Website News
Some interesting finds over the past few weeks, all
of them visual finds.
Firstly, I'm delighted that my old friend Michael
Laing is unearthing some amazing images from over twenty years ago.
Unlike a lot of the images I come across that were taken from far away
on equipment like disc cameras (remember them?), Mike had really good
camera equipment even back in the '80's and the quality of these images
is pretty stunning. The first collection of images from Mike's vaults
are of those old heavy metal favorites Garrison.
It's amazing to me how young they look to me now. Mike's growing
collection can also be found on his Flickr pages.
The second batch of images I got recently helps me
create a page for a band I remember well, but had no material from
before, Gene Regulation. Thanks
to Mike Madden from the band for sending these. Mike's reminded me that
he was in the year above me in HND Communication Studies at Kirkcaldy
Tech, so he's used his artistic skills he learned there to create some
great posters for the band.
Mike's also sent these wonderful posters he did for
one of Bill Gimix's many alternative clubs he organised.
I'm grateful also for Teresa Watson for getting in
touch. Theresa was instrumental in many of the great things in the
Kirkcaldy music scene in the '80's, not least as the organiser behind
the Stupefied tape, and for getting Who Cares and The
Circle Line together. Hopefully Theresa has some great stories and
/ or some great material to share with us.
Tom, Oakland
California, August 22 2009
Well, a few more weeks and it feels like a lot has
changed again.
For boring old personal reasons I actually, for
once, had quite a bit of time on my hands in May, so I spent a lot of
time weaning myself off my Mac habit, as I realised that Apple are
basically taking the piss with the mark ups they are charging for their
hardware (oh and of course this new anti Apple feeling had nothing to
do with me being interviewed down there and not getting the job...). I
remembered that the only reason I got so heavily into Macs in the first
place was because after millions of bad experiences with Windows 98, I
would never give Microsoft another chance, and the only viable
alternative to Windows at the time was Mac. I invested a bit of time
re-discovering Linux and I'm happy to say that there is now a better
alternative to Windows (well, "better" is a matter of opinion I
suppose) and that Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu Linux, is now my
operating system of choice and the new platform this website is
maintained on. The website has actually been hosted on Linux since it
was re-launched in 1997, so it's now maintained and hosted on
opensource software. More info on my recent technical experiments, and
the reason why I had so much time on my hands, and may not again soon,
on my blog at www.zanak.blogspot.com.
I've also been experimenting with audio restoration,
the biggest project completed so far is the "remastered" Stupefied tape. I've also made available
some music in alternative file types, one is a "lossless" file type,
which results in much better sound quality. I've done a new advanced audio help section which
hopefully will explain all. I'll make music available in these new
formats as time permits, I've managed to convert some music and it is
available on the Stupefied, Blazing Apostles, Nationwide, Darlingheart
and Ghost Train pages.
Using different software to maintain the website has
also made some things seem a bit easier, so I've been introducing some
little band "icons" on the index page. I think they are rather cool.
Thanks to "Smiley" George McArthur of The Gimix and lattery of the Ghost Train (for their last two gigs) for
getting in touch recently, and I will honestly reply to your e-mail
soon George! George was very recently the bass player of a band in
Glasgow called Kirby, Colin Livingston of The
Twist and Who Cares? was the drummer
of
the band. Sounded
interesting, I've yet to track down any material of them on the
internet.
And a big thanks to Scotty from the Ghost Train for getting in touch and for
the info that may help us track down more material.
Today I did a new page on Leven's Rockets
Revenge, thanks to Rab from the band for all the material.
Just purely for fun, I have added a link to the old
Kirkcaldybands.com, to the website
history page from the days when it was a
sub set of Pooheads.com. I didn't know how easy it would be to
resurrect
an old website, but I found the disc it was on and it kinda works. Of
course, there are lots of broken links, etc that will never be fixed,
but I thought it was fun to see how the website has changed. Of course,
please don't e-mail us on the e-mail addresses listed on these pages,
they haven't worked for many years!
