Commando 5335-5338

Commando 5335-5338 is out today in the UK. Just search “Commando comics” should you want to subscribe.

(Covers courtesy of Commando)

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Epic Bergman

If you want greatness, this is it. The 1948 movie “Joan Of Arc” with the great Ingrid Bergman. Shot in colour in a very theatrical way, her acting is second to none in this film. Give a true star a script like this and magic will happen. 72 years later it still holds up, and more. It may be old but I still have to see a version of this tale that evokes so much passion, such grandeur. With any other actress it could have fallen flat, with Bergman you have 140 minutes of cinematic history.

So glad to have this in the old collection now (as it has just seen release on DVD in Sweden).

(My shot of said DVD)

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Japan Is Opening Up

Good news from Japan today as they are slowly opening up the country for business again. As far as live concerts go, starting in July concerts up to 1,000 people will be allowed, or 50% capacity of any given venue. Meaning you can theoretically sell 27,500 tickets for a Tokyo Dome show and it will be OK. Should this work, Japan will be the first country to get back in business again. Things can change but this is the word that is going out right now so you will have promotors all over the country scrambling to get going. For Babymetal this is good news although they may not be in a hurry to go out just yet. But they do have the 10th Anniversary to think about and that is coming up in October.

Let us hope that this is the light at the end of the tunnel.

(Babymetal shot from Stockholm 2020, courtesy of Kalle Thelin – news picked up at the Babymetal reddit page)

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Cozy Powell

Here is glimpse of the good old days. What you see here is a spread covering the career of Cozy Powell that was in print in my fanzine DEEP PURPLE FOREVER #2 (May 1991). I nicked the biography from a (then) fairly recent official press thing and added three more albums and a shot of Cozy on the right page and a story with a couple of “Down To Earth” era Rainbow snapshots on the left. The headline read “20 years with Cozy Powell”. I had met him briefly back in the “Headless Cross” Black Sabbath days but I never interviewed the man. So in 1991, I thought a piece like this was OK for the Purple magazine. After all, he had played on many Deep Purple Family related albums.

The years went by but in spite of me doing countless Purple related interviews during those years I still never got around to meet the man again. But my friend (photographer) Michael Johansson did and as he was hired to do a session with Cozy together with Yngwie Malmsteen for (the Japanese publication) BURRN! at the Strand Hotel in Stockholm on June 24 1997 he did manage to slip him a copy of the issue mentioned above. Cozy asked Michael why the biography ended in 1991 and found out that it actually had been published at the time. Later on, I did publish a spread from this occation in DEEP PURPLE FOREVER #28 (in February 2001 – as the club celebrated the 10th Anniversary), but as we all know he had passed on by then (in a car accident on April 5 1998). His visit to Sweden for this session, which was for Japanese promotion for the Malmsteen album “Facing The Animal”, was his last in this country and it had been very low key (no concerts or anything). When I published this shot people were quite surprised. You can see the cover shot of BURRN! that resulted from this very session in the layout down to the right.

Good times.

(My shots of these spreads – many thanks to Michael Johansson)

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Talk of the day (Kiss, Ted Nugent, Hagane, Fanny)

KISS

Added another puzzle from UK company Rock Saws and this time I went with the Kiss “Destroyer” box. I quite like these puzzles, and there is a growing number of them out there so they must be doing rather well.

TED NUGENT

If you like “Cat Scratch Fever” you should know that the album is set to be rereleased on Red, White & Blue Vinyls on June 26. Me, I want “Weekend Warriors” and maybe it is coming up next, who knows?

HAGANE

I mentioned the Japanese band Hagane recently on this blog and I have just discovered that guitarist Sakura Yoshida has her own YouTube page going, and she really is one hell of a guitar player. You can check her out doing Judas Priest classics etc. Hagane means steel, so good name for a Metal band.

FANNY

The “Godmothers of Rock”, Fanny (1969-1975), is to rerelease their first self titled album on June 26 (White Vinyl). This is to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of said album. You may not have heard of them, but they were the first all female rock band to get signed on a major label in the States back in the day. So this is a piece of rock history.

(My shot of the Kiss “Destroyer” puzzle)

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We Have Takeoff

I have to say that it is good fun to see the Deep Purple Podcast rise. Now we are getting bonus episodes with interviews and it is starting to look pretty good. In episode 56 they are covering the Ian Gillan Band album “Clear Air Turbulence” and hot on the heels of that we just got an interview with IGB guitarist Ray Fenwick. Word is clearly getting out among the musicians out there that this podcast is doing a good job and it is starting to pay off. I kind of predicted that it would and here we are. Good times ahead.

(My shot of my copy of the 1977 album “Clear Air Turbulence” – great cover art by Sci-Fi master Chris Foss)

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Paperback Warriors

As you know I love old school paperbacks and I have quite a collection of mainly Swedish titles from the heyday of this scene within easy reach in the library/music room downstairs. Yesterday I stumbled across a site called Paperback Warrior that is just awesome. And they have a (Paperback Warrior) Podcast going on YouTube as well. Did not take me very long to find a couple of books for the old collection about this scene that I just had to order (quite expensive too), and I will blog about those later on when they get here.

(Top image shows some of my Shell Scott books by Richard S. Prather – top notch entertainment right there)

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