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: