The Shed on the Web

The sad news today of the death of singer Ronnie James Dio from stomach cancer at the age of 67. The singer had been a member of Ricthie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Black Sabbath (where he replaced Ozzy Osbourne) and well as fronting his own bands Elf,  Dio and Heaven & Hell. I saw Dio as part of Rainbow at Newcastle City Hall in 1977 – he was the original singer in the band that Ritchie Blackmore formed after leaving Deep Purple. He co-wrote much of the excellent debut album simply called Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. This album has been a long time favourite of mine especially for the track The Temple of the King, which sadly they didn’t play when I saw them.

One day, in the year of the fox 
Came a time remembered well, 
When the strong young man of the rising sun 
Heard the tolling of the great black bell. 
One day in the year of the fox, 
When the bell began to ring, 
It meant the time had come for one to go 
To the temple of the king. 

In my opinion Rainbow only made two decent albums, the first two, the ones that Ronnie James Dio sang on! I still prefer the first one to the somewhat overblown second album Rainbow Rising, so much so that when I got divorced I grabbed it back off my wife when she tried to claim it was hers!!

She was a big fan of the little bloke and it was probably only because of this that we went to see Black Sabbath twice while he was lead singer, once in Newcastle and once in a god awful venue in Leeds. I had seen Sabbath with Ozzy and no matter how much I liked Mr Dio I don’t think he could fill the gap left by Ozzies departure. I did take some photographs of Sabbath with Dio at the City Hall at that gig I will have to see if I can dig them out.

At some point when we still lived in Sunderland we went down to London to see a band and Val and I had to return home early because of some commitment where as my brother and his mates spent the following day in London before getting the train back.  She had joked that she bet they met someone famous and indeed while wandering around who should they bump into but RJD – they got him to sign a postcard for her. However I should point out that they originally thought he was the singer out of the Scorpions!

A sad day for rock music as one of it’s truly original voices has been silenced.

The program for this years Proms is announced tomorrow – not something I’ve ever been excited about before but this year I am. My knowledge about classical music has expanded so much in the last year that now I know what I would like to either go and see or listen to. So I can’t wait!

Tonight we have my nephews and niece staying with us while their Dad goes to see Peter Gabriel at the O2. He bought the tickets with his mate ages ago and didn’t realise that his wife would be away this weekend. So during the week I got a text off him saying I could either a) have his ticket and go to the concert or b) look after the kids while he went. As we hadn’t actually seen Noah since he was born 10 months ago we decided to go with option b!

After all I’ve never been a big Gabriel fan, I think his first solo album is brilliant but haven’t really liked more than a few tracks since then. Biko obviously and Games without Frontiers from the third album and possibly Sledgehammer if I’m in the right mood. On the whole though it’s not the sort of thing I can sit and listen to.

I’ve seen him a number of times over the years, mostly in the early part of his solo career. The first time was at Knebworth in 1978. Genesis had headlined the first Knebworth that year in one of their first major gigs without him. The second festival, called Oh God not another boring old Knebworth, featured The Boomtown Rats, Franks Zappa, The Tubes and Peter Gabriel. My brother and I went with our next door neighbour Steve Bittlestone and his friend from university.

The thing I remember most about his set was that he got onto the stage via a ladder with a panda strapped to his back, he then sat down at the piano and sang ” Me and my Teddy bear, got no worries, got no hair!” a reference to the fact that he had shaved most of the long hair he had in his Genesis days off. He also wore a white suit with an orange hi-vis jacket over the top. He did take this off though, replacing it with a leather jacket,  for the final song which was the Genesis song The Lamb lies down on Broadway.

The next time I saw him was the following year at Reading festival where he appeared on the Sunday night with former Genesis band mate Phil Collins on drums. The show started with Collins beating out the rhythm for Biko on a huge drum while Gabriel sang the lyrics. I’m not sure if this was the first time he had performed the song live but we certainly hadn’t heard it and didn’t know what the fuck was going on!

