![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/morse6.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/morse3.jpg)
At the controls of a spacecraft
On this slow(ish) news day, we will leave you with a couple of items that the mailman delivered to our trainspotting department.
Sir Elton Hercules John writes about the keyboard geniuses who blew his mind for The Guardian. Jon Lord gets a mention:
And as the decade progressed, keyboard players progressed too, away from their soul-jazz roots. We think of heavy rock as a guitarist’s art, but in Deep Purple, Jon Lord was experimenting with distortion to give the organ a sound as hard-driving as the guitars. So did Rod Argent when the Zombies broke up and he started Argent. Gary Brooker left the Paramounts, abandoned his electric piano, formed Procol Harum and made A Whiter Shade of Pale, a record that sounded like nothing anyone had heard before. In the Small Faces, Ian McLagan changed and adapted a rhythm and blues style of playing until it perfectly fitted the psychedelic era: it’s him that’s really driving Itchycoo Park or the title track of Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake. Keith Emerson was bringing his training as a classical musician to bear on the sound of the Nice: it was the start of progressive rock. And Rick Wakeman seemed to come out of nowhere: he’d only just left the Royal College of Music when he played that amazing Mellotron part on David Bowie’s Space Oddity.
Meanwhile, in Budapest… A set of Russian nesting dolls vaguely resembling members of Mk2 was spotted in the wild:
Thanks to Uwe Hornung for reading The Guardian, and to sterling gunn and his sharp-eyed better half for the pic.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
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