André Rieu in Leeds, 2016

On Friday we set off over the M62 to Leeds to see the famous violinist from Maastricht, André Rieu perform with his orchestra, The Johann Strauss Orchestra.

We arrived half an hour before the show started and found our seats way up in the gods. A couple were sitting in the seats next to ours and he turned to me with a grin saying "We thought you weren't coming!"
"Yes," I said "we were worried we might miss you!" Hooray! I thought, someone with a sense of humour.

But then his wife, who was sitting next to me said, "Are you big fans of André Rieu?" She looked a bit surprised when we said yes and said "Oh... I'm not so keen myself - he wanted to come..." She sighed and added "I hope it's not all Oom-Pah music, I don't like Oom-Pah music. If it's all Oom-Pah music I'll probably fall asleep."
"I think you'll be alright," I ventured, "it's fairly infectious..."
"Have you been before?" she asked after a pause. "Oh yes!" we replied and her face took on a shocked expression.
"Oh, really? Well..." she said leaving a lingering impression she thought we must be somehow mentally deficient. I exchanged a sympathetic smile with her husband and proceeded to ignore her. He was already there before me...

You could guess it couldn't you? She sang along to every tune whether vocal or not with a frail, grinding, very high pitched "aaaahh" warble... "Are they always the same guest artists?" she asked as the first soloist left the stage (Frederic Jennignes playing the zither for Tales of Vienna Woods followed by the theme from The Third Man).
"No, we've seen the St Petersburg Trio and The Berlin Comedic Harmonists at different shows..."
"Germans???" Her lips pursed in surprise.
"Yes," I said, "Their finale was to machine gun the back circle..."

We were well away from the snow machine as it dropped a generous amount on the audience below. It's funnier that way...

Another wonderful night with a few surprises and the usual elongated ending, long after André has announced things are coming to an end. This is always a cue for the first punters to stand and shuffle along the rows to get out first to the car park. They miss a good half hour - probably the best half hour of the night... Godzilla was staying put though... "Ahhh, aaaaahhh aah, ahh a-aaaahhhh!"

Creeping Bentgrass Play A Masonic Dinner

Last night we played for a Masonic Dinner and Social Evening and had a most fabulous evening.

There is a dinner first and we set up and leave the hall before the dinner to sit in the foyer until it is time to go on.

We only drink water during and before a gig so we sat there sipping whilst the ladies were worried by no such reservations...

The dance floor started to fill up with our first song and remained packed for the entire night. This makes for a dream night for entertainers!

Feedback at the end of the night was ecstatic and we felt we had given the best that we could, for an audience that encouraged us all the way.

Thanks for the booking and it was our pleasure!

Carnforth Steamtown Locomotive Shed, 1981

One for the steam railway enthusiasts. I'm still scanning old photos and in this article we're back to black and white and a day out to the excellent steam railway museum at Carnforth just north of Lancaster and Morecambe. Lots of photos and little text (stop that cheering!) because I'm no expert about railway stuff. The date was Wednesday 25 February 1981. Enjoy, but just as a reminder please read the copyright notice in the left hand column.

There were a number of famous locomotives housed at Carnforth including Sir Nigel Gresley (above), The Flying Sctotsman, Lord Nelson and a locomotive that some twenty years later would be painted red and pull the Hogwarts Express...

On a Wednesday in February there are no engines to be found working. We wandered round the engine sheds, almost without seeing anyone else!

The collection had locomotives in all conditions but not much room to step back to admire them!

A nice reminder of a day over 35 years ago to look at machines from 70 or more years ago!

A Trip To Bury Market

Yesterday we had a day out to Bury Market. It's a long, long (very long) time since we last went to Bury and the size of the market there takes the occasional or new visitor a bit by surprise. It is huge! There are rows and rows of market stalls selling everything from sweets to food of every kind and from material and sewing thread to gowns and evening wear. If you are looking for cheap entertainment items there are stalls with both new and second hand books and DVDs. Hidden amongst all these rows of delights are small, sometimes tiny cafes with a few tables where people sit cheerfully (or sometimes a little bit morosely...) nursing a mug of coffee or something to eat.

There's a meat and fish market hall that has to be seen to be believed. I had no camera with me of course - I refuse to treat my phone as a camera, it takes bloody awful photos and I hold a camera more steadily if it's jammed against my eye... So I waited until I got home and then looked for a photo on t'internet and got the coloured pencils out.

The meat and fish stalls looked wonderful and there was little smell which tells me that the fish was very fresh and had been properly looked after on stands that were well maintained and cleaned. There were other foodstuffs too that made me think of school days and had my mouth watering.

