TV Heaven

Now that Doctor Who's finished until Christmas, I find myself once again with nothing of any nutritional value whatsoever to watch on television. It's the silly season, with seemingly nothing on but wall-to-wall sport on the main channels, and wall-to-wall wallpaper on Channel 4 (Big Brother, the modern equivalent of a family visit to the lunatic asylum.) Not that it bothers me in the slightest that there's nothing to watch; television is at the heart of many of today's evils.

Imagine, if you will, a quiet summer evening at home; you're minding your own business when suddenly, and without warning, your doorbell rings. You open it to reveal Channel 4's very own fashion fascists Trinny and Susannah, who invite themselves in and go straight to your wardrobe, criticising your dress sense and snipping bits off your hair. Appalled at the intrusion, you ask them to leave and return to your armchair, when seconds later the door goes again. It's "Doctor" Gillian McKeith, who barges past you, turning out the contents of your fridge and replacing them with macrobiotic wood shavings and goats' yoghurt. And who's this? Jeremy Kyle and Vanessa Feltz waiting in the wings, hurling insults at your dysfunctional family. Alan Titchmarsh!  In your front garden, dotting it with nasty little water features and Welsh slate chippings.  The cheek of it!  Having persuaded the unwelcome intruders to leave, you batten down the hatches, only to hear a shrieking cackle from your kitchen; Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins, the party guests from hell, have set up camp in your house for the week, with cameras following their every non-event.

I mean, you just wouldn't stand for any of it, would you? So why do millions let television's freakshow into their homes every night, making people feel so inadequate and so insecure about their dress sense and their weight, what to buy, what not to buy, what to think, and generally making life a misery for us all?

Well, once again I find myself turning to the more genteel days of television - material which I have recovered from old VHS tapes, old shows commercially released on DVD, or old British programmes which can be freely downloaded online if you have the knowhow. These days, I watch what I want, when I want it, but it's nothing you'll have seen in the last week - I'm more interested in the programmes that time forgot, the shows which never got repeated to death. You see, in a more innocent age, the television companies had better budgets with which to make diverse and entertaining comedy, drama and light entertainment programmes. In these days, the television industry is much less tightly regulated, which has allowed the budgets to be stripped bare in order to deliver the maximum return to shareholders. Add to the mix the fact that hundreds of channels are having to share out both the advertising revenue and the raw talent that used to belong to a handful of broadcasters, and you should start to realise why quality television has gone to the dogs.

So here are ten recent examples of what's been playing chez moi from the golden age of steam television over the last week or so. It's not all good - some of it is atrocious rubbish, in fact - but at least it's not loud, brash, in-yer-face, self-consciously post-ironic, interactive on the red button, in Dolby Surround, available in HD on the Plus One channel, and crucially, not made by a bunch of braying media students who might otherwise have made excellent doctors, plumbers, chefs, skilled tradespeople...

1) Crown Court: An Upward Fall (December 1977)

From the early experimental days of colour broadcasting comes Crown Court, a thrice-weekly courtroom drama played out by actors, with members of the public making up the jury. Usually, it was compelling drama, with occasionally hammy acting and lots of men with funny beards, but Christmas 1977 saw the production team enjoying a definite end-of-term joke in the form of "An Upward Fall". Written by absurdist playwright N.F.Simpson, this does for TV drama, more or less what Picasso did for clocks. It follows a fictional 73-day libel case concerning a comment made about an old people's home in the Cairngorms, which, bizarrely, has its only toilets sited 3,000 feet down at the foot of a mountain. Quite unlike the average Crown Court story, which would deal with a more run-of-the-mill case, the story introduces surreal elements into the plot along with a host of increasingly irrelevant witnesses, including a Sherpa forced to abandon his party in the Himalayas in order to travel to the UK to testify, and a bizarre appearance by a pre-EastEnders June Brown (Dot Cotton). Quite what the general public (and the studio jury) made of it is really anyone's guess.

Crown Court is shown daily on Red TV, Sky 186.

2) Nearest And Dearest (July 1968)

Hylda Baker and Jimmy Jewel play the hapless sibling pickled onion magnates in this rather vulgar sitcom from the dying days of black-and-white television. It's very much of its time; the unreconstructed humour is bawdy and occasionally sexist when viewed in a modern context, and much like "On The Buses", the actors literally bellow out their dialogue (Baker and Jewel were veterans of the music hall, and came from a background where they had to raise their voices to be heard over a guffawing audience.) In its favour, the warm Northern humour is infected with a certain charm, even if you can see the jokes coming a mile off. It even made me laugh out loud occasionally, which is more than you could say of, for example, the BBC's current top-rated sit-com "My Family".

Full series available on Network DVD

3) The Avengers: Mission: Highly Improbable (1967)

"In Color", naturally. This was the final proper Emma Peel-era episode, starring the perennially-stylish Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee as the duo who keep 1960s London swinging. In this delightfully madcap adventure, our heroes investigate a mad professor who has invented a machine which shrinks people to the size of dolls. It's sheer, unadulterated, harmless escapism, and the special effects surprisingly good for their time. It's especially noteworthy to see a young Nicholas Courtney playing the role of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to type, several years before the character had even been created.

The Avengers shows each Friday night on BBC Four.

4) Lucky Ladders (1991)

Downloaded purely for the novelty value. No, honestly. Lucky Ladders was a daily staple of the six months I spent out of work after leaving school, and the latest in a line of cheaply-made quiz shows screened by ITV as part of the behemoth daytime schedule that brought us Richard and Judy, weatherman Fred Talbot on a floating replica of the British Isles, and, later, the insultingly-lowbrow Supermarket Sweep. Anglia TV's top-rating word game was hosted by a balding Lennie Bennett from inside a succession of hideous golfing sweaters, with tacky prizes (the contestants' souvenir Lucky Ladders wristwatches are not as much Tag Heuer as Poundland) and a visually-distressing pastel-coloured set with neon trim which could cause you to physically vomit yourself all the way back to the 80s. But strip away Bennett's cheesy demeanour and you have a totally harmless parlour game requiring an element of skill, and one which all the family can play at home. A superb format; television will not see its like again.

5) Another Sunday and Sweet FA (Jan 1972)

Another slice of Granadaland in all its majesty, thanks largely to Michael Apted's signature "cinema verité" direction. Jack Rosenthal's tale about a Sunday morning football match is awash with his trademark wry humour, gentle cutting wit and, as you would expect, some extremely well-rounded characters, of which the over-zealous referee is a particular joy; by the end of the programme you can't decide whether you want to hit him or shake his hand. The all-star cast features Fred Feast and Joe Gladwin, while a young Anne Kirkbride (Coronation Street's Deirdre Barlow) puts in an early appearance as the leggy girlfriend of one of the players. It's not laugh-a-minute stuff, but it's strangely heartwarming and a very constructive way to while away an hour.

Available on Jack Rosenthal at ITV (Network DVD)

6) Dr. Who - The Sea Devils (May 1972)

Possibly Jon Pertwee's finest moment as the good Doctor. When prehistoric monsters start climbing out of the sea, the Doctor and Jo find themselves drawn into the investigation. An atmospheric soundtrack (created, of course, by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on some prehistoric synths) helps to add tension to a fast-paced story with a strangely claustrophobic feel, and the action sequences are well filmed, although Colonel Trenchard's character is decidedly wooden and, frankly, the monsters look a bit silly in retrospect. Harmless '70s fun.

Available on BBC DVD

7) Unplugged with Bjork (1994)

This choice sits rather at odds with all the others on the list. In this hour-long MTV presentation, the diminutive Icelandic tackles songs from her debut album, replacing Nellee Hooper's gleaming techno-influenced production with ethereal acoustic sounds created using such instruments as a row of half-filled wine glasses and a lampshade. Many of the classic songs are radically re-invented, but they lose none of their mystique, and I defy you to not to keep your jaw from dropping during the heartbreakingly gorgeous 'Like Someone In Love'. Brilliant musicianship all round - a low-key spectacular.

8) The Dustbinmen (1969)

More Northern sitcommery from Jack Rosenthal. This often-overlooked show started out life as a one-off TV film about the 'hilarious' exploits of the Number Three refuse collection crew. Rosenthal's four lovable rogues may appear clichéd now (Winston, the football fanatic, is very irritating, while Eric, the dim Welshman, is actually quite an offensive caricature) but the show was an immediate hit with the public, and the programme was recommissioned, this time as a six-part sitcom. The re-casting of militant leader Cheese And Egg, now played by Bryan Pringle, was a masterstroke, but on the downside the humour was made far less subtle, perhaps to appeal to a lower demographic. The Dustbinmen can look and feel laboured at times, but it can still raise the odd smile, and it reveals a grimy snapshot of late-sixties Britain, with the trades unions and working-mens clubs still rampant and plentiful Watney's Red Barrel on tap.

Available on Network DVD

9) Pipkins (1973-81)

Whilst recovering from wisdom teeth surgery last month, I started watching daily lunchtime stories from this DVD, which I have bought for my niece to watch when she's older (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.) Pipkins has dated badly, but it demonstrates perfectly how, two generations ago, quality children's television could still be made on a shoestring budget. Okay, granted the puppets look very scruffy indeed (Hartley Hare is positively flea-ridden) but their characters have genuine depth, as well as a soupçon of humour to keep the adults entertained too. It's highly moralistic without ever being preachy, and topics of relevance, such as a death of a pet, a visit to the dentist or how to break the ice with a new neighbour, are dealt with using abundant humour and charm. My friends' 5-year-old twins love it, particularly the old ATV 'In Colour' logo at the start, which I also used to love at their age!

