Blake

Dreaming of #guitars: Teisco K-2L as played by Oscar from Liminal; Vintage REVO Series 'Galactica' & ‘Surfmaster’; Rapier 33 (remake of classic British sixties guitar, Watkins Rapier); and Epiphone 1958 Korina Flying V. Need to sell one before I can buy again, of course!

Believe, Villans. Before the Final, I wanted to take in the moment to share a few words with you all 💜 theplayerstribune.com/ezri-konsa-pre…

"𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲, 𝐛𝐨𝐲𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐠𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐭." Benjamin Zephaniah 💜🩵 #AVFC

Thanks very much for buying Revival! 🙌

New album Revival out today exclusively on @subvertworld - a new indie music co-operative by musicians for music lovers. subvert.fm/blake/revival #subvertworld #newalbum

"The Beatles came out, and there was life to what they were playing. Rock & roll seemed viable — it seemed less like prepackaged marketed pap, and more like there was some expansiveness to the music. I thought the Beatles' music had an incredible economy about it, and at the same time went just about anywhere you could want music to take you. "We were thinking, 'These guys are awful good.' But also, 'they look like they're having an awful lot of fun.' "So we became a rock & roll band. The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock ‘n’ roll band. What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing." --#BobWeir "It was like the Beatles were saying, 'You can be young, you can be far-out and you can still make it.' They were making people happy. That happy thing — that’s the stuff that counts — was something we could all see right away. "They're at least as responsible for us being here as anybody else is. They were real important to everybody. The Beatles took rock music into a new realm and raised it to an art form." --#JerryGarcia "I come from classical music, so my roots run back to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Chopin and Ives. It's a kind of larger scale of thinking. I personally think that with tunes — that is, songs with lyrics — you can hardly ever develop them. All it usually is, really, is a melody and lyrics and a chord change and you have to more or less be musically repetitive. "But there are some people who do tunes very well. The Beatles managed to put a lot of development in their stuff. There's nobody yet who has equaled what they did with a tune." --#PhilLesh "'Strawberry Fields' . . . god, it was just beautiful. It made your heart beat a little faster. And the content, the lyric content, was so powerful. The arrangements were perfect. It couldn’t have been better. [And] ‘Fool On The Hill’ — I can remember the room, we were in New Jersey, me and Jerry, listening in a tiny room. And there was no heat. It was the middle of the winter, and so we were in gloves and coats, and you could see the breath. And there it was, ‘Fool On The Hill' . . . we just looked at each other and said, ‘Oh boy, this is great music'. "The Beatles were really something to come to grips with. Because we really weren’t ready for a Beatles. They were big for The Grateful Dead and everybody who was listening to music in the '60s. When Beatles records came out, everybody went out and bought ‘em and went home, and listened to the Beatles. It was Beatles — Beatles, Beatles, Beatles." --#MickeyHart #GratefulDead #TheDead #Deadheads #JamBands #Improv #Psychedelia #HallOfFame #TheBeatles #Songwriting #Fun #Influence

Released over barely a year and a half, all the songs are here for not just a great album, but one of their best. Shuffle them about a bit, open with Lazy Line Painter Jane, close with This Is Just a Modern Rock Song, sequence the rest accordingly, and they could have put out one of the all-time great indie-pop records ( to go with the others they released). Still, the EPs have their own distinct magic, like hidden treasure. And anyway, wilfully straying from the path of success is part of what made Belle and Sebastian so special.

@batcountry1980 100% 🙌

I join Amnesty International in condemning #Eurovision and call everyone with a conscience not to watch it. BIG THANK YOU to the 5 countries who withdrew from the competition: Iceland! Ireland! Netherlands! Slovenia! Spain! Put Apartheid out of our lives.

