To see it, go here – http://www.rocksourcearchive.com/rs_user1.php?db_user=rs_2012

The link takes you today’s 2012 facts but you can search for any day using date search box at the top.

Here’s the link …

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/iwitness-reports/id569178772?mt=8

Here’s a demonstration video…

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0ByYNj8YEUjnZeWNKeWxNa3ljZTg

If you’d like to know more, Neil Cossar at Absolute PR – (07768 652899 neil@thisdayinmusic.com) is doing the PR.

To get your very own daily music trivia quiz (with links to the answers) simply go to https://twitter.com/#!/rocksourcetweet .

Questions are based on the world’s biggest chronological music facts database, and cover all eras and types of music.

More details : e-mail : johnny@rocksourcearchive.com

Phone : Johnny Black – 0044 (0)1380 738779

Twitter : @RocksourceTweet

Website : www.rocksourcearchive.com

This pic, sent to me by my good friend Jonathan Morrish [third from right in pic], was taken in the mid-70s when I worked as a press officer at Epic Records in Soho Square, London.

The occasion was the presentation of some gold discs to The Beach Boys – Carl, Brian and Dennis Wilson – plus a birthday cake for Brian. Peer closely and you can just see a surf board atop the cake. I’m on the far left, clutching a gold disc. As far as I recall, it wasn’t actually Brian’s birthday. They celebrated his birthday every night on that tour.

Feel free to snigger.

You can see what I’m doing by going to @RocksourceTweet. i expect, and will manfully try to ignore, harsh criticism for this unwarranted, spineless volte-face.

1. I don’t like the ‘like’ button. I was reading something on Facebook about the death of a Canadian musician in grim circumstance and the grief his parents were going through. I don’t think it is appropriate to ask anybody to ‘like’ this sort of thing. It’s an abuse of a valuable word. Maybe there could be a button which opened up to give a range of options, such as sympathise, not funny, don’t care, and then ‘like’ could be one of the options.

2. I don’t care for careless misuses of the word tweet. In a recent rock obituary it was written that a musician had ‘tweeted his grief’ about the death of the deceased. Tweeting your grief is a ludicrous cheapening concept. It’s worse than sending a Hallmark Deepest Sympathy card when someone’s beloved has died.

And then we wonder why, given half a chance, they try to acquire the trappings of that lifestyle for free by looting as much of it as possible from their local stores?

I can’t, in any way, condone what’s been going on the last few days but I can easily understand it.

As long as those kids are ruled by corrupt and stinking rich governments and financial institutions; as long as they are ‘educated’ in cash-strapped schools so they don’t learn to read or communicate properly; as long as they are offered the lowest-grade of crap to warp their already limited perceptions when they watch tv or play on their consoles; as long as they see no future and no meaningful society … riots can be expected.

Funny. It looks a lot like North Africa or the Middle East when I watch what’s happening right here, right now on tv news. Maybe what we’re seeing is a different kind of protest against a different kind of corrupt regime. Except I don’t think these kids consciously realise they’re protesting. They just want all the stuff our media tells them they should want and finally they see a chance to get their hands on it.

Maybe what we really have to fear is what they’ll do if it ever dawns on them that X-boxes and Flat Screen tvs and branded trainers aren’t going to improve their lives one iota.

Maybe we need a system that gives a flying fart about the people who live on its underbelly.

This is the picture from page 107, referred to above. That’s me in the middle with the long red scarf. The geezer second from the left is my old chum Tom Ferguson, then a member of a punk band called Sanity Clause, and now a bastion of Billboard magazine. Tom wrote the comment at the bottom of the previous page of diary entry.  Check those flares. Check my natty red trainers.)

You might notice mention of my friend Nic Dartnell in the entry. I went to school with Nic in Scotland, played in a band with him, and he came south, just as i did. He was then, and is now, a superb artist. See his stuff at http://www.nicdartnell.com/ You might know his work from several album covers.

The little clipping at the top of page two of the entry is just something we have always done in the diaries. We cut stuff out and stick it in along with the entries. I say ‘we’ because I am not the only person who writes in the diaries. they’re open for anyone to read and/or contribute to.

I wasn’t impressed by The Clash that day. To be honest, I was never impressed by The Clash. I saw them many times and never got it. I got to know Strummer a bit while I was working at CBS in the Press Office and he was a lovely bloke, but their music never really got to me.

I like the final observation that ‘Lara was also there but I never saw her’. I now have no memory of who Lara was. I can only speculate that I fancied her madly for a couple of weeks.

That’s it. More when I get the chance.

I just had occasion to send an email to the leader of a band which has been internationally successful for the past thirty-odd years.

His auto-reply came back with a message saying that he now only deals with e-mail on Mondays and Thursdays.

It goes on to say that if anything requires an answer any quicker, then that answer is no.

Now that’s what I call the courage of your convictions and I salute it.

Anybody else out there been the recipient of a witty auto-reply message?

In those far off days theatres had names like The Adelphi, The Odeon and The Palace. Even the humble Roxys and Essoldos were touched with a faintly exotic charm.

The magic began to wear off, for me, when the Hammermsmith Odeon was taken over by Labatts and then by Carling. The addition of the name of a beer company on the front of Odeon was just plain wrong.

Yes, I know Hammersmith Odeon was originally a Gaumont Palace, and I know these were both commercial ventures, but dammit they were lovely names with a ring to them. They were chosen to sound good and they did sound good.

The change to Labatts and Carling and now HMV is simply a matter of re-branding, of corporatisation, of identity massaging. As a shop I’m quite fond of HMV – it is steeped in the history of the music business almost since day one – but as a prefix stuck on the front of the names of dozens of lovely old venues, I’m not at all smitten by it.

Nowadays, of course, almost every venue in the UK is either an O2 or an Academy or both.

Given half a chance they’d re-name the queen’s pad in London as the O2 Buckingham Palace.

I shouldn’t really grumble because things here are not half as bad as they are across the Atlantic where the hapless residents of Englewood, Colorado, have to go out to see their favourite artists in the Comfort Dental Amphitheatre. Back East in Bristow, Virginia you can mosh the night away at The Jiffy Lube Live Amphitheatre. No, I’m not joking. That’s real. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

What possible romance could there be in strolling into the 1-800-ASK-GARY Amphitheatre (it’s in Tampa, Florida) with your best girl or guy on your arm? It’s so blatantly a temple of consumerism that the very name cheapens the music you’ve come to see.

The 100 Club, The Marquee, The Rainbow, The Roseland Ballroom, The Matrix, The Gaslight – those are names to conjure with, names to enrich your dreams.

These days even Bob Dylan plays in places called The Blockbuster Pavilion, The Interior Savings Centre and The Citizens Business Bank.

So, anyway, on the basis that if you don’t laugh you’ll cry, we might as well have a little bit of fun with this depressing phenomenon. May I invite some lists or suggestions that tie in with this theme of re-naming and re-branding?

1. What would be the most inappropriate re-branding of a venue or a building of any sort for that matter? You know the sort of thing I mean – The Virginia Plain Cancer Hospital. the Estee Lauder Because You’re Worth It Battered Wives Refuge.

2. What’s the worst venue name you know of that already exists?

3. What’s the best, most-cherished venue name that you can remember?