IN WHICH I VOLUNTARILY BLOW MY OWN TRUMPET

I hope that you will forgive me shamelessly plugging something of my own, but amongst the other things that I do, I am the editor of this rather fine UFO magazine. I was brought in a few months ago to mastermind the relaunch, and my first edition is now on sale through those jolly nice people at MagCloner. I am, actually rather proud of it!

UFO MATRIX is not just a magazine about UFOs, it is also a magazine about the wider implications of UFO Culture. It examines the history and the mystery of the subject in depth, bringing on board the cream of the world's UFOlogical and Fortean researchers.

Issue Eight brings a new and chilling aspect to the Roswell mythos, an examination of one of Scotland's best known abduction cases, a little known facet of the Betty and Barney Hill case, a look at the truly unsettling aliens created by H.P.Lovecraft, and columists including representatives of BUFORA and MUFON (UK).

Editor Jon Downes has been a central figure of British paranormal and Fortean research for several decades, and is one of the best known British researchers and authors in the field. Contributors to issue 8 include veteran researchers such as Nick Redfern, Richard Freeman, Malcolm Robinson, Stanton Freiedman, and exclusive content from John Hanson and Dawn Holloway of the Haunted Skies Project.

At last a valid UFOlogical magazine for the 21st Century.

Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Language: English

Read on...

JUST IN CASE YOU ARE INTERESTED: Episode 58 (the latest) of my monthly webTV show

The latest episode of our monthly webTV show from the CFZ and CFZtv, bringing you news on our activities within cryptozoology and natural history as well as the latest cryptozoological, and monster hunting news from around the world.

This episode brings you:

CFZ in summer
Harvest mouse
Small mammal trapping
Trail cams at Ashcroft
Roe deer
Prudence
Short tailed Vole
Diamond Jubilee
Very large `owl pellets`
Owl pellet experiments
Yeti DNA project
Mystery cats in Cumbria
Corinna looks at out of place birds
New and Rediscovered: New yellow frog
New and Rediscovered: New lizard
New and Rediscovered: New skink

MICHAEL DES BARRES: True Brit

This arrived this morning, and it immediately rang bells in my subconscious. Where had I heard something about a celebration of British music before. And then it clicked. YESTERDAY. Or rather the wee small hours of the night before last, when I was talking to Michael des Barres in America. (Or rather, he was in America, I was struggling with a recalcitrant telephone and a MP3 recorder in a tumbledown cottage in rural North Devon..

This banner ad is from those jolly nice people at HMV, who (I hope) are not going to get annoyed with me for having hijacked their rather nifty promotional artwork to make a socio-cultural point of my own. But I have noticed this about the music busines; it is one of the most truly Fortean aspects of the whole thing that people from various disparate parts of the industry often seem to follow the same path at the same time for no apparent reason. This year it seems to be Britishness, which is a pretty cool thing to be exploiting.

Michael's new album 'Carnaby Street' is very much following the concept of him re-examining his roots bck in the grooviest era of British music - the mid 60s, when men were men, girls were chicks, and the Hammond organ was king. I am getting intrigued by all this, partly because I am somewhat of a devotee of the morphic resonance theories of a dude called Rupert Sheldrake. If you want to know more about him check out his website: http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html

Another interest in this whole affair is that like Michael I am very much into the music of that particular era. I keep on finding lost gems that I had never heard of before, and I think that if I pick Michael's brains enough then I will probably find some more lost gems that I otherwise would not have heard.

But my main interest is that I am seriously impressed by the first track to be posted from the forthcoming album, and my chat with Michael the other night has enthused me even more. It is probably me being OCD, but when I get impressed by something I am like a terrier with a rat, and this new record is making me feel particularly terrier-like.

So, this is probably a good time to repost the rather excellent 'Painkiller'...

MICHAEL DES BARRES: Exclusive interview

I like being a journalist. OK my craft has come in for somewhat of a battering in recent years, and I usually don't tend to admit that I once wrote various odds and sods for The News of the World. But I still - on the whole - enjoy what I do, and one of the things that I enjoy most is the fact that I end up talking to such nice people. Last night I email Michael des Barres. As regular readers of this blog will know, yesterday I posted a sneak preview of his upcoming new album; a slinky, funky (and ever-so-slightly-sexy) bluesy number called 'Painkiller'. In the lunchtime post my new MP3 recorder arrived, and I spent much of the day trying to work out how to use it. I emailed Michael asking whether I could talk to him at some point, and - much to my pleasure, (and I have to admit, slightly to my constevrnation) - he emailed me back with his telephone number.

