An Open Letter To The Labour Party
I am a left-winger. I went to an anti-poll tax protest, by myself, when I was (I think) eight (I had to go home early because it went past my bedtime). I think that the two greatest governments of the last seventy years were the Atlee government and the first Wilson government. I’ve been a Guardian reader since before primary school (albeit with occasional dalliances with the Independent). I’ve been hugged by Billy Bragg at anti-fascist rallies and devoured Tony Benn’s Arguments For Socialism when I was in school. I wanted to join Young Labour when I was in primary school. I’m a member of Amnesty and Greenpeace, I’ve played anti-fascist benefit gigs, delivered leaflets for Hope Not Hate. I’ve been on the dole, and I’ve worked in the NHS. I love Mark Thomas, Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy. A few years ago a few online friends and I had a detailed discussion about Margaret Thatcher – specifically trying to draw up a rota so that those who wished to dance on her grave would not be inconvenienced by those who wished to piss or shit on it. I’m a lefty.
I’m a member of the Liberal Democrats, but the first two times I voted for them – in 1997 and 2001 – I did so with a sense of residual guilt because of having been raised all my life to believe that the reason Thatcher won in 83 and 87 was because the SDP split the left vote. It’s only over the last six or seven years that I’ve defined myself as a Liberal Democrat (and more recently as a liberal) rather than as a disaffected Labour supporter.
In short, working with the Tories is about as appealing to me as testicular cancer, and while I see the need for the coalition, I am very, very dubious about it. I am precisely the sort of person, in fact, that Labour should be trying to win over.
Now I’ll be frank – no matter what, I’m not going to vote Labour in the next election, because the last government was so outright evil. I simply won’t support mass-murdering torturers who, among other things, removed the right to a duty lawyer when arrested, brought in 28-day detention without trial, made it politically acceptable to blame immigrants for eveything, and destroyed huge swathes of the NHS ( in the first ten years of the Labour government, on average more than two psychiatric beds a day were lost – at one point when I was working at a hospital, we had ten more psychiatric patients on our ward than we had beds for).
But I might be persuaded to vote Labour in the election after that, if I happened to live in a Labour/Tory marginal. And if the next election is fought under a preferential system, as I sincerely hope, then you might well want me to give you my second preference. And even if neither of those is the case, it’s entirely possible we will have another hung parliament again relatively soon, in which you might want to work with the Liberal Democrats (and would need the support of the membership).
But rather than try to persuade me to look more favourably upon your party, most of what I’ve seen from both your Parliamentarians and your membership (with a few honourable exceptions among the members – if you’re a Labour member who I’m in any kind of regular contact with, I’m not talking about you here) has been designed to make me, and those like me, ever more determined to stick with the Lib Dems and stay as far away from Labour as possible.
Now, I’m not talking here about the normal politics – even though Labour would have made cuts were they in power, *of course* they’re going to attack the government for them now. That’s what opposition parties do. And I’m not talking about the normal dirty tricks, going back on manifesto commitments to get at the other side, accusations of gerrymandering and so on. That’s all par for the course, and while it’s not nice it’s something all parties are guilty of (I can’t actually think of any examples where the Lib Dems have done so, but I’m sure Labour can). I’m talking about a few main things. If you do these, you won’t have my support, but you’ll at least have my *respect*:
1) Admit you were wrong on civil liberties and the ‘war on terror’. These two things are areas where Labour got things so utterly, horribly, catastrophically wrong, both pragmatically and – what is worse – morally, that there can be no excuse. I *should not* be listening to Kenneth Clarke – a man whose last period in charge of justice and civil liberties I viewed at the time with horror – and thinking “It’s nice to have a moderate in this job after those horrific authoritarian Labour ministers”. No amount of apologies and meae culpae can make up for the horrors inflicted by the last government, but if delivered sincerely enough they might at least persuade us that you won’t do it again.
