Taking us slightly but unashamedly off piste from our usual bloggings on music and travel, Joe has written a tribute to his MotoGP hero Marco Simoncelli, who sadly died yesterday in Malaysia.

There is a code that motorcycle fans use to describe racing accidents. ’A crash’ generally means that the rider walked away. ‘A bad crash’ means they are probably in the medical centre. And ‘a really bad crash’ means that a human life is in the balance. This morning, as New Zealand rugby fans cheered and the boom of celebratory fireworks crackled through the Auckland night, I received a text from my friend Lee; ‘Simoncelli. Sepang. Really fucking bad crash’.

Marco Simoncelli, the brave, handsome, funny, thrilling motorcyclist had died during the second lap of the Malaysian MotoGP. His bike was sliding away from him through a corner when it suddenly resumed traction, veering at terrifying and unavoidable speed into the path of two other bikes. Either impact could have proved fatal. Somewhere in the incidents’ milliseconds Simoncelli’s helmet came off. He lay motionless on the track, his distinctive halo of hair lying flat and still amidst the tyre marks.

The majority of motorsports stars are best viewed ‘in character’. Leather clad, helmet on, visor down. In their impenetrable suits they become the anonymous immortals we so want them to be. The true greats however need little more than their eyes to communicate with the lenses watching them as they wait on the track. Pop up the perspex and there’s Ayrton Senna or Valentino Rossi, speaking to every viewer without needing to say a word. Yet place a driver – or rider – near their machine without the superhero outfit, and the lunacy of their sport becomes far too real.

As the commentators struggled to describe what had happened, everyone saw the same thing. Marco Simoncelli was missing his helmet. We knew what that meant.

Riders know that motorcycle racing is dangerous. Their crews, their sponsors, their friends and their parents know it. In the years that they have worked to reach the premiere class of MotoGP they will have lost teammates and competitors. No matter what the results of qualifying, death sometimes finds a place on the grid.

And today, at Corner 11 of the Sepang International Racing Circuit death found Marco Simoncelli. Despite the efforts of the medical staff and the prayers of his friends, at 4.56pm local time, it took him.

SuperSic was not to every riders’ taste. (You say his nickname ‘SuperSitch’ by the way – like so many things in life it sounds better when given the proper italian pronunciation).  His riding style was so wonderfully full-on it could have been devised by a 1950s screenwriter. Heart-on-his-sleeve? Yes. All-or-nothing? Absolutely. On-the-limit? Of course.

Witness Marco at Silverstone earlier this year. He is racing nobody really, but still riding so hard that a pool of standing water throws him from his bike. He hurtles over two hundred metres at massive speed, yet manages to stand up at the end with the composure of a seven year old executing a knee slide across the kitchen tiles.

In a sport where many are ‘cool’, he was the coolest. In a risky sport, he was among the riskiest. Which made the public love him as much as many of his fellow riders were exasperated by him. Competing against such natural talent can be infuriating. To beat him on the track only to find him the natural star of the post race ceremonials probably didn’t endear him either. Such things sadly no longer matter.

Marco Simoncelli will never again taste victory champagne, nor will his hair shake in the wind from the top step of the podium. His big eyes will not smile at us from within the snug confines of his helmet. His glove won’t wave at us as he waits for the race to start. His sport will miss him, and so will we.

On a day when New Zealand lifted the Rugby World Cup for the first time since the infant Sic was learning to walk, few outside of the motorcycle fraternity will remember Marco’s passing. I will, and I happen to think you should too.

So when the Webb Ellis trophy is next held aloft spare a thought for the man who should be 28 years old, bashing fairings, rattling cages, grinning, chattering, and thrilling. And the time after that consider the 32 year old who should be contemplating retirement. And beyond that, well it’s folly and pain to imagine I suppose.

Death was on the grid today. It took a good man.

RIP Marco.

Joe Harland, currently resident in Barnes, West London, blogs about his experience hanging with the Marc Bolan fan(atic)s on the anniversary of his death last week.

