Stiff Little Fingers with the original line-up, played a storming set at the Welly in Hull. The power and intensity of their songs was spot on.
The lyrics are the most powerful of any punk band!!
The guys were great – really friendly!!
Loved it! They haven’t lost anything in all those years!
Here’s a few photos:-
Some more in Blog!!
I haven’t stopped playing this album. It is so intimate and deeply honest. This feels like a creative man baring his soul as he tries to put his whole life and illness into some positive perspective. It is an artistic achievement that is immense but it is the sheer honesty and integrity that cuts into you. I’ve never heard anything like it. It is a cathartic eulogy for life. Everything is chance yet out of that random element comes beauty.
James has poured every last drop of his talents into this. It has essence about it.
I’ve never heard a tumour being compared to the big bang. All life pours out of it. The world, born of chance, is a chance event producing a paroxysm of incredible wonder.
It sounds, from the colour of this album that James has terminal cancer and this is his response. If that is the case I hope that something wonderful happens and James recovers. It happens. Where there is life there is hope. If that is not to be then this album is great addition to the lexicon of human accomplishment. It captures so many emotions that usually go unspoken and probably unfelt. James articulates them perfectly. This is a wonderful life we are living. The natural world is so incredible. This is an apt legacy.
I feel I am sharing something so personal we rarely get the opportunity.
This is an album about death but it is also a celebration of life and love. We are here for such a short time. It is our duty to live and love and delight in the glory around us in the fleeting moments we are here.
I don’t know what James’ partner feels about this outpouring. The love is raw.
Life should be about love not hatred and violence …….. if only!
There is nothing we can do in the face of chance and time but stand up to it and appreciate the sheer scope of beauty we are living amidst.
We live with what we have, without hope, and drink in the awe and majesty of the moment. There is nothing we can do but appreciate the world around us.
We have a duty to preserve this jewel of a planet and pass it on.
Thank you James. We will pass it on. There is something. We will pass it on……….
What an incredible concert at Hessle Town Hall.
Arthur’s band is the best ever and Arthur was in top form. What a voice! And what an incredible act!
The music was amazing.
I had a few words with the man. He is better than he was back in the 60s.
We had a real psychedelic experience!
Here are the photos to prove it!!
More photos on blog!!
I’m playing the new album by James Varda – Chance and Time. It is beautiful but so incredibly poignant.
I hope James is taking an artistic stance but this sounds like his valedatory last offering.
Life may be just one thing after another but it is so full of wonder and awe. It means so much to me as well, James. That’s what hurts so much. It could be so wonderful. I live in England’s civilised Eden, complete with wild birds, blue and green, and I see the fanatics reducing it to brown dirt and red blood.
I want to pass the idyll on – not the disaster we are creating.
This album is so atmospheric and emotionally charged. It is surely Jame’s best album.
It’s not quite too late. That sun may still shine on us. I hope it shines on you James. You’re a source of light and warmth. We need your sensitivity to build a new zeitgeist!
What a talent. What a delight.
What a wonderful album that takes you on that life journey.
It’s been a busy musical time with lots of good gigs. There I was right at the front!
Stiff Little Fingers did a glorious gig at the Welly in Hull this week. Back to their original line-up and searingly powerful. We all flew the flag. The best Punk band in the world.
After the gig I was fortunate enough to meet them all and have a chat in the dressing room though my ears were ringing so much it was hard to hear what they said. They were a really friendly bunch and signed all my albums!! Great guys!! I’ll put some photos up as soon as I’ve sorted them!!
Last night was Rich and Lou’s Loudhailer in Cottingham – another great night with loads of talented people. The Backroom is a brilliant venue! I look forward to a lot more.
Because of our big brains babies take a long time to grow. They need a lot of nurturing and looking after. They take forever to become independent (around sixty years!)
Because of this they need two parents to provide the care, love and stimulation.
It’s bloody hard work.
Hence evolution has created a mechanism to ensure babies are brought up and cared for. It is pair-bonding. We call it love.
We fall in love and stay together. It’s all to do with hormones, pheromones and chemistry.
Being in love is a biological phenomenon evolved to keep two animals together long enough to bring their children up to an age when they are relatively independent (round about the age of sixty five!)
Being in love causes changes in brain chemistry resulting in euphoria, obsession with the partner and intense sexual stimulation. This great sex results in babies.
The intensity reduces but the relationship is fostered by this chemistry. It usually lasts for about seven years – long enough for a child to become relatively self-sufficient.