2) Stop dismissing the gains the Lib Dems got out of the coalition agreement. The *LAST* thing you want is for people to start thinking the Tories aren’t really so bad. All that will achieve is all those who avoided voting Tory last time because of scary folk-memories of Thatcher (a diminishing number anyway) thinking “Well, this government weren’t so bad, and since the Lib Dems had no real influence I’ll just vote Tory this time”. A HUGE amount of your support is predicated on “Ooh, Tories, scary!”, so it’s in your interest to give the Lib Dems credit for as many ‘nice’ things as you can from the coalition government – even (or perhaps especially?) when they weren’t Lib Dem ideas. That way those who like the current government will at least not vote Tory over Lib Dem next time (I assume everyone’s agreed that a Tory majority would be even worse) while those who don’t like it will turn away from the Lib Dems and towards Labour because they had so much influence and it stil turned out badly.
3) and this is the most important… STOP IT WITH THE HOMOPHOBIC SHIT, RIGHT NOW!. The constant ‘jokes’ about Cameron and Clegg being ‘in a civil partnership’ are, frankly, sickening. No true Liberal – no decent human being – will have the slightest respect for anyone making jokes like that. Anyone making that kind of joke is, firstly, showing themselves up as homophobic, and thus nobody any liberal (or any decent human being) could vote for, and secondly showing they have the mentality of a sniggering schoolboy, which doesn’t lead to a great deal of trust in their ability to run the country.
The coalition government presents Labour with a real opportunity to make themselves more attractive, both to future voters and to the Lib Dems as a future potential coalition partner. Instead, they appear to be sinking and trying to pull the Liberal Democrats down with them (and, it must be said, succeeding somewhat in the latter if opinion polls are to be believed).
Next election we *could* have a choice between the Tories, a Labour party who’ve admitted their mistakes and reformed, and a Lib Dem party with experience in government. Or we could have a choice between a still-unelectable New Labour, a Tory party who now appear like good guys because they can take credit for Lib Dem achievements, and a shattered Lib Dem party who the public at large see as a Tory appendage. The second option there does not sound like a good one for Labour *or* the Lib Dems – or for the left in general, or for the country.
I have a number of Labour friends who are convinced that the Labour party can be the party of Atlee and Bevan, the party that gave us the NHS and the Open University, the party that legalised homosexuality and ended the death penalty. That party is no longer my party, and I doubt it ever will be – too much of my political identity is now firmly Liberal, and that’s not going to change – but it was a good party, and a necessary voice in British politics. But at the moment, you’re the party of Iraq and torture, of ID cards and detaining people in psychiatric wards when they’re untreatable, of “British jobs for British workers” and homophobic jokes, of Hazel Blears and David Blunkett.
Take a look at yourselves in the mirror, and ask yourselves – “Is this really who I want to be?” You could be so much more…
Linkblogging For 12/08/10
I have been nominated in Miss S.B.’s Very Prestigious And Entirely Serious Blog Awards (or the Willies for short). Oddly, there appears to have been some sort of administrative cock-up, and I have been placed in ‘Best Beardy Blogger’ rather than the correct ‘sexiest blogger’ category. Nonetheless, you should still vote for me – currently I’m in second place, one vote behind Tez Burke.
I have become fascinated by Frank “The Dave Sim of astrophysics” Tipler, recently. Tipler is an extremely gifted physicist who did major, important work in the 70s and 80s. He then, in the early 90s, claimed to have proved the existence of God, using physics. The book in which he did this, The Physics Of Immortality, is far more rational than you might think – respected scientists like David Deutsch have endorsed the main lines of its argument – but since then he’s spiraled into strangeness. If you want to read the workings of a brilliant, near-genius mind going at full speed but completely off the rails, then read this, an academic paper that purports to show that Obama’s refusal to endorse a Supreme Court Justice can be traced back to his bad understanding of physics (in a paper written by someone else but in the Harvard Law Review when Obama edited it, so Tipler is convinced Obama was the secret author). Along the way he tries to reintroduce the concept of the luminiferous aether to Relativity, argues that evolution must be incorrect in a universe where reverse timelike causation can happen, and claims that the film Starship Troopers will persuade people of the evils of so-called ‘partial birth abortion’. It’s quite the most bizarre thing I’ve ever read…
Some medics are proposing that statins should be given out free by fast food companies. Apart from the many other ways this is wrong, there are the small facts that cholesterol levels have nothing to do with heart disease and that statins don’t actually work…
In better health news though, yet another study showing a link between low vitamin C levels and cancer.
