To Where I Am Now

Sunday December 29th 2024

As the blog will be subscription based from January 1st, I’ll be sending to the complete mailing list for these last 3 days of the year, so I apologise if you feel you are being bombarded. Otherwise, thanks for all the messages and of course the 12 new subscriptions, I’m now at 47. I hope that there will be some more, and I would hope to get around 10% of the mailing list. But if you are cutting costs into the new year, I understand, there are so many things to subscribe to apart from my musings - sport, movies, magazines. I had a ridiculous subscription event happen today. I saw there was an offer to get 6 issues of Uncut magazine for £14.99. I like to have contemporary magazines in The Archive alongside the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker magazines from the seventies. When I went to put in my details (bank account holder) my name was too long for the field, haha, how stoopid is that? Consequently I wasn’t able to make the subscription. I guess it’s only available for people who don’t have double-barrelled names.

If I don’t get many more subscribers to the blog, it will be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. I was thinking that if I did Patreon as well, In Deep blog members would get the cheapest possible rate for whatever it is I offer (or free if I could do that, I’m not sure if it allows me to do that). My main problem is I have no idea what to offer and that’s the main reason I haven’t done it. I’m not sure how many consistent blog readers I have but I did expect to lose a chunk if it was subscription only. Maybe I could have a free one every now and again to entice readers or simply let people who don’t have funds get a peek. I suppose if it’s purely a subscription, I’d better make it interesting every day - I’ll do my best.

I’ll be looking forward to the holiday season ending as I’ve spent it by myself and that’s weird. It’s not like I have nothing to do but I have been trying to balance worry with fun, and fun has been watching the three Matrix movies, which I didn’t think aged very well, especially all the silly fighting. I watched Rebel Moon parts 1 & 2. I tried to watch Baby Driver but I was so irritated by the first 15 minutes I had to stop. I watched Dead Boy Detectives (Milky Way was on the soundtrack) Gangs Of London (too brutal) and The Lincoln Lawyer (sucked in) but I remain being rather unsatisfied by Netflix shows. I have to get into the DVD collection and watch some fifties, sixties and seventies films with better dialogue and intriguing plots and less shiny characters, or obvious nasty type extras. The golden age of cinema isn’t about special effects, explicit sex and gratuitous violence.

Today I watched Bohemian Rhapsody. I’d been putting it off because I saw Queen live at the Liverpool Empire on November 1st 1974 on the Sheer Heart Attack tour. I wanted that to be the image left in my mind - it’s still there, the film just made me sad about Freddie (a fine performance from Rami Malek). I realised that when I saw them it was the week before the album was released. The single (Killer Queen) was released on the 11th October so that’s the only song the audience would have known from the album. Killer Queen reached No.2 on the UK charts, but what stopped it being a No.1 single? You guessed it - Gonna Make You A Star - David Essex. It held onto the No.1 spot for 3 weeks whilst Killer Queen was No.2 for two weeks before it started to descend.

Music today has been Queen - Sheer Heart Attack (1974). I love the songs on this album, it’s grandiose whilst being simultaneously rooted. What a band, the guitar parts and Brian May’s unique tone, the harmonies, Freddie’s voice. When they did Now I’m Here live, the spotlight was on Freddie and then it went off, and the next time he sang the line he was somewhere else on the stage under another spotlight. That was choreography for rock bands in those days.

Music Of The Daze