I dropped into the Pigeonhole in Daventry today, which to be fair is not that unusual an occurrence. What is most unusual is to find a vintage, mint conditioned Raleigh Chopper for sale. The beauty you see pictured (the bike not me) is as spotless as it was the day it left the factory; the detailing is perfect everywhere and I have to be honest, I would dearly love to own it. Priced at £695, it isn’t cheap but then again these things are highly collectible; I can’t think of a more iconic bike to represent seventies youth than the Chopper. And, believe it or not, the sale price represents good value for money.

As I understand it, the bike has been restored; the chap that did it clearly skilled. Paul Bowditch, Pigeonhole’s proprietor was kind enough to let me sit on the bike, take some pictures of me doing it and even email them to me afterwards too.

It's about time the Chopper was pictured on my site - if only I’d been wearing some seventies gear at the time! 

In return for Paul's kindness, this post promoting Pigeonhole and advertising this great bike. Christmas is coming – if you are looking for a present to buy the loved one in your life; this bike could be perfect.  But you had better be quick – I bet this thing won’t hang around for long.

http://www.pigeonholedaventry.co.uk

Pigeonhole
Bishop Crewe House
North St.
Daventry
NN114GH

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This post is a website first for me. Not once in three years have I published something on this site written by someone else. However, Chris Tucker wrote me such a super response to my post entitled “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” that I wanted to share it with you all. The comments are associated with the original blog post but if you had read the article before, there is every chance that you wouldn’t notice them - and that would be a shame.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Chris’ feedback; I am sure that he spent as much time on his response as I did writing the original post and I really appreciate the effort to engage.  

My view is that Chris should start his own blog – I’d be a regular visitor. 

Enjoy!

And Chris - thank you.

Dear Adrian, 

As skewed as your Weebly stats may have been, you can be sure to have at least one dutiful and grateful reader. That's me, by the way. I feel compelled to petition that you keep the website alive, and I'm going to tell you why. 

I was born in the late 1980s and, outside of my Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd album collections, my view of the 1970s is generally marked by bell-bottom flairs, casual racism, the first Rocky movie, political upheaval, and the colour orange. At university, I learned that academics often present the decade as one being dragged, its platform shoes kicking and its ringed fingers clawing at chest hair, into cultural modernity. The recent Yewtree scandals have only added to the perception of the decade as a fraught and sordid one, a ten-year-long Abigail's Party, except with more cat suits and sexual harassment. 

However, your blog does a great job of bringing some jovial normality to the era. Rather than the sweeping, narrative-driven 1970s given to us in The Professionals re-runs and Panorama specials, your blog gives us a view of the period that is celebrated without prejudice or tight-collared revisionism. A few days ago I caught an early 90s Whitesnake track on the radio and felt the same pang of childhood nostalgia that you likely to derive from corduroys and Mark III Cortinas. I immediately thought of your blog and its relationship to the years of your life that are long passed but never forgotten. 

It can be said that your blog has become a lens into my own future, a type of modern memoire that seeks to give order to the disorder of memory. The 1990s, in my case, are not long passed, and Oasis and Blur records have not quite receded into the cultural memory like the ELO and Yes albums that gather dust in back alley record shops in the bohemian parts of town. However, that day will come, and I'll probably be the one blogging about it - reflections on Toploader and Grange Hill sitting alongside reviews of people carriers and TV shows about Ant and Dec. 

If you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve then you've most certainly done it well, but I for one can say I'm glad to know when a bizarre ornament you own is featured in a BBC documentary.

Maybe you're Adrian Baldwin the author, and the man of the same name is a less prolific imposter.

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Today I have been bombarded with emails trying to get me to buy stuff on Black Friday (BF) – culprits include Argos, Amazon, Lovell Rugby, Ebay, Europcar and most unexpectedly Ann Summers (though the pictures were nice).

This American inspired, post-Thanksgiving shopping phenomenon just leaves me cold. How much Christmas shopping am I planning to do today? Well none to be honest because I am working. Surely most working age adults in the UK would have to be doing the same thing – BF is not a public holiday after all.

News on the BBC website reveals that police have been called to Tesco to break up aggressive shoppers seeking “unbelievable” BF deals.

Am I missing something or are some people just mad? Even Tesco’s management with its “every little helps” slogan will probably be thinking “really” and “get a life” or even “for God’s sake go to Aldi you cheapskate bastards”!

If you have descended into a spending/buying frenzy, I hope you saved enough dosh to make your Christmas shopping worth fighting for.

