It’s been four years since the passing of the great Andrew Weatherall can you believe. We saw on Facebook a link to this great mix from Outlaw Yacht Club, Leeds 2013 (from a great night presented by our good mate Chris Madden) and we just had to share it. The mix starts off with Big Youth, Ari Up, Dr Who in dub then goes into rockabilly and much more and you know what? It’s downloadable. RIP Andrew Weatherall.
It’s been exactly a fortnight since we lugged that bag of seed compost on two buses from the nearest B&Q and then sowed various seeds on the kitchen and the upstairs windowsills (post here) but we’re now seeing some action (it’s the tomatoes that are popping up first rather than the chillies). It’s been less time since we sowed the sweet peas (a week perhaps?) below.
There’s people who say they’d rather buy plants than seed as “they haven’t the time” to wait for the seed to grow. They forget after the seed has been sown and it has the right conditions it’s the seed that does all of the hard work in the background. All you have to do is make sure the compost is kept moist and all’s okay. Then all the gardener has to do is get on with their own lives (eat, sleep, drink and be merry) while the seeds get to work. There’ll be a bit of pricking out and repotting in the future but that’s hardly hard work and then the plant will just keep on growing hopefully.
Seed sowing, give it a try, you’ve got nothing it lose and it’s far cheaper. If you’ve got your own transport you won’t be lugging bags of compost on two buses either.
Cheers to DJ Frederick for letting us know about this great quaility half an hour recording of last week’s imaginary stations show WDWD – Off The Map Radio broadcast by Shortwave Gold. It was recorded in Belarus by Aleksandr Myadel (cheers Aleksandr for putting it up on youtube).
At 13 minutes in there’s One Deck Pete‘s “I’ll take the high road too” mix and here’s the tracklistings:
Stereognosis – Farewell
Outward Bound – First Cue
Tetsuo – Not taking the bus
Hidden Orchestra – East London Street
Tubby Isiah – Lost dub
If you want to hear more of the show, ten of the latest Imaginary Stations episodes are up online here at our Mixcloud. The show is also looking for some financial help to cover the production and transmission costs so we can continue to transmit on shortwave, more on that here:
Here’s a couple of tunes for a Friday evening. First an Augustus Pablo classic called Melody Dub which is a B side to the tune Unfinished Melody. It’s a stripped down bass and drum instrumental with a crisp high end, whisps of double-tracked melodica floating back and forth into the mix interspersed with short piano and keyboard parts. Definitely a less is more tune.
And another example of said style is the B side Roman Stewart’s I was lonely called One Heavy Duba for obvious reasons. As far as we can remember, the (slightly pressed off-centre and very scratched) copy we own was bought on a second-hand shop crawl of Nuneaton in the late 1970’s. Distance memories of boxes of scratched seven inchers nestled in dirty beer crates between rusting fridges and old washing machines with the smell of mould and damp coming from them, ahh the good old days that we’ll never see again etc…
We’ve just found out about the Incredible Edible Lambeth Seed Swap of 2024 which takes place on Saturday 24th February 2024 at the Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB from 1pm-3pm. Looks good! More details here.
Our favourite part of the flyer was “Tea /coffee and a few biscuits will be on offer.” Only a few biscuits? Has that line been put in to put off the free biscuit freeloaders? It looks like a brilliant event no matter how many biscuits available!
As we’re working from home we do have a bit of an advantage that we can do a litle bit of gardening at lunchtime during good weather. Today as it was on the warmer side we decided to sow a few more seeds. The kitchen window has become a little crowded so we utilised some spare space in the raised beds under plastic out in the back.
The second covered raised bed is starting to fill up too. The celery cut from the base is starting to grow, those volunteer giant garlic bulbs are doing well and we have some parsnips in the middle so we decided to put some pots of sweet peas either side. Hope they like the heat under the plastic as we haven’t had decent sweet peas for a few years now. The below pic is going back a few years but it is inspiring us to have some sweet peas back in the garden again.
Yesterday our good radio friend in Cincinnati, Justin Patrick Moore tipped us off that Vicki Bennett from People like us was doing a show on WFMU. It’s now available via listen again here (The show named “February 14th, 2024: This Is Bardcore, This Is Barcode, This is the Pooless Flute”).
As you can imagine there were some crazy records played, bizzare mash ups and some “odd sausages” (as an old workmate used to say). Here’s two tunes that we’ve never heard before that caught our attention. The first is Polo & Pan with Nana (above) and it’s a bit of left-field pop on the catchy, happy tip. And we’ve just found out it’s sampled off this tune below from Os Tincoãs another band we have had to research. And an interesting band they were.
The second is Keezo Kane with Ga Ga Ga (James Brown Steppers Mix) which is great stuff. If you’re a lover of some real musical madness do check the show out. Cheers Justin for letting us know about it.
In-between the rain and sunshine yesterday, we got out into the garden and sowed some seed in the raised bed at the side with some transparent plastic tacked over the top so to create a cheap mini greenhouse. Those pallet box collars we were given a few years ago have had a good life, the polythene on the top don’t last sadly and needs replacing every year but they do work. In these “poor people’s greenhouses” we sowed some beetroot, the Lldl lettuces we purchased last year and some parsnips. Parnsips are funny anyway and need fresh seed but these seeds were bought last week so touchwood should be okay if the soil gets warm enough in there. Fingers crossed we will get some germination out there.
And speaking of germination we have had some success on the kitchen window with two cherry tomatoes showing their tiny seed leaves. Great stuff, all we need is the rest of the windowsill seeds to kick off now.
The sun’s out today and we’ve been listening to a great show called Golden Apples in Dub with a selection by Jesse Yuen (of RTMFM’s North of The River Swan that returned to the radio yesterday by the way). The show was broadcast by RTR FM 92.1 Perth, Australia and a fine dubbed out show it is. Listen and enjoy some very nice tunes here and some great “Baby I love you so” versions which you can never get enough of! It’s a great show Jesse!
Cheers To Debby H again for sending some pics. The above are some of the dwarf daffodils (about 6 inches tall) growing in her garden. As she says “They are popping up in clumps all over the place. These are the first flowers that have opened up in our garden this year and they are brightening things up nicely.” She also sends a picture of some croci (below) growing along the path by the Pymmes Brook. Great stuff Debby! It can’t be long until all our gardens start getting into gear now.
Weeds up to me knees 