This episode of Recovering Queen was such a delight to listen to. They’re covering the wonderful Bicycle Race, a definite 10/10 Queen song. I love their banter about the song itself and the cover at the end was fantastic!
Tag Archives: Music
1986 Interview With John Deacon
I love this interview with John Deacon, bass player with Queen. He comes across as a very ordinary and likeable person.
Interesting to hear his recollection of Under Pressure, that it was David Bowie pushing them to do it better.
Queen at Live Aid
It was 40 years ago today. I remember watching bits of Live Aid and had a VCR recording it, but as an almost ten year old, I got bored and went out to play. So I don’t remember seeing Queen play that day, but I’ve watched their performance multiple times since.
The official Queen YouTube channel is showing a remastered version of their set for 24 hours only, so the video above may not work if you’re visiting this blog post in the future.
Go get yt-dlp and save a remarkable performance for your own viewing pleasure!
Now, go look at a 480p version of their set. You’ll notice some improvements to the audio, which I like, but the 1080p video in the remaster could have been so much better.
Edit a few days later: it’s gone. I hope you grabbed a copy for yourself!
Primer (Oscilloscope Music)
Here’s a cracking demo by DJ_Level_3 and Marv1994 done on an Oscilloscope, with the music creating the visuals. The music is great too, but of course, it’s not really responsible for the visuals, there are high-frequency sounds doing that, which we can’t hear. Utterly amazing stuff.
The demo got 1ST PLACE in Wild, and 1ST PLACE in Crowd Favorite at the recent demo party, Revision 2025.
Thanks Hackaday for featuring it.
Dick Van Dyke and Chris Martin in Coldplay’s latest video
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started watching this video, but it is so sweet and lovely, you have to watch it.
Queen of the Cold Feet
My wife and I have started rewatching Cold Feet, and I couldn’t help but notice that we’re now older than the characters during their original run at the turn of the century. It’s a strange sensation to watch characters who are at a younger stage of life than I am now, especially since I once thought of them as older, embarking on family adventures that I wouldn’t consider for several more years.
Anyway, in season 3, one of the characters is getting IVF, and they want some music. It’s weird how the nurse got the name of the song wrong, but I guess they weren’t able to license that one, and the music would have been added later…
There’s a funny meme about that song. If I find it, I’ll add it to this post.
Keith Jarrett – The Cologne Concert
I’d heard of the troubles Keith Jarrett had when he played in Cologne but forgot to find out what his music sounded like until I came across the incident again this morning while listening to Cautionary Tales.
Jarrett was due to play in the opera house there and requested a particular type of piano. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the one he wanted and provided him with a beaten up rehearsal model. It was out of tune, the pedals were sticky, and it was in a terrible condition.
He refused to play at first, but after the promoter, an 18yo woman named Vera Brandes pleaded with him to play. He had to avoid broken keys, and concentrated most of his playing in the middle of the keyboard.
To make things worse, he had driven over the mountains from Switzerland the previous night, his back was in a brace, and he was hungry, having had to miss his dinner earlier in the evening.
I haven’t listened to all of it, but it is remarkable what he coaxed out of such a broken piano! Sometimes, less is more.
Celebrating Shane MacGowan at his funeral
This is a fantastic way to celebrate someone’s life. RIP Shane.
Thanks to my wife and this Reddit thread for the links.
Get Smart gets Ska
Remember Get Smart? If you’re of a certain age, you saw this when it was broadcast, or if you’re slightly younger, you saw it on reruns on Saturday mornings, or you might even have come across the 1990s remake, which I haven’t watched yet.
Anyway, the theme song was great. It’s instantly recognisable and the Melbourne Ska Orchestra did a great version of the Get Smart theme song with a ska beat. If you liked the original I think you’ll love this. Great video too!
Get Smart ska style.
Open Cubic Player and Mods
Oh dear. This will be so niche that nobody is going to read. Anyway.
Long before MP3 files were a thing, the world had mod files. It had s3m, xm, and it music files. There was a thriving scene of musicians creating music for the love of it. Files were distributed on bulletin boards, by swapping disks and in the early internet of the mid to late nineties, by downloading from Hornet or ftp.cdrom.com.
Before I was really online I frequented BBSes in Ireland and every Sunday morning I’d download the latest week’s worth of new scene music from a BBS in Northern Ireland. Luckily, the telephone system here was loosening up, and we had pretty cheap rates at the weekend and in the evenings. There was a huge amount of rubbish there but some classics too, all sadly rotting away on some long forgotten hard drive.
The days of using a modem meant a slow connection to the world. Thankfully, the files weren’t huge. Unlike MP3 files, mod files were instructions on using embedded samples to play the music. The samples were short 8 or 16 bit sounds that were used over and over to make the music. That resulted in tiny files. For example, the title music to Cannon Fodder, a piece of music that is over 2 minutes long, is only 245Kb, and that was a fairly large file for the time.
Want a taste of amazing mods without doing any work? Many years ago I purchased a compilation CD called Freedom with some remarkable tracks. Here are a few songs from it. YouTube really doesn’t do them justice, however. You can grab MP3 rips of the CD from scene.org or look for the songs on The Mod Archive.
How do you play mod files today? The simplest way is by using VLC player. That player natively supports several mod formats. Install it and double-click your mod files to load them. Another option is Open Cubic Player. You’ll find the original DOS version on that site, but a separate Unix port is now maintained on this GitHub repository. Opinion on how good a player it was is divided in the community, but I loved it.
It’s a command line application you can install on macOS with brew install ocp or grab the Linux version from the GitHub repository. A DOS version is available from their homepage, which might let you run it on Windows. I created a macOS application using Automator. I had it “run shell script” and entered the following to change the directory to where my MOD files are stored and then launch the player:cd ~/retro/MODS/ && /usr/local/bin/ocp
Save that as an application and copy into Applications. I couldn’t get it to load mod files by associating them in Finder but it’s possible to use the file navigator built into the player.
If you were active in the PC demoscene in the 90s, you’ll probably remember this player, and I think you’ll enjoy revisiting some of your old mod favourites. You can download mod files from a few sites listed on the Open Cubic Player GitHub page, but the best place to look is The Mod Archive. Best of all, you can play the mods in your browser, so you don’t need to worry about this ancient player at all. Their “About Modules” page lists other players for Linux, macOS, and Windows too.