Rob Chapman

@scribblerrob.bsky.social

3191 Followers 681 Following

The gentle rumble of distant dub thunder. https://www.rob-chapman.com

The cover of Roxy Music's Stranded LP
Any of you ever been in a working men’s club? Thought not. (Parodic posh voice.) Oh, wait, we did go to a gig at a community centre that time didn’t we, Samantha? You remember. That world music thing. Lovely food. Yeah, but you have no ideas what goes on in that community centre the rest of the week do you? Because rent-tribunal advice and eviction aren’t high on your list of priorities are they Samantha? So yeah, working men’s clubs. Ever been in one? These dens of iniquity where the commoners gather together to hear off-colour jokes and drink draft bitter. Only, I remember playing benefits during the miner’s strike, not the last one, the one we won back in the 1970s. When I was in jazz groups and there was still some fucking hope. I remember playing those places when all the club turns put their hands in their pockets and contributed to the cause. And I remember those same clubs in the last miner’s strike, the one we lost. And they were running food kitchens and emergency funds for the workers on the picket lines. And those same club comedians were still putting their hands in their pockets and giving half their fee to the cause. Yeah, those comedians. You remember the miners, don’t you? Kept your house all nice and warm. Yeah. Those ones. Pneumoconiosis on the lungs and the wrong kind of laugh at the wrong kind of jokes. That’s the ones. Where was I? I’ve lost my train... (Voice from audience) Ranting! OH, YOU BET I WAS RANTING. FUCKFACE. THIS IS WORTH RANTING ABOUT. HEAR ME OUT. The first bottle is thrown.
On July 7th 2006, almost exactly a year after my cancer operation, Syd Barrett died from a far more invasive strain of the disease. I wrote a lengthy obituary for Mojo magazine during the hottest week of the summer, and once the temperatures had subsided from the sweltering high 80s to the pleasant low 70s, Caroline and I spent a week revisiting some of my childhood haunts in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. The only cassette we had in the car was a Ralph Vaughan Williams compilation, containing his best-known short orchestral works: In the Fen Country, The Lark Ascending, Norfolk Rhapsody, English Folk Song Suite, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, etc. It was a car-boot purchase, 50p, lovingly curated, and packaged with a hand-made inlay, a generic landscape view on the outer sleeve, a photo of “Rafe” on the inner, and a quaintly etched drawing of “the composer conducting his Sea Symphony in Leeds in 1958” on the cassette label. The C90 showcased the best orchestral performances of each work. Three Boults, two Beechams, a Boughton and a Handley. It remains the least clandestine but most treasured bootleg in my collection.compiled I would guess by some dedicated old classical buff, pleasingly ignorant of or indifferent to cross-licencing deals and the debilitating effects his actions might have on the future of live music. We had it on permanent play for the entire week. It was high summer. The harvest was mostly gathered in, pretty village cottages displayed their home-grown produce and put out an honesty box for payment, the air was ablaze with memory essence and orchestral colouration. I concluded that there were far worse places I could have grown up.
Sandy my hometown. The Sandhills to the left."A town with a beach, many miles from the sea." Northbound passenger train in the dying days of steam.
A wonderful account of a festival in the West Yorkshire hills where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Goldfinches on the telephone wires outside our house.
Fife Scotland. Photo taken by Ian Krause courtesy of FB. "65909 backs gingerly into the Smith Anderson Fetykil paper mill in Leslie, Fife, in late-August 1966."
Test match cricket like I remember it.
Master and apprentice.
Our Jasper having pulled another all-nighter. Mousers at the gates of Dawn.
A Pete Brown poem from Horde magazine 1965. Pete later used the opening line in the Bruce-Brown composition He The Richmond.
Messi.
Twink Alder and some music biographer who saw him play with Stars.
Two Spike Hawkins poems from The Lost Fire Brigade. Fulcrum Press 1970.
My mega sales in June for my print on demand self published books.
"He was considered insufficiently robust for active overseas service and served his time with the Pioneer Corps in the south of England, first as a non-combatant auxiliary fireman, then on anti-aircraft emplacements, enduring long arduous shifts among the concrete fortifications of Canvey Island and Shoeburyness in the Thames Estuary. Where he had once trained his eyes upon the immutable mirk and the rocky outcrops of the misted westerly isles, he now watched the wounded arcs of incoming doodlebugs as they plummeted into the blue-grey waters of the North Sea. Here he felt the tang of a different air in his nostrils, tasted cockles and mussels for the first time, beachcombed the shoreline, sorting sea shells from spent shells. He enjoyed the company of colleagues who laughed readily, were quick with their caustic wit and happy to send up whatever adverse circumstances they found themselves in. Back in billet they mocked the solemnity of news broadcasts, considered most politicians opportunists or fools, and pointed out that Lord Haw Haw was clearly three sheets to the wind during his increasingly deranged nightly missives."
Caravan's Land of Grey and Pink LP, released 55 years ago, the summer I left school. My Canterbury Freedom Suite.
Captain Beefheart's Gumbo and Plastic Soul album. Clear Spot.
Platform Four on the long gone Cambridge to Oxford line at Sandy station in 1966
John Lennon wearing a face that all genius songwriters should wear at some point.