Guest Blogs

5 ALIVE – Steve Rastin – The Five Albums That Keep Me Alive

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Steve Rastin is the long suffering promoter from Rhyl who refuses to acknowledge the war is over and he just keeps fighting on… From putting on Wednesday night gigs at Bar Blu for five years from 2004, he currently promotes shows at the same venue – now called The Front Room.
Steve also wrote a weekly music column for the Rhyl Journal and produced a fanzine called Collide-A-Scope and a review website called Shanty Town.

Name:  Steve Rastin

Best known for:  Persistence…!

Current location: Rhyl

Where I’d like to be right now: Anywhere but Rhyl

My music collection has a lot of… Eclecticism

Don’t judge me for… Tax evasion

Five albums that keep me alive and why:
Cut – The Slits (42 years old and still nothing sounds quite like it).
The Clash – The Clash (quite literally life changing and a constant reminder to never let go of my roots).
Closer – Joy Division (sonic perfection and lyrics that chime with my darkest moments).
Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires – Scientist (the maddest, baddest dub collection ever).
Entertainment – Gang Of Four (even more influential both sonically and lyrically today than it was at its time of release).

GUEST COLUMN – Steve Rastin – “THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT”

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You could take a walk through the streets of any town pre-COVID and witness gangs of kids hanging around and often creating (mostly) low level nuisance, primarily through sheer boredom.
Nowhere to go and nothing to do except stay in their bedrooms playing on their Xboxes and munching Pringles, something that they then get criticised for anyway by older generations who can’t wait to have a pop at “the bloody kids of today”.
The obvious solution would be under 18s gigs where young bands, DJs and soloists could take their first tentative steps into public performance and where their mates could hang out, but these events have been conspicuous only by their absence in North Wales in recent times.

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CRUD COLUMN – Radio Killed The Video Star

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I’ve just bought a Google Home Device thing; y’know, one of those Alexa – Siri type things that spy on you and report you etc? The purpose being to ask it shit questions like, ‘Hey Google, why is Nigel Farage still alive?’ (Still waiting for the right answer on that one…) and to easily cast music from t’internet… For as much as I love playing the regular supply of vinyl that I struggle to keep up with… I also love listening to the radio…
Time is of course of the essence and so much time is taken up listening to and enjoying music (in my case, mostly new music) that I long for a method of downloading stuff directly into my head to save listening in real time! (does that make sense?). Eating breakfast, on walking, in the car, writing blogs, music is on as much as possible… And a great source for me for new material and enjoyment is the radio…More

GUEST COLUMN – Skip Dwight – The Verlaines – ‘Death And The Maiden’

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There are theories about human evolution that explore how, when and why our ancestors started producing art. One of these theories posits that for a large part of our pre-history there was no such thing as art. Early Man’s main focus was survival so artistic expression and appreciation didn’t even register as a ‘thing’. We now know that early Man started cave painting 70,000+ years ago. Expression through art was a massive leap forward in our evolution and it must have started with a single person.More

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