The Lockdown Letters

1st March 2022: Pick up your shoes, pull up your socks, let's go. After two bleak years, music in Oxford is re-emerging. This coming weekend, Klub Kakofanney has two gigs lined up, our Friday night club night, and a more relaxed Sunday afternoon...

17th December 2021: Which one of you brought this goat? We are approaching the end of another year and still we have the spectre of Covid hanging over us, a storm warning on the horizon. Nevertheless, I'm sure the weather is milder and...

14th November 2021: 21 months later,... no, it's not the third part of a zombie film franchise. A complete stranger berated me last week because I was wearing a facemask in the supermarket. They took it upon themselves to tell me that I was a sheep and that wearing a mask is...

25th September 2021: Seventy thousand badgers, badgers, badgers... Some people get obsessed about getting Facebook clicks and YouTube views, and will even buy themselves thousands of fake clicks and fake thumbs-ups, believing this is the key to b...

16th September 2021: Rats dressed up in their Sunday best. At the age of four, Boris Johnson said he wanted to be "World King" when he grew up. It could have been worse. He might have wanted to be a rock star. Blown up out of ...

10th September 2021: Drum's quite good, bass is too loud. This week a parking space in Bath sold for £115,000. How can it be right that we live in a society where some people struggle from day to day, and are homeless through no fa...

3rd September 2021: The proverbial chicken. It is the first Friday of the month, and just in case you have been living in a cave, there is no Klub Kakofanney tonight. We had hoped to have restarted gigs by now, but venue wo...

27th August 2021: A dollar and a half. Which would you rather do? Would you prefer to write a song which is a top ten hit this year but soon forgotten, or would you rather write a song which doesn't make the top ten bu...

20th August 2021: Rewinding the tape. MPs crowded into the House of Commons this week to discuss the dreadful Afghan situation. There was no attempt at social distancing and the cameras revealed that many of the MPs d...

13th August 2021: Giving a monkey a shower. I was checking out an article on a news site this week. I really shouldn't read the Readers' Comments below news articles, yet I do, even though I know they'll make me grind my te...

6th August 2021: Doing the one-man conga. Here we are again, the first Friday of another month and still no Klub Kakofanney. I really thought I'd have stopped doing these lockdown letters by now, but I was thinking the sa...

30th July 2021: Five gold rings, ooh shiny. Halfway through the Olympic slog and the BBC is bubbling about Charlotte Dujardin who finished third in the dressage, (ballet for horses), and thus became "Great Britain's mo...

23rd July 2021: I dream in black and white. To quote the famous Sun headline, "Phew, what a scorcher". Every shop I went into this week had people grumbling that it was "too hot". Next week it will be ra...

16th July 2021: Mice, gerbils, hamsters, squirrels..... I had a plan for this coming weekend. My plan was to walk down to The Hubble and Home, that budding new venue in Oxford, find out exactly where it was, and send out info about the...

9th July 2021: Dance just one more time. 1966,... whatever happened in 1966? The best seller that year was Jim Reeves singing of distant drums, The Rolling Stones had their 19th nervous breakdown, The Beatles were trippi...

2nd July 2021: How big is your chicken? It is the first Friday of the month, July, and we are irreversibly missing another Klub Kakofanney night. But hopefully this is the very last time I will have to use that phrase. W...

25th June 2021: The emperor's new dinner jacket. After being definitely on this year, the Truck Festival is now definitely off again until 2022. Still no news at all on the Wheatsheaf, or the future of live music in the city cen...

18th June 2021: Ready, here we go again. We are not in reverse. It's irreversible. But it sure feels like we've left the handbrake off and are rolling backwards down the hill. I had thought this would be my last letter b...

11th June 2021: The fiddle it was wailing. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and the best news I've heard this week was that there was so much demand for vaccines from the Under 30's age group that you crashed the booking sy...

4th June 2021: Prune-flavoured yogurt and other cultures. Life is slowly returning to normal. We have enjoyed the sunniest day of the year so far and the first test match of the summer started at Lords. Did you know that the cricketer's ...

28th May 2021: There's a moose loose. Slowly the world is opening up. Hopefully, by the end of June, we'll be able to live normal lives again without restrictions, although there seems to be some reservations coming t...

21st May 2021: Nil points? Have an avocado. Are you all on the edge of your seats waiting for the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend? No, me neither. The Italian entry sounds more rock'n'rolly than most though, although t...

14th May 2021: Like left needs right. Legend has it that during the Napoleonic Wars with France in the 1800s, a ship was wrecked off the coast of Hartlepool, and a monkey which had been on board escaped. It was capture...

7th May 2021: Banging on the door. It's the first Friday of the month and it's,.... well you know the rest. It should be a Klub Kakofanney night, but the country is not quite there yet. A government-sanctioned gig ...

30th April 2021: Together we can mash potato. If you, like me, are losing track of the hours and the days, here is a reminder: Monday is a Bank Holiday, (yippee), and Thursday is local elections day and a chance to make your o...