‘I climbed up it once,’ said John Peel, pointing west towards the sunset silhouette of Glastonbury Tor. We were at Glastonbury Festival, the longest-running and best-loved in the UK. ‘It was the year of the first festival,’ John went on. ‘Marc Bolan and I decided to climb the Tor. When we got to the top we sat down, and Marc said: “When do you reckon it was built, John?” I had no idea, but I wanted to sound smart, so I said “Er, 1359 I think.” Marc walked around the tower, came back and sat down again. “There’s a plaque around the other side. You were a year out. It was 1360.”’John smiled to himself as he remembered, staring into the middle-distance a little longer. Then he glanced toward the Brothers Cider Bus at the bottom of the Pyramid Stage field. ‘Time for a drink.’

I’d like to say we raised a glass to Marc’s memory whilst I eloquently interrogated John about T. Rex and their shared role in shaping a 1970’s pop music landscape that was the artistic opposite of the bleak British social backdrop it accompanied. But I can’t say I did. We probably talked about the merits of pear cider, or the perfect time to play Status Quo in a DJ set.

That pretty much starts and ends my second-hand experience of Marc Bolan, except to say that on the night he died the sirens of emergency vehicles attending the car accident on Barnes Common awoke – amongst others – an old man sleeping in a dusty back room of a nearby Victorian flat. For ten minutes he watched the strobing of electric blue police light through the trees before heading back to bed.

My Grandfather was not what you’d call a music man. Living as he did so close to the ‘Bolan Tree’ it was not uncommon for him to encounter a lost fan looking to pay their respects. By the early eighties however his age and shaky grasp of popular culture was baffling pilgrims who came looking for the memorial, only to be told in no uncertain terms by this kindly local expert that ‘Just down the road is the exact spot where Jimi Hendrix died.’ When my Mother finally corrected him he was genuinely surprised. ‘Well you can understand the confusion can’t you?’ he reasoned by way of explaining away the mistake. ‘They both had curly hair.’

On September 16^th this year, Marc Bolan’s deathaversary, I got up at six, strode past bleary-eyed businessmen and commuting cars to what is now listed by English Heritage as the ‘Marc Bolan Shrine’. I thought I would be the first of the visitors. Not so. Due to my trademark lack of proper research it turned out I was pretty much the last.

Purple Pied Pete from Preston has been coming to the Bolan Tree every year for the last thirty four. ‘I still live in the Seventies y’see.’ I could see. The fifty year-old man sitting in front of me was a ringer for nineties Pete Postlethwaite facially, but the glittering purple glam rock jacket and Bolan t-shirt belonged to a pre-Thatcher Britain I was too young to remember. ‘Cost me my marriage did Marc. It really did. And when we divorced she said she were going to smash all my Bolan records unless I agreed to sell the house.’ He took a gentlemanly sip of his champagne and went on: ‘They’re worth about eight grand the records are. But I wouldn’t sell ’em for a million pound.’ Which seems reasonable. If your entire life has been devoted to a single cause in the way Pete’s has, selling your records would be like selling your faith. And, as televangelists like to say, faith is a hole that no amount of money can fill.

Sunflower is a comparative newcomer. She started coming in 1996 to watch the sun go down, to have a drink, to chat about Bolan, and to mark in a quiet and kind way another lap of the sun without him. ‘Sometimes something magical happens. He died at five am, and last year at that exact time the tree lit up and – okay there’s probably a lot of them around here – but a fox peered around it to say hello to all of us.’ This is considered evidence not of sunrise and a burgeoning vermin issue, but of Marc’s presence, as FOX was the number plate of the ill-fated car he died in.

But why do they come to where he died anyway? Tradition holds that you more usually pay your respects at gravesides rather than the place of passing. Not least because otherwise hospital wards would be knee deep in wreaths and mourners all year round. ‘It’s because.’ Pied Pete pitched in, “this is where his soul left his body. And we think it’s still here don’t we?’

‘Definitely,’ agreed Sunflower.

Which makes the Bolan Tree rather unusual in the ghoulish realm of rock death sites, in that it marks not folly, but misfortune. It’s not Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, it’s not an LA drug-scoring underpass or old graffiti’d old bedsit. It’s a tiny spot cared for by passionate, obsessed, and infatuated fans of possibly the only man who ever made a Gibson Flying V look good. Odder still is the way that some people choose to leave their message for the ‘Cosmic Dancer’; they write on hubcaps and stick them to the tree that put a terminal halt to Marc’s mini, and to him. Hazard warning triangles would seem more appropriate.

