On Saturday June 27, Breathing Space returned to The Intake Club in Mansfield, their third gig since Liam Davidson replaced Mark Rowen on guitar.

Although the gig was advertised as an 8pm start, thanks to a long tailback on the M1 delaying one member of the band it was almost ten before Breathing Space finally hit the stage.

Liam Davidson

Changing just one band member has transformed the band’s sound far more that I’d expected. Mark Rowen’s economical jazz-tinged playing was a major element of Breathing Space’s sound, and Liam has a very different style. With Mostly Autumn he’s always very much in the background, but I’ve always thought he’s a far better guitarist than many people realise. Given the chance in the spotlight shows just how good he can playing lead. He doesn’t try to copy Mark’s solos note-for-note, instead using the basic structure as a template for solos of his own.

The result is a far rawer and rockier band. Many of the big soaring ballads and jazz-rock jams that epitomised “Coming Up for Air” have been retired from the set in favour of guitar-driven hard rock numbers, turning the overall energy level of the set up several notches. A surprise was the Mostly Autumn standard “Never the Rainbow”, which I’d not heard Breathing Space play live before.

The set included several new songs from the forthcoming album “Below the Radar”. The title track has been in the setlist for a while, but the standout of the new numbers has to be the encore, “Questioning Eyes”, a huge soaring epic in the same league as Iain’s “The Gap Is Too Wide” or “Carpe Diem”.

• Pop: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so the producer fixes it with auto-tune. When they tour, all the vocals are lip-synched.
• Indie: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so sings completely out of tune both on record and live. Because that’s “for real”.
• Rock: The singer can’t hold a tune in a bucket, so gets sacked from the band before they get past the toilet circuit. They keep auditioning replacements until they manage to find someone who can actually sing.

Or am I just getting cynical in my old age?

The Falkirk West SNP member said analysis carried out by Falkirk Council showed the night coal runs by freight company DB Shenker were creating a substantial vibration problem.

He said the average vibration level for DB Schenker trains was 0.075 millimetres per second and could reach up to 0.091 mm per second.

That is in contrast to Freightliner Limited trains who also use the route to transport coal to the Fife power station. Tests revealed they created a vibration level of just 0.025 millimetres per second.

Mr Matheson said the different readings could be attributed to the speed of the trains and the different coal wagons used by the companies.

The DB Schenker (ex-EWS) trains use coal hoppers delivered shortly after privatisation to replace life-expired wagons dating from the 1960s. EWS, charismatic leader Ed Burkhart decided to ignore decades of rail experience developed for European conditions in favour of doing everything The American Way. So these new wagons had ‘more economical’ American-style heavy cast bogies rather than the lighter designs favoured up to then in Britain and Europe for a very different rail environment. He didn’t take into account the extra punishment they inflicted on tracks that carry heavy passenger traffic. And I wonder how much environmental noise was ever considered - after all, in America the rails always run though the worst bits of town inhabited by poor people whose opionions tend to be ignored.

Freightliner’s more modern wagons use far more technically sophisticated bogies designed to minimise track wear. And they also seem to be a lot quieter.

- Marillion, White Russian

65 years ago was the D-Day landings.

65 years later, 943598 British voters chose to insult the memories of those who gave their lives on that day by voting for a party who represent exactly the same values as the enemy they died fighting.

Some people claim it’s just a protest vote; a way to say ‘up yours’ to the political establishment in response to the scandals about MPs expenses. How many of these voters have actually stopped to think what they’re endorsing?

I count many of black, Jewish, gay and transgendered people amongst my friends and acquaintances. This vile party is fundamentally opposed to their very existence; they want to herd them all into concentration camps. They’ll deny it in public, of course, but they’ll be lying. You have to be pretty stupid not to see these neo-Nazis for what they are. It’s the non-white, non-straight, non-Anglo-Saxon British citizens that a BNP vote really says ‘up yours’ to.

And their use of British WW2 imagery, when their leaders idolise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, really sticks in my throat.

From the opening Mellotron chords of the title track onwards,  the sound is still quintessential IQ; pure 80s neo-prog, ten-minute songs in strange time signatures featuring swirling keyboards, lengthy solos, melodramatic vocals and often impenetrable lyrics. While their fusion of Gabriel-era Genesis with bits of Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator and King Crimson has never been spectacularly original, over the course of 25 years and nine albums they’ve honed their big near-symphonic sound to perfection, and this album is at least as good as anything they’ve ever done.

One thing you can’t accuse them of is a lack of tunes; even though the lengthy songs often lack conventional hooks or choruses Peter Nicholls has a great gift for hauntingly memorable melodies. And this being prog, the instrumentalists are just as important as the singer - new keyboard player Mark Westworth proves himself more than capable of filling the shoes of the recently-departed Martin Orford, and guitarist Mike Holmes contributes some superbly fluid solos.

As with most prog albums, this is a complex work that takes many listens to fully appreciate. The title track and the poverfully intense “Ryker Skies” make the most immediate impact, but after repeated plays the lengthy “The Province” emerges as the album highlight.

