The Bangles

We are exiting this month for another as we march on towards winter and so we're taking a look at artist whose music was bought mainly on cd first time around, a part of the guitar pop revival of the mid nineteen eighties.

I bought the 1985 Different Light album on the new fangled cd format after weighing up that compared to buying the tape version and having bought the first two singles from it which remains in my collection in its original Japanese pressed edition with smooth sided case.

Banglesmania grew to the point "new" material was needed so Going Down To Liverpool as issued as a single which garnered attention for a reissue of the more rootsy All Over The Place album which I originally bought on tape and then replaced in the early nineties by the compact disc version.

The last original album was Everything from October 1988 with its hits In Your Room and Eternal Flame.

Greatest Hits was a "contractual obligations" album, they owed Columbia records an album as per their contract which featured a number of remixes.

At the time in 1990, I was rather divided over it because it only offered three songs two unreleased from the All Over The Place sessions that were new but by 1997 MiniDisc had entered my life to the point a portable player was on the cards so a slot in compilation held an appeal.

That cd is not actually a cd but a rare Super Audio cd issued in 2003 that only plays on super audio cd players and I recently acquired a copy where again being the only Bangles album on that format remastered by Joe Palmaccio who died a few days ago straight from the analogue tapes.

It does sound very good with additional depth on many tracks.

The old house

This week we are taking a bit of step back with an entry that belongs very much in the earliest days and that begins with my family living in a Post War local authority house after moving out of the core City area where my Father and by extension my Grandad and Grand Mother lived.

This place was situated in one of the green lungs between the main totally built up area and what I'd call the burnt bits of toast that just hang on the core with small green pockets between which was a substantial house with big long gardens, a play area in the front but only two biggish bedrooms.

A fair chunk of things had happened since that move such as giving birth to by older brother, myself and a younger one so with one being at an age he'd be going to secondary school we really needed a place to live with three bedrooms.

As the system was then, a few enquiries and work by a local Councillor resulted in us being moved up the list for a transfer to a brand new property that was in an adjacent piece of the "burnt toast" but in same school district that had been built within a new mainly private development.

This was it but getting on for fifty years later as we moved in nineteen seventy and there front gardens were at that time communal with no fences between, just between the smaller rear garden compared to what we had, a pathway around the backs and a garage block we rented for the Austin 1800 at the side.

It was quite modern in that it featured electric underfloor heating with adjustable vents at the time a porch at the front, a small cloakroom and a downstairs toilet in additional to the bathroom which had one upstairs.

Life at No. 33 was different, for one thing I had to learn to find my way to school by myself, vividly recalling answering questions about explaining the route to by Mr. Smith my beloved Headmaster as there would not be any mile and a quarter supervised walk or a lift with the farmer nearby in his big Landrover.

Another thing was that I got the main say in the bedroom that housed me and my younger brother as Big Brother had his own now and so I had a record player, tape recorder and radio all in their together with a shelf that housed my Blue Peter, Skippy, Beano and Pink Panther annuals and that weeks comics such as obviously the Beano and Sparky being a bit young at first for the likes of Tiger and Roy of the Rovers.

Unusually compared to my peers I did have my own tv, a 405 line only Decca that daddy had got second hand from a friend in the TV trade cheaply which was black and white as was the Bush dual standard 405 line set with screw on 625 line UHF converter fitted which also had a FM radio which was in the front room.

The UHF needed an outdoor antenna as reception was poor with ridges blocking closer signals while simple brass rod dipoles sufficed for VHF reception but that UHF was a must because at that time younger children's programming on the BBC was only on BBC2 and that was only on UHF and one of the shows I watched was Fingerbobs.

Fingerbobs was a finger puppet show presented by Rick James who was born in Ontario, Canada and featured the lead character Fingermouse who was a hand puppet.

Sadly he died on October 7th this year.

The other big one was Play School which had many presenters over the years and here's a couple of presenters and a few characters such as Humpty Dumpty, Teddy and Jemima.

There were famously round, square and rectangular windows one of which would be picked and that would lead to a short piece.

Given my issues around migraines then that extra toilet came in handy given how soon they came on and for being in bigger place we had playmates we could meet up with outside school although at that time we were lacking a proper playground.

Generally I would say in hindsight I was happier there for having my own space and with the rent being taken care we didn't have much to be concerned about.

Classical Music on sacd 22- Beethoven and the Violin Part II

 It has been a bit of while since we last did one of these, around August time if my memory is right  where we look at one or more recordings because building a collection of classical music is something that takes time and has its own challenges.

One challenge tends to be couplings of works where it may not occupy most of a disc where some labels may record another work by the same composer as a fill up, others may add works in similar style by another.

The other is rarer but is relevant to this weeks entry where a label commences a series of recordings by an artist and composer but it gets delayed or sadly as it was with one series recordings by Holst it was began with one conductor but sadly they die part way through so another needs to be found.

We had looked in May at two discs by this duo with Frank P Zimmerman on violin and Martin Helmchen but Covid rather messed up the recording industry with restrictions on performing indoors and varying restrictions on international travel.

Eventually in August 2020 they were able to get together to record this second and last set of Beethoven's concertos at the Siemens Villa, Berlin, Germany for stereo and multichannel sound which includes the well known Ninth opus 47 "Kreutzer" Sonata so called as it was dedicated to violin virtuoso Rodolphe Kreutzer and published by Simrock in Bonn which is often coupled with the Fifth for those who don't collected the whole series.

This disc by Bis technically and artistically is a great achievement  and well worth the long wait for.

Previous entry: Beethoven and the violin

The world of School Audio Visual

This particular post has been about three years in the making so while I was in bed late last week armed with a pencil as using a computer isn't a good idea with a severe migraine I made some notes.

The period I went to Infant and Junior school was interesting as much in society and the sciences was beginning to change.

For instance the actual school building we had itself was Victorian and rather small designed in a period where for one thing education was only up to the age of twelve and that boys from eight upwards went to separate school so it only had five classrooms some of which were small.

Various changes such resetting to the age limit to eleven plus, becoming totally co-ed and a rapid expansion of the area lead to it becoming outmoded but it took a long time a hard struggle with the education department for a new purpose built school to be built by 1974.

That was the backdrop of my education and into which the increased use of external teaching resources came in from study packs and the introduction of radio and television education programs for schools which were either incorporated into a teacher own lesson plan or in case of music and movement the teacher acted more of as your local conductor of the radio lesson.

This rather austere looking thing was the original schools radio which was a self contained unit comprising of a long, medium and critically vhf waveband radio unit with amplifier with a small speaker and a socket for an external one.

It used Tubes (Brit Eng - valves) and even the tuning indicator on the far top right was one designed so two green sections touch if it was correctly tuned in.

It was designed to be transportable which may seem a joke in todays world of small very lightweight electronics but it was it was then and had a detachable carrying handle so it could be taken classroom to classroom as needed.

We also had a television which was rented as like the radio that too was tubed and in general they tended to be less reliable producing much heat in small space so if anything went wrong the people we rented it from would send a replacement out.

This thing was a Baird twenty five inch if I remember right set with a VHF tuner and a rotary UHF one although reception was problematic here needing an external UHF antenna.

It was all housed in wooden cabinet with folding doors on a stand with wheels which our long suffering teachers had to wheel into the classrooms with narrow gangways as that thing was darn heavy to move by any other way and then plug the antenna in.

While today we have streaming on things such as the BBC iPlayer and Bytesize, this was an era where sound recording was being used in many schools to store a program that then could be played at a more suitable time.

Without getting technical, given the era most schools had open reel recorders with spools of tape which if they were like mine were Tandberg series 15 mono machines with a built in amplifier and speaker but the increasingly popular compact cassette was creeping in so we had a few of them cos they were smaller and easier to handle with the tapes being just snap in and play.

Video recording was popular only really going in the two thousands in schools using big cassettes of tape and special recorders which had a built in timer so they could be set to record programs and then taken to a classroom.

We did not have a video recorder as they were only just becoming popular as I left for boarding school but then it was the Philips N1400/1500 series that were used before VHS took over in the very late 1970's which is what we got in high school although we still had the Philips for a period too.

There was a replacement for schools radios although by the mid nineteen seventies many schools used radio recorders which were very much portable and had cassette recorders.

These were made by Coombe of Worcester which was big with a large loud speaker and had presets which we had in the dorms at boarding school.

Having been out this morning the feel of autumn air I experienced in school in that era came flooding back to me.