Saturday, July 03, 2021

WEEKENDER: If someone had told me... by Wiggia


The title to this short piece is one of those phrases we use in hindsight as a get-out clause.
Actually if eighteen months ago much that was being touted and pushed as future agendas and narratives, I would have put in the conspiracy theory bin.

The speed with which things have changed and continue to has not only got me starting to believe in the basis of many of these theories but beneath the surface more than just hints are emerging that show there is indeed a movement for change in the western world and it is not for the indigenous peoples' benefit.

As I have said before the Covid virus whether deliberate or not in the way it has been handled worldwide has proven to be a wonderful opportunity to advance other things that if enacted upon are going to make big changes to the way people live and not that far into the future either, if it all happens the great reset comes to pass.

Once again the climate fanatics have a half open door to push against. Eighteen months ago it would have seemed inconceivable what many are now pushing for, and governments have quickly taken the cue to advance much of the same.

The screw on our lifestyles is being turned it appears every day, as items like eating meat that most of us saw as the mad ramblings of the eco nutters is coming up on the rails; focus groups acting on ‘our’ behalf use the healthy eating habit meme to persuade us to save the planet by reducing our meat consumption, while at the same time government committees state that the price of meat will go up to ensure consumption drops.

The same thing is happening with anything transport related. EVs may be the preferred future, but there is no way at present we can power them should the numbers ever get near the government targets, so restrictions will be enforced; firstly the ‘cheap’ to run EVs will become subject to restrictions, many forms have been muted already, pay per mile to make up for the lost fuel revenue, charging to be increased in price to level with fossil fuels, restrictions on usage, i.e. pay more to use during peak times, the banning of all private vehicles from city centres (already happening) and coercion to use public transport.

If I hear 'build back better' again there is a chance something will be lobbed at the TV screen. Everyone everywhere is using the phrase at every opportunity. What does it actually mean? You can repeat something as long and as often as you like but if no one actually explains what it means there is little point, yet on and on they go repeating the mantra. It is easy to think this is something dreamt up and coordinated in some sleazy smoke filled room in Davos; maybe it was and the conspiracy theorists are correct. Or is it simply those at the top in governments world wide are not that bright and have simply latched onto a phrase they all think will work for them in delivering right-on statements. If the latter it shows a total lack of individual thinking ingenuity and shines a light into those who would govern as not being that bright at all.

It is not easy to believe this is someone purporting to run the country; it has to rank as one of the most inane statements in the English language uttered by anyone in recent times and there have been many.


There has been a flood of buzz words in the last eighteen months, most pointless, many misleading and some just stupid, plain English forsaken for a phrase with a very limited life: furlough, tiered, traffic light, self distancing, lock down, bubble, new normal... it goes on and on; long Covid, vaccine (when it isn’t a vaccine), herd immunity (that’s a bovine phrase), Covidiot, flattening the curve etc. etc. etc., all of these have been hijacked or invented to suit an agenda, all replace standard English words that actually explain things in a much more descriptive accurate and simple way. As I have said eighteen months ago anyone using these phrases out of context would have been laughed at.

The NHS eighteen months ago had many flaws and a GP side not fit for purpose. Who could have foreseen the total close down of all services but for treating the virus, most of the NHS staff making Tik Tok videos to relieve boredom and ending with an NHS that is now a basket case, with the potential for thousands more to die from neglect by that organisation than have done from the virus. Eighteen months ago you would have laughed at the suggestion and the stupidity of shutting all else down.

Who could have foreseen the borrowing of money at the highest rate ever in peacetime? £303 billion in one year was spent above income attained leaving us with a debt so large we are totally finished if interest rates go up even 1%; savings will be wiped out by inflation and still they spend and talk of further restrictions on wealth creation in many areas.

Meanwhile the quality of politicians continues to plummet, from a pre Covid poor to post? Covid dire, our Health Secretary manages to make a complete arse of himself by managing to get himself recorded on the office CCTV, that in itself is quite an achievement as the camera was so bloody obvious, but still….