Britain Votes has a piece on the parallels between the recent electoral upsets in Canada over the last decade or so and what we can expect in the UK if we don’t get a proportional system.
And some of you may have heard about the supposed ‘proof’ of P!=NP. R.J. Lipton explains why it probably isn’t a proof, though it’s interesting work (not crackpottery, genuinely valuable mathematics), while for those who are confused, Ian Stewart explains P vs NP using Minesweeper
How To Live In A Comic
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
Recently, there has been much speculation around Nick Bostrom’s paper, “Are You Living In A Comic Book?”, which argued that given how easily comic books can be created, and the number of characters that appear in them, it is more likely that any given individual is a character in a comic book rather than a ‘real’ person in ‘reality’ (if such a thing as an objective reality even exists, which Tegmark et. al. give us ample grounds for disbelieving).
Certainly, Bostrom’s hypothesis would give us an explanation for some of the more inexplicable phenomena we see every day. People’s appearances changing, as they do every so often, could be down to a new artist coming on to the book – or perhaps to a guest appearance in another title. The occasional inconsistencies one sees in the world, such as the recent tragic destruction of Starlight City, when for three weeks people from Megapolis could enter and leave the city and from their point of view everyone there was alive and well, while from the point of view of anyone in Starlight the city was devastated and a million people were killed, could be the result of an issue of a crossover coming out out of sequence. I am sure similar examples will occur to the reader.
So, accepting Bostrom’s claims, what should be our response? How is one to live, in a universe where one is at the mercy of many capricious gods (writers, editors, artists, readers and so forth)? The higher one sets the probability that one is living in a comic book, the more important this question is. What we might call the four-colour problem could simply be stated as – “How can one maximise one’s healthy lifespan in a universe created for entertainment purposes?”
Firstly, one must make the assumption that one only has an existence when in a panel of the comic – or when performing actions that it is heavily implied must happen between panels. For example, I am a college professor. I very much doubt that my current actions (writing this paper) are happening on panel, and my life is not interesting enough to read about. It is entirely possible, though, that one of my students is the star of the comic – possibly mild-mannered young Billy Bradshaw in my class has some connection with the new moth-powered vigilante who turned up in town at the same time he did. Or maybe my colleague in the physics department, Dr Hermann Von Mörder, has some sort of double life.
Of course, that is an absurdity – I deliberately chose Billy and Hermann because they, like myself, lead uninteresting lives. But nonetheless, it is almost certain that my only appearances on-panel will be a brief picture of me in the middle distance giving a lecture, while something more interesting happens in the foreground. However, as I am a professor it is implied that I write research papers, and hence this paper gets written off-panel.
Hanson, among others, suggests that in this case one should try to live as exciting and interesting a life as possible, so one maximises one’s on-panel appearances, and also minimises the likelihood of the comic getting cancelled. However, examining cases where this strategy has been attempted tends to show that this is at best a flawed strategy. One would have considered the life of Urania, The Nuclear Woman, to be entertaining enough for even the most jaded palates, with her day-job as a lion tamer, her love triangle with the prince of the K’zaan Intergalactic Empire and Dinoman The Human Dinosaur, and her role in defending the earth against no less than twenty-seven alien invasions. Nonetheless, Ms Urania was last seen in a rocket-ship whose controls had become jammed, heading straight into a black hole.
In fact, if one looks at the people who have had the most exciting lives, one can see that with the exception of The Big Three, they have a tendency to die young. Many, of course, come back from death, but this is by no means guaranteed.
However, the fates of our heroes are as nothing to the fates of those we could call, for want of a better term, supporting cast. At least five times, the entire staff of a major Metropolitan newspaper with connections to Hyperman have been wiped from existence and replaced with an entirely different staff, none of whom seem aware of the previous people to have done their jobs (this seems to happen at roughly the same frequency which Hyperman gets a new hairstyle). Only two reporters seem immune to this, and one of those is constantly getting dropped off tall buildings, kidnapped by arms smugglers, and otherwise inconvenienced.
So the solution would seem to be that one should aim to be a bystander at as many important events as possible, whilst avoiding being in any way involved in them. Probably the optimal strategy would be to invest in several wigs, false moustaches etc, and try to be in as many crowds as possible. Attend events such as exhibitions of mummified Egyptian cats, lectures on riddles in Anglo-Saxon poetry, public displays of skill involving superheroes along with easily-replaceable dangerous-looking-but-harmless objects, and so forth. Maybe take on multiple part-time jobs – working as a cleaner, one could easily get work at a major Metropolitan newspaper, a nuclear test site *and* the offices of a corporation belonging to a mysterious reclusive billionaire.
But on no account should you speak at these events, and nor should you appear vulnerable or in need of rescue. Remember the case of B. B was a bystander who seemed to have a long, healthy life ahead of him in crowd scenes. But on being rescued once, he made the mistake of saying “Gee, t’anks, you’re my fav’rit”. B quickly moved from being a bystander to being comic relief, getting involved in hair-brained money-making schemes, irritating aliens who kidnapped him by mistake, and generally having an exciting life. But then, all of a sudden, B disappeared. It is conjectured that the writer(s?) grew tired of him.
If you wish a long life, spend as much as you can in the gutters, and the remainder looking at the stars, but from afar.
[For those without a clue what this was about, see here and especially this ]
Linkblogging For O9/08/10
Sorry I’ve been away for a few days, but I’ve had a migraine for three straight days now…
For those of you on Emusic, two great albums you *must* download. Asphalt Orchestra by the band of the same name is an album by a marching band. But it’s a marching band playing – accurately – music by Frank Zappa, Bjork and Charles Mingus, as well as new compositions by the likes of Stew & Heidi Rodewald. (NB the EP ‘Harm & Ease’ credited to Stew on Emusic is actually by a different band of that name). If you like incredible musicians playing stuff that goes ‘skronk’, this is for you.
On the other hand, if you like incredible musicians playing clever, melodic pop music, then you’ll love The Underground Garden by Blake Jones & The Trike Shop. Blake’s earlier albums are among my very favourites, and he guested on theremin, melodica and vocals on the last National Pep EP, and this album is his first on Emusic and easily up to their standards. The problem with describing Blake’s music is that the references one would use for him – Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson, early solo McCartney, with just a touch of Frank Zappa – very, very melodic music but clever and experimental with it – have been used to talk about a lot of fat dull men making fat dull music. This is music that is like them not because it’s copying them, but because it’s the same kind of thing. If you like great tunes, and songs with titles like The 5 Deadly Fingers Of Doctor Theremin, or about the idiocy of those complaining about the ‘war on Christmas’, then get this.
Bright Club is, for those who don’t know, a club night that combines comedy, music and academia, with people from University College London working with comedians and musicians. Were it not in That London I’d be there every week. It’s run by my good friend and former bandmate Miriam Miller, and they’ve recently started a podcast, where the comedians interview academics. The most recent edition of the podcast features my other good friend, Debi Linton, in her capacity as paleontologist. Check it out.
Pillock has a wonderful post on Superman and Marvel comics
And Fred at Slacktivist has done some *WONDERFUL* stuff on the occasions of the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I think the best thing he’s ever posted is this. It’s a transcription of a letter from an ex-slave to his former ‘master’, and is quite simply the most eloquent ‘fuck you’ ever.
Incidentally, for those waiting for PEP!, it’ll be next week. I decided that since it’s been delayed so long, I’d put issue 2 out on the 5-month anniversary of issue 1. Sorry for all the delays, especially to the wonderful writers and artists.
The Coalition Three Months On
For those of you wondering why I’ve not done many ‘fandom’ type posts recently, it’s because I’ve had no money, so was unable to pick up my comics for a few weeks, or to replace my broken DVD player. Payday is Friday, so the balance should return then.
