Sunday 10 October 2004

Well, the vibrandoneon turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It makes a nice enough sound (as far as I could tell in the car park of Queen Street station), but it's not ergonomic by any means in that there's no obvious way of holding it, and it's not that well constructed for a small instrument costing over a thousand quid. There was glue leaking from the underside of the key fronts, and the woodwork just didn't quite seem finished. A couple of notes didn't speak, and if I selected both sets of reeds I ran out of puff in a few seconds. So on balance I don't think I'll be ordering one. Punk ethos remains intact.

I'm making the most of not being a playing musician by doing as much listening as I can fit in. This week's gem is from the newly-released volume 6 of Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles - one man in Swindon's home demos. The CD finishes with one of his seaside songs The End of the Pier, whose ridiculously catchy but convoluted chorus begins 'What the butler saw was heaven/Ice cream clam and legs eleven'. And this is a song that failed to reach the XTC quality threshold back in 1990. The man's a national treasure.