Bill Hicks once questioned why Christians wore crosses, reasoning that the last thing the Almighty would want to see on his return to earth is gilded miniature replicas of the means by which his previous visit was rather painfully terminated. ‘That’s like wearing a sniper’s rifle in memory of JFK,’ he concluded. Which is why rock sites tend not to be littered with the specifics of their heroes passing. The Cobain family home is not, to the best of my awareness, knee-deep in heroin needles and shotgun cartridges, nor is the swimming pool where Brian Jones failed to surface surrounded in snorkels and inflatable armbands.

Pete and Sunflower don’t care. The early morning sunlight is warming their tired faces, the champagne is pepping their spirits, and as they pack their wares away their satisfied smiles speak of people who have no doubt they’ve done the right thing by their man. And I wander off realising that contrary to my previous belief, obsession isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it can in fact be rather wonderful.

Sad day. We lost a very dear four-legged friend and family member. Lily the Weimaraner was a special dog – faithful and loving, mischievous, with schnuggles at the ready whenever they were needed. She may also be the only Weimaraner named after a Bob Wills song. One thing we’re sure of: she’s the only dog whose misadventures were recorded for posterity by Joe in Live Fast, Die Young (ironically, because she lived slowly and died mercifully old), reproduced here as a little thank you for all the good times:

I was having a lovely dream about flying a Harrier jump jet. Piloting a jump jet is not easy, especially when your co-pilot leans in close and licks your face with her tongue.

Another lick. I woke up to a chilly Charleston morning on a blow-up bed apparently determined to tip me onto the floorboards of a wooden house warped into a Riddler’s lair by years of barometer-shattering humidity. Chris was asleep on the sofa, Courtney had left for work, and her dog, a sturdy but friendly Weimaraner by the name of Lily, seemed to want to go somewhere. Presuming that she needed the doggie toilet I took her downstairs, opened the front door and watched in horror as she whipped by my right leg and ran into the road.

‘Car!’ was all I could squeak as a red Nissan, sun-bleached pink, raced towards her.

Ohshitohshitohshitohshit. I’m going to have to tell our generous host that we’re grateful for your hospitality, we’ve enjoyed your company, and we’ve killed your beautiful pedigree dog. (And while we’re getting it out there, Chris is thinking about playing his guitar at you.) The car braked, the bonnet dipped, the rear springs rose, and with a nonchalance which said ‘I know what I’m doing, you plum,’ Lily skipped out of the way with so little time to spare that she left a sliver of drool on the bumper.

I ran over, unsure whether to chastise or kiss her. She must have thought I was going for the full snog, because she glanced left and ran like only big dogs can, out of sight in this city I didn’t know.

Nononononono!

I ran in the direction she had, looking for evidence of four-legged intrusion – upturned bins, startled children, that sort of thing. Nothing. I walked around, practising the conversation in my head. It was an improvement on the first scenario, but not a big one.

‘Hi Courtney – there’s good news and bad news.’

‘What’s the good news?’

‘I didn’t kill your dog.’

‘And the bad?’

‘I lost her. Do you fancy a go on my mate Chris?’

After nearly an hour of searching I slunk dejectedly home. There I would tell Chris what I’d done and we would get in the car and go, leaving a note of apology on the door. I walked into the living room. Chris was snuggled up on the sofa with Lily watching the Weather Channel.

‘Been for a run?’ he asked.

‘Er, yeah, sort of.’

‘It’s going to be a beautiful day. Breakfast?’

‘Yes please.’

Lily looked up at me with a mischievous glint in her eye, and growled a little growl that sounded disquietingly like a laugh.

R.I.P. Lily Dale Connor-Price, 17th July 1998 – 5th Sept 2011.We’ll miss you.

Last week the film American: The Bill Hicks Story opened in select theaters in the US and on slightly iffy torrents around the web. As my home town of London was the city that arguably loved him most I’m optimistic that there will be a cinema showing it. Which is more than can be said for Chris, who now lives in his home town of Valdosta, Georgia and where, seemingly, hardly anyone has heard of him. When I find the cinema I will plan my visit with the sort of methodical zeal usually reserved for concerts by my favourite bands. Because even seventeen years since his death, Bill Hicks deserves some fucking respect. 