The Labour party goes for the grievance vote by putting up Jo Cox’s sister as a candidate, despite not being a Labour member until a month before being chosen and bending all their own rules on selection, and now the Muslim vote they curry favour for has discovered the fact she is a lesbian; they surely didn’t believe that once found out it would not make a difference with the ROP supporters - naive or stupid? At the same time all political parties involved in the by election show total cowardice in failing to mention the teacher threatened with his life and living in hiding because it might lose them some votes.

And Angela Rayner (crayons) now deputy party leader and former shadow education minister has just put out this statement about Hancock….

 "Matt Hancock was in fragrant breach of his own rules"
"A senior minister has a duty to uphold standards, when faced with the opportunity to have an affair he should have reclined"

Amazingly some Labour MPs are pushing her as a replacement for Starmer!

Meanwhile the PM just lies about everything.


Eighteen months ago it was ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’; now, after a large part of the population has had two jabs to save ‘our’ NHS we are told we will need two more in the same year. Just how good is the efficacy of the jabs we have been given, if we now need two more to protect freedoms that have not returned?

Eighteen months ago you could go on holiday anywhere in the world. Now, even if you do escape you will probably be stranded and have to return at great expense and go into quarantine. For the elite nothing has changed in eighteen months, but then they only make the rules, there is no expectation they will ever have to abide by them.

'Staycation', another awful word coined first by another waste of space, one David ‘I am not a quitter’ Cameron, is giving a boost to the local holiday market, well to those who can afford £2500 a week for a one bedroomed cottage in Cornwall; no point in trying to get a room in a hotel, they are either booked solid till 2023 or full of dinghy people as army barracks are not good enough for them despite being good enough for the army.
 
I read a report by someone who took his wife to A&E for a suspected broken arm in an East London hospital. Upon arrival there was a queue and virtually everyone in it was foreign, many different languages were being spoken; it would appear that the influx of illegal migrants to inner city areas and who have a health problem of any sort rock up to A&E as they can’t register with a GP, thereby clogging up a service we pay for and they don’t and never have. This isn’t new, just worse: I remember when my mother was dying in St Mary’s in London, parking round the back of the hospital meant I had to come in via the A&E; it was striking, the place was packed and I could not see a single white face in the place - a mixed area for sure, but not one. You cannot help but wonder how many were not actually entitled to health care. When I mentioned the fact to a nurse looking after my mum she said the place was a de facto destination point for so many from abroad who want to game the system and there is little they can do. Nothing has changed: with over a million at least of illegal migrants in this country, some reckon at least twice that, the cost must be horrendous for the tax payer, yet the virtue signallers think this is all OK and shows we care as a nation. We do care, as long as they are genuine and have come through the right channels and not the English one.

But our own should come first. They pay for it, and all those virtue signallers in the NHS who are so loose with the services we make possible, or did.

Again the influx of dinghy people has highlighted something that was partially buried or kept under wraps eighteen months ago.

Eighteen months ago if you decided to sell your house and move it was not easy as not that many were putting their properties on the market as the conditions post Brexit made the market a bit unsure of direction. Come the virus and the country bankrupting itself the housing market goes through the roof and the government gives it or the builders a helping hand; who seriously would have bet on that, the economics of the madhouse? It keeps the Daily Mail happy though: “man charged with murdering wife and children, seen here in an earlier photo in front of his luxury £750k house in... a popular area for aspiring rappers.”

Add to that demand for building materials has risen at an unprecedented rate during that period. Timber alone has doubled for many types and much is simply unavailable, so house prices have rocketed and now if you decide not to move but upgrade your old house it will take a lot more money and a lot longer to get the job done. Congratulations to our new chancellor for exacerbating the problem.

Since eighteen months ago, the press have become the mouthpiece of the government: any dissenting or challenging statements are ignored completely or those uttering such mischievous items of fact are now de-platformed, cancelled or declared nutters. Marches are only reported if of the correct type - BLM and XR are on the approved list - anything else even if hundreds of thousands attend are totally ignored, all in the name of having a united front in tackling the virus (despite all this togetherness they have still made an utter cods of large areas of the fight against the disease.) The BBC of course have no trouble taking this stance as they have been doing this as the new normal for years now.