Gabriel was this time wearing an orange jumpsuit and played a really great set. Another former Genesis member Steve Hackett had appeared the previous day and everyone was expecting him to join Gabriel on stage so the fact Phil Collins turned up was quite a surprise.  At the end of the show Gabriel and Collins donned the leather jackets and sang The Lamb lies down on Broadway again.

Then the following year I saw him again at the City Hall in Newcastle. We had quite good seats as I recall being a few rows back in the centre. The tour was entitled, for some reason probably known only to him, the 1984 Tour of China and the program was a small red book like the one Chairman Mao used to hand out! The lighting on the stage was quite basic, mostly white lights, and was meant to look futuristic but now looks very dated. This time he was wearing a black jump suit!

He was also using a radio microphone which was quite a new technology at the time and seemed to be having a number of problems with it as he kept hitting it. At one point during Games without Frontiers he jumped into the audience and made his way along the row next to us getting people to sing the jeux sans frontier bit into the microphone. Me and my mate Nick grabbed it as he went past and screamed into it, don’t know if it came out of the PA or not – hopefully not!

That was the last time I purposely went to see him, I did see him at Glastonbury with Youssou N’Dour when he came along to join in on the hit they had had together Shakin’ the tree. I also seem to recall that he played at Glastonbury one year but I’m not sure if I saw him – probably only in passing if I did.

The photographs on this page are the ones I took at Newcastle City Hall in 1980 and as you can see the stark white lights didn’t do the pictures any favours. The other images from Knebworth and Reading were taken by a photographer called Alan Perry and you can buy prints from these two shows and many other shows by a huge range of artistes from his site.

A new series of Skins started last week and like the previous 3 series the man who finds the music has managed to find some fantastic music to go with the action. I blogged at the end of series 3 that I had liked a piece of music so much that I had to try and find out what it was and that was when I found the Skins Music site.

The track in question was Franki’s Gun by The Felice Brothers which still gets played on a regular basis. So after I watched the repeat show the other day (having fallen asleep during the adverts and missed part 3 the first time round!) I checked the site to find out the identity of a couple of the tracks. The one that stood out was the Great Procrastinator by Ivan Campo which can be heard on their Myspace site.

So I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the series and being able to find out what that snatch of music I liked is called and who it is by. At some point I will have to watch series 1,2 and 3 again to check out the music on those shows – and I still don’t think I’ve seen the bit where Tony gets hit by the bus!

A few years ago the Grateful Dead released a box set of recordings from their 1969 run of shows at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. These shows were recorded by the band on a 16 track machine, the first album to be recorded on one. Some of the music recorded over the four nights was originally released on the bands first live album the legendary Live/Dead. Recordings of those shows, of various qualities, have long circulated amongst deadheads but the news of an official release of the entire collection had people leaping for joy!

The only problem was that the 10 disc collection was to be a limited edition of 10,000 copies and to add extra spice to all of this if you pre-ordered you got an 11th disc, containing more music from the same era, as a bonus. So the set became an instant collectors item and right from the start silly money was being spent by some who had missed out on buying copies on ebay.

Well last week a copy went on sale on ebay.co.uk – someone in London was selling his copy and it was noted with interest on my Dead group Eurotraders. The estimate that was touted was probably somewhere in the region of £250 – so i decided to watch it and see what happened.

It started at £85 and quickly progressed to around the £200 mark where it stayed for quite sometime. However by the time the final hour came round it was sitting at just over £280 and then in the dying seconds the price jumped over the £300 mark finishing at £310.50. The seller offered free postage which was decent of him!

So there you are, now my problem is deciding if I want to keep my copy or sell it and raise some much needed cash. I mean I would want to be thought of as a breadhead would I?

With the changing of the IPS tag and DNS details of my third domain I completed the move to my webserver and all three sites are now hosted from my shed!

Now hopefully I can get on with other things!