Available on - you guessed it

10) Sapphire and Steel (1978-82)

More from ATV's archives, and this time it's Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, the big-name stars of a very strange show indeed. Possibly mooted in the pre-planning stages as ITV's answer to Doctor Who, Sapphire and Steel had several flaws, not least a microscopic budget for special effects, shaky camerawork and wobbly sets. The production team, however, turned these apparent weaknesses to huge advantage - rarely has television drama looked or felt so creepy. The stories, written by PJ Hammond and generally concerning the titular adventurers' attempts to rectify temporal anomalies in the present day, are very original and intelligently written, although sometimes whole 25-minute episodes pass by without any plot developments, such was the desire to pad them out to six or eight parts. The show's success wasn't helped greatly by 1979's ITV strike, and by the time the final series was shown, ITV had all but given up on it. To the casual viewer, Sapphire and Steel will look hugely dated and overlong (no more than Blake's Seven in my opinion, anyway) and some of the effects are very amateurish (the meat-monster in Assignment Three, in particular, will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief) but there are as many strong points - the creeping shadows in Assignment Two and the Victorian children escaping from modified photographs in Assignment Four are actually quite terrifying. Best watched alone, in a cold room, last thing at night, with all the lights off.

Available, etc.

Hmmm...

1984 and all that

Last time I updated my blog at any length, I was thick with mucus and struggling to make sense of daytime television. Much to my approval that day, I found Patrick McGoohan's seminal creation The Prisoner screening on ITV4.

I first became acquainted with this bizarre little series back in 1992, when its twenty-fifth anniversary was being celebrated with a re-screening on Channel Four. I enjoyed the programme so much that watching it became a weekly ritual, complete with beer and nachos. Would Number Six ever escape his captors in the Village?

Like many viewers during its original screening, I struggled to make sense of The Prisoner when I tried to view it as a conventional drama, but the series' fundamental message, as far as I was concerned, was that mankind should at all costs embrace his freedom of expression and his right to individuality. With this accepted, I realised that everything my father had ever taught me about not following the massed herds; about taking pride in ploughing your own furrow in life, was confirmed in here in glorious Technicolor, with a wicked Ron Grainer theme tune to boot.

Repeated screenings over the past two decades have revealed the series to contain many layers, all waiting to be peeled back like an onion skin. Every time I watch it I learn a new lesson. McGoohan, who will by now be enjoying his 81st summer on this earth, predicted far more about modern society than anything of Orwell's. His bizarre creation may not have made much sense to frustrated viewers, watching in black-and-white on their hired Rediffusion sets back in the 1960s, but watching the classic episode 'Hammer Into Anvil' last week, I was brutally reminded of how this classic series prophecised much of the modern surveillance society.

In the episode, Number Two, the 'democratically-elected' leader of the Village and McGoohan's nemesis, finds his uncompromising interrogation techniques responsible for the death of one of the Village's residents. Number Six vows to avenge the death, and embarks on a campaign of subversion in order to destroy Number Two's mind and cause him to step down.

Here, Six's every move, word, phonecall and action is recorded and continually monitored in case he lets his guard down. In one scene, his voice patterns during two separate recorded conversations are compared in order to make a case for his 'guilt'. McGoohan's eventual victory at the end of the episode is a rare one, and all the more savoury for it.

Today, I read that the Home Office plans to record, from next year, all our emails, phonecalls and texts, all in the interests of national security.

Well then, where, in the name of national security, are the extra police officers we keep being promised? Every day, people are being knifed, mugged and attacked, sometimes for no more than the shoes on their feet or the change in their pocket. How much is all this extra surveillance costing us, if we can't feel safe on our own streets? Don't get me wrong. I have nothing to hide. I am, however, concerned about the basic civil liberty to privacy being grossly breached.

I read all this in a newspaper I found on the train to my beloved capital city London today, which brings me neatly onto the subject of London's "free newspaper" culture. 'Free For All', episode 4 of The Prisoner, sees Number Six being invited to run for election as the new Number Two, and finds the supposedly democratic electing process anything but. The village newspaper (read 'propaganda sheet') foretells Six's victory and tells the Village population continually what to think, and how to vote come election day.

All this reminds me of Associated Newspapers' career assassination of Ken Livingstone, perhaps one of the most passionate and principled politicians of our times. Scarcely a day in April passed by without a snipe at Ken and a thinly-veiled hint to vote for Boris Johnson come May 1st.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnson was hailed as a winner even before the first vote had been cast, something which has caused me to abruptly halt my lifelong habit of buying the London Evening Standard, and strengthened my hatred of the Associated Press stable of reactionary rags like the Daily Mail, which routinely picks on the fat, the unfashionable, the poor, foreigners and anyone who doesn't fit into their quasi-Utopian blueprint for British life, while remaining one of Britain's best-selling newspapers. Hmm, isn't intolerance to others one of the fundamental principles of how wars start?

So how, in what I idealistically like to think is a democratic society and a rationally-thinking world, could a politician with a track record for gaffes like Johnson's get elected? By brainwashing Londoners by giving them free newspapers like the vile London Lite, that's how. Honestly, you could give the job to the kids' puppet Sooty and he'd do a better job.

Well, all you apathetic Londoners, you've got the leader you deserve, and I hope you're happy.

1,000 Great Albums, continued

ELO: Electric Light Orchestra (AKA No Answer) (1971)

Baroque pop is a phrase first coined in the 1960s to categorise the growing popularity of using orchestras in pop records. This trend may well have started with the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, a fact I cannot verify but certainly, baroque pop grew in popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s, from early classics like Keith West's “Excerpt From A Teenage Opera” and Chris Farlowe's “Out Of Time” through the delicately-layered music of Honeybus and the Beach Boys. The tradition continues strong to this day in the lush orchestrations of Goldfrapp's latest album and the delicate but sparse instrumentation which punctuates the music of Belle and Sebastian, or Teenage Fanclub.

But think about orchestras in pop, and the first name which will probably spring to mind is ELO, a band whose love of grandiose music arrangements was fully consummated on 1977's lush Out Of The Blue double album, a truly sublime listening experience which they never bettered, and which has fallen into popular folklore as the ultimate musical 'guilty pleasure'.

In the late 1960s, Roy Wood, the guitarist, singer and songwriter of The Move, had an idea to form a new band that would use cellos, violins, horns and woodwind to give their music a classical sound, taking rock music in a new direction and "picking up where The Beatles left off", citing as their starting points "Yesterday," "Strawberry Fields Forever," and "I Am The Walrus." Jeff Lynne, frontman with fellow Birmingham band The Idle Race, was excited by the concept, and in January 1970, when lead singer Carl Wayne left The Move, Lynne accepted Wood's second invitation to join the band - on the condition that they focus their energy on the new project. The duo (plus Move's bassist Rick Price and drummer Bev Bevan) immediately started developing the concept, and Lynne and Wood pooled their songwriting skills to produce some of The Move's most commercial fayre (Tonight, Chinatown, California Man) in order to finance ELO.

Where does “baroque pop” come into all this, then? The term is one which normally refers to something far more fragile and beautiful, and altogether less bombastic in its approach than what we have come to accept as classic ELO. Whereas the late 1970s saw ELO producing music which appealed to the middle-aged, their debut album would more likely appeal to aficionados of Middle Ages music.

Recorded between 1970 and 1971, largely as a four-piece, Electric Light Orchestra shows an enthusiastic and experimental band who are uncompromisingly true to their founding ideals. Make no bones about it - if you're expecting ELO's trademark afro-haired Brummie jollity, you won't find it anywhere on this album.

10538 Overture, the album's opening shot and perhaps its most obvious candidate for a commercial crossover opportunity, was ELO's first Top 10 hit, and one which, criminally, you never really hear very much of these days. The majestic opening guitar chords give way to some irresistible multitracked cello, which saws and grinds away in time to a constantly-descending chord sequence. Lynne's heavily-phased lead vocal recalls the story of an escaped prisoner, and Wood's impassioned cries in the chorus add extra emotional effect. The end result is a dramatic rollercoaster, with its doomy strings, hunting horns and increasingly-frenzied cello snippets recalling everything from nursery rhymes to Hendrix riffs. It all ends in total, unbridled chaos, much like the aforementioned Strawberry Fields Forever, and the end result is, to my ears, just delicious, if hardly uplifting.

Look At Me Now could at first be considered a poor cousin of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, only with a more impassioned vocal. Granted, it borrows the string section lock, stock and barrel, but the Eastern-flavoured closing section is quite an original concept which quickly banishes any thoughts of plagiarised Fabness. Nellie Takes Her Bow is a much more familiarly-styled Jeff Lynne composition, not that dissimilar from his earliest tracks on “Looking On”. It's heavy on the piano flourishes, all minor sevenths and melancholy vocals, a Victorian music hall-styled melodrama with a frankly alarming middle section, where you half-expect the Sealed Knot society to burst in wearing full regalia. More of the same can be heard on the ludicrously overblown Battle Of Marston Moor, a high concept track which Bevan reputedly refused to play on because he considered it 'ridiculous'. It is, in fact, a superbly arranged piece of 17th century pastiche, especially when you consider that it's practically a Roy Wood solo track, and Wood is almost certainly playing all the parts himself. Marston Moor isn't one of his best tracks, but it's an interesting cut nonetheless. It probably wouldn't sound out of place as the soundtrack to a period drama, in fact if you close your eyes you can almost smell the gunpowder. See My Baby Jive, it ain't.

