Lego creations

Outside of Meccano which was my favourite engineering based toy, lego was the second best because provided you avoid the misguided souvenir kits, your only limit on what you could make as a boy was your very own imagination.

Even running out of parts could be tackled buy either buying whole new sets some of which may contain things like electric motors or bundles of bricks in whatever form and colour you prefer. 

Unfortunately the very set I had as a boy and all the extras got taken away by folks in my mid teens for some reason or other but I do long for a 'proper' one.

My Junior inspired art

Most of us encountered art either around us on maybe on the things people bought us such as books, packaging of toys and so on.

As you slowly and for some of us definitely slowly developed your fine motor skills  you may of started to doodle on pieces of paper, done some colouring before doing art in the nursery or infants class usually around the things you know starting say with faces of siblings and so on.

Later on in juniors you'd of had lessons where you might be given a subject to interpret and draw which in my case included drawing things like branches, pussy willow, acorns and flowers that we'd seen in nature study. In my case we went outside to draw them too!

A while ago I did draw some Canada Geese in pencil as I'm a bit of a techophobe when it comes to using tablet and computer software and here is the picture.

Yes that's a Hello Kitty pencil I used to draw it with!

Billy Joel, The Piano man Pt.3

Following on from the first two posts of this series, finally the specialty record company Mobile Fidelity re-issued Billy's 1983 album a few weeks ago.

While from the part of view of artistry this fails to keep up with his artistic development such as that on the previous years The Nylon Curtain, what it makes up for is his abilities to bring about a fine pastiche of 50's music for the 80's which hit the nostalgia market head on.

It also helped no end that Billy had embraced the pop video for stations such as Much Music and MTV so those memorable songs from the album such as the singles Uptown Girl, Tell Her About had lodged their way into ones visual recollections of that era. Billys performances on what I can consider to the best songs on the album such as the uptempo Christie Lee, the doowop inspired the Longest Time  and plaintive An Innocent Man are amongst the best he's ever recorded.

This remastered super audio cd that also has a layer that plays in regular players offers much improved transparency over the original and 1998 remastered edition coupled with an amazing rich sound that makes you feel Billy's singing in your room on a good quality stereo.

Strongly recommended for Billy Joel fans.

More Foreigner on sacd and the ZZ Top box set

Well the term "Head Games" sometimes covers the kind of games some folk play  it has been and may  even apply given just how long from announcement to issuing these discs have been.

You might recall the first two albums had been re-issued by the specialty label Mobile Fidelity in the form of super audio cds that also play on regular players from the 'original master tapes'.

Originally issued in 1979 on lp, cassette and 8 track (still have mine!) it was Foreigner's reaction to the criticism of their rock being too smooth and commercial and an answer to the English new wave being somewhat more edgier something hinted at in the cover that remains at least with me just a little disturbing

The album features the singles Head Games, Dirty White Boy which did produce some allegations of racism (misguided imho) and Love On The Telephone. 

One criticism of it is the sound where producer Roy Thomas Baker had a sound that involved getting a dirty feel featuring distorted drums so while this version is less harsh in part because digital mastering has improved over the years, it remains rough round the edges.

After a lineup change, in 1981 the band issued 4 which is a play on the fact it was their fourth album and it was one of several top selling hard rock albums of 1981/2 sitting aside Reo Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity, Journey's Escape and AC/DC's For Those About To Rock

It also sold extremely well in the UK aided by the popularity of  the 45 "Waiting For  A Girl Like You" although Juke Box Hero also was a big worldwide seller.

1981 also was a format transition year so while it was issued on lp and cassette it was briefly issued on 8 track and also in Europe the original cassette was re-issued with a higher quality Chrome dioxide issue as people started to buy more tapes for car and walkman usage.

It also was one of the first cds I bought in 1986 with a period green 'target' crosshair pattern on the top layer.

