Iron Butter Tray

Memories. Treacherous little bastards that they are. This is a tale that starts with an episode of the Simpsons and ends in surprise, disappointment and something else that I haven't thought of yet but will add into the final edit.

The modern world, eh? Everything on tap. At the drop of a hat.

The Simpson's has some great jokes. I've modelled my fatherhood on Homer. Ron. A joke with Ron in it had to be my favourite.

"In the Garden of Eden" by I. Ron Butterfly.

Obsessive is a bit of a recurring theme in my life. Beer. Pies. Music. In particular the sort of stuff the NME liked in my formative years. (Meat and potato, that's what the NME recommended. None of that revisionist beef and onion crap.)

Skint. That describes my childhood years. No money for new records and no effing downloads. What were my options? Systematic taping from the radio and second hand stalls.

Funny how some things stick in your memory. I can remember setting off for that market. In a field. A car boot you'd call it now. Me and my brother. Dragging poor Mum around all those record stalls. Standing while we went flickidy flickidy flick through banks of disks. It must have driven her crazy. Like my kids do me, when they browse a games shop.

We'd prepared, me and my brother Dave. We were on the look out for Strange Locomotion and Tom and Jerry. And, of course, that late sixties stuff I'd been reading about in NME.

The world is a very different place now. Film, music, TV. Everything is available at the drop of a switch. Jammy. jammy, jammy bastards, the kids of today. Telly programmes were shown once or twice and then gone forever. There were no videos or DVD's. If you wanted to watch a film, you had to go to the cinema or wait five years until it was shown on TV.

Records. Most were deleted within a year or two. Most stuff more than a couple of years old was only available second hand.

You see these threads merging here?

In some bleak East Midlands field, I was delighted to get my sticky teenage hands on a weighty, if scratchy, copy of Ball by Iron Butterfly. (In term of  record-buying coups, it rates second to finding The Standell's Try It for 25p in Mablethorpe.*)

I've not listened to it in years. It was quite a shock. I can't remember bugger all of it. Not even the tracks that inspired the poetry I burned on reaching nineteen.

Barnsley Bitter, Home Mild, Holes Mild. That's what I drank back then, in the days when I though Ball was the grooviest record ever. I hope my memory of the beer is better.




* At least for me. Dave's highlight was finding Five Live Yardbirds in Cornwall. I record that later went missing when in my custody. He still hasn't forgiven me.