I had just dropped off my nearest and dearest at Kew Gardens, where they were going to sneer at the Christmas displays and raid the shop. I was zooming home to wait in for deliveries. Christmas comes in a van.
It was only when I came to a halt, at the rail crossing off the Sheen Road, that I noticed it. Checking my rear view mirror, everything was blurred.
I thought; "Well, is this it? Should I summon assistance, or lie down with my head in a brown paper bag, or what?".
Then I realised that I had the volume on the sound system cranked up to eleven, and it was the car that was shaking, not me. I was listening to 'Hideaway', from the album 'Never Going Home', by the band Big Skies.
I can't send you a link to that particular song (the album is on Spotify, go rack up a few pence for them, I have put a link on my Facebook today), but believe me when I say that it has the ideal intro .... sounds like a stack of stainless steel bars slowly starting into a landslide. Jim Cubitt, 'Last of the Axemen'.
And then it led me to ponder and reflect, which is always a bad thing. About the long, long road a-winding, from Right Turn Left, via Blue Screen Life, to Big Skies, and the kind of music they made, which always appealed to me, and why. I think because these lads were born twenty or thirty years too late. At almost any time in the intervening period, their songs would have been up there in what was once called the Hit Parade. Nowadays, all we get are people who want to be Beyonce, and who generate sub-soul warblings.
What happened to rock and roll?
That's why I'm angry. I do not want to live off my Led Zeppelin archive, or come across things like Queens of the Stone Age from time to time. I want .... I want .... what do I want? Artistic integrity plus killer riffs, maybe. Is that too much to ask?
Here's a nice video of a Big Skies tune:
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