Manchester tart. Not the sort with high heels and caked-on make-up masking advancing years ("Fancy an 'orrible time, dearie?")... I put this photo on my FaceBook page last night and immediately people were drooling all over their keyboards in the rush to comment. Moya Gleave in New Zealand was the first to describe it for those southerners who had hitherto doubted its very existence. "It's a pie....Almond shortbread with raspberry jam, custard, coconut & cherries."

The cherry should be a little more prominent... We went to do the weekly shop once back in Blackpool and Miss Franny placed it in a bag under what she thought was a bag containing two iced buns. It was actually a cauliflower... Not an iced one...

And - joy of my childhood - a wimberry pie! Wimberries are like bilberries but with a much more concentrated taste. They seemed to disappear from shop shelves in the 1970s and then we had to make do with bilberries which came from Poland or Ukraine or somewhere else that was affected by the clouds bearing gifts from Chernobyl. So they disappeared too. I haven't tasted a wimberry pie for four decades, but a few minutes ago I cut into it and...

oh. my. god....... So that's the first of our weekly visits to Bury then...

Fade To Black And White

A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to move my files of film negatives and, to my dismay, as soon as I picked up a file half of the pages slipped to the floor.

The "pages" were plastic sheets, each holding seven strips of negatives. Whilst these do not get used all that much, they are still the definitive version of my early photographs and for any publication work a fresh scan is needed at high resolution.

The problem was time. Isn't it always...? But in this case it was the effects of time on thin plastic sheets bought around 35 years ago. They had degraded to the point where the punched holes for the file's ring binders just ripped out. Indeed huge chunks of plastic were breaking free at every single touch. So I've had to buy a new supply of sleeves, choosing Kenro paper sleeves this time. Whilst I had the negatives out I thought I might run a few through the scanner again.

Each time I do this I'm amazed at the leap in the quality of reproduction. When I first scanned them onto a computer it was at the size of 320x240 pixels when the entire VDU screen could squeeze no more than 800x600 pixels altogether. Photo screen savers were as yet unknown so I didn't think at the time to try scanning any larger. These days I can scan a 35mm negative up to tens of thousands of pixels. My current screen size is 1680x1050 and for reproduction a scan of over 5000 pixels is required for a sharp image. I'm amazed at people who think they can take a small image off the web and resize it, thinking that the "hidden details" will adjust the sharpness as they go along. Nooooooo!

This image was taken in 1971 from the interior of a cave on the beach outside the harbour wall at Polperro in Cornwall. Not an easy topic for a light meter to cope with...

Moving north into Devon in the same year, here is a shot taken from the top of Clovelly's main street which descends down to the beach at a gradient that taxes the back coming up and the knees going down! This was not a sunny day...!

1972 and that's me on the right on stage with the band Spiral somewhere in Oldham. At the time I was working in a photographic studio and was necessarily in trendy mode...

The year after I was working for myself and the hair had grown a bit again, before it all fell out a few years after... I'd never fit into those dark green velvet trousers these days either...

Also from 1973. Spiral it's fair to say, was not a top-earning band... When we didn't have a gig we would go out for last orders at a pub in Failsworth (between Oldham and Manchester) and as it was on a cul-de-sac, we would park near this house. It was always in darkness, unless the inhabitants only occupied the rear of the place, and we always used to joke it was haunted. We called it Terror Towers or something similarly ridiculous that would appeal to a teenage mind after a pint of Watneys Red...

In 1974 my parents moved to Blackpool to take over a small hotel on Trafalgar Road, which runs between the Promenade and Lytham Road, close to The Manchester pub. I stayed on in Rochdale for a while and came over to Blackpool for free food at weekends... This was the view of the Pleasure Beach from the South Pier in 1974. Not only is this pre-Big One roller coaster and Ocean Boulevard, it's before the Space Tower was built or the Avalanche. The old Aztec frontage to the River Caves can be seen extreme left. In front of the Big Dipper with its old spherical finial is a simple roundabout ride, dating back to the late 50s or early 60s, of space rockets that could be raised or lowered by means of a joystick in each rocket.

Circa 1976-78 this shot from the Central Pier shows Blackpool's previous sea wall and the slade used for vehicle access to the beach. The pedestrian footbridge is very new and Lewis's and Woolworth's stores bookend the Tower. Visitors are enjoying a lively sea and the beach food carts and caravans sit waiting for the tide to go out.

From the pedestrian footbridge we can look along the Promenade roadway, looking north. This was taken on August Bank Holiday Monday, 1978. The Vauxhall car in front of the bus is brand new as the T-registration only came out on the first of that month. The bus is single-decker 571 and on it's way to Manchester Square. There's a healthy crowd of visitors on the Promenade and the roadway has two lanes of traffic in each direction with room for a central refuge for crossing pedestrians.

