Pre-Bianca, surely? The rather wonderful Marsha Hunt if anyone?


Not actually, no (after checking what one of those was). But my apologies for starting this hare.

Back to riffs ...

The Beethoven/rock riff comparison is very interesting. As IRF and Martle both say, much of the difference lies not in the little "musical object" itself but in the relationship it has to the rest of the piece. (Also, riffs don't so often get transposed around to different pitch-levels like the Beethoven motive.) You often find that the various elements of a rock song (eg. riff, verse, chorus, bridge, solo(s) if any) have little or no thematic relationship with one another, usually because the song is "assembled" from these elements (which may of course have been conceived by different people, each instrumental and vocal part having effectively been composed by the person who plays/sings it) into a musical whole, rather than expanded outwards by a single person from a "kernel" of musical material as in symphonic music (to name only this).

Sometimes I have the hard-to-pin-down feeling that these elements in a song somehow don't complement each other or "hang together", and that they are more likely to the more experienced with working together the group might be, or the more "compositorial" or directorial the contribution of (one of?) the songwriter(s) might be. When they do, though, the whole certainly becomes more than the sum of its parts, again in a way that's hard to get a handle on, and indeed in a way that a composer of any kind of "non-thematic" music might try to balance and interlock the most disparate elements into a coherent piece of music.

And it isn't just the riff that's distinctive, as Ruby's quick recognition indicates, it's the quality of the sound, the timbre, which in these days of recorded music being dominant we have become much more sensitive to than previous generations were. Since the Stones have been mentioned, I was reminded that Devo's version of "Satisfaction" omits the original riff completely but is still instantly recognisable...

Oh dear, I'm turning into a Stones' anorak but Brown Sugar was written and performed at least as early as Altamont, some time before Sir Mick met Bianca, although not released until much later. But I'm more than happy to agree that identifying it with anyone in particular is a pretty pointless exercise anyway. 

£35 for Deep Purple tomorrow. Or about the price of seven Proms. We Deep Purple fans are very elitist, you see  

Good value? For me it's worth every penny. And the ticket itself isn't the big expense. Add in the train fare, hotel, meals, and obligatory souvenir t-shirt and I won't have much change from £300. And this is a cheap year for me because they're only playing one UK date. In 2002 I saw seven gigs on the tour and I daren't even begin to calculate the total cost  

But there aren't many bands I would pay that for...

cacophagy? or coprophagy?

OI! Barrrett! I 'eard that! And I've told  you about wearing flip-flops in class

Curses! I am discovered. Now'll I'll have to play 'Smoke on the Water' at FULL VOLUME, just to vent my flip-flop envy. Actually, that's not a bad idea anyway ...

Interesting point, Kitty.  The latter is the word I wanted but couldn't remember - or what is unfashionably known as the correct word.  The former is one I cobbled together myself only to discover, with the assistance of google, that I was not the first person to do so:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cacophagy

Anyway, George denies that this is what they meant.  I read somewhere that Jagger said it had something to do with that another oral activity - the one that sounds a bit like an Irish airline; but I don't see much reason to believe what Jagger reportedly said to unnamed reporters.