Usually, I tend to fill most of my spare moments with work of one kind or another. But this weekend, exhausted, I made a policy decision to ignore the manuscript awaiting my peer-review, my own manuscript that’s awaiting revisions in response to others’ reviews, and the sermon series than I need to start preparing; and I watched four films instead. It was fun.
A few years ago, I wrote about the heavy metal band, Anne Heap of Frogs, that I was the guitarist for in my late teens; and then about Crossfire, the band that come out of that, and some other bits and pieces. But there is one more chapter to the story, and it’s much more impressive.
After singing with AHOF and Crossfire, Richard Whitbread went on to front a much more serious band, Metal Jester, which did well enough to get a gig at the Marquee — then, one of the top rock venues in the UK. The layout of the ticket suggests they were third on a bill of three, which would still pretty darned impressive, but as Richard elucidates below, they were actually the main act.
Last time, we looked at the first six Genesis albums, with Peter Gabriel in the lead singer role. When he left the band at the end of the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour, things did not look good for the quartet he’d left behind. But they decided to carry on without him, promoting drummer Phil Collins into the lead-vocal slot. Collins would go on to sing lead on eight Genesis albums, two more than Gabriel had — but were they good?
Posted in Music, Retrospective
The Reinvigorated Programmer 