1976 and Brush tramcar 638 turns off the Promenade to return to the Rigby Road depot along Lytham Road. A car driver is hoping the tram will let him scoot in front once the pedestrians have cleared the way. At this time no other town in England had had street trams for over twenty years and many visiting drivers had sudden panic moments as they realised that Blackpool's trams were not going to swerve away from their antics...

In 1977 riding the Grand National roller coaster meant bouncing out of your seats and holding a handrail on the back of the seat in front of you. Restraints of any kind were not thought necessary. Just to make sure however, as the coaster trains neared the top of the lift hill a recorded voice politely said: "Please... do not stand up..."

Ancient Vinyl Loveliness

This weekend there's a craft fair on in Blackpool Winter Gardens. I spent yesterday afternoon helping out on the stall where Miss Franny and daughter Gill sell their handmade jewellery and cloth bags, aprons and so on whilst next to them Miss Jeannie sells her hand-made greetings cards. Both Miss Jeannie and Gill were unavoidably absent yesterday which explains my attendance. But this morning I was free to wander round the other stalls. And thus I ended up spending money.

Now this stall had loads of boxes of old 45s. Not only that, but they all looked in good condition. You can look at a 78 rpm record and know how likely it is to play or jump and the odd scratch doesn't necessarily cause great offence. But with 45s I've come to realise that even the ones that look pristine can jump because the grooves are so close together it's impossible to see some damage with the naked eye. But I took the chance. At seven records for a fiver you can't go all that wrong... This is Billy Fury's 13th Top 40 hit and his sixth Top Ten hit. Once Upon A Dream entered the charts in July 1962 and reached No.7, spending a total of 13 weeks in the charts. Sadly this one was in a plain white sleeve rather than Decca's orange with diagonal stripes.

Regardless that it may be "before your time" most people will have heard this one. Rawhide sung by Frankie Laine was the theme tune to the TV western series that featured a young Clint Eastwood as the character Rowdy Yates. It entered the charts in November 1959, the 30th and 31st (it re-entered after dropping out of the charts) of 32 chart entries for Frankie. So whilst it came towards the end of his career it got to No.6 and became the song he's probably best known for. Probably more people can remember this record than can remember that he had four No.1 hits with: I Believe in 1953 (the song reached No.2 eleven years later for The Bachelors); Hey Joe, also 1953 (sadly not the same song Jimi Hendrix had a hit with); Answer Me which entered the charts only a fortnight after Hey Joe (Nat "King" Cole also recorded it but never had a hit with it. A lot of people would recognise that version though). His final No.1 hit was A Woman In Love in 1956 (sadly not the same song that Barbra Streisand topped the charts with in 1980 - a shame as it would have been quite hilarious to hear Frankie belt out "I am a....")

Friday On My Mind is one of the 1960s' great ear worms of a song. It reached No.6 as a debut hit for The Easybeats who only charted one more time. Their follow up hit reached No.20 and was called Hello How Are You. No... me neither...

The McCoys were a similar case really. Hang On Sloopy got to No.5 after entering the charts week ending 2 September 1965 and almost anyone who was buying records at the time could accurately sing the chorus line. Their only other hit came three months later, a cover of Fever which only managed No.44.

We Got Love was one of Alma Cogan's later hits, just failing to get into the Top Twenty. It entered the charts week ending 18 December 1959 thus being in competition with any Christmas records at the time, though the Christmas No.1 spot was shared (this was the last time this happened to a No.1 slot) by two records sharing the same first few words - What Do You Want by Adam Faith and What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For by Emile Ford and The Checkmates.

Ragamuffin Man brought the run of hits of 1960s band Manfred Mann to a close. It reached No.8 in 1969, their last hit before - as Manfred Mann's Earthband - they started another (but shorter) run of hits in the 1970s. In the 1960s they had 17 hits, only four of which failed to hit the Top Ten and of those four, two of them stopped inconveniently at No.11. They had three No.1s and the other two that failed to reach the Top Ten both reached the same spot - No.36.

Ray Charles' only No.1 was I Can't Stop Loving You. I dismissed it as music for older people at age 8 when it came out in 1962 but now - as a member of the older people demographic - I love it...

Creeping Bentgrass in Charnock Richard

Saturday 8 October 2016. This last weekend we played for a charity event in Charnock Richard - the village in Lancashire, not the nearby motorway services...

We were at the Football Club playing for one of Jack Gerrard's events. He's the man behind the Chorley steam fairs and all monies were going to Rainbow House.

We played to a fairly packed house and what a great crowd they were, singing along and loads of enthusiastic applause. We took another four bookings on the night, so we must have done something right!