For two years in the mid-nineties I produced an in-flight radio comedy show for British Airways. (For those under the age of twenty-five, in-flight radio meant ten channels of endlessly looping movie-length audio shows that were immediately rendered redundant the moment Boeing put screens in the back of their headrests.) This meant that every month I crafted a two-hour master class in humour, in which stars from Eddie Izzard to Dudley Moore talked about their favourite comedians. Every time they name-checked someone, I would get hold of the relevant CD or cassette and find a clip to illustrate their point. The result? A pointlessly thorough knowledge of the routines of Al Read and Albert Brooks, and a swearing supersense which allowed me to spot any and all bad language from the soundwave on the screen. Eight hours of comedy, five days a week, for two years. There wasn’t a joke I hadn’t heard or a set up to which I didn’t know the punch line, and following one particularly mirthless trip to a London comedy club in which I sat nodding approval at the gags rather than laughing, I quit. 

I say this not because I think it is particularly remarkable – it isn’t – but because I hope it provides some context and validation for this next statement: Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian ever. The funniest, most exciting, most incendiary, most thought provoking, most moving, most thrilling, most how-ever-the-fuck-you-want-to-measure-it comedian that ever picked up a microphone.  

He wasn’t a seer, or a visionary, a political genius or even a psychotropic warrior as some of the more effusive hagiographies would have it, but in the exacting science and precise art of writing and telling jokes he has never been bettered.  

Often labelled a ‘rock ‘n’ roll comedian’, his influence can be found on the classic triple album Aenima by Tool, and in the dedication on Radiohead’s The Bends. And he died young, shortly after Kurt Cobain and whilst the world’s eyes were still on Seattle. I made a programme about that coincidence a few years back – check out the start of it here: 

Now, many other comedians have been labelled rock ‘n’ roll of course. Lenny Bruce was, and then he stopped being any good. Which isn’t massively rock ‘n’ roll. Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson were too, but then Rik started playing a Tory MP and it became clear that they’d gone MOR. Good lord, even Newman and Baddiel were described as rock ‘n’ roll. Posh kids twatting about in an arena isn’t rock ‘n’ roll. Just ask Pink Floyd.

But Bill Hicks was rock ‘n’ roll. Not because of the material about drink and drugs, the regular references to Hendrix or dying too young. Bill Hicks was rock ‘n’ roll because his recordings are the only ones as constantly exhilarating to listen to as your favourite band’s albums. He was rock ‘n’ roll because people are still doing elements of his act to this very day, just as bands are still covering The Stones when needing to quickly win over a hostile crowd.  

Not that anyone nowadays tries and directly steal Hicks’ material, but if you see a comedian getting morally intense, pausing to let the discomfort cloak the crowd and then puncturing the tension with a gag – that’s Bill right there. If you hear someone confronting an established taboo whilst ensuring that there’s a punch line every thirty seconds, that’s Bill. If you find you’re being entertained and educated – well, chances are that’s Bill too.

If however you see someone stealing his act wholesale, you’re watching Dennis Leary. And nobody will ever, ever, make a film about his life.

The winners of the GP guestbook competition have been announced. Go here to find out if you’re a winner. Otherwise please enjoy new bloggings from Joe.

In October 2002 Chris Price and I entered Nottingham’s hallowed and legendary music venue Rock City. We walked up the stairs to the main room where their in-house metal messiah was, as they used to say, ‘spinning’. (Rock music is, frankly, a piece of piss to DJ. Unlike the trance-trousered ilk of Van Dyk and Tiesto, whose silky-sonic segues must be faultlessly executed, the rock DJ must simply wait until one track ends and then bang in the next one before anyone has a chance to leave the dancefloor.) We ordered beers – plastic bottles, urgh – and surveyed the scene.

Then something rather odd happened. Hearing Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’ heave from the speakers, Chris took a long swig of his warm Carlsberg, cleared the steps down to the dancefloor in a single bound, and without explanation began wildly swinging his arms around like a marionette under the spell of a drunk and delirious master of puppets. Then he began charging around the perimeter of the dancefloor, bounding and swinging, loping and windmilling.

There was only one thing for me to do. I tripped down to the sprung floor to join him, linked my hands behind my back, hunched down and shifted lumpenly from one leg to the other as though stamping out fires with my feet. After a minute or so we stopped and returned to our beers.

‘You saw it too then?’ I said, leaning against the bar.

