START TOWER BRIDGE I hadn't heard from Robinson in a long while. The last I'd heard he was spending his days talking unprofitably to strangers on the internet, in between bouts of unsatisfying and poorly-paid occasional work. REALLY STUPID I listened to the first record I ever bought, again, the other day. I thought it fabulous: in fact, I thought it sounded better than ever. There were things - the piano break on 'Don't Want Anything To Change', for instance - which, 13 years and a few bands on, sounded a lot more impressive than they did in the suburbs of 1988. THE LOOK Even for aesthetes like us, vanity projects are not the way forward. Robinson has never been tempted to grow a moustache. RAIN, ASPHALT AND LIGHT I listened to The Trinity Session again too. I didn't even bother dragging out the old Chris Roberts reviews. I can pretty much quote them verbatim anyway. The album practically made me want to go and form a quiet, echoingly minimal rootsy folk-country combo that plays original materials and cover versions of cunningly-adapted standards. JOHN FLINTSTONE We made it. It was a close thing at times, but we survived. We staggered out of the B%(*&dale gig still intact, just about. We had trained ourselves for weeks with special sick-bags, manufactured in a new factory outside Warrington, thinking that at the end of this course we would be ready for anything B^&%^dale could throw at us. Of course, we were wrong. SWEDEN / SWEDEN / OOOH! There had been rumours that Robinson had become embroiled in a heterosexual relationship, but he hotly denied them. He took me to a travel inn on the outskirts of Basingstoke. It was said that Samuel Richardson had once stayed on the site of the original inn, the Robertson Arms. TINY VICTORIES Robinson reads to me from the Melody Maker, Spring 1989. Pat Kane of Hue and Cry, responding to an interviewer, says that he corresponds with a 13-year-old girl, who worries alternately about her skin and the state of the ozone layer. 'She's the Ordinary Angel, the archetypal Hue and Cry fan'. TYNE BRIDGE He said that it would have been absurd to ask Mondrian to add a few more colours to his palette. I cannot tell you where he finally found 'Love'. END _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "peculiarly deranged fanbase" "frighteningly named +-+ +-+ Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+