Steve Thompson

http://laterbro.com/messages/

This article is taken from a story I wrote ages ago called "Remembering the Eighties". The 80's story was originally commissioned by a website called "Metal Godz". The site is long gone and my eighties article remains unfinished and unpublished. [caption id="attachment_792" align="alignright" width="300"] Click to enlarge.[/caption] During all the recording sessions for Neat Records we had the assistance of Conrad Lant. Conrad was a good tape op and got on well with everyone. He was always going on about his own band. It seemed that they saved up for about 3 months until they could afford enough pyrotechnics to blow up half a city and then they  had a major blow out and had to save up to do another show. Conrad said very little about the music, it was mostly about the explosions. One day he informed me that the bass player had quit and he was being called upon to play bass. A gig was imminent so I loaned him my Gibson EB3 I still had from my own early career. Conrad could barely contain himself seeing all these bands make recordings. He wanted his band committed to tape too. We had a slack day coming up so I relented and said he could bring his band in during down-time. Again I loaned him the bass. I produced three tracks with them but the only title I remember was "In League With Satan". I taught t he guys a musical trick sometimes called "The Devil". Theoretically known as the "tri tone" it is a very discordant combination of two notes and I thought it would be most effective in their music. Say you were playing a G, the tri tone from that would be C#. At high volume it sounded horrible and they loved it. I had no idea these tracks would come out as a single, I just produced it as a favour. Now Conrad was convinced he was on the way to mega stardom and in need of a bass so I let him talk me into selling him my EB3. I explained the history of the instrument and made him promise it was going to a good home. The next time I saw my old bass it had holes drilled in it and an upside down crucifix nailed crudely to it. My bass was now a mess and Conrad had become Chronos!  

The "Do Button" from IFTTT looks like having amazing possibilities  https://ifttt.com/products

I wrote Lonely at The Top for the Tygers of Pan Tang for their 3rd album "The Cage" back in 1982. They were already planning to record my song "Paris By Air" but their chief songwriter, John Sykes had just quit the band and strong songs were in short supply. I went round to their management office which was above a Carpet shop in Whitley Bay and played this song to their manager (My brother Graham actually). Tom Noble may also have been present. All I had was an acoustic guitar so I demonstrated the song with much arm twirling, foot stomping and shouted "kabooms". They loved it and said "go ahead and make a demo" - which I did, and the song made the album. What I didn't realise until just now (see pic) was that the song also came out as a single. To be honest in 1982 things went ballistic with my songwriting and I would have had a hard time keeping track of where any of my songs were.

Sorry to bother you with tests but it seems my Wordpress postings do get triggered to Google + via the Jeptack sharing plugin. However the title is not included and it seems a somewhat random image from my blog gets posted. What happens if I purposely add an image to this post?

Also go to Googe+ Sorry, as you've probably guessed, this is yet another test.

I  shared a letter on Zero Hours contracts a few days ago on Facebook  thinking my little circle of bolshy friends may have something to say about it. Now I'm astounded to see it's been shared over 14,000 times and the likes may go over 13,000 anytime soon. This and the 100's of PM's I've received from some pretty desperate people tell me that this is not just one mans rant. These are big numbers that endorse my belief that there's a lot if injustice going on. It's not just abusive "employment" conditions either. There is housing rental injustice as pointed out by my friend Kev Howard who also brought to my attention recently the injustice being perpetrated on people with disabilities by ATOS et all. I'm sure there's more e.g. the financial injustices: corporate greed, bankers bonuses and tax avoidance that everyone is talking about. The exorbitant cost of life's necessities such as water, gas and electricity. The mis-labeling of our food products. I was just remarking to my wife yesterday, if we put together the money we've clawed back in illegal banking charges and mis-sold PPI over the past few years it amounts to a huge chunk stolen from our income. What the hell is happening? What can we do about it all?

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These pictures are from the Aspirational Digital Stories workshop held in July 2014. All the participants designed their ideal city and then presented their ideas to the group















e group.

In 1999 Tom Kelly and I wrote and produced a musical "Steel Town". It tells of a young man's dream of escaping the Steel Works into the world of music (wonder who that could be?) Tom produced the lyric to the song I'm posting which brilliantly captures how that young man's parents may have felt (who could they be?) As we now know, those who did not escape Consett steel works saw its demise in 1980. We put the musical on at the Custom House South Shields and then we took it home to the Empire in Consett. Tom and I are now re-developing the musical to become a Teesside story. To help this we're running some community workshops complete with fantastic archive film from the North East Film Archive. This video shows a lot of Teesside people but only uses minimal clips from the archives so I feel comfortable showing it here. For more you'd have to come to a workshop.

After Windows 7, Movie Maker changed drastically. There is no time line. In my opinion the timeline is fundamental to video editing (also to music and audio). The lack of a timeline in my view renders Movie Maker in Windows 7 and beyond useless.