I shooshed Prudence out of my study. She was asleep on the floor and snoring loudly, and I was afraid that if she had stayed, then Michael would have thought that I was suffering from a particularly embarrasing digestive tract disorder. I grabbed a bottle of diabetic pop, plugged in my new MP3 recorder and telephoned him. It had been years since I last did a pop star interview, and I have to admit that I was a little nervous....

MICHAEL: Hi Jonathan
JON: Is that better?
MICHAEL: Yes, much. Now you sound like Anthony Newley where before you sounded like Eno
JON: I'm telephoning from a tiny village in North Devon that no-one has ever heard of. We are in the middle of nowhere, and the telephone lines are not great
MICHAEL: That's absolutely spectacular, I haven't been in Devon in 40 years. I think with Silverhead my first band, during the 70s when it was the de rigeur thing to do to get a cottage in the country and make an album, I think we went down there, but we ran out of coke so fast, we all ran back to London
JON: I think in the little village that I am in no-one has ever heard of coke; they think its that black stuff that comes in bottles
MICHAEL: (laughs) but you can have it with Jack Daniels...

...anyway I am delighted that you have picked up on the song. The whole album is really rough; its a real lineage album. Its not a homage, but its kind of part of my roots; that whole growing up in the mid-60s, going to The Marquee and seeing Zoot Money and Georgie Fame. The whole trajectory of the British Edwardian dandy blues guys. I wanted to make that album, and that's what we've done.

JON: It is interesting that you say that, because I thought when I first heard it that I could hear Zoot Money's fingerprints all over it..

And it was perfectly true. There is something magickal about the hammond organ driven bluesy rock/pop from the mid-1960s. I was only a boy at the time, and discovered it all many years after the event, but I discovered Zoot Money playing on a Kevin Coyne album in the late 1970s and fell in love with the sound. My old friend Tony 'Doc' Shiels, the Irish bluesman, gunslinger, surrealist and wizard also spoke (and speaks) very highly of George Bruno 'Zoot' Money, and the whole English funky blues sound that Money pioneered can be heard in wallages on 'Painkiller'. It was his love of this sound that inspired the band to search for authenticity with the correct keyboards, and a masterful musician - Jebin Bruni, who plays with Fiona Apple - to play them.

Michael spoke of his teenage years in swinging London. Mitch Mitchell, drummer with the Jimi Hendrix Experience had been a classmate, and together they had seen many of the musical legends of the time. "Did I remember Terry Reid?" he asked. "Well Duh!" I wanted to say, but decided not to. You don't say "well duh!" to someone you have only just met, and whose vocal ability you have admired for yonks. Yes, I told him. I did remember Terry Reid - the amazingly unrecognised singer who apparently turned down the post in the nascent Led Zeppelin that eventually went to Robert Plant in favour of a solo career that went nowhere fast. He is one of the most under-rated singers of his time...

My conversation with Michael was like that. He was obviously supposed to be plugging the forthcoming album, which is called 'Carnaby Street' (fittingly enough for a record which revisits the scenes of Michael's mis-spent youth, but we soon realised that we were two men who still took music seriously, and I just enjoyed listening to him reminiscing about "magickal times", the memory of which are "what this album is all about". He waxed lyrical about the glorious mixture of blues and soul which produced such a rich vein of music over the years; a vein which he is unashamedly mining on the forthcoming album.

He is in the process of taking a reunited Silverhead for some reunion gigs in Japan. In December Michael told Japanese fans:

"I have always felt that Silverhead came alive in Japan. We were a very young band when we arrived. On landing at Tokyo airport we were greeted by car loads of fans who followed us into the city. They gave us such love. We realised that Rock and Roll could bring people together and help celebrate each other. We left Japan a better band. Now we return and will play our hearts out for you...These songs mean as much to us today as they do to you....May you come forever....!!"