“Frequency” doesn’t break any new ground, but I don’t think anybody really expects or wants them to at this stage in their career. And if they’re not very original, they do what they do so well that it doesn’t matter.

None of this shopping around, poring over “Whatever SLR” and comparing rival cameras with similar specs; just a matter of what Jessops in Torquay had in stock that was within my budget.

I ended up with a Sony α200 with an 18-70 zoom lens, plus a 75-300 telephoto zoom, and after two weeks I can say I’m very happy with it so far. It did take a few failed photos to get used to the fact that it didn’t have the shutter delay which was a ‘feature’ of the bridge camera I had before. What you see in the viewfinder when you press the shutter is pretty much what you get in the picture; the autofocus is extremely fast.

So here’s some examples of what I took with it

The down platform at Lostwithiel in Cornwall is a classic shot for early to mid morning. Loco-hauled passenger trains are long-gone, but I find Voyagers are quite photogenic.

An EWS 66 moves sllowly across the crossing at Lostwithiel on a china clay train.

Testing what the 300mm telephoto can do.  The train was something like half a mile away.

And of course it’s got to be able to handle indoor concert photography, which is one of the most challenging types of photography there is.  This one of of Heather Findlay of Mostly Autumn at The Wharf in Tavistock.  I took it at 3200 ASA handheld at something like 1/60th.

One from DEMU showcase on Saturday; another high ASA slow shutter speed handheld shot; I think I went down to 1/15th sec on this.

This camera is also a joy to use; all the buttons are clearly labelled and the menus are intuitive so that you don’t keep needing to refer to the manual to find out what something does, or how to something. After a year in which I took very few photographs, this camera has got me excited about photography again.

I missed the Derby show last year for family reasons. This year it’s moved a different date, and moved out of it’s old home at The Assembly Rooms become the latest show to move to a dismal sports hall on the fringes of town. If you’re one of the minority of visitors that travels to shows by train, this is almost always a bad thing; rather than a location within walking distance of the main railway station, you have an extra half-hour’s travel each way by bus to get to the place. It’s why I don’t go to the Nottingham show any more; that one always such a pig to get to I’ve decided it’s not worth the effort.

Saying that, despite the hall lacking the character of the old Assembly Rooms, they still had a good selection of layouts and traders. Derby always emphasises non-British modelling, and there was a selection of French, Swiss, German, American and Canadian layouts as well as British outline. The simple but effective “Glenrothes North Junction” flew the flag for British N, a slice of 1990s central Scotland.

The traders did my credit card too some serious damage, with a lot of continental rolling stock doing it GBH in the first few minutes. The long-awaited Kato Swiss RIC stock is finally out at truly eye-watering prices, and last years modern Minitrix wagons have finally appeared, including the long tarpaulin-roofed flat. This is one of those 1:160 models of a continental loading-gauge prototype that happily scales very close to a 1:148 representation of an equivalent British gauge version. And I also picked up a Dapol InterCity livery DVT. There was also a Dapol 66 in DRS “Compass” livery which lunged at my credit card but missed, because I’d spent enough money by then.

Then it was a three hour journey by bus, two trains, a tram, and a lengthy walk across central Manchester to Bury for the latest date of Mostly Autumn’s spring tour. I’ve seen this band so many times that it’s not just the band, but their siblings, parents and significant others who are greeting me by name!

Mostly Autumn have been on blindingly good form on this tour, and tonight’s gig was no exception. Having Gavin Griffiths back on drums seems to have lifted the energy of the live performance to a new level  And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Heather as enthusiastic or as animated before this tour; she’s also on spectacular form vocally, and dominates the stage visually. Bury has always been a good venue to see the band, great atmosphere and good acoustics; just about the best sound balance I’ve heard on this tour; every voice and instrument clearly heard in the mix, and nobody so loud that they drowned out anyone else.

Still another half-dozen dates left on this tour; the next gig is next Saturday at Bilston in the Black Country, followed by appearances at Southampton, Tavistock, Oxford, Gloucester and Norwich. I’m planning on going to three of these. If you like powerful 70s-style melodic rock with a bit of celtic-flavoured prog thrown into the mix, you really ought to go to one of these.

But the charity concert in memory of Howard Sparnenn at The Duchess in York wasn’t any ordinary gig.  Six bands, all of which Howard had been involved with, with York’s finest, Mostly Autumn, topping the bill. This was as much a social gathering as a regular gig; many, many familiar faces in the crowd, and a lot of people I hadn’t had the chance to catch up with for ages. And the atmosphere for the whole evening was incredible; you did feel that it was really about Howard. And he was definitely there in spirit.

Smart Move and Freeway opened the evening with two entertaining sets of covers; Freeway were especially good with their mix of Thin Lizzy, UFO and Judas Priest songs, even though they made me feel old. I remember when too many of them first came out, and it was many years before Olivia Sparnenn was born. They were followed by Free Spirit and Flight, the latter reformed (again) for the occasion, with blues-rock sets made up of what I assumed was original material.