It is also difficult to believe we would have a border in the middle of the Irish sea separating us from another part of the United Kingdom. Eighteen months ago if that had been suggested as a solution to a problem we would have laughed at it, but that along with all the other nonsense is an indication of how we have progressed or not, and the nots win.

Finally an advert in the Times today, the 1st of July by the Co-op:

“Your goodbye wishes matter

"Plan your funeral with us and choose now how you want to be remembered. We’ll make it personal, every step of the way.

"Buy a CO OP plan before the 30th of June and get up to £50 back to spend at the CO OP.”

Not taking any chances, are they?

Friday, July 02, 2021

A share-owning democracy, or socialism?

If I understand the drift of Margaret Thatcher’s vision for the United Kingdom, it was one where the ordinary person might eventually own the house they lived in, instead of paying rent forever; and own shares so that they could have some of the benefits of capitalism, instead of seeing themselves as serfs working for ever-wealthier bosses.

If the project works, it destroys the socialist ‘take all and provide for all’ model; but if it fails, how many might opt for shabby security over potentially ruinous freedom? The jury is still out, but I dread the verdict.

The stock market has become a rollercoaster in recent years. Here is a graph of selected days – the high of the tech boom of the ‘90s, the low points of 2003 and 2009, and where we are now. To give some idea of ‘real terms’ I also supply the figures adjusted by the official RPI index https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/cdko/mm23 (June’s market close is deflated by May’s RPI, the latest available):


As you see, the magic 7,000 figure around which the market is now circling – above the historic high point of 6,930.2 on 20 December 1999 – is actually worth about half what it was then. Yes, you might do better by picking particular stocks or funds, but yesterday’s star could be today’s dog, as for example we see in the legal-vulture-besieged Neil Woodford https://www.ft.com/content/2f077ae2-f19e-11e9-bfa4-b25f11f42901 . At least with Prince Ras Monolulu’s racing tips https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/horse-racing/54695641 you got a result the same day.

Most people aren’t gamblers, at least not with their life savings, which is why they used to like with-profits funds, getting an annual statement from the insurance company to say how much their holding had grown since the year before. However such funds found it difficult to cope with the volatility of the last decades, sometimes having to impose ‘market value adjustments’ to stop investors running away en masse in a bad year.

The uncertainty is compounded by what’s happened in the bond market. The unimaginable levels of debt in our system have forced the government to drop interest rates to near zero; when a personal pension plan holder wants to retire with an annuity, it has to be secured with bond investments on which the annual yield is now pitiful, so that one needs a far larger fund to get the same income. The alternative is to leave one’s pension investment in equities, with their associated risk.

This dilemma was not anticipated in the good old days, when (for example) Equitable Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equitable_Life_Assurance_Society sold pensions with a Guaranteed Annuity Rate at retirement age of up to 12 per cent. When EL were caught out by the rates collapse at pay-out time they tried to reduce the investors’ fund value to compensate, but the court ruled that out; hinc illae lacrimae https://www.latin-is-simple.com/en/vocabulary/phrase/749/ .

The investment boom of the 1980s lit expectations that were fanned by regulators. It’s understandable in a way – there were cases of maturing mortgage endowment plans that yielded six times their target value – but only if you think good times go on for ever. At one point the illustrated yearly growth on pension funds was in the bracket 8.5 – 13 per cent. However by the beginning of the 90s even the best funds run for our insurance company weren’t showing anything like that higher figure.

As with so many issues, instead of looking for cat-stroking villains we need to understand that the roots of our problems are systemic. Britain threw away the wealth of generations in two world wars with a great depression in between – there was no Roaring Twenties here. Post World War Two America – seizing the chance to finish off the British Empire - turned off the financial tap to us even as it poured money into western Europe to rebuild it and prevent an outbreak of communism. The terms on which we joined the EU withered many of our industries for over forty years. Meanwhile the Third World gained our technological know-how and exploited it with desperate urgency as only the poor can – one company I used to advise specialised in exporting large machine tools from our closing factories. Is it a surprise that money-making seems to centre around housebuilding these days, rather than industry? It is as though Stone Age men could eschew hunting in favour of selling each other caves.

