Rants ‘n’ Raves
Rave: Hyde Park Calling
Photo Credit: Phil McKenzie © 2006 The Bandanna Club.
What can I say? Absolutely excellent weekend! 60,000+ people enjoying a range of top musical talent and classic rock!
Full details are in the Bandanna Club Good Times section
Includes a Photo Gallery.
+12Rave: Summer in England
Today is the Summer Solstice – the longest day of the year. Hard to believe that the days will now start to get shorter again, but there you go…
All over the UK, the last few weeks have seen many a clear blue sky with temperatures as high as the mid 30′s (C).
At the site I currently work at in Hampshire, all the trees and flowers have burst into their full bloom. Everywhere, the whole place seems to be teaming with life and I find myself looking for excuses to get outside – just for a few minutes – at regular intervals.
Most evenings when I pull into my driveway, I catch a whiff of one of the smells of summer; freshly cut grass, BBQ lighter fluid (and later more mouthwatering smells!) etc. At times like this, I can’t think of many other places in the world that I would rather be.
Forget France – come to England!
+17Rant: Always the Stick – Never the Carrot!
Late last week, the new Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander announced a £10m fund for the development of nationwide road charging schemes.
A day later, London’s Mayor Ken Livingston indicated during a public debate that the London congestion charge could rise to £10 per day.
+18Rant: Water Water Everywhere…
Over the last month, water companies across the south have been imposing hosepipe bans (and taking the opportunity to increase tariffs and press the Environment Agency, to approve compulsory water meter installation).
While it is certainly true that the last 9 months has been an unusually dry period and this, combined with a significant level of consumer waste has made a bad situation worse, the root cause of the problem is undeniably years of underinvestment in the water infrastructure.
+13Rant: What a Charlie!
The latest home office fiasco has demonstrated why Charles Clarke is earning his nickname: “Jockstrap” (because he is full of b*llocks).
Not content with inadvertently releasing over a thousand foreign prisoners, it’s now clear that the Home Office freed 288 foreign prisoners after they became aware of the problem last summer! In all, the home office released 1023 offenders between February 1999 and March 2006. They included those guilty of serious offenses including drug dealing, rape, murder and pedophilia.
+21Rant: Guantanamo Bay – (way past) time to close it!
Here in the UK, at least one senior minister (Peter Hain) has also called for the camp to be closed and has intimated that Downing street is – at the very least – uncomfortable with what is happening in Guantanamo.
For the rest of the thinking population throughout the supposed “free world” Guantanamo has come to symbolise the worst hypocrisy of the current US administration.
+22Rave: Wire Daisies “Just Another Day”
Photo Credit: by Brian Marks CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Having fallen out of touch with much of the UK music scene in the mid 90′s, (during the period I shudderingly refer to as “Clubbing and Remix Hell”) I’m enormously pleased to see the return of a growing number of original new bands emerging in a renaissance of the UK music industry.
Chief among my favourites has to be the Cornwall-based Wire Daisies. Their debut album “Just another Day” is a milestone in Indie music and rightly went straight into the iTunes charts in September 2004 when it was launched.
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