But when he returns to America after the gigs, he will be starting real work on promoting the new record which will be out in the summer or autumn.

One of the things that I found particularly refreshing about him was the fact that he still feels passionate about what he does, as - apparently - do his fans. A lot of the people, about 80% he estimates of those who come to see the band, he told me, are young men and women who think that "we are an indie band". You could almost see him grinning as he said that. I told him the true anecdote about how I had played 'Painkiller' to a young lady of 14 who had been working in my office all afternoon, and how she was already talking about getting me to blag her a copy of the album and some tickets to go and see the band if they come to England. This actually appears to be a very real possibility if things go well, and it won't just be young Jessica trying to blag her way onto the guest list. I think her ageing Uncle Jon will be trying to do that as well.

The main emotion behind the album, he says, is "Joy. Its not angry, its not ironic, its just energetic"... "It's just the blues" I interject. "Exactly" he said. The opening track sets out his stall for the album. It starts with the line "I was 19 in 1967. I'm just laying my cards on the table. I'm not being retro, I am not looking backwards, I'm just saying that this is what happened".

"We are very proud of it, and its a great band" he enthused. The cover, by the way, according to Michael "has me bursting out of a Union jack".

He seemed so pleased that I had been so impressed with 'Painkiller'. "Its at a very early stage" he said, and went on to say that I was one of the first people who had heard it. He said that he was particularly impressed with Gonzo Multimedia, because when he met Rob Ayling it was so perfectly obvious that he, like Michael, and like me, was someone who still took music seriously and truly believed that it was important and life affirming. We talked about dogs, and we talked about cake, and scones, and I promised that if he wanted to, next time he is in England he can come down to my tumbledown rural retreat and play with my dog and eat my wife's home-made cake. He sounded rather enthusiastic at that and promised that he would pack his wellies alongside his high heeled boots. And I think that he might actually have meant it.

He was one of the nicest and most charming blokes that I have spoken to in a long time. His level of enthusiasm about 'Carnaby Street' has enthused me to such an extent that I am really looking forward to hearing more of it. Unless I have completely misjudged the situation, Michael des Barres is a perfectly charming, and completely sincere geezer who - blessed with a fine set of vocal chords, and the idee fixe that rock music is a good, noble and spiritually uplifting discipline, who has quite possibly just made one of the great albums of a long and distinguished career.

Bring it on dude.

YESTERDAY WAS WHAT IS VULGARLY CALLED A COCK UP!

Back in 2005 or so then British Prime Minister, the universally appreciated and adored Tony Blair (what a nice man he was, golly) launched some sort of vote-winning exercise when he announced that any community in the UK who could get enough names on a petition could get broadband. Gosh, what a nice altruistic fellow he was.

The teensy weensy North Devon village of Woolfardisworthy from whence the Gonzo Daily editorial team conduct their world-beating activities (Graham, Corinna and I live in a tumbledown 200 year old cottage there) was one of the aforementioned communities. Unfortunately, as far as we can ascertain, no-one did much to upgrade the 1970s era telephone lines. (If we are impugning that nice Mr Blair here, we apologise, but we are sure that he will forgive us. Not only is he such a nice man, but we are sure that no-one ever criticises him) but as a result our broadband service is not as good as that in most of the rest of the United Kingdom.

Yesterday it didn't work at all for most of the time, and when it did it was (as we said yesterday) a three toed sloth with a depressive illness, or like a geriatric tortoise on tuinal. Therefore, there wasn't more than a skeletal series of posts on this esteemed blog. Sorry guys.

It seems that we are back on full strength today, but if the coverage is patchy ever again you know who to blame!

JUDGE SMITH: Orfeas lauded en Francais

So it seems that we are not the only people to be massively impressed by Judge Smith's Orfeas album. The following review is from a French wesbite, and is translated by those jolly nice people at Google. We are posting it for several reasons, not the least because the sentiments expressed are very similar to our own; like us he was someone that they had vaguely heard of, and like us the release of Orfeas has turned them into a true fan...



Rating: 7.5/10

His name sounds perhaps like a distant echo in the memory of some. Judge Smith is indeed the co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator with Peter Hammill , although it has left the adventure start 1969 before recording the first 33 laps of this group. Occupied by various musical projects, from design stage performances to composing for other artists, creating an opera of modern music in a TV series and even a film, Judge Smith expects 1991 to produce his first album, a collection of songs written between 1968 and 1977 ("Democrazy") and 1993 for his first original album is finally born ("Dome Of Discovery").



In the 2000s, he moves up a gear than seven CDs released since, one of which, "Curly's Airship", he says is the most ambitious rock album ever produced to date. "Curly's Airship" is also the first Songstory , name that gives a narrative form of music he loves and whose "Orfeas" is the third avatar. The man is complex and analysis of his music proves it. Indeed, "Orfeas" is certainly an ambitious and complex concept. Beyond the argument (revisiting the myth of Orpheus by modernizing, becoming a rock guitarist Orpheus and Eurydice idolized his muse that he will eventually), it is especially the bias of the composition s 'is original. Judge Smith has decided to register by September formations of different musical styles, each being associated with a training style.



We discover, therefore, in order of appearance on the disc, a Greek bard singing so hard on bombastic guitar arpeggios Hispanic, the Orfeas Band, rock band, Judge Smith using his technique of speech music on the soliloquies of Orfeas , a technique also used in interviews complimented with a string sextet, techno music to symbolize the passage from dream to reality of the heroes of classic opera songs way between Orpheas and Eurydice, played by Lene Lovich and finally a group of metal for the tragic end of the story. If the bard who plays the role of narrator is amusing at best, annoying at worst, the string sextet mixing romantic and contemporary music and that there is not much to say about the passages techno and metal very marked in their respective genres, back on the other three sets. Orfeas The Band plays instrumental rock classic, even if an instrument is an accordion relatively discreet. It serves mainly as a backdrop to the two soloists are impeccable as John Ellis and David Jackson . John Ellis (the "hands of Orfeas") treats us gratifying guitar solos and removed. David Jackson shines for her many saxophone in However, a register wiser than he who was in his VDGG . The duets between Judge Smith and Lene Lovitch resemble vocal improvisations: no guidelines really emerges from these "songs", this is a conversation where protagonists are expressed in these notes as in musicals where the music follows the text and not the other.



Finally the six soliloquies and two interviews using an original technique called speech music whereby every inflection of the voice is converted into its equivalent music. The "score" is then created and played by an instrument whose sound is superimposed on the voice, generating an echo phenomenon, all served on a discreet orchestration. The effect is pretty amazing and made ​​the soliloquies are sufficiently short that the surprise did not turn into annoyance. All these styles are intertwined in the album, giving a report to the staff and less chaotic. Unnecessary to consider what was coming off the lot titles, "Orfeas" is an indivisible whole that we appreciate as a whole or rejected as totally.



But creativity, inventiveness, attention to detail, the factual quality of the interpretation are undeniable. All sprinkled with a healthy dose of humor. As for assessing the results, it's just a matter of personal taste.

JUDGE SMITH: Popular in Belgium

There really is somethging magickal about Judge Smith's new album 'Orfeas'. I know that I keep banging on about it, but it really is one of the most magickal pieces of music that I have heard in a long time. Clearly othger people think so too, which is why I am reposting this Belgian review. I have not done any editing on it, because I think that correcting the odd grammatical error would take away some of the wide-eyed charm of the rveiew, which is obviously by someone who loves the record as much as I do...

http://www.keysandchords.com/6/post/2012/03/orfeas-a-songstory-by-judge-smith.html

Orfeas: A Story Song By Judge Smith 18/03/2012
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Christopher John Judge Smith is an English composer and co-founder of the band Van der Graaf Generator. Initially he was successful under the name Chris Judge Smith, but ultimately he chose simply Judge Smith. He was the original drummer for Van der Graaf Generator, but when Guy Evans took the drumsticks in hand yet is limited to the vocal parts. After recording the first single "People You Were Going To" Smith decided to drop this project.

Along with saxophonist David Jackson, he formed the band Heebalob. But unfortunately this was also short-lived, zoadat Smith eventually chose solopad. Of the many songs in that period he overwhelming, there are few to excel on his solo debut "Demo Crazy" from 1991. This release was badly crushed in a limited edition and is now a real collectors item. Two years later 'Dome Of Discovery'. The strange thing behind this album is that Smith except the vocals also each note sampled sounds from real instruments arise. In 2000 he completed the double 'Curly's Airship, a project that dealt with the R101 airship disaster in 1930. Eight years we had to wait on 'Long-Range Audio Device'.