My reaction to Keir Starmer's last ditch press conference - an unsurprising reaction but possibly a helpful one (at least to those who, like me, consider him an abysmal PM). Like many, I approached Keir Starmer's prime ministership with deep-seated pessimism, my expectations already set at rock bottom. Yet, I confess: I failed to foresee the clinical precision with which he and his inner cabal would sabotage their own administration and scar Britain. The crux of their debacle lay, first, in a distinctly dictatorial, authoritarian reflex. And second—crucially—in a seething contempt for those who lent them their votes, while simultaneously performing a grotesque pantomime of flattery toward those who never would, and never will, support them. Having exorcised from the Labour Party its most authentic voices—people of unimpeachable integrity, such as Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, a purge that eluded even Tony Blair’s repertoire—Starmer embarked on a rampage: He slashed disability benefits; armed and fed intelligence to the Israeli government as it executed genocide in Gaza; channeled his own inner Farage, perhaps his inner Enoch Powell, to vilify migrants and treat refugees as vermin; gutted international aid to masquerade as a defender of defence spending; bulldozed wildlife and their habitats; unveiled a new lexicon of draconian anti-protest laws; left trans people suspended in legal limbo; clung with religious fervour to absurd, socially ruinous fiscal rules; allowed Rachel Reeves to squander £100 billion covering the Bank of England’s outrageous and wholly unnecessary Quantitative Tightening losses—a gift that keeps giving to the City’s banks—while imposing yet another round of austerity on government departments and public services. Once the great hope of the downtrodden, Starmer’s Labour has become the villain - the genuinely nasty party. Once a human rights lawyer, he has single-handedly plunged Britain into a shoddy, incompetent authoritarianism. theguardian.com/politics/2026/…

@ITHERETWEETER1 @BluesWeiser @jhadleymusic1 @atslmusic @happyasyoulike @TheDrIsINMusic @mpclarke5 @EcceShnak @hausersmusic @leechristian69 @TheJoJoManBand @TheFodsBand @NightWolfUK @papasatch52159 Thanks! 🙏

It’s #bandcampfriday and here’s a free download of my cover of one of my favourite #PaulMcCartney songs, ‘Temporary Secretary’. thisisblake.bandcamp.com/album/temporar…

Can’t wait for Sir Olly Robbins to win his unfair dismissal case. #StarmerOut

Visited Gwent Gardens, Townhill, Swansea yesterday where one of my heroes, Pete Ham, grew up. Also went to Ivey Place that inspired his band’s first name, The Iveys. A beautiful and talented man who left us way too soon. #peteham #badfinger #theiveys

@davedavieskinks You're Dave -fucking- Davies. Pay this man no mind.youtube.com/watch?v=GP0X0C…

@RichardBurgon I’m afraid it means giving up on Labour, Richard. It’s dead. Starmer and his ilk killed it in 2020.

Blame for Labour’s defeat lies squarely with Keir Starmer and his clique. They put factional interests over having the candidate best placed to win, Andy Burnham. If Labour is to be the “Stop Reform” party, then the leadership must stop treating progressive voters with contempt - and start appealing to them. That means a return to real Labour values - through policies like a Wealth Tax, public ownership of energy and water, and an ethical foreign policy that are all popular with the public. And it means ditching the approach of trying to ape Reform and kicking the left, that has alienated so many people who have voted Labour previously.

George Martin, the Beatles' producer, was received like that in Brazil, with the girls choir Meninas Cantoras de Petrópolis, in 1997. Song: "Because" by The Beatles. #smlpdf #sheetmusic #Noten #partituras #spartiti 乐谱 樂譜 sheetmusiclibrary.website

Our public services aren’t for a secretive profit-hungry US tech firm. Sign the petition to tell the Government to scrap all contracts with secretive US tech firm Palantir. you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop… via @38degrees

@jeremycorbyn @M_Star_Online 👏

For too long, Britain has blindly followed the United States as it indulges in disastrous imperial fantasies around the world. It’s time to forge a different path. My piece for @M_Star_Online. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/britai…

@OborneTweets @Pollydoodle1 “But Harold Wilson was onto something important when he said the Labour Party was a “moral crusade or it is nothing”.” 👏

Starmer was doomed the moment he sacked Sue Gray and chose instead the adolescent McSweeney. I charted this tragedy foretold in my Byline Times diary. Here are the relevant extracts: