Another quick-fire report from Blighty thanks to Jim Jupp and Ghost Box Records. Yesterday postie called by with another fantastic package from Jim –
Fellfoul by Mulgrave Audio featuring a score by Jim and Belbury Poly. If you’ve not come across it, Mulgrave Audio is making atmospheric audio dramas that catapult me back to the days when TV drama and public information films in the UK had an undercurrent of ephemeral threat and usually we’re accompanied by incredible music.

This 10″ vinyl includes a page of the accompanying Fellfoul comic strip with art by that absolute legend of UK comics John Ridgway!

“Fellfoul has all the feel of a lost episode of Dramarama or Play for Today, a curiously British affair that is imbued with a sense of teh bizarrely normal.” – Starburst Magazine

If you have any passion for those autumnal, slightly odd folklore driven TV dramas from the 80s and their dreamlike scores you need to get this.

You can order it via the Mulgrave Audio and Ghost Box shops.

In other news, I’m typing this before heading off an a four hour drive down to Stroud where I will be catching up with a Derry & Toms original… Tash is getting hitched!

Will there be another report with wedding photos tomorrow?

I dunno.

I’ll probably get langered though.

In podcast news, the next episode is just around the corner. I’m talking to returning guest Allister Thompson about The Land That Time Forgot… The book by ERB… The film scripted by Moorcock and Cawthorn… Its cinematic sequel and… The Asylum remake starring and directed by C Thomas Howell. And that my friends was a real challenge to get through.

But we did it for you.

Then we’ll reconvene with Miles to try and get past just banging on about all things Doctor Who to properly cover The Coming of the Terraphiles. Maybe.

As the last few months have been generally all over the place with real life events I’m reckoning on things settling a bit for the summer (with any luck) so I’ll be rebuilding the itinerary for the coming second half of 2024. It will soon be time to launch the Halloween poll too, which seems odd as we’ve only just passed the summer solstice.

HA!

Summer my arse. The weather here in the North of England has been fucking bollocks. But the sun has come out today for Tash, so that’s a good omen.

Anyway, I’d better get driving so take care out there. When I get back, the second John Ridgway page that includes a download code for Fellfoul will be headed out to a Patron Demon…

Until we meet again… On the Moonbeam roads.

FINALLY!

After all this dancing around the subject of Michael Moorcock writing for the iconic Doctor Who IP and talking Alien and Quatermass and Blake’s 7, Miles joins me in the Cloister Room as we just about get to The Coming of the Terraphiles…

Just about…

But with our tendency to go off on tangents AND 61 years of Doctor Who to consider perhaps it was inevitable that this would be a multi-part deal. Anyway, join us as we talk about Timelords, edgy 90s Who novels, 12p swiss rolls and much more besides… even a bit of Moorcock here and there.

 My publicity shot for my ‘The Next Doctor Who’ pitch – who needs question marks when you can simply look mysterious/confused

LISTEN TO THE CASUAL TREK PODCAST

After a gloomy first few months of the year, wholesome rays of sunshine are breaking through the bruised skies and lifting moods across the land. Or here in Derry and Toms certainly.

As the fug ascends, I’ve been deep into my musical backlog of bandcamp pickups and vinyl deliveries.

First up, Jim Jupp’s Ghost Box Records released their fifth Pye Corner Audio platter – The Endless Echo.

If sinister dance grooves overlaid with an atmosphere of menace are your jam, get down and pick this up. The heavyweight vinyl is yet another example of how Jim and Ghost Box have an essential place in the marketplace if you’re looking for their specific brand of haunted folk psychedlia and electronic grooves. Which, quite frankly, you you should be.

Yet to take a spin is my signed double live album by Whitley Bay’s finest Moorcock-inspired metaloids, Tygers of Pan Tang.

I have been streaming it though and the new material from their 2023 studio release Bloodlines clearly demonstrates they haven’t lost a step in their steady pursuit of solid NWOBHM stompers. As a vintage 80s greb I really should have paid more attention to the Tygers. Beyond name recognition they never really did it for me at the time but this live set has had me digging back into their catalogue and I think I may have been missing out. I think I always demanded a certain level of darkness, grandeur and epsicosity in my metal, including thrash, but I’ve mellowed with time and these days I just appreciate a great metal banger. And this album delivers.

Over on Bandcamp there have been a surplus of riches these past few months, first and foremost via our occasional co-host and top mucker Imrryr. His latest release By then we’ll be dust and the regret of others (only his third this year – you’re getting slack D) is a sobre doom metal-laced meditation on just how fucked things are for so many people but it contains a hopeful seed.

Characteristically atmospheric and layered this is the first collaboration between Imrryr and Owlripper Recordings in the Czech Republic. As always you can bag Immryr’s entire back catalogue for a snip and, as it happens, you can do the same with Owlripper too. Well worth the shelling out.

Meanwhile, Duck Pond Sailor, all-round top fella, co-host and GNS specialist Graham sent me a mysterious package…

This unmarked and enigmatic cassette, found at a car boot sale, contains some remarkable underground electronica evoking memories for me of sweaty clubs and warehouses circa 1992 or 3. Incredible, evocative and hypnotic. Whatever the true solution to this riddle, you can check out the tunes for yourself and slip into the sweaty, post-E fug and pick them up on Bandcamp.

