The R&R quiz and The Fortune's pussy fans....

July 9^th – How rock ‘n’ roll are you? OK, the quiz:

 1) Other than Rory Gallagher, name the other two members of the band Taste?

2) What was their name before they became Black Sabbath?

3) A music video set in a bar paired two unlikely people (one a motorbike maniac the other a witch) in a search for love; who are the two people and what’s the name of the track?

4) Gimme an ‘F’ – Gimme an ‘I’ – Gimme an ‘S’ – Gimme an ‘H’…..” Track and band, please?

5) Name the two related artists who recorded a song about Encino ladies?

6) Gary Moore recorded a version of Shapes of Things. Who did the original and in what year?

7) Arthur Conan Doyle knew where 221b was and he wasn’t the only one; who and what?

8) The dog that barked in the beginning… Track and band, please?

9) A difficult balancing act and a difficult instrument to play in any century even for a farmer; Band and track, please?

10) Pulled off the stage by frenzied fans at a New England gig, this bass-playing front man was hospitalised. Who?

 A lot of these you’ll know, but I bet number 10 foxes y’. Frenzied fans can be a real problem at gigs particularly if all you want to do is something seemingly so alien at a gig these days; i.e. watch and listen to the band. It’s like this phenomena that’s percolated into any performance these days, the desire of audience members to whoop and yell during and at the end of a performance. As if just showing your appreciation by clapping isn’t enough now we have to yell and scream, whoop and holler with all the rest of the baying pack. That’s when delight and critical acclaim for the performance stops being about the performer and switches to being about the audience member; applause graffiti, if you like, and folk do it at the drop of a hat these days. The performer only has to make a topical comment or play the beginning of a song and FM they’re off!

As you can probably tell, I’m not a fan, let alone a frenzied fan. The epitome of this behaviour is the mosh pit. Won’t dwell, done it before in this column, but…WTF? A more ridiculous spectacle I have yet to see; really. I well remember the hard-cases back in the day of my youth (think, Methuselah and then some) and their macho antics of what they called dancing with another hard-case. This consisted of pushing your clenched fists into your kidney area, sticking your elbows out in imitation of a chicken, half swivelling the upper body in time to the music and head-butting your opposite number…but twitching your heads away from a collision at the last moment and the faster the music, the more frenetic was the near head-butting…FFS.

From out of this has grown those much to be regretted spectacles in the modern rock concert; mosh pits, gobbing (both from and to the stage) stage diving, missile launching (beer, piss, shoes) which all serves to distract from what the event is really all about; the fuckin’ music FCS! And unfortunately a wild band on stage is reflected by the wild crowd behaviour out front.

Do you remember a band called The Fortunes? 60’s band that had a string of hits, all of them of a style that would please granny and any batch of small puppies in the house at the time. Soft, safe rock doesn’t come into it. It was so soft and safe that it could collide with a marshmallow and come off the worse. Go onto YouTube and have a listen, if you get through more than half of You’ve Got Your Troubles without projectile vomiting you win a copy of the ’phone number of the local therapy unit. The other 9 questions above I’ll give the answers to tomorrow but that one, number 10? I’ll let you have that now.

On this day in 1966, Rod Allen, the lead vocalist and bass player with the aforementioned band (The Fortunes) was pulled off the stage by frenzied fans (according to the musical papers) and was hospitalised with minor injuries…minor injuries; see you can tell the level of mush-pop they were playing. If they were playing anything worthy of the name rock music those self-same fans would’ve pulled him into their midst, ripped his head off and used it as a tennis ball (which they’d smack back and forth with two guitars plucked from the stage) then roll his torso in honey and piss before setting light to it with an acetylene torch…but they didn’t, they gave him ‘minor injuries’; lightweight pussy-cats the lot of ‘em…