 WMM 2.6 

 Luckily there is a work around. Download Windows Movie Maker 2.6 and install on your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer. http://on-msn.com/wmm26 

HD Format 

 A couple of other things are worth doing also. Windows Movie Maker does not always support HD formats. To get around this you need to install some plugins (very easy and straight forward) You can find the plugins here www.stmedia.org/dl/hdplugins.zip 

 The plugins will give you the following resolutions to save your movie to:

• 1280x720
• 1440x1080
• 1920x1080
• 960x720 

 Look on your drive for your Movie Maker 2.6 which will be in a location something like the following:

 C:\program files\Movie Maker
 OR C:\Program Files (x86)\Movie Maker 2.6 

Copy the prx files to the shared folder as follows…………

 C:\program files\Movie Maker\shared\profiles 
 OR C:\Program Files (x86)\Movie Maker 2.6\shared\profiles 

 If the “profiles” folder does not exist then go ahead and create it.

I was sad to hear this week that Alvin Stardust had died. I spent quite a bit of time with Alvin in the late 80's producing an albums worth of my songs with him. The tracks never saw the light of day so I'll attach a compilation of them to this post. I know Alvin was not his real name but I always called him that and he always referred to himself that way. He called me a while back and we talked about dusting off these recordings and trying to do something with them. Clearly that must have been before he embarked on the album that he planned to release in November but I now realise he was suffering with cancer at the time he called. He never mentioned it of course. I remember him as quite a gentleman always very polite to everyone and never the pop star. He came to Newcastle several times to work on the recordings and sometimes stayed at my home in Whitley Bay. I didn't drive in those days so we got the metro to the studio in Newcastle each morning. He didn't bat an eyelid and nobody recognised him. I did see the pop star side one time however. After one set of sessions he was due to catch an early flight next morning so he was staying in a hotel. I dropped him off there in a taxi and as he went up to reception he said "watch this". He checked in and on some subterfuge or other asked to see the duty manager. When she arrived he turned on the charm and a glowing pop star smile. The manageress asked if he would mind having his photo taken in front of the hotel and insisted on upgrading him to a suite of rooms at no extra charge. As she went off  to make these arrangements he turned and winked at me and said "works every time" !

I've only scratched the surface with IFTTT https://ifttt.com/ but it looks set to become ever more highly regarded with $30M in funding. IFTTT is pronounced like Gift without the "G". It means "If This (happens) Then (make) This (happen). It's kind of a visual programming tool kit for the Internet and social media. It's pretty easy to use and there are lots of "recipes" you can use to get started. The recipes do things like: send a tweet if a YouTube Video gets commented on, send me an email if it will be raining tomorrow or Monitor a Wikipedia Page. You and edit and refine existing recipes or make your own using the easy toolkit. Now they have announced a set of recipes for outer space http://ift.tt/1sReoqS but what really looks like being the next big thing are the recipes for the Internet of things http://nyti.ms/1tjbb7j

Trying the Hootsuite app to post to my site.

"I was near Hamburg, Tygers Of Pan Tang were performing their show. I took this picture while the band was playing a beautiful song called Paris By Air. The audience goes crazy but all of a sudden my mind goes to Steve Thompson, the man who wrote this song so many years ago. Many thanks, Steve!"

I've got boxes of "ideas tapes" (Cassettes) in the attic. Luckily digital ideas are easier to store and access (see pic) Back in the 70's and 80's my various publishers and production companies were always badgering me for more songs - give is more !! make us money !! - oh the stress. Sometimes the very pressure they exerted staunched the creative flow. Lately new ideas have been dropping from me like ... well er... the proverbial dropping off you thing (again see pic). I wonder if my old publishers would be pleased to hear this. The ones I haven't either sue'd or told to F off that is. Sadly, I can't really play you any of this stuff as it is really ruff so just hum along with the picture.

Steve T

I'm making this post on the basis that it should go to all my social media outlets using a mixture of plugins + smoke and mirrors. I've pretty much cracked it all but for Google+ - Now, Google + does not play nice with very much else at all. It's a shame where Google have taken this social network as I thought it had great promise. I would like my postings to go to Google+ as there are people there that I like to connect with. However, I do not like Google+. Firstly the content is scrunched up into little boxes in the center of the screen. Then there's the fact that Google are trying to channel people into using the network the way Google wants rather than how the people want. This probably goes for all the social networks and it's a trade off between the benefits and fun we can extract from these tools offset against the annoyance they cause us with constant changes.

Steve T

I think it's time to overhaul my http://stmedia.org website. I quite like the Wordpress skin I'm using but it has some odd anomalies. Perhaps it's time to use a more modern and updated template. I think what I'll do is create a mirror site and copy the content. Once I'm happy I'll port the skin over. I want to retain some of the retro stuff and many of the quirks are lost in the mists of time.

Steve T