Being cynical we are all being exploited by retailers looking to meet their year-end targets and the media that has nothing better to report on today.

Black Friday really is “Bullshit Friday” if you ask me.

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Do birthdays ever make you feel a little melancholic?

Today sees this site reach its third birthday; here before you, three years of care, commitment and creativity - and approaching 300 articles for that matter.

But should I celebrate or have some kind of site party? The thing is, I am not sure.

What dear reader do you think?

The site’s original purpose was to assist me in my search for gainful employment; to my absolute relief, that aim was achieved within three months of the site going live - but that meant a repurposing was necessary.

Since the end of February 2012, adrianbaldwin.com/co.uk/.net has essentially been about entertaining visitors; this achieved (well attempted might be more appropriate) by sharing my reflections on…

…well anything really.

In fact “random” is the adjective that best sums up the content. There is some site architecture, there are some loose/ongoing themes (the 70s, cars, music, nuclear matters) but there is a real risk that the criticisms, “inconsistent”, “unstructured”, “untidy” or “unplanned” could be levelled – all with some merit!

Being self-critical, it is certainly the case that a reader with a specific interest i.e. jigsaw puzzles could come across my site, read one relevant post and then never find anything else that was of interest to them.

My site reminds me of the famous line from the Forrest Gump movie “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get”. Certainly a reader will have no idea what they’ll be subjected to on their next visit (hoping of course there is one).

Like the chocolate chooser, at least a site visitor knows there will be something to consume – and that must be better than finding an empty box! The risk is they might not like what they try; but then the very element of risk surely makes a selection more exciting!

The fact is that I enjoy writing and I manage this site as a hobby, albeit a rather solitary one. From a selfish perspective I guess that it suits me to leap from topic to topic without boundaries; it stops it getting boring or just getting too hard. From a positive perspective, I have proved (to myself anyway) that I can write about anything; that I can find an angle that makes a subject interesting and worth writing about.

But is this just self-congratulatory nonsense, a form of literary masturbation? Aside from some self-indulgence, what has this site achieved since 2012? It hasn’t made me any money, or made me famous; my twitter following remains pitiful.

Even my website stats have been inaccurate thanks to Weebly messing up the counts.

What do you think? I’d really like to know.

My questions to you:

• Do I carry on as is? 
  
• Is another repurposing exercise necessary? 
  
• Do I stop?
  

My questions to myself are:

• Have I achieved everything that I am going to with this environment? 
  
• Would my time be better spent doing something else? I am sure that Mrs Baldwin has firm views on this. 
  
• Should I surrender my plethora of website addresses to the other Adrian Baldwin because he is a real author?
  

Two songs spring to mind, so in between playing Christmas Compilation CDs in my car, should Prince “1999” or Lesley Core “It’s my party” get an airing; celebration or commiseration?

Help me choose which one to play.

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Christmas is fast approaching and I am starting to get into the spirit of it; some present buying has taken place but most noteworthy for this post is that Christmas CDs are being played in my car. I was listening to one during a journey over the weekend and thought I’d share some reflections.

When listening to Last Christmas by Wham I thought the title more apt than ever given that the last time I listened to Last Christmas was indeed last Christmas.

I have to be frank, Wham is horrible and my tolerance for Wham’s crappy pop music is very low indeed. Bizarrely though, Last Christmas is George Michael’s and when I heard it performed by Human Nature, I just had to change the tune in disgust – how dare someone else mess around with it. The realisation that the Wham version is sort of sacred was more than a little unsettling for me.

But taking the thought process past Wham; if anyone thinks they can do a rendition of Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody”, they can f**k off. Slade at Christmas is almost as sacred as the nativity.

I wrote about my favourite Christmas CD three years ago as one of the earliest posts to this site. In the years since I have acquired a number of Christmas compilations and still there isn’t one to rival “It’s Christmas Time”. Every other compilation I have purchased has some tunes on it that require skipping over and that annoys me.

I must be getting old because I find myself getting a bit bar humbug; here are my grumpy observations:

• What possesses the compilation makers to put the “Power on Love” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood on – it’s a miserable bloody song and I hate it. 
• No Christmas tune recorded after about 1987 is worthy of airtime – East 17, Westlife, N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Destiny’s Child etc. can all shove it as far as I am concerned.
• If a Christmas tune doesn’t have jingle bells or something equally festively jangly (unless it’s Jona Lewie) then the artist isn’t really trying hard enough.
  

