Podcasts about Prestatyn

The landau driver stood outside Prestatyn railway station, watching the early morning commuters. His attention was drawn to a young woman darting down the high street. She stopped beside his carriage and asked him to take her to a nearby farm. Her behaviour was erratic, and William wasn't sure he wanted to drive her anywhere until she told him, “My mistress is lying on the floor. She's very ill”...*** LISTENER CAUTION IS ADVISED *** This episode was researched and written by Eileen Macfarlane.