‘Yup,’ belched Chris. ‘Genius.’

And we’ve never discussed the incident again.

Why did this happen? Well that’s a slightly longer story.

In 1988 hard rock took over the UK. To read the alternative music press however, whose army surplus combat trousers were all in a twist about the Stourbridge Sound of the Wonder Stuff, you would never have known it. The broadsheet music press were frothing over the likes of The House of Love, but it was Guns ‘N’ Roses, not the Stone Roses, howling from the stereos of second-hand Ford Escort in high streets and car parks throughout the land.

Iron Maiden headlined the largest heavy metal gig ever at Donnington in August of that year, when around 120,000 people gathered to watch a bill which included Dave Lee Roth, Kiss, Megadeth and Axl Rose’s crew. Even the also-rans of that period – bands which nowadays would have quit long ago through lack of sales – shifted enough records, merchandise and tickets to fund a lavish LA lifestyle of cocaine, hairspray and playboy bunnies. Ratt, Poison, Cinderella, Mötley Crüe, Faster Pussycat, LA Guns, Warrant, Skid Row and more – all could sell out an extensive UK tour. Even British bands doing bad impersonations of the Americans found themselves headlining at the Hammersmith Apollo. (Quireboys, anyone?) For goodness’ sake, Def Leppard’s Hysteria, which hails from that same purple patch, has gone twelve times platinum in America. Twelve times!

In the four-channel televisual world of Great Britain however, this explosion went largely unnoticed. With the exception of Tommy Vance’s Friday Night Rock Show on BBC Radio 1, and the occasional guerrilla raid on the charts, there was no reflection of what was happening in the rock clubs. Market stall holders’ money pouches were bulging with the profits of sew-on Maiden patches, but for the most part Thatcher’s Britain looked eagerly forward to the next Phil Collins album or the ooh-cheeky-get-you thrills of the Pet Shop Boys.

But something was happening. And somewhere deep within the offices of the BBC’s flagship cultural documentary strand Arena, a plucky producer had resolved to make a sixty-minute programme telling the story of the genre. On April the 7th 1989, ‘Arena: Heavy Metal’ was broadcast on BBC2.

‘Arena: Heavy Metal’ is not a great documentary, but it is a wonderful document; evidence of a stiff institution like the BBC attempting to embrace something it knows it should, but can’t quite bring itself to do. All the greats are in there of course – Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osborne, Bruce Dickinson (complete with requisite fencing scene and a remarkably Tufnell-esque tour of his stage wardrobe), Maurice Jones guiding us backstage at Donnington, where the only concession to comfort is an orange plastic swing and an empty paddling pool. But for every embarrassing metal moment there is some tremendous live footage of Hetfield’s mob, Slayer, Maiden, Napalm Death and more.

But all that becomes irrelevant around forty-five minutes into the programme. Following a peculiar section on Japanese metal, and a brief chat with a moustachioed Brummie metalhead espousing the delights of music that ‘picks you up and throws you across the room’, it cuts to a circle of air guitarists in a club rocking out. A lone man, lost in the music, bounds around them swinging his arms like an orangutan on acid. The caption reads: ‘Rock City, Nottingham’. It starts at 5.58 in this clip:

So that’s why we did it, and that’s why as we drained our beers we wore the smiles of men who’d fulfilled a childhood ambition. Albeit one that we had forgotten we held. But why am I writing all this now, eight years after the fact? Well, on Monday night a friend and magnificent man by the name of Russell Hancox came to my house armed with rosé wine, fine conversation and a DVD he’d dubbed off for me. It was the Arena show, exactly as I remembered. Except for one thing.

When I first watched it, I hadn’t noticed Raw magazine editor Malcolm Dome – aptly named and pleasingly bald – explaining the genesis of the term ‘Heavy Metal’. The phrase, he tells us, was first used in a musical context by a producer and music journalist called Sandy Pearl in 1968, in a review of the Byrds song ‘Artifical Energy’. He thought it apt to describe the aluminum quality of the Byrds’ guitar sound. ‘Artificial Energy’ comes from the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, the last Byrds album before Gram Parsons joined and took them all whimsical and country.

So, though I’m week late, ladies and gentlemen please raise your glasses and wish a Happy 64th Birthday to Gram Parsons, the first man to try to kill off Heavy Metal.