23rd April 2021: Pizza with extra everything please. Funny how the wealthiest operators in football this week decided they wanted an even bigger slice of the pie, meaning less money would trickle down to the grass roots clubs. Not u...

16th April 2021: It doesn't just warm you up. The lockdown rules have changed recently, but as usual, the government didn't bother reminding people what is appropriate or what the rules are this week. In an exercise of trappi...

9th April 2021: When the loud gets louder. Still all quiet on the Wheatsheaf front I am afraid, so to remind you of better times, here is a blast of the electric past from some of our Klub Kakofanney gigs. It starts loud a...

2nd April 2021: Singing boogie woogie woogie on the floor. The health statistics look more promising every day, and I hope you've all managed to enjoy this week's new found freedoms and a splash of sun. If you are uncertain what you are no...

26th March 2021: As busy as a fizzy sasparilla. A friend mentioned to me this week that in one respect, grass roots music is just like soccer. If kids have nowhere to play football today, we won't have any professional football...

19th March 2021: The multi-coloured freak show. Do you feel local music is under threat and under-appreciated? If not, where have you been for the last twelve months? Oh yes, lockdown, pandemic. Well there is that. Terri of Get...

12th March 2021: Two hundred decibels and a ruddy big pick-axe. It is good to see that the covid numbers across the country continue to head in broadly the right direction. Both the vaccination programme and our own actions are having a real i...

5th March 2021: Do not fight a gorilla, even pandas are tough. I write this mail with a sense of sadness. Tonight, the first Friday of the month, would have been a Klub Kakofanney night, and I realised that it is now one year since our last K...

26th February 2021: The memories we have they play their games. When I first started putting these lockdown letters together, last March, I thought I might be doing them until June or July. Little did I know it would be June or July 2021. So ...

19th February 2021: There's something in the air. This week I've been rummaging through my old recordings and decided to dig out some blasts from the past. Here are some of great Klub Kakofanney performances from bands who, as fa...

12th February 2021: A chemical reaction in the brain. Did you see the news this week about a US court case, conducted over zoom, in which one of the attorneys had a snapchat-style filter turned on which transformed his face into a cu...

5th February 2021: The sheep are staring through you,.... Baaaaaa. Compared to last week, the news this week looks decidely better. We've passed the peak and the pressure on the NHS is slowly easing, over 10 million people have had an all-importa...

29th January 2021: A tap dancing mouse on caffeine. I find myself having mixed emotions this week. On the one hand, the covid numbers are shockingly high, much higher than we ever thought would happen, but on the other hand, they h...

22nd January 2021: We're all going to have to clean it up one day. A recent headline made me look twice: Knob tossing in Dorset cancelled due to danger to human life. The mind boggles. At least mine did. I had completely the wrong idea. It refere...

15th January 2021: Part of the solution. I hope you are all keeping well out there in Lockdown Land, and I hope by now that at least some of you have been contacted by the NHS to arrange a date for your first innoculatio...

8th January 2021: Eat your fruit loops in the dark. So here we are, one week into 2021, and I've had enough of this year already. Covid numbers are through the roof, our NHS staff are under the most awful pressure, we are back in l...

31st December 2020: Soak me down in whiskey. New Year's Eve would normally be a special Klub Kaofanney event, a night when we have just local bands playing, letting their hair down, crowded, chaotic, noisy, with a whole lott...

24th December 2020: Not the Cristmas news. I wasn't planning on sending out an email this week, this being Christmas and all, but a few days ago Phil and Sue put together a short fun Christmas message for friends and fans ...

18th December 2020: When Frosty went pop. So here we are, the last weekend before Christmas, a time when music venues would have been rammed with rocking revellers and drunken dancers, but sadly that isn't happening this ...

11th December 2020: Winter lights and starry nights. Are you ready for some music? Last week I looked back though the archives for some great pieces of rock from our Klub Kakofanney nights. This week I've dug out some special pieces...

4th December 2020: All wrapped up in a BIG red bow. I'ts the first Friday evening of December, and in normal years that would mean tonight is our last Klub Kakofanney before Christmas, and the start of a series of seasonal gigs fro...

27th November 2020: Hot cross bun anyone? Great news this week. Trump has lost the election, even though he thinks coming second in a two horse race makes him the winner, a covid-busting vaccine has proved highly effectiv...

20th November 2020: She scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin. What a week, we've had great news about vaccines to combat Covid, Trump has lost the US election even though he and his rabid supporters don't think so and are calling for a recou...

14th November 2020: Walls and Bridges, (no, not Beau Bridges) What a great week for news. It started with Trump failing to win the election, (even if he and 71% of the people who voted for him still don't accept it), so maybe the world can n...

6th November 2020: Dreams of tomorrow. It's the first Friday of the month, a night when we hoped we'd have fireworks at the Wheatsheaf, but sadly that isn't happening right now. That's been the story of the year. So w...

