Space Ritual back at The Borderline

Space Ritual concerts are like your best friend's wedding. There is the long anticipation, the familiar faces, the noisy children and embarrassing uncles, a pay your own way bar and good music.

Mix these together for a few hours and the results are unpredictable but will always look like a riot from a distance.

When I last saw Space Ritual in March 2011 I moaned that I had only seen them twice in 2010 but 2011 turned out even worse and I only managed to see them once! This is a friend who need to get married more often.

Not surprisingly this absence meant that I was almost desperate for their brand of space/jazz rock and booked early for their return to The Borderline. Somehow I still managed to forget to buy a present but I'm hopeful that they did not notice.

The first surprise was the set-up on the empty stage. Getting all of Space Ritual, plus their usual guests, on to any stage is problematic so it seemed odd that they would make this even harder by having two full drum kits.The surprise was deepened when the kits were occupied and a stranger occupied the space where I expected to see Sam Ollis, son of Terry who did take his rightful place behind the other kit.

I had much the same feeling as I do at weddings when a distant relative turns up with an unfamiliar partner and you try and remember what his/her marital status is and whether there is some dark mystery that you are not party to that explains the change.

I stood on the customary front-left that put me right in front of Mick Slattery's lead guitar with Chris Purdon's sonics to the left and main-man Nik Turner centre stage to my right. Thomas Crimble's keyboards were on the far right and that meant, that once again, he was invisible to me except for when I made a trip to the bar. And that was a shame as he is sporting a fine head of hair these days that veers towards the mad professor look.

That left Gary Smart on bass to take up the rather narrow holding position between Nik and Terry.

Clearly arranging Space Ritual on the stage is a problematic as getting the seating right at the reception.


The other fans took their preferred positions too and, just like a wedding, there was some jostling for drinks, the best place to take photos and to dance with the chief bridesmaid.

This movement reintroduced friends who had not met since the last bash, or was it another one? Memories are exchanged, gaps filled and plans made.

The changed line-up suggested a heavier sound but that quickly proved not to be the case and we were treated to the usual Space Ritual fusion of jazzy spacey funky rock that makes them sound like nobody else, least of all any of the other bands that build on the Hawkwind legend, including Hawkwind themselves. The song remains the same but it sounds very different.

This free-form and confident style was reflected in the set list. There was one, and I took a photo of it to prove it, but it was hastily written in faint pencil and got abandoned after a few songs anyway.

We had a few surprises along the way, like Urban Guerrilla, which I never really liked that much, and even a Space Ritual version did not do much to excite me. It sounds like a single to me when I prefer long album tracks.

Long album tracks like Orgone Accumulator which they did an absolutely blinding version of. It was easily worth the price of the tickets just for that.

And being Space Ritual the music comes with some dancing from Ms Angel who had some new costumes to play with and also had a chance to play with Chris' electronics.

So cramped was the stage that when I returned from my foray to the bar I found Ms Angel dancing in the space I had vacated!

All too soon it was time for the bride and groom to leave for their new life together and the rest of us were left to wonder when we would be doing it all again. Soon I hope.

Finding some nice things in Dalston

Arriving unexpectedly early gave me a bit of time to explore Dalston before the theatre and I love exploring London so that is what I did.

Immediately out of the station is the lively Ridley Road marked stuffed with unusual food stuffs including fish arranged by colour, enormous yams and chillies that look as pretty as I am sure they are tasty.

There are a few other stalls too, such as kitchenware, clothes and music but it is mostly food and it is all attractive and very cheap.

Following Ridley Road to the end (not a short walk) and then circling round Matalan to the right takes you to Hackney Archives which seems to be a posh name and a posh building for a public library. I approve in principle but it is not that welcoming for people trying to get introduced to books for the first time.

Opposite the library is an amazing mural.

This is the Hackney Peace Carnival Mural painted in 1985 to commemorate the 1983 Hackney Peace Carnival.

This is just a part of it but you can feel the excitement and the music.

London has a fine tradition of murals, it has more than any other city that I am aware of (there were around a dozen in Brixton when I worked there), and finding a new one is a highlight of any urban exploration.

There are some seats there too so you can sit there for a while and appreciate all of the detail in the picture.

Who could not love this?

The mural also acts as the reception area for one of London's forgotten spaces, the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden.

The to the garden entrance, unlike the library opposite, draws you in expectantly. It's like being a child again following Rupert in to a Cornish cave.

As its name suggests, the garden is an attempt to reclaim a disused railway line for community use.

So many of these areas lie forgotten behind high walls and I welcome their return to life.

This project is in early days but already the vision of the project is clear and the foundations have been laid to make those dreams come true.

The community use is served by the covered area at one end.

Here children of all ages can gather to learn, play or just sit and enjoy the rest of the garden.

This space feels different from those around it and that feeling seeps in to you and the Victorian city outside recedes from sight and memory.

The planting has only just begun so you have to rely a little on your imagination, and the free leaflet, to anticipate what it will look like once everything is in place. This Summer looks like a good time to go back and see how the work is progressing. It should be warmer too.

