Andy Lewis

@andylewis.bsky.social

2171 Followers 356 Following

Music producer, bass player, DJ. Soho Radio presenter. Weller band alumnus. Helped invent Britpop.

The LP of Folk Songs by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
A cafe called Conti's in Lampeter, Wales. There's a large plastic ice cream to the left of a brown front door. The storefront is a kind of faded yellow colour. An old wooden sign has Conti's Cafe carved into it. Through the big glass window you can see hanging light bulbs in clear glass lampshades and evidence of a dark, fuggy interior and the dim shapes of a few people. There's a massive pot plant in the right of the window. On the wall next to the window is a notice board that probably has council notices on it. It wasn't the sort of place to have a menu.
The end of an era.... Conti's Cafe's Lampeter and Llanerchaeron 2h • O It was not a decision taken lightly but due to very deep personal reasons the doors of Conti's Cafe in Lampeter will close for the very last time tomorrow. The memories will live on for many of you who frequented the cafe i'm sure there are many stories to share, if only walls could talk. A warm welcome is extended to you all to visit the cafe for the last time, Bryn Fon will be present from around 3 onwards to entertain you all.
A Lockspeiser LDA01 in flight. It's a remarkable looking thing. Like someone has stuck wings and a propellor to a narrowboat, but the big wing is at the back and the horizontal stabiliser is at the front under the cockpit and the propellor is right at the rear of the fuselage. In this photo it's flying at about 2000 feet over some typical English countryside. It's white with a black stripe around it, and there's a chap in the cockpit flying it who may well have been the designer Ben Lockspeiser. I don't think anyone else was brave enough to get into it, although it was apparently very easy to fly in spite of resembling the thing Tony Hancock gets into in Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines
Bobbie Gentry in a spectacular orange outfit, holding a tiny guitar that makes her look like she's absolutely flipping mahoosive. In the foreground, what looks like the top of the extension tube fitting to the AKG C12 microphone that the BBC were ever so fond of using back then.
A UK Deram promo copy of If You Wish It by Jon Gunn
Spike Milligan in a T shirt that bears the legend MY CAT'S A METHODIST
The cover of soul compilation Sound Of The Grapevine that features a map of the towns to the east of Manchester that included the constituency of Makerfield
A Royal Navy submarine- HMS Otus I think- gingerly transiting the Manchester Ship Canal on the surface, passing under Barton swing bridge by the look of it.
A very much in focus BBC journalist in front of the Scottish parliament building. Well, I think it's the Scottish parliament building. It's so out of focus it looks like the entrance to the Banbury Big Tesco.
A street light obscured by a tree
The Coles 4104 microphone.
House Of Bamboo by Andy Williams. Other, considerably more worthy American music is available, without a doubt. But come on. This is one of the best things to cross the Atlantic. Admit it. You’re smiling…”Number 54, the house with the bamboo door. Bamboo roof & bamboo walls. It’s even got a bamboo floor…”
Some pricy sparkling wine, one bottle of which is wrapped in the kind of orange cellophane that used to go round bottles of Lucozade when I was a kid a hundred or so years ago, when you could only fry it from the chemist.
A boy falling into some water dressed in the heighth of mid 70s beige fashion, captioned DICK.
Moment Of Softness by the US T-Bones on a British Liberty Records promo copy in "birth sleeve" if you think such things are important which personally I don't. It's a mark of how weird people have got about collecting 7" singles that having the original slice of vinyl isn't enough. Oh no, it's got to be in the original sleeve it was shipped in or you're "not a proper collector". I am *not* a proper collector, I am a musician and a DJ. The records are the most important thing- or more exactly the music etched onto the records, That's the thing that really matters.
That thing everyone is doing where you answer questions about what you think of stuff and it basically tells you how woke you are. In this case I’m the pope
A photograph of the Odeon cinema in Watford. A typical 1930s town centre cinema, a brick building with a white concrete facade. There are two shops either side of the entrance hall, a travel agent (Frames) and a restaurant called Gema,
A screenshot of an AI transcript from an audio podcast that reads All right, everyone, how you doing? Well, I've been today.
I’m behind the mixing desk at Black Barn studios. It’s a big table with lots of knobs and buttons on. Other bits and pieces of recording equipment are in shot.
The Philips N1500 Videocassette recorder, with its top open. It looks as though a cassette recorder, a radio, a Philicord organ and a Teasmade have had their genes spliced together by a mad scientist. On the right, a little clock which is the timer. Some transport buttons to its left. Some sort of level meter is next on the left, a crude tape counter and two knobs marked Audio and Tracking are on the left. On the top are a random assortment of buttons that set the channel to be recorded and various other functions long since forgotten. It's in the kind of wooden case beloved of late 60s/early 70s music centres.
A hulking behemoth of a video tape cassette. It's square. It's called a Philips VC 45.
UP YOURS BABY!
From the NYT "Strands" puzzle. I have spelt WILLIES.
A tabby and white cat pokes his head through a window and says hello, by staring intensely at me.
The sample rate display of my DAC, showing a project running at 48.