Anyway, this post is one of the few I’ve ever done that’s at someone else’s request. Penny Andrews (who is one of the more sensible Labour people I know) asked me as a Lib Dem to post my views on the coalition three months in. I’m not sure that three months is adequate time to form a judgement.
To start with, my basic position has remained unchanged from three months ago. I am a supporter of the Liberal Democrats. I think it was right for them to go into coalition. But I am *not* a supporter of the current government. Long before I figured out my own political philosophy enough to realise it’s a reasonable match for liberalism, I knew that “the opposite of what the Tories want” is a pretty good rule of thumb.
I believe this will be a bad government. It will make things worse. But I also see enough concessions in the coalition agreement that convince me that the coalition government, if it keeps to that agreement, will be significantly better than a Conservative government with no Lib Dem presence would have been. I’m not hoping for or expecting good government over the next few years, just that we make it a little less painful.
I’m going to split this into three areas – economic, civil liberties/constitution, and impact on the Lib Dems. I would have added an ‘environment’ one, but frankly I’ve not seen anything, good or bad, on the subject from the government yet. I’m going to skim over a lot of stuff – this government has done a *LOT* in its first few months
Economics
Well, this is the hard one, isn’t it? No question, the emergency budget was fairly horrible. It wasn’t quite as bad as Labour are making out – there are some important Lib Dem concessions in there which will make a real difference, like the rise in Capital Gains Tax and the rise in the level at which you start to pay income tax – but nor is it the ‘progressive’ budget the Lib Dem leadership were spinning it as afterwards. The cuts announced – and the rise in VAT – will cause immense damage to some of the most vulnerable people. People will *DIE* as a result of these cuts. No question of that.
The question is, would more people have died had things been done differently? I have no way of knowing. What I do know, however, is that all three main parties were agreed before the election that cuts were necessary (Alistair Darling told Nick Robinson that there’d have to be cuts worse than those Thatcher made) – they were only arguing over small implementation details, not over principle, however much Labour wish to give a different impression now.
I suspect there were *possibly* ways of cutting less and taxing more, but that’s just a suspicion, and economics is my weak point.
Some of the complaints, though, have been motivated by sheer partisanship. Take the cuts in Housing Benefit. I can see why people oppose the new rule that will mean people can only claim the thirtieth percentile rent in their area, rather than the median – that might well hurt a lot of people. On the other hand, it could also drive rent down and get rid of what is in effect a massive state subsidy of private landlords. We’ll have to wait and see. But people are complaining about the cap being placed on the top housing benefit payments, as if it was somehow horribly regressive. They’re capping the rent at four hundred pounds a week.
To put that in perspective, the government are saying they’re not going to give people more in rent than I earn after tax – and I earn more than the average wage. Quite frankly, I agree with that. My current – very nice and quite spacious – two-bedroom flat costs four hundred pounds *a month*. Given the choice to pay for four flats of that standard for people who actually need it, or pay for one mansion on housing benefit, I know what I’d choose. (Even in London it’s perfectly possible to get somewhere decent to live for significantly under four hundred a week, and if we shouldn’t be subsidising landlords, how much more should we not be subsidising absurd regional inequalities?).
But many of the cuts *will* hurt people, and this government will quite rightly be punished for that. I just hope people remember that Labour would have done the same, and at least turn their protest votes to smaller parties that genuinely wouldn’t have made those decisions, if they’re going to protest.
Some of the other changes, I don’t want to judge. The changes to the NHS sound like more Blairism, frankly, while the simplification of the benefits system depends so much on the implementation details that it could easily be one of the best things ever to happen to the country if done properly, or it could be a cock-up of such gargantuan proportions that it ends up with people starving to death for lack of money. I’m going to wait to see how those shake out before judging.
Civil Liberties and Constitution
This is *MUCH* better. We’re getting rid of child detention for asylum seekers, we’re no longer going to deport gay people back to countries where they’d face jail or execution (this was sped up by a High Court ruling, but was in the coalition agreement anyway). We’re bringing in an upper chamber elected by PR, and a referendum on AV for the Commons. We’ve got rid of the ID Card scheme (though there’s still work to do there).