Well, now we’re out of the EU, though it seems that like jilted lovers they still try to make as much trouble as possible; but there’s no going back to the status quo ante; it’s a different world now. Although it’s nice to hear a PM who makes optimistic noises, we’re already seeing that ‘free trade’ is not an unmixed blessing; we have exchanged the mini-globalism of Europe for the maxi-globalism that has done so much for the multinationals but whose benefits have not really trickled down to the rest of us. If we really are de-industrialising and also turning expensively and erratically green in various ways, how are we going to support our over-large population, especially when we are still expanding it with further influxes of people?

We are long overdue a consideration of how to cut our coat according to the cloth we still have; otherwise people will start to contemplate a different system.

Thursday, July 01, 2021

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 1 July 1961

Elvis and Del Shannon still occupy the top two places; at third, for the second week, comes 'Temptation':


Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

25 June: American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, discharged from the US Navy two years earlier for his political views, attends a Washington, D.C. rally of Elijah Mohammed's Nation of Islam.The strange connection is based on both parties' belief in racial segregation, and vehement antisemitism. Malcolm X (who six months before had been sent in secret to broker a truce with the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta) gives a speech there;  Rockwell himself speaks at another NOI rally in Chicago in February 1962 (in 1967 he is murdered by John Patler, a former member of Rockwell's party who had been expelled a few months earlier for trying to introduce Marxist ideas.) In 1964, Malcolm X leaves the NOI, disillusioned with its leader, and is assassinated the next year by NOI member Talmadge Hayer.

27 June: Arthur Michael Ramsey is enthroned as 100th Archbishop of Canterbury.


28 June: following the April failure of the Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored 'Bay of Pigs' invasion of Cuba, President Kennedy issues a trio of directives to transfer the responsibility for the planning of peacetime paramilitary operations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 'The directives... were so secret that copies were not released to either the CIA or to the U.S. Department of State' (pic source.)

1 July: Fantasy Island opens: a theme park on Grand Island near Buffalo, New York

UK chart hits, week ending 1 July 1961

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1

Runaway

Del Shannon

London

2

Surrender

Elvis Presley

RCA

3

Temptation

The Everly Brothers

Warner Brothers

4

Pasadena

The Temperance Seven

Parlophone

5

A Girl Like You

Cliff Richard and The Shadows

Columbia

6

Hello Mary Lou / Travellin' Man

Ricky Nelson

London

7

Halfway To Paradise

Billy Fury

Decca

8

But I Do

Clarence 'Frogman' Henry

Pye

9

The Frightened City

The Shadows

Columbia

10

You'll Never Know

Shirley Bassey

Columbia

11

Pop Goes The Weasel / Bee*Bom

Anthony Newley

Decca

12

Runnin' Scared

Roy Orbison

London

13

Well I Ask You

Eden Kane

Decca

14

I Told Every Little Star

Linda Scott

Columbia

15

Little Devil

Neil Sedaka

RCA

16

Have A Drink On Me

Lonnie Donegan

Pye

17

More Than I Can Say

Bobby Vee

London

18

Marcheta

Karl Denver

Decca

19

Ring Of Fire

Duane Eddy

London

20

Weekend

Eddie Cochran

London


Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Bang goes real estate, eventually - a reader's comment

Your responses are welcomed: reader 'PasserBy' comments on a recent piece, with reference to the redidential and commercial property markets:

I would agree that there is no housing crisis, other than that manufactured by the government.

The main criteria for housing is that it be built and bought with borrowed money - ie the Banks keep the wheel turning and shave off their profits.
There is money in old housing but not as much as the megabucks required for newbuild residential.

As an aside, the commercial property market is in freefall. Again you wont read about this on the BBC - heaven forfend any bad news should leak out!

Whats happening behind the scenes is that pension funds (large and small) can neither rent nor sell their CommProp 'investments' and are starting to wobble. Of course the rules dictate that you cannot hold residential property in a pension so not even conversions are possible.

