Welcome back, LJers! (Thank you, bubba.)

Today has been a rather crappy day. Poor sleep (cursed World Service on Radio 4), the start of some kind of coughing bug and general annoyance with everything. Luckily, after a tired and emotional moment, I remembered I had to go buy milk. Slouching about the supermarket, I was rather surprised to hear Town Called Malice on their speakers. I do not have a cool local supermarket: it always reminds me of the Tesco's we used when I was a small child in the Midlands, with that cold fluorescent light which emphasizes the lacklustre offerings rather than enticing you to buy. So a pure shining example of late 70s post-punk music with lyrics sharper than Weller's cheekbones and a compulsive beat just isn't their usual thing. Either they were being deeply ironic by playing something about the banal mundanities of suburban life, or they simply weren't registering what tape had been stuck in the machine. I noticed a couple of other women tapping their hands on their thighs in a surreptitious dance. Wouldn't it have been better if we had all burst into some kind of synchronized dance routine? Getting the urge to dance to old Jam songs in the supermarket just makes me think of Vic Reeve's I Remember Punk Rock though, so maybe it's just as well we all gave each other sly smiles and carried on tapping and bouncing on the balls of our feet.

And speaking of old punks, which he wasn't really but I was trying for a bad link, some additional Peel stuff:
Peel, RIP stencil art
an mp3 of John cocking things up, one night in the early nineties (via submit response)
a handy round-up of the tributes via no rock'n'roll fun.