Where Worlds Collide

Quite a few gamer friends of mine are fanatical cultists of Amber, the diceless RPG based on Roger Zelazny’s dimension-hopping setting. Robert Donoghue has some Amberish thoughts, and manages to put his finger on precisely what’s always bugged me about the setting.

For those unfamiliar with it, Amber basically posits an infinite number of universes, each one only fractionally different than the ones next to it, and the princes of Amber travel through these realities (‘shadows’) by making progressive changes in their environment. This means that no place but Amber (Where you can’t do this stuff) is really unique. If you find a place you like, but accidentally blow it up or something, you just move to an otherwise identical universe where your bartender is left handed.

Now, this model works fantastically if you heartily want to buy into the idea that only Amber and its princes matter* but if you step away from that at all it gets a bit dodgy. For example, it’s hard to say any given place matters in some unique way, or to say any _person_ matters, since a replacement is just a quick shift away.

Now, my exposure to the setting is limited to reading the books, and one convention-style one-shot game several years ago which probably didn’t expose me to the game’s strengths. But I’ve always found it’s played bait-and-switch on me; it purports to be about parallel universes, but what you really get is a dynastic soap opera where all those potentially fascinating parallel universes are just insubstantial background.

I’ve been to some funny places for gigs this year. Last time I saw Mermaid Kiss was supporting Panic Room in a village hall in Gloucestershire. This time it was a working mens club in Nottinghamshire, walls covered in posters for dodgy tribute bands.

Seeing the low ceiling I feared the worst for the sound quality, but once Mermaid Kiss took the stage my fears proved unfounded; the sound was pretty-near perfect. They had the same semi-acoustic lineup as at Lydney, acoustic guitar and no drums, which means they can’t play some of the rockier material from the albums, but a lot of the more atmospheric came over well. Much of the set was similar to April’s gig, with several new songs from their as-yet unrecorded next album. High spot was an absolutely mesmerising “Seattle”, sung totally solo by Evelyn Downing.

And then Breathing Space came on and played an absolute blinder, certainly the best headline set I’ve ever seen them play, helped by the same crystal-clear sound. Something like a two-hour set, playing practically all of their superb “Coming Up for Air”, several songs from the first album, and three Iain Jennings-penned Mostly Autumn favourites. I have to say it was strange hearing Breathing Space playing “Distant Train” the night after hearing the Mostlies playing the same song at Bury Met (And I’m not going to get into arguments over which version was the best!). “Hollow” was lovely; Olivia Sparnenn has made that song her own now. So was the encore “The Gap is Too Wide”; in both cases they had to be the best live versions of those songs I’ve heard. Their own songs came over at wonderfully well too; with some interesting takes on arrangements in places, such as John Hart’s wind synth replacing the slide guitar on “Don’t Turn a Blind Eye” and the extended jazzy instrumental section in “Head Above The Water”. It’s difficult to find anything to say about Livvy Sparnenn and Iain Jennings I haven’t said before, they were both on great form. But I do have to say I’m finding myself liking Mark Rowan’s guitar playing more and more. He’s not flash, but his playing is always exactly what the songs require, never playing a note more than is needed, whether it’s the fluid soloing on the title song of “Coming Up for Air” or his really simple but amazingly effective solos on the big soaring ballads.

Two great bands, nearly three hours of great music. It’s a crying shame that they played to such a tiny audience, something like fifty people. Surely this beats watching the Eurovision Song Contest on the telly?

Coming up - Mostly Autumn at Bury Met tomorrow night, followed by Breathing Space supported by Mermaid Kiss in Mansfield the following night. There’s an outside chance of a third gig on Sunday, in which case I’ll need the bank holiday Monday to recover.

There won’t be any pictures (at least none of mine), because my camera died at MA’s gig in Leicester, which looks like CCD failure. At the moment I don’t know if the camera is worth repairing, or whether I’ll need to shell out for a new one

Another meme, from The Ministry of Information

1. Last film you saw in a cinema?
It’s so long since I last went to the cinema that I can’t actually remember

2. What book are you [re]reading?
Currently halfway through Charlie Stross’s “The Atrocity Archives”.

3. Favourite board game?
Can’t single out just one - I can name Railway Rivals, Illuminati (which isn’t technically a board game, but plays like one) and Arkham Horror, which is always fun, but takes ages.

4. Favourite magazine?
I don’t think there are any I now buy religiously every month, they all seem to have gone downhill lately - “Continental Modeller” has become “Obscure Bolivian kettle monthly” and “Classic Rock” seems to have turned into a Guns’N'Roses fanzine.

5. Favourite smells?
Bacon. Vegetarianism, cured!

6. Favourite sounds?
Fender Stratocaster played through a Marshall amp by someone that knows what he’s doing
A real Mellotron (Yes, I know the response to that is “have you ever tried to lift a real Mellotron”)
English Electric 12CSVT diesel engine on full power - such as a class 37 climbing that grade out of Weymouth.

7. Worst feeling in the world?
I don’t really feel like answering this one.

8. What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?
“I suppose this means I have to get up”

9. Favourite fast food place?
Murray’s sandwich bar in Alderley Edge

10. Future child’s name?
Hessian for a boy, Rafia for a girl. That is not a very serious answer.

11. Finish this statement. “If I had lot of money I’d..”
Buy a house with a basement big enough for a big US-Style model railway layout.

12. Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?
No! There is a teddy bear named “Isambard” in the house, but he sits on the sofa.

13. Storms - cool or scary?
Cool, provided you’re under cover.

14. Favourite drink?
Coffee (white, one suger)
Old Specked Hen
Leffe Blond

15. Finish this statement, “If I had the time I would”
Build that US-style basement buster with the money from question 11

16. Do you eat the stems on broccoli?
No. The stems don’t get as far as the saucepan

17. If you could dye your hair any color, what would be your choice?
I like it the colour it is now, thank you.

18. Name all the different cities/towns you’ve lived in?
Slough, Reading, Sale, Cheadle Hulme

19. Favourite sports to watch?
Cricket

20. One nice thing about the person who sent this to you?
He didn’t exactly ‘send’ this to me, but he does appear to like Marillion, giving him better taste in music than 99% of the population.

21. What’s under your bed?
Dust.

22. Would you like to be born as yourself again?
That’s just a fundamentally silly question.

23. Morning person, or night owl?
Night Owl.

24. Over easy, or sunny side up?
Eggs, ugh.

25. Favourite place to relax?
Horse Cove, south Devon (between Dawlish and Teighmouth). Unfortunately they’ve put up some of those horrid pallisade fences ruining the view.

26. Favourite pie?
Shepherd’s pie

27. Favourite ice cream flavour?
Vanilla

28. Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?
I’m supposed to tag people?

After their triumphant return to the live stage last year, 80s neo-prog veterans Twelfth Night are back for more.

(Photo © Jane Vincent, used with permission)
I caught the second of their two UK dates, at The Peel in Kingston. Not completely sold out, but the place seemed pretty packed. If this gig didn’t quite match the incredible atmosphere of the comeback at Deptford gig last year, the performance from the band themselves was on another level entirely. Gone was the hesitant start in the first half; this time the whole band were firing on all cylinders right from the very beginning. They didn’t look like a band who were playing only their fourth gig in twenty years. It was clear the band were really enjoying themselves on stage, Andy Sears prowling the stage like a demented uncle, showing incredible depth and range as a vocalist, both with his own later material, and his interpretations of the older songs by the late Geoff Mann. Andy Revell reeled off some incredible solos, and multi-instumentalists Clive Mitten tripled up on guitar, keys and prog-style lead bass. And yes, there was more than one bass solo.

