One Riff To Rule Them All...

Let's set our way-back-when machine to Friday 17 April 2009 shall we...


Being a Friday night, by all rights I should have been out on the town getting absolutely wasted, or at least been at the pub with my mates. 
As it turns out I was doing neither of those things. I don't remember why, maybe I just didn't feel like going out that night.


Instead, I found myself watching Later...With Jools Holland, which is a brilliant showcase of musical talent that I don't really get around to see enough of.
It was a good night to watch as well. Doves, one of my favourite bands at the time were on, as were Marianne Faithfull, the Noisettes, and Grandmaster Flash. That's enough reason for anyone to tune in.


The programme was ticking along nicely in the background while I did bits and pieces, and I was enjoying discovering Madeleine Peyroux for the first time. And then, after she had finished playing River of Tears, Jools uttered these now immortal (to me) words:
"Now, I'm going to drop a name here because he's one of the great guitarists of all time, Eric Clapton.
He said to me 'There is this amazing guitarist, you've GOT to hear him.' Well I'm going to say the same thing to you, and I'm going to invite you to do that now. Please welcome the amazing guitarist Mr. Joe Bonamassa!"


Jools then sat down behind the piano to join in with the moment my musical world was turned upside down.


Now at this point I should say that over the few years prior to this I'd been growing more and more disillusioned with the state of the music scene in general. 
I'm a HUGE fan of people who can get out there, play their own instruments, write their own songs, and preferably do both at the same time. 
The influx of more and more manufactured groups and people with great voices singing songs they probably never dreamed of writing was starting to depress me. I longed for the days (that I sadly never saw) when the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream were at the forefront of everyone's musical conscious. 


But those days were long gone. People now were happy to listen to manufactured Pop, increasingly ridiculous Rap/Hip-Hop, and generic American Indie Rock weren't they? There weren't any really talented musicians left in the world were there?


And then Lonesome Road Blues hit me right between the temples.


The very next day I was in HMV earlier than I've ever been in my life to buy the album "The Ballad of John Henry" on the strength of that one song. And with the other 9 studio albums he has released now firmly in my collection I'm no less in awe of him as a musician.


Fast forward to last night at 19:30, and I'm sitting in the Brighton Centre with my friend Chelle who I converted to Joe VERY quickly. 
Iron Maiden's "2 Minutes To Midnight" is blasting through the room.
We've been in this position before, at the end of last year we were sat in the Hammersmith Apollo. 
That night was our first experience of Joe live, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that it left me stunned. 
His albums are works of art, as close to musical genius as there's ever been in my opinion. But the live experience, well that was just on a completely different level. 


The way he manipulates the guitar is like nothing I've ever seen before in my life. He switches from Blues, to Rock, and back again between songs, even during them with immaculate ease. And just for good measure he'll throw in a 10+ minute acoustic solo performance that I'll never see bettered in my lifetime.


I cannot over-emphasise just how much you need to take the extra 15 minutes of your time to click through to the links of the two songs I've included in this blog. If you love music in the way that I do, you can't help but love him instantly, and you'll have a tiny fraction of the feeling of anticipation and excitement that I felt last night.


The last wails of Bruce Dickinson disappeared from the Brighton Centre. 
And the lights went out...

The Power of Prayer?

I get the feeling that this particular blog could split a lot of opinion, so I'm just putting that out there right from the off.

Last weekend, as I'm sure almost everyone will be aware, Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba suffered cardiac arrest on the pitch during their FA Cup quarter final match against Spurs at White Hart Lane.

Medical staff rushed on to the field to treat him, and the game was quite rightly abandoned.
Fabrice was taken to hospital and is thankfully making brilliant progress considering that doctors have since said that he was "in effect dead" for 78 minutes.

I have absolutely nothing but best wishes for Fabrice, his family, friends, team mates, and fellow professionals in general. It is a trying time for them all.


But what I wanted to say is this:

In the aftermath of this terrible incident, tweets were being sent left, right and centre. Television and radio interviews were pretty much non-stop. And the vast majority of people were "praying for Muamba" or made comments along the lines of "God willing he'll pull through".

Now let me make it absolutely clear here that I have no problem with people who are religious. Most religious people are lovely, and simply don't share my views of the world. But a small part of me felt some anger towards those people when I saw these messages being sent.

With the world looking on, two club doctors and a Consultant Cardiologist who happened to be at the game rushed to the aid of Fabrice, along with several ambulance staff.
They spent minutes trying to revive him on the pitch before carrying him to the ambulance to take him to hospital, never once stopping their efforts.
In the 78 minutes that this man's heart was not beating, nobody once thought about anything other than saving his life, however unlikely that might have seemed.

