The Dog, The Dog He’s At It Again



I love this song so much. BBC4 is repeating its Prog Rock Brittannia programme from a few years back again –and why all of those [foo] Brittania showcases are such sausagefests is a question for another day — which is why I had to find this again. Caravan might just be the most English band of what in any case is such an English genre of music anyway and this perhaps their most English song. Gentle and calming and witty.

Metal Monday: Anthrax

Right, there are four classic thrash metal bands, right? Metallica is the one everybody knows, good but overrated, Megadeth, the one started by the guy kicked out of Metallica, Slayer, serious and scary and finally Anthrax, not at all serious but the best of the lot (some of you might want to substitute Sepultura for any of the first three bands). And the reason they are the best of the big four is because they didn’t take everything so damn seriously. They didn’t sing about nazis and evil and death and satan, but had songs about Judge Dredd (as seen last week) and John Belushi. They were also one of the two bands that turned me into a metalhead back in ’87, ’88 or so, the other being Maiden. Discovering yank comics at the same time, nothing was as cool as reading the shoutouts to Watchmen, Batman and Judge Dredd in the liner notes of Amongst the Living.

Welcome to the Belly of the Beast.



NOT!



Bring the Noise.



Got the time?



Sheer indulgence



Cuttlefish.



Twenty years ago today…

One of those moments where you knew the world you grew up in had changed. Those two-three years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Gulf War were incredible, when it seemed the whole world would be set free. I grew up in the eighties with regular nightmares about nuclear war and all of a sudden not only was the Cold War finished, but the worst oppressive regime in the world had actually freed the symbol of the resistance against it and was negotiating how to end itself. things looked so great and then it all turned to shit again, with South Africa today being the best evidence for the idea that having equal rights is a necessary, but not a complete condition for creating an equal society.