Finally, thanks to Bruce Jackson, for the iconic
Kirkcaldy image below. I think my only memory of this place from the
1980's is not getting past the bouncers!
Tom, Oakland
California, June 28 2009
After a gap of a few months mainly taken up by my
own marriage back over in Scotland, I'm getting round to one or two
updates. Thanks a lot to Iain Cummings for sending over the MP3's of
the "Pooka" EP, these are now up on the Twist
page. Also Gary Bonar, drummer of Locomotive
latenight (who holds the distinction of being the first band member
to get in touch with me after the website went back live in April
2007!), for the new pic from the lineup of the band when mark Nicol was
playing bass.
Tom, Oakland California, May 31st 2009
Well it's a Sunday and I'm siting in bed in Oakland California in the rain. It does not rain a lot here, the rainy season is from around October to March, so when it does rain it brings back memories.....
Thanks a lot to Ian H who is ex Schoolhouse for getting in touch. He send me this link to a really interesting blog post it is worth a read, and also he is hoping to get together some Schoolhouse material for me. He has sent the wonderful "Tadpoles" as a taster.
More sad news as a reminder that a lot of this great material was a long time ago and old father time is the most unforgiving parent, Bill Gimix asked me to post the following:
More dead in Kirkcaldy....Friend called Mickey
Hamilton.....one of the 'Original Station Barmy Army'.....in the
station bar where we all sprung from!!....Mikey was half of the
Original Gimmick{yes i know}......So......
I want you Give him a Mention sumwhere please as one of the
'ForeFathers of punk' in Kirkcaldy.
Tom, Oakland California, March 1st 2009
Well I can't believe it's really been so long. Firstly, thanks for all your e-mails since I last updated the site. It was particularly nice to hear from Rob Jackson who played the classic Bentleys gig with the Crucified Brains and Cameron Campbell from All Days Fade, The Amused and Darlingheart.
Talking of Darlingheart, Cameron has sent over a load of interesting material, pictures, press cuttings and tour material from their support slot with Blur. I'm hearing that material that was intended for the unreleased second album may be available to us soon.
Some amazing new pictures of the "pre-Scotty" Nationwide line up arrived today, so I quickly uploaded them whilst I was doing other updates. These pictures are really cool and seem to capture the look of the times they were taken perfectly.
Davie Brown has also dug out some great additional Ghost Train material that I have added to the site today. There are really good versions of their first single (Killing Time / Hope and Glory) that were recorded from the master tape at the recording session. These versions sound a bit different and, in my opinion, sound better than the single. Also included are parts of live gigs from 1988 and 1989. Coming shortly are copies of, what I think are complete two gigs from 1985. I heard some of these recordings when I was over in Scotland at Christmas and they sounded amazing, can't wait to hear the whole versions.
Lastly, thanks to Iain of the Schoolhouse for getting in touch (and sorry I have not got round to personally replying to you yet) with the promise of more material and a great song called "Tadpoles".
So, no one wants to hear any excuses for me not updating the site since last May, do they..... Oh well, if I must, I am at the tender age of 42 getting married for the first time in April of this year and the planning for this seems to be a full time job, that of course I do as well as my full time job. Also, due to an irritating flaw with Adobe Dreamweaver (which I use to make this site), I couldn't move the programme off the non portable iMac to my laptop, so I could grab 10 minutes here and there, particularly when traveling, to update the site. Happily now, after I spoke to a very nice lady at Adobe, this is now resolved, so having arrived four and a half hours (yes four and a half hours) early for a flight from San Diego to Oakland (California) I have amused myself for hours updating the website. So thanks San Diego airport for free wifi (and the wifi here is really fast) and thanks to Apple for great laptops, I've now managed to do some updates. Phew!
Tom, San Diego Airport, CA, February 18 2009.
We have the luxury of a three day weekend here in the USA, this does not happen enough. It's Memorial Day on Monday, so I've had time to do some updates to the site, and we have had some interesting new material in the past few weeks.
