Listening again to (or should that be 'experiencing'? The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (which is far and away their most difficult album - and that's saying something!!!) I have at last at last at last hit on the track I think that the introduction to "No-one Driving" comes from. It's their 1977 single 'United'. Either that or its double A side partner the wonderful "Zyclon B Zombie".
As soon as I heard it I saw the connection.

Which ties in beautifully of course with John's comment to In The City when he talks of his influences during the Metamatic period.
Asked about how punk affected and influnced the sound of Ultravox, and why he hadn't taken that further, he talks about 'far more interesting things that other people are doing, like Throbbing Gristle and Thomas Leer. In this respect, TG are the perfect example of the counter-punk industrial/electro era of the late 70s and early 80s.
In essence, punk was 'gang' music (based in London), all about being a bunch of lads and kicking off with your mates in a violent, reactionary way. This isolated all the friendless youth of the grey suburbs, the loners, the misfits, the social 'outcasts' if you like. The Billy-no-mates crowd of the soulless concrete suburbs from the Northern cities of Manchester and Sheffield. Ian Curtis. Marc Almond. Genesis P.Orridge. John Foxx. Phil Oakey. Many others.
Go on - someone tell me POrridge was from London....
But you know what I mean.

There's also a striking resemblance between the introduction to "Hiroshima Mon Amour" (and subsequently Blurred Girl) and a song by Can from 1969 called "Spoon" which I only heard today for the first time.
Makes sense again - John has often cited Can as an influence, epitomising his love of psychedelia and the very early emergent prog rock scene which spawned Floyd, Kraftwerk and Neu. That whole Dusseldorf too-cool-to-be- hippies thing with Conrad Plank.

Does this expalin why I otherwise I have no idea what the appeal of Captain Beefheart is?
And have hitherto been unable to justify my love of Trout Mask Replica?

After much prayer, a few disagreements and almost two bottles of wine, Mrs Vicar and I last night finally came up with the plan to 'multiply' our Cell into two.
Since three more people joined a couple of weeks ago it has been unmanageable at 15 and only one or two houses can host this many people. The intimacy has gone, people only read two verses each and it takes a year to get through the prayer requests.
Splitting into two groups was always going to be hard and we put it off over Easter, but in His presence last night we think we have come up with two groups of people that have the dynamics of the larger group and the capacity to grow and mature.
Unfortuantely I can't go until late tomorrow (after the school visit) but she is going to offer our ideas to the group for them to take away and consider for discussion next time we meet in a fortnight.

I thank God for his patience with us, and his guidance.

Inspired this evening, I have at last trawled through a sufficient number of albums to put together the compilation that Mike challenged me to do over the summer.
Throwing a dozen or so albums onto a CD in mp3 format (the tradition running since 2003) is easy, he said. And as neither of us has done a compilation properly since the days of tapes and vinyl it's been quite fun.
VERY hard tho, and I havent settled on a running order yet.

The compilation, which has the working titled "Play:List" is as follows:

Her Second Winter - Metamatics
Monk Rock - Justice
Shady O'Grady - Louis Gordon
Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles
United - Throbbing Gristle
Half Past One - Can
Pale - Robin Guthrie
Triple Vision - Doctors of Madness
Bouncer see Bouncer - Scott Walker
The Projectionist - John Foxx
Secular Delusion - Astrea Redux
Credo - Pentatonik
Weissence - Neu!
Pyrex My Cuisine - Soft Cell
Ant Man Bee - Captain Beefheart

Looks pretty good written out. I'm pleased with that.

Launched my new sign-in name at the new forum earlier. Mrs X has done well to set one up so quickly in the wake of the ultravox one closing over the weekend.
Shit happens guys, get over it.
I decided this was a good opportunity to play around with a few names before joining RH later in the year when I would like to have this second anonymous persona to help him out. So 'birdsong' is temporarily unavailable for comment. All future correspondence should be made to TheBlueBlaze at the same address. Mystic Comics, March 1940.

Shame I can't get the fekking avatar to work...

The 'deal' on the new office is signed and we can move in whenever we like! Officially it's ours from 1st November and D paid rent for that month this morning - which they said would be fine and required NO deposit!!
The arrangeemnt just seems to get better and better - my sceptical side has already expressed concern that it's too good to be true, but at the moment I can't see anything wrong with it.
The paln to move down the corridor into Room 5 hasn't worked out because the landlord hasn't got back to us with a price yet to rent it. Meanwhile though all our stuff just sits there waiting, as it turns out, to be moved to the Bargate site.
Only found out about the vacancy on Friday I think, when D met someone in Fareham who knows someone who knows someone else who knows the Shopping Centre manager.
Up above all the shop units are some stoerooms and three offices. One for the management and one for security, and a third which, until two weeks ago, was used as a training suite by 'JustNailz'. Notice the spelling with a 'z' - that tells you the kind of company they were.
And 'were' too of course. Does nobody do any research before opening something like this?? How many nail parlours are there in the city now??

So they went bust and did the customary 'runner' leaving, stock, desks, shelving, chairs, posters clocks, mugs, kettle etc etc (how do they afford to leave all this stuff behind? They don't own it I suppose, that must be the answer...) and the opportunity has fallen into our laps.
700 sq ft over two rooms - one 450, one 250. For LESS rent than we are paying where we are now. I can hardly believe it.
There are also numerous 'stock rooms' up there, and just today one became vacant. It's 600sq ft - which is three times as big as the two units we rent from Keepsafe. These each cost £180 pcm - that's £360.
These guys are going to let us rent one from them for £100 pcm!
Plus we can put up as much signage as we want AND there are no rates either!!!

Negatives? The kitchen and toilets are crappy (worse than at present) and MILES away from the office down concrete corridors lined with pipes that wind around like the inside underbelly of a Vogon spaceship.
It's all very exciting, despite being rather awkward to find.
Our nearest door into the building is in the top cornet of a public carpark behnd the bins. You know those weird unmarked doors you always see in these places.

Already we are itching to move and its great that we have so much time to get ourselves organised. Starting next week the room will be empty (except for the stuff we've asked to keep) so we will be going in to paint and measure up. The saving in the short term gives us more money to buy new furniture and racking for the stock room, and in the longer term convinces me more that the rise to a living wage will indeed be possible come the new year.
And the lease is for only one year at a time, which suits us as we are loooking for somewhere long term, more expensive and more 'professional' later, probably now abot two years hence.

Forgive me, but it feels good not having Kink visit us this evening for her session at the Gallery tomorrow.
I have to go back to work, I have a million phone calls to make and after dinner tomorrow we have the first Open Evening at the catchment Secondary School. Not one of our favoured options, but worth a look see to have a baseline for comparison with the others over the next few weeks.