The garden has a fun side too.

The industrial walls that enclose and define the shape have not been hidden, instead they have been celebrated as part of the garden.

The painting on the wall is fun and so are the heads hanging on the wall.

By then it was almost time for curtain up (metaphorically speaking, the Arcola theatre does not have a curtain) and time to let this little bit of magic slip away.

This was only a little detour on the way from the station to the theatre but it did enough to convince me to take a longer detour and to linker a little longer in Dalston next time I go to the theatre there.

Copyright's conceits

SOPA and PIPA may have caught the headlines recently but there has been a lively debate on copyright for several years now and there have been other subtle changes, such as the harmonisation (i.e. lengthening) of some copyright periods.

I am firmly against copyright restrictions for several reasons, for example I am swayed by the argument that openness leads to greater wealth/value creation, but my main argument is the sheer conceit of the whole concept of copyright.

It's all my own work

Giving copyright to a work to a single individual makes the preposterous claim that all the intellectual effort that went in to producing it is theirs and theirs alone. This ignores the necessary contributions from teachers who built the skills, peers and friends who guided the work, and other vast army of artists who created the cultural environment in which the new work sits.

In music this is often recognised with Band A being honest and saying that they were influenced by Bands B and C. But Band A gets all the money.

Only I could have done it

This assertion claims that the work is so unique that only the author could have created and, by implication, anybody who produces any similar work must have copied the "original".

The obvious counter argument to this is the story of the young boy and an owl who learns he is a wizard and goes off to school to learn about magic. That, of course, is the story of Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic.

Not only is it true that somebody else could have produce the work it is also very likely that somebody else could have done something similar but better.

Copyright is a lie

These two lies make copyright a falsehood and it should be abolished.

January's KSoc Committee Meeting

Having agreed to join the committee of the Kingston upon Thames Society I then found myself working in Cardiff when I should have been attending their monthly meetings and it took me until January to arrange a work at home day so that I could attend.

We meet in one of the committee members' houses and the location rotates. This month I had a pleasant walk of 3.15 Km that took me 29 minutes according to my phone and the useful iMapMyWalk app.

The Society concerns itself with development matters and there were a few significant topics to get our teeth in to. Tolworth Broadway might be about to lose its hideous and divisive barriers, Seething Wells might finally get a sympathetic development and Primark might get an awful lot bigger.

On societal matters we discussed our application for a grant to the Heritage Lottery Fund (somehow I got volunteered to do that), our AGM on 18 January (when I'll be in Cardiff again), possible speakers for future events, holding a garden party or other such social event, publicity, membership and the website.

We also drifted on to some of our favourite topics like Huf Haus (we love them, some residents hate them) and buses (we love them too).

I found it an interesting and productive meeting and I look forward to get more involved in things like publicity where I can exploit my talents and my interests.

A few months in to the new role and I'm still glad that I agreed to join.

The Winter Palace reimagined by Simon Fraser

The saga of Nikolai Dante in 2000AD is drawing to a close and is doing so in style. The story is propelled by intra-familial rivalries that out-do Eastenders with their violence (torture is a family habit) and inspire bloody revolutions that engulf a large empire.

Capturing the dynamism of the action and the grandeur of the setting is the stunning art work of Simon Fraser.

This is his view of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg rebuilt in the twenty-seventh century by Dmitri Romanov, Patriarch of the Romanov dynasty (and Nikolai's father), as the symbol of the new empire.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Films escape on to DVD so quickly these days that it takes something pretty unusual to entice me in to the cinema.

Previously that has been things like Avatar in 3D and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the final instalment of the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson (the original version in Swedish, of course).

This time it was just the happy circumstance of being near a cinema, on a free afternoon, when I film I quite fancied watching was just about to start.

Having the Odeon iPhone app to hand helped make this happen.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (a.k.a. MI4) arrived five years after MI3 which is a long time to wait for another chapter.

MI4 acknowledges its place in the canon. Some characters from previous stories appear, including one of the core team with Ethan, and we also hear what happened to Ethan's wife who played a large part in the previous film.

The Ghost Protocol is a simple but clever device to simplify the technology deployed which (mostly) takes us away from the high-tech stunts that have characterised some of the previous films.

This helps to make the film less episodic and more continuous with the stunts supporting the plot rather than the other way round. Overall the feel is more like the old TV series where there is more drama from the possibility of their schemes being detected than from them going wrong.

Of course there are stunts and the main one is the climb of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the worlds tallest building.

This was a little overpowering for someone with my vertiginous tendencies and I found myself sliding back in my seat so that I would not fall of it.

And that was typical of the film; tense, dramatic and exciting. The plot twisted nicely a couple of times too, sometimes to twist again in another direction.

I went in to the cinema expecting something classy and clever but essentially superficial. What I got was a lot more. This is a really good film and leaves you panting for MI5.

The only thing that let it down was the end. The very end. As Ethan walks towards the camera for the last time he has clearly got his iPhone earphones on the wrong way round. Somebody should tell him the microphone goes on the right.