Where Worlds Collide

Olivia Sparnenn

On Saturday June 27, Breathing Space returned to The Intake Club in Mansfield, their third gig since Liam Davidson replaced Mark Rowen on guitar.

Although the gig was advertised as an 8pm start, thanks to a long tailback on the M1 delaying one member of the band it was almost ten before Breathing Space finally hit the stage.

Liam Davidson

Changing just one band member has transformed the band’s sound far more that I’d expected. Mark Rowen’s economical jazz-tinged playing was a major element of Breathing Space’s sound, and Liam has a very different style. With Mostly Autumn he’s always very much in the background, but I’ve always thought he’s a far better guitarist than many people realise. Given the chance in the spotlight shows just how good he can playing lead. He doesn’t try to copy Mark’s solos note-for-note, instead using the basic structure as a template for solos of his own.

The result is a far rawer and rockier band. Many of the big soaring ballads and jazz-rock jams that epitomised “Coming Up for Air” have been retired from the set in favour of guitar-driven hard rock numbers, turning the overall energy level of the set up several notches. A surprise was the Mostly Autumn standard “Never the Rainbow”, which I’d not heard Breathing Space play live before.

The set included several new songs from the forthcoming album “Below the Radar”. The title track has been in the setlist for a while, but the standout of the new numbers has to be the encore, “Questioning Eyes”, a huge soaring epic in the same league as Iain’s “The Gap Is Too Wide” or “Carpe Diem”.

Simple guide to musical genres:

• Pop: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so the producer fixes it with auto-tune. When they tour, all the vocals are lip-synched.
• Indie: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so sings completely out of tune both on record and live. Because that’s “for real”.
• Rock: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so gets sacked from the band before they get past the toilet circuit. They keep auditioning replacements until they manage to find someone who can actually sing.

Or am I just getting cynical in my old age?

The train company formerly known as EWS seems to have got itself in a bit of bother over noisy coal trains.

The Falkirk West SNP member said analysis carried out by Falkirk Council showed the night coal runs by freight company DB Shenker were creating a substantial vibration problem.

He said the average vibration level for DB Schenker trains was 0.075 millimetres per second and could reach up to 0.091 mm per second.

That is in contrast to Freightliner Limited trains who also use the route to transport coal to the Fife power station. Tests revealed they created a vibration level of just 0.025 millimetres per second.

Mr Matheson said the different readings could be attributed to the speed of the trains and the different coal wagons used by the companies.

The DB Schenker (ex-EWS) trains use coal hoppers delivered shortly after privatisation to replace life-expired wagons dating from the 1960s. EWS, charismatic leader Ed Burkhart decided to ignore decades of rail experience developed for European conditions in favour of doing everything The American Way. So these new wagons had ‘more economical’ American-style heavy cast bogies rather than the lighter designs favoured up to then in Britain and Europe for a very different rail environment. He didn’t take into account the extra punishment they inflicted on tracks that carry heavy passenger traffic. And I wonder how much environmental noise was ever considered - after all, in America the rails always run though the worst bits of town inhabited by poor people whose opionions tend to be ignored.

Freightliner’s more modern wagons use far more technically sophisticated bogies designed to minimise track wear. And they also seem to be a lot quieter.

Where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here, where do we go from here?

They boarded up the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
You can’t take a photograph of Uzis on a street corner
The DJ resigned today they wouldn’t let him have his say
Surface scratched where the needles play, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here

Terror in Rue de St. Denis, murder on the periphery
Someone else in someone else’s pocket
Christ knows I don’t know how to stop it
Poppies at the cenotaph, the cynics can’t afford to laugh
I heard in on the telegraph there’s Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

The more I see, the more I hear, the more I find fewer answers
I close my mind, I shout it out but you know it’s getting harder
To calm down, to reason out, to come to terms with what it’s all about
I’m uptight, can’t sleep at night, I can’t pretend everything’s all right
My ideals, my sanity, they seem to be deserting me
But to stand up and fight I know we have six million reasons

They’re burning down the synagogues, Uzis on a street corner
The heralds of the holocaust, Uzis on a street corner
The silence never louder than now, how quickly we forgot our vows
This resurrection we can’t allow, Uzis on a street corner

Where do we go from here, where do we go from here

We buy fresh bagels from the corner store
Where swastikas are spat from aerosols
I sit in the bar sipping iced White Russian
Trying to score but nobody’s pushing
And everyone looks at everyone’s faces
Searching for signs and praying for traces of a conscience in residence
Are we sitting on a barbed wire fence
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

We place our faith in human rights
In the paper wars that tie the red tape tight
I know that I would rather be out of this conspiracy
In the gulags and internment camps frozen faces in nameless ranks
I know that they would rather be standing here besides me
Racing the clouds home, racing the clouds home

You can shut your eyes, you can hide it away it’s gonna come back another day
Racing the clouds home, are we racing the clouds home
Racing the clouds home

- Marillion, White Russian © EMI Music Publishing, quoted in full with permission

65 years ago was the D-Day landings.