The setlist was much the same as last year, with the bulk of the set coming from the Geoff Mann years. It’s difficult to point out the high spots from their two-hour set. The “Ceiling Speaks” makes for a dynamic opener, “Blondon Fair” never sounded more sinister and menacing, Andy Sears’ solo piano version of “First New Day” was spine-tingling and the epic “Sequences” was flawless. As last year, the second half of the show was taken up with the Fact and Fiction album played right through in it’s entirety. As Clive Mitten said at the beginning, this is prog-rock, and playing a concept album right the way through without any breaks or announcements is a very prog thing to do, right from the choirboy singing the falsetto parts of “We are Sane” to the Gilmouresque guitar wig-out at the end of “Creepshow”. They ended, of course, with the final encore of “Love Song”.

Easily in my top three or four gigs of the year, and unquestionably the best which didn’t feature female lead vocals. Whether this short run of dates is a one-off, or whether we’ll get to see them again is still an open question.

A followup to my previous Actual Play post. As before, this is an actual transcript of the message game on Dreamlyrics.com

“Quick,” Hollis muttered in mild disappointment. But now without the crossbow pointed at her, she could grab the whole person and slam him into the ceiling head first a few times. Which is what she was going to do if he was still visible…

He seems to instinctively understand what Hollis is trying to do; he drops the crossbow and concentrates on trying to avoid being dragged ceilingwards by hanging on to the stair rail. He’s pretty strong, and Hollis doesn’t have quite the right psychokinetic grip on him. But the wooden stair rail begins to creak and splinter.

“Get down here!” he cries, “Mad wizard!”.

“Not mad,” Hollis murmured. “Merely annoyed. I get that way when people try to kill me.” She shifted from trying to yank him skyward, to whipping him back and forth like a rag doll in the hands of an angry child. Since he’d tried to kill her, breaking a couple of wrists or his neck from the whiplash effect didn’t bother her in the slightest.

Sooner or later he would come loose — the sounds from the rail made sooner sound likely — and then he would be *hers*.

“We might think about backing out in just a moment …”

She could use the man to stop up the entryway while they escaped, but they needed to get him loose and get moving.

But he’s not hers just yet; she can feel him struggling, and he’s strong. Somehow he manages to brace himself, and avoids getting twisted around. That handrail isn’t going to last long, though.

Another man, this one small and wiry, appears at the top of the stairs. He’s got another crossbow.

“The woman!”, cries the big man, “Be quick”.

He aims the crossbow.

With the new arrival Hollis couldn’t wait to wear out the handrail; she had to let go of his — so she could twist the new arrival so that his crossbow was pointed at her first assailant as he released.

“Gath, you can jump in here anythime …”

“Stop!”, says Gath, “I can explain

The man with the crossbow pays no attention.

“This is for Rik, bitch”, he says, as he looses the quarrel.

The big man lets out a strangled gurgle as he rolls down the stairs, to lie sprawled at the foot of the steps with a crossbow bolt sticking out of his neck.

By the time he reaches the bottom, the crossbow man has gone,

This starts out with a couple of opposed rolls between Hollis’ Superb psychokinetics and the unnamed NPC’s Good Strength. Both rounds ended in ties; my NPC was lucky with the dice; I really hadn’t expected him to live this long. When the new arrival turned up on the scene, his luck ran out. This was Crossbow vs. Psychokinetics, and the result was Terrible vs. Great. That’s a difference of -5. Since I’m not using the extended combat rules fo this, that’s a near death, and because he’s an unnamed NPC and mere canon-fodder, it’s game over for the big man.

I’ve not been to this venue before; like Gloucester Guildhall and Bury Met it’s a provincial theatre rather than a rock club. I heard it described as a ‘mini York GOH’, which isn’t a bad description; quite a large balcony (which was pretty full), but standing downstairs.

Having seen the band nineteen times now, it’s getting increasingly difficult to find anything new to say about them, except that the new lineup was well and truly gelled now, and as I’d come to expect, this was a pretty tight and impassioned performance. There’s something wrong with the British music scene when a band this good isn’t playing to much bigger audiences.