And once he had been revived, and his condition was stabilised, a great number of these same people announced that thanks to God he had been saved.
It's at times like this that I think God takes far too much of the credit, and doctors, paramedics, nurses, and everyone else involved get too little.

Throughout the entire ordeal, I never once prayed for Fabrice Muamba, but I was nothing short of astounded by the medical staff that brought him back from beyond the brink.

Inside the mind of a "genius".

When I first registered this blog I wasn’t really sure what I wanted it to be. I didn’t want it to be a one-trick pony that was tied down to one subject or even one tone of writing.

The simple fact is that some days I want to talk about ridiculous things on TV that have annoyed me, some days I want to laugh at the silly things people have said or done, and sometimes there will be serious things to talk about.

In an ideal world, those serious things would be few and far between, so it’s with a heavy heart that my first post falls into this category.

Some of you may have heard of Stanislaw Burzynski, but a few of you might have. He runs the Burzynski Clinic, an alternative cancer treatment centre in Houston, Texas.

I had certainly never heard of him until today, when I was looking through my Twitter stream and saw that his organisation had decided to sue Rhys Morgan, a 17 year old college student.

Why would he do this? A fine question to ask. The reason is that Rhys had himself posted a blog (found here) questioning the efficacy of Burzynski’s treatments.

Rhys has since posted a follow up blog (here) detailing the thinly veiled threats and promises of legal action that he received from one Marc Stephens acting on their behalf.

In reading the account of these events on Rhys’ blog I found out about the remarkably similar position that Andy Lewis found himself in after posting an article on his Quackometer blog (here).
Again Marc Stephens is involved and the emails sent include what could be interpreted again as thinly veiled threats, this time mentioning his family and newborn child.
Of course, Andy has also posted a follow up article including details of these communications (here).

Now, I’m not going to write another blog questioning the validity of Burzynski’s claims for a cure for cancer (the blogs by Rhys and Andy do that more than adequately), I’m genuinely interested in the mindset of people who make these claims of revolutionary treatments and cures.

There are two main conclusions that are drawn in the majority of cases: either the person is an out and out fraud, praying on the vulnerable, weak and desperate in order to fill their own wallets, or they genuinely believe that their treatment works, and flat out refuse to accept anything alternative to this reality they have created.

I can’t decide which of these two alternatives is more worrying (and dangerous).

In the Burzynski case, families are being asked to pay huge sums of money in order to be accepted onto one of their medical trials (they are trials because the FDA has not approved the treatment), and travel to Houston for a treatment from which, according to the Cancer Research UK website, there is no evidence of any benefit to cancer sufferers.

If the first of the two options is the correct one (in any instance) then it is surely our duty as fellow humans to draw attention to the exploitation of desperate families by frauds obsessed with increasing only their bank balances, and not the life expectancy of their patients.


In my opinion these types of organisation, operating under the false pretence of providing a “miracle cure” should all be subject to scientific scrutiny. This should be the case for any medicine/drug/treatment that is intended to be available to us in any capacity.


And I strongly feel that any organisation avoiding these basic responsibilities should be subject to legal action. In a great many cases there are people’s lives at stake.

The second of our two options is always the more bizarre in my mind. A ‘lone genius’, discovering a fantastic new treatment. This always rings alarm bells, as many others have pointed out, because very rarely are scientific breakthroughs the work of one person.
New treatments are developed and refined through collaboration, scrutiny, and most importantly, critical appraisal.
If a single person discovered this treatment, and their work has not been peer-reviewed in a major scientific journal (in some cases no journals at all), how can we be confident that it is factually correct? This is why any and all trial data must be made available so that claims can be confirmed or refuted. This is the essence of scientific discovery, and any true scientist will tell you that it is welcomed with open arms. Only those with something to hide have any reason to shy away from it.

There are also the conspiracy theorists out there who claim that “Big Pharma” is suppressing the result of their work as it would put them out of business.
This is all well and good, but you cannot silence scientists the world over. Big Pharma cannot have every scientist and journal in its pocket. If the work was important in any way, it would be published in some form. This argument simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny at all.

The bottom line is that whether they do so maliciously or innocently, these purveyors of unproven ‘alternative’ treatments are creating a false hope in so many families while picking their pockets.
And in these cases where bank accounts are being drained, robbing the families of other options to make the time they have more comfortable, false hope is as good as no hope at all.

This isn’t a question of morality; it’s a question of humanity. And these exploiters just aren’t human in my eyes.