Both sides had chances, but I said to the man sitting next to me that we would be in for a long night, and that penalties seemed to be the only way this match would be decided.

It stopped raining for the second half, but it remained goalless, as did extra time. I had never before witnessed a penalty shoot out live. It was a memorable experience, the highs and lows of conversions or misses. By the time the first five penalties for each side were completed, the scores were equal, so we were into sudden death. At about penalty number fourteen, MK Dons' Jude Stirling had the chance to be a hero after Scunthorpe missed one. But he also missed. Willy Gueret, our goalkeeper took the next and scored, but so had Scunthorpe, and they then converted number seventeen. Up stepped Tore Andre Flo to keep the Dons alive. But his shot hit the bar and it was all over.

The atmosphere in the ground had been great all night, what it would have been like if MK had won, who knows. But when all is said and done, they are definitely not yet ready for a higher league, maybe another year. Roll on next season.

Rock Island Line

On July 13th 1954, Chris Barber and his jazz band went into the Decca studios in Maida Vale to record their first album. At the end of the session, they persuaded the producer to let them put down two "skiffle" numbers. With Chris on bass (quite a change from his usual trombone), Lonnie Donegan on guitar (He normally played banjo in the band) and Beryl Bryden on washboard, they recorded Rock Island Line and John Henry.

The album called "New Orleans Joys" was fairly popular. During the mid fifties, the band toured extensively, and the "skiffle" group always had a session in the middle. This was hugely popular and became quite notorious. This encouraged the record company to eventually release the two skiffle tracks from the album as a single in November 1955. By the following year, Rock Island Line had sold over 3 million copies and entered the top ten. John Lennon said he listened to it incessantly. He was not the only one. At my grandmothers in Rotherham, I must have worn out the 78. In my view, this was the first ever British guitar based popular/rock record. So July 13th 1954 is when it was born.

Early in 1956, Lonnie insisted he would not leave Chris Barber, and recorded more songs with him, even though later in the year he toured on his own in the USA. When he returned, his popularity was such, it was obvious he could not continue with the jazz band, and embarked on his successful solo career. In 1958, one of my favourite TV shows, "The Six-Five Special" (an early version of "Top of the Pops") was made into a movie, on of the first I saw at the cinema. Lonnie's Jack O'Diamonds was the highlight.

Blues Britannia

Every now and then, the BBC comes up with a documentary on popular music that really hits the mark. "Blues Britannia" was compulsory viewing for anyone interested in how American blues inspired so many of our great musicians of the last fifty years. Clips from performances from black performers such as Muddy Waters put alongside those of white middle class British bands including The Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds were fascinating. But the strength of the programme was in the the interviews with many of the musicians such as Jack Bruce, Bill Wyman, Ian Anderson, Paul Jones, Chris Deja and most of all Keith Richard.

Keith was brilliant, lucid and articulate, apart from the occasional "hureeeegh". He was in his element talking about how black American artists inspired him to play the guitar their way. He also did a great impression of Captain Jack Sparrow. Paul Jones mentioned how Brian Jones was starting a band and invited him to be vocalist, but he turned it down!

There were mentions for Jelly Roll Morton (I still have a record somewhere), one of the best exponents of blues piano, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee (reminding me that they headlined one of the concerts I went to see around 1965 at the Odeon Hammersmith) and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. "Man of the World" is still a fabulous song.

One of the main contributors was Chris Barber, who someone mentioned was the grandfather of British blues. As well as leading his jazz band, he brought a number of black American artists to play in the UK. I saw his band play at Dunmow Jazz Club around 1962/3, but before then, in 1954, he recorded, perhaps, the first important record that included British guitar based popular music. But that is for another time. One glaring omission from the programme was how the banjo/guitar player from the Chris Barber Jazz Band was playing guitar blues in the mid fifties. Just listen to Lonnie Donegan's "Diggin' My Potatoes" on YouTube.

The programme ended with how British bands re-exported blues based rock to an American white audience who had never heard of their own originators of this music. And the rest is history.