The setlist was much the same as Gloucester, except they didn’t play ”Second Hand”, and moved “Above the Blue” to the first encore. High spots were an impassioned “Unoriginal Sin”, a great “Simple Ways” (lovely to have that back in the setlist again), and a really strong version of “Carpe Diem”. With the sad news from last Sunday, “Tearing at the Faerytale”, and “Heroes Never Die” (dedicated tonight to Howard) carried a very strong emotional resonance indeed.

Only another four days, and I see them again, at the Limelight club in Crewe.

Howard Sparnenn, father of Livvy Sparnenn of Mostly Autumn and Breathing Space fame, passed away last Sunday.

A true larger-than-life character, his was a familiar face at a great many gigs by Breathing Space, Mostly Autumn and Odin Dragonfly.

I first met him at the Heart Full of Sky launch party in February last year. I got chatting to him outside the pub after the gig, and at first I didn’t realise he was the father of a member of the band. Since then I’ve met him at a great many gigs, and he always took the time to say hello.

As well as a devoted father, he was also an accomplished drummer. I only saw him play the once, at the Roman Baths in York, when he was filling in on drums for Breathing Space while they searched for a permanent drummer. He told me he thought it wasn’t fair on his daughter drumming for her band; having her dad on drums would cramp her style. He was still a very fine drummer.

Fantastic bloke, who left us well before his time. He will be missed.

“Wild West Heroes, they change the world, they make it shine. As you ride the ice, between the heavens, leave a trail for us” - Mostly Autumn, Tearing at the Faerytale.

In a dark, dark town, there was a dark, dark street.

In that dark, dark street, there was a dark, dark building.

In that dark, dark building, there was a dark, dark room.

In that dark, dark room, there was a dark, dark corner.

In that dark, dark, corner, well…

The gig was a double headliner, featuring Jump, and the band I’d gone to see, Panic Room. I’d seen Panic Room’s debut gig a week earlier, and they’d been exceptionally good, especially when you consider it had been their first ever gig. On the final date of the tour I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen them reach greater heights.

The vibe was really good before the gig started; I saw a few familiar faces when I first arrived at the venue, and met most of the band in the bar beforehand; Gavin Griffiths in particular is a great bloke.

To be honest I’d rather have seen Panic Room play a full-length headline set rather than the truncated one-hour 20 they were allocated following Jump. I wasn’t that familiar with Jump’s music; I thought the first couple of songs were a bit average, although the third (or was it the fourth) number was a bit more impressive. Just as they were getting into their stride, the power failed, not only silencing the band, but plunging the room into darkness.

Hats off to Jump’s singer for keeping the audience entertained for the best of half and hour; we heard some funny stories of their exploits supporting Marillion, we had a singalong of “Script for a Jester’s Tear” (And I could remember the words after all those years!).

As the darkness grew longer the venue stuff discovered it wasn’t a blown fuse in the building. Not just the street, but the entire neighbourhood was without power. Eventually Mick the promoter gave the accouncement we’d been expecting for some time; the power was likely to be out for the rest of the evening, and it was “match abandoned”. It will be rescheduled, but probably not until the beginning of next year.

So I never got to see Panic Room play.

What saved the evening from being a total loss for me was meeting Heather Findlay, which was completely unexpected.

On the Readers Recommend Overspill blog, poster DarceysDad has a disturbing realisation

More seriously, Abahachi’s comment (about new genre discovery and subsequent borderline-obsessive catching-up) got me thinking, and I’ve been hit with a freighttrain-sized realisation: Any band/genre that I believe I discovered for myself is likely to still be right up there in my all-time faves. Anything I can specifically remember being introduced to by someone is much more likely to have fallen away again in my estimation (or at least in the frequency of plays). This is REALLY scary, and not a little conflicted: random picking of songs I hear via radio and magazine covermounts thus appear to mean more to me than the considered opinions of my friends! Am I some kind of anti-social loner, musically? A cooler-than-you snob? What the f???????

I don’t think that’s true of me; I find there’s little correlation between how much I like any artist and how I first ‘discovered’ them. It’s a random mix of recommendations from offline and online friends, radio, reviews in the media (usually the least reliable), covermount disks, seeing them live at festivals or as support acts, or in one case, through being invited to a gig by an actual member of the band.

I’ve thought about some of the bands I’ve really been into over the years, those for whom I’ve got most or all their albums, or seen live many times.

• Rainbow: I’ve mentioned this one before, but they were the very first hard rock band I ever got into, and it was hearing ‘Eyes of the World’ on Nicky Horne’s late night show “Your mother wouldn’t like it”.
• Pink Floyd: Blame Nicky Horne for this as well; he played “The Wall” more or less to death. That was actually the first album I bought.
• Deep Purple: The natural follow-up from Rainbow. In my case I bought an album more or less at random from a secondhand record shop for a couple of quid. It turned out to be the classic “Made in Japan”. Pity there was a bad scratch right across ‘Child in Time’.
• Blue Öyster Cult: This was was the first one I can definitely track down to a personal recommendation - it was a college friend who played me ‘Astronomy’ from the live album “Some Enchanted Evening”.
• Black Sabbath: Hearing “Heaven and Hell” and “Children of the Sea” on the late Tommy Vance’s “Friday Rock Show”. As soon as I heard those two slices of operatic metal melodrama I knew I had to get that album the day it was released. Even to this day I prefer them with Dio than with Ozzy.
• Marillion: They were the first completely new band that I got into right at the start of the career. I remember hearing their demo on the Friday Rock Show, then seeing them at the 1982 Reading Rock Festival. I bought their debut single and album on first release, and saw them blow Black Sabbath off stage a year later at Reading in 1983. And I’ve followed them (and Fish’s solo career) ever since.
• Porcupine Tree: The Porkies (as they’re known) sort of crept up on me. I bought “The Sky Moves Sideways” largely out of curiosity after hearing Steve Wilson’s work on Fish’s excellent “Sunsets on Empire”. I followed up with “Stupid Dream” and “Lightbulb Sun” on release, which got a few plays but never really became favourites. Then NRT told me in a blog comment that they were playing at Manchester Academy, and I decided to go along. On seeing them live, their music suddenly made sense.
• Mostly Autumn. You might not have guessed if you’re a regular reader of this blog. But like Porcupine Tree, they’re a band that didn’t happen overnight with me. It started with the cover mount disk on “Classic Rock” containing ‘Half the Mountain’. That encouraged me to buy the album “The Last Bright Light” which became a regular in the CD player. I bought “Passengers” when it came out, but just like Porcupine Tree, it all made sense the first time I’ve saw them live, a low-key gig at Jillys in Manchester that I only found out about by pure chance.
• The Reasoning. Again, this started with a covermount disc. Not The Reasoning themselves, but Rachel’s previous band Karnataka, with the superlative ‘Talk to Me’ from their live album “Strange Behaviour”. Before I got the chance to see them live, Karnataka imploded. I joined TheStorm yahoogroup to find out what on earth had happened. I found that nobody was willing to say what happened, but I did find it was an quite an interesting discussion list, which was where I first heard of the formation of The Reasoning, and of their first ever gig in Swansea, which made the journey down to.
• Breathing Space. I said that I got into one band by being invited by a band member. Breathing Space was that band. The occasion was the launch party for Mostly Autumn’s “Heart Full of Sky” in London. The gig finished at a ridiculously early time of half past nine, and Anne Marie Helder invited the entire audience to pub round the corner, which wasn’t actually that large a place. That’s where I first met Livvy Sparnenn, Mostly Autumn’s backing singer, who also sings lead for Breathing Space. She was very persuasive when it came to their gig in York the following weekend