Speaking of which, it's at just this point in the album that the mood desperately needs a lift, and respite arrives right on cue in the form of Wood's catchy 1st Movement (Jumping Biz), which borrows heavily from Mason Williams' 1968 magnum opus Classical Gas yet somehow still manages to sound quite original. The double-tracked acoustic guitars are beautifully played, and demonstrate just what an underrated guitarist Wood was.

Mr. Radio, track six, is another theatrical tour-de-force courtesy of Jeff Lynne, which recalls an uncanny lyrical talent Lynne showed in The Idle Race for inventing a host of slightly oddball characters to narrate his songs, rather than singing them in the first person. Here, the singer is a desperate, lonely individual clinging onto his radio for company after his wife has left him. The pianos are quite ghostly and the lyrics almost tearjerking. The string-laden coda sounds like the soundtrack to an old-black and white film, leaving you feeling quite – ahem – moved. The next offering, the instrumental 49th Street Massacre, conjures up mind pictures of Depression-era America. It starts with a pounding and menacing beat which will have you looking over your shoulder for a crazed axeman, and features a playful ragtime middle section which offsets the wonderfully atmospheric mood of the main melody.

The final two songs sound suspiciously more like conventional Wood/Lynne compositions, and finish the album on rather a lighter note, which is not unwelcome after all that earlier stürm und drang. Perhaps these were unused Move songs, I don't know; but either way they tread an altogether more familiar musical path. Queen Of The Hours wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Move album, but there is nothing particularly outstanding about the string section, and the parts could just have easily been played by an electric band. The album's swansong Whisper In The Night sounds like an offcut from Wood's first solo album, Boulders, from which I would imagine this track's roots lie. It's another tender love song, in much the same vein as 'Dear Elaine', of which the varispeed 'choir' at 2.24 ("Angels sing!") is a particular joy.

As I wrote earlier, this album is absolutely nothing like the ELO that you hear on the radio. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it may as well be a different band.

What kind of a world would this be without “Mr. Blue Sky” to cheer up our darkest days? I can't bear to think – but without this album, it would certainly never have happened. Listen with an open mind, and prepare to be quite amazed.

TV Hell

I hate being off sick.

Thanks to a couple of so-called friends in the office who love me so much that they wanted me to share their miserable colds, I am currently sitting at home in my dressing-gown watching TV. Nothing new there, though - although I have tried to avoid taking sickies all my working life, I was no stranger to it back in the '80s, when I was at school.

Back then, there were just the four channels - imagine that, kids, just four channels - of which two didn't even bother broadcasting in the daytime, save for the occasional coverage of a Trade Union Congress conference or an unscheduled announcement about the Crystal Palace transmitter operating on half power. The only things to watch on TV during the day back then were programmes which had been specially-made for us schoolchildren, such as little mini-documentaries showing a day in the life of a binman or a vet, perhaps a bit of Fred Harris standing in front of a huge calculator ("Basic Maths") or modern social history in the form of Yorkshire TV's awardwinning "How We Used To Live".

But these are modern times, and broadcasting has allegedly come of age, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the way TV and the media are continually contriving to infantilise us through lazy use of the English language (bringing out a brand of biscuits called "Yumbles" for God's sake? Wouldn't have them in the house; I prefer the infinitely-more cultured Jules Destrooper Virtuoso, myself.)

With the age of the internet and DVDs, multimedia learning can now be delivered in a variety of new and exciting ways, and the quaint practice of taking over half the nation's TV stations to educate the nation has disappeared.

But has it, though? It's just gone 10 on a rainy Thursday, and I'm off sick, so I sit down with my tea and toast and try to make sense of the array of channels on offer. My befuddled brain is thick with mucus, and if I start watching television, I fear I might start getting impatient with it...

BBC1 starts the day with two hours of property shows. Living In The Sun, the first offering, looks at a couple who aspire to living on the Costa Del Sol, but who can't be bothered to learn the lingo and return to a rain-drenched UK, defeated and miserable, after three months of avoiding Spanish food. The bastards. I'd even eat a plate of Yumbles (whatever they are) for a chance like that. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to make preparations for a new life in Spain by learning the language first, you deserve everything you've got coming to you. I'm sure the Spanish know a thing or two about naming biscuits correctly...

Anyway, I'm not prepared to waste my time watching people whose wealth outweighs their common sense, so I move on, past a black-and-white film on BBC2 (some things never change!) and onto Jeremy Kyle (ITV1), where the perma-tanned Jerry Springer clone is busy goading warring families into airing their dirty laundry in public; as far as I can tell, a sixteen-year-old father of two is being publicly berated for being a bad dad. I can only stand a few seconds of this vulgar theatre for the terminally ignorant, and contemplate that perhaps mankind hasn't moved on that far from the days of the Victorian lunatic asylums, where people paid to laugh at the hapless inmates.

Channel 4 is busy with a decidedly more upmarket attempt to get people to better themselves by improving their CV-writing skills, while Trisha on Channel 5 starts at 10:30, immediately where Jeremy Kyle left off on ITV1. It's ultimately the same show, but this time a sexually-impotent husband is made to weep copiously on live television for the entertainment of a baying studio audience, the lurid caption reading "Marriage Has Killed Our Sex Life" screaming from the screen in one of the default Windows fonts (as a graphic designer, I find this only marginally more offensive than the programme itself.) I'm rather disturbed to think that there are probably people that sit through a whole hour of Jeremy followed by an hour of Trisha's own particular brand of misery. Is it any wonder that they say 8 million British people are on antidepressants?

BBC3 and BBC4 at least have the decency to remain closed-down until 7pm, so it's straight onto - mercy! - Judge Judy on ITV2. So that's 50% of the channels I've watched so far showing cheap confessionals because apparently there's nothing better to show. I suddenly find myself in mourning for that trusty old standby of my formative sick-days, Ceefax; it's true, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...

Repeats of Ironside and Quincy are showing on ITV3, literally watched by hundreds, rather than millions of people, while ITV4 (fast becoming my favourite) have an exciting line-up for the next few hours: repeats of The Saint, The Prisoner, The Big Match (from 1983!) and Minder. Now we're really cooking - if I didn't have better things to do while off sick, like writing a blog, making some nice chicken soup, or cutting my toenails - I might be tempted to sit through this.

Bring back the testcard, that's what I say. The fact that the same handful of adverts play out to miniscule audiences on a constant loop in daytime demonstrates to me that the advertisers don't really see much value in daytime TV. Imagine how much energy we could save by closing down these moribund stations when they have nothing of any particular substance or value to show. With nothing to watch on TV, those who don't work would find better things to do with their time, like reading books (ooh, now that could be dangerous) or learning how to cook instead of relying on additive-loaded ready meals, or making their own clothes instead of being told what to wear by the fashion fascists who pop up every five minutes on daytime TV.

In my day, my mother used to put the radio on in the mornings while she did the housework, because there was no television as such. This fuelled my imagination far better than any TV show ever could. In fact, I'm going back to the radio now - Jeremy Vine's excellent Radio 2 phonein starts at 12, then I'll probably endure an hour of Steve Wright (who these days had lost all the vitality his show once had, and sounds like he's presenting from his deathbed) before Danny Baker on BBC London at 3, which will probably be the cerebral highlight of my day.

With the exception of the children's channels, which aren't going to get my attention unless they suddenly start showing some classic Tom and Jerry or Road Runner, the other 40 or so channels are essentially showing variants of all the abovementioned programmes, which immediately makes me question why, with all these channels at our disposal, we are instead making our choice not between channels, but essentially from three genres - wall-to-wall repeats, patronising "improve your life" programmes, or confessionals.

1978: three channels. 2008: three genres. A case of "plus ça change, plus ça meme chose"...?

Links:
White Dot
Gives a number of reasons for not watching TV, and ideas for what to do instead. Includes an anti-TV survival guide, articles, and interesting products.

Transdiffusion
A look back at the days of television for schools and colleges

Revenge of the MP3 player

I must be cursed, or something. The new MP3 player - or should I say MP4 player, for this is what it was - arrived a day or two later after my last post, all the way from Tokyo via eBay. Which was all very well and dandy - an 8GB iPod Nano clone for a meagre £5 (plus the small matter of £15 shipping!) And a built-in radio. And look, it even plays videos! My prayers are answered!

Only the radio's preconfigured for the Japanese FM band, so I can't listen to the radio. And it refuses to play videos. And the conversion software supplied with it is full of viruses. And to cap it all, it's not even a bloody 8GB player at all, more a 1GB player which has been hacked to display a capacity of 8GB in Windows!!

So I wrote off to the seller to tell them that the item was not sold to me as described, and to enquire about a refund. Much to my surprise, they wrote back apologising for "any inconvenience caused" (this is a matter of fraud, which in my opinion elevates it far higher than a mere triviality), although on reflection I decided not to bother; I considered that I probably won't get a refund for the extra postage costs, and besides, a 1GB MP3 player is better than none at all.

When it works, that is - because today, the 15th day of ownership, the whole thing has died on me, displaying nothing but an eggtimer icon. Frankly, it should be a donkey's face, because that's how I feel right now. As someone who prides myself on my inability to get caught by scammers and fraudsters, I cannot believe I have been so foolish.

