Against All Gods, by A C Grayling.

It's only 64 pages so it didn't take long.

I read this last week and recommend it too - quite a gentle read with dark undercurrents, characters one cares about and almost a satisfactory conclusion...

If you want a novel with wet characters, try Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, ho ho.

Just finished Vanities of the Eye by Stuart Clark - a superb account of how sight and perception were conceptualised in the early modern period. 

Alan Rawsthorne: Portrait of a Composer
by John McCabe

This has inspired me to go on a right Rawsthorne journey. Must be good.

At the moment,  I'm half way around the M25 with Iain Sinclair. 'London Orbital' is a good reminder,  er,  just that.  Soon I will accompany Sinclair on John Claire's journey out of Essex. Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish' is always within Sinclair's reach.

Picked up a book about the London book 'runners'. The book is dedicated to Martin Stone,  who was also a great 1960s rock guitarist. It's called  'A Pound of Paper - confessions of a Book Addict'  by John Baxter. A quick read, kool, fab.

Also reading Musil's 'The Man Without Qualities' and 'Subject Without Nation" by Stefan Jonsson enough  to satisfy any modern cultural critic.   ...Nation State, Nation State,  while away with me pleasant hours...

Great band. I don't know if he was in that band, though I should know. The book's written by an Australian and he doesn't say
 which band.  He was in ' Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers ' though. That was a mite later? Not sure about all these 'beat combos'.

Shouldn't really spend too much time on the r3ok forum digging into the minutia of roack family trees but I did find this in amongst an incredibly long article which confirms Martin Stone was an early member of Savoy Brown. As follows........

The band received a big break when Brian Wilcock, a DJ at Klook's Kleek R&B Club, Railway Hotel located in the West Hampstead area of London and a friend of Harry Simmonds arranged for the band to play the interval for Creams appearance there on August 2, 1966. Since Cream made their official debut at the 6th National Jazz and Blues Festival on July 31, this would be their first club engagement outside of a warmup gig held on July 29 at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. Expectations were high for the Cream which played two sets but Savoy Brown went down such a storm during their slot that they racked up enough gig offers to enable them to go full time-and Wilcock eventually became their tour manager in September 1967.


The band started to expand their gig list to include engagements at the Tiles Club, Flamingo and the Marquee in central London and the Metro in Birmingham. Kim once said about those early shows, "We started playing places like the Metro in Birmingham, which is like a big soul club, but we managed to please the people because we had Brice Portius, a black singer, and they would relate to him in the sense that they might relate to Geno Washington, even though we were playing blues. I mean we would play up-tempo stuff and bounce around a little." Several shows even found them backing Champion Jack Dupree. Altogether, their lineup remained stable except for pianist Hall, who once again had conflicts with his daytime job that caused him to drop out for awhile but return on a part-time basis when his replacement didn't work out. Demos and acetates were recorded with this lineup prior to the sessions for their first album. Ex-Stone's Masonry guitarist Martin Stone was added while O'Leary departed to become a member of John Dummer's Blues Band [see John Dummer's Blues Band]. Both Graham "Shakey Vick" Vickery and Steve Hackett auditioned to play harp during this period, but O'Leary was not replaced.