The book goes to print today, and just in the nick of time the final cover design has arrived. Chris got so excited when he saw it that he let out a small wee. And cover art that makes a man wee should be shared, we hope you’ll agree.

Here’s what to look for when you’re browsing your local book store for Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America on May 4th. Or if you’re ordering from the interweb, they’ve sent you the wrong book if it arrives and doesn’t look like this (click on the image to see it full size):

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If we sound a little too excited by the prospect of an actual book with an actual cover with our actual names on it, containing actual pages with words on them that we actually wrote – well, it’s because we probably are. Thanks again for your help making it happen – helpful Parsons can find out if they have qualified for the ‘Most Helpful’ title in the acknowledgements at the back of the book. Naturally we’re keeping quiet about who they are for now, winky smiley face.

10th April 2010

A spring sun is setting over Hammersmith. The sunglasses of people walking westward reflect a bright orange flare. Short-sleeved men and short-skirted women up their pace to get home before the April night spreads its clear-skied chill. Couples who have survived a grim winter of squalling rain and weekend nights of Strictly-Come-X-Factor’s-Got-Talent-On-Ice mooch in silence back to their flats. New couples swing held hands looking forward to a summer of chilled wine in the park.

I sit down on the upper deck of the Number 10 bus and it rumbles towards Kensington. Past the offices of Universal Records, the most successful record company in the world, now occupying the same space as a seventies record exec’s drinks cabinet. Times and commerce have changed.

Through ‘Little Tehran’ where the Iranian takeaway delivery riders start their mopeds and roll away with a shake and a rattle.

An evening breeze rustles the headscarves of Kensington’s well-to-do ladies and Muslim women. Twenty yellow cagouled, sore footed tourists carry their heavy legs past the closing shops, whilst bag wielding bargainistas are cajoled out of glass doors as shop managers lock up for the night.

Runners spanning an evolution-flouting range of body shapes barrel, potter, bounce, jog and run their way through last minute preparations for the London Marathon.

Tonight isn’t about running though. It’s not about shops or fast food or sunsets. It’s about a simple musical proposition; the greatest composer of all time at one of the greatest venues in the world.

The elegant red brick and sandstone rotunda up ahead is known as the Royal Albert Hall. Robbie Williams swung here when he was winning. He was pretty good from what I can remember.

For my sins I watched sturdily built chanteuse Alison Moyet here, supported by the briefly popular Curiosity Killed The Cat. They were wretched.

I watched open-mouthed as surf-friendly, soul voiced lap steel maestro Ben Harper did the classic band leader thing here and with a sequence of clenched fists silenced his band one by one, then pushed away his microphone and sang unaided to the whole hall. That was impressive.

My grandfather proudly boomed his musical limitations here as he sang Christmas carols employing only one note. At the age of eight it was remarkable how moving Ding Dong Merrily On High was when sung in his singular tone known to the family as the ‘key of doom’.

The Tindersticks glummed here as they tiptoed their way through a set that deftly avoided anything that you could term crowd pleasing. I’ve stood in the DJ booth and watched Zane Lowe dazzle a crowd here, and seen The Killers bring Vegas, complete with palm trees and unwelcome saxophone intrusions to its stage.

On one extraordinary evening Chris and I attended the George Harrison tribute concert here. No-one knew what to expect, but the presumption was of a birthday honours list of rock ‘n’ roll knights performing the greatest hits of the Harrison canon. Surprise it was then to many in the crowd when the compere, one Eric Clapton, announced that the show would be in two halves. The second half would celebrate the music that George made, the first would celebrate the music that he loved. And unlike the majority of the audience, George’s passion was for the music of India. I have no doubt that the hour of Anoushka and Ravi Shankar that we witnessed that night was of the very highest calibre, but it was unfortunately wasted on me.

And judging by the faces of the Foo Fighters in the next door box, it was a little wasted on them too – in particular their drummer Taylor Hawkins. Taylor is a man who could look fidgety in his sleep. In interviews his eyes dart, expressions flit across his face as briefly as the thoughts to which they’re attached. He was, one presumes, murder to teach. As he rocked from side to side during the sitar solos it looked like he would explode like some Loony Tunes rocket, lit but then tethered for too long. The evening concluded with Tom Hanks singing the Lumberjack Song and British folk obscurity Joe Brown leading a band of megastars on banjo. That was, well, bizarre.