We need both partners to bring up a child.
In Africa they say that it takes a whole village to bring up a baby!
We have big brains.
In order to develop big brains we have to have a lot of nurturing. This brain development begins inside the uterus. We have to nurture babies in the uterus for 9 months while their brains grow.
By the time they are ready to be born they have big brains and big heads. This makes birth a problem. If women had been designed they would have big openings to deliver babies through. Unfortunately they have evolved and not been created. They have to try to squeeze the baby out of the vagina. The baby’s head is so big it can hardly fit through. Birth is consequently dangerous for mother and child. There are lots of deaths, injuries, pain and brain damage.
If a god had designed this then he is incompetent or vindictive. It is not however designed by any god; it has evolved through mutation and is hence not as good as it could be.
Having babies and menstruating are two ways in which misogynous societies (coming from the patriarchal Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions) put down women. They make out that menstruation is dirty, sex is dirty, childbirth pain is just reward for having had sex and that women are to blame!
Religion does not like sex. It tries to blame women and thus justifies making them second-class citizens.
There’s nothing wrong with sex. It’s a good biological mechanism for reproducing. There’s nothing dirty or unclean about it.
Religion just likes to control and suppress people.
The problem with sex is that it produces too many children. We are overpopulated and destroying the world. We need to limit our numbers and use contraception. We need to use our intelligence before we destroy the world.
Read all about the folly of religion in my novel The Book of Ginny.
or
or perhaps he more humorous
Or read about how overpopulation is destroying the environment
The people who have inspired me have been human beings who have stood up for freedom, equality, fairness, justice and passion! They have been writers, artists, politicians, musicians, scientists, film-makers and ordinary people!
Emily Pankhurst, Thomas Jefferson, Bobby Searle, Angela Davies, Jerry Rubin, Jack Kerouac, Roy Harper, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Tom Payne, Gerrard Winstanley, William Morris, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Levellers, Tolpuddle martyrs, Patrick McGoohan, Ken Russell, Picasso, George Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Beatles, John Lennon, Germaine Greer, Bob Dylan, Nick Harper, Bob Marley, Michael Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dylan Thomas, Vincent Van Gogh, Guagin, Renoir, Goons, Monty Python, Ken Loach, Plato, Philip K Dick, UN Declaration of Human Rights, Kurt Vonnegutt Jnr, D H Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Desmond Morris, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, Pink Floyd, Albert Einstein, Gallileo, Lennin, Karl Marx, Ken Saraweyo, Arthur C Clarke, Henry Miller, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Don Van Vliet, George Best, Marty Feldman, Jello Biafra, Woody Guthrie, Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band, Country Joe & the Fish, Enid Blyton, Donovan, Leonard Cohen, George Orwell, Jefferson Airplane, Robert Sheckley, Haruki Murakami, Iain Banks, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchins, Jacque Cousteau, Stephen Hawkins, Pete Smith, Stiff Little Fingers, Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Richard Dawkins, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, John Steinbeck, Buddha, Richard Brautigan, Herman Hesse, The Rolling Stones, Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Isaac Asimov, Jane Fonda, James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis, Salvador Dali, Magritte, Heironymus Bosch, Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, Jackson C Frank, Frank Zappa, Kathy & Toby, John Cooper Clarke, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Clash, Sex Pistols, Red Cloud, Evo Morales, Fidel Castro, Aldous Huxley, Mahatma Ghandi, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Margaret Atwood, Woody Allen, Mr Tranter, A S Neill, David Attenbrough, Pete Seeger, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Fugs, Kashuo Ishiguro, Keith Moon, Cream, Edmund Cooper, Ivan Illich, Tony Benn, and hosts of others.
I am continually inspired!!
Perhaps you would be inspired by some of my books?
I can’t help thinking about what might have been.
Jimi Hendrix was a genius. He was a musician of with such technical skill that he was only limited by his own imagination.
That imagination transcends genres to create emotions, moods, awe and wonder.
In his short life he had only begun to explore the range of what he could achieve with a guitar. His virtuosity compared favourably with classical guitarists such as Sergovia and jazz geniuses like Django Rheinhardt.
I believe that he would have extended his range to explore all genres. I can only wonder at the music he would have unleashed upon us in the past forty years!
Jimi was a showman and I believe that sometimes overshadowed his virtuosity and became a frustration to him.
He would have outgrown that!
What a tragic loss!
Perhaps you would enjoy getting my view on Rock Music in my books –
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