Been a little slack with the answering of e-mail this past week or so. Please bear with that but there's stuff to be attended to. What can I tell ya? Anyway, I'm sitting here listening to Laura's first Radio (Scotland) Thrift Shop. It's really great and you can hear it if you go to the Radio Scotland site Listen Again page. There are 4 in all running into September.

This coming Sunday, some very special guests are coming to hang out here for a few days. The great Phast Phreddie Patterson whose Back Door Man zine was a humungous inspiration to me is schlepping by with my twin sister in R&R, Ms Nancy Breslow and her daughter Syd(elle). It's gaunnae be grand.

I was in Falkirk today for the first time in a while. Walking past Leckies, a shop that sells overstocks and stuff from places that have gone out of business. I'm surprised that it's still there but it seems to be thriving. Anyway, It took me straight back to the start of '77 when they bought the contents of a record store. There were many, many 45's but chiefly we figured there'd be a cachet of Sex Pistols "Anarchy's" in there someplace that we could sell on. It had been withdrawn and somehow we talked the owner into letting us go through the entire collection. So myself and Alistair Beattie went down there and rummaged through the whole bloody lot. We found some decent stuff but there was not a copy of "Anarchy" to be found. There was a ton of Mr Big's "Romeo" though. It had the next consecutive catalogue number to what we were hunting for, every copy of that we found gave us hope that we figured there must be at least a couple of copies of that booty hiding amongst the piles but t'was not to be. Ali is no longer with us but we had a laugh down there. It was like being in a vinyl mine and as futile as the main objective turned out to be, undertaking such a task seems like it just couldn't happen now. More's the pity.

View the trailer and pray for a screening to come right the f-word down at a cinema near you. Details of upcoming trysts with these devils can be found at the Slowboat site also...

from PJ at DIRTY WATER...

"Please note that the Electric Prunes tour of Europe has been postponed.

They will now not be playing at Dirty Water on Thursday 1st September, nor anywhere else in the UK.

This is due to poor ticket sales for the festival at which they were due to play, organised by members and management of the Damned. The man with the money backed out...

We hope to see them back some time in the not too distant future."

Who'da thunk it? A major refurb of the Bo'ness Hippodrome is on the cards to transform it into an "arts" venue. The former La Fabrique will undergo a major transformation so watch this space for the full skinny. It's a cracking building and it's not gonna be a Starbuck's. How 'bout that?

Don's been out on the town again...

"went to the red devil lounge and saw some of the "pop overthrow" festival. i caught 3 acts: jill olson, chris von seidern and bobby sutlliffe.

jill olson (olsen?) was great great great. one good tune after another. country-pop in the laura cantrell vein. she had a really good band. she plays bass - a big old hollow body kay. someone told me she used to be in a band called red meat. i thought she looked familiar. she got an encore on a night with a lot of bands and short sets -- she was that good.

then von sneidern came up -- first meticulously wiping jill's lipstick off the mic. he did an acoustic set, solo, on a takamine 12 string. he moved his capo up a fret for each song. in one song he changed keys by moving the capo up in the middle of the song. i never saw that before. he was good but i kept wondering how his songs would've sounded if he had a band behind him.

he was followed by bobby sutliffe from ohio. bobby had written to me asking if i could get cyril to come and play. cyril showed up just in time to catch his set but didn't bring a guitar or amp so he just watched. sutliffe opened with chuck berry's "let it rock" which immediately brought back groovies memories. his next tune was NRBQ-ish. he had a white gibson SG with one P-90 pickup-- an oddity which neither me or cyril had ever seen before. matt piucci from the rain parade came up (with gretsch tennessean) and they did television's "glory". good but didn't quite fit... a little too art-rock. then sutliffe switched to a rick 12 and did a great song which cyril really dug. after that bobby said, "we'd like to finish with a song by the greatest san francisco band ever, the flamin' groovies". and they did "i can't hide". it was great. jill was up front rockin' out. for me it was even more of a kick standing next to the guy that wrote it! cyril then told me all about how he wrote it at 5AM at rockfield while everyone else was asleep except for him and dave edmunds. and they woke everyone up to hear it.

we hung out upstairs at barry simons office for a while then came back down and i went in and said hi to mr. sutliffe and introduced him to cyril. a good night."

You couldn't make it up... TEENAGE FANCLUB with Malcolm Middleton at Falkirk Town Hall on Friday October 7th (2005). Full details on ticket info will be linked when I get it.

And now, H just tipped me off to this Roky Documentary. Watch the skies! Further information as it becomes available, I just e-mailed the contact there to ask when it might hit up Europe.

In a perfect world it'd be the "Surprise Movie" at the Edinburgh Festival but hey, I'm nothing if not a realist.