Nice Enough To Eat

I appreciated Cat Stevens...very much.

My good friend Viv and I would listen to most of the Blues bands of that time.

We were dedicated to soul and blues...her father managed a band....and for a period of

time so did I. 2 of Free sat in our Putney lounge and sketched.

I appreciated Donovan too.

Yes Ginger Baker was a drummer with energy....but, not so sure about him....did not know

him.......as such but have met him....or someone who seemed to be called Ginger Baker and was on another planet. Not mine. But yes I J watched the programme.

Glad, at least he like animals.

My fav times of all being in London surrounded by a wall of sound and

Biba, freedom to be myself and do some really special things....special to me

anyway.

Mark, do you know the Cat Stevens - Sandy Denny link, plus a few others who can be thrown in?

Hi Barbara. Did they indeed? My sister was well into Free, which surprised me at the time because she was a big Cat Stevens fan. But they were a fine group and Paul Rodgers had a really good soulful voice. Simon Kirke, the drummer, appeared as one of the talking heads on an excellent documentary film aired on BBC1 the other night on the odious Ginger Baker. The best thing that you could say about the man (apart from the fact that he was a very good drummer, it's true) was that - like Hitler - he was kind to animals.

Spooky Tooth and Free provided a very important prescription for me in the 70s .

Yes, yes and more yesses. The What's Going On album with his distant, deep thought look on the cover, a really clever concept album before its time. He was such an underrated musician. I MUST see your comments! I once wrote a review of it for our college magazine after it got the platinum disk for UK sales, bit cock-eyed after being out a while but that's Cambridge for you.

Sure, publish the comments. I know plenty of the scandalous stuff too, but not telling any of that.

Brian, thanks so much for your fascinating comments. May I publish them this weekend on my blog site as an adjunct to the NETE post? Interestingly, my wife baby-sat on a couple of occasions for the Fairports and remembers Sandy of course. The irreplaceable... I am not going to try to digitise either my record or cassette collections until well into my dotage. For the moment, they still sound fine in their original formats and I have such a ton of new stuff on CD to listen to and turn into thrilling compilations! Next Sunday, I'm going to write about Marvin's What's Going On by the way.

Jane, I'm sorry you weren't able to get through this but this kind of nostalgia is probably a bit of a boys' thing. We never grow up. Since you were the only one left who commented on La Vie en Straw, I thought I'd try something different. But I won't give up on the other one; I'll maybe do it twice a month or something like that. Hope you're keeping cool in this sapping heat.

Oh yes, Unhalfbricking - which I have recently digitised. Neil and Edna Denny outside the gate on the driveway, with some of the Fairports having tea in the garden. My mother and Edna were good friends, oh the boring hours of them gossiping. Sandy and I used to have a joke about being born in the same bed! She was a year and a half older than me. My parents were over on leave, some of my mother's family had moved into SW19 and SW20 so that is where they went. I was born in that little hospital (still there but changed function somewhat). The birthing room had one bed, hence our joke. We went to the Leather Bottle pub opposite a couple of times to toast the hospital. She could tip a pint or two, our Sandy. Even from 1978 to the present I terribly miss her.

So, I am biassed as hell. Despite that, she had the voice that other female folk singers aspired to have before and since and had she lived and cleaned up a bit would have just got better and better.

I also have What Is Soul? Not actually a bad mix for a sampler album. King Crimson, hmm, I listened to my now crackly LP whilst digitising and find it so dated, it is a jury out band for me now. Progressive music was not as good as the people selling it made it out to be. The use of the electric organ through to synthesiser now gets on my nerves although once I believed it uncool to listen to music without.

Growing up during the early 1960s, albeit going 'home' many weekends for many years from '66 on, with Richmond Jazz and Blues Club, Eel Pie Island and other wonderful jazz, blues and folk clubs and pubs throughout SW London, the Stones and so many others like the Yardbirds, Spencer Davis Band, the Pretty Things (etc, etc) were 'local' groups. Yes, they came from all over, but for them that was the 'scene' and there I was from 13-ish on part of a group of kids obsessed with music. Despite parental protest and being pre-'social workers falling over themselves to not let kids roam alone' we used every device such as back and side entrances of stations to avoid paying fares to travel about on the Southern Region trains that got us to neighbouring parts of (then still) Surrey such as Richmond, Twickenham, Barnes and Putney.

Oh yes, please pursue this compilation of favourite 14/6-worths (I have some with 12/6 labels still on them, njah-njah). There is no going back in time, no recovering the past but hearing it again is sometimes pure gold. One warning though. If you have a large collection, if like yours truly you set out to digitise it all, it takes ages. Firstly, there is always the album or single you just have to listen to rather than record just record, which probably means doubling the time because after thinking about whether to digitise or not you will inevitably do it, thus why did you not in the first place. Secondly, it takes ages anyway. I am about a third of the way through after pushing two years. I then have the ****** cassettes to consider :-(

Mark, this is obvioously very important to you, but I had to give up before half way through.