Julian Moore's Blog

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It’s Just Not Cricket – the majority of 70s compilation albums contained no authentic recordings whatsoever

Before music streaming sites and endless YouTube videos, the quickest way to get your daily dose of chart hits was to buy a compilation album.

The curated musical juggernaut known as Now That’s What I Call Music cornered the market in the early eighties and, although it now faces stiff competition from the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, it hasn’t lost its appeal...

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Cross Bones Graveyard near Borough High Street in London is a pauper’s burial ground with a legend going back to medieval times. Prostitutes were buried here in the 16th Century as they were forbidden to be buried with the usual rites. They were often stacked on top of each other, and beggars and thieves used to pick through the graves, gathering what little they could of any value from the deceased.

It was also called a ‘Single Women’s Churchyard’ and between the 12th an...

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Masquerade by Kit Williams – it looked pretty but did your head in

The late seventies gave birth to a very different kind of publishing phenomenon; the armchair treasure hunt. Long before Geocaching was a thing, the book ‘Masquerade’ featured puzzles hidden in beautiful and elaborate illustrations by artist Kit Williams and sparked a national craze as armchair puzzle solvers up and down the country (and later the world) attempted to unravel its mysteries and thus discove...

What’s the worst music on the planet? It’s a good question. I am a huge fan of terrible music. From Wing to Steve Wilson to Maxine Swaby and Jan Terri and back, I’ve spent so much time listening to terrible music that I know some of it (lyrics included) even better than the music that I profess to love. So this article on the BBC News site caught my attention.

What doubly caught my attention is that my hometown is mentioned via Portsmouth Sinfonia, which was a 70s project to get a bunch of peo...

Ok so recently there was a thing going around Facebook to show the ten albums that made the most impact on you, meant to be shared over ten days. Of course this is basically impossible so I decided to keep going. So here’s the first 20. I’ve written a little bit about why each album / track had a place in my life and included a playlist for you to listen to. Hope you enjoy it.

Rite Of Spring / Firebird – Stravinsky conducted Bernstein
This was the first piece of music I really connected with....

I’ve come across this. I quite like it. It’s a track called Rattlesnake by a band called King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

I’ve not heard it before. It’s kind of bonkers.

Give it a listen.

I thought people had stopped taking those kinds of drugs. Perhaps they’ve started again.

The post Rattlesnake – King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard appeared first on Julian Maurice Moore.

Whilst labouring away at other pieces of long-form fiction, I’ve written a short story so I thought I’d get it out there.

It’s sci-fi / dystopian fiction and it’s called The Determination Engine.

You can grab it for free on the Kindle store between 15th – 16th July here – The Determination Engine On Amazon. It’s a fairly short read, between 20 minutes to half an hour; would go well with a coffee over the weekend.

I hope you like it. If you do, please leave a review on Amazon; it’s one of the...

Ok. Apart from chess. And some other classics. But apart from those, Race For The Galaxy is hard to beat if you can overcome the initial brainache.

So what is it?

Race For The Galaxy is a card game that revolves around creating as large a space empire as possible in the shortest possible time. Why do I say shortest possible time? Because the way you play the game can force the game to end to your advantage.

It has its roots in the game Puerto Rico, a resource / worker placement game. In Puert...

If you know me personally then you’ll know I have a bit of an obsession with anything Tiki related and I love a good cocktail. So I was kind of thrilled that, while I was searching the internet for Tiki stuff in preparation for a project I’m working on (which may never see the light of day, but hey) I came across a comic book whose story is not only 100% Tiki, but includes cocktail recipes as part of its modus-operandi and features more gratuitous boobs than Game Of Thrones.

Tiki Surfer Witc...

If you’re into writing or reading in any way (and you probably are, if you’re reading this), then The Elements Of Eloquence – How To Turn The Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth is a must have book.

I was lucky enough to get this as an xmas present a couple of years ago and once I’d started reading it I couldn’t put it down. I now always keep it around and dip into it every now and again (along with some other books I’ll tell you about in another post).

It’s definitely one of those books t...