What options do I have, then?

Well, I could send the faulty player back, but frankly I don't know whether I can trust the seller to refund all my costs.

I could always report the seller to eBay, but then at best eBay will only cancel their account, leaving them free to start again; a little light research tells me that apparently, MP4 players like this are the second-highest cause of fraud on eBay.

Or I do nothing, which means the scammer is free to carry on his little game and makes me feel like a coward and an apath.

The internet has been good to me over the years, providing me with boundless entertainment and keeping me in gainful employment. Fifteen years in, that bubble has finally burst. I lament the passing of the old-fashioned shop; at least if I had bought a faulty player from Dixons or Currys, I could take it back, complain to Trading Standards or take some kind of action. I am instead left feeling impotent and 20 quid worse off.

Support your local shops, then. You'll miss them when they're gone.

L

R.I.P. Jazz, 1995-2008

MP3 player buying tips

Well, that Samsung MP3 player didn't last long. What a piece of rubbish, honestly - I eventually got used to the fiddly controls, but they were so touch-sensitive that, exactly as I predicted, they eventually stopped working altogether.

Or rather, all the buttons started mimicking the behaviour of one another, probably because the contacts on the circuit board were too close together, because some dickwit decided to make the circuit board way smaller than common sense ought to dictate.

The final straw was last night on the train, when the "volume up" button got stuck, continually driving the sound up to maximum volume against my wishes and gradually driving me mad with rage.

So what, in my opinion, goes into making a decent MP3 player?

• Well, most importantly, don't buy one with more than 2MB storage. Anything else, and you'll only ever listen to your favourite tracks, to the detriment of everything else you painstakingly ripped and downloaded. If you buy anything bigger, prepare to forget 70% of your music collection, because it will just get neglected. Sometimes less is more.
• If you really must buy an iPod (and I'm still resisting the urge) then I advise you read up on other users' experiences. I wouldn't buy something where you had to send it away to get the battery replaced. A friend of mine tried to use a home iPod battery replacement, and it's messed up his hard drive.
• Don't pay more than you think your MP3 player is worth. Okay, I'm annoyed that I just spent £35 on an MP3 player that lasted a few months, but if it had been a £200 iPod, I'd be absolutely hopping mad.
• Style over content. Just because your player looks poncey, or is overpriced, doesn't mean it's any good! If you need a credit card to buy it, then it's probably not worth having. If you have more money than sense, don't come to me when your MP3 player breaks.
• You need an inbuilt radio. Because if you're too busy to update your MP3 player, you will get bored with the songs on it very quickly.
• Proper buttons. Never again will I use Samsung's silly little microswitches.

Take that, Mr. Samsung, and stick it in your USB hub.

Plastic bags? They're rubbish.

So M&S is to start charging people for carrier bags. Good on'em, that's what I say. And charge double that. And good luck to Ken Livingstone, extending the congestion charge for high-polluting vehicles.

I resent the way supermarkets and shops automatically give me carrier bags that I don't need. I resent being made to feel like a Martian by shop assistants whenever I refuse one. That's why I have invested in three Co-Op cotton bags which are duly produced whenever I purchase more than I can carry.

You should see the looks on the faces of the assistants in Waitrose when I get out my off-white, Fairtrade, tree-hugging, wholemeal Co-Op bags. You would think that I'd just pulled a pair of soiled underpants out of my pocket. Actually, some retailers, such as my greengrocer, actually appreciate the gesture.

So stop this snobbery NOW, and let's get on with saving the Earth. Honestly, it wasn't that long ago people used to bring their own bags to the shops. Are we all that forgetful?

Tax 'em all, and then double it, that's what I say. Because if that's what it takes to get people thinking about the environment instead of sitting around stuffing pies into their corpulent cakeholes, then all the better.

Guess what? I got a fever and the only prescription is... more cowbell

I'm just lovin' that crazy cowbell at the moment - here's my all-time top cowbell playlist...

• The Move - Do Ya
• Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper
• David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
• Climax Blues Band - Couldn't Get It Right
• Status Quo - Don't Drive My Car*
• Beatles - Drive My Car*
• ELO - Evil Woman
• Lou Reed - Vicious
• Booker T - Soul Limbo
• Slade - Bangin' Man

* interestingly enough, the titles of these songs appear to cancel each other out!! How many other songs do this? ("Up, Up and Away" vs "Down Down", for example, or "Don't Go" vs "Go Now"...?)

Lest we forget the Jif lemons...

Having just returned from doing a little Sunday lunchtime light shopping (heavens, do you remember when we used to sit down and eat roast beef at this time of day?) I was more dismayed than ever to see how hard the supermarkets are pushing instant pancake batter, egg whisks, bowls, plastic lemons and other pancake paraphernalia.

Now look here. I'm no puritan (unless you count that hour I spent the other night birching myself with twigs for having a slightly impure thought about that bird who used to be in Coronation Street, you know, the blonde one behind the bar - no, not Bet Lynch) but didn't Shrove Tuesday used to be about using up your spare food, not buying more?

Premise number one: The word 'shrove' is a past tense of the Old English verb 'shrive', which means to obtain absolution for one's sins by confessing and doing penance. Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the shriving (confession) that Anglo-Saxon Christians were expected to receive immediately before Lent, a period of abstinence placed halfway between Christmas and Easter to counterbalance the excesses of the aforementioned festivals.

The modern purpose of Shrove Tuesday, however, seems to be more about no more than providing a handy stopgap for high-flying marketing bods who need to hijack another traditional Christian festival in order to boost their profits between those other traditional commercial feasts of St. Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.

Premise number two: The traditional reason for eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday was to use up eggs, milk, sugar and flour immediately prior to the commencement of the fast.

I had to queue for bloody ages in the shops today, because half the world, it seems, was hellbent on systematically emptying the shelves of eggs, milk, sugar and flour, and worse still, instant batter mix (!) in anticipation of Tuesday's forthcoming frivolities. Anyone would have thought war had just been declared.

So this coming Tuesday, while half the world starves, the wealthier half will follow an already oversized meal with a dessert comprising fried discs of batter made from the spoils of their day's hunting in the supermarkets. More pancakes will almost certainly be made than consumed.

Here's one for the older readers. Remember "lemons"? You know, that yellow fruit whose juice was squeezed over the cooked "Pan Cakes". Lemons were (and still are) inexpensive and widely available from "greengrocers", a subgenre of friendly independent traders called "shopkeepers" who used to occupy that Tesco Metro at the end of your road. (You know, the ones doing 'buy one get one free' on plastic lemons.)

(Incidentally, the brand of plastic lemons associated with Pancake Day are manufactured by the same firm who make Domestos, Vaseline and OMO washing powder, which I honestly didn't think had been in the shops since the late 1960s.)

Plastic lemons are not biodegradeable. Don't buy them. Real ones are perfectly environmentally-friendly, and they don't contain nasty artificial preservatives such as sodium metabisulphite either. (As an additive, sodium metabisulphite may cause allergic reactions, particularly skin irritation, gastric irritation and asthma. It is not recommended for consumption by children.)

Real lemons have a myriad of other uses, such as being an efficient all-round cleaning agent. A selection of these can be found here.

Suddenly, I really don't fancy pancakes.

Here endeth today's lesson.

Wunderbar!!*

Yes, it's true - the pic's a bit blurry, but this is none other than Edward Tudor-Pole (Tenpole Tudor, Sex Pistols) and Roman Jugg (The Damned) playing "Swords Of A Thousand Men" at my local pub last night.

Yeah, that's right. My local.

They were excellent, by the way: Ed played acoustic guitar and sang enthusiastically throughout, showing Elvis and Lonnie Donegan influences with a soupcon of Status Quo. Last night's show was deafeningly loud, well received by the audience and probably best enjoyed absolutely steaming drunk. Which, in fact, I was.

* Oh, they didn't play "Wunderbar", sadly!

Greeks bearing gifts: a scam alert

I've just received one of those WAP Push text messages from an unknown number - the kind that invites you to click on a weblink in order to download a mysterious message which, for whatever reason, can't be conveyed via the normal text system.

Now, I never, ever give my email address or telephone numbers to anybody I don't know personally. Not anybody. Ever. That's official policy - it's the only surefire way to avoid being bombarded with junk texts and messages, and what's more, it actually works. I'm also registered with TPS so that I don't get telemarketing calls either, so thinking laterally, I assumed that whoever had sent the message must have been somebody I knew; maybe it was a colleague or a friend trying to send me a picture message via a web-based system. So I clicked the link. And you really would have thought that someone like me would have known better, wouldn't you...?

What I saw was something called MobileTube - a webpage cunningly crafted to resemble YouTube's official site, something which I should imagine their lawyers should be interested in! The dead giveaway was a copyright statement belonging to W2Mobile and instructions for opting out of the system by calling 0870 609 1795, otherwise I would be charged £1.50 every time I got a text from them.

Temporarily flummoxed, I rang the number, only to be presented with an automated system asking me to enter my mobile number in order to unsubscribe. The distinctive whiff of rats entered the room. There was no way I was going to entrust my mobile number to a computer, so I googled W2mobile and was presented with examples of fellow people being innocently scammed.

Next, I rang T-Mobile in order to ascertain whether I'd been charged, and they told me that this is, in fact perfectly legal; by signing up for a contract phone, I automatically permit my number to be used by anyone for the purposes of scam adverts. That's like walking around with extra big pockets so that thieves can help themselves to the contents!

