The 2017 Preview

[Mild applause]

Thank you, thank you. That was 2016. How will we ever forget? Do let the door hit you on the arse/ass on the way out, will you.

Phew. Still alive? Good. It's important to remember that January 1st to December 31st is only a year in the way that 1760 yards is a mile, it really doesn't matter where you place it, it's just a measurement of distance, if you look at time as a journey.

So... What can we expect from 2017 bearing in mind the odds for forecasting every single event in 2016 would have won you more money at the bookies than has ever existed or will exist until 2457. Had you been insane enough to have guessed just 200 of the celebrity deaths in a Yankee with Brexit, Donald Trump, Treeza May and Bruce Forsyth still being alive you could have bought earth and have the moon thrown in for good measure. You'd own everything, everyone, even wombats.

Applying a wee bit of logic, considerable amounts of drugs (mainly historical), and a kind of Salvador Dali procreates with Nigel Farage surrealism, here's 20 things that could happen in 2017:

1. 'Taking a Shitie' - The question on everyone's lips by the end of the summer will be 'What's your shit face like?' Take your picture while having a dump and then Instagram it. Crapper Snappers will be on the prowl and the name John-Henry will become the most popular name by December.

2. Staying on the anal theme; Kanye West's ego is lost down a rest room basin just outside Las Vegas. The 'rapper' blamed a taco he'd eaten earlier and would under no circumstances blame himself for eating it. President Trump has vowed to deploy many Mexicans to retrieve it from the shit mines of Iowa.

3. A photograph of Jamie Vardy will emerge at the end of May, shortly after Premier League Champions Leicester City are relegated, of the striker pissing on a photograph of the Arsenal team taken shortly after turning down the opportunity (in July) to play for a consistently average team rather than a bunch of one-season wonders. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, being French, just shrugged.

4. Kirk Douglas announces his wedding to Olivia de Havilland and the honeymoon will be two weeks at an S&M club in Deptford.

5. The government announces on the same day that ### ##### dies that due to a lack of money the NHS is being relabelled Virgin Health Service and it will only cost you £25 to see your GP.

6. A petition to have Jimmy Savile's remain dug up, desecrated and then thrown down a disused mine in Siberia is signed by over 10,000,000 people.

7. The Daily Express forecasts a ice age/heat wave this winter/summer with a likely apocalypse to follow if the immigrants and asylum seekers don't get you first.

8. Tim Peake is savagely attacked on Twitter and by media outlets for having a nice quiet two-week holiday with his family in the Algarve when he should have been appearing on television or radio at least once a week making a dick of himself.

9. Dolly Mixtures get a new name as not to offend people called Dolly or the odd sheep. The news is greeted by riots, social media outrage and the PM making a statement in the House. When the Daily Mail reports that the children's confectionery has been made with beef lard for the last 30 years the story dies overnight.

10. Rich people admit the 'trickle down effect' doesn't work because they only accrue money and never spend it. One multi-billionaire admitted to only eating $100 bills, sometimes with some egg mayonnaise.

11. Someone's arse explodes because of implants. Bits of gluteus maximus land in a woman's soy latte.

12. With a third of the world's best musicians dead, the other two-thirds refuse to leave their homes to record new music for fear of dying in some freak fan-related incident meaning for best part of the year nothing in the pop charts means anything to anyone over 30. New musical trends include DubChicken and Slime n Bass.

13. Slovenia elects a Toilet Duck as president.

14. The BBC offers to sell people the dates when Nigel Farage will not be appearing on their channels.

15. Donald Trump suggests that White American men should be allowed to have several wives and a small number of slaves to keep their plantations profitable and because most Americans are responsible people he disbands the police departments and allows the people of the USA to police themselves.

16. To be allowed to comment on or write letters to the Daily Mail you will first have to provide evidence that you are a vile scumbag - perhaps a photo of you beating a black dog or urinating in the doorway of a Polish deli or shitting on the face of a homeless person.

17. There will be more 'drama' in the USA as people begin to admit they only buy certain types of music because their 'homies' do and that 94.7% of Americans think most of the music they hear is shit. In the UK over 90% of people under the age of 18 go into a state of shock and delete all their dubstep mp3s.

18. After facing a third leadership election, Jeremy Corbyn wins both Strictly and I'm a Celebrity (his eating of an alligator penis pickled in Cameron jizz clinching it for him in the Bush Fucker Trial) and still the UK media think he's an old useless tool with a wonky handle. With Labour on 4% in the polls, Tom Watson makes a move to have Katie Hopkins elected as leader.

19. The Sun backs a campaign to make it legal to beat people of Eastern European origin if you think they stole someone's job.

20. The internet gets switched off.

The 90th One - Review Special

Meanwhile Gardens by Levitation
and
Meanwhile Gardens by Levitation

As my regular reader will have noticed, I was currently playing my way through my upstairs record collection; starting at A and going all the way to the Zutons. I got to C, found my way to the extraordinary album by Cradle called Baba Yaga and figured I'd stick a link to the best song on the album on my social networking sites. This simple You Tube search set the tone for the entire week (and, no, I haven't made a mistake at the top of this page).

Chloe's Room is a strange one. It's about 16 minutes long and is pretty much a folk/acid/prog track. It is the outstanding track on Baba Yaga and suggested that the man behind Cradle, the utterly bonkers Terry Bickers, was something of an old hippy. Finding Chloe's Room proved to be almost impossible and the only thing I could find on the entire interweb thingy was the entire album on You Tube. Thanks to my extraordinary powers of observation, the recommended watches on You Tube included something called Food for Powder by the mighty Levitation and something I didn't know existed.

Levitation was the short-lived Terry Bickers project after he walked out on The House of Love (yes, that's where you've heard of him) and he famously split the band up after a gig suggesting the band had lost it at a time when it was clear they were just about to become one of the best bands in the world; the music press loved them, even if some dared to suggest they were actually more influenced by prog rock than anything else. I had to be content with just two albums - Need For Not (the only official album) and Coterie (an album of b-sides, extras and out-takes that was actually released before NFN) and a large hole in me.

If I had to sum up decades of my life by bands, the 60s was probably The Beatles, the 70s was Genesis, the 80s was Talk Talk and the 90s would be a struggle between The Verve, House of Love and the mighty Levitation. I'm inclined to think on overall output that Levitation would just scrape in as the winners - that's how important this band were to me. But they disappeared, Bickers did odds and ends but apart from Cradle most of it was meh and because of Cradle I discovered there is another album, that was never released. except there wasn't just one album, there were two...

For me, finding a lost Levitation album could only really be matched by a new Talk Talk album and I frantically searched the net for some idea of what Meanwhile Gardens actually was, only to discover there were two versions of it. The original version with Bickers on vocals and a different version with another vocalist, dragged in after Bickers threw his toys out of the pram.

I found a blog. I found a link. I downloaded an album that I can't buy. Then I downloaded another album I can't buy that was the same but different.

Meanwhile Gardens (1): Despite being press darlings in 1993, the fact it took me 19 years to discover this album even existed suggests that Levitation were not commercially viable, which might suggest why this album was never released. That's a massive shame because even though this album is clearly not the finished article, it showed just where the band were going and they were going 'Prondie'. If Talk Talk were the innovators of Post-Rock, then Levitation were the innovators of Indy Prog and even if bands such as Blow Up Hollywood have never heard their stuff, then their influences must have been seen in other bands.
This is a monster of an album - not in size, but intention. It starts off like an indie shoegaze album but quickly morphs into something different. Bodiless, Greymouth and Food For Powder are all pretty generic and the kind of thing you imagine Levitation doing but not making the finished cut; but once Gardens Overflowing starts you realise you've just wandered into wonderland.
If you got lulled into the sense of disappointment by the first three tracks, the next 6 bend you over and give you a damned good fucking. Prog pop meets indie brilliance meets something altogether new. King of Mice, Going Faster, Magnifying Glass are all massive tracks; long, sprawling and resonating with menace and passion - Going Faster possibly a single, but also classic Levitation, which best sums of King of Mice as this could have featured on any album and been a highlight. Twice is an instrumental that just barks at you and makes you wonder why they didn't do more and the actual album ends with the sublime Burroughs, possibly one of the best tracks ever written by anyone anywhere.
The album is completed, as such, by three tracks that were recorded at the studio but never got further than instrumental tracks - Heavy Roller, Unknown and All At Sea are all unique, not like you would imagine from a band with the sensibilities they have and possibly a hint at where the band might have gone had their leader not been a bit mad.
Obviously, knowing me, this album has been on heavy rotation since I downloaded it. It's in the car, it's in the office and I'd have it in the bog and bedroom if the wife would let me. it has a few weak spots, but it is like finding an orgasm I forgot about 20 years ago and reliving it over and over. 9½/10

Meanwhile Garden (2): After Terry Bickers left the band, the remaining members figured they had a future, even without their master. They did, they became Dark Star and had their own flirtation with success. However, they went back into the studio and re-recorded a lot of the above album with a new singer, Steve Ludwin, and this version was released in Australia and has since become something of a collectors item.
As a Levitation album it's not a patch on the above, but as a stand alone album, with some different tracks, it's pretty good. Ludwin is no Bickers in the vocal department (and that is damning him with faint praise as Bickers vocals sometimes leave a lot to be desired because they can seem so weak at times) and you get the impression that the gutsy tracks on 1 have had their balls removed by too much production. Take King of Mice, an atypical Levitation track which with Ludwin singing just hasn't got the power or the atmosphere and it suggests that Levitation were only brilliant because of Bickers and as hard as the rest of the band tried, without their god they were just another cult. 6/10

Things have moved really fast since I downloaded these on Tuesday. I have now discovered there is actually two versions of the first album - the summer and autumn versions. Whether these will ever be available or found on the net who can say (a quick search just kept taking me back to the forum where I first discovered this), but the history of one of my favourite bands has just got a whole lot murkier and after nearly 20 years of resignation, I'm excited at the possibility of finding even more tracks by them. That helps keep the legend alive!