There might even be a cassette or two left from G’s haul.

Over on a different slant entirely, our favourite Canadian co-host and musical tour de force Allister Thompson is not only closing in on the final stretch with his new novel, but he’s continuing to pursue his wider passions with his second album of old British and Irish traditional favourites – Ancestors

Allister is one of the most eclectic and versatile artists out there, with a catalogue that includes (but is not restricted to) prog, folk, kosmiche organ drone and post-rock. And even some Moorcock inspired atmos…

And Allister will be back in D&Ts soon as we look to tackle another chunky raft of material with the confluence of MM, ERB and Doug McClure!

All that is really only scratching the surface of what’s been in my ears lately (including the latest excellent releases from Hawkwind and spin-off Hawkestrels).

On the podcast front, you’ll have noticed a recent lack of strictly Moorcock-focused content. That’s partly accidental and partly down to recent events ripping up the schedule, but we’ll be back with some MM yakkin’ soon, one which we’ve been building to steadily with all of our IP shenanigans and another that just needs programming back in now that shit seems to be settling down.

Join my co-conspirator John and me as we board the Civil Administration ship London where our brutally oppressive crew sets the speed to Time Distort 5 and makes for Cygnus Alpha where we will all suffer for our crimes!

En route, we’ll have plenty of time (between beatings and summary executions) to discuss Trevor Hoyle‘s novelisation of the first four episodes of Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7 and the series itself. And some other stuff.

Sadly, we chose a book that features NO SERVALAN WHATSOEVER. But we still talk about her…

Andy Darby is back in Derry and Toms to talk about his all-new novel, The Blade in the Angel’s Shadow!

Enochian madness, brutal sieges, swordplay and the machinations of the Elizabethan court all combine to give our heroine a hard time, some gnarly powers and a profound ethical dilemma.

It’s available from all good stockists now…

Andrew Nette returns to Derry and Toms as we continue to muse over some formative telly, novelisations and other stuff but on this occasion to talk about Nigel Kneale’s enduring and iconic character Professor Bernard Quatermass (and a load of other digressions, naturally, including brief musings on a favourite mercenary war flick). We roam around the original Hammer films, the impact of Quatermass on the zeitgeist and, most specifically, the 1979 serial and its novelisation by Nigel Kneale himself.

HUFFITY-PUFFITY PUFF!!!

Loz returns to Derry & Toms to talk about the remaining tales we haven’t covered that complete The Weird of the White Wolf. 

Elric tests some early chat-up lines in While the Gods Laugh, Moonglum finally shows up in The Singing Citadel and Loz bares all (though not his nipple) in a grievance-filled tirade against neopolitan ice cream.

JOIN US!

Here we are in March and the schedule is hotting up. As of yesterday, we have three episodes in the can queued for editing and many more on the itinerary.

Yesterday I recorded with Andrew Nette for the third time and it’s always a pleasure Andrew, particularly when you tell me it’s a balmy evening down under whilst drinking an iced Tullamore Dew and I’m sitting there freezing my knackers off drinking lempsip on a grey, miserable and wind-swept Bradford morning.

Anyway, minor grumbles aside it was a great conversation as always and we went off down various rabbit holes, as is de rigueur for Breakfast in the Ruins. One, in particular, was around the English character actor Percy Herbert, who will be a well-known and instantly recognisable face to anyone of my ilk as he appeared in around 90 films over the post-war period up until his death at the age of 72 in 1991.

Sometimes it takes such an observation to kick off a brief investigation into folk like Percy and he had a staggeringly eventful life. He served in WW2, was injured in the Far East, and ended up in Singapore’s Alexandra Hospital, the scene of the notorious 1942 massacre of doctors, nurses and patients by the invading Japanese Imperial Army. Subsequently, along with just a handful of other survivors, he was sent to Changi POW camp and over the remainder of the war was put to work on the Burma Railway, where not only would he work on the Bridge Over the River Kwai, but post-war be cast in the film and pull dual-duty serving as consultant to director David Lean.

Later he would go on to feature in Carry On films, dozens of other war movies (including a personal favourite of mine – Too Late the Hero – if you haven’t seen it it’s a great example of the very rare selection of acerbic and deeply cynical war movies that focus upon the British army in the Far East in WW2*, albeit it’s a US-produced Robert Aldrich flick) and even genre flicks like One Million Years B.C. 

And, naturally, he rocked up in The Wild Geese alongside Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris and a busload of other British war cinema bit-part stalwarts…

What a fucking dude!

He has now made it onto my fantasy casting list. I gave this some considerable thought and I’ve settled on von Villach, chief lieutenant to Count Brass. His final appearance was in the 1987 film The Love Child alongside a young Peter Capaldi who, incidentally, would make a pretty great Bowgentle.

In podcast news, the first of those three queued-up pods will be appearing in a week or so and we’ll be back with Elric as Loz and I complete our reading of The Weird of the White Wolf, which we started way back in episode one with The Dreaming City.

But first, Phil and I have the small matter of decamping to Great Yarmouth for our annual nerd-in Sci-Fi Weekender where we generally just hoot it up staying in a trailer for a long weekend talking to comic artists, drinking over-priced beer and forcing down our free VIP Jagermeister. I’ll probably post another report from that very trailer so stay tuned…


*See also The Long and the Short and the Tall