There is, apparently, an optout, in order to comply with telecommunications law, but T-Mobile don't advertise this, presumably because they might lose revenue.

Having now opted out, I am looking forward to an end to these anonymous texts, and if you value your privacy and the privacy of others, then I plead with you to ask your provider to add you to the optout list, before someone helps themselves to £1.50 of your money whenever they feel like it.

Legal theft! Going on, right under our noses, while we all sit around eating pies. And this with half the world living on less than a dollar a day. How utterly, excrementally disgusting. I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race, sometimes.

More examples of W2's scams:
http://www.screamingwhisper.com/interactive/showthread.php?t=10965

Morgan, amusingly, is exacting revenge by draining bandwidth from W2's site - shame I didn't think of it first:
http://morgansfun.blogspot.com/2007/09/mobile-tube-w2mobile-scam.html

1000 Great Albums: The Original Mirrors (1980)

Original Mirrors - Original Mirrors (1980)

Who, then, are Original Mirrors, and why have you never heard of them? And moreover, why should you care?

Primarily, the Original Mirrors will be forever remembered as an early vehicle for the songwriting and producing talents of pop-obsessed Scouse genius Ian Broudie, who later founded the Lightning Seeds. Prior to the Original Mirrors, Broudie had been a member of Big in Japan, along with Frankie Goes to Hollywood frontman Holly Johnson.

The remainder of the band's members had great pedigree too, though; lead vocalist Steve Allen had been in art-punk outfit Deaf School, while drummer Pete Kircher had enjoyed chart success a decade earlier as one-fifth of Honeybus, who are one of my all-time favourite Sixties bands.

The first album from this Liverpool-based quintet disappeared without trace in 1980, despite being championed heavily by the late John Peel. It resurfaced briefly in the mid-90s as a CD reissue (bundled with 1981's follow-up Heart, Twango And Rawbeat). Perhaps it was re-released in order to capitalise on the success of The Lightning Seeds; we shall never know either way because, just like the original albums, it disappeared as quickly as it resurfaced, which is how I came to pay a hefty twenty quid for it on mail order, just to hear a band I'd never heard, solely on the strength of my appreciation of Broudie and Kircher's previous and future efforts. I'm pleased to say, though, that the gamble paid off.

Track one, Sharp Words, starts the album with the band already in fifth gear. It's a punchy little number with some frantic octave bass work and some hypnotic drumming, which serves to introduce us properly to the rhythm section before the rest of the band properly get a look in, and well they might, because they really are one of the best rhythm sections I've ever heard – no-one misses a single beat. Some wilfully angular lyrics add a sense of avant-garde nonsense, although vocalist Steve Allen seems at times like he's taking it all rather too seriously. There's also some 60s organ in there for a bit of vintage flavour, but the overall feel of the track is fresh and invigorating.

The second song starts with some U2-esque delayed guitar and a droning male chorus, in fact it's only when the vocals come in that it you fall in and realise that that it's actually a very clever reinvention of the Supremes' 1967 smash hit Reflections. I think it's the only time I've heard an all-male band cover the Supremes, and it's a brave move that really actually works quite well. The production literally shimmers, although the vocals go a bit OTT in places again. Interestingly enough, the 'beeping' intro from the Supremes version even puts in a cameo in a very subtle nod to the original, and is perhaps one of the earliest examples of sampling in pop music that I can recall. Reflections really should have been the hit of the album, but then all things being fair, the Original Mirrors really should have had a share of the early 80s limelight.

The Boys, The Boys (hey, nice title, lads) picks up where Sharp Words left off, stylistically speaking, although for me things don't really get going until the ska-styled outro, which kicks like a mule and introduces us to Chris Hunter's excellent saxophone work. There's more of the same on the slower, atmospheric Flying, possibly my favourite cut of the whole album, where the vocal slowly transforms into a gorgeous sax solo which reminds me of the lush fadeout on Hazel O'Connor's 'Will You' from the film Breaking Glass.

Side One finishes on another energetic note with Chains Of Love, which, despite some dated keyboard sounds, doesn't drop a single beat and would have actually been quite cutting-edge back in 1980. It would probably have been a hit had Duran Duran recorded it, but maybe Original Mirrors never got the same kind of exposure. Kircher's metronomic drum work is a particular highlight here; when closely examined, it's clear that he doesn't try to dominate proceedings, preferring to scatter his trademark rock-solid beat with some very intricate drum fills.

The galloping Could This Be Heaven, which was released as a single, starts side Two off in a suitably pacey fashion without copying anything we've already heard, but sounds ever-so-slightly camp when viewed through modern eyes; it reminds me of those all-too-energetic unsigned bands you used to see on Summertime Special in the early 80s but could never remember the name of. It's not an unpleasant song, by any means, but the next one, Boys Cry, I found a bit uninspiring. It rips off a number of very familiar rock and roll riffs, and the wolf-whistle in the instrumental break really stinks the place out, but if it's the album's only true low point, then it shouldn't put you off.

Night Of The Angels is possibly the least accessible track on an album otherwise full of instant pop gems, sounding perhaps a bit like the kind of thing Soft Cell would release a couple of years later, but it's an excellent track all the same. Momentum is restored with the penultimate track Panic In The Night, which contains more saxophones and some excellent call-and-response vocals from the band, who all contribute backing vocals elsewhere around the album. The set closer, Feel Like A Train, sounds quite unlike anything else on the album, and may well have sat more comfortably on the second album, and leaves things on a bit of an anti-climax for my personal tastes.

I actually think the Original Mirrors were way ahead of their time, but sadly the album has dated rather badly as a result of employing 1980's cutting-edge technology. Original Mirrors is an excellent debut album, which should have established the group firmly as a fixture in the early 80s, and it's not entirely clear to me why they weren't bigger. It is, however, a difficult piece of work to review! It seems to want to defy categorisation, but then it's probably not fair to try and pigeonhole bands, who – let's face it - spend their lives wanting to be accepted on their own terms.

Certainly, all of the songs possess an infectious energy and are tightly played by a very lean and efficient band where there's absolutely no room for dead weight, even if Allen's vocal delivery sometimes goes a bit 'showbiz' for my liking. For all my occasional complaints about his delivery, he is a very talented vocalist with an interesting style. Broudie's influence reveals a deep love of power-pop, but fans of Three Lions, Change or What If... should not expect an album of lost Lightning Seeds gems.

1000 Great Albums: Status Quo: Quo (1974)

I read once that Alan Lancaster (the principal founder member of Status Quo, despite what revisionists might say) walked out on the recording sessions for 1983's "Marguerita Time" because to put it mildly, he didn't like the style of the song. Complaining that he wouldn't be able to show his face in public if his beloved band had gone 'all soft', he is alleged to have walked out with the words 'But I'm a rocker!'

The stuff of Spinal Tap legend, made real; any resemblance to a diminutive, moustachioed bass player called Derek Smalls is purely coincidental. Marguerita Time went on to be a smash hit that Christmas, while Lancaster refused to tour, flew to Australia and sulked. But what if, with hindsight, he might have had a point after all?

Let's rewind to 1974. Status Quo, psychedelic one-hit wonders of the late 60s, have reinvented themselves as denim-clad masters of the three-chord shuffle, and after a lean period during which their albums sold rather poorly, have signed to the mighty Vertigo label. It's an imperial phase for Quo - from the early to the mid-70s the classic 'frantic four' lineup really couldn't put a foot wrong. The band have just returned from a mammoth world tour with Slade, and enter the studio to record the follow-up album to Hello, their first to go to Number One and which has yielded two classic hits in Caroline and Roll Over Lay Down.

This period is generally considered to be Status Quo's golden era; the space, say, between 1972's frantic Paper Plane and 1976's, er, frantic Mystery Song. Later, the band would produce unashamedly commercial fayre in order to try and crack America (Rockin' All Over The World, Red Sky), experiments with disco (don't believe me? Listen to 1978's god-awful Accident Prone) and then, when we didn't think they could sink any lower, they went all 80s on us with a pointless cover of a minor hit for Dutch duo Rob and Ferdi Bolland, 'In The Army Now'.

But for many years in the 70s, Quo were truly and deservedly at the top of their game, and smack-bang in the middle of this golden era is the album Quo, boasting a mere eight tracks and a ludicrously high-concept sleeve depicting the band as a mighty four-headed creature which looks like the love child of an ancient oak tree and Mount Rushmore.

The epic opener, Backwater, starts with the kind of extended loud-quiet-loud intro that Quo would later turn to classic effect on Whatever You Want. It starts with Rossi and Parfitt playing a simple duelling guitar melody, their trademark Telecasters buzzing away harmonically. Unlike previous albums which were recorded more or less 'as live', some attempt was made during the sessions to keep the instruments separate without losing the overall character of the music, as was the case with 1977's Rocking All Over The World album, which lacked atmosphere, despite boasting some of their strongest songs. The result is a big, bold guitar riff which gives way to a calming bridge, filling time until the rest of the band come thundering in, Rossi providing the classic Quo hammer-on riff in the left speaker while Parfitt bangs out brutal machine-like chops on the off beat in the right channel. It's a potent rocker which never disappoints and doesn't sound overpretentious or flawed. Three verses and an epic guitar solo later, Backwater climaxes under the weight of one of John Coghlan's best ever drum solos, a grand symphony for tom rack which may just have been the template for Cozy Powell's 'Dance With The Devil'. This serves to segue seamlessly into the thunderous Just Take Me, which finds Parfitt picking a fight with an old Bo Diddley riff and turning it into one of Quo's hardest ever rockers.

