I knew 1979 was gonna be a bad year before it even started, although I didn’t see Thatcher’s election as a certainty until it happened. Much of my take on the world back then was filtered through the music I loved. On 29 December 1978 I headed up to Camden to catch a multi-band new wave gig at The Electric Ballroom headlined by The Brian James All Stars. This was the band that eventually became The Brains. Their performance that night was so-so and for me it didn’t compare with the excitement of seeing The Damned live when James was their guitarist (or even when they reformed without him).

Yoko Ono keeps popping into my life. Last week I was reading and commenting about her on the Old Rope blog. The piece in question particularly grooved me because it featured an embed of Ono’s Bottoms (AKA Four) from YouTube. Here’s a short extract from that blog followed by some of my comments: “…Ono has taken more than her fair share of shit over the years. Richard Di Lello’s The Longest Cocktail Party, whilst being an illuminating and entertaining insight into the world of Apple, also offers glimpses of the derision leveled at Ono – even from within the Beatles inner circle.

Recently a friend suggested I try to acquire some Russ Henderson vinyl I wanted via Discogs. I’d landed on this site a few times but had never really investigated it. When I checked it out, I was disappointed to find only two Russ Henderson titles were listed there, the 1966 vinyl album Caribbean Carnaval! (sic) and the CD compilation London Is The Place For Me 2, which features a Henderson track taken from Caribbean Carnival; only the latter was available in the Discogs marketplace, but needless to say I already had both it and the release it is taken from. I double-checked my copy of the 1966 vinyl and ‘Carnival’ is spelt correctly on the sleeve and labels, the spelling error had been generated in the Discogs listing, although I’ve now amended it.

Back in the late 1960s my mother Julia Callan-Thompson was in the countercultural jargon of the time an ‘India freak’; a drop-out obsessed with the ‘mystic east’. Among my mother’s extant papers are a number of letters she sent while out on the hippie trail, and one she received from a woman called Georgian Shaw as she was making her way back to Europe. My favourite among the various surviving missives my mother sent my grandparents over the years is the following, mailed from Kathmandu on 13 June 1969: “Everest although cold was the most beautiful sight you could see. Yes!

After the mass protests last week and demands for the resignation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) political gangster Narendra Modi, I’ve been checking out the follow-up reporting. The demonstrations were a spontaneous outpouring after more than a hundred people died from drinking toxic bootlegged alcohol in India; many more were poisoned. Modi is a hardline Hindu nationalist whose fundamentalist political positions have exacerbated Hindu-Muslim discord in Gujarat, the only part of India where there is an outright ban on alcohol. It should go without saying that Modi’s inflammatory policies play a significant role in contributing to social misery in Gujarat.