Newsletter September 2000

There are a few music fossils to dig up this month. Expanding our Sex Pistols/Glen Matlock section of last month, we offer for download print-quality files of two long-gone shock!!!horror!!! memorabilia. The German pop magazine Bravo featured a bound-in poster every issue, and to them goes the credit for the first-ever Sex Pistols poster in early 1976. Our scan is complete with authentic creases from the magazine.

Britain’s Daily Mirror tabloid might often be dismissed as a totally brain-dead publication, but the blank generation was never like this. When the drunken interviewer Bill Grundy provoked the Pistols into saying fuck on national TV at teatime, the newspaper raised the intellectual level of discussion with a thought-provoking front page almost completely devoted to the incident. It’s a bit yellow now, but we scanned it. The full transcript of the interview is priceless.

Also long-gone are the pivotal Bronski Beat singles Smalltown Boy and Why? from 1984. You can still hear the short versions on their first CD Age Of Consent, but the extended versions are not available. This is a pity, since they were among the most ambitious club records of the time, especially Why? Mike Thorne adds his commentaries about their production and the extraordinary contemporary social/political background. Bronski Beat helped alleviate much prevailing bigotry with gay activist songs which became top-five hits. The effectiveness of their message with all sectors of the population did much to encourage gays to venture out from the ghetto and into society-at-large.

We continue our posting of print-quality resolution files of long-gone covers which we think deserve to live on a few people's walls as a printout. These two 12" covers are our latest in the gallery. Click on the album graphic or find them in our Words and Pictures page.

Since you can’t buy the original recordings, we provide streaming versions in RealAudio and Liquid Audio of the full-length versions. For obvious copyright reasons, we can’t offer these for download, unfortunately, but at least you can get the idea from these reasonable-fi versions in mono. Incidentally, it helps to avoid high-traffic times when listening to real audio, since the internet gets congested and not all the little sound packets reach their destination in the right order. This is what causes the stuttering you often hear.

We always thought we owed it to you, our supporters, to help cut through the often still-imprenetrable jungle of techspeak, and we’ve been keeping our extensive Help Desk section up to date. In this big area, you will find simple, non-technical accounts of most computer and media subjects, from memory to Liquid Audio and MP3 to downloads and compression. We’ve also integrated our monumental MP3 player review more into the Help section, to make it easier to follow at your own pace.

A special greeting this month goes to our visitors from Slovenia, Andorra and the Maldive Islands. It’s a pleasure to entertain you at such a distance. We don't overlook other larger, distant culture zones, and we're certainly glad that Russia and Japan are still speaking to us after the political dancing of the last few weeks. It's just that there aren't many of you and we're glad you each sent an ambassador. For the US contingent, we offer five free CDs to the first presidential candidate to name the leaders of two of these three countries. (For our distant cousins if you don't get the joke, just ask us via the contact section and we will enlighten).