Down, Down...

Just when you thought 2016 couldn't take away another rock star... Rick Parfitt of Status Quo is gone.

The Quo were formidably good at what they did... but it wasn't really for me, and I never saw them live.

But many musicians rated and respected them – including, maybe surprisingly, John Lydon, who perhaps saw something punkish in the Quo's refusal to ever do anything but stick to basics and go for the lowest common denominator.

This year of the wins of Brexit and Trump and the losses of Bowie, Cohen and Prince (and many more) has been bloody awful. I dare to think that 2017 has to be better – rather than a case of down, down deeper and down.

Honest John

After John Densmore's 'Riders On The Storm', here's another essential rock book I should have read already and have only just got round to... and another honest John.

In 'Anger is An Energy' John Lydon certainly talks a good book. 'A paradiddle is what a drummer practises,' he explains. 'Every drummer I know, they're always in a corner going, 'Paradiddle, paradiddle, paradiddle', tapping their knees. 'As on so much else, he's right, of course. 

But he is particularly interesting when he gets to Ginger Baker (who, along with Tony Williams, played on Public Image Ltd's album 'Album').

'Look at what that fella did with drumming!' says Lydon. 'That's from the bombed-out part of London, that one, right? And in the 70s he's off to Africa to live with Fela Kuti before anybody even knew what that place was offering! He was straight into it...'

So right. Long before the discovery of so-called world music, Mr Baker had been there, done it and come back inspired.

Underground, Overground

Is this what we went through the Sixties for? It's difficult to decide whether the sleeve of Atom Heart Mother being adorned with the Queen's head and stuck on a stamp is a win or a lose.

This is the conundrum posed by a new set of official UK postage stamps dedicated to Pink Floyd.

The Floyd once appeared to be the epitome of the counterculture. Have they now been fully subsumed by the establishment? Or have they simply made a mockery of it?

On balance, maybe we should just smile and move on.

A set of Sex Pistols stamps next? With Johnny Rotten alongside the Queen's head...