Stan Hoight

Unintentional compliments are arguably more truthful and thus more valuable.

As a couple of people mention in the comments, watch how he uses the heel of his left hand at the very start: marking the downbeat with a little bass cluster. Those little details that make the groove work! (... that I'd never noticed before)

Fork horror. Jolly good. Your voice is great, Ray. Brisk and crisply enunciated.

YouTube video by Lee Mendelson Film Productions, Inc. Vince Guaraldi - earliest television recording of "Linus and Lucy"

Vince Guaraldi’s first television performance of Linus and Lucy, from 1964. youtu.be/9EMfA5_tm8Y?...

Pretty sure this is actionable.

Gosh, I’m getting on to that.

It’s all very murky. WEA had just bought the 50% of Radar they didn’t own from Andrew Lauder and Martin Davis, so you can see why they’d play hardball, but it’s harder to understand why Chrysalis would want to help Lauder and Riviera do a stick-up for Costello (and Nick Lowe).

So, er, the idea here is that now we only write about people we think are great?

You won’t pay any tax on your music income if your bass costs more than you make from music, but you can’t reduce the tax on your lion-taming or jute-importing income with it.

Very generally, if you declare the music income and deduct no other expenses against it, you’d be able to reduce your taxable profit on it to zero, so effectively a £150 deduction.

Young Punctum is fantastic from end to end and this is a magnificent and moving conclusion. Most of my minute readership doubtless already know this but if you don’t, my goodness get on to it.

Accelerating the last part may, on reflection, have been the objective.

I recall that Costello was between labels (because he was refusing to deliver masters to Radar) but still contractually obliged to Warners (who bankrolled Radar), thus the Chrysalis-distributed 2 Tone release getting pulled and the swift establishment of the Warners-distributed F-Beat.

Confused and disturbed by being made to laugh out loud by Sting.

Good god is Owen Jones still going.

I was completely unable to extract any semantic content from however many words that was apart from a vague sense that foreigners might be bad.

I just spent a happy five minutes working out the gap between the release of the first Jazz Chorus amp and the first chorus pedal (about a year, as it turns out), so I think we must accept digressions as inevitable.

Thus this snarky reference in Maximumrocknroll #17, from September 1984.

Mary of Scotland

A slightly prosaic, but endlessly useful thing for someone starting in a band is an inexpensive tuner pedal, if she doesn’t already have one.

Dave's a change of glasses away from Charles Hawtrey.

I like it a lot. It seems not to be trying to be anything but itself, which is the best thing they could possibly have done with it.

Today this is a “The Byrds went off the boil when they signed with Columbia” account.

Ontologically, Northern Soul is a nightmarish n-dimensional Venn diagram.

I believe in you.

His hypnotic, declamatory delivery of Boys Keep Swinging is just magnificent.

Me (loftily): Ha, people and their feelings about Bowie.
Also me: I loathed Let’s Dance so deeply I shot my copy.

A brochure, c. 1958, from Foyles Book Clubs offering an extremely small table as an inducement to members to enrol their friends and illustrating its powers with regard to holding telephones, coffee and, rather exotically, television snacks.

Unexpected excitement in my Quality Book Club edition of E.S. Turner’s Call the Doctor: A Social History of Medical Men.