Where Worlds Collide

2005 was the year when British outline N turned the corner. British N endured a couple of fallow years after Bachmann took over Graham Farish and relocated production to China. Then N seemed to take a back seat while Bachmann released model after model in OO, many of them rushed in an attempt to beat competition from Hornby. It took the arrival of a new manufacturer, Dapol, to make them pay attention to N. Since then we’ve seen Peco enter the fray, making British N look healthier than it’s been for years. We’ve seen Farish bring out the 170s and 158s with all-new mechanisms, and the Mk1 suburbans and Super BGs with much finer detail than anything produced before. Dapol gave us the GWR 45XX small prairie, rendering the Farish kettle range obsolete in a stroke, as well as the Dogfish ballast hopper, and the six wheel milk tank (but not yet in a diesel era livery, sadly) The year ended with not one, but two class 66s, from Dapol and Graham Farish. I’m hoping next year will bring the promised Peaks and Warships from Farish, as well as the Mk1 coaches in blue and grey, and Dapol will bring out

The Continental scene was the complete opposite, a year of consolidation and retrenchment. I’m told that N is in decline in the European market. Have German houses suddenly started getting bigger? We saw the virtual demise of the Arnold range, dragged down by the collapse of the Lima group, although with the company now owned by Hornby, some models will hopefully come back. We also saw Roco all but abandon N, with nothing save a few reliveries. The year ended with Roco going broke, but being sold to new management with production relocated to eastern Europe. I’m guessing that the ‘reissues’ that appeared towards the end of the year (Orange Eurofima coaches, Italian freight stock) were actually old stock being sold off to free up capital, and weren’t actually new production.

This leaves the ‘Big Two’, Fleischmann and Minitrix. Both released very few completely new models in 2005, concentrating on reliveries.

What will 2006 bring? Here are some of my wishes:

• Minitrix SBB EC stock in the new “Cisalpino” silver/blue colours. Since the common prototypes formation is a six car set made up from two A (first class) and four B (second class), selling them as a set of one A and two Bs would work well.
• Fleischmann BR185 in BLS silver/green livery as a BLS Re485. Since the prototypes tend to hunt in pairs, a powered/unpowered twin set would be nice.
• Hornby to get the Arnold Eurofima coaches in FS Turquoise and Cream back into production. An improved and upgraded BLS “Brown” Re4/4 is probably too much to hope for; the old model is rather long in the tooth both visibly and mechanically.
• The long promised Hobbytrain SBB UIC coaches to finally appear. I need both the Grey/Green EWiv style livery ones, and especially the promised Hupac livery.
• For completely new models, I’d like to see somebody produce the FS Cisalpino Pendolino sets, and at the other end of the spectrum, the modern EMUs used by the BLS and several other private railways.

1. Post more regularly in my online games. Sometimes I wonder how my players put up with me.
2. Play and GM more face-to-face RPGs. Since relocating to Manchester all my offline gaming has been at conventions, of which I’ve attended three or four a year. I’m thinking of joining or even running games at Fan Boy Three, Manchester’s game shop.
3. Get a model railway built in a reasonably complete state, including scenery. I’ve started too many overambitious schemes that ended up being abandoned part way through. Perhaps I need to start with something simpler. I think meeting up with the North East Cheshire Area Group of the N Gauge Society might be an encouragement here.
4. Go to church more regularly.
5. In order to accomplish any of the above, improve my time-management.

I went to more gigs in 2005 than any year I can remember, double the number in 2004. By all accounts 2005 was a good year for live music, whatever genre you prefer. I managed to see the following:

• Rammstein
• Asia/Barclay James Harvest
• Porcupine Tree (twice)
• Mostly Autumn (twice)
• Fish
• Marillion
• Paradise Lost
• Van der Graaf Generator

I’m not even go to try to rank these in order. High spots were the pyrotechnic sturm und drang of Rammstein at the beginning of the year, the awesome sonic maelstrom of Van der Graaf Generator, and by complete contrast, the imtimate atmosphere of the two Mostly Autumn shows, including the Christmas show in London. Who else can combine Floydian epics, celtic jigs and a traditional Christmas hymn without any of them sounding out of place?

The only real disappointments were the cancellation of The Mars Volta, a band I’d very much like to have seen live, and the quite awful performance the pseudo Barclay James Harvest supporting Asia. Even Fish, whose live performances can sometimes be decidedly patchy, put in a good performance on his ‘Return to Childhood’ tour.

So far, I don’t know what 2006 will bring, gig-wise. There’s nothing on the immediate horizon.

Everything that could possibly exist can be found somewhere on the Internet. But Iron Maiden album covers with Eddie replaced by Spongebob Squarepants? (Link from Making Light)

2005 has been a good year for music if you ignore all the overhyped four chord whiners and poseurs that clog up the charts. Here’s my top ten albums of the year. It excludes albums like The Darkness’ One Way Ticket to Hell or Rammstein’s Rosenrot, which came too late in the year for me to get the chance to listen to.

The Best

I can’t single out any one album as the best of the year, but there are four that stand out.

Opeth: Ghost Reveries

Mikael Åkerfeldt and his fellow Swedes’ finest album to date, seamlessly mixing Scandinavian death metal with English progressive rock to produce a dark, swirling masterpiece.

Mostly Autumn: Storms Over Still Water

Another solid release by York’s finest, continuing the evolution of their sound. The earlier folk stylings are largely missing this time around, in favour of commercial hard rock and some wonderful soaring progressive epics. They’ve improved tremendously as musicians, and I think their best is still to come.

Porcupine Tree: Darkwing

A harder-edged album than earlier releases, which drags progressive rock kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Porcupine Tree manage to combine metal, indie-rock, progressive and psychadelica in equal proportions, and display some superb musicianship without ever falling into self-indulgent widdling.

The Mars Volta: Frances the Mute

The Mars Volta take their frenetic punk-prog crossover even further out, with high energy improvisations of boggling complexity, and even more exotic ingredients added to their heady brew of influences. Easy listening it certainly isn’t.

The Rest

Deep Purple: Rapture of the Deep
The album that comes in a tin! Difficult to believe that it’s now ten years and four albums since Steve Morse replaced Richie Blackmore, and only now does his guitar sound seem fully integrated with the band. Light years away from ‘Smoke on the Water’, this one takes ‘No One Came’ from Fireball as the template, updated for the noughties. Get the special ‘tin’ edition for the bonus track ‘MTV’, a caustic swipe at the conservatism of American classic rock radio.

Dream Theater: Octovarium
While I still believe DT peaked with their fifth album, Metropolis II, their second-best is still more impressive than many other bands’ best. More prog and less metal, this one is an improvement on the rather tuneless Train of Thought.

Leaves Eyes: Vinland Saga
The surprise of the year. I caught this band live supporting Paradise Lost, and found their female-fronted viking-flavoured Euro-metal quite infectious. It certainly evokes images of longships and horned helmets.

Paradise Lost: Paradise Lost
With a self-titled tenth album, the Yorkshire doom metallers cut back on the electronic Depeche Mode sounds in favour of their earlier walls of twin guitar. A long-awaited return to form, or a cynical attempt at a retread of past glories? You decide!

Spocks Beard: Octane
There second release since the departure of founder and main man Neil Morse. With tighter arrangements this has a more streamlined commercial sound compared with earlier work, but it works well, and there’s some excellent songwriting and musicianship here. And there’s plenty of Mellotron.

Van der Graaf Generator: Present
Reunited after 28 years, their comeback double album is patchy but excellent in parts. Five new songs, two of them classics, and a whole disk of instrumental improvisations.

Making Light and their commenters put the boot in to the awful hack thrillers of Dan Brown.

I’ve managed to avoid them myself, even though half my work colleagues seem to be reading him, even when I tell them they ought to be reading Neal Stephenson instead. One of them is even amused when a Google search on “Illuminati” brought back this page of mine.

Why do his books sell so well if they’re so terrible? There are a number of theories, such as the ones suggested by SF author John M Ford:

[Ursula] LeGuin noted some time back that people will buy bestsellers (and go to hit movies) because they can participate, through the Law of Contagion, in the money involved. Film is the most expensive art form we have, which is one reason it’s taken so seriously.

And there’s also the Book Everybody is Reading factor, which is like the Movie (or, if you live in New York, Broadway Show) Everybody is Seeing. It’s easy to get left out of the conversation if you don’t get the references. (Note that there’s at least one book annotating the references, so you can both not read the novel and pretend you know more about it than people who have. Which leaves you both about even.)

Or maybe it’s because Dan Brown’s cliché-ridden pabulum is sold in supermarkets, so is readily available to the types that don’t darken the doors of a proper bookshop, filled with a such a bewildering array of titles that it means they have to make actual decisions about what to read.

The same thing happens with music. As in this quote from a review of the new album by The Darkness:

This album does not come close to the quality release of the last Journey album, Generations.

It almost unfair to compare this CD to bast array of recent good hard rock releases that come through my door. For an album that many people can find in their local supermarket, this is no doubt one of the best rock releases of the year.

So I think people should be reading Neal Stephenson and Gene Wolfe rather than Dan Brown, and be listening to Opeth and Porcupine Tree rather than Franz Ferdinand or Coldplay. Does this make me a snob? Or just someone who ignores media hype?

As anyone watching any UK news reports should know by now, there’s been a huge explosion at a fuel storage facility in Hemel Hempstead, resulting in a black cloud of smoke spreading across a large part of southern England. John at The England Project, who lives in Hemel Hempstead, has been liveblogging the event. At the moment, it’s looking like this was most likely the result of an equipment failure or maintenance error. Although terrorism can’t be ruled out, it’s looking unlikely. Certainly early rumours of a plane hitting the site have been discounted.

It’s a miracle that nobody was killed. I’m assuming that this means that everybody who was supposed to have been in the area at the time is accounted for.

While it doesn’t affect me directly, the location appears to be very close to the head office of my current employer. The company website is currently not accessible; this doesn’t look good.

Update. Looks like the place took the full force of the explosion. BBC News reports:

Northgate Information Solutions - the UK’s leading supplier of specialist software for human resources - said four of its employees had been taken to hospital but were later discharged.

In a statement to the stock market, Northgate said: “The fabric of the building and the fixtures and equipment inside have been badly damaged. The back-up systems that were in place have also been rendered inoperable.

“Northgate’s ability to service its customers has therefore been temporarily affected.”

The firm, whose shares fell in early trade, said a fall-back plan had been put into action, and work transferred to other offices from its main headquarters, where 400 people are employed.

“Northgate’s financial exposure is limited by its insurance policies that provide sufficient cover for the building and its contents as well as for any business interruption,” it said.

The Ministry of Information draws attention to a bit of a spat between Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree and Roine Stolt of The Flower Kings.

Steven Wilson:

Bands like the Flower Kings and Transatlantic? The DEATH of progressive music. These are the bands that reinforce every prejudice people have about progressive rock: old-fashioned, pompous, pretentious, hung-up on sci-fi concepts � that for me is rubbish.

Roine Stolt:

What he present is his opinion that we are the ‘death of progressive rock’, it is not that nice a statement really. I suppose he’s trying to say that bands like us scare the younger audience or the hip crowd and press away, that he now apparently is eager to please, it is in his ‘marketing plan’.

I don’t like to see musicians slagging each off in public, especially when it escalates to claims that some bands have no right to exist. Porcupine Tree and The Flower Kings are trying to do quite different things; why can’t they just leave it at that? Leave that sort of behaviour to louts like Liam Gallagher or the now-sacked bassist of The Darkness.

It reminds me of some of the endless flamewars the Marillion mailing list Freaks, a few years back. Why do people that prefer a more modern streamlined progressive-tinged sound feel the need to constantly condemn those bands who stick more closely to a 70′s template? I’d still much rather hear a slightly derivative copy of 70s Yes or Pink Floyd than any one of the endless production line of overhyped third-rate copies of XTC or The Jam that infest the present-day music scene.

Over the past few days my weblog has been repeatedly hit by a crapflooder, using randomly-generated text and a large number of URLs for either news or entertainment media sites, presumably in an attempt to flood my blacklist with junk and render it useless.

I have been unable to derive a regular expression that can filter out all his garbage without causing a lot of false positives. Short of disabling comments altogether, I’ve unfortunately had to implement some extremely aggressive filters, which will have to remain in place until this bozo gets bored and gives up.

So if you’ve tried to comment, and found your comment blocked, that’s why. Replace whatever word or domain it takes exception to, and try again. If you just give up, the spammers win.

Sorry for the inconvenientce

It appears that the new Tory leader, David Cameron, is a fan of generic corporate indie.

“The last album I bought was Hot Fuss by the Killers,” says Cameron, whose deeply presentable appearance hides the fact that he spent much of his adolescence listening to bands like the Clash and the Specials. “The Killers are very good and quite energetic, and I tend to listen to that kind of music in the car to forget about work and keep me awake. The Snow Patrol album is also excellent, and I like Radiohead.”

I thought Tories of his generation were supposed to be Iron Maiden fans.

Worse still, he’s a Smiths fan…

But perhaps the most surprising revelation was David Cameron’s penchant for “miserable” music by Radiohead, Pulp and The Smiths - all well-known critics of the Conservatives. Smiths singer Morrissey once recorded a song about Margaret Thatcher called “Margaret on the Guillotine”.