By CommProp incidentally, I am referring to retail and light industrial properties - right up to office blocks and distribution centres.

Prices have to be kept elevated else the whole british economy and mentality will collapse. It just remains to be seen how long the plates can be kept spinning.

The coming tsunami of 1 million + Chinese from Hong Kong after some manufactured crisis there is the plan. They, with their wealth, are currently buying up houses at an incredible rate all across the UK.
This is what is fueling the 'boom' in house prices.

This is required because the demographics of the UK are incredibly bad for housing and house prices. The Boomers are stepping into their endgames in ever larger numbers the the houses they bought in the 60s and 70s are flooding onto the market. The Chinese are needed to prop the whole thing up.

When I say 'housing' or 'house prices' I of course refer to their main role as collateral for the vast amount of borrowing currently outstanding in the UK. If housing goes down, the banks and likely the UK economy will crater.
Its more likely to happen than not and it'll make 2008 look like a picnic.
But every little tweak and fiddle by the government is directed to keeping prices elevated.

Britain is hoist on its own petard but the less it struggles the longer it'll survive.... fascinating to watch.

Saturday, June 26, 2021

WEEKENDER: Plans, Trans and Sportweardeals, by Wiggia

A couple or so of items caught my eye this week. The first was another announcement from Bojo on how to waste our money, and it is always ours.

To be paid for by the MoD... as the MoD is using the same money as everything else the government uses that is just double talk. What he was trying to imply was there would be no extra money being spent on this vainglorious waste of time. It could be the MoD will cut our defence spending even more to make room for this pointless exercise, who knows these days, we are rarely told the truth about anything.

Do we really need a ‘national yacht’? Which other nation uses a floating gin palace to exhibit its wares around the world and would anyone else contemplate such a choice? It looks to me like jollies for all again at the tax payer's expense.

£200 million: when was the last time a government project came in on budget?

It could have spent the £200 million on some much-needed coastal protection vessels, but that would have also been a waste of time as the few we have are only used as Channel shuttles and we wouldn’t want to increase the inward flow even more again at our expense.

Bojo ‘hopes’ it can be built in a British yard. To be honest, what a cringe-making statement: a vessel made to promote British goods and services is made in a foreign country? Sometimes making it up is easier; no doubt a yard in Hamburg or similar is already drawing up plans, I would love to be wrong but the irony is too strong.

When this was offered up as an idea, someone somewhere should have said nah, but it like HS2 will go ahead anyway; while the printing presses are running there is no stopping this government hosing our money away.

And now for something completely different. Our phone use is quite limited these days as we are both long retired, I have a good SIM deal on my mobile which fits my lesser needs these days and a combined broadband and landline package.

We all pay the monopoly Open Reach a twenty pound a month line rental charge which is in itself a rip off as you have no choice, but there is another matter which slipped under the radar: our package including the landline phone that is rarely used these days has free evenings and weekends as part of it, not free of course but cheaper. What I never realised was the fact that calls made during day time in the week were so bloody expensive, I was still under the assumption that landline calls were always cheaper than a mobile; wrong!

It was the fact that our having just moved house, the phone was used a lot more than normal contacting tradesmen suppliers etc., and I expected my monthly bill to rise so did not check the details, just acknowledged the final figure; but a very long call trying to get through to that other monopoly our GP surgery made me look out of curiosity at that monthly statement and I could not believe what I saw: they actually have the cheek to charge 25p a minute for daytime calls including a connection fee. I know with what I would like to connect, it has to be the biggest con in all our utility charges. How on earth can they justify that on top of a £20 line rental?

I had to check around the other providers as I thought there was a mistake, but no they are all similar.

I stupidly assumed that landline calls were around a 1p a minute, which they should be, there must be hundreds of thousands of old people who are not digital age savvy who have no idea what their landline is costing them. It's an absolute disgrace to charge so much, no wonder so many are ditching landlines all together and using their mobiles for everything; even my old Nokia emergency phone on PAYG is only 2p a minute.

And lastly something that was always going to split opinion and could turn nasty as women's sport becomes a playground for those men who failed as men in sport but could be winning as trans women.