Firstly there are a set of songs 1980 from a band called CB Talk, also pictured above. I don't know anything more about them aside what came with the songs, but they are rather good.
We have dipped into the early 1990's, with Circle Line and Perfumed Galaxy, pictured above. The material came to me via Alan Liddell who also played with the Blazing Apostles / Locomotive Latenight and Nationwide. Perfumed Galaxy also features Danny Holland on bass. Danny played with Locomotive Latenight towards the end as well as his own band, The Receiving End.
By far my favorite recent update, is the new material on the Who Cares? page. I made an arse of the record level when I recordrd the above 1988 gig and Ian has spent months digitally transforming the only tape of a complete gig that we have, the difference is remarkable.
It's amazing what you can do with audio technology and I've really enjoyed hearing this gig again without the deafening hiss. The newly restored audio is available at the Who Cares? page, it's great to have a better copy of the only available gig of this horribly short lived band. It'd be even better to locate the other tape I know I made in 1988, sadly posted missing for 18 years now, see item 6 of the Top 10 most wanted on the Treasure Hunt page.
Lastly, having worked for ages on pages like the Introduction page when the website was first re-launched back in the April of 2007, it's been difficult to get round to re-writing something that is pretty out of date now. So, instead of re-writing it, I've added the above video to the introduction page. This is not really any sort of formal introduction, rather a very brief excerpt from some test footage we filmed for a video project related to this website. The video project has yet to really take shape, and given the time that may be involved, may not take shape for some time. But this little video is a fragment of what may be to come, and it updates the old introduction page, just a bit.
Tom, Berkeley Ca, May 25th 2008.
Well how time flies, and four months after my last update I am finally getting round to added some new material.
I feel rather guilty about the amount of time it's taken to update the site. I've been coping with a house move and some rather strange technical problems with my old faithful iMac, which is where this website lives now. It's pictured above in it's new location in Sunny Berkeley, California, however, I won't bore anyone with these excuses!
Today I've added -
A Billy and the Low IQ's page and a Godsquad page and also added pics and music to the Laughing Academy page (thanks Dougi) and a brand new page for Backlash (thanks again Dougi). I've also added some new material to two of my favorite bands pages, from material supplied to me by Alan Liddell. Some more great pictures of Nationwide, taken I think at the WMCA in Valley Gardens Kirkcaldy, and also the entire original Nationwide Demo, which Alan thinks was recorded in a studio in Glasgow around 1980. Also today I uploaded the remainder of the Locomotive Latenight music, which completes the batch of tapes Alan gave Ian. There are some cracking songs there, all pretty good sound quality too, they are from the end of the band's career around 1987, 1988 and 1989. The songs feature Allan Liddell on Marimbas and two different bass players, Mark Nichol and Danny Holland. Thanks also to Mark (Swanny) Swanson and Siobhan Swanson, for the pictures of Absolute Alexis, who now have a page.
Tom, Berkeley Ca, May 4th 2008.
Thanks to Dougi McMillan of The Strutz, Laughing Academy and Godsquad for getting in touch. has provided some cracking new material, including some rather good pics of the Gimix,
and this pic of a
band from the late 1970's called "Electrolux. The filename says this
was taken in 1977!
A Laughing Academy page has been started. Pages on Godsquad and Billy and the Low IQ's are to follow.
I've also been having a great time uploading the pics and music of the Blazing Apostles / Locomotive Latenight that Alan Liddell of that band (and Nationwide) dropped off an Ian's house the other day.
Ian is shipping Alan's other material over to me, including the complete original Nationwide demo.
There is a
great new pic that Alan supplied of Nationwide
added to their page.
Tom, San Jose Ca, Feb 17 2008.
I installed some website traffic monitoring code onto the index page in early January and I've been pretty amazed by the volume of visits and, more importantly, the length of time some of you out there are spending on the site - thanks for your interest!
So, I have installed a feature I was asked to install a while back, a Guestbook. The link to it is now the very last item in the "Other Stuff" section. There are a number of free "ad supported" services out there that you can install. If the guestbook proves to be a feature people like and use and I end up liking the software, I'll pay the $14 and go for the non ad supported version, as I'm not keen on hitting people with adverts if I don't need to.
