Vinyl Release

Anyone remember SFX? Anyone? No? Nobody? Not to worry. It didn't live that long. SFX was a music magazine launched in November 1981, and which died on the vine in the Summer of '82. It was edited by ex-NME writer Max Bell and the twist was that all the content was on a cassette tape, not printed on paper. Billed as 'The only music magazine on C-60', there were about 19 issues in all, sold in the shops mounted on cardboard.

In Malibu, it seems, miracles really do happen. 'I was an Englishman. I didn't know it wasn't wise to go out at that time of day and take a swim, so I did. I decided to turn back and head for shore and at that point I realised, "I'm fighting the Pacific". There was no way I was going to win. There was no-one on this earth who could help me so I did the most instinctive thing... I called out to God and said, "God, if you save me, I'll work for you", and in that moment a wave came from behind me and pushed me forward. He saved me... The tide somehow had changed and I was able to get back to land.'

This is Graham Nash talking about David Crosby just over a year ago: 'Who are you? Are you a decent person? Or are you an a**hole? It would be very easy for me to get into why I don't want to do any more Crosby, Stills and Nash or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young work. There are too many reasons. It's too complicated. It's too painful. I'm just telling you, it's over. It's an incredible shame because when we're good, we make very good music that touches people's hearts and changes their minds. But he tore the heart out of CSN and CSN&Y because he's not a really great person'.

Every now and then, it's OK to be wrong. Not often, I grant you, but on occasion a long-held misbelief can be way better than the actual fact. That lyric you misheard years ago maybe, a phrase which has informed your enjoyment of a particular song – until you discover that the words and meaning were something different all along. Sometimes the reality can ruin the thereafter. And it's better to continue with your fantasy.

Whether life was imitating art or vice versa is a moot point, but whichever way you look at it Joseph Nye Welch was one extraordinary geezer. A partner in a Boston law firm called Hale and Dorr, on the 9th of June 1954 he found himself in court challenging Senator McCarthy to provide 'before sundown' the list of 130 Communists posing a so-called subversive threat in defence plants across the US.

Way back in the day, I was telling Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead about one of those weird cartoons that used to pop up in episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus on the telly. The particular cartoon in question featured a giant big toe, sliced off at the joint, which had been re-assembled as the tip of the trunk of some kind of prehistoric mammoth – an error in extrapolation which sought to ridicule scientific assumption in a similar vein to the way the Pythons mocked religion and politics, etc.