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Wednesday

Joe Strummer - London Is Burning (AKA Burnin' Streets) Myspace mix

Bumped into this alternate take of Burnin' Streets from Joe Strummer's excellent 'Streetcore' album the other day on my mp3 player.


It originally surfaced - at least to my knowledge - on Myspace around the time Streetcore came out in 2003. 

Although it can be found on You Tube (see above), it's a strangely neglected version and being almost completely reworked from the final album version, deserves an airing.  Pay attention!


Sunday

Guile on Louder Than War

Good to see Guile on Louder Than War here

Meanwhile the band continues to put up excellent footage from their gig at The Public


Saturday

WTF?


A few weeks back these curious adverts began springing up on billboards I was passing on a daily basis.

At first I just dismissed them as the marketing slogans for a new Manic Street Preachers album.





Well perhaps not.  But they had that shouty pseudo-intellectual feel to them and you could see the bafflement on the faces of passing motorists.  Which is no bad thing.

But what essential consumer item were they trying to flog?

Thursday

What 'B' sides were for

On one of those endless trawls of cyberspace, I bumped into this marvellous example of the dying art of the 'B' side:

 
 
Bringing an obscure song to a new audience, or possibly just larking about in the studio with a spare hour of recording time to kill.  Either way 'B' sides used to produce gems like this on a regular basis.

Which inevitably made me go and search out the original, which readers of a certain age may recall was by the Dodgems, one of the gloriously off kilter bands to emerge in the first throws of punk, pawing their grubby mitts towards their 15 minutes of fame. 

More by accident than design you suspect, the came up with this:


A classic, pure and simple.