Headbang - 13 March, 2026

7 of us gathered at Dave's - on time - and wolfed down the curries. All except Jayne, whose additional order of Vegetable Balti had somehow been omitted.

The remote attendees all - with the exception of Phil - logged on at various times. Malcolm from sunny Christchurch, Rob G and Rob D from not-so-sunny Midlands and Highlands respectively, Aidan from Edinburgh and Colin, after his regular evening hospital visit, from Banchory.

Thankfully, at Dave's we had no feedback or echo isues on the evening although the Teams menu baffled a little and we were unable to "mute all" or "share screen". Aidan, however, had to dip out mid-evening as his IT connection seemed to be playing up.

Ten themes coming up, the first of which was:

It's now half a century since the early days of punk, which is reflected in those appearing in theme 2:

Everyone got at least one vote but the narrow joint winners were Gary Valentine and Peter Hook.

Others who had recently reached the biblical three score years and ten were:

A new theme was the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual year-end bash attended by the sitting President. (The present incumbent has now renamed it the Trump Kennedy Center Honors):

I don't know why Beth Hart and Jeff Beck chose I'd Rather Go Blind to honour Buddy Guy but they were clear winners anyway.

Theme 4 was part 1 of those who had recently turned 80:

Roger Glover's bass solo at the introduction of Black Night was a narrow winner.

Spotlighting various instruments played in bands has been a bit of a recurring theme - Saxophones, Violins, Twin Guitars etc have previously featured but this time it was Flutes, which seemed to bring out all the performing weirdos:

We all thought Ian Anderson's one-legged performance and appearance at the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus was pretty much out there, but Thijs Van Leer and Peter Gabriel took it to a whole other level. Sanity prevailed in the voting, however, as Ian McDonald, with the help of fellow musos Steve Hackett and John Wetton, reprised his performance on one of the stand-out tracks on King Crimson's debut album, to win.

A previous theme had been Comebacks so I thought it was time to look at some of the Final Gigs played by various performers:

Bowie announced, to the surprise of the fans and his band-mates, the "death" of his Ziggy Stardust character before playing the appropriate final song at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973. Of course, he then went on to other characters - Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke etc.

The Band's performance was at the Last Waltz, filmed by Martin Scorcese, with appearances from a host of mega-stars - Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Bob Dylan etc.

Cream did do a few reunion gigs at the Royal Albert Hall in 2005 but that was largely to help Jack with his medical bills, having had liver cancer causing a transplant.

A clear winner was the Beatles' legendary rooftop gig, with Billy Preston guesting on keyboards.

Theme 7 was the second part of the Octogenarians:

 

Dolly's performance of Jolene was when she was inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. She sang the first verse and then other guests took on the vocals in turn. The task here was to identify each of those guest singers - in turn, the answer was Pink, Annie Lennox, Simon LeBon, Pat Benatar, Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Sheryl Crow and Brandi Carlisle.

The location of David Gilmour's 2024 gig was correctly identified by Harry as Circus Maximus, Rome and the track was a clear winner.

Other Octogenarians - plus a few Nonogenarians and one notable Centenarian were:

On now to the Obituaries:

The Steve Cropper medley was a comfortable winner.

Others who had recently passed were:

There were 6 entries for the Jukebox. The nominators were not revealed prior to voting and, ethically, were asked not to vote for their own nomination:

A dead heat between Dave's and my nomination - and Jeff Beck's second win of the evening, having earlier taken the Kennedy Center Honors one.

To round off the evening, the final theme was another short one of 4 tracks with Zero being the common factor:

Just one more thing - the team photo. Jayne did the honours and I asked her to try it with the overhead lights on and then with them off:

The latter one highlights the screen a little better.

I mention the "broad church" and the "catholic" tastes of the group a lot and this Headbang demonstrated that - I reckon that there were performers from as many as 13 musical genres featured: Pop, Rock, Prog, Punk, Soul, Post Punk, Country, Ska, Reggie, Indie, Opera, Electronic and Blues.

Headbang - 14 November, 2025 - Final votes

Votes now received from the 9 who watched all 49 videos at Friday's Headbang. A total of 15 tracks  were nominated and this was the final pecking order:

Nigel Kennedy's stellar performance with The Who was the clear winner with 4 nominations, scoring 10 points in all. Arcade Fire's lively performance at Austin City Limits tied with The Jam's cover of Ray Davies' David Watts with bass player Bruce Foxton in fine voice on one of his rare lead vocals with the band.

5 of the nominated tracks were live performances in the 70's, despite video and audio technologies not being as good as they are now. The 15 tracks were spread across 8 of the 10 themes with the 2nd theme - Violins - receiving nominations for 4 of their 5 tracks.

Voting for the ranking of the themes was:

For a change, voting in the polls on the night was fairly consistent with the final votes above.

As regards the date for the next Headbang, Friday 13th March is the only date when all 12 of us appear, at this stage, to be available. 

Headbang - 14 November, 2025

Andy and Steve were otherwise engaged but the other 10 of us participated in last night's Headbang - 5 at Dave's and 5 remote. No problems this time with logging in to Teams but there was a persistent echo/feedback that was very annoying and made the usual banter/conversation well nigh impossible.

A partial solution to the echo was to mute all the remote participants whenever any of us at Dave's were speaking - but that was to the detriment of the usual interaction. Dave and I are planning to do further research before the next Headbang to try to find suitable solutions.

Anyway, Gerry, Jeb and me - at the Douglas for a quick pre-match beer - were joined by Aidan who had a late change of plan to attend in person. Curries collected then Gerry drove us over to Dave's - on schedule - where all the remote participants - including Malcolm at breakast time in Christchurch - were already online - about 20 minutes early!

Once curries were consumed we tried to resolve the feedback issue - to no avail - so we just decided to proceed with the music, by now about 15 minutes later than planned.

The usual start was SEPTUAGENARIANS - and the votes for the 4 tracks played were:

 Other Septuagenarians - no tracks played - were:

The second theme was VIOLINS - tracks where violins had a strong presence:

(Phil was having technical difficulties so didn't manage to vote via WhatsApp and soon had to leave the meeting).

Theme 3 was OCTOGENARIANS. Just as the last time there were so many who had recently reached the age of 80 that I had to split this theme in two - this was part 1:

No casting vote so a tie between Ian Gillan and Jose Feliciano.

The 4th theme was an acknowledgment of the pending centenary of the GRAND OLE OPRY - an American institution since 1925. Initially just a country music radio show, for 3 decades from 1943 the broadcast came from a live concert venue - the now legendary and esteemed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The radio show now comes from a new purpose built venue but the Ryman, after refurbishment, is a much sought-after concert venue - and not just for country music stars. We played 4 examples and the voting was very even:

I think that's our first ever 3-way tie. Incidentally, Gerry's phone battery had now died so his vote was manual and, as a result, the WhatsApp polls don't tell the full story.

Next was OCTOGENARIANS (2):

Neil Young's second appearance was a clear winner.

There were plenty of others with recent big birthdays too:

Not to mention some Nonogenarians and even a Centenarian:

It still being officially AUTUMN, that became our next theme - just as we did at this time last year:

Green Day are real live crowd pleasers and regularly go down well with the Headbangers too.

Time for the OBITUARIES. First of all a few short entries in a continuous medley:

Then the main men:

There were others who had recently passed as well:

I decided it was time for another vote on some more songs from the past that would probably be NO LONGER PC in today's woke times. The votes this time were for the one that is thought to be most offensive to the audiences of today:

(Our) Andy put in a late remote vote for Killing an Arab, which would have tied it with Blue Mink's "curly black and kinky, mixed with yellow Chinky". The only surprise is that, in a time of the Jeffrey Epstein/Andrew/Trump/Guiffre stories in the news, that Wishbone Ash's subject matter didn't gain more votes.

So now we come to the JUKEBOX and it's confession time for me. The track with my name against it was put in to see if anyone would smell a rat - and nobody did. The alleged Eminem & Jelly Roll track is not real - it's AI created. nobody seemed to like it anyway:

The final theme was 4 tracks from JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE!. He's an American late night show host and comedian who usually ends his shows with a live music performance. Think Letterman (now retired). Like the other networks - Jimmy Fallon (NBC) and Stephen Colbert (CBS) - his ABC show regularly mocks Trump, but one of his recent comments so offended the Donald that he got on to ABC's owners (Disney) and managed to get Jimmy Kimmel's show taken off air. Thankfully it's back on now. Anyway, here's the votes:

Just time for the usual team photo:

Headbang - 8 August, 2025 - Final votes

Votes now received from all 11 who attended last Friday. There were a total of 21 nominations for everyone’s top 3 tracks – over 40% of the total tracks played received at least one vote. Here’s the details:

 Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets received votes from 4 Headbangers – the most of all. Talking Heads and Carly Simon were next best with 3 each and there were 5 more tracks who each received 2 nominations, leaving 13 tracks with just one nomination each.

