Friday, October 17, 2025

FRIDAY MUSIC: The Handsome Family, by JD

THE HANDSOME FAMILY (songwriting and marriage partners Brett and Rennie Sparks) have been defining the dark end of Americana for over 30 years.

Asked to describe their music Brett says, “Western gothic” — music inspired by the abandoned strip malls of desert America where thorny weeds slowly reclaim the land.

Handsome Family songs may be dark, but there’s always laughter on stage. Rennie sings as well as plays banjo and bass. She often introduces songs with seemingly unrelated stories. Brett, with his deep baritone and stentorian presence, is the undeniable center of stage. The two are joined on-stage by multi-instrumentalists Alex McMahon (electric guitar, pedal steel) and Jason Toth (percussion and Omnichord).

Regarding the band name, Brett said in an interview: “It’s just kind of a stupid name. We used to have this really obnoxious drummer, and he used to call me ‘Handsome’, that was his nickname for me, I think for sarcastic reasons... And he wanted to call it the Handsome Family... and we thought it was funny, too. We thought it was a good name."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handsome_Family

The Handsome Family - My Beautiful Bride

Handsome Family - So Much Wine - McCabe’s 2012

Invisible Man

The Handsome Family - Weightless Again @ Kraakpand 5.4

Far from Any Road

“Cathedrals” by The Handsome Family

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

The Goon Show

The Goon Show, a phenomenally funny and surreal entertainment, originally ran on BBC radio for ten years (1951-1960). Titled at first ‘Crazy People’ it was broadcast on the Home Service. A list of the episodes is here.

The core trio of performers were Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers with co-founder Michael Bentine who left the lineup after 38 appearances.

Secombe was previously the first postwar showbiz success of the four, with a frenetic act at London’s Windmill Theatre, and his manic chattering can be heard on the earliest extant Goons recording (from the second series):

Bentine is an interesting man, not just for this and other comedy work. He was an expert pistol shot who trained the SAS in his style; also he wrote of psychic experiences in his non-fiction and autobiographies - perhaps he inherited from his Peruvian father some of the otherworldly spiritual strain found in South America.

Most of the Goon Show scripts were written by the manic-depressive genius Milligan with help from Larry Stephens. Jimmy Grafton and others. Milligan had occasional episodes of nervous exhaustion and breakdown; no wonder, given the intense pressure to create.

A famous passage from one show, animated below, is where the halfwit character Eccles is asked for the time:

It appears in this whole 1957 episode:
Other gems include this exchange from the script of ‘The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill on Sea)’ where Neddie Seagoon interviews Major Bloodnok regarding the theft of an Army boot:

Seagoon: I tell you, Major Bloodnok, I must ask you to parade your men. 
Bloodnok: Why? 
Seagoon: I’m looking for a criminal 
Bloodnok: You find your own, it took me years to get this lot

As with the Monty Python series, influenced by The Goons, fans will have their own favourites.

Four more complete episodes are below - available while this precious material is permitted to remain on Youtube!

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Sunday, October 12, 2025

Round The Horne

Currently there is a touring stage show based on a BBC radio comedy series called Round the Horne - we saw it on Thursday:
It was first broadcast in 1965 and for millions was associated with eating Sunday lunch.

The humour always included sideways references to homosexuality which was not decriminalised until 1967. A couple of ‘camp’ characters, Julian and Sandy would use the insider gay’s language of ‘polari’…
… which the show’s compère would pretend not to understand.

Like the earlier Goon Show (which ran from 1951-1960) the format was to split the funny content into two halves, with a musical interlude. Perhaps this is because there may be an optimum attention span for sparkling verbal comedy - full-length films based on successful half hour shows don’t seem to work so well; the narrative tends to dominate the wit.

Here are the first six episodes; more are easily available on the Net:

Friday, October 10, 2025

FRIDAY MUSIC: Classic Hits, part 7, by JD

 The CASCADES-Rhythm Of the Rain

Reet Petite (The Finest Girl You Ever Want to Meet)

My Girl - The Temptations (1964) (HD Quality)

Everly Brothers - Cathy’s Clown [Americana] HD

Little Richard - Good Golly Miss Molly (Muhammad Ali’s 50th Birthday)

Billy Roberts “Hey Joe”-

This is the very first recording of the song “Hey Joe”, ever made. It is a home demo recording by the song’s writer, Billy Roberts. The song has a long and complicated history regarding it’s authorship, but this is the absolute first version ever recorded, in 1961/62.

(Editor’s note: for even earlier roots please see this 2020 post on Broad Oak Magazine)

Wednesday, October 08, 2025

You suffer from COVID

That is, Censorship Of Valid Informative Discussion.

There are things that may not be discussed and awkward types who do so will be de-platformed and persecuted.

Take Dr Vernon Coleman for example. He is a retired GP and was a prolific and widely read journalist as well as successful author of fiction and non-fiction. Until he came out as a Covid dissenter in 2020. Now look: he is banned e.g. not only from posting on YouTube (which he did for years) but even from looking at it.

He is not completely an unperson - his name is still there on the Net - so the Narrative will poison the wells ahead of your quest to find him. Here is the opening paragraph about him on Wikipedia:
If only there were some easy way of collecting all reviews like this - it would make a handy guide to getting recommendations for reading about interesting people.

Anther man and issue is the comedy writer Graham Linehan, who controversially holds that men are not women. Wikipedia doesn’t quite do the boot-in-the-balls-and-strangle-him thing, but carefully includes this para compiling quotes from media tpes who know which hymn sheet to sing from:
There, be warned about an obsessive has-been.

Next after Covid-19 and transgender issues comes climate change.

In 2012 an American climatologist called Michael E Mann instituted a lawsuit against the conservative writer and broadcaster Mark Steyn and ‘rightwing’ blogger (sic Wikipedia) Rand Simberg for defaming him. Mann had allegedly misrepresented climate data to warn of a “hockey stick” leap in atmospheric temperature; the supposed abuse of the truth was compared to the abuse of a child.

The case ran for twelve years - who among us would withstand the strain of such a prolonged action, surely an instance of the process itself being the punishment?

The jury compensated Mann to the tune of $1 from each defendant. They also imposed punitive damages of $1,000,000 against Steyn but this was later reduced to $5,000 when it turned out Mann and his lawyers had misled the court about what Mann had lost in grant funding:
Each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.
It may seem unfair but for me, just a look at Mann’s photo on the Wiki page tells a story:
There are many other areas of public interest suffering from official oppression, lying and obfuscation: mass immigration, systematic child abuse, the alleged ‘genocide’ in Gaza, Ukraine…

Distraction, too: Some say that Sir Keir Starmer’s recent headline-hitting proposal to introduce digital ID was intended to drown-out the story around £740,000-worth of undeclared donations to Labour Together (LT), a think tank of which the PM’s now chief of staff Morgan McSweeney had been a director at that time.

This saga may run a long while yet as it is also germane to how Starmer rose to power. It is being pursued by Muslim convert Jody McIntyre who in last year’s General Election as a newbie Parliamentary candidate very nearly ousted Jess Phillips MP from what had previously been a very safe Labour seat. See his Twitter/X thread on LT-Gate here.

The tale is part of a bigger story, of how Labour is harming the country by pandering to a minority that seems destined to break away from its control no matter what the leadership does.

The truth is becoming elusive but those who steer us according to their preferred blinkered narrative may drive the ship onto the rocks.

We must resist “COVID”, the “Censorship Of Valid Informative Discussion.”

Saturday, October 04, 2025

Has the Labour Government targeted Nigel Farage for a rogue assassination attempt?

“Asking for a friend”…

How might it be done? Let’s look to the US for an example.

We know about two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, the first being 20-year-old Thomas Crooks’ long-distance shots at the Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024. Although Trump escaped with only a nick in his right ear the bullets actually killed an audience member and injured two others.

Following that incident people asked about what looked like lax security. The photo here shows agents clustering protectively around the Presidential candidate but you will see that brave as the female agent is she was not tall enough to shield him fully - Trump is six foot three. One more head shot might have changed history. The same article quotes a bystander who says he and others had spotted Crooks on a rooftop several minutes beforehand and tried to alert police, who seemed confused and slow to react.

All this in the context of years-long blackguarding of Donald Trump not only in left-leaning media - how about “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” ? -but by politicians such as Hillary Clinton (remember Reno?)

So, here and now: Farage.

Zia Yusuf of the Reform Party has said “Two weeks ago [mid-September], the authorities reduced Nigel’s security detail by 75 per cent.”
Mr Yusuf went on to accuse Sir Keir Starmer of embarking on the “most extraordinary, unprecedented vicious and coordinated set of demonisation attacks and incitement of violence” against the Reform UK leader.

He added: “We have seen [Sir Keir] get 11 cabinet ministers, along with his own rhetoric, calling him racist, one of those cabinet ministers - the Home Secretary no less - called him ‘worse than racist’, the Deputy Prime Minister in an extraordinary intervention, accused Nigel of ‘flirting with Nazism.’”

Mr Yusuf told GB News that if anything were to happen to Mr Farage, he would “hold the Prime Minister responsible”.
Coming back to the Deputy Prime Minister’s “Hitler youth” slur, I noted that when challenged by BBC News, Lammy did not retract, he simply said that he accepted that Farage had denied it!

In fact the biscuit-eating oaf doubled down on his evidence-free accusation with a sinister insinuation:
“I wasn’t at school with Nigel Farage. I don’t know what songs he sang at school.”
There’s a dog-whistle, if you like. Presumably we must imagine Nigel and his pals at Dulwich College marching around the playground singing the Hitlerjugend anthem “Es zittern die morschen Knochen” (The Rotten Bones Are Trembling).

Lammy should resign of course, but should never have been appointed in the first place. He is an ignorant and unscrupulous moron.

One suspects he was carefully briefed not only on his non-retraction “clarification” but also on the original vile slur, which may have been given to him because a brighter Cabinet minister would have had to fall on his/her sword if it became a serious issue. It’s a collective campaign and Lammy has been used as the mule for one of the worst bits; he may yet be forgiven by the public because he is so stupid that nobody expects anything better from him.

So, we’ve wound up the social media to fulminate against Farage; all we need is some crazy wokeist with a knife or a bomb. Or a gun, which few except criminals own these days.

And then there would be the sorrowful official reactions, like after this week’s Manchester Yom Kippur attack.

It is difficult not to think of this Government as almost evil.