But tonight I’m hoping to finally witness a musical experience worthy of the magnificent surroundings.

Tonight we are going to see a man who can take five otherwise unremarkable notes and put them in a sequence which paralyses me with delight. He is an eighty-two year old Italian, winner of one honorary Oscar, and wrongful loser of five real ones.

That he is the greatest cinematic composer of all time is beyond doubt. He may not have the grandeur of Williams, the bravado of Barry or the bombast of Bernstein, but across the fifty years of his career he has written, conducted and recorded a range of music so extraordinary and prolific that even he himself can’t list it all. His influence is so all-encompassing it’s impossible to plot. Maybe he’s the greatest composer of music alive on the planet full stop. Personally, I’m backing him.

Currently he is walking onto the stage some three hundred feet away from us. His name is Ennio Morricone, and he is a genius.

Several people have asked who we are and how Missing Parsons works. So here’s a short lesson in three easy steps. Missing Parsons is a book, a band and a blog. We think of all three things as being expressions of what it means to be a fan of music – mainly (but not exclusively) Americana. If you love music – especially if you love it a bit too much – you’re a Parson too. Welcome along! Gram Parsons is the inspiration for what we do because he was all about turning people on to the music he loved.

You’re reading the blog right now, so that just leaves the book and the band.

1. The book.

Missing Parsons the writers are Chris Price and Joe Harland. We work in radio, and met when we made programmes and devised the playlist for BBC Radio 1. Joe still works there as an executive producer and Chris, after a few years devising music strategy for MTV, runs a radio production company and media consultancy called New Slang Media.

Together we’ve written a book about our search for the soul of American music. It’s called Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America, and you can buy it here. (US Parsons go here for details of how to get your copy.) If you’d like to find out more about the book, have a read of this synopsis, or read the prologue on Amazon.

So the book side of it looks like this:

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2. The band.

Missing Parsons the songwriters are Chris Price and Simon Kilshaw. Simon is a lecturer in Music Technology at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. He’s the technical and production brains behind the band – it’s Simon who wrote the program for playing the Theremin on a Wii (listen to it on our cover of If I Needed You) and he’s also working on another exciting evolution to Missing Parsons’ technology presence, of which more soon.

Chris and Simon met at school and have played music together for years. We recorded a soundtrack to accompany the journey described in the book, and the first track on the album, Live Fast, Die Young – can you see what we’ve done there? – has become our theme tune. We wrote the songs, sang and played all the instruments with a little help from more talented Parsons on the bits which were too difficult to do on our own (crikey the pedal steel is hard).

You can buy the album from iTunes, Amazon or your favourite digital music retailer, and if your territory supports it you can listen on Spotify.

So the band bit looks like this:

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So far so good. Now, as we were never very good at Venn diagrams at school, the next bit is probably ill advised. But here goes. Put another way – don’t they say ‘expressed as non-overlapping sets’ or something? – Missing Parsons, represented as a whole, currently looks like this:

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Simon and Chris are on the left writing the music, Chris and Joe on the right writing the book. We’re working on ways of making Missing Parsons look more like this:

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More details as we have them.

Hope that clears things up for now. Thanks again for being part of the Missing Parsons community. We get so much enjoyment out of your comments, suggestions and feedback. If you’re a recently welcomed Parson and your appetite has been whetted (whet? whit? what?) there’s more on our Facebook page (where we have most fun), You Tube channel, Twitter stream, No Depression page and MySpace profile. Phew!

All the best,

Chief Executive Parsons Chris, Joe & Simon

Missing Parsons

Several of our esteemed American friends have asked about US availability of Live Fast, Die Young, so we thought it worth putting together a simple guide. As yet we have no publishing deal in the US, so there are two options for getting hold of your copy:

1. While stocks last, buy your copy from the Missing Parsons shop. We have a limited number of *signed* copies available for purchase from within the US. Cheaper than ordering from the UK and personally signed to you! We also have Missing Parsons t-shirts and physical copies of the soundtrack album for those that like to touch, hold and caress their music.

2. Order the book from Amazon.co.uk. This will be shipped from the UK, so the postage will be slightly higher than your usual Amazon orders, but at the time of writing there’s a 33% discount which goes some way to covering the difference.