Backwater could have been a great single, but the record company had other ideas, reasoning that Francis Rossi was the lead vocalist of Quo and that to let anyone else sing lead on a single would confuse the public, and thus it came to pass that the album's third cut, Break The Rules, a rare group composition which essentially is a rewrite of Down The Dustpipe with added honky-tonk piano, was released as a single. BTR always sounds great on compilation albums, and it's always welcome at parties (well, most parties) but listened to in isolation, but it sticks out like a sore thumb when bookended either side by two of Lancaster's heavier contributions; Drifting Away, a fast-paced rocker probably best listened to when speeding up the M1 on a Harley, closes Side One, and Lancaster's final contribution Don't Think It Matters (a slow, drawling, more bluesy cousin of Roll Over Lay Down) opens Side Two, which on the whole shows a more diverse side to the band than the unrelenting, piledriving rock of Side One.

Next up is Fine Fine Fine, a gentle country rocker of very little consequence written by Francis Rossi and Bob Young, the songwriting duo responsible for most of Quo's classic hits. It's a welcome antidote to the unrelenting barrage of boogie we've been listening to, but certainly not one of the duo's strongest tracks. However the penultimate track, Lonely Man, is one of Parfitt's best songs, built around a gentle rhythm guitar riff rather than that lumpen, chunky stuff he usually plays, and like his later Living On An Island, almost succeeds in being heartbreaking thanks to some sensitive lyrics.

The final track, Slow Train, rewards us with a grand finale that contains everything bar the kitchen sink. It's another seven-minute epic, which, unusually for Quo (but for the second time on this album) has a narrative lyric, telling the story of the writer leaving home and having to 'jump a ride on a cattle trucking slow train'. The song is made up of several different parts - perhaps they were fragments of different uncompleted songs. Quo would, quite rightly, be scorned in later years for their ludicrous Stars On 45-style live medleys (such as the Doors' Roadhouse Blues mixed with the Mexican Hat Dance, an unholy marriage culturally akin to welding a Great Dane's head onto the body of a kitten) - but Slow Train stands as a magnificent example of what Quo used to be good at, and are now terrible at: segueing melodies without resorting to cheesiness.

Drummer John Coghlan leads the band through several changes of time signature, from the template headbanging riff at the start, through a military two-step during which you expect Max Wall to burst in; and a Celtic reel which once again sees Parfitt and Rossi's guitars duelling just as they did at the start of the album. And then comes The Almighty Drum Solo, followed by a grand reprise. Coghlan, for once, sounds like he's enjoying himself, and it's possibly his finest moment with Quo, in fact possibly Quo's finest moment, period.

Quo really is Lancaster's album insofar as he contributes over half the songs, in fact Francis Rossi's nasal noodlings only put in an appearance on three of the album's tracks, and the result is a harder-edged and less 'pop' sound than its predecessor. Weighing in at just under 40 minutes, Quo is not a taxing listen, and may even shatter some people's perception of what classic Status Quo sounds like.

The latest reissue includes a remaster of the original B-side to Break The Rules, Lonely Night, previously a rarity which doesn't feature on any other album, and again shows a syncopation between Rossi and Parfitt that is as natural and as perfectly timed as the mechanisms on a grandfather clock. As I listened to it the other day, I suddenly realized where I'd heard the pitter-patter drum track before. It's Buddy Holly and the Crickets, of all people.

Maybe Lancaster was a rocker, after all. I'm no fan of Lancaster's solo work, but if the rest of the band had only listened to him back in 1983, they might not have unleashed some of those later aberrations on us.

1000 Great Albums: Jeff Lynne: Armchair Theatre (1990)

Six degrees of separation, as defined on Wikipedia, is the idea that if you are one "step" away from each person you know, then you are two "steps" away from each person who is known by one of the people you know, and therefore you are no more than six "steps" away from each person on Earth.

Strange but true? Well, my music collection certainly seems to bear out the theory, because it's probably true that every piece of music ever made is, culturally speaking, just six steps away from being connected in some way to the great Jeff Lynne, the Beatle-obsessed, bubblepermed, aviator sunglasses-wearing Brummie genius who masterminded the success of ELO throughout the 70s.

Lynne tragically found that being in one of the world's most successful bands ceased to be any fun anymore at a point when he still owed Epic three albums, which he grudgingly released in the 1980s. The last of these, Balance Of Power (1986), found the once-mighty 'Orchestra' reduced to three members, with all those once lushly-arranged string sections replaced with 80s synths and Lynne singing as disinterestedly as the guy who does the safety announcements on my morning train.

Turning his back on the road, Lynne called time on the band in order to produce records made by his heroes, people such as Tom Petty (whose Full Moon Fever he co-wrote and produced in 1989), Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and of course George Harrison, whose Got My Mind Set On You was a massive hit and invigorated both Harrison's and Lynne's fortunes, and thus his new career as a producer to the stars hit the ground running. Arguably, the high point of this period was the formation of the Traveling Wilburys, a kind of cross between the Rat Pack and the Monday afternoon Crown Green Bowling team.

The affable Lynne must have received thousands of credits on album sleeves, for everything from production and songwriting through to playing tambourine and, for all I know, making the tea, but it's actually nothing short of astonishing that he has only ever officially released one solo album (released between the two Wilburys albums) and, even more criminally, it remains out of print 17 years after it was released.

Armchair Theatre is one of my favourite albums, but while it lacks the inventive genius of ex-partner Roy Wood's debut solo album 'Boulders', its widescreen production and warm, rich sound make it a joy to listen to time and time again, in fact along with ELO's 1977 masterpiece Out Of The Blue, it's one of my favourite Sunday morning albums.

The opening song Every Little Thing is a pacey little number which starts with an in-yer-face section of chorussed saxophones (all of which are played by the aptly-named Jim Horn) that, despite honking away excitedly like a gaggle of distressed geese, wouldn't have sounded out of place on an Art Of Noise album. Make no mistake - it's definitely a Jeff Lynne production - the heavily-gated snare sound is a dead giveaway for starters - but the impeccably-arranged vocals echo classic ELO in a way that Lynne hadn't managed to do since the band's popularity began to wane in the late 1970s.

Rocking up like it was made by Elvis Presley's backing band in 1956, Don't Let Go, the second track, is a delicious piece of rock and roll pastiche that wouldn't actually sound of place on a Wilburys album, and demonstrates clearly Jeff Lynne's passion for his heroes' music. The saxophones return in a brief but joyful solo that recalls the best of Lord Rockingham's XI, and the stop-start chorus of multi-tracked 'ooo-eee's and 'ah shucks'es are simply gorgeous.

Lift Me Up is a soaring ballad which reminds me of World Party, which when you think about it is an incredible feat indeed, considering that Karl Wallinger built his whole sound around his own self-confessed obsession with ELO! The same could, in fact, also be applied to the soulful ballad What Would It Take, with an amazing chorus which could have been arranged by the Mamas and the Papas, and even more so the final track Save Me Now, which, like World Party's own Bang! (1991) takes environmental destruction as its main lyrical theme, though for some reason Lynne chooses to sing it in the style of Bob Dylan, which completely defies explanation.

At times, Armchair Theatre features lush string arrangements that recall the timeless sound of 1930s Hollywood productions, and never less so than on some tasteful reinterpretations of the standards September Song and Stormy Weather (recorded in tribute to his recently-deceased mother) as well as his own Don't Say Goodbye. Stormy Weather, in particular, boasts some fine slide guitar from – ooh, surprise surprise – George Harrison, as well as some cheeky lifts from Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. In this respect Lynne displays a real love and respect for this era's classic romantic sound. September Song also takes the unusual step of using recorded footsteps as a percussive element, a trick he first tried in 1977's album cut 'Jungle' (and which Roy Wood had used in 'Wake Up' as early as 1969!) However, if you're talking production techniques, Now You're Gone, perhaps my own favourite cut after What Would It Take, is another affectionate pastiche, all swirling Indian strings and tablas, and if, as I suspect, Lynne is using a varispeed to impersonate the female Indian vocals, then his skills are better than I have ever given him credit for.

Was there a follow-up album? Well, Armchair Theatre received some good reviews but failed to sell in any kind of quantity. In the late 80s, Lynne had fallen out with Bev Bevan over the use of the ELO brand name, creating an acrimonious rift between the two musicians and resulting in Bevan forming the inferior ELO Part Two, who continue to this day under the name 'The Orchestra' without the involvement of Lynne or Bevan.

Lynne released an album in 2001 under the ELO name called 'Zoom', which could be considered a close relative of Armchair Theatre, but not by any means an ELO album - after all, the only other classic ELO member present on the album was keyboardist Richard Tandy, and with contributions from George Harrison and – ack! – Ringo Starr, it was probably more of an exercise in getting the surviving Beatles back together. The set lacks the atmosphere of Armchair Theatre, and while I wouldn't dismiss it as a complete failure, the fact it was released as ELO probably reflects the record company's lack of faith in Lynne to sell records under his own name.

But to give credit where it's due, Armchair Theatre is definitely a masterpiece in its own way. It's easily the second greatest thing Jeff Lynne's ever recorded, after ELO's Out Of The Blue, and a great companion piece to the solo albums he recorded with Tom Petty and George Harrison at the time.

