Five Miles Out

They are in paradise

I am not a born Londoner. I had lived in Luton, Royston, Brightlingsea and Cambridge by the time I was 28. I had started working at Newham Sixth Form College in December 1992 (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/922 ). I had anticipated a couple of years there and I would be able to find something closer to home.

Commuting was such a drag that I decided that it would be easier to live in London and go back to Essex at the weekends. I had always been wary of London and my experiences on the OBAS audit (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/973 ) and PE1 exams (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1541 ) had done nothing to change my opinion. We had visited London as children but after school visits in 1981 and 1982 I did not visit again until a Christmas shopping expedition in 1988 (I feel sorry for the poor woman sat next to the heavily hung over twenty something on the bus to London).

I moved to East Ham, which is not the prettiest part of London to live in a shared house. It was burgled twice in two years, hardly the best start. It was also far too close to West Ham’s ground.

Now I love London. I love the mixture of cultures. I love the different foods you can get and the fact that you can get it when you want it. I love the public transport system – I live within 2 minutes of the bus stops and 5 minutes of the underground. When Crossrail opens it will be less than 25 minutes to Oxford Street.

I love the facilities that are here. The museums and the art galleries, the chance to explore culture unlike anywhere else in the UK. I love the theatres (even though I do not go as much as I would like).

I love the Christmas light in London – this is Seven Dials near Covent Garden. The lights are always spectacular in this part of London.

It is tacky and silly, but I love Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. Everything may be three of four times the price outside – the experience is the thing.

I love that you can find so much history here. There are so many walks you can do – Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Princess Diana and so on. There is history in every street – especially if you look up from ground level and see the unaltered buildings. The tiny side streets and alleys with restaurants underground.

I love that you can walk in central London and not take the tube. Non-Londoners will slavishly get on the tube to go from station to station, not realising that it is actually quicker to walk. (thanks to Alan Moore for that advice).

I love that you can find anything that you want. Multiple comic shops and huge book stores.

The city has a beauty of its own from the west to the east, from the north to the south. Camden Market, Canary Wharf. The Indian street food of Hounslow. The restaurants of Brick Lane. Chinatown in Soho. Parliament and Big Ben.

This is a love song to London from the most quintessentially British band ever. The Kinks.

Waterloo Sunset

And our love become a funeral pyre

We left Ranthambore (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1749 ) by train with Dad and I both ill (as well as around twelve others out of our group of 27). They even overcharged us on the bar bills, I had managed to down several lagers while confined to my room with a terrible stomach. There was space on the trains to spread out and I dozed until we disembarked and got a coach to Fatepur Sikri.

Our tour guide, Lianne, thought that I looked so bad that I should stay on board the coach. The whole thing about fear of missing out kicked in and I made it up the hill to the abandoned city. It had once been capital of the Mughal Empire, but was eventually abandoned in 1610. The Mughal emperor was very fair – having a Muslim wife, a Hindu wife and a Christian wife.

(Fatepur Sikri)

There were some interesting gifts being sold by hawkers, but Lianne was opposed to any purchase she did not get a slice of the takings, so we were hustled back to the coach. It was a two-hour further coach ride to Agra. Our hotel was beautiful – the best of the tour. All the rooms were round a huge central quadrangle with a swimming pool. The restaurant was stunning. At breakfast there was even a toast chef – you pointed to a colour chart and he did the toast that colour for you. Unfortunately Dad and I were so ill while we there that we barely ate anything and spent all the free time resting in our rooms.

On the first evening we went to see a show which was partially live and partly filmed inserts showing the history of the Taj Mahal. It was built by the emperor Shah Jahan as a monument to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

The hotel was less than half a mile from the Taj. This was good as the plan was to see it at sunrise so we were queuing from 5.30am. There were two queues – one for Indians where the price was 25 rupees, the other was for tourists and was a lot more expensive. £10. The queues were also split by sex, due to the need for searches.

It was well after 7am when we got in.

(Tour party at the Taj – Dad kneeling front right, I am just to the right of centre in the back row)

It is a lot more polluted around the Taj Mahal than pictures would lead you to believe. It is constantly hazy.

(Me on my third day of not eating)

To go inside the Taj Mahal you had to wear these bright orange show coverings.

Most of the common pictures of the Taj Mahal do not make it clear that it is covered in beautiful, intricate designs.

There are four towers at the corners.

There are few shots that are not from the front. The only slight disappointment is that the inside is very plain.

We went back to the hotel where the healthy few ate and then we went out to the famous Fort. Agra was the capital of the Mughal Empire after Fatepur Sikri and before Delhi.

This is what the Taj Mahal looked like from the Fort – the pollution is especially bad over the river.

Our cases left at 5pm as we were off to Khajuraho the next day (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1913 ).

The Doors were one of the late 60s group influenced by mysticism (or drugs). Their name was taken from the quote – ”There are things that are known and things that are unknown. In between them are doors.”

They made six studio albums before Jim Morrison (the lead singer) died in Paris. The first two are exceptional and then there are declining returns that match Morrison’s decline, before a return to form on the sixth album LA Woman.

Light My Fire

Playlist:

Break on Through
Light My Fire
Tale It As It Comes
The End
Strange Days
Love Me Two Times
People Are Strange
When the Music’s Over
Hello I Love You
Love Street
The Unknown Soldier
Touch Me
Roadhouse Blues
Waiting For the Sun
Love Her Madly
LA Woman
The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)
Riders on the Storm

On This Fantastic Day

Day 5 in Egypt was our one late alarm call – 8am, other days were 6am or even earlier (to beat the worst of the heat of or to travel). The boat was already moving away from Luxor when we woke up and, because there were no mosquitos, the windows were wide open and I could see the fields outside. Egypt’s fertile strip is limited to a narrow strip either side of the Nile so the country’s population of over 80 million is crammed into a narrow strip of land.

Cruising like this is the most civilised way to be a tourist. Relaxed travel between sites with room to move around. Bliss.

At Edfu we got horse buggies to the temple. The hawkers and the drivers were even more pushy here than in Luxor. We paid our tips in bulk at the start so that the guides would handle it all. This did not stop them asking for more.

(Randa leads us into Edfu Temple)

Edfu is one of the best-preserved temples from the Ptolemaic era in Egypt (late in Egypt’s history, just before its conquest by Rome).

As we left the hawkers were even worse than when we arrived, they targeted the women in the touring party as they were not as blunt as the men were at ignoring them (there were also a lot more of them).

(Edfu town from the carriage)

Back on the boat we had a lovely barbecue lunch on deck as we cruised on to Kom Ombo. Afterwards the Captain gave us a tour of the boat – the kitchens were the cleanest I have ever seen in my life. Enterprising hawkers would approach the boat and throw up their wares for inspection – if you wanted them you just threw the money back down.

It was 5pm by the time we got to Kom Ombo and the Sun was starting to set. It is another Ptolemaic temple, but of an unusual double design. While Randa went to get our tickets for the site I was appointed as the temporary guide and told to keep the party under control.

(Not the best tour guide – Yalla Yalla)

(Me and Dad – it suits him better)

It was fancy dress night on the boat – a way to make money selling us costumes. The Jellabiyas are comfortable though and I still have mine

Peter Sarstedt is remembered for one song, Where Do You Go To My Lovely? about a woman who rises from poverty in Naples to be part of the jet set (he made a less famous sequel called Last of the Breed many years later). I liked it so much I bought the single from a special oldies range issued in the early 80s and this was the B side. Hr is a really good singer/ songwriter and I Am a Cathedral is another classic track.

Frozen Orange Juice

It’s 8.15 and that’s the time it’s always been

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were (or are) a synth band from Liverpool. Mike was always a much bigger fan than me. I have to admit that I think that their output was much less good after their third album Architecture and Morality. Even on that album half the tracks were touched by genius and the remainder just seemed like weird experimentation. I loved Joan of Arc, but the public preferred Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans (renamed Maid of Orleans on single release to avoid confusion) – I mean who releases an album with two songs about Joan of Arc? That is artistic.

Andy McCluskey (one of the two key members along with Paul Humphreys) has a lot to answer for, being responsible for Atomic Kitten. A group of such little talent it made Hear’Say look like the Beatles, they released terrible covers of songs like Eternal Flame and The Tide is High. The public will buy any crap with a group of scantily clad blondes singing them. Not just that – without Atomic Kitten Kerry Katona would not be famous, so that is another mark against them.

Ahem. Back to OMD.

OMD’s most important single was Enola Gay – the name of the plane that dropped the first of the two nuclear bombs used in combat. The song’s lyrics reflect that raid on Japan.

For many years the story was that Japan would have defended the islands to the last and the war would have gone on for many years without this bomb and the one days later on Nagasaki (a different type of nuclear device). There is plenty of evidence now that this was not the case and the reasons were actually twofold. A need to finish the war before the Soviet Union could get into Japan and the American military’s desire to test the bombs in combat.

Thus the world lives under the spectre of nuclear Armageddon to this day. It is less of a high profile threat since the fall of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War there were frequent points when both sides were close to launching enough nukes to destroy the world – either due to a real event (most famously the Cuban Missile Crisis) or misread data or errors in systems.

The threat now is if a terrorist group could ever build one. The materials to produce one have been made by rogue states, like North Korea, and the materials from the former Soviet Union were never wholly accounted for. It would not have to be a big weapon, the radiation fallout from a small one could devastate swathes of the Earth, causing even more damage to fragile ecosystems that we are destroying due to the Climate Crisis. Genie’s don’t go back into bottles.

There is no need for nuclear weapons anymore. There are enough natural threats without stupidity being a way to destroy the human race.

Enola Gay

Playlist:

Electricity
Messages
Bunker Soldiers
Enola Gay
Souvenir
Joan of Arc
Maid of Orleans
Georgia
The Beginning and the End
Genetic Engineering
Telegraph
Tesla Girls
So In Love
Secret
(Forever) Live and Die

Young People Speaking Their Minds

Everyone should know the mantra – if it is too good to be true, then it is not true. Somehow plenty of people, including many smart people just forget this a lot of the time.

The first time I remember seeing films with characters inserted into old scenes was Forrest Gump. Forrest is seen with JFK, Richard Nixon, and others looking like he was there at the time. The same film used one helicopter to look like seven in the scene where he arrives in Vietnam. No one believes it is real when presented in this context.

(Forrest meets JFK)

Superhero films and fantasy are now filmed on green screen and look totally realistic. The computer generation makes them more akin to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than live action films in a traditional sense.

(X-Men: Apocalypse)

It used to be requests from Nigerian princes or other African politicians, offering huge sums of illegal money if you would only send them your data and a few hundred pounds to unlock customs. People fell for it. Or Microsoft Global Lotteries where you were randomly selected for $1,000,000 from your e-mail address (and surely if Bill Gates was doing that it would be Hotmail addresses not Google or Yahoo).

Nowadays there are special offers from retail companies, or bank accounts/ Paypal accounts to unlock. Even the simple trick of replying to see the real e-mail address it is from or hovering off a link that purports to be real but sends you to some random site that will be used to extract your money is beyond some people.

Random messages from HMRC to refund you money are another winner. If your e-mail isn’t a real name it can be a giveaway. Dear HotDiva32, you have a tax refund to claim should be giveaway.

People even still fall for the phone call scam where the Police claim that they need you to transfer all your money into a secure account to help them trap a fraudster at the bank. So you cannot tell anyone at the bank.

On holiday in 2016 I used a cash machine that I think took my details. Whether it was that or not someone tried to use a clone of the card a month later in the Cayman Islands. The bank was really good, they stopped the withdrawals and texted me. I made sure I called back on the number that I had not on the one in the text and it was all legit. I got my money back.

Schools need to teach financial management; IT scepticism and critical thinking.

The thing that worries me is that technology has got to the stage where fakes can be made of people speaking and doing things that they have not done. Deep Fakes.

Fake news is rampant and weaponised to the extent that human turd Donald Trump points to the real news and calls it fake. His baying, moronic supporters swallow it. If you are British and support Johnson and his gang of nationalists, yet laugh at Trump, here is some news – Johnson lies almost as often as Trump.

Nina Schick has written a wonderful book about this.

I really worry about humanity’s future unless people learn to distinguish reality from what they want the world to be like.

I had heard this song a lot of times, but I never knew what it was until I watched the credits of Forrest Gump. It was used in the Vietnam scenes – a conflict that still seems to define the USA’s foreign policy psyche to this day. Buffalo Springfield were very much of the same period as The Byrds (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/12/16/nowhere-is-there-warmth-to-be-found/ ) combining psychedelia, country, folk and rock.

For What It’s Worth

You Should Learn To Walk Before You Crawl

The end of a night out drinking usually means that you want food. Not just food but crap food as the alcohol puts the brain into starvation mode. In Brightlingsea back in the 80s the usual option was Chinese, though there was an Indian restaurant on and off (more often a sit down after a stag doo – Grace Allen’s sister had a party trick involving smashing glasses in there, so it was odd she was never banned). I love the Goodness Gracious Me sketch that riffs on this:

When we moved on to drinking in Colchester the kebab became the late night after meal of choice. This was partly due to the law change that the Blair government brought in to allow pubs to open later and the kebab shops were the only ones open when we finally left. The problem with the legislation change was that it did not encourage continental style café drinking (as opposed to British binge drinking). Everyone just went out later and later.

(Colchester High Street at night)

If we finished before midnight KFC or McDonalds were possibilities – which is where I discovered a terrible weakness for the former’s Zinger Tower Burger. I try to ration myself on these but I feel like I could eat them all the time – it is the combination, chicken, salsa and hash brown that does it.

As for McDonalds – they do 99p cheeseburger offers, Dave once managed to eat 10 of them in one go.

The kebab shops were worse. I would not have wanted to be Phil Salmon after he ate 6 raw chillies. At least I would not have wanted to be him in the morning.

Dave has been the most amazing though. There was the time he picked up the half-eaten kebab in a Colchester car park and finished it. The best time was when we were in there in the wee small hours and he ordered a large donner meat and chips. This was to eat while they cooked an entire chicken for him – with garlic sauce. I felt sorry for Rose (his wife) that night.

I hate kebabs, even when drunk. Though a lot of the kebab shops in Colchester do a damn good burger – at least they are that way when I am drunk. These days I don’t have to deal with the post drunk munchies.

In the Greek Islands we had a Chinese takeaway (at the end of the road in Crete) and a lot of time there would be amazing ice cream sundaes to eat (Lindos and Kos Town). You take what you can get at the end of a night out.

In The Sun pub (in Brightlingsea) I heard a track that had the word “she” in the chorus and I tried to track it down. This was the first one that I tried but it was not the right one. Bloody good song though.

She Comes in the Fall

I Still Hear the Songs

I have never been a fan of Disney. Mum took us to the cinema to see the films when we were children but not a fan. I smiled at Disney’s hubris at building in Paris, rather than the warmer climes of southern Europe and the years of losses there. At the same time Disney was a declining movie company and looked like it may disappear or be bought up by one of the other studios.

Now Disney is a super powerhouse, owning the Star Wars franchise and Marvel, making huge amounts of money and it is one of the entertainment titans of the early 21^st century.

In 2009 Dad took my two daughters, Chantelle and Charisma, and me there for four days and three nights. I may not like Disney cartoons but the site is great fun.

We got the Eurostar straight into the park and paid the extra to have our bags taken to our hotel so we could go straight in. The Eurostar was amazing on its own as you get out of London in minutes.

We arrived 2pm French time and went to see Frontierland and on the paddle steamer. Charisma will not mind me saying that she is very particular about her food (and it continues to this day) and we were always trying to find places and things that she would like.

Our hotel was in the park – not the one over the gate where you came out and were straight into the attractions, but about 10 minutes away. It was so big that it was at least another 4 minutes to our rooms. It came with the right to go into the park from 8am, rather than 10am for day visitors. Sadly it was the third day before we worked out how to do the park most efficiently.

This is the hack. Get up and have breakfast then be at the gate at 8am. Not all the rides are open but use those that are – especially the popular ones like Space Mountain. After 9.30am queue for the popular rides that open at 10am like Big Thunder Mountain – some you have to wait at a gate for it to be opened and run. By midday the park is packed so go and eat lunch and then siesta. Return for the parade in the afternoon and then go for dinner. The parades last an hour and are absolutely spectacular, with plenty of chances to interact with the participants. By this stage the day trippers have gone and you can get on loads of rides quickly. The closer it gets to the 10pm closure the less people there are in the queues.

Dad pleaded blood pressure when it came to Space Mountain meaning I had to take Chantelle. She loved it but I was thoroughly nauseated. On the last day she really wanted to go again so I screwed up my courage and kept my eyes shut.

(Early start with the park behind us – Charisma at the front, Chantelle and me at the back)

(Queuing for Big Thunder Mountain – along with Pirates of the Caribbean, my favourite rides)

As we went at the end of October the place was in full Halloween mode. That included the parade where a selection of Disney’s worst villains led the way as The Nightmare Before Christmas played on a loop.

(Charisma and Chantelle ham it up and look cute😊).

One of the things that you can do in the afternoons is pay for the fixed balloon ride over the park. It is a fantastic view.

(The hotel)

(The park from the balloon)

There is also the studio park. We tried it on the third day – first of all a tram tour, then we realised Charisma was tall enough to go on the rock and roller coaster. We never got on it as it broke down – though we queued for ages. The sight of people walking out of the tunnel put us off trying again.

(The Magic Kingdom at night)

Pirates of the Caribbean was amazing and It’s a Small World is aimed at children, but we could have ridden it for hours.

It is not cheap to go there but is was a really fun time and the girls loved it – though it was tiring.

There is not a huge amount of 21^st century music on the list, but I love this track.

Don’t You Worry Child

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9BtTrZdft8

Fuck them and their law

Is there anywhere in the UK that gets the bad rep that Essex does? We are stupid; have no taste; we all have spray tans, holiday in Marbella, shop at Lakeside and are obsessed with money.

This started with the “Essex girl” jokes in the early 1990s, which were based on the erroneous assumption that women in Essex were sex obsessed idiots. Most of the jokes were a variation of”blonde women” jokes that have been around for far longer.

Then there is The Only Way is Essex – a TV reality series so moronic that I thought that it was a comedy spoof when it started.

Part of the problem is that Essex is not homogenous. The southern parts border London, the north is next to Suffolk. The further noth in the county you get the further you get from TOWIE country – Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill. Once past Chelmsford Essex is far more like Suffolk than the south of the county – largely villages and small towns, apart from Colchester.

(Brightlingsea from the air)

Colchester is a Roman town and retains a lot of its history. The Castle, the Dutch quarter (due to the trade routes) and lots of old buildings. Up until the 2009 financial crash it was a hugely successful regional town with a really banging night life, lots of restaurants and plenty of business including a newly developed Riverside industrial centre. Like a lot of the country the last ten years have not been kind with shop and bar closures. We even lost our favourite pool club, the kind of place where you hired the table by the hour and could get bar food – great for a cheap night out.

(Colchester Castle)

Clacton is like a miniature Southend On Sea. You get the seaside stuff but it is not that big. It does sit next to Jaywick (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/10/03/all-those-lonely-lonely-times/ ) the most deprived part of the country.

Essex is one of the least diverse parts of the country and there is a definite sense of English nationalism that persists that reaches a peak in Clacton, but is prevalent in places like Wickford and Southend too. Too many people who live in the county think the rest of the UK looks like Essex and that diversity is some metropolitan agenda rather than the reality in much of the country.

(Clacton pier)

The most beautiful part of Essex is Dedham vale on the Suffolk border. Made famous by the works of John Constable it remains an area of outstanding natural beauty. Think about this when you think about Essex – not TOWIE or the xenophobia.

There have not been a lot of famous bands from Essex. Depeche Mode and Blur (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1090 ) are from Basildon and Colchester. The biggest band is probably the Prodigy. They started in the rave craze of the very early 90s – including the first song based on TV clips with Charly. Even their first album shows that was not their limit and the track Weather Experience hints at a wider ambition. They are most famous for lead singer Keith Flint and the single Firestarter as the group started to move towards a rave/ heavy metal crossover. There have been many great albums – Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, Fat of the Land and Invaders Must Die.

For me the best is their second album – Music For the Jilted Generation. An album very much about the rave generation and their experience. This track was their response to the policing of raves by the government. Fuck them and their Law.

Their Law

Playlist:

Jericho
Charly
Everybody in the Place (single version)
Weather Experience
Out of Space
Ruff in the Jungle Bizness
Their Law
Voodoo People (pendulum mix)
Poison
No Good (Start the Dance)
The Narcotics Suite
Firestarter
Smack My Bitch Up
Breathe
Funky Shit
Narayan
Spitfire
Invaders Must Die
The Day is My Enemy
Ibiza
Razor

We Can’t Rewind We’ve Gone Too Far

Doctor Who has form with audio stories – back in the 70s there were some vinyl LPs, like an abridged Genesis of the Daleks. Then there are the missing stories (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/08/29/like-the-deserts-miss-the-rain/ ) that the BBC released on cassette (sometimes with bizarre linking commentary) and then on CD. The weirdest bit was in The Daleks Master Plan where there is a silent movie sequence, so it is just silent movie type music. Got to be grateful we have these though.

BBV were a company who filled this void after Doctor Who went off the air in 1989. They made videos with cast members which, for copyright purposes, gave them other names. They also made a range of audios featuring the Professor and Ace. The first was Republica, which I still think is the best Who story Mark Gatiss wrote. The BBC were not happy and they were renamed The Dominie and Alice.

BBV’s output diversified into using old monsters (Paul Ebbs’ Race Memory and Iain Hepburn’s In2Minds being great examples) and Faction Paradox (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1869 ) when Big Finish productions gained the official rights to make Doctor Who audios.

I had great expectation for their first release – The Sirens of Time. They made it a story featuring three Doctors (only Davison, Colin Baker and McCoy would work for them at the time). It was absolute garbage. It was of the standard of an 11 year old fan could have done (and not a talented one). Big Finish refused to use narrators and that meant characters would extensively describe what they could see to each other – or if a character was on their own they would talk to themselves – particularly badly done in Alan Barnes’ Storm Warning where the Doctor spends 15 minutes chatting away to himself.

The second release was Phantasmagoria by Mark Gatiss. I fell asleep every time I listened to it.

Part of the selling point was that they did not have to worry about special effects money – all fine, but a big space battle and armies fighting on audio is just noise. There was a limited budget for cast members and these big stories have a limited number of speaking roles.

There have been some good stories. Rob Shearman is a talented playwright and The Holy Terror, The Chimes of Midnight and Jubilee are all good stories. Paul Magrs (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1517 ) has written many, including The Stones of Venice, which was the script used to attract Paul McGann to the company. On the other hand, I was told, Paul McGann told them if they gave him a script as bad as Seasons of Fear again that would be it. I think the money has brought him back though.

The problem is the machine like need for so many stories. There have been so many spin offs featuring supporting characters like Jago and Litefoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. There have been 56 stories about them alone.

The biggest problem has been that some of the least talented writers are closely connected to the company and have written huge amounts of material. Alan Barnes and Nick Briggs are dreadful writers. Great writers would find it hard to produce the amount they have done. They are barely passable as writers.

Big Finish repeatedly held themselves up as a pseudo charity that were making these stories for Who fans and not making any money. The late Craig Hinton gave me information many years ago about costs for each audio that enabled me to work out (using the company’s financial statements) that they were coining money in during the first few years, most of it going to the owners. As soon as my article was published business was split into new companies and exemptions used to stop disclosing information. Gary Russell even e-mailed the owners of the Jade Pagoda mailing list asking for me to stop repeating this information. Unfortunately for him I was one of the owners of the Pagoda so I e-mailed him back asking which points he was disputing and showing my workings. There was never a reply.

There have been some good stories (in addition to the ones above by Shearman and Magrs). Eddie Robson’s are always good and Jim Mortimore’s The Natural History of Fear is brilliant. Phil Pascoe’s …ish, most of Lance Parkin’s and Simon Forward’s The Sandman.

You need a hell of a lot of time to sift the gems from the huge amount of dross. For a certain kind of fan Doctor Who isn’t Doctor Who without the actors so this was, and is, catnip. Even more so for fans who found the books hard work and they praise Big Finish to the roof. Do not believe them.

Pat Sharp thinks that this song is silly – pretty brave from the man who recorded I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet, sporting a mullet that was out of fashion years earlier. The Buggles were Trevor Horn (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/05/18/this-is-not-enough/ ) and Geoff Downes (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/10/29/ill-hear-you-when-youre-calling/ ). They made two albums, though the second sank almost without trace. This is undoubtedly their best, and most famous, song.

Video Killed the Radio Star

The thunder of guns

AC/DC are an Australian band that started in the 1970s. I had no idea who they were as, like a lot of heavy metal bands, they did not have hit singles in the UK. Clive Hook lent me a load of their albums on tape in the early summer of 1981. Their early albums are not the best produced and do not showcase their sound at their best – Powerage, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap and High Voltage. Their album that actually showcased their early material the best way was the live album If You Want Blood You’ve Got It.

Keen to show my knowledge at school now I was an expert on AC/DC I talked about Bon Scott on their new album Back In Black. To my utter shame Gareth Huckle pointed out that Bon Scott had died of alcohol poisoning the previous year and Brian Johnson was now the lead singer. I was totally mortified (I always thought Gareth was a cool guy and was liked by most people – the fact that after I left Royston I came to know him a lot better when he played Dungeons and Dragons with us only showed I was right).

Back In Black is a monster album – one of the iconic heavy metal long players. Brian Johnson is actually an improvement on Bon Scott and it is full of great songs (see the playlist below).

It seemed like a last hurrah though. Their 80s albums were just repetitive and did not have the anything new to add. Songs like Let’s Get It Up just seemed like their ideas from the ‘70s (Big Balls in this case).

So when Andy Sadler took a stereo on holiday in 1991 and stuck in The Razor’s Edge album I inwardly groaned. The first starts quietly and builds with each repeat of “Thunder”, getting louder and with more instruments joining in. I am not sure that I have heard anything else quite like it anywhere. There are a couple more great tracks on the album but, for me, that was their swan song.

The track is hugely popular and covered by hundreds, if not thousands of bands live. Dumper played it, (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/06/10/ma-youre-just-jealous-were-the-dumper-boys/ ) changing the lyrics to “Dumperstruck” and if anyone is ever sick you can tell a metal fan if they say that the person is “Chunderstruck”.

AC/DC continued but they had a definite move to the mainstream when their music was chosen to be the backdrop for Iron Man. Iron Man was not the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film, but it was the one that made the franchise. Robert Downey Jr rehabilitated his career as hard living genius, Tony Stark. He was so important to the franchise that he commanded over $50 million a film.

This is a scene from The Avengers which always makes me smile. The “Agent Romanov did you miss me?”, overriding the PA system so that AC/DC plays, the iconic landing and then that Reindeer Games comment. One of the (many, many) missteps in Iron Man 3 is not using the AC/DC music – The Invincible Iron Man is heavy metal for heaven’s sake.

Thunderstruck

Playlist:

The Jack (live)
She’s Got Balls
High Voltage
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Big Balls
Problem Child (live)
Let There Be Rock (live)
Whole Lotta Rosie (live)
Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be
Bad Boy Boogie
Rock ‘n’ Roll Damnation
Riff Raff
Highway To Hell
If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)
Hell’s Bells
Shoot To Thrill
What Do You Do For Money Honey
Given the Dog a Bone
Let Me Put Your Love Into You
Back In Black
You Shook Me All Night Long
For Those About To Rock (We Salute You)
Heatseeker
Thunderstruck
Money Talks
The Razor’s Edge