30th October 2020: Bonfires burning bright, pumpkin faces in the night. Yes, its Halloween again when strange creatures with facemasks come knocking on doors demanding candy. A band which is never short of a facemask or two is our local macabre music...

23rd October 2020: It will all end in tiers. The news has made grim reading this last couple of weeks, but in the middle of it all there was some good news for the local music scene. The Bullingdon on Cowley Road is to rece...

9th October 2020: Let's twist again. When you were at school, did you ever make one of those twisted strips of paper called a Möbius band which forms a three-dimensional object with only one surface and one edge...

2nd October 2020: Let's all do the conga. Here we are again. It is the first Friday of the month and in normal times right now I'd be charging up cameras and sorting out signage ready for a Klub Kakofanney evening. Tonigh...

27th September 2020: Dancing on our doorsteps. Yet another TV talent show started this week, this time with Little Mix looking for the next generation of wannabes. Why does the mainstream media always want to manufacture a ban...

20th September 2020: The crowded boat. How are you coping with The Rule Of Six? It doesn't present a problem for me personally, but for at least one band I can think of, Monkeyfists, with seven band members, they can't...

11th September 2020: Can you hear the drums? While rummaging through my archives this week I came across some old footage I shot a few years ago of Duchess, a brilliant band from Wantage which took percussion to a new level....

4th September 2020: Things you can do in a face mask. So here we are again, the first Friday of the month. In other years this would be the return of Klub Kakofanney after the summer break. When gigs first started being covid-affecte...

28th August 2020: Gingham Check. Did you know that as well as banning live music performances, Scotland has now also banned pre-recorded music in cafes and restaurants. The rationale behind this is that they were...

16th August 2020: Marching bands in miniskirts. This weekend the powers that be removed a few more of the covid restrictions and now you can legally go ten-pin bowling again, or fritter your money away in a socially-distanced c...

7th August 2020: Cracked as an August field. Its a Friday evening in the middle of summer, so what could be better than a cold beer and some great live music? I've got the can of beer in the fridge with my name on it, but sa...

1st August 2020: Lo-fi video, hi-fi fun, broadband on the dance floor. Blue skies, sunshine,.... I hope you are all making the most of the summer sunshine and have been boosting your vitamin D levels, and if, like me, you are part-vampire and nocturn...

26th July 2020: Facemasks at the ready, mouse mats on standby, volume at ten. Remember the time when you could get on a bus without a facemask and didn't need to decipher social distancing regulations to buy a pint of beer? Aaah, those were the days. And w...

17th July 2020: Paint me with colours. Hands up if you know what an Irish Bouzouki is. No, its not a black coffee fortified with Ouzo. No, its not a Dublin seagull related to the sooty tern. No, its not a clever tax do...

10th July 2020: And the band sang "Get on with it" According to the news this week, pop music is getting more upbeat. A mathematician has analysed half a million songs released over the last 35 years and discovered that songs in 2...

3rd July 2020: All hopped up and ready to go. Its the first Friday of the month again and that means only one thing, its Klub Kakofanney night,.... or at least it would be if live musc wasn't a casualty of this terrible disea...

28th June 2020: Something Old, Something New,... but mostly Something Old. I hope you've all been keeping yourselves safe, are looking forward to going shopping again, and are making sense of the latest confusing regulations about social bubbles. Its no ...

14th June 2020: Lying in the morning sun. Stonehenge is closed, but the solstice sunrise was broadcast live on the internet. What a strange world we live in. How are you spending your longest day of the summer? We seem t...

5th June 2020: Its the first Friday of the month, so its time for,.... oh,... not yet. I hope you are all still keeping well, and adjusting to the dramatic changes to our lives over the last week. Yes, I'm talking about the weather. That lovely sunshine has disappea...

15th May 2020: Be Alert, Britain Needs Lerts. We seem to be in the age of government by marketing slogan. No, I don't know how you can be alert to a virus sneaking up on you, but hopefully you are all managing to dodge infect...

1st May 2020: Mayday,... Mayday. In other years, many of you would have been out at the crack of dawn today, dashing down to town to enjoy the May-morning celebrations followed by a beer for breakfast and a Redox...

25th April 2020: Stayin In. "This song's called Stayin In", says Glenda. "Its about stayin in". It sounds like a heavy rock anthem for these times, but it comes from 2015, and I discovere...

17th April 2020: A little bit of reggae does you good... baggaboom baggaboom. I hope you are all still keeping well out there. Thank goodness we have the internet to keep in touch. If you are feeling a bit gloomy, here is some reggae magic to funk up your d...

11th April 2020: The Klub Kakofanney Easter Egg. Here we are, the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, the sun is shining, and we are all, quite rightly, staying indoors. So here is a special treat for all you music lovers out there, so...

3rd April 2020: Klub Kakofanney Reloaded. I hope you are all keeping well, and coping with life in lockdown. Keep strong and stay safe and we'll get through this. Its the first Friday of the month and that should have bee...