Tag Archives: Ross Allen

Cosmos and reggae make Saturday night alright

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Big thanks to Debby H for sending us a great picture today (above) of possibly the last cosmos of the year in her garden. She said, “If the weather brightens up later on, I will go out and deadhead them, then maybe they will keep on flowering.” Great stuff! We hope they do keep flowering.

Now we love the cosmos, we can’t stop seeing them about. Here’s one spotted on our early morning travels in SE23 this week, they’re a bit blurred but you’ll get the gist.

And a few doors down we saw a nice raised (vegetable) bed with some trellis used as a squirrel, pigeon and general pest deterrent, what a clever idea.

And from gardening we move onto the subject of music which goes hand in hand here on Weeds. We heard Skinshape x Horus – N’Téro (feat. Modou Toure) on last week’s Ross Allen NTS show here and it’s a lovely slice of reggae! Catchy as anything too.

 

Here’s a nice bit of dub called Order Dub for a Saturday night off the Self-Titled EP from Nadia McAnuff & The Ligerians from SoulNurse Records out of Tours, France from the golden year of 2022. It’s a subtle bit of mixing but lots going on if that makes sense.

 

And we just found by pure chance now on Bandcamp a do over of a version of Dennis Walks‘ Heat Don’t Leap by the one and only Gregory Isaacs called Gone is the Love from a good few years ago. Great tune!

And funny enough there was a few cuts of the original “Heart Don’t Leap” and more great tunes on On The Wire the other week. Listen in here!

Do you reckon the weather will hold out for gardening tomorrow? It was perfect here this morning and afternoon. Fingers crossed!

Sunday morning listening to Dennis

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We just found this recent show out of the blue (no pun intended), it’s Ross Allen doing one of his foundation music specials on his Meltdown show on NTS. This time it features the great photographer, PIL logo/Metal Box designer, Urban Shakedown/Basement 5 founder and many other things Dennis Morris. It’s not just an interesting listen, it’s a must listen!

We were reminded that in one of Dennis Morris’s books there’s a great picture of the Sex Pistols on an old-school coach (nothing as grand as having a loo or those tables with fancy lamps on it that football teams used to travel on cup final days in the 1970’s) on the M6 travelling away from Coventry the morning after their gig at Mr George’s in December 1977. It was a completely different world then, it’s all double decker coaches now and they have loos and even sarnies and tea and coffee on offer now!

Whilst the radio show was playing and remembering that photograph a tale came to mind and apologies if we’ve mentioned it before. It was a story we heard in 1978 from a chap we went to college with whose older brother was a car mechanic. This bloke did talk a lot of rot and this story beats the lot. He told us just before Christmas 1977 his brother got a call at his garage in Coventry to go to the motorway to fix a coach which had broken down. When he got there he saw it was a band on tour and was told it was the Sex Pistols. What was really odd though after a while he saw that all of the band (and their staff) were all dressed in suits and flared trousers and all of the punk image was a big act just for publicity (so he told us). Probably one of the best punk stories we may have ever heard. How the band kept that fact hushed up for all these years we will never know. You heard it here first.

Going back to reality and the radio show, the first tune Black Skin Blue Eye Boys from The Equals featuring Eddy Grant (Dennis mentions a couple of great Eddy Grant stories by the way) that starts the proceedings took us back in time to an excellent reggae 12″ influenced by that great tune (below the original).

Welcome to the night train, welcome

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Yesterday evening just after sundown we wandered to the bottom of the garden just to take in a bit of the night-time air. With a little bit of light coming from the back of a neighbour’s house we could just make out two frogs “doing lengths” in the newly renovated pond. Lovely to see them back. Nice to hear their croaks too!

The netting which keeps the Lewisham Heron from getting its beak in has a few raised areas at the side that night visitors can get in and out of and in the top left hand corner is a moss covered stick come frog ladder. it was great to see we have visitors making a trip and it’s been a while since we noticed we had frogs and we wonder if it was the ever decreasing depth of the pond was putting them off before.

It was also nice to see that the Tree Lilies we got given from our good mate Marc B (cheers for passing them on Marc!) have started to sprout! Here’s one of them above. That’s what’s good about gardening the receiving and passing on of surplus plants and seeds.

We’re writing this while listening to an old Ross Allen show on NTS and this is playing from the late great Bunny Wailer.

And a couple of posts ago we posted up the track by L.S.Diezel called Volume 1 that had a lovely Yabby You sample in it and Ross has just played the tune that was sampled in a remix style. Tune! Roll on the good weather so we can play tunes like this loud!

Daddy was a garden-er, he never hurt nobody…

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If someone tells you that gardening is expensive and that you need to spend a small fortune to grow something, tell them they’re having a laugh! Today from the pound shop in Catford we procured a 20 litre bag of multi purpose compost and a box of shake ‘n sow butterfly and bee seed mix for the grand total of £2. Well worth it if you’re watching them pennies.

With the said compost we sowed some peppers we got free from Kitchen Garden Magazine and some tomatoes that were left over from last year so that didn’t cost us much either. We cut up some individual plastic seed trays we got from Shannon’s a couple of years ago, popped the seed on the top and then covered them with a light layer of compost and stuck them under a plastic propagator cover by the window in the back room. Fingers crossed we’ll see some signs of life in a couple of weeks or so.

We also stuck a couple of trays containing more tomatoes and some Kitchen Garden cabbages outside in the garden in the upside down terrarium we found in the street years ago. Let’s hope it warms up weather-wise for them!

And the last bit of sowing was done in a couple of pots on the kitchen windowsill with some basil seeds and some cut and come again lettuce which we’ll use for micro-greens. And there’s still some multi-purpose compost left for next week. Thrift, we love it here at Weeds! Who says you need money to garden.

And the soundtrack to this piece was the excellent Ross Allen show dedicated to Andrew Weatherall which is well worth listening to, click here to tune in.

Dubbing on a Sunday night

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A piece of out there dub courtesy of the great Dennis Bovell at the controls called “Coolie” from Sarathy Korwar (Featuring Delhi Sultanate & Prabh Deep). Jazzy vibes, some dubbed out keys and a lovely rhythm section, what more do you want? The Bandcamp “The time has come to open thy heart/wallet” legend comes quicker than you think. The vocal version is tops too: “Cocaine run by the CIA, Opium smuggling run the same way”. Tune!

And talking of the great Blackbeard Bovell… (off the 1980 LP I Wah dub)

And an excellent show from Ross Allen on NTS where Dennis Bovell picks some tunes. It starts with the excellent Bovell produced Riot in Lagos from Ryuichi Sakamoto and it goes from there.

A tune to start the weekend with

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SANEafqL5io

Thanks to Ross Allen for playing this on last week’s Meltdown on NTS radio from Durand Jones and The Indications called Morning in America. Lovely stuff and a tune and a half! One to coax that sun out this weekend. We love that Isley Brothers-like freaky guitar at the end!

Tomorrow never knows

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Thanks to @hincmariana for letting us know about the great free event tomorrow at The Garden Museum. We’ve left it a bit late but it’s an event worth going to if you like a seed swap like we do.

Incredible Edible Seed Swap
Sat 27 January 2017
1.00-3.00pm (no booking required).
The Garden Museum
5 Lambeth Palace Road
London SE1 7LB

And accompanying news of the seed swap here’s a couple of lovely tunes heard on this week’s Ross Allen Show on NTS which has been on rotation here at Weeds HQ. The first is by The Officials called Distant Drums on a very limited Soul Jazz/Studio 1 release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hXeBDp7N2o

The next is a previous unknown Four Tops track called Don’t bring back memories (we don’t think this was the actual mix Ross played but it is a tune!) Best of luck to all who are going to the seed swap tomorrow!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtccMD8iPgM

No rest for the wicked

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Here’s a couple of recommendations if you fancy music of a chilled nature. The first a tune that Tom Ravenscroft and Ross Allen have been playing on the radio comes from Charlotte Gainsbourg (produced by Guy-Man from Daft Punk) called Rest. It’s a brilliant song but do disregard the “walking in the air” lyric or you’ll think of that dreadful Snowman film. The second is an excellent set from Laut & Luise (a record label from Cologne and Berlin) thanks to our good mate Will who slung it our way. It’s a mix in an “out there” downbeat style (track listings please!)

We’ve been busy the last fortnight so we haven’t had much time to garden until yesterday when the sun came out in force. The lawn was mown and the seed spuds we bought from Shannon’s many moons ago were finally dug up. Usually as soon as the plant’s flowered we’re in with a fork pulling up marble sized spuds but this time it’s been well worth the wait!Also we tried for the first time an alternative weedkiller (a strong solution of salt and water with a little dot of washing up liquid) for the cracked pavement out the back. We will revisit the area in a week or two to see if it actually works or it’s back out there on our hands and knees.

I’m waiting for the (weather) man

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Waiting for the weather to turnWhat’s going on with that weather at the moment? One day you’re in the garden with your jumper off, the next indoors with the heating on. They’ve even talked about sleet and snow at the London Marathon tomorrow. Madness!

Well we aren’t taking any risks here at Weeds HQ (above) so there’s a array of tomato plants, a squash, a safflower plant and sweet peppers all being kept indoors until the risk of frost is passed. And look at that Mongolian Giant Sunflower in the centre go! Below: That will be us up that ladder in the summer if the advert for those giant sunflower seeds we bought on ebay for 80p is to be believed.massive sunflowersOut in the garden we’ve got some fleece over the spuds (after we earthed them up as extra protection) that are now coming through. Don’t be fooled by that bit of sunshine at the moment as it can still be nippy overnight but give it a few more weeks and all will be well! spuds under fleece and thingsSoon we’ll be able to put out those Dahlia tubers that are sitting in the corner of the back room that are starting to sweat in their packaging. Talking of Dahlias, have a butchers at The National Dahlia Collection here for a comprehensive list of said plant, there’s even varieties called Punky and Abba but why no Charlie Harper or John Peel?PunkySoundtrack to this post is this classic Babylon from Johnny Clarke that’s being played on last week’s Ross Allen’s Mi-Soul show on Mixcloud as we write. Tune!