We want to make it as easy as possible for our friends in the US to get hold of Live Fast, Die Young. Our Research & Insight department (Facebook) tells us that roughly 75% of the Missing Parsons community is American, and we would love the book to be made available in your fine book stores and upstanding interweb sites. Until then, please consider one of the other options above.

As ever, thanks for your support, Parsonage and friendship.

Chris & Joe

Missing Parsons

Some radio musings from Joe which didn’t quite make it through the copy edit, but we liked it so here it is in mini-blog form:

The CD player had started to skip again. We put the new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album on. It raced past in a clicky thirty-second montage. We put on Jeff Buckley’s Grace. A twenty-second glitchcore remix wasn’t what we had been hoping for. There was no option but to flick on the radio. Train’s ‘Raindrops of Jupiter’ blared from the speakers.

‘Search,’ said Chris reflexively.

Crunky hip-hop. Maybe Chamillionaire. Could have been Lil’ Jon.

‘Hmmm. Search again.’

Somewhere on the FM dial Daniel Powter having a ‘Bad Day’.

‘One more for the win.’

‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by the most successful vowel-less band of all time, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

‘Yes!’ dueted driver and passenger.

But as the song hit the middle eight the DJ faded it out. ‘Okay, we got Steve on line one. What’s your problem, buddy?’

‘Hey Bill. I’m trying to change the oil filter on my Torino, but it’s stuck fast. I tried lube, tried wrenches and I’m getting nowhere. Any ideas?’

‘Sure Steve, no problem. You got an old belt you don’t mind getting dirty?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK. Take the belt, tie it real tight around the filter and yank it hard in a counter clockwise direction – that’ll get it started. You can do the rest by hand.’

‘Thanks, Bill.’

‘You’re welcome, Steve. Good luck with it. This is Van Halen.’

You know how every once in a while you hear a song that is so brilliant, so how-come-that’s-not-been-done-before magnificent, that it stops you in your tracks? Well, this may be the geekiest thing I’ve ever confessed, but sometimes radio does that to me. Chris is the same. Every once in a while you hear a link, feature or stunt that knocks you flat. This was one of those times.

‘Genius!’ squeaked Chris. ‘It’s like “Gardeners’ Question Time” for petrol heads.’

‘With some classic rock thrown in for good measure,’ I said. ‘Incredible.’

Van Halen reached the middle eight, and again the song was faded out. Bill again. This time Dave was struggling to fit a new muffler on his Chevrolet. With Bill’s help, he wasn’t struggling for long.

‘Thanks Bill! I’ll give that a shot right now.’

‘Good luck, Dave. Hope it works out for ya. Ooo-kay-eee, this is Led Zeppelin.’

To help explain what I found so incredible about this show, let me give you a little background. UK media is obsessed with audience research. Absolutely fixated. Because this research offers insights into the lives of its audience, and those insights lead to brainstorms and think-a-cises which in turn lead to TV formats, radio shows, magazines and books.

Let’s imagine that, quite by coincidence, ten separate women wake up one morning and fancy an orange for breakfast. Later that day they each meet a representative from a research company who asks about their eating habits. They say in passing, quite reasonably, that they enjoyed an orange that morning. This data is fed into the company’s research software which identifies an ‘emerging trend’, and before you know it marketing wonks throughout the land are assembling their best people to see how they can capitalise on the new ‘Citrus Mum’ phenomenon.

But the Holy Grail is finding something deeper than mere insight. The real pay dirt is stumbling upon a ‘truth’. A truth, at its simplest, might be ‘people enjoy watching football live on the telly’. At its best it might tap into some previously unnoticed human behaviour. However, even with millions spent every year on trying to find new ones, researchers find truths about as often as scientists discover new elements.

But Bill, it seemed, had beaten them all. His warm, personal, caring style didn’t scream ‘focus group’, which is why I think the show was his idea and not that of a media conglomerate. And what was his million-dollar truth? Simple: ‘On Sunday mornings me and my buddies fix our cars. When one of us has a problem we help each other out. And we love rock music.’ That’s why I loved Bill’s show. It was the truth. And you don’t get that on the radio every day.

You can pre-order Live Fast, Die Young on Amazon now at a guaranteed 25% discount!