On May 9, 2011 appeared than this 'Orfeas', and this is Smith's third straight song story. It is actually an interpretation of the myhte of Orpheus, performed by seven separate ensembles. In addition to Judge Smith granted a lot of famous artists their cooperation. Or how about Gigi Cavalli Cocchi (drums), Dutchman René Commenée (percussion), John 'Fury' Ellis (guitar to include Peter Gabriel, The Stranglers), David Jackson (saxophone), Dorie Jackson (backing vocals), Lene Lovich (vocals), David Minnick (guitar), Ben Nation (cello), Ricardo Odriozola (violin) and Bert Mantilla (accordion). The song story is neatly divided into three acts. Together accounted for 34 tracks or 77 minutes and 42 seconds exactly. Smith eagerly makes use of wild contrasting music is a melting pot of Southern guitars, classical string orchestras, meditative trance sound and metal rock. Some describe it as ethereal pop, though I would seriously consider this term.

Judge Smith is a magical musician who's counting a coherent story. Philip Verhaeghe (3)

JUDGE SMITH: new podcast now online.

Jon Kirkman emailed me a few minutes ago.

"Just so you can do a story about it there is a new Judge Smith Podcast live on the Gonzo website HERE

It is almost an hour long and is Judge in conversation with me and we are also playing tracks from the Orfeas album. There will be two more Judge Smith Podcasts in the next few weeks".

For the record, I am still engaged in a love affair with this extraordinary album, and am very much looking forward to talking to Judge myself, some time soon...

JUDGE SMITH: Dutch Review

CHRIS JUDGE SMITH - Orfeas (2011)

Co-founder of Van der Graaf Generator ...

... made ten albums and now comes with 'Orfeas', a retelling in a modern style of the classic story of Orpheus, the mystical musician to the Land of the Dead travels in search of the lost Eurydice.

The legendary Chris Judge Smith is This "movie for your ears", as the accompanying letter states, including assisted by David Jackson, nice to him after his forced departure from VDGG again to hear, guitarist John Ellis (Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Stranglers), drummer Gigi Cavaalli Cocchi (Moon Garden, Mangala Vallis) and Lena Lovich (the famous new wave singer).

Smith's love for a combination of song, spoken word and music is here performance exhibited in a 34-piece 'three act-song story'. So there you love but it appeals to me: strong musicianship, excellent production and great songs all take the strong and fairly strong musical interludes, a sort of mixture of death metal, trance, rock and classical music, I sometimes just to short. Smith is also a novelty which he, with a relatively unknown technique, recorded vocals into music and melody. I find it intriguing but it is hard to explain. Listening is the motto.

Orfeas is an excellent and successful attempt of Smith to this wonderful, classic story telling again, wrapped in a fine coat in which musical creativity and humor have found their place. The sleek layout and the book make it down. Harry 'JoJo' de Vries (what a week 11)

Thank you for your support

I have to say that I am rather enjoying my new position as Oberbloggenfuhrer for Gonzo Multimeda. And I am glad that you guys out in bloggoland seem to be doing likewise.

Initial browser figures are quite encouraging, and it looks as if we are doing something right. I had a long chat with Rob last night, and we have cooked up various things that are going to happen in the forthcoming weeks and months so, watch this space...

JUDGE SMITH: Many layers of the onion

ORFEAS, Part Three
I am still trying to get my head around this record. The more I listen to it the more complex it becomes. One of the most irritating things about much popular music is the wysiwyg sundrome - basically what you see IS what you get, and the thing about artists like Judge Smith is that it is nothing like that.

It works on all sorts of levels. On the surface it is a jolly collection of songs which tells a story with engaging characters.

But it is also a whole collection of different pieces of music in a number of different idioms. It also features Lene Lovich (who is a great and sadly underappreciated singer) and John Ellis, the guitarist from The Vibrators who was one of my inspirations back when I was a spiky haired little herbert just about to be expelled from a not-very-good public school back in the day.