This new super audio cd is a bit better sounding although a friend of mine informed me the High Resolution files from HDTracks recently put out sound better.
Both discs come in a gatefold mini lp style presentation with full insert featuring lyrics with the disc held in a lint free pouch.

Changing format but compatible with both sacd and regular cd players we move to a box set recently issued.

The biggest boogie band on planet earth? Probably these Texan rockers I'd say.

Just arriving through the door will be this box set  recently issued by Rhino/Warner's that has the first ten albums (Self titled to Recycler) by the band seeing them through classic blues boogie to their synthesizer reborn era of the mid 80's.

What makes this set particularly appealing  even though the discs are held in just card replica sleeves in a card outer box is that for the first time every album from Z Z Tops first album through Tejas will be issued in their original mixes on cd for the very first time.

In the early cd era (1987) Warner Bros. and Bill Ham, ZZ Tops producer, decided to issue  6 early albums in a 3 cd set called the ZZ Top Six pack back to back and the replaced the original drumming with a machine and edited a number of the songs.

In the opinion of many fans making 70's songs sound mid 80's in this way was beyond a travesty and even when separate cd issues were done these mixes remained in print although in 2006 Fandango! and Tres Hombres were remastered from the original recordings with bonus tracks but Rhino didn't follow though until now.

For years fans made do with their original London and later Warner Bros. re-issue vinyl with some even digitizing them and making available as unlicensed downloads

This is how they look in the box. Note how they look like small scale vinyl lps with Tres Hombres and Tejas being gatefolds.

For this set the mastering from 2008 of Eliminator and 2006's Fandango are used, slightly altered clones are used of the original Deguello and El Loco masterings and straight re-issues of Afterburner and Recycler with the remainder freshly mastered.

As you can see on the rear of the box is a list of the albums with song information and a thumbnail of each album.

For the modest £22 including mailing  it simply has to be the best news in eons for digital fans of this band.

The old days

 It's Early Summer where I had been talking people about their childhoods and how different things are compared to what modern children are used to not least the more authoritarian way schools were run and how teachers treated us.

It wasn't unusual for a board rubber used to clean the blackboard of to land next to an inattentive child or just informed you were to stay in over break times  if you hadn't completed the work set. 

Whenever I spent time in skirts back then while the teachers were not around, that's like I looked.

I mentioned comics which were big with us but comics often lead to year books or annuals with original storylines and more pages in colour as many comics were just two tones on newsprint.

Here's a bunch from the early to mid 1970's so I know these and my comic reading tastes at the time were little different than most boys and the two main ones, the Beano and Dandy were aimed at girls as well as boys having a mixture of story types some set at home, some school based all very relatable.

I have a number of the Beano and Dandy Collectors editions with classic stories and compilations by various cartoonists who worked for both outside a few original old comics.

Mary, Mungo and Midge

Age Regression is of the past because it was in the past the first time around so when
people often hear the grown ups talking about how we live, the type of environment they planned and how that affects things this taps into some of things we recall of the past.

For instance in the late 1960's and 1970's the way children lived was changing rapidly brought on by both the idea of keeping more green spaces and also using less land for housing.

One famous children's tv series caught it well.

Yes that is a lift to the flat Mary lived in with Mungo the dog and Midge the inquisitive mouse in their town. They had a flat with a balcony that served as their garden and if they wanted more space then they'd go the communal park where fairs and other things go on.

Here's Mary playing with the bright colourful building blocks.

It was a show that i loved as a young boy whose parents while moving out of the inner city hadn't been transferred to high rise flats but lived in newer traditional houses just beyond.

The show had annuals such as this one we had and in the pre video recorder era, records of the stories we could play over and over again.

 I often harboured the thought they were trying to prepare us to this more isolated existence where everyone kept themselves to themselves, a far cry from the sort of life my folks had had.

For one thing you couldn't just play in each others gardens or on the street, just in doors in the park away from the neighbours and the other is it remove the wonder of seeing the natural environment with it's calming effects.