The coalition’s attitude to prisons and crime has been a complete U-turn on the last twenty years of insanity, with Ken Clarke (who is a Tory arsehole of course, but one who’s surprisingly liberal on social matters) talking a huge amount of sense here. Lynne Featherstone is making huge strides in equalities (though there’s still a lot of work to do there). We’ve got the Freedom Bill coming soon. We’ve agreed to stop collaborating with torture (and how I wish that was something that didn’t have to be said).
Were it not for the (apparently temporary) extension of 28-day detention, and the stupid, unworkable, *EVIL* plans for an immigration cap, this government is shaping up to be truly *great* in the areas of civil liberties, freedom and democracy, something I never thought I’d say about a Tory-led government.
Impact on the Liberal Democrats
We’re fucked, electorally, for at least one election. That’s worth it, if we manage to do some good/prevent some harm, but the problem is the leadership seem intent on worsening the situation.
We’re working with the Tories, but we don’t have to pretend we like it, and so far Nick Clegg in particular has been doing just that. There has been almost no clear distinction between what is Tory policy and what is Lib Dem policy in the media, and Clegg has done nothing to make that distinction.
It’s got to the point where some Tories (but, thankfully, no Lib Dems I know of) have been talking of the possibility of electoral pacts at the next election. Let me make something clear now - if the Lib Dems decide not to stand an official candidate against some Tories, I will personally stand as an ‘independent Lib Dem’ against the most high-profile of them, and pay the deposits of at least two other people if they’ll do the same. But I can say this confident that there is no way the party would do something so mind-bogglingly stupid.
Luckily, the back benchers haven’t been so complacent. While not making a fuss or being an ‘awkward squad’, decent Lib Dem MPs like Adrian Sanders and John Leech have argued in Parliament against bad policies in the coalition agreement (while of course still having to vote for them) and voted against bad policies that are not in the agreement. I’m particularly proud of Leech as he’s been entirely sensible in his public statements, while taking what seems to me the correct line in balancing principle and pragmatism in Parliament. He’s no longer my MP, but I spent several years in his local party and campaigned for his re-election, and am very glad I did.
We need *QUICKLY* to start establishing ourselves as an independent voice, separate from the Tories. I suspect this will start to happen with Autumn Conference. The question at this point is whether we’re only going to lose the five to ten percent of people who voted for us because they thought we were Labour-lite, or whether we’re going to do such a poor job of putting forward liberal values that we alienate our actual real supporters.
So overall, the coalition – horrible and evil on the economy, but quite how horrible I’m not yet sure, just like I’m not yet sure if it’s better or worse than Labour in that respect, pretty damn good on social issues, and terrible for the Lib Dems as a party. Exactly as I expected.
Best Live Beach Boys (Home Taping Is Killing Music)
This is now deleted from rapidshare, as I promised it would be.
One thing I’m going to keep doing on here on occasion, despite the fact that no-one cares, is voicing my love for the music of the Beach Boys. As the band are coming up to their fiftieth anniversary, various ideas are being floated of how they should celebrate this (Mike Love wants to do an album of remakes of their old songs, featuring people like Justin Timberlake. I suspect the other surviving members would rather die.) but one thing I think should happen is a live compilation, covering their career.
Unfortunately, over the years, the Beach Boys have got a reputation as nothing but a nostalgia band, ploughing through the hits soullessly, praying that the inevitable release of death will come swiftly and prevent them ever having to sing Barbara Ann again. And that’s not an unreasonable reputation, actually.
But it’s slightly unfair in that the Beach Boys have at times been a fucking *fantastic* live band. But unfortunately, at their peak, in the early 70s, when they were performing extraordinary material and doing so astonishingly well, the audiences didn’t care. Listening to recordings from that time, you can hear Mike Love *scream* at the audience to shut up before Dennis sings Forever or Carl does Only With You. You hear audiences shouting “Barbara Ann” in the middle of solos, and Carl saying after songs “Now we’re going to do a song from our Surf’s Up album… but we’re not because YOU WON’T LISTEN!”