It is also a remarkably complex allegory, which uses a Chorus in the fashion of Greek Classical drama. But it also has drug jokes (one at least).

I am giving it a few more days, and will be listening to it again. Judge, by the way, emailed me yesterday. He seems a jolly good fellow, and I will be interviewing him in the not too distant future, so watch this space dudes and dudettes..

JUDGE SMITH: Speech Music and Allegorical tales

ORFEAS, Part Two

We sat down to listen to it last night, and although I know vaguely what I was expecting, but what we got was nothing like it.

For one thing I didn't expect it to be so enjoyable. I was expecting a piece of heavy Art with a capital A, but what we got was definitely well crafted, artostically valid, yadda yadda yadda, but it was also really entertaining and good fun.

It tells the story of George Orpheus, a rock guitarist of a certain age, whose career is dependent on his artistry on a magickal guitar called Eurydice (which he completely misunderstands, misreading it as "Furry Dice"). It transpires that Eurydice is actually his muse (no, not a three piece rock band from Teignmouth, that would have a capital M, duh!) and the magick guitar was her way of communicating her creative spirit into the engagingly numb skull of George O.

When George O turns his back on his creativity, disaster strikes....

One of the most striking things about the album is the way that Judge Smith uses a singular technique that I had not come across before:

"Speech-music involves taking a recording of a spoken voice, and then setting that recording to music; a music that closely follows the rhythm of the spoken words and the natural rise and fall of the speaker’s voice. This rather demanding and arduous technique was first heard in the 1980s, in the work of a small number ofcomposers and performers, all from the Americas. These include Scott Johnson, Hermeto Pascoal, and Steve Reich, while more recently René Lussier and Charles Spearin have continued to develop the idea. But perhaps the most accomplished speech- music practitioner to have emerged is another American, David Minnick,whom I was lucky enough to involve in the Orfeas project. My own initial experiments in the field can be heard on the 2007 L-RAD album Long Range Audio Device, and my only minor claim to originality in using the technique is that I believe I mightbe the first composer to use 'acted' or deliberately performed speech to generate the music, as opposed to documentary recordings of one kind or another".

JUDGE SMITH: Orfeas (Yer Press Release)

2/29/2012 - London, UK - Independent composer and recording artist Judge Smith, who in 1967 co-founded with Peter Hammill the influential underground band Van der Graaf Generator, has created a movie for your ears – a new concept CD titled 'Orfeas'; a retelling of the ancient myth of Orpheus, the magical musican who travels to the Land of the Dead in search of the lost Eurydice. Since his Van der Graaf Generator days, Judge Smith has been responsible for a wide variety of music projects, including four stage-musicals (with productions at the Edinburgh Traverse, Sheffield Crucible and the Lyric, Hammersmith), opera and cantata libretti, songs for the ‘70s TV show ‘Not The Nine O’clock News’, and songs recorded by Peter Hammill and Lene Lovich. His film ‘The Brass Band’ has won several international awards. Judge Smith's music is complex in structure and often fragmented, but is always tuneful and strangely memorable, with humor never far from the surface. In the course of a twenty-year independent solo career, he has released ten CDs and DVDs.

“My principal interest is in telling stories with words and music,” explains Judge. “Some of my CDs are collections of songs, the usual format for an album, although people say that my songs are unusual and idiosyncratic. However, three of my projects are in a different category. Over many years, I have developed a new way of making extended musical narratives that I call ‘Songstories’, which are more complex than song-cycles or ‘rock operas’. They are not ‘musicals’ either, since they are pretty well un-stageable, and are each intended to be being complete as an ‘audio experience’. The three Songstories are all very different. The first, ‘Curly’s Airships’, a double CD with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes, was completed in 2000 after six years full-time work, and tells the story of the 1930 R-101 Airship disaster. It is probably one the largest and most ambitious pieces of rock music ever recorded. The second, ‘The Climber’, released in 2009, in complete contrast, is performed by me with an unaccompanied Norwegian male voice choir, and a double bass. The third Songstory is ‘Orfeas’, my own interpretation of the Classical myth.”

