Joy Division - New Dawn Fades (live)

A tribute to the Division. And to Tony Wilson. RIP.

A moveable feast

After three and a half years we leave club Loz today. Most of the time, I love my vinyl. But on moving days, I begin to wonder what on earth possessed me to buy The Brothers Johnson, Gorkys Zygotic Mynci and the complete Belle And Sebastian fey 1997 EP range. There's an interesting debate about whether I should just chuck the lot in a skip here

Pensioners' special

We are brassic. Skint. Looking for cash down the back of chairs. This is all due to a convoluted house move. This is all beginning to show. Tonight, having found a fiver in coppers, foreign currency and through selling a book of 12 postage stamps for £2, I ambled off to the local chippery, the intention of splitting a fish n' chips to share with my beautiful girlfriend. The chip shop staff took pity though, and allowed us to have two pensioners specials - £2.50 for fish, chips, gravy and breadcake (buttered). I'm a mixture of feelings to be honest. It's a great deal. But if I'd had an extra 60p we could have got the spam fritter thrown in as well.

Goodbye old Silver Spurs

Duos. A very hit-or-miss affair, generally. Renee and Renata - bad. Kylie and Cave - inexplicably good. Winehouse and Church - let's not go there. Then there's Nancy and Lee, without a shadow of a doubt the best and most menacing/kitsch/beguiling duo ever. The strawberries and cherries and an angel's kiss in spring of Frank JR and Mr Hazlewood's evil 'some velvet morning when I'm straaaaaight' worked great and set a lineage in place that continues to this day with Richard Hawley and the Tindersticks. Apparently, Hazlewood was once punched out by Sinatra senior after telling Nancy to sing These Boots Are Made For Walking "like a 16-year old girl who fucks truck drivers". He then made bizarre solo albums in Sweden, became a really notorious old cuss, smoking and boozing and brawling and then, knowing he was dying, he released Cake Or Death last year as a finale. It was, by and large, bobbins. Remember him instead for Some Velvet Morning, Summer Wine, Ladybird and I Move Around, with their laconic drunkeredness and Billy Strange orchestration. Oh, and read this obit. RIP Lee, you grizzled old trooper.

Listen to Some Velvet Morning

Where's me Sharples

This girthy story about a fat woman who got stuck in a deckchair having to be rescued by emergency services as the seas accelerated towards her is one thing. But why the blue blazes do all the fat people in this photograph look like Ena Sharples. It's as if a cryogenic Corrie convention are all holidaying on the south coast. Probably Bournemouth.

Scorchi-oh

So Britain basks. But none of your Bournemouths or Brighton's for us. No, we went to Hornsea, a little gem of Victoriana on the neglected east coast, which would surely be a really expensive curio if there was something as new-fangled as a train line there (the victim of Beeching cuts - and now a charming track for mini Motos). It was lovely, gazing out from the promenades to the North Sea, despite the abundence of semi-nakeds on Shoppers. Genteel, and delightful, in a lazy Sunday kinda way. Later, and perhaps ravaged by the sunbeams, I decide to sell my original Rolf Harris stylophone, complete with 70s packaging and demonstration disc. To me it sounds like marrauding bees caught in a pylon, but I reckon the Klaxons or one of the princes of New Rave will snap it up jack quick.

A week of contrasts

Been off work all week with a dodgy back, some even dodgier painkillers that make my dreams go a hazy shade of purple and a sense of impending crisis after we realised our new house would have required an astonishing £30k of work before we could even get round to sorting out the carpets. Deal subsequently pulled, we have spent most of this week back on the home trail. And am happy to report - today - some success. And a better house than the one we just lost! Funny the way the cards are dealt at times, innit? Now we can look forward to Autumn barbecues in the garden on the right, a choice of outbuildings, and a two-minute walk to this park on the left!

Listening: Noah Georgeson; The Zombies - Into The Afterlife; new Rilo Kiley stuff

Watching: Have been hooked into Heroes, if just for the Japanese time traveller's amazingly manic off-kilter laugh and pirouettes

Loving: The sunshine, even while on my back

Overheard in chemists: "Mam, I'm dyeing my hair red" "Why?" "I've got to dye it red before I can get it brown"