On a different topic, no sooner than I had listed on the Treasure Hunt page, that I'd love to hear some audio again from the January 1985 Balwearie Charities Gig (above pictures of Nationwide and Days of 29 from this gig supplied by Hunter) - I got an e-mail from Alan Liddell saying he had been looking around at his parent's place and he had located the Blazing Apostles performance from that night, plus a load of other interesting material, including their janice Long show session, plus the whole original Nationwide demo. Nice one Alan, we will get his material up and available to everyone as soon as we can manage it, although give us a few weeks, as these cassette to digital transfers take time......
I'm also experimenting with posting messages on the schools pages at Friends Reunited, starting with my old School, which was Balwearie. Initially to see if I can find out who organised that gig, in the hopes that may get me nearer finding more material from the gig. Sound was recorded off the mixing desk and, of all things a video was made. Alan thinks it was, then current pupils, as I left the year before it couldn't have been any of our year, so maybe the year below us was more enterprising! My message is being "moderated" just now and I hope I have not broken some rule designed to stop people advertising commercial websites on their bulletin boards. Oh well, we will see. If I get away with this one I hope to post messages on other Kirkcaldy Schools on Friendsreunited to see what else I can dig up.
Tom San Jose California, January 23 2008
I've had made the most out of the US long weekend and have managed to add another two bands into a section I've been meaning to do for ages, called other bands. You can also find this link at the bottom of the list of bands on the main index page. This is meant for bands of the era that weren't from Kirkcaldy (for the sake of argument I'm counting bands I want to feature from Leven, Burntisland and Kinghorn as "Kirkcaldy"), but other bands who played Kirkcaldy a lot, but had more tenuous connections with the area. I may add to this over time, or maybe not. I've featured two bands already, the kings of political rock Political Asylum and the funk masters Blue Vega. I've also spent a huge amount of time re-doing the Treasure Hunt page and have dropped mails to people who may have some additional material for this website, thanks to Alan Liddell, Clark Thompson and Andy Carr for replying already.
I'd also be grateful for some feedback on the new idea I had for the two totally new pages I did today. If I have a whole gig or album, I've also included a link to a zip file, so people can download the whole album / gig at once.
Good idea? Or too big a file to download?
Tom San Jose California, Jan 21 2007 (Martin Luther King Day).
Having got over the annual hassle of Christmas and New Year, and some earlier hassle that involved us in a house move in early November, I'm now in a position again to do some website updates. Ian's got over his house move too and has been busy. First task was the audio restoration and digitising of the Twist's " Strangefruit" tape, kindly leant to us by Fergus Henderson.
The material sounds great and was on my iPod throughout a lot of the Christmas break. I laughed when I saw the cassette itself, which was a "Soundhog" branded cassette, which I remember as a dirt cheap brand from the late '70's - the cassette must have been around ten years old when the Twist used it!
Also digitised are Ian's 7 inch Kirkcaldy vinyl singles.
These are now up on the website - new material from the Strutz, Side Effects, Blazing Apostles and the soundtrack to our lives in 1986, the classic Ghost Train Killing Time / Hope and Glory double a side.
The Side Effects material is really good, I'd love to learn more about this band.
There has also been a mini Ghost Train reunion! Jeremy Flynn and Davie Brown got together at HSK Music late last year.
I've had some good contacts from more people with material for the site, hopefully some Blue on Shock and more Receiving End material will come soon, maybe even the one and only Gimiz video will appear soon.
Also, Ian is still to digitise his Kirkcaldy 12 inch singles, I believe there is some Days of 29 and Ghost Train material there.
Tom, San Jose California, January 20 2008.
Spent a very nice day in Kirkcaldy last week with my new camera, taking pictures of pubs and venues. I even ventured as far as Kinghorn! So the Kirkcaldy Gallery has become more of a "pubs and general stuff" gallery and I've done a whole new section on the website for pictures of venues (or rather, in quite a few cases, pictures of gap sites and old people's homes where the venues were!). Same story as ever, if anyone has pics of the venues that are no longer with us, please get them to me. Also some new pics added to the Ghost Train page, as supplied by Davie Brown.
Tom, October 11 2007, on a flight from Atlanta GA to San Francisco, currently above Nevada.
New MP3's added to the Ghost Train and Nationwide pages of the site - thanks to Mark Nicol for supplying the files. I've been listening to Dusty Bedrooms on my iPod constantly since I got it from Mark.
Tom October 6 2007, Edinburgh Lauriston Travel Inn
Huge number of updates to the site over the last few days. Firstly, thanks to Mark Nicol for the links to the youtube copies of the Ghost Train and Blazing Apostles videos. Mark has also sent a cracking Ghost Train song that I have just uploaded to the site.
Big thanks again to Hunter for all the scanning - there are a large amount of new images added to the Gimix page, these came from Chil the drummer of the Gimix and were scanned and sent to me by Hunter. New audio is on it's way also, from Chil and Hunter too.
Also, Bill is working on a digital copy of the one and only Gimix video, can't wait!
So, I've managed to get all the new Gimix images added to the Gimix page, as I've been sitting here with my laptop on a flight from Newark New Jersey to Edinburgh. Having dropped my old faithful iBook in the airport, I hope it makes it back in one piece so I can upload these pages!
Tom, September 30 2007, somewhere above Ireland (I think!).
Some cool new pics taken my Michael Laing in the Summer of 1989, added to the Amused, Ghost Train and Twist pages. Thanks again Mike. New section added for links to the webpages of current and more recent bands from the area.
Tom, Sept 10 2007.
Thanks to Andy Carr (Sacristy and Summerfield Blues) I have a ton of new material on Sacristy and Summerfield Blues. As it's a public holiday today in the US, I'm sitting in bed with my laptop adding the new images. Andy's also provided some new info in the myriad of bands that he and his brother Mark were involved in - The Tabs, Moonstone, The Fauves, etc. etc.
A photo of the Tabs is above. They were Mark Carr on drums, Steve Bell on guitar and Andy Carr on bass and vocals. This photo is from a gig in St Andrews church hall in the summer of '84. I think I took this photo on a disc camera (remember them?).
My first experience of a live band was at school in December 1982. Somehow the Balwearie authorities allowed Mark's first band, Moonstone, play a gig for us in the Assembly room of the school on the last day before the Christmas break. I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. I wore my new green army jacket and jeans. I remember they played some Status Quo songs and House of the Rising Sun. Also, UFO's "Doctor Doctor", which was their most popular song, a real set highlight. Unfortunately we have drawn a blank to find any Moonstone material, but I remain in hope.
Anyway, there are a load of new Sacristy images on their page and even more Summerfield Blues pics on their page. I have so many Summerfield Blues images that I have reverted to a more traditional web page creation style on that one and have done clickable thumbnails, click on the thumbnail in the grid and you will reveal the larger image. Hopefully the Sacristy page is not too "image heavy" to load on its own now.
On a Sacristy theme also, my sister was playing
about with Friendsreunited and has discovered that there is a listing
for an "Alexander (Sandy) Allan" who left Kirkcaldy High in 1985 and me
now lives in the same city as me, San Francisco. I wonder if it is the
same guy who played sax in Sacristy - seems too big a coincidence for
it to be anyone else. I would send an e-mail to him to find out, but
there is some problem with Friendsreunited taking my credit card. My
sister continues to research.....
Two more picture of the Tabs gig in Summer '84 are below.
Tom, September third 2007 (Labor day)
This is what I'm looking like most of the time at the moment, sitting on the settee working on my websites, despite my long suffering iBook beginning to exhibit some rather eccentric failures of keyboard, probably due to over-use. The number three is now impossible to type on this machine now!