1000 Great Albums: Fleetwood Mac: Tusk

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (the world's favourite album until Michael Jackson released Thriller) occupies a special place in everyone's record collection. It seems to mean something special, personal and different to everyone who owns it, and so to me, Rumours will always be synonymous with long red February sunsets over the French Alps, where I spent a week some years ago, learning how not to snowboard.

Like my other chalet-mates, I had grabbed a random selection of CDs before leaving home, and although I had owned and cherished a copy of Rumours for years, I hadn't appreciated quite what a magnificent album it was until I heard it one afternoon while taking in those spectacular Alpine views. To this day I still can't explain why; hearing it in the right place at the right time, perhaps, but the album took on a miraculous new significance for me, instantly becoming one of my all-time favourites, and my friends universally agreed that it was a good choice of album to take away on holiday.

I probably would never have heard Fleetwood Mac's follow-up album, Tusk, had it not been for the recommendation of one of our chalet-mates, a Yorkshire lass called Jane, who told me she thought Tusk was an infinitely better album than Rumours, adding enigmatically that I wouldn't know why until I heard it. Well, I do love a challenge, and so it was that I vowed to buy a copy as soon as I returned home.

Tusk reputedly cost millions to make, and although it wasn't a total commercial failure, by all accounts the returns weren't anything like Warner Brothers had anticipated. More or less everyone concerned blamed this on Lindsey Buckingham, the man who had single-handedly saved Fleetwood Mac (now, there's gratitude) some years earlier from drowning in mediocrity by reinventing the tired blues band as über-gods of FM radio, drenched in California sunshine and killer harmonies. Co-producer Buckingham decided he wanted something really different from its million-selling predecessor, and, taking inspiration from the Punk and New Wave movements, set about deconstructing the Fleetwood Mac sound.

The record company were dismayed by what they were presented with; a self-indulgent double album of strikingly different musical styles, lacking in the velvety texture and continuity that Rumours had, and lacking in its predecessor's obvious commercial potential. The good that came out of this was that Buckingham's often startling studio experiments led to many fantastic and eclectic solo albums, and turned an already awesome guitarist into someone untouchable in his own field. Fleetwood Mac, however, required Buckingham's Midas touch to be successful, and so it was that his solo career never really took off while Mac would never enjoy another success like Rumours.

Tusk starts with the haunting Over and Over, which just gives me the shivers every time I hear it. It's a slow and tender Christine McVie composition that sounds as smooth as anything on Rumours, although the backing is kept sparse to the point of being skeletal. Occasional bursts of slide guitar and spectral backing vocals add texture, while McVie's honeyed vocals sound every bit as delicate as her fractured emotions as she lays her soul bare ("All you have to do / Is speak out my name / And I would come running, anyway"). The result is a song which could easily move me to tears, thanks largely to Lindsey Buckingham's slick production, and that same bluesy, soulful feel returns later in Never Make Me Cry, a vintage Mac cut from what is otherwise a very unpredictable album for the first-time listener.

Track two is Buckingham's own The Ledge, which sets out his stall for the rest of the album. It's completely unlike anything you've ever heard before from anyone, let alone Fleetwood Mac, apparently arranged using rubber bands for guitar strings and biscuit tins as drums, and that doesn't mean it's a bad track: it just sounds, well, different. The whole thing is a breath of fresh air: pure, primitive and honest rock and roll. It enters your head, messes about a bit (listen on headphones and you'll know what I mean) and leaves via the other ear before it outstays its welcome. It's also one of the most enduringly charming songs on the album, and its close cousin That's Enough For Me does the same job to a slightly diminished extent.

Before we've had time to come up for air, we're straight into McVie's next composition, Think About Me, a bright and breezy slice of radio-friendly FM pop which seems quite out of place next to The Ledge. I would imagine it was strategically put there by a record company boss to give us something familiar three tracks in, but it's a welcome dose of the usual solid fare to compliment Buckingham's musical whims.

One of Fleetwood Mac's great strengths was that the three-way songwriting partnership allowed for great diversity. The first of Stevie Nicks' compositions, Sara, is bland and overlong, but Storms is quite entrancing, while she is at the peak of her mystical best on the moody epic Sisters Of The Moon. By the halfway mark, it starts to appear to be the case that Tusk is actually three solo albums in one: the madcap experiments of Buckingham's, Nicks' mystical ramblings and those ice-cool bluesy offerings from Christine McVie.

It should be noted here that the majority of songs on Tusk were written by Lindsey Buckingham, many of them just as original as The Ledge if occasionally slightly flawed. Save Me A Place could almost be the Beach Boys, with its flawless gospel-tinged harmonies, and the lush That's All For Everyone finds a tired and emotional Buckingham yearning for creative freedom. One of the weaker tracks, What Makes You Think You're The One, sounds like a half-baked jam session which somehow made it onto the album, as does the catchy-but-insubstantial Not That Funny, where he vents his spleen at something or other. Even one of McVie's weaker moments, Honey Hi, sounds like an incomplete demo, but hey, that kind of thing was never supposed to matter in New Wave's DIY ethic, and it's a pleasant enough way to while away three minutes.

Tusk's title track is the complete opposite, however, and Buckingham's great centrepiece of the album. Drawing inspiration (allegedly) from Buckingham's jealousy of Nicks' (alleged) affair with Mick Fleetwood, it's a slow burner which begins with Mick Fleetwood's excellent jungle drum beat and slowly unfolds to reveal a simple but enormously effective bassline, an impassioned vocal, and reaches a crescendo with a 100-piece marching band and the repeated refrain of 'Don't say that you love me! Tusk!' (allegedly, Tusk is the nickname Fleetwood assigned to his male member. What, you mean yours doesn't have a name?) Heady stuff indeed.

Tusk's followup, Mirage (1982), suffered from trying too hard to replicate the success of Rumours, while Buckingham's solo debut, released two years after Tusk, is worth a listen only if you've really enjoyed Tusk's more extreme experiments, although its successor Go Insane (1984) is far more polished. I reckon Tusk is a masterpiece of an album, so if you're reading this, Jane from Yorkshire, thanks, because my world is a far better place for your recommendation. That said, it is not an album which will automatically appeal to casual Fleetwood Mac fans. Try it. You'll either love it or you'll hate it, but at least you'll have listened to it.

As an interesting footnote, US college rock band Camper Van Beethoven covered Tusk note-for-note in 1987 whilst snowed in on a skiing holiday with an injured drummer. The tapes were remastered and released in 2004, and if you enjoyed the original Tusk as much as I did, then you'll be interested in CVB's tribute, a highly irreverent but affectionate tribute which matches Buckingham's spirit of musical adventure.

1000 Great Albums: The Move: Looking On (1970)

Whilst Looking On is possibly my least favourite Move album, it was released at a pivotal time in the band's career and is therefore worthy of appraisal in my book, not least because it marks the joining together of two of my favourite rock musicians of all time, Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, as songwriters, and marks the formation of one of pop's most underrated, and tragically, shortest, partnerships.

Under the management of the late Peter Walsh, a great man whom I was fortunate enough to get to know personally during his 1990s career as a health insurance salesman, the band's output at the turn of the Seventies was largely a game of two halves.

Impresario Peter was booking the band into cabaret venues, a world away from their early shows on the credible underground circuit where an earlier incarnation of the band gained notoriety for smashing up television sets onstage. Singer Carl Wayne had left to pursue a solo career in cabaret, leaving Roy Wood to helm the ship until the arrival of a young Jeff Lynne, who was drafted in following a successful stint in The Idle Race, having just produced their second album. Lynne's arrival came with one proviso: that the Move would evolve into a new band, Electric Light Orchestra, the earliest stirrings of which can be traced back to this album.

The Move's singles around this time varied in style from radio-friendly pop such as the lightweight 'Curly' and the irressistibly upbeat 'Tonight' to 'Brontosaurus', often credited as one of the earliest heavy metal singles. The Move's albums, however, were essays in experimentation which bore little similarity to the act seen in the hit parade. Here, new ideas could be tried out away from the cut and thrust world of the pop charts.

1970 saw The Move at their creative peak. With the songwriting burden lightened by Lynne's arrival, the band's main songwriter Roy Wood was busy completing a solo album 'Boulders', a wondrous confection on which he would write, sing and play every note himself and which would not see the light of day until 1973. With the band slimmed down to four members, and a plethora of songwriting talent waiting to be mined, it was time to re-evaluate things.

Looking On starts with the title track, a heavy metal dirge with Lynne's sweeping piano flourishes which lyrically looks forward from the band's television-smashing days ('TV looking down, I'm just looking on') and which dissolves into an extended jam around a descending chord sequence with every instrument in the studio thrown at it: sitars, Arabic pipes, wah wah guitar and a hulking great drum solo. And why not? Roy Wood could play practically any instrument he was given. It's a passable enough opener, but not the band's best song by a long chalk.

More coherent altogether is the Bev Bevan-written Turkish Tram Conductor Blues, which employs a basic rigid 12-bar structure and the same heavy metal sound with a parping coda on those Arabic pipes again. The enigmatic 'What' closes side one, and is Jeff Lynne's first composition and lead vocal on the album. It's rather long, very morose and wouldn't sound out of place on ELO's second album. Which isn't to say it's a bad song at all, in fact Roy Wood's production saves the day with a suitably doomy choir effect.

When Alice Comes Back To The Farm is something of a curio. Released as the first single after the chart topping Blackberry Way, it failed to create any impression whatsoever in the commercial world, which is something of a surprise, as the melody is certainly quite accessible, if not as catchy as its predecessor. It's followed by 'Open Up Said The World At The Door', a more uptempo Lynne composition with some great boogie-woogie piano and another blistering bin-bashing solo from Bevan, although the slow funereal coda always puts an end to my enjoyment of this track, sounding like some kind of terrifying film score and in fact quite out of place not only on this album but in Jeff Lynne's overall body of work, as it's my considered view that Jeff's best songs are the upbeat ones.

After the aforementioned 'Brontosaurus', a Lennon-esque rocker with a great bass sound best played at full volume, the album closes with 'Feel Too Good', a progressive number which, unlike the other extended tracks on this album, doesn't outstay its welcome and even throws in a couple of false endings in the form of a doo-wop masterclass (pure Wood) and a hilarious cockney pastiche with barrel piano and a lusty refrain about lettuce (pure Lynne) not to mention a choir of vocals in a repeated refrain of 'what can you do?' which sounds uncannily like Dusty Springfield.

So were the Move treading water with their third album?

Well, as a Move devotee, I think the Wood-Lynne partnership needed time to cement, because to me, Looking On lacks direction and discipline. It would only be a few months before the release of two delightful but much more mature non-album tracks in the form of 'Tonight' and 'Chinatown', followed in 1971 by the band's swansong album 'Message From The Country'. Had the Move bowed out here, they would have gone out on a real low; it's fortunate that they stuck around and made another proper album before they called it a day, because by the end of 1972 this beautiful partnership would be no more.

1000 Great Albums: The Clash: Sandinista! (1980)

It is often said of the Clash's fourth album, Sandinista! (1980), that it is four sides too long (the original vinyl was a triple album, priced, at the band's insistence, at the same level as a single album.) It weighs in at around 2½ hours, and, listened to in one mammoth session, would test the patience of a saint.

But, when all is said and done, it's 36 tracks for the price of 12, so what did you expect? Funny, isn't it, how nobody ever dares to suggest castrating the previous year's double album London Calling, because it is Officially A Revered Classic Album and therefore above such criticism, despite containing total dross like Jimmy Jazz and Lost In The Supermarket among otherwise indisputable moments of greatness.

That's not to say that Sandinista! isn't unashamedly self-indulgent. Recorded in just three weeks in London, Manchester, New York and Jamaica, Sandinista! is brimming with diverse musical styles and experiments, a daring avant-garde piece which invites comparison with The Beatles' White Album. If you don't like a track, don't worry: something completely different will be along within minutes.

The set kicks off with "The Magnificent Seven", the first track from a new, mature Clash which sees Strummer polemicising over - of all things - a funky white rap which grooves along nicely, thanks largely to Paul Simonon's superb bassline which pins the whole sound together, even if the scattershot lyrics are a little patchy. After five minutes, Joe Strummer proclaims 'fucking long, innit?' and the track starts to fade out, after which we are spirited into the Motown-styled "Hitsville UK", a paean to the DIY punk music ethic with an all-female vocal line. Your ears might be telling you that this sounds nothing like the Clash, but just take a look at the lyric sheet. There's no mistaking the real thing. Sandinista! is something of a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The album can at times seem both disorientating and exhilarating with its musical changes of turn. Looking at Disc One alone, there's the delightful dub-flavoured "Junco Partner", a brass band-led "Something About England", the woozy, parping "Rebel Waltz" and even freeform jazz on Mose Allison's also-ran "Look Here". In fact, the casual listener won't hear anything that sounds remotely like classic Clash until the second half of Side Two, when "Somebody Got Murdered" rewards the listener's patience with a typically heroic anthem.

The first of the three discs ends with another flawed excursion into dub, "One More Time", which doesn't really go anywhere, is interminably long, and frankly, if you're not into reggae, you'll be delighted by the next track, which is... er, the same track all over again, remixed with a studio flange effect used with all the enthusiasm of a teenage guitarist trying out his first effects pedal. Perhaps not the most obvious note on which to end Disc One, but there are bigger and bolder surprises to come.

Disc Two starts reasonably enough with Joe Strummer's stuttering "Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)", a funked-up ode to life in New York. "Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)" mines the classic Clash sound once more, but the album moves back into more eclectic territories with the calypso-flavoured "Let's Go Crazy", which all at once spirits up the sound and the atmosphere of a Notting Hill carnival. The third side even closes with a surreal gospel pastiche ("The Sound of the Sinners"). Another cover, Eddy Grant's "Police on My Back", opens Side Four, reinvented here as a pacey punk number, neatly subverting the album's trick of making punk sound like reggae.

But it is Disc Three that will trouble your record player the least. For starters, the opening track to Side Five, "Lose This Skin", isn't even the Clash at all, more a selection of Clash members backing Joe Strummer's old busking mate Tymon Dogg, who plays violin throughout. It's actually quite a catchy melody if you can stand Dogg's vocal - I still swear blind it's Toyah Willcox singing and, I kid you not, there's even bloody bagpipes at the end of the song.

If Sandinista! is the Clash's White Album, then its "Revolution 9" is surely the unlistenable sound collage "Mensforth Hill". There's even a "Good Night" moment just before the end in the form of a reworking of "Career Opportunities", reinvented here as a children's classroom singalong, just in case the point was a bit too subtle the first time round.

Sandinista! does, in fact, sound way ahead of its time, mixing genres as fluidly as any of Joe Strummer's solo work with the Mescaleroes. The band (with producer Mikey Dread) clearly had a glut of ideas and wanted to try something totally different. The results can sometimes sound a little disjointed, perhaps even chaotic at times, but hey, that's punk for you, and if you miss the point, then maybe you're not as punk as you thought you were. The album is certainly a less commercial effort than London Calling, and maybe that's why it palls on the ears of those with less sophisticated tastes, people who were expecting nosebleed White Riot-era punk or those who bought "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" on the back of that jeans advert.

Sandinista! takes the curveball of styles thrown by its predecessor and runs away with them, and as such it takes some patience to appreciate. If you get the joke, Sandinista! is a wonderful album indeed, but just like a good Stilton, you'll appreciate this rich musical offering at its best when it's broken up into smaller chunks.

1000 Great Albums: Status Quo: Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon

Ma Kelly's Greasy Spoon was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1970 by Pye Records.

It completely broke the mould that had made Status Quo a household name with their debut hit, the plastic-psychedelic "Pictures Of Matchstick Men", two years earlier, in fact this third album would be quite unlike any of Quo's output to date, except perhaps for an uncharacteristically hard-rocking cover of the Everly Brothers 'Price Of Love' which was issued in late 1969.

This is a not an album that wants to impress its audience with over-produced cod-psychedelia and frilly shirts like its two predecessors. The blueprint for the new decade was gritty, down-to-earth boogie, and the album cover says it all; a gingham-checked waitress looking twenty years older than she probably is stares from behind the counter of an eponymous "greasy spoon" café typical of its era, looking bored and positively reeking of vinegar, stale tobacco and cheap instant coffee. Piles of washing-up fester in the foreground. This warts-and-all cover is the neatest possible metaphor for the music itself, recorded as it is with minimal overdubs and production errors left in for good measure.

Ma Kelly is a refreshingly honest and unpretentious work. The moment you launch into the opening "Spinning Wheel Blues", you can smell the grease, the sweat, the faded denim. It sounds raw, perhaps like it was recorded in the back room above a pub: a twelve-bar blues that doesn't even call upon the services of a fourth chord, and Francis Rossi hasn't even bothered rhyming his lyrics! The song just chugs along nicely, doing its own thing, and by the time the guitar solo kicks in you're already hooked, and tapping your foot if not nodding your head.

Track 2, "Daughter", which bears some traces of the band's psychedelic history, is the one that will get you nodding your head. Rick Parfitt's guitar goes all baggy - you can even hear the strings rattling about, and Rossi's lazy drawl of a hookline is totally irresistible in its simplicity.

The band throw in a further surprise in the tender acoustic ballad "Everything", sung by Parfitt, with cello and acoustic guitars all the way, before totally letting rip with "Shy Fly", which, along with "(April) Spring, Summer and Wednesdays" and "Lakky Lady" sound way too cool to be Quo songs, which isn't to say they're not fantastic rock songs in their own right - they just don't sound like typical 12-bar Quo because the band dare to push the envelope out a little, something at which Quo would eventually become rather adept, even if it did mean releasing atypical tracks like 1983's "Marguerita Time". "Shy Fly" could almost be a Canned Heat track, and the funky "Lakky Lady" boasts the best lead solo on an album where Francis Rossi is still clearly finding his feet.

Apart from that, it's chugging Quo boogie all the way, with perhaps only one seriously weak link in the form of "Lazy Poker Blues". Highlights include a cover of Steamhammer's "Junior's Wailing", played with far more feeling than the original, and the album closer "Is It Really Me?/Gotta Go Home", which repeats a thundering great headbanging riff for nine - count them - nine and a half minutes. Quo apparently used to stretch the song out live for half an hour at a time, and to be honest you could probably sit there, shaking your head to it for a full half hour without getting completely bored, even if the melody doesn't really go anywhere.

"Ma Kelly's" is the template that Quo built their career on, and if, like many people I know, you think Quo are a bunch of one-trick ponies, then take a listen to this. Quo were at their most credible in the early 1970s, and this album is the perfect snapshot of a band at the peak of their powers.