65 years later, 943598 British voters chose to insult the memories of those who gave their lives on that day by voting for a party who represent exactly the same values as the enemy they died fighting.

Some people claim it’s just a protest vote; a way to say ‘up yours’ to the political establishment in response to the scandals about MPs expenses. How many of these voters have actually stopped to think what they’re endorsing?

I count many of black, Jewish, gay and transgendered people amongst my friends and acquaintances. This vile party is fundamentally opposed to their very existence; they want to herd them all into concentration camps. They’ll deny it in public, of course, but they’ll be lying. You have to be pretty stupid not to see these neo-Nazis for what they are. It’s the non-white, non-straight, non-Anglo-Saxon British citizens that a BNP vote really says ‘up yours’ to.

And their use of British WW2 imagery, when their leaders idolise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, really sticks in my throat.

“Frequency” is the latest album by old-school prog veterans IQ. While they’ve never been very prolific, this being only their ninth album in a career that stretches back more than a quarter of century, everything they’ve released in recent years has been consistently good.

From the opening Mellotron chords of the title track onwards, the sound is still quintessential IQ; pure 80s neo-prog, ten-minute songs in strange time signatures featuring swirling keyboards, lengthy solos, melodramatic vocals and often impenetrable lyrics. While their fusion of Gabriel-era Genesis with bits of Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator and King Crimson has never been spectacularly original, over the course of 25 years and nine albums they’ve honed their big near-symphonic sound to perfection, and this album is at least as good as anything they’ve ever done.

One thing you can’t accuse them of is a lack of tunes; even though the lengthy songs often lack conventional hooks or choruses Peter Nicholls has a great gift for hauntingly memorable melodies. And this being prog, the instrumentalists are just as important as the singer - new keyboard player Mark Westworth proves himself more than capable of filling the shoes of the recently-departed Martin Orford, and guitarist Mike Holmes contributes some superbly fluid solos.

As with most prog albums, this is a complex work that takes many listens to fully appreciate. The title track and the poverfully intense “Ryker Skies” make the most immediate impact, but after repeated plays the lengthy “The Province” emerges as the album highlight.

“Frequency” doesn’t break any new ground, but I don’t think anybody really expects or wants them to at this stage in their career. And if they’re not very original, they do what they do so well that it doesn’t matter.

I think having my camera die on my three days into my holiday was a blessing in disguise. I’d had a Fuji S1000, which I was never really happy with, and faced with an exposure meter fault that would cost more to repair than the camera was worth, I decided it was time to upgrade to the DLSR I should have bought a year ago.

None of this shopping around, poring over “Whatever SLR” and comparing rival cameras with similar specs; just a matter of what Jessops in Torquay had in stock that was within my budget.

I ended up with a Sony α200 with an 18-70 zoom lens, plus a 75-300 telephoto zoom, and after two weeks I can say I’m very happy with it so far. It did take a few failed photos to get used to the fact that it didn’t have the shutter delay which was a ‘feature’ of the bridge camera I had before. What you see in the viewfinder when you press the shutter is pretty much what you get in the picture; the autofocus is extremely fast.

So here’s some examples of what I took with it

The down platform at Lostwithiel in Cornwall is a classic shot for early to mid morning. Loco-hauled passenger trains are long-gone, but I find Voyagers are quite photogenic.

An EWS 66 moves sllowly across the crossing at Lostwithiel on a china clay train.

Testing what the 300mm telephoto can do. The train was something like half a mile away.

And of course it’s got to be able to handle indoor concert photography, which is one of the most challenging types of photography there is. This one of of Heather Findlay of Mostly Autumn at The Wharf in Tavistock. I took it at 3200 ASA handheld at something like 1/60th.

One from DEMU showcase on Saturday; another high ASA slow shutter speed handheld shot; I think I went down to 1/15th sec on this.

This camera is also a joy to use; all the buttons are clearly labelled and the menus are intuitive so that you don’t keep needing to refer to the manual to find out what something does, or how to something. After a year in which I took very few photographs, this camera has got me excited about photography again.