I've had some nice e-mails this week from Bill Gimix, plus Dave Acari and Andy Carr from The Summerfield Blues - keep your e-mails coming guys, knowing you are enjoying the website makes sitting here on a sunny San Franciscan afternoon working away on my iBook seem worthwhile!
Talking of the Summerfield Blues, I have begun a page on them, thanks to some pics Andy Carr sent me. There is also a huge amount of new material coming from Dave Acari, including of all things, a video! Kirkcaldy bands first video download - look for this in around a weeks time.
I've also had some nice reaction to the piece I wrote on Ritchie Smith in the Workshop Band page of this website. It's nice to know that after fifteen years people still have so many fond memories of him. There will be more Ritchie related material on the Summerfield Blues pages. I'm not clear what other bands Ritchie played with, blues bands are classic for having loads of people guest with them. If anyone has more info on this, please feel free to mail me - the link to my e-mail address is at the bottom of the main index page to this website.
I'm also very happy to be collaborating with Clark Thomson of, amongst others, Darlingheart. We are working to bring a ton of unheard (and unseen!) material to the website.
Tom, September 1st 2007.
Having spent a Saturday or two trying to learn XHTML, I decided that I had to think about the old "balance of time" I had available, verses the money I wanted to spend, and I took the plunge and bought Dreamweaver instead and went back to another GUI based website creation tool. Thanks to Colin Usher, ex of The Twist, for his initial idea to do that. I have spent, what seems like forever re-creating the website in Dreamweaver. In reality, it's been two weekends, but that's a long time! I bought a huge "Missing Manual" book about Dreamweaver, but decided that I'd concentrate on the content, rather than making the a flashy website. So you will see that a lot of the design of the old website has been retained.
I have enhanced and enlarged many of the pictures, I reckoned that most people are on broadband these days, so large pics are not a huge issue.
The old Rapidweaver site, became impossible to update, due to that tools habit of continually crashing - so there are many updates now, most are indicated in brackets under the relevant link to the band page on the main page.
The update that is really worth separately calling out though, is Davie Brown's wonderful collection of Ghost Train audio. This came to me coincidentally, on Saturday as I was doing a huge amount of work on the site, and I have been listening to it ever since. Thanks again to Ian for the analogue to digital transfer and audio enhancements. This is all on the Ghost Train page now. It also includes an interview with Scotty and Mark Nichol, a great period piece.
Also new are some great pictures Julie Watt of The Amused and Inside Eva sent me.
Some of the look and feel (to use an IT term) of the site is the same as the old, but this is a total re-creation. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some typos and broken links. Please let me know if you spot anything, my e-mail address is on the site's main page.
Tom, Aug 19 2007.
I have learnt a ton of stuff on XHTML, but it's gonna take some time to re-create all the links etc, so I'm just hoping this Rapidweaver thing holds together long enough for me to do some more updates. Big news is that i have finally got hold of the Gimix tape that Davie Wallace sent to Ian a few weeks ago. It's been amazing to hear the band after all these years and the tracks are available for download on the Gimix page. Thanks again to Davie for sending the tape and Ian for digitising it. There is also a new Locomotive Latenight song on their page called "The Secrets", thanks for Gary Bonar for sending that.
Tom, July 3rd 2007
I'm just doing some minor tweaks, but after wasting most of Sunday using Rapidweaver as it kept crashing (I counted around 14 crashes) I'm moving this site to a new web creation tool. Thanks to the suggestion from my old friend Michael Laing, I have decided to try to learn a little HTML and re-create this site using a free, HTML tool. So this may take me some time to do - I just bought a book on the subject and it looks relatively straightforward - famous last words! You can follow more of the news on this on my blog - zanak.blogspot.com.
Anyway, the headline news is that the Kirkcaldy Bands Treasure Hunt has uncovered it's best lost treasure yet. From the 80's vortex I've uncovered some real Gimix audio, thanks to Davie Wallace who was the guitarist of that band. I haven't heard it yet, as I'm based in California , it's easier for Ian to receive the audio that needs converted to digital. But Ian says that the sound quality is surprisingly good, especially as the cassette itself looks particularly knackered. So Ian should send the CD of the digital version of the cassette over here in a week or so, so look for the new audio on the Gimix page in around 2 weeks time. This'll be the first time I've heard the Gimix in 21 years I think, I have no idea what they will sound like. However, an important find of a legendary Kirkcaldy band.