The various sporting bodies have had more than enough time to take a view on this but the woke world we live in now has hobbled their answer to the question. An awful lot of medical facts show whatever medication to lower testosterone is taken, people who grew up as men have a built in advantage in power and bone structure.

It is noticeable that so far those who have transitioned and suddenly declared an interest in competing in women's sporting events are all well past their sell by date as men, and most are appearing in what could be called the less glamorous sports or versions of sport like masters events. Again, for the older transition-er, whether or not Laurel Hubbard wins in weightlifting in Tokyo is not really the point, what has happened is that a wedge has been driven into women's sport and the door is being prised open to accommodate trans women.

When I was cycle racing many moons ago at a decent level on the track, the East German machine was well in action producing endless women champions, all on drugs that gave them much of the power of men. Anybody who saw them close up was looking at something from a horror movie: muscled beyond belief, hair on the face and elsewhere and setting world records few could approach. It was wrong, they hid behind the Iron Curtain and got away with it for years; it made a farce of many women's events in many sports.

One thing that is never mentioned in all the prattling that has gone on as to whether any of this has a place in sport, is the fact there is not one example of a woman changing to a man trying on the same scam because it would be a waste of time; it only works one way, but no one dares to speak out on the fact, so cowered are they about saying the wrong thing.

As Sharon Davies, brave lady, has said they are gaming the system, and they are. It hasn’t really started yet but when those more youthful start to go down this path and claim they are women there will be a big problem. Also, n this day and age people will do anything to make money or be noticed: note the number of TV programs based on people with no talent other than being able to make idiots of themselves with no shame as long as they are in the limelight for their fifteen minutes of fame.  Changing one's sex is just another way for some to be noticed; the parents who put little boys in dresses and claim the children want to be something else is another example; a small section of the gay community can’t wait for a Pride parade and get their willies out in public as has happened.

The fact that the NZ government and their woke feminist PM Jacinda Ardern have come out and backed their weightlifter is no surprise.

In boxing they have a bigger problem and it has already raised its ugly head. In a physical contact sport like boxing any man-held physical advantages are positively dangerous. How any trans is allowed to compete against women is beyond comprehension. Women's boxing is very much a minority sport anyway but is this one ripe for the trans mafia to compete in? This example shows the danger and the simply mind-numbing indifference by the sports controllers. The trans community would appear to sanction what could be legalised murder in favour of hurty feelz. We live in strange times.

Women's sport is on the cusp of being made irrelevant. The answer is of course to have a separate category for trans athletes, the competition could be put on in the Coliseum in Rome where they have a history of one-sided competitions put on for the masses.

https://recentlyheard.com/2020/01/23/transgender-mma-fighter-who-broke-skull-of-woman-named-bravest-athlete-in-history/

And finally, as Scotland once again fail to advance in the European Football Championships, not all is lost for the fans...

Friday, June 25, 2021

FRIDAY MUSIC: Wally Fawkes, by Wiggia

JD is temporarily indisposed and recuperating; Wiggia steps into the breach this week: 


As JD is out of action for a short time the Friday music slot is barren. Week after week JD fills  the page with the weird and wonderful world of music. His depth of knowledge on the subject apparently is ad infinitum. I couldn’t and wouldn’t try to emulate his postings, my own field of knowledge in music is confined to modern jazz and I have in the past put up posts on that small area of the genre, and I could have revived one of those or written something similar again.

But one of those scans of today's birthdays in the paper brought back some memories of the past so something slightly different emerged as a suitable stand in for JDs Friday slot.

The birthday that stood out was of one Wally Fawkes, clarinettist and cartoonist, who I have to admit I believed had gone to a better place, but no he is still around at 97 Born in Canada, Wally emigrated with his family to Britain in 1931. He showed through various media a talent for art and ended up on the Daily Mail drawing column breaks and graphic illustrations after winning a Daily Mail competition and being spotted by the paper's chief cartoonist.

