Category Archives: Thoughts on the World

Last Friday we attended a wonderful concert celebrating the life and music of the late Jon Lord, “musician and gentleman”. This unique event filled the Royal Albert Hall, both in front of and the stage, which as befits the man who dedicated himself to merging orchestral and rock music, was largely filled by an impressive 80 piece orchestra, with only a small space at the front for the soloists and rock musicians.

After a few emotional introductions, the concert started with the first movement of the Concerto For Group And Orchestra, which led into a first half entirely devoted to Jon’s orchestral music. The highlight was undoubtedly a stunning rendering of Sarabande. The last time we saw Jon Lord was at the Sunflower Jam 2011, when he did a spine-chilling version with a solo violinist. This was quite different, as conductor and musical arranger Paul Mann used the full power of the group and orchestra at his disposal, and re-cast Sarabande as a rolling battle between the strings, and everyone else.

The second half followed a very different vein, with a focus on Jon’s rock music. Things got off to an excellent start with Paul Weller re-creating The Artwoods and running through a couple of their rocking 60s numbers – which I have on 8-track cartridge! Next up was the music of Paice Ashton Lord. Ian Paice and original bassist Bernie Marsden were supplemented by Don Airey, and a young Irish singer, Phil Campbell, who did great justice to the lyrics and vocals of the late Tony Ashton.

The focus then moved on to Deep Purple Mark 3/4, firstly with an orchestral version of Soldier of Fortune, then with the arrival of original bassist and backing vocalist Glenn Hughes, Bruce Dickinson joining on vocals, and a second keyboards slot filled by Rick Wakeman. This set included the ballads This Time Around and You Keep On Moving from the under-appreciated post-Blackmore album Come Taste The Band, for which Hughes and Lord obviously shared writing duties, but the crescendo was Burn. This was a great choice – a true Purple anthem which we will never hear from the current Glover/Gillan line-up, it showcases Hughes’ falsetto vocals which are undiminished from the 70s, and it has two organ solos, one each for Wakeman and Airey… Add an enthusiastic full orchestra and, I swear, the Albert Hall’s enormous pipe organ, and the sound was felt as much as heard.

Finally, the stage re-filled with the current Deep Purple line-up. They started their set with a couple of more recent tracks, including their own tribute to Jon Lord, Above and Beyond. They then got stuck into a selection of more classic tracks. Some, like Black Night, were played straight by the band, but appropriately most were re-cast to exploit the orchestral musicians. The two which particularly stick in my memory are Perfect Strangers, with the haunting riff perfectly suited to a large string section, and a unusual but very effective version of Lazy, with the lead guitar part played largely by a violin!

The culmination of the evening was an “all hands” version of Hush, featuring the full orchestra and for which many of the other solo musicians were invited back on stage. With more than 10 rock musicians and almost 80 orchestral ones this threatened to lift the Albert Hall’s famous roof, and clearly great fun was being had by all. Those who have criticised Jon Lord’s attempts to merge rock and orchestral music could not have been proven more wrong.

All in all, a fitting tribute to the great man.

Regular readers may be aware that I became very fond of a Google app called Currents. This took RSS-enabled news feeds, and presented them as attractive “magazines”. For feeds with significant image content (like most of the photography blogs I follow) Currents did a remarkable job.

Beyond making news reading sexy, Currents delivered two other pieces of distinct value: an easy to read default two-column layout on larger tablets, and a “stack” widget which allowed you to quickly swipe through the day’s news, aggregated chronologically, and click through to read the items of most interest.

However, I am writing this in the past tense. Currents is no more. An “update” a couple of weeks ago quietly moved my feed list over to the execrable “Google Play Newsstand” and uninstalled Currents. The replacement is clumsy, with none of Currents’ visual flair. An uninspiring reading experience is exacerbated by a useless widget which removes the brilliant former “flip through” capability.

Unfortunately this is not the first such aberration by Google. It’s less than six months since they killed off both the Reader app (maybe not such a great loss) and the sadly-missed iGoogle (which ironically was killed off allegedly because most users prefer Google’s tablet apps!) Now they are forcing us towards a dreadful replacement for the best of those apps, and I’m not happy…

This also comes on the back of various screw-ups regarding Chrome: the ready plain-text disclosure of stored passwords, the broken scrollbars, menus spaced ridiculously widely on normal PC displays. I could go on, and on, and on…

The arrogance of Google’s developers appears to be exceeded only by their stupidity or blindness to the faults in their “improvements”. When they deign to respond to a torrent of public displeasure, they do so by claiming that it’s our fault for not understanding the brilliance of their ideas, not by listening and responding to customer feedback.

I really don’t understand why Google are behaving this way, but it does seem that having emulated Microsoft’s successes of the 90s, Google are now determined to repeat their mistakes of the noughties, breaking compatibility, destroying things which worked well, and systematically driving customers into the arms of competitors. Apple might get away with treating customers with disdain, but Google have neither their shiny hardware nor the fans’ love for the blessed St. Jobs.

For now I’m sticking with Android and probably Chrome, but I’m genuinely interested in making sure the market starts to develop high quality alternatives, before Google rip their remaining carpets out from under us. If you know of a proper non-Google replacement for Currents please let me know.