This Songstory uses wildly contrasting styles of music to tell its story, including instrumental Rock, Mediterranean guitar music, modern classical string sextet music, classical Trance dance music and Death Metal. 'Orfeas' also features a radical, and little-known, technique for transforming recorded speech into melody. “As far as I am aware, I am the only person making work like this, and I think it would be probably fair to say that no one else does what I do,” says Judge.

“Best known for his role in the formation of Van de Graaf Generator, Judge Smith is clearly not an artist with much interest in toeing the line. 'Orfeas', a three-act 'songstory' in which Smith and a host of guest performers re-imagine the titular Greek legend as he headlines at Wembley Arena, is effectively an exercise in schizophrenic musical theatre, replete with rambling soliloquies and plot-revealing dialogue set to avant-garde chamber music, that takes in everything from Jaunty rock radio-jingles and ethereal pop.” Dom Lawson – Classic Rock Presents Prog

In recent news, on November 6, 2011 a performance of Judge Smith's 'The House That Cried' was held in Como, Italy. The show also took place on November 20, 2011 in Chiasso, Switzerland.

For more information visit www.Judge-Smith.com

To purchase Judge Smith – Orfeas CD http://www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk/product_details/15417

Press inquiries: Glass Onyon PR, PH: 828-350-8158, glassonyonpr@cs.com

JUDGE SMITH - Tell me the old old story

ORFEAS, Part One

I've got a confession to make. I have vaguely heard of Chris Judge Smith over the years, but until this evening I hadn't ever got around to listening to him. And not for the first time in my life, I am cursing the unfortunate omission.

OK, what do you think when you hear that an ex-member of Van der Graaf Generator has made a mildly avant garde concept album based upon the classic story of Orpheus and Eurydice?

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Rock music is often a medium prone to hyperbole, and the word 'classic' is one of the most over used words in the genre. However, when one finds out that the earliest known appearance of the story is in the 6th Century BC, it makes claims that "Robbie Williams has made a 'Classic' album" seem pretty small beer, but I digress - I do that a lot, you'll find)

Still digressing, for those of you who are not familiar with the old old story about how Orpheus lost his wife and went into Hades to find her, you had better check it out HERE)

You know it is going to be classy; you know it is going to be edufite; you know that it is going to be well crafted. But, bloody hell, you don't realise that it is going to be so much fun! Corinna, (my wife), Graham (my best mate) and Prudence (my rather silly bulldog/boxer bitch) sat down to listen to it this evening, and none of us got even slightly what we expected....

To be Continued...

PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF

If you have been following the old Gonzo blog, ably edited by our friend Jon Kirkman, then you will probably be wondering who the hell I am, and what the blazes I am doing here.

Well, my name's Jon, and I am probably better known as "That fat weird bloke off the telly who believes in vampires". Well, as well as believing in vampires (which I do, by the way, but that is an entirely different story) I have been writing about music for even longer than I have been writing about things that go bump in the night. The only difference being that most of the time no-one much read what I had to say. Even less people bought my records (which is one of the reasons that I became a writer in the first place), but music never stopped being very important to me.

Yes, I admit it. I was one of those deluded souls who truly believed that sitting in muddy fields in the rain listening to a bunch of grown men making whooshing noises on synthesisers was somehow going to change the world! I'm still not sure that it won't.

About a quarter of a century ago when I was editing a small-press fanzine that no-one much read, I met a bloke called Rob Ayling. The main thing that we had in common was that we both took music far too seriously, but that was enough, and we soon became firm friends. He and I both had dreams; I was going to travel the earth in search of monsters, and he was going to start a record label for the delectation of those people who also take music far too seriously. Twenty-five years on, we have both realised our ambitions, and what other two disparate middle-aged men can claim that?

Now, twenty-five years on from our first meeting at a Daevid Allen concert in Exeter Arts Centre, we are collaborating again. Rob decided that although
I had never stopped taking music far too seriously, it was time that I started to write about it again. I won't ever argue with Rob - he is from Yorkshire, so I gathered a few like-minded folk around me, we girded our loins, and set to work.

So here we are, at the beginning of a brave new adventure. We are going to do our best to make this a daily thing, and we hope that you will join us. C'mon guys; it is time to see the world through the eyes of a bunch of middle-aged weirdos who still have a sneaking suspicion that music can change the world!