It was during the war that he started on his musical career. He once joked that Londoners were spending so much time in underground shelters during the war they were in danger of becoming troglodytes; this gave him the name for his band Wally Fawkes and the Troglodytes and also a shortened version, Trog, as his pseudonym for his cartoons.

Fawkes took a course at Camberwell Art College and it was there that he met Humphrey Lyttleton. They both played in George Webb's Dixielanders band but when Lyttleton left in ‘48 to form his own band Fawkes left with him and stayed until ‘56. He played sporadically with Lyttleton for years afterwards.

His cartoon character Flook ran in the Daily Mail for 35 years and Lyttleton and others including Barry Norman and George Melly contributed to the scripts for the series. It later appeared for a while in the Observer and he became the political cartoonist for Punch and other titles and finished at the Sunday Telegraph.

His music is best known as a band member with Lyttleton; his own band the Troglodytes was disbanded not long after the war.

The contribution that he and Lyttleton made extended far outside of music and both enjoyed prolonged careers. They are a type of talent not seen today, being able to switch in their careers and run parallel with the same success, Fawkes only gave up his cartoons when failing eyesight forced him to stop in 2005.

With Humph in 1983

From 1954, featuring Wally Fawkes and Trogs Blues

This was recorded in 1992 at the Bulls Head in Barnes, long a music venue for jazz 
and my brother-in-law has played there with others and his own band for years

Not sure when this was actually recorded but it was released in 2012

And an early number with his own original band, the Troglodytes
  

Get well soon, JD.

Thursday, June 24, 2021

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 24 June 1961

Del Shannon's 'Runaway' stays at #2 all month, behind Elvis' 'Surrender':


Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

18 June: the OAS, a terrorist organisation trying to force France to keep possession of Algeria,
bombs the Paris-to-Strasbourg express train, killing dozens and injuring over 100. 
The newspaper splash above is found here.

19 June: Kuwait, a British protectorate since 1899, gains independence (photo source.)
 Iraq's leader Abdul Karim Qasim, who seized power there in 1958, lays claim to Kuwait six days later.
Britain sends forces to defend the country in Operation Vantage.

War criminal and mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, kidnapped in Argentina and put on trial in Israel, gives evidence in his defence, claiming he was merely obeying orders. 
He is found guilty on December 15 and hanged on May 31 the following year, his body cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea.

21 June: the USA's first desalination plant opens in Freeport, Texas.

(Image via 'Historic Photographs' Facebook page)
21 June: 'A thin TV screen only 4 inches thick with an automatic timing device to record TV programs for later viewing is the wave of the future as shown at the Home Furnishings Market in Chicago.'


24 June: despite a ban in Dade County, Florida, Henry Miller's controversial book 'Tropic of Cancer' is published in the USA by Grove Press, 27 years after its first publication in Europe. Booksellers are still threatened with prosecution for violating anti-obscenity laws; in 1964 the US Supreme Court rules that the book is not obscene because it has some redeeming social value.

UK chart hits, week ending 24 June 1961

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1

Surrender

Elvis Presley

RCA

2

Runaway

Del Shannon

London

3

Temptation

The Everly Brothers

Warner Brothers

4

Pasadena

The Temperance Seven

Parlophone

5

The Frightened City

The Shadows

Columbia

6

Hello Mary Lou / Travellin' Man

Ricky Nelson

London

7

You'll Never Know

Shirley Bassey

Columbia

8

But I Do

Clarence 'Frogman' Henry

Pye

9

Pop Goes The Weasel / Bee*Bom

Anthony Newley

Decca

10

Halfway To Paradise

Billy Fury

Decca

11

I Told Every Little Star

Linda Scott

Columbia

12

A Girl Like You

Cliff Richard and The Shadows

Columbia

13

Runnin' Scared

Roy Orbison

London

14

More Than I Can Say

Bobby Vee

London

15

Have A Drink On Me

Lonnie Donegan

Pye

16

Well I Ask You

Eden Kane

Decca

17

What'd I Say

Jerry Lee Lewis

London

18

Little Devil

Neil Sedaka

RCA

19

Weekend

Eddie Cochran

London

20

Ring Of Fire

Duane Eddy

London