Cluttered Like My Head

  When I was a kid, Ghost Rider was my favourite Marvel comic. I think there were several reasons for this - my first exposure to the character was definitely the Topps stickers of the mid-70s. There was a GR sticker, referring back to Easy Rider, where GR was saying something like "Peter Fonda, eat your heart out" - I had no idea what this was referring to, but even then, I knew it was cool.  Years later, when I first discovered US comics, GR 56 was one of the first ones I bought. At this time, I didn't really appreciate that the UK comics were a repackaging of the US ones. I had found a GR comic and I loved it. Over the next few years, I was able to collect GR pretty consistently - partly cos it was regularly distributed in the UK, and partly cos he was a B-list character, and his title rarely sold out. I stopped buying comics around the time issues 73 came out, and kept that up for maybe 18 months.  When I came back, GR had been cancelled. I kept looking for his title ...

  There's a website called setlist.fm where you can catalogue the gigs you've been to, get to build up your history, compare setlists and stuff like that. Obviously for new gigs its pretty comprehensive - you buy the tickets online, lots of other people sign up to the website - people record bits of it own their camera and the setlist is detailed dynamically, either as it happens or pretty quickly afterwards.  But its not as good for older gigs - cos its relying on attendees making contemporaneous notes, either because they grabbed a setlist from the stage at the end of the set, or they noted it in a diary or something like that.  I used to have a Gene website, and there was a spell where I went to a few gigs over a short spell, and I reviewed them and recorded the sets. I used this to build out the detail on setlist.fm for those shows - but there's loads of other gigs I've been to that don't have that sort of info. I saw the Pale Saints, Pixies, All About Eve and T...

  I read the recent biography of REM, "The Name of this band is REM" by Peter Ames Carlin. I've read a lot of books about the band in the past, but much as my interest in the band dwindled towards the end of their career, so did the biography industry, and most of the books stop at their peak rather than afterwards. This book carries on to the breakup of the band, and has been well reviewed over the past year or so, and with my interest in the band renewed following the Shannon / Narducy Fables tour in 2025, I put it on my Christmas list and have devoured it since then. First things first - the band aren't interviewed for the book, so any words from them are from contemporary interviews or as told by other people. It's at its strongest in those early years - capturing the contradiction between a band that was willing to put the hours and the legwork into becoming a great band, and one that didn't want to appear in its videos and have decipherable lyrics to sin...