Breathing Space took the stage with a somewhat amended lineup due to some members being unavailable; Olivia Sparnenn and the Jennings brothers were joined by Bryan and Andy from Mostly Autumn, and Harry James from Thunder on drums.  With an improvised lineup this wasn’t the best Breathing Space gig I’ve ever seen, although “The Gap Is Too Wide” with Anne-Marie Helder guesting on flute was wonderful. I always find Livvy singing ‘The Gap’ incredibly moving. I know the song wasn’t originally about Howard, but it still fits.

Mostly Autumn are in the middle of their tour, and played a shortened version of their touring set. They rose above a few irritating technical glitches to deliver a tight but emotionally powerful performance. The band have been on superb live form this year, this one was well up to their usual standard. They finished in the only way they could, with “Tearing at the Faerytale”, the song written about Howard, and “Heroes Never Die”.

The evening ended with a film of Howard’s performing a drum solo, recorded in Matlock in Derbyshire some time in the 1980s. A reminder that Howard wasn’t just a great bloke, but a superb drummer as well.

Amidst the posts sneering at U2 (Guardian blog commenters absolutely hate U2 with a passion I can never quite understand), commenter Iainl sums up precisely why this proposed law is dangerously flawed.

I don’t pirate music. And I’m certainly not depriving you of any funds. But I still don’t want to be kicked off the internet just because some kid has randomly used my address as the spoof field when hiding their tracks - something that is already so common in email as to be totally unworkable.

That just about knocks the nail on the head.  With their past record of Mafia-like behaviour, I don’t even trust the media cartels to be able to distinguish between use of legitimate streaming sites like Spotify or Last.fm and illegal downloaders. And who’s to say the next time somebody in the record industry gets into a dispute with a legal file-streaming site over the level of royalty payments that they won’t respond by using this law to threaten that site’s users with disconnection?  Vague promises from record companies that they won’t do things like that are worthless.  Once such a law is on the statute books, somebody sufficiently nasty-minded or greedy will try to abuse it in that sort of way.

Even though I wish every major record company to go to the wall, I’m all in favour of creative types earning a fair reward for their efforts.  But I don’t trust the existing media cartels to do it for them. With their own long track record of ripping off their creative talent they don’t exactly have any moral high ground on which to stand.

And surely the big record companies are largely responsible for letting the download culture “music should be free” genie out the bottle in the first place, by spending too much effort trying in vain to prop up an obselete business model rather than attempting to devise a new one.

To give one example, one of the biggest drivers of illegal file-sharing sites has been the fact that the legal downloading sites wasted years crippling their products with DRM, which was something the marketplace clearly didn’t want. If you were foolish enough to hand over money for a DRM-crippled download, you merely rented the music for a random amount of time. Sooner or later you’d upgrade you media player, or the company you ‘bought’ the download from will decide to shut down the DRM authentication server, and your file will no longer play. You were simply better off pirating it from a file-sharing site.

By the time they realised that DRM was a crock and started selling the DRM-free downloads the marketplace wanted in the first place, illegal file-sharing was too well established. It’s now far harder for legitimate substription-based downloading sites to get going than it would have been had the cartels not tried in vain to strangle downloading at birth.

First, the price.  I cannot honestly say that £7.99 for a magazine with approximately the same number of pages as Classic Rock, which retails for a little over half that amount, really represents value for money in these recessionary times. The price is printed in such a tiny font many people aren’t realising the damage to their wallet until they reach the till.  It’s even been suggested that that they’re betting on people being too embarrassed to change their mind at that point. It also seems to have fairly limited availability; smaller newsagents that stock Classic Rock don’t seem to be selling it, and the only place you can buy it appears to be W.H.Smiths.

There are some good articles on artists like The Reasoning, Steve Wilson, Pendragon, Coheed and Cambria, and good (if somewhat sexist) piece on Women in Prog mentioning Mostly Autumn, Breathing Space and Panic room, among others. The recent London gigs by Panic Room and Mostly Autumn also get glowing reviews.

But there’s also a lot of recycled material from the past. The cover story on Pink Floyd doesn’t really tell us anything we haven’t read many times before, as do the similar retreads on Rush and ELP.  Worse still, the magazine contains too much very obvious space-filler. The worst offender is the 10 page article with Phil Jupitus discussing Genesis album covers, mostly taken up by large images of the album sleeves themselves, pure padding with little or no worthwhile content. One wonders how future issues will fare if they’re struggling to fill the very first one.

There’s also another serious concern. While it’s great to see bands like Mostly Autumn, Panic Room, Breathing Space and The Reasoning get some very positive reviews, I can’t help thinking that there’s going to be a very much reduced coverage of anything remotely “Progessive” in the parent magazine.  This makes me wonder if shunting progressive music into an overpriced, limited availability low circulation ghetto magazine will ultimately be a net loss.