And face it, if you were a musician and you had a choice of two setlists – setlist a) your psychedelic song with jazz flute solo, your R&B number, your song about transcendental meditation, a pseudo-Wagnerian love song and one about the way white people have treated Native Americans, or setlist b) a load of songs about cars and girls with three or four chords – and you knew that if you played setlist a you’d have a couple of hundred people in the audience getting drunk and shouting at you, and if you played setlist b you’d have tens of thousands of people dancing and singing along, you’d probably choose setlist b too.
But even so, we’ve had several attempts over the years by the band to redress this balance. As late as 1977 they were still getting jazz flautist Charles Lloyd in to do gigs with them, in 1993 they did an extra ‘rarities’ set in the middle of their set, Brian Wilson between about 1998 and 2004 played tons of obscurities in his sets before eventually settling down to a more hit-oriented show, and in 2004 and 2008 the band that currently calls itself ‘the Beach Boys’ did (astonishingly good) 50-song sets in the UK including some of their best and least-known songs (the setlist in 2004 contained songs so little-known that someone I know who knows some of the band members got a call after one gig by Mike Love, astonished that someone in the audience knew all the words. That someone was me…)
But even though there have been five official Beach Boys live albums released, they don’t really represent this experimental or interesting side – they conform to the band’s standard surfin’ oldies style to a greater or lesser extent (with a partial exception for 1974′s wonderful In Concert).
So what I’d like to see is a double-CD set, spanning the band’s career, of some of the great music they’ve done live. No new Barbara Ann or Surfin’ USA versions, just something to show what a fantastic band they could be.
I’ve put something like that together here, from the best of the forty or so shows I’ve got. None of these recordings have been released legally, to my knowledge, but even so if anyone who believes they have a copyright interest in that material gets in touch with me I will gladly remove it. I will remove it after a week anyway.
It’s from various different sources ( audience recordings and soundboards), different generation copies, and different encodings (mostly MP3, but some FLAC). I’ve tried to make it flow more or less like a proper concert.
If you download it, let me know what you think.
Tracklist:
1 Brian Wilson/Til I Die – Brian Wilson live 2001
2 Surf’s Up – Munich 1972
3 Sail On Sailor – Manchester Apollo 2008 (John Cowsill lead)
4 Cool, Cool Water – Munich 1972
5 Forever – Manchester Apollo 2008
6 God Only Knows – London 1968
7 Here Today – Manchester Apollo 2008
8 All This Is That – Nassau Coliseum 1974 (FLAC)
9 Marcella – Carnegie Hall 1972
10 Funky Pretty – Tampa 1974
11 Wonderful – Paramount New York 1993 (FLAC)
12 Heroes & Villains – Carnegie Hall 1972
13 Don’t Worry Baby – Carnegie Hall 1972
14 Wake The World – London 1968
15 Kiss Me Baby – Glasgow 2004
16 Airplane – Central Park, NY, 1977
17 Let Him Run Wild – Manchester Apollo 2008 (Scott Totten lead)
18 You Still Believe In Me – Paramount, NY, 1993
19 It’s About Time – Princeton University 1971
20 Good Vibrations – Syracuse NY 1971
21 Break Away – Prague, 1968
22 Only With You – Chicago 1972
23 In My Room – 1964
24 Please Let Me Wonder – Brian Wilson live 2001
25 Darlin’ – Carnegie Hall 1972
26 Feel Flows – Central Park, 1977
27 Trader – Tampa 1974
28 Looking At Tomorrow – Princeton University 1971
29 Caroline No – Princeton University 1971
30 Long Promised Road – Tampa 1974
31 Wild Honey – Washington, DC 1967
32 Let The Wind Blow – Munich 1972
33 Cuddle Up – Boston Commons 1972
Beach Boys members:
Mike Love
Carl Wilson (1961 – 1998)
Al Jardine (1961-62, 1963-1998)
Brian Wilson (1961-64, 1967, 1970, 1977-1983 as touring member)
Dennis Wilson (1961-1983)
Bruce Johnston (1965-1971, 1979-)
David Marks (1962-64, 1997-99, 2008)
Blondie Chaplin (1971-74)
Ricky Fataar (1971-74)
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