mintybloggydiarythingy 2.0

Week from Monday 2nd March 2026 - The start to ANOTHER NEW MONTH... Already? why! that's three in as many... It's also another one of those 'IN-BETWEEN WEEKS' when I ALMOST forgot to post anything to this bloggydiarywotsit AT ALL! (It's just past dawn on THURSDAY when I'm writing this little segment.) I had my monthly armful up at the horsepickle last weekend, and I've done the required paperwork and phone calls in preparation for my NEXT appointments. I popped to the shops for such essentials as cereals and a TV GUIDE. I get up, take my meds, do some puzzles, make coffee and watch some cartoons. After that, who knows? All part of life's rich tapwasher... As I've suddenly regained an enthusiasm for STEVEN WILSON's music, I paid a visit to the Bandcamp of INSIDE-OUT MUSIC, the leading vendors of yer so-called "PROG ROCK", to stream a few more items of that ilk. With yet another BANDCAMP FRIDAY imminent, I ask myself the question ...

Week from Monday 23rd February 2026 - I'm putting the finishing touches to another "HOT TICKLES" sampler. These are compilation discs of whatever 'proggy-but-mostly-King-Crimson-related' odds and sods I might have sitting around on the hard-drives. They don't come quite as frequently as they once did, but I've now reached VOLUME 169! It includes the last three or four "STORMY'S MONDAY SELECTIONS", some leftover 21st CENTURY SCHIZOID live tracks, the Bandcamp-only bonus tracks from the last SOFT MACHINE album, a couple of ambient soundscapey things and a PETER GABRIEL live track from WOMAD 1982, concatenated in a tastefully flowing manner... T-SHIRT WEATHER IN FEBRUARY...? brr! wot a scorcher! I ventured out on Wednesday, orf up the horsepickle to get yet another BLOOD TEST. There was a lot of folks in the 'queue' ahead of me, and they eventually split us up and dragged some of us upstairs for a leeching on LEVEL C... By the time I e...

Week from Monday 2nd February 2026 - I've been exploring some of the lesser known backwaters of BRAND X history, especially around the time of the lost album "MANIFEST DESTINY" (1997) and when Gong drum-meister PIERRE MOERLEN joined them for a tour at very short notice. Needless to say, I've been doing this through the medium of some pretty dodgy b***legs, but the music shines through ne'ertheless. On the last show of the European tour they even played cracking versions of a couple of MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA toons! I've also been digging (into) some of PERCY JONES's solo material from the nineties. I liked what I heard, but it's very much 'OF ITS TIME' (quite a lot of electric drums - there was one bit that even reminded me of SQUAREPUSHER!). There's also a few weedy vocal tracks that are best left on the shelf! I've dug out my quarter-of-a-century-old copy of COREL-DRAW to see if will run on m'LINUX lappy, via the magic of W.I.N.E...

Week from Monday 5th January 2026 - A few days ago, my bus hop into town encountered a great deal of near-stationary and logjammed traffic. An entire section of the MOTORWAY has been closed off, which meant that all of the local transportation, in both directions, has been diverted through FAREHAM itself. I therefore planned my Saturday journey 'UP THE HOZZY' with this in mind, allowing plenty of time for hold-ups. But I OVERCOMPENSATED and got to the check-in desk an hour early! 'PATIENT WAITING', even before I got 'seen to'! No worries, of course, because I had my TRUSTY TABLET with me and was able to listen to the whole of the BBC comedy serial "THE ISLAND" in one sitting. My project continues of dragging a few choice GRIDLING BAND ditties into the 21st Century, cleaning them up and posting them on THAT YOUTUBE THEY HAVE NOW. The third item is "ALDMONKSTON ROCK". Once again, I've isolated Snilt's voice, using clever modern secret...

This morning I watched the stunning LAURENCE OLIVIER fillum version of "RICHARD III", which I hadn't seen since I was at school when the Shakespeare play of that ilk was required reading for ENGLISH O'LEVEL. There's a new LIVE release from P ercy, A lex, K enny and T im just arrived in my in-tray, albeit slightly later than I was expecting, but just in time to qualify for the PICK'O'THE YEAR listings. I must confess, I haven't really given it the attention it deserves yet, since all of my listening time of late has been taken up with ancient GRIDLING! But on first listening, it sounds the biz! I'm sure that over the 'holidays' I will strap on the ol' AKG's and REALLY get into it, man! At this time of the year, I don't listen to RADIO 3 quite as much as usual, as so much of its daytime programming gets cloyingly Christmas-oriented. But I've been playing CATCH-UP with some of the 'good bits' that I've missed, suc...

...I am getting EXTREMELY frustrated, trying to rescue a couple of GRIDLING BAND tracks (that no longer exist anywhere else) from a forty-two year old CASSETTE. Despite repeated attempts to transplant the tape into a new shell, and numerous rewind/fast-forward runthroughs, the tape always seems to jam to a standstill approximately five minutes from the end, cutting off the very track that I'm trying to DIGITISE. Audacity at the ready, while I play the WHOLE side through until (fingers crossed!) I get to the point I need... So I have just enough time to pop around the corner and drop off my PRESCRIPTION at the chemist... Around 1983 to 1984, JOHNSON'S GRIDLING BAND conceived of an ambitious musical project that would have been the follow-up to the mildly successful cassette album "THE WINKY ELVES ARE COMING!". A number of individual tracks were recorded (or half-finished) over an eighteen month period, but the whole thing proved to be FAR too ambitious for the recor...