Not much to report as I've been laid low with Covid... or maybe a bad cold... I'm not sure.
It's like my body was working at fever pitch to get the new book out and get me through the Paperback & Pulp Book Fair and then relaxed its defenses. I held up through Monday and Tuesday while I dealt with various orders and restocks. On Wednesday I decided I was going to take a couple of days off, just to recharge the batteries before I launched myself back into writing the introductions of the next couple of books.
I often write something for my own pleasure between projects. That's not to say that I don't enjoy writing my books, but I'll do something that is not immediately for print. This is how I managed to do much of the writing on the last volume of Forgotten Authors. This time, I planned something completely different: a new "rock family tree". Or, indeed, a "prog rock family tree".
I've discussed these before. Back in my teens I was obsessed with Pete Frame's family tree-style posters that were published in Sounds and as I kept quite a few issues of the weekly, plus I was buying Kerrang! at the time, I was able to pull quotes from various bands and check news columns for the dates people were leaving and joining — this was all pre-internet, remember — and then spent hours hand-crafting my own poster-sized trees, jigsawed together from upwards of 16 sheets of A4 paper.
Only one survived, although I have rough drafts of a couple of others from the same period around 1981... but this new one was to cover a band that wasn't to come into existence for another twenty-five years. While I've not kept up my subscription to Kerrang!, I have still kept up my love of many of the same bands I was listening to back then: Hawkwind, The Enid, Marillion... all still going. And bands, or closely associated bands, still keep other favourites alive: Jon Anderson's Band of Geeks and Steve Howe have both just released albums and Rick Wakeman is touring, keeping the memory of Yes alive, Deep Purple put out a new album this year with Ian Paice the youngest surviving member at 76! Gillan and Glover both turn 80 next year, as does Ritchie Blackmore, although his last Rainbow tour was 2016. Michael Schenker is a youthful 69.
It has been a fantastic year for music as far as I'm concerned. There have been new albums from a lot of favourites, including Marillion (An Hour Before It's Dark Live, This Strange Engine Deluxe), David Gilmour (Luck and Strange), Steve Hackett (The Circus and the Nightwhale), Big Big Train (The Likes of Us), Beardfish (Songs for Beating Hearts), Pure Reason Revolution (Coming Up to Consciousness), Peter Gabriel (i/o), Meer (Wheels Within Wheels), Dave Foster Band (Maybe They'll Come Back For Us), Kyros (Mannequin), Lesoir (Push Back the Horizon), Ebony Buckle (Hearts Get Started) and, my favourite, Frost* (Life in the Wires).
And because I was listening to the last named album on high rotation, and listening or reading whatever interviews I could find, and scouring the Discord and Facebook pages for news, and generally wallowing in Frost*ieness, I thought I'd throw together a Frost* family tree.
The moment I decided that was going to be my between-projects-project, my throat started feeling scratchy; by Thursday I was coughing my lungs raw and it got worse from there. Saturday, Sunday, Monday I was wiped out completely and things began to slowly improve on Tuesday/Wednesday until we reach today: feeling a lot better, still snotty, but not suffering from anything that a strong tissue can't cope with.
The Frost* thing kept me busy and for what passes as sane. I've listened to a lot of Jem Godfrey's and John Mitchell's oeuvre for five days solid and I would happily do it again because they are incredible musicians and astonishingly creative composers. Individually they're dynamite, but together, like Hart to Hart, they're mur... magnificent.
With the tree now finished — a bit ragged and a bit all over the place because musicians these days don't stick with one band; Mitchell has half-a-dozen on the go at any one time as he's a guitarist in great demand — I'm going to get back to writing those introductions and see what I can manage before bumping into the buffers of Christmas.
(* A larger version of the above can be downloaded as a PDF from here. That's Frost* at the head of the column... not only are they fantastic musically but they have a sense of humour...)
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