In trying to get to the bottom of my retrospective outlook, I have come to the conclusion that it is only the tunes that existed when I was a child/young adult that resonate for me or trigger the feelings of Christmas excitement.

Of course I could just be mad.

Keep an eye on the site – the Christmas decorations will be going up on the home page shortly.

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Before I start - it’s not a typing error. Don’t get stressed, bear with me it will all make sense.

A few weeks back I wrote a gig review after seeing a band called “Purson” at a venue in Wolverton, Milton Keynes. At the time, I added a note to the band’s Facebook page, the content of which you can read below:

“Great gig at the Craufurd Arms. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and have written a review if you are interested in reading it - post: http://www.adrianbaldwin.net/blog/purson-at-the-craufurd-on-the-24th-a-gig-review. My colleague Mark and I were arguing about whether “Well Spoiled Machine” was on the set list. I am sure it was but please correct me if I am wrong. Thanks a lot. Adrian”

Since the glamorous, heady heights of MK, the band finished its UK tour and then jetted of to the States to do mundane promotional stuff like play on cruise ships with Kiss and have photos taken with stars and cars (visit the Purson Facebook page and see for yourself). I jest of course (about both MK and dull States trips); how exceedingly cool for the band to hang out with the glam rock glitterati.

Given the excitement filling the band members’ lives and the elapsed time since the gig, I didn’t expect a response to my FB post…

…but last night the following reply landed in my inbox.                  

Purson wrote: "Excellent review Adrian, a pleasure to read! Well spoiled was not on the set list though!"

I have to say I am well chuffed, not that the comment starts with the word excellent but that the response got sent at all. I wrote in the earlier piece about the band liaising with its audience after the gig; getting back in touch with me is more evidence of good customer service and a band that values its fans. I applaud that commitment - enough to take the time to share my experience with everyone that cares to read this.

From a personal perspective, it is nice to receive a positive review particularly when I question the value of spending my time writing the content for this site. It is a shame that my memory failed me with regards to “Well Spoiled Machine” (I put it down to age and playing the “Circle and the blue Door” in my car on loop) but there are positives:

• Mark Hughes will be pleased that he was right and I was wrong. He’s a legal type and has to sweat the detail.
  
• In light of his challenge to my original post, I was prepared to question my own recollection and ask for help.  I am also prepared to admit when I am wrong.
  
• Well Spoiled Machine is one of my favourite Purson tracks and so, on a pure technicality, part of the offending copy was still correct (all right that’s rather tenuous).
  

The biggest positive though; Purson clearly has a personal touch (I told you the title would make sense), the band has not let celebrity and exposure make it arrogant and aloof.    

I repeat my recommendation from my previous post - look this band up, buy a CD, download a tune, put the album on your Christmas list; find out if Purson rocks for you.

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It’s the 19th November and I have been showcasing a seriously sexy moustache for 19 days in support of Movember. Only another 11 days until I can shave it off and believe me I am counting them down.

Looking like a seventies porn star has, perhaps inevitably, meant I have had to suffer the adoring attention of droves of female admirers; seriously, looking as incredibly handsome and horny as this is tiring. And the wolf whistling and groping – honestly you wouldn’t believe it!

Thank God there’s money in it.

Since my last post funds have been spurting in… 

…or rather they haven’t.

Thank God for top man Mike because without his benevolence, my fund raising would amount to zero, which would be a bit shit!

So dear reader, this is the money shot - there is still time to sponsor me if you are willing and able. Any amount is fine.

Come on, do it, you know you want to.

Obviously everything (well almost everything) you have read to this point is total bollocks but that’s okay because Movember is about raising awareness of testicular cancer. This post is, arguably, bang ‘on brand’.

http://mobro.co/abaldwin

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I watched the first episode of a two part series on Channel 4 on Saturday night called “It was alright in the 1970s”. The programme, narrated by Matt Lucas, examined seventies culture from the perspective of its portrayal through the popular television of the decade.

Regular visitors will appreciate that this was essential viewing for me - and I can report that I actually watched episode one twice (once at 9pm and then again at 10pm on Channel 4 + 1).

By way of a synopsis, the programme featured a series of commentators (from the media of the time) and celebrity observers of various ages reflecting upon what they were watching – Benny Hill, 321, Sale of the Century, Casanova 1973, Doctor in The House, Miss World etc. All those contributing were filmed in a studio surrounded by seventies stuff that would look thoroughly at home in my ‘things’ gallery (to be honest, I did covet a few of the items on display).

The broadcast material reviewed suggested that the attitudes of the time to racism, sexism, feminism, religion, equality, sexual orientation, violence, animal cruelty, the sexualisation of children and young adults, advertising, smoking and drinking were so far removed from politically correct (PC), that any enlightened sort would find themselves wincing in discomfort.

To be frank, some of the material reviewed from the decade was dark (even though it was supposed to be funny) and made worse by the observers reflecting that what was portrayed on telly probably made viewers of the time think that the kinds of behaviours that would land you in court these days, were acceptable. It was observed by more than one commentator that it was no wonder that deviants like Jimmy Saville could hide their perversions in plain sight.

The fact is that since the seventies, society has moved on in leaps and bounds and whilst one could argue that we are now too tolerant, too litigious, too PC, too health & safety; we are in a far better state than we were in then. And that’s a revelation for me; there’s a lot about the seventies that I am glad is history.  Blimey!

Saturday’s programme showed footage from Miss World that even portrayed the legendary Terry Wogan in a fairly poor light (and so very soon after Children In Need too).  What was socially acceptable in the seventies is simply unacceptable today but that leaves people like Dave Lee Travis (so recently persecuted and prosecuted) in a bit of a fix. I am not condoning his actions at all but being evaluated in court by judges and/or juries, via a legal system with no social references for the decade in which many of the “damned” behaviours took place, is a recipe for pain.

Returning to the seventies television programmes, I remember many of them from my childhood, albeit that I was young, innocent and completely oblivious to some of the undercurrents. I think it’s pretty safe though to assume my kids will never see the outdated shows and sitcoms – no TV channel would be brave enough to broadcast them.

During my viewing discomfort, there was one highlight that cheered me up; I have attached a shot from Casanova 1973 showing the wonderful Leslie Phillips – see that blue glass thing behind his head; I have one of those. No idea what it is (a punch bowl perhaps) but it will shortly have its own post in my seventies gallery. What better way to date it than to see it showcased in such a way.

Episode two of the series is aired on Saturday 22nd and I’ll be watching that for sure. You can catch up with the first programme on 4OD.

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It’s Movember and I am growing a comedy moustache to mark the occasion and to raise awareness and funds for testicular cancer research; I am part of a team of facial hair growers at CLM/Maxxia called CLiMax (great isn’t it – perfectly attuned to the purpose of the old plums) so you can check out my fellow reprobates too.

If you are willing to contribute a little something to the cause that would be very much appreciated. A link to mymospace follows: http://mobro.co/abaldwin

In my case a horse shoe moustache has taken root on my face and surely makes me look devilishly handsome?

Or perhaps not!

If you are female and fancy a tickly snog, please let me know because Mrs Baldwin is keeping her distance and frowning a lot. I am putting it down to the growth but of course there may be deeper underlying issues in our relationship.

Regular readers will regularly read a load of old bollocks on my site but this post, for once, is meant to be.  

Thanks for your help.

Ade

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I drove to work today listening to a CD I found fascinating, so much so that I decided to share it with you (well sort of bearing in mind that I can’t exactly play it to you).

The CD by Apocalyptica entitled “Plays Metallica by Four Cellos” has actually been available since 1996 – so it has taken me eighteen years to get around to hearing it. The CD features eight songs by Metallica but all performed by the Finnish quartet using cellos only.

If you are a Metallica fan, and I think it helps to fully appreciate the CD, the result is really interesting; the music is competently played and a clever and decidedly alternative take on the original thrash metal.

The track list is detailed below and it contains some complex, multi movement pieces; the fact that these tracks could be reduced to a single instrument and still work, is tribute to the quality of the original song writing. If you, like me, are unfamiliar with the cello, you’ll be impressed by the range of sound that one (well four) is able to accommodate.

To be frank, the lack of vocals (though I added my own), electric bass and twin bass drums do affect the drama of the music but it is still Metallica. In terms of an experience; in my head I liken it to the difference between a decent shower and a full on thunderstorm.

Metallica has experimented with classical music before, the S&M album features the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and is just brilliant. It proved that heavy metal and orchestral music could be combined to great effect.

I didn’t however assume that Metallica’s repertoire could be transferred to classical instrumental and still work – Apocalyptica’s interpretations suggest that it can.

For those days when banging heavy metal is not conducive to one’s mood/wellbeing (occasional though they are), there is a mentally soothing alternative.

Track listing
Enter Sandman
Master Of Puppets
Harvester Of Sorrow
The Unforgiven
Sad But True
Creeping Death
Wherever I May Roam
Welcome Home (Sanitarium)

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