35 Minutes

Paddy is right, we have been rehearsing pretty bloody hard - honing our set list to a well-honed 35 minutes, with an optional mystery encore depending on audience demand. It's pretty honed.

Make sure you leave plenty of time for getting to the gig on Friday as Johnston Street is a major thoroughfare of the inner north and the traffic can get pretty bad. Speaking of traffic, had we more time and inclination we might consider a thematic cover for the night of Traffic's 1970 classic album John Barleycorn Must Die.

Traffic, like Squid Ink, had problems relating to a paucity of songwriters. Steve Winwood wrote pretty much all the hot stuff on JBMD and originally intended it as a solo album. However, like Modern Doug Park, he didn't enjoy recording alone and couldn't resist the lure of playing with the dudes (so to speak) so he welcomed back his bandmates to play on the record - subsuming his ego and making it a group project. What a guy.

It must be pointed out though that on track five Stranger to himself Steve plays all of the instruments (as well as singing). Here a comparison with Paddy seems more apt. But though a talented multi-instrumentalist, Paddy is these days first and foremost a bass man. Traffic's bass player was the great Rick Grech who later became an alcoholic carpet salesman and died tragically young. He has absolutely nothing to do with Crafty's drum kit, which is actually a Gretsch.

Rick Grech also played in Blind Faith with Winwood, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker (speaking of drums). Silky-D copped shit from the dudes a while ago for accidentally referring to Ginger Baker as Ginger Rogers while discussing his baby-boomer dad's decision to join a Cream covers band, which was tentatively named Clotted Cream. Clotted Cream didn't work out as a name, because my dad's friends decided they wanted to cover other bands as well. One of the covers they are doing is Keep on Running by the Spencer Davis Group - which featured an up and coming young keyboardist called Steve Winwood, before he left to join Traffic.

Winwood, Clapton and Ginger Baker later all played on Blind Faith's famous Gothenburg 1969 bootleg album, which was released on the Moby Dick record label in July 1969. The label was obviously named for the classic 1851 seafaring novel by Herman Melville that is one of Silky-D's enduring faves and comes highly recommended if you like reading about knots, different types of boats and other engrossing stuff. But Silky D is much less fond of that modern Moby, the electro pop chrome dome who is so named because he is a direct descendant of Melville (actually Herman is his Great Great Grand Uncle according to Wikipedia).

On his most recent album, the tepid and underwhelming Hotel, Moby plays every single instrument, just as Steve Winwood did on "Stranger to Myself". But this isn't entirely true. Moby cheats. He doesn't play the drums. He aint no Ginger Baker. To make matters even more annoying, Moby also includes a secret hidden track - a practice that Silky-D despises because it stuffs up his Ipod playlist and because if something is good enough to be on the album then it ought to be on the bloody album, not hidden away like a dog-boy under the house.

Anyway, the name of the secret hidden track on Moby's "Hotel" is "35 Minutes." Coincidentally, 35 minutes is also the exact, scientifically measured, length of Squid Ink's rocking set, to be delivered at The Barleycorn next Friday. Don't miss it.

And the length of Traffic's classic album John Barleycorn Must Die is also - you guessed it - 35 minutes.

with apologies to Paddy, whose award nominated post I ripped off for this monster.