A pictorial gardening report from near Coventry

A big thanks to Mike & Julia from outside Coventry for some snaps from their great garden. As before we are going to let Julia’s brilliant pictures do the talking, and there’s some wonderful stuff here as ever. As Mike said in his email “Things are happening in our garden”. They certainly are!

Cheers for sending these pictures over and may your garden carry on looking great for the rest of this year!

STOP PRESS: Julia has just come back with the plants featured in order as in the blog post. Thanks Julia!

Allium
Salvia – hot lips
Alstroemeria
Geums with wallflowers in front
Geums with a lupin type bush which I have never seen before and am not quite sure what it is
I think it’s a penstemon
Yellow poppies and geranium

Radio time machine

Cheers to Karl S for passing on this flyer for a gig in the early 1980’s at Coventry’s premier punk venue The Hand and Heart. We were shocked to learn at the end of the gig a giant fight kicked off. A “ruck” at a gig in Coventry in the early 1980’s? We don’t believe it! Ta for sending us the flyer Karl.

Today we also picked up a repress of the original version of “Jah Heavy Load” by Ijahman Levi. It’s a “must have” reggae tune that a while ago would put you back the cost of a family weekly shop. It was first heard on this show below with John Lydon with Robin Valk on BRMB Radio in Birmingham many many moons ago. The version below is recorded in mono off the medium wave complete with distant stations fading in and out in the background. Radio connects us all.

It’s frosty up north (or will be soon)

Cheers to Mike & Julia from just outside the fair city of Coventry for letting us know that the frost covers are out and fine looking ones they are too.

It’s been a bit funny when it comes to weather here in SE23. We had a frost the other week and then last weekend it was quite mild. I’m sure we seen some blossom on a couple of trees in the week too, it’s so crazy is this current weather. Cheers for the picture and we look forward to more of your great photographs next year!

The Dream Academy

Big shout to our good radio friend across the pond Justin Patrick Moore on his first book published by South London’s Velocity Press just a couple of miles away from Weeds HQ in Rye Lane, Peckham. 

The book is called The Radio Phonics Laboratory and as it says on Velocity Press’ website “explores the intersection of technology and creativity that shaped the sonic landscape of the 20th Century”. If you love Karlheinz Stockhausen, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Robert Moog and the like, go and buy one from the Velocity website here.

By request of the author here’s a daft dream we had around the time said book went to print. We’ve no idea what relevance the dream has in the scheme of the universe and also what Freud would have said but we can only put it down to a couple of tabs of co-codamol before bedtime to stop toothache.

The dream was about a man who fixed vintage valve radio sets in an old factory in Coventry that also housed an exhibition about radio propagation, “Which is a very interesting subject” the man told us.

The factory was in a street off a back entry behind Cedars Avenue in Coventry where Delia Derbyshire was brought up. In the dream we imagined we woke up and were going to travel back to Coventry to find this non existent factory and the radio exhibition housed within it. Then we woke up!

It’s not much of an exciting “we won the lottery and now live on a luxury Richard Branson type island” dream and doesn’t make much sense, unlike the great book from Justin Patrick Moore. We promise we will never divulge our dreams again but the long and short of it is, if you love a bit of electronica, you’ll love this book!

Pre-solstice shouty vibes

ded yampy 2

Big shout to Tim and Stand up and spit for posting up the second issue of my old fanzine Ded Yampy from many moons ago here. Respect is due Tim!

If you love “Ranting poetry, sweary poetry, boozy poetry” Stand up and Spit is for you!

Cheers to my good mate Pete R too for originally spotting it!

More old time fanzine business here. Cheers Joly!

Scratchy, very scratchy

The Realms – Happiness is your middle name/Happiness version  (Summertime)

Here’s another tune found in Coventry (possibly from John’s in Hillfields) many moons ago, a lighter slice of UK reggae produced in 1975 by Clement “Clem” Bushay (he of Louisa Mark’s Six Sixth Street production fame).

I only found out while trying to find the single on youtube recently that this is a version of a Stylistics original and also sounds like it owes a debt to Edwin Starr’s “Stop her on sight (S.O.S)” at the beginning. A fine tune with a mellow dub that has a touch of the UB40 sax about it but nice all the same.

http://soundcloud.com/weedsuptomeknees/the-realms-happiness-is-your