Oliver Wood Photography

Last night was a good moody night, one of those nights when I have a clear sense of the ethereal harmony of things, the characteristics of the seasons, the weather, an almost syneasthetic sense of correlation’s. Actually, I was out and about on my bike but I don’t really know quite where I was as I managed to get lost somewhere between Adlington and Pot Shrigley on very dark lanes. Eventually I found my way back to the secluded Macclesfield Canal and made a very precarious return journey along the rutted towpath to the familiar setting of Whitley Green. The prospect of a “strange encounter” and the possibility of having to route an assailant or a misjudged high-speed manoeuvre resulting in an impromptu slam dive with bike seemed to add to the excitement in the dark darkness. Yes I know, I’m weird crazy personified :-)

It was a bracing night with a fierce looking sky made up of hard edged broken cloud scampering to the east in a jostling squally fashion and allowing the impressive stars to show through; albeit somewhat tentatively. My favourite planet Mars looked fabulous last night, skulking low in the south and standing out from the crowd with its unmistakable fiery orange glow. There was a curious mood of ominous portent with a robust war like essence to this red theme’d and typically seasonal night. Don’t ask me to explain! Actually, I have quite a soft spot for Jupiter too, naturally! It’s an interesting and highly energetic world perfectly suited as the Ruler of Sagittarius—but of course.

I am continuing to indulge in a sort of nostalgia for the music of my youth, or rather shall we say the missed (non-attentive) years of my pre adolescence. Actually, my adolescence was firmly rooted in the “Punk” era of the late 70s, a time when one had to pretend not to like any of the preceding genres. Nearly everything we hear now appears to be in some way derivative and it is easy to convince oneself that the non “classical” music styles have run out of material and exhausted all possibilities for invention and progression.

This is why I like to loose myself in a sort of retrogressive journey of belated discovery trawling through obscure 70s back catalogues for those fiendishly well arranged and ambitiously orchestrated “P Funk” masterpieces from the early 70s and virtually everything on the Stax label. No one does music with this sort of quality now. It would be fascinating to delve into the John Peel shows from the pre-Punk era too if only to get an angle on the “underground” or serious and innovative stuff when all we can think of is razzal dazzle commercial rubbish. Who can remember “Family” and those gritty social narratives set to organ rich compositions with a hint of 70s TV themes?