"Space Does Not Care"

[Tom Byrne]

Having sat up to listen to this until 3am last night, I just thought I'd write in to praise Chuck's show.

It's a really eclectic mix of psychedelic, progressive and space rock music. Subjective opinion - some of it is awful, some mediocre, a lot of it very good indeed. The point is that Chuck makes a very wide selection and presents stuff that would otherwise just not be heard. 

I had a bit of an epiphany at the end of his show, when he played the closing tracks of "Chronicle of the Black Sword". Despite the mystical bent of my own work, I've always preferred the technogically inspired Hawkwind material, typified by the Calvert period - High Rise, Robot, Uncle Sam, Damnation Alley, etc. The fantasy stuff of the mid 80s never did a lot for me, and Chronicle, purchased in 85, never got a lot of playing. However, I was very impressed by the closing section last night, (maybe I've mellowed over the years!) and consequently it will be on the turntable later today!

(I should say that my favourable opinion of Chuck's show is by no means influenced by the fact that he has played 50% of my own album over the last few weeks!)

Well done Chuck, keep up the good work.

As far as my own stuff is concerned, I'm about 1/4 of the way through my second album "Asham Fair" - thanks to Steve Youles, Arin Komins and Rich Warren for acting as imptomptu critics and suffering the odd MP3 DCCed over to them on IRC for comment!

Amazon appear to have decided they want to charge struggling artists an exhorbitant sum for selling their stuff in z-shops, so the listing of the first album there has finished and is now on ebay. It's selling reasonably well (a few copies despatched this week), but as its progressive style is celtic/world music based rather than space or psychedelic, I think I'll seek out an appropriate distributor when I get tired of stuffing the odd 2 or 3 envelopes a week myself.

Having done my homage to my celtic roots, I'm enjoying working on the 2nd album, which is a rather heavier, space-rock influenced product.

Regards

Tom Byrne