Here’s two tunes for a balmy Saturday night. The first is a wonderful tune from Dubamine on Dub-Stuy Records called Mosquito Dub featuring a couple of samples from the great David Rodigan. “Every single mosquito had me for dinner, lunch and breakfast.”
And we just found this:
Then we end the evening with The Secret Soul Society with Stay. A very nice chilled tune indeed!
Keep those windows open tonight as it’s going to be a warm one.
Thanks to our good friend across the (big garden) pond Justin Patrick Moore for finding this brilliant game in a thrift store in Cincinnati this morning and mailing the picture over pronto. It’s very much in keeping with our last post about Antiques Roadshow and doesn’t the bloke putting in a bid put you in mind of Private Walker from Dad’s Army (below)?
We do love a thift store/second hand/charity shop here and we’re always up for seeing any charity shop finds from the best to the worst. Seen any overpriced Max Bygraves records at your local charity shop or some old net curtains that are more expensive than new ones? If so, take a snap and send us a picture. We will not name the shop and keep the location anonymous so they’ll be no comebacks. And going back to auctions, here’s a bit of fast chat business…
After a text alert to Weeds HQ this week that records were dumped locally, we found a 1970’s shopping bag with rope handles with “Lanzarotte” enblazoned on it containing some LPs outside a garden wall down the road. No A&M God Save the Queens or Bullet Dubs in there but the record above stood out for us on the bizarre sleeve stakes. We’ll be bringing the battered 1970’s Lanzarote shopping bag with miscoloured thick rope handles next time BBC Antiques Roadshow hits the Horiman’s Museum and see what they think about that great piece of antiquity.
By the way our favourite specialist on The Antiques Roadshow is the glass expert Andy McConnell. And here’s something we didn’t know about him until we read about it this morning here: “A trained journalist, Andy spent 1972-76 in California, interviewing & touring the US with many of the greatest rock & folk bands. The theme continued into the early ‘80s when he produced promo videos at Island Records, for acts including Tears for Fears, Kid Creole & The Coconuts and Steve Winwood. Leaving Island in 1983, he production managed a black music series for Channel 4, Rockers Roadshow.” The above is one of the said shows which contains some great footage of Mikey Dread and others we’ve never seen before. Andy has gone up even more in our estimations now!
As for the Lanzarote bag we also found this great LP from Milt Raskin in it which has an excellent sleeve and is a nice bit of exotica well suited for this sunny summer. More on this LP here. DJ Frederick and Gerry Hectic, do you know this one?
Here’s to more sunshine!
This morning we wandered around the garden with the watering can and spotted these carrot flowers from plants that were sown in a large pot (found down the road with a “please take me” note on it) up near the house. They’ve got strange old graphic type flowers. Architectual flowers for a Lldl budget?
We then found a sprig of lemon thyme growing out of a strawberry terracotta planter (also found on a wall to be thrown out). We did have a bigger plant in one of the beds but it just didn’t make it through the winter this year but this spindly thing did! Lemon thyme works well on roast chicken and we’ll be feeding this plant with comfrey liquid) to see if we can make it grow more as we have culinary plans for it.
And while watering the wild bit at the bottom of the garden, we found the old slow cooker container that is now a micro-wild pond and also an overflow for plants that have been thinned out from the big pond. There’s some water mint, hornwart and even a water lilly and the actual container isn’t even that big.
Enjoy this great weather and as the late great Joe Maiden used to say, it’s better to water early in the morning then the evening. Watering in the evening only invites the slugs and snails and you don’t want that.
Any pictures of your garden you’d like to share? Send us your pics to: one deck pete (at) g mail (dot) com.
A big shout to Dr Strangedub who alongside DJ Baby Swiss hosts the great Echo Chamber on KFAI. If you love Reggae, Dub and Downbeat you must tune in live here or to their archive show here. The programme goes out in Minneapolis + St. Paul on a Wednesday from 2 to 6am and that translates from 8 to noon here in the UK. It’s a wonderful show and one to listen to live if you’re an early starter. Tune in for some serious good tunes from the reggae spectrum and associated genres. We also thank our good mate Will J for originally informing us about the show many many years ago.
A big thanks goes out to Dr Strangedub for playing at 18.13 minutes in on this week’s show here for an early mix of Madtone‘s “Replace the soundcard” (though “Replace the hard drive” is a good title too Dr Strangedub!) amongst some great tunes over the four hours including this one from Dry & Heavy and that one from The Frightnrs. There’s also some tunes which were left over from last week’s Dread Western show here as well. A show to tune into. Big ta to our mates from across the pond!
We’ve just received a picture from Wlad (US7IGN) in Kyiv, of a volunteer/self seeded poppy he saw while walking in a park. We also need found out that Wlad has a new book out here which is a continuing story of his life in Ukraine. More on his first book here.
