Wet

A truly vile start to the day, weather-wise, but I'm going to work anyway and then only plan on pottering about the house, cleaning the new bathroom and finishing a slightly fiddly linocut - how's that for the rock and roll lifestyle...!

To counteract the whole middle-agedness of the above I'll probably listen again to a bit of Alex Chilton - now there was a gentleman who knew all about the rock and roll lifestyle! A good example, too, if anything, of a career managed in reverse. A major pop success as a teenager, he then goes on to form a groundbreaking but commercially unsuccessful band and then potters around for years as a cult figure, making bits and bobs of releases on various labels and of varying quality (often deliberately sloppy and/or badly-produced.) There's a compilation of his recordings for New Rose from the early/mid-eighties, called 'Stuff', that I like, that I actually picked up off the back of the same "Strum and Drum" cassette where I first heard The Raw Herbs. It's like a fairly shambolic collision of old-time rock'n'roll with a punk sensibility and a smattering of that kind of No Wave art-jazz that was around at the time - pretty heady stuff, and microcosmic of AC's solo stuff as a whole in that some of it is pretty dicey but some of it ('No Sex', 'Bangkok', 'Underclass'...) is pretty bloody marvellous...!