A summer blogmeet is being organised in central London, some time between the middle of July and the end of August. If you hop over to Aquarionics, then you can leave your details and the dates you can/cannot make.

Item 136. Johnny Dankworth Big Band - Tomorrow's World (1973)

The single I've got has a 1973 issue date, but this sounds to me like the original version from 1967, which was used as the Tomorrow's World signature tune all the way through to 1981.

Thursday nights, just before Top Of The Pops: Raymond Baxter, James Burke, the actually-rather-dishy-in-his-own-way William Woollard, Michael "Screen Test" Rodd and Judith "zip-fronted one piece flying suit" Hann. By the time that Maggie "millions of tiny particles!" Philbin had moved in, the theme tune had been scrapped, the future had been downsized, and the magic had gone.

Item 137. The Gun Club - Ghost On The Highway (1982)

You slaughtered your loving man / Killed him in his sleep / The blood and crying of your murder / Simply stains your sheets / Now, you're a ghost on the highway / Your gesture's meaningless / You're lost to the living men / Trailing souls to the end.

Starring the late Jeffery Lee Pierce, this is a fine and furious piece of blood-soaked melodrama. Gothic - but in the traditional sense of the word, as opposed to the kohled-and-crimped, black-black-blaaaaack sense of the word.

Please?
Thank you.

It really was bloody great though.
There: that's your review.
I told you I was going to be brief and to the point this week, didn't I?

• My mate Dymbel's review on rec.music.rem. (Note: I didn't actually compare him to a member of the band Grandaddy; I said that with his newly cropped hair and comparatively bushy beard, he could make a convincing Leather Daddy...heh heh...)
  
• The Guardian's five-star review.
  
• The NME's review, with set list.
  
• A nice précis of Michael Stipe's most memorable on-stage comments (scroll down to Brixton stories 09:22 AM) - my, but he was in a cheerful mood.
  
• We are R.E.M. and this is what we do: Caroline's well-written and evocative account of REM's Utrecht and Amsterdam shows. With pictures. And some rather stats-dweeby comments of my own at the bottom of the page.

Such a good idea that I can't believe that I've never come across it before: Karen over at Rise is asking her readers to leave nominations for Post Of The Month. All nominees are then linked on her sidebar for the duration, until the final decision is made.

I've nominated two exemplary posts: Coronation Day 1953 (from Naked Blog) and the newly minted Big Brother Inc: Statement of Whereabouts (from Diamond Geezer).

Me, I'm thinking of starting a Blog Hiatus Of The Month competition. Candidates: Acerbia, not.so.soft and Swish Cottage for keeping it clean, simple and artfully designed, My Ace Life for thankfully relapsing after about two days (my favourite type of hiatus), and Aquarionics for constructing a great splash page (and then also relapsing almost immediately).

This prestigious award is dedicated to raising the profile of Blog Hiati everywhere, and to promoting them as a valid art form in their own right. Are there any other candidates? (Accidental Care Bear Hiati don't count, obviously...)

Update: A late entry for little.red.boat.

Item 134. Crystal Grass - Crystal World (1975)

Funky orchestral disco (or was it proto-disco?), with a soft trippy sheen. I picked this up as a cheap second-hand 7-inch about twelve years ago, based on the faint memory of hearing it on Fab 208 Radio Luxembourg (well after my bedtime, hiding beneath the bedclothes, transistor radio pressed up against my ears, putting up with the constant signal drift and trying to tune out the endlessly rotated Peter Stuyvesant adverts).

Bonus points if you can identify the Number One single from the late 1980s which sampled this track.

Item 135. Nitzer Ebb - Join In The Chant (Gold!) (1987)

Just as I could never take "Goth" at all seriously (because it sounded to me like a shallow dilution of Siouxsie & the Banshees / The Cure / The Birthday Party / Joy Division / The Doors, with all the artistry replaced by empty pose and juvenile bombast), so I remained fairly scornful of the likes of Nitzer Ebb and their "Industrial" ilk, who seemed to be doing a similar three-years-too-late-and then-some job on Cabaret Voltaire / DAF / Test Department.

However, having been freed from such snobberies by the passage of time, I find that this single from 1987 does appear to have worn surprisingly well. It's still more than a bit silly (one thinks of earnest young men with bleached flat-tops and oiled, gleaming torsos, bashing bits of metal and shouting a lot - or at least, ahem, I do), and that whole "we are the Aryan master-race" schtick does border on the tiresomely juvenile (no, dears - you're from Essex, remember?), but there's still something quaintly effective about it. Guns! Gold! Charge! Fire! Muscle and Hate! Hurggh! Haaggh! Ah, bless.

Yes, seriously. Chig has got one going spare.

Update: Sorry, too late. I expect it will be much better on the telly, anyway. Except for The Thrills, of course. Do they really have to be this year's Travis / Coldplay / David Gray mid-afternoon middle-of-the-road sanitised-corporate-indie-lite"breakthrough act"? Just like I said they would be at the back end of last year? Does life really have to be that sickeningly predictable? Am I ranting into the void? Does anybody other than me even care? Is this the way the future's got to be? Shall I stop?

