Oh to be by the sea!

A few days ago we heard from our good friend from Japan, Stevyn from the great Iron Feather Journal fanzine who is away on holiday at the moment. He said “Hokkaido is minus 10 and there’s tons of snow so we took a mini vacation and flew south to Okinawa (pic above) and now relaxing by the sea side”. He sent us this picture below from his holidays of part of a jungle with a genuine viper warning! That’s brilliant Stevyn. We hope you had a great Christmas and that you’re having a great holiday, cheers for the pics.

More santa business

And to continue the festive themed soundtrack here’s a clever little number by Bodyswitch from the Stocking Stuffers EP a nice dubbed up version of Carla Thomas’ Gee Whiz, it’s Christmas.

 

And a lovely dub from from R. Santa on Nou Art Records out of Barcelona called “Time Dub”

 

Has Gavin &  Stacey finished yet? And is it really the last one?

See you by the heel stone

Spotted in a charity shop in Lewisham this morning, this excellent solstice-related jigsaw puzzle. Let’s hope every piece is there or it may be a right pain in the neck when it comes to completing said ancient monument.

 

We thought of a daft thing, wouldn’t it be great to travel back in time and bring the game to a cave and see if stone-age man/women/kids would enjoy the game. We reckon they would be delighted with it especially knowing that it was on sale for the bargain price of 4 quid.

And on the subject of those sacred stones we just found this excellent film on youtube! We even spotted an example of the famous “Punk Kicking Dance” (that we’d never be able to do now) at 3.51 mins in. Happy belated Solstice.

More on the Stonehenge Festival Campaign here.

Keep WARM this winter

Here’s a track we found by pure chance last night while putting together a shortwave mix. It’s from Mice Parade (who sadly we’ve never heard of before but will now research) with a track called Warm Hand in Farmland and it’s the Stereolab remix from a couple of years back. It’s one crazy track, part brass, part acoustic, part hip-hop and part mad and over 5 minutes long but it don’t seem it.

We may be imagining it, but is the piano sampled from the start of The Persuaders theme tune by John Barry used in the latter part of the tune? We’re sure of it.

And if our memory isn’t playing tricks on us The June Brides used The Persuaders theme as walk on music once when they supported the great McCarthy (which featured one Tim Gane oddly enough). Coincidence or a tenuous link to play McCarthy’s brilliant Frans Hals tune again? Who knows.

Now that Darragh has gone

It seems like a while away now but the weather over the weekend was awful, blustery and wet. We’re back to some sort of normality for this time of year, cold and wet! Cheers to Rich R for the picture from last week just as the storm was arriving in the Lake District. Great to hear it wasn’t too mad up there.

Reggae is outernational

Big shout to Thomas from Dub Explorations for letting us know about this excellent tune by Professor Skank from Greece entitled Jah Jah Is Coming (The rootsman version). This has taken a couple of days to worm its way into our brain here at Weeds and now we can’t get it out of our heads. A must have tune!

Gardening in the echo chamber

A big thanks to our good friend across the pond Dr Strangedub for playing part 2 of One Deck Pete’s An introduction to Dub Gardening on last Wednesday’s Echo Chamber at 84.00 minutes in here.

The show is a excellent listen for a Wednesday morning from 8-12am UK time if you love all things dub, downbeat and everything related all played by the good Doctor Strangedub and DJ Baby Swiss play all sorts of reggae annd downbeat related tunes on their 4 hour show. Live link to KFAI from the twin cities here.

A wonderful tune was played on the show from Femi Kuti with a song called Politics Don Expose Them, wonderful stuff! Thanks again Dr Strangedub!

Live good in your neighbourhood

Big shout to The Rhythm Doctor for playing this wonderful tune by Johnny Cool on his excellent IDA Radio show Waiting Room earlier this week (at 49 minutes in with extra dubbed out bits by RD himself) called Long Time Ago and what a great tune it is!

Also reggae related, by accident this evening we found two hours of The Rootsman talking to the late great Augustus Pablo. Welll worth listening to, all on pirate radio WKLR Radio in Bradford from 1992. Reggae (like radio) never disappoints. Ever.

Autumnal Japan

Thanks to Rob C again for a few more pictures from his trip. As he writes, “Japan is obviously famous for its cherry blossoms in the spring, but the changing leaves are also a popular attraction in the autumn. It was a little early when I was there, but as the days passed, there were clearer and clearer signs of the leaves turning from green to gold to vibrant red”.

And to say we are in awe of the greatness of Tokyo Tower above, (officially Japan Radio Tower as it says on Wikipedia) is an understatement. It puts our local radio/TV landmark at Crystal Palace to shame. It would be nice to have a little crystal set rigged up to a MP3 recorder and see what can be picked up from the photo location!

Thanks a million Rob, well interesting photographs and we may even have a part three to this series!

Japan pics © Rob C 2024

We are not going to complain

We’ve just heard from our good friend Rich R in the Lake District about the weather tomorrow morning up there and it looks like it’s around minus 4. We will not complain about the supposed cold weather here in SE23!

Rich has just come back from a trip to Scotland around Oban and sent us some brilliant pictures from his highland adventure. The above makes of us think of what Mars would be like if it had water. Wonderful looking place.

And the above photographs too look like a special place even though we wouldn’t want to be doing any skinnydipping in the water there at this time of year. We’ve saved a great one until last, a majestic looking sheep from Kerrera. Wonderful stuff Rich and thanks again!

Scotland pics © Rich R 2024