You don’t see that kind of thing at Chelsea

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The garden is doing alright this year, it’s July already and some things are doing well and some not. We don’t know if it was the peat-free compost we got from the local supermarket but the peppers and tomatoes didn’t do much so we had to buy some plants from B&Q and Lldl istead.

The Hydrangeas are doing great for the first time in years and we have a lot of greenery going on in the side bed (above) even under the shade of the big tree next door. The poppies and the pot of lettuce on the weird wooden coat hanger are grand with not much interference from slugs. There’s a nice poppy just flowered next the lemon verbena (we’re having a cup of lemon verbena tea at the moment) and if you look hard enough you may see a tomato plant or two!

Yesterday while killing a bit of time we popped into a library in Clerkenwell in the afternoon and picked up the book All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt. We whiled away a bit more time than we thought as next thing we knew, the librarian was ringing a schoolbell and shouting “It’s 5 o’clock and the library’s closing”.

What was great was in said book there was a mini interview with Mark E Smith and Irmin Schmidt. Little did we know that in 1977 that Mark E Smith rang Irmin and asked if Can would come over and do a joint gig with them. Now how good would that have been? In Dazed & Confused a few years ago here Irmin says of The Fall frontman “What I took (from the interview) is that I met a very lovable person.” Ahh isn’t that great? A book well worth having a look at!

Shortwave’s not hip? Who told you that?

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On Sunday 7th July 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz the Imaginary Stations crew will be bringing you COOL 2 via the services of Shortwave Gold.

Expect entertainment of the summer vacation kind via the ionosphere. They’ll be a live BBQ in the studio with running commentary (plus amateur firefighter), a specialist towel folder to give you tips on how to place your towel on the sunlounger when reserving premier poolside seats, alongside some summer tunes. There’s a mix from our very own galloping gardener One Deck Pete with “A 7 inch single summer special” at 4 mins in featuring Earl Brown, Stereolab, Freda Payne, Anthony Johnson and Martel Robinson. So roll out the beach blanket, blow up that beach ball and get yourself comfy and tune into COOL 2.

Then via WRMI on Wednesday 10th July 2024 at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz there’ll be the debut show of COOL which was broadcast to Europe the other week which we posted about here. Tune in and enjoy the “summer of shortwave” vibes.

Cool Runnings

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Here’s the studio audio of Imaginary Station’s COOL from Sunday 30th June 2024 transmitted by Shortwave Gold to Europe via shortwave. The programme features cool tunes for this summer of ours (even though it’s been a bit grey here today) featuring DJ Frederick and Justin Patrick Moore.

At 3.47 in there’s a mix by One Deck Pete called “Summertime and the living is easy”. Here’s the tracklistings:
Jimi Tenor with Cold Diamond & Mink – Gaia Sunset, Part 1
Glass Beams – Mahal
Augustus Pablo – Satta Dub
Chancha via Circuito – La Victoria ft Lido Pimienta & Manu Ranks

Get some suntan lotion on and enjoy the sunshine!

Two for the road…

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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.

MC Hammer Price

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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…

I suppose you’d like to know how much it’s worth?

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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!

Found and lost

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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.

Serving up the subsonic stew

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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!

Everyone loves a poppy

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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?

Something very special from far far away

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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.