The magazine Byline Times with Andy Burnhams on the front under the headline Northern Soul
An AI generated transcript of a podcast on Spotify. It reads Do you know what I mean? So there's no. Speaker 2 Obvious Fred running through them. The only thing they do have in common I guess is me.
A photo of me next to an original Jenny Ondioline that was taken in a musical instrument warehouse in New York. I am on the left of the photo crouching down, next to me is a keyboard instrument that looks ever so art deco, made out of wood with what looks like an old fashioned radio set underneath it.
Centre Point
Got To Find A Way by Cajun Hart. A proper one, not a bootleg unlike the one Eddie Piller plays.
This Is The House Where Love Died by First Choice on 7”
Chains Of Love by JJ Barnes on Contempo
An Alesis 3630 compressor. A black box with two LED meters and lots of knobs. Infamously used by Daft Punk on the master bus of their mixer with the compressor's effect linked by a side chain to the kick drum so that whenever the kick drum goes BOOM the rest of the tune drops slightly in volume so that the initial thump of the BOOM is more present. A genius hack.
“So I’ve set aside Wednesdays for songwriting. Clearly it’s going well” A man sits behind a desk in front of a couple of screens with some interesting outboard equipment in racks but no evidence of any actual musical instruments. This is because he’s probably run out of things to put into the prompt dialogue box of his AI songwriting robot
Echoes Of The Cheers by Don Fardon.
The BBC's coat of arms, eagles wearing hunting horns holding up a shield of blue with seven stars and the globe encircled with a gold ring. Above the eagles is a lion holding a thunderbolt. There's a motto in Latin under the shield which reads QUAECUNQUE. It's a photo of an example on the wall inside Broadcasting House in London.
Going Underground THE FINAL VINYL. A vomiting gob spews out the names of the bands... The Booze Boys, Best Kept Secret, The Upshot, Going Underground Band, Speakeasy, Excel
A copy of House Of Bamboo by Andy Williams on the British London records release from 1958. It’s housed in a creased but otherwise intact original sleeve.
A BBC correspondent in Australia, a young woman sitting on a red sofa in an airy modern business space, is asking the question "So what's the reason behind these huge mouse invasions?". She is holding what appears to be a mouse. It's grey and fluffy and mouse-shaped. It's a microphone. One of those ones that are supposed to be clipped on but are used as hand helds by a new generation of social media content providers because a) they're cheap as mics go, and b) holding them in your hand nearer your mouth allows much more voice signal to be captured without you having to speak any louder. Useful if the only place you've got to file your despatch is a co-working space. Presumably because the studio is full of mice.
A man wearing the kind of armoured suit bomb disposal technicians wear. It's two-tone green, with a substantial amount of protective padding and a massive helmet
Paula Parfitt singing Im Gonna Give You Back Your Ring on a desperately rare original not a bootleg Beacon Records issue that’s from way back in 1969.
The cover of The Immediate Singles Collection from c1985
A snail slithering across the brickwork of a brutalist concrete cosmos
A screenshot of a Lincolnshire Live headline that reads "Coastguard issues danger warning after huge hole dug at Skegness beach" and underneath is a picture of a huge hole that's been dug in some sand
An AI generated plaque on an AI generated statue in an AI generated photo that reads RUPERT LOWE: A LIFE OF DEDICATION, A SYMBOL OF COMPASSION
Watford's famous Peace Memorial statue. Three men on white Portland stone plinths. The Fallen and The Wounded are on each side of Victory. They are naked, they are cast in bronze, in bronze. Victory is holding his right arm aloft in salute, or maybe he's beckoning down the Dove from Above.
Dr Who title c1974 saying HELL'S ANGELS ON A BARGE
Three women dancing while others in the background look on, captioned THE ALGORITHM WILL FEED YOU MORE OF THAT
Mr Tony Blair, Armando Iannucci's round friend from Saturday Night Armistice, whispering into Armando's ear during the programme
Me on the waterfront in New York. I'm wearing shades, an orange John Smedley sea island cotton top with a co-ordinating pocket handkerchief in my jacket pocket. The jacket is a dark brown, custom-tailored affair with two oversized buttons, the top one of which is done up. My trousers are by the same tailor, Susannah Hall of Clerkenwell, and are a fine dogtooth check in brown. On my feet, brown suede boots from Jeffery West. Behind me is some water and what I think is the Freedom Tower where the WTC used to be.
Paul Weller and his cat. Again.
The eBay auction for a copy of the 7” of Paula Parfitt’s “Love Is Wonderful” on Beacon Records, which has just ended with a winning bid of £733. No, I did not buy it. I already have it.
A grey squirrel looking at the camera sitting on the edge of a dilapidated planter in a community garden. There are leaves and weeds in a pile behind it
JJ Barnes Chains Of Love
A screenshot of the last time I referenced The Daemons on here, when I pointed out the absolute majesty of the subtitles for the phrase "as this barrow is called by the locals" appearing as the man doing the talking is standing next to a wheelbarrow. In the actual picture, a man dressed in an early 70s dark brown suit is standing with his back to us. Next to him is a wheelbarrow, the sort you might find on a building site.
My copy of THE MANUAL {HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE THE EASY WAY) by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond.
A screenshot of Flight Radar showing the area around Doncaster with an aeroplane registered G-NOWT showing up.