Tom, June 15th 2007
New lists of gigs added for The Amused and All Days Fade, and an updated list of gigs added for Who Cares? , Thanks Ian. Schoolhouse page added. Audio added to The Amused page.
Tom, June 10 2007
New audio of Locomotive Latenight added today, a whole load of very good sound quality MP3's recorded by Gary Bonar, who was the drummer of the band.
Also, some new information on Who Cares? added to their page.
Tom, June 2 2007
Many new pics uploaded today of the Ghost Train, thanks to Davie Brown. Also, a very minimal Blue on Shock page, created with the only material I have of them - a pic from the Abbosthall in 1983, also supplied by Davie Brown.
New posters added for The Twist and Silent Falls, supplied by Michael Laing.
Tom May 16 2007
After some considerable messing about with the web creation tool I bought to make this website (Rapidweaver - if anyone is interested, my advice is "avoid!" it crashes when saving about one time in every 4 and uses a huge amount of RAM It is only really useable in my iMac now, after I bought 2 gigs of RAM for it!) I have been able to make some updates:
The Twist - New pics from taken by Michael Laing, thanks Mike. New audio - most of the rest of the gig at the Abbotshall from March 3 1988. The "Talk to the Animals" MP3 was previously the only song from that gig on the site. Also two songs from Stupefied.
The Blazing Apostles / Locomotive Latenight - New page, with record cover and news cuttings images, supplied by Gary Bonar, thanks Gary.
Who Cares - New info on the band from Ian. Also audio - "Family Man" and "Thank Crunchie it's Friday" from Stupefied and the whole gig at the Abbotshall from March 3rd 1988.
Silent Falls - New info on the band from Dave Cunningham.
The Receiving End - Two songs from Stupefied, this page needs a lot more work!
All Days Fade - Two new songs from Stupefied.
Coming soon - New audio from The Amused
Also - I hope some material being dredged out of scrapbooks and attics by some of the guys who have been in touch already.
Tom May 12th 2007.
I was back in the UK in mid April, mainly to see the wonderful reformed Van Der Graaf Generator (check out the influences I listed in my interview for "Private Parts", back in 1986 on the Surgical Wars pages, yes - I am still a fan!).
Ian and I also managed to digitise a lot of tapes, we spent one whole afternoon just listening to old tapes that Ian had, and that I, somehow had managed to lose the digital copies of over the years. Despite being annoyed at myself for losing the digital files in the first place, the good thing is that, I think we have been able to improve on the quality of the original digital copies. So, the classic "Stupefied" tape was copied in this session - remember that? This means that I can feature a audio for many more bands that I have been able to before. So a new page is going up today for The Receiving End, the first audio is going up for the Silent Falls, and new audio is going up for All Days fade, The Twist, Who Cares? and The Ghost Train.
I've been listening to The Ghost Train's "Waiting for Madness" a lot, hearing this again brings back a whole era for me. The Twist's "Ask a rhetorical Question" has the same effect. It's also been great to hear the only "studio" recording that "Who Cares?" made again.
Ian's vinyl ands record deck is in storage just now, as he's in-between houses. So we weren't able to digitise any of that, which is a shame, as there is some good Ghost Train stuff there and also the only audio we have of the Blazing Apostles.
Since I came back from the UK I'm also delighted to have the first e-mails from former band members. Word is spreading already, which is great. Maybe this website won't be a museum of just one person's memories after all.
I've had mails from former members of The Blazing Apostles and The Twist. So, our lack of audio for the Blazing Apostles, which meant that an important Kirkcaldy Band was not featured here before, will be corrected soon, I hope as I'm promised some new material. It'll be great to hear them again, after all these years I've forgotten what they sounded like.
Tom May 6th 2007, San Jose California