...so blog postings will be brief and to the point this week.

Matters arising:

1. In one of my greatest artistic challenges to date, I recently had to compile, mix and burn a couple of party CDs for a bunch of up-for-it teenage lesbians (hello Google). I can now report that today's up-for-it teenage lesbians are mostly dancing to Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, Karma Chameleon and Reach. In that order. But if you follow these three with Baby One More Time, they will all sit down again en masse. Would Pink have been the smarter choice, perhaps? (Because I sure as hell know that tATu wouldn't have been...)

2. Our Princess Diana Memorial Garden went on show to the general public last weekend, a mere seven weeks after being planted, as part of the village Open Gardens weekend. K and I took Friday off work, in order to fuss and fiddle over every single last detail - K being particularly obsessive about the edges of the new turf, which now sport a geometric precision which borders on the computer-generated (and yes, kitchen scissors were involved.) On the day itself, we laid out a little Resource Activity Table, complete with laminated planting & building plans, and a Before/During/After photo album, for our visitors to pore over.

As the afternoon wore on, I found myself slipping into dealing-with-the-public-courteously-and-informatively Tour Guide Mode with an ease that bordered on the alarming. Do feel free to step up this way...do feel free to step up this way....yes, that's a Rambling Rector...yes, lovely, isn't it...yes, we're so pleased...do feel free to step up this way...do you know, I hadn't picked up a hoe until seven weeks ago, and even then I held it upside down, ha ha ha!

(Upon hearing this last comment, Mark from the Boutique Hotel rolled his eyes suggestively at me, muttering seditiously that maybe you should think of a way of re-phrasing that. Meanwhile, I was desperately reminding myself to say Rambling Rector, knowing that it was only a matter of time before I accidentally blurted out K's alternative title for this particular climbing rose. Rumbling Rectum. He's such a sauce-pot.)

3. I've been migrated to the much-vaunted New Blogger at last. This seems to have resulted in a dramatically improved page loading time, for which I am most grateful. However, when I tried to update the YACCS comments code, New Blogger also managed to lose about 80% of my template - so thank God I had remembered to take a backup for once (other Blogger users: beware).

Apart from that, everything's fine. Except that New Blogger is also unable to republish my archives - it gets stuck in an endless loop of retrys. And except for the way that my Post Title box keeps disappearing. But hey. Blogger wouldn't be Blogger without these charming little idiosyncrasies, would it?

Oh, I know! I know! New Blogger, New Danger. Hahahaha!

4. It's REM at the Brixton Academy tonight, and it's anybody's guess what they'll be playing. The band have apparently rehearsed 75 songs for this tour of smaller venues, including a couple of new numbers - and since the audiences will mostly be comprised of committed fans rather than casual punters, they are digging out a lot of Fan Faves, as opposed to leaning too heavily on big hits and recent material. In fact, they're even taking requests via their official site. I wasn't going to bother with this - but since Caroline of prolific.org had two of her requests played (in Amsterdam, two nights ago), I've now submitted a request for The Wake-Up Bomb, Find The River, At My Most Beautiful, and the song which got me into the band in the first place: Can't Get There From Here.

Caroline also has set lists for the first two dates of the tour (tonight's the third), both of which she attended, while some great photos of both dates can be viewed here.

Finally: if anyone reading this is going tonight, then I'll be in Dogstar (corner of Atlantic Road & Coldharbour Lane) before the gig with Buni & Dymbel, from around 19:00 to 19:30. I'll be the one in the blue short-sleeved checked shirt. So no surprises there, then.

Item 132. The 101'ers - Keys To Your Heart (1976)

The Clash were my favourite band long before I heard them play a single note (the articles/interviews/live reviews/lyrics/photos already telling me all I needed to know). So for about six months between late 1976/early 1977, I had to content myself with this posthumous single by Joe Strummer's old band, released just after he jumped ship from pub-rock to Punk Rock. It's an interesting brew. Sure, the musical base is your typical blues-derived chugging boogie, but there's already something Other about Strummer's impassioned, fractured delivery (particularly in the song's intense mid-section breakdown), which lifts the track well away from the standard issue bar-band fare of the day. I must have listened to this several hundred times over the years - and it still blows me away.

Item 133. Furious Pig - Bare Pork (1981)

Today's Blissblog Uber-Hipster Influence: a bunch of obscure shouty blokes, making the most fearful din - but winningly so, as I hope you'll agree. Although I can't help but be reminded of Monty Python's The Death Of Mary, Queen Of Scots:

BOOM CRASH WALLOP SCREECH.
Silence.
"I think she's dead."
"No I'm not."
BOOM CRASH WALLOP SCREECH.

Anyway, it's only a minute and a half long. You'll live.