His picture made us take a few photographs ourselves of our own poppies. Our poppies are dotted around the front and back garden. Some are self-seeded but most are the results of our anarchic “chuck the seeds anywhere” method where they are usually scattered not far from where we open the packet.
The above are the poppies that are in the pots wired up to the very strange wooden coat hanger thing (below) we found in the street many moons ago here.
Other people would have sawed it up and used it for firewood not us, we attached some plant pots to it.
And one that just appeared in the front garden (above). Did we sow it or was it the birds, who knows?
A big shout to Jesse Yuen (of RTMFM’s North of The River Swan) for letting us know that he’s moved into a new house in Perth and that in the garden they have a wonderful looking Foxtail Agave (above) that’s actually flowering! As Jesse said “Flowers are rare for the plant and each one only flowers once in their life, after 10-15 years.” and he also said “It’s like ours is welcoming us to the new house.” We agree with you there! What a great housewarming present.
Jesse also said “All over Perth you can see them flowering, and the members of local gardening Facebook groups are speculating that because we had a really dry, long summer, they are in shock which has bought on a mass flowering season.”
He was saying the bees are going bonkers for the flowers and told us “Apparently once it finishes flowering the big head dies off and these smaller “pups” take over” (above and below).
Absolutely wonderful stuff Jesse and best of luck to you and the family for the new house and hope everything goes well with the move and getting settled in! More on the wonderful plant here.
Happy Solstice to all! Rather than bunking the train down to Wiltshire, English Heritage has got tonight’s sunset and tomorrow morning’s sunrise on a live stream. Sadly there won’t be Hawkwind playing Silver Machine live, Ken Barlow in full druid gear and you can’t sit on top of the stones but we are sure it will be an event. Tune in as from now to hear some ambient classics and enjoy!
It looks great, we’ve just seen a bloke walking around carrying a union jack with an acid house smiley face in the middle of it, some people eating cheese sandwiches, some sort of giant made out of bedsheets and wood and we’re loving the comments “Dave in Atlanta – Stonehenge doesn’t exist, it’s all done by projections, can you see people actually touching the stones?”
We’ll be up with the postman at 4 am for the sunrise.
Thank you to our mate Rich in the Lake District for sending us photographs of the newly formed community allotment in his area. They had a generous farmer donate them some land earlier this year and now the space is a work in progress (above and below). As Rich said “The allotment is in a very special spot and we are really enjoying having a go” (look at the scenery in the background!) and that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about just cracking on, learning by any mistakes, enjoying the many successes and going with the process. Go with the (gardening) flow!
The report so far from Rich: “We have set out loads of small plots and planted all kinds of stuff. Spuds, carrots, rhubarb, turnips and squash. We had lots of donations from others. Apparently there are 2 herds of deer in neighbouring fields but so far nothing has eaten our stuff, which is not only growing nicely, but also not dying! We have planted in about 75% of our huge patch and will be delighted if we manage to get a meal out of it in the end!” That’s great news Rich!
Also Rich told us that his neighbours saw a giant Stag in his back garden the other day. We’ve had reports of Wild Boars in gardens in France from Debby H and now Stags in the Lake District. Blimmin eck, crazy stuff.
We remember a few years ago going to an allotment not far from here and one of the allotmenteers (you can call them that can’t you?) had one big cosy shed with a dartboard, football table (and supposedly a bar but we’re not sure if we were being wound up) and a big BBQ grill outside. By all accounts it was in use as a clubhouse type socialising hotspot from 7am till well after sundown during summer (we’re sure it had outside lighting and fairy lights adorning it too). How the owners and their neighbours had time for actual allotment maintenance we don’t know.
As we reported at one of our Steroid Abuse nights many moons ago (above), allotments are fast becoming the new nightclubs/social clubs/pubs! And why not?
We look forward to more pictures of this horticultural development and to hear about how people have got on with it all there. Thanks again for sharing the pictures Rich!
A few weeks ago at 7.30 am on a Sunday morning we were strolling around Brockwell Park in the parish of Herne Hill with extreme toothache (don’t ask). It was a lovely sunny morning at the height of festival season and the council workers were out in force on an overtime spree collecting litter (Sunday morning working is double time aka “Double Bubble”). A mini-moke passed us with a balloon tied to the back of the cab and Patrick McGoohan and The Village immediately came to mind.
On catching up with said vehicle when one of the operatives was taking a leak in the bushes we excitedly said to the driver “We love your truck with the large balloon attached to it. Please tell us you have watched The Prisoner.” Sadly he didn’t know what we were talking about but it did make us smile and made us forget about the toothache for a while.
Pic above: The Prisoner mini-moke with Rover on a beach which looks very much like Camber Sands. The same place where reputedly Public Image Limited ended up on a “Punk Jolly” when they should have been at Birminghams ATV studio’s for their debut appearance on Mickie Most’s Revolver show.
Weeds up to me knees 