These tracks originated in 6 different decades with the 1970’s being more than half of the total. All 9 of the themes had at least one track in this list.

The voting for the themes wasn’t so straight-forward. For years, the ranking has covered all the themes in descending order but this time, for some reason, 3 of our group chose to cut the scoring back to just their top 3. Accordingly, the following results may be a little skewed:

What is clear, however, is that the top 3 in the list above are well ahead of all the others.

Headbang stats

The Headbang has been going, in one form or another, for over 30 years but I only started keeping (minimal) records in November 2003, when the original “Gang of 5” – me, Colin, Dave, Malcolm and Gary – attended Dave’s.

5 years later, in December, 2008, the structure of themes started. By then, Andy and Jeb had joined the gang. Gerry joined in March, 2011, Steve in November that same year. Phil made his debut in April, 2015 but didn’t appear again until November, 2019. Aidan was August, 2016, Rob D August 2020. Rob G is our newest recruit – February, 2021.

We’ve had occasional “guest” appearances by Francis, Dylan and James but Ian McRae (who joined in March, 2011) sadly made his last appearance in March, 2016.

In a different way, one of the founder members – Gary – has, effectively, left the group. His last appearance was in July, 2019.

In total, there have been exactly 600 appearances from 17 individuals since November, 2003. In that time, there have been 71 Headbangs, all of which I’ve attended. Colin has only missed 2 whilst Dave missed 6. Dave has hosted the vast majority of the meetings but Jeb, Steve, Aidan and Gary have each taken turns.

The drams should have been flowing on Friday – it was Jeb’s and Gerry’s 50^th appearances. Here’s the full list of attendees to date:

Since themes started in December, 2008 there have been 60 Headbangs at which there have been 366 themes played. Many of these are regulars, repeating at every Headbang (Obits., 'Genarians, Jukebox etc.). At the other end of the scale there are as many as 125 themes that have only appeared once.

Headbang - 8 August, 2025

Almost a full house last night - just Malcolm missing - he had sent his apologies - he was on a plane travelling back from Queensland to NZ. There were 5 of us attending remotely - me, Aidan, Colin, Phil and Rob G - and this rum crew at Dave's:

The usual difficulties at the start with logging in to Teams - not helped by me giving the wrong link address to everyone. Blame the drugs.

Usual start - SEPTUAGENARIANS - 5 tracks and one vote per person:

A clear win for the Clash's mash-up video from a couple of live gigs.

There were 5 others who had recently celebrated their 70th birthdays:

The 2nd theme - and the videos - was provided by Andy:

There was a comment afterwards that the winning act wasn't really Glam Rock, although it's generally accepted that the charts in the years 1971 to 1975 were dominated by this genre and all these performances were from that periond.

In the 4 months since the last Headbang, there had been so many musicians reaching 8 decades that the OCTOGENARIANS theme had to split in two. The first part's details were:

Labi Siffre was a clear, but unexpected winner here.

After that we had Part 1 of the BEST OF THE BEST. Every 10 Headbangs I resurrect the winning track from the popular vote at each session. Previous winners had included a number of Medleys and, rather than play them again as was, I picked out the dominant track and played it in its entirety. The results were:

Honours even between the first 2 tracks. The only full medley that was played in its original form (Burt Bacharach) failed to register any votes.

Now the 2nd part of the OCTOGENARIANS:

Carly Simon's live performance of her classic hit came from the Queen Mary 2 in 2005.

- and that wasn't all the Octogenarians. Here's a few more that didn't feature in the music played:

and there were a few NONOGENARIANS:

Part 2 of the BEST OF THE BEST's votes were:

Too many OBITUARIES  as well, so again I had to split it in two. First of all we played one track consisting of short (one minute approx.) excerpts from slightly lesser lights who had recently passed:

Then we played full tracks from the following 4:

The 8th and penultimate theme was the Jukebox. Six nominations were received and the results were:

Finally, the 2nd part of the OBITUARIES:

An appropriate closing track but the clear winner was always going to be the legendary Brian Wilson.

There were, of course, many others who had recently passed:

I did manage to grab a screen shot of our gathering: