The I's Have It.

Peter's musical odyssey through the west Midlands of Britain, made ever more daring by his sometimes startling musical company (Frank Black is not an aid to road safety) has swamped the blog (or ITMHTGO to our regular reader) with more A's than a high school honours class, although it would probably be 'honors' wouldn't it, as they don't like to complicate the spelling over there do they. We don't pay much attention to spelling here on ITMHTGO either, although a casual glance down the alphabetical list of artists now covered reveals that so far there have been no I's. Yes I know, there's no I in team, but I'm striking out with an III of my own. If we wait for Peter to get to his I's it will be December 2010 and he will be swerving into oncoming traffic somewhere north of Birmingham, hopped up on bothersome punk music at 8 in the morning. There's a gap on his shelf where INXS won't ever be.

Wolverhampton, so often the venue of so many of my most memorable gigs (The Coral to about 20 people, The Smiths for all the wrong reasons), was the place where I saw the Indigo Girls. I remember the evening for 3 reasons - I went with my cousin Bob, there were a lot of people wearing dungarees in the crowd, and I think they (the people on stage, not the assembled dungaree'd masse) did a cover of This Train is Bound for Glory. I don't know who wrote it originally, but I know it was originally a gospel song from the 30's. Johnny Cash covered it, or re-invented it at a later date, and Little Walter's My Babe was based on it. To get back to my point, my introduction to the Indigo Girls was hearing Kid Fears (off their 1989 major label self titled debut) on the radio on a Saturday afternoon, and going out to buy the album immediately. It's certainly one of their finest moments, and one of Michael Stipe's too (they are all from Georgia I think). The combination of the voices of Ray and Saliers is surely up there with the Everly's, although in this clip the crowd, attempting to sing the missing vocal of Stipe's are a bit rough round the edges (Mancs for you).

I'm rambling. Here are The Indigo Girls.

I recently taught a class where one of the members told me he'd had a 'Pinochet Scholarship', meaning that he'd been forced to leave the country in 1973 when the fascists took over, or be dropped out of an aircraft, or worse. A Chilean band on tour in Europe at the time, Inti Illimani, were forced to undertake 'the longest tour in history' - as vocal supporters of the overthrown elected president Salvador Allende it was not advisable for them to return home. They were away 15 years. If you'd bought every one of their albums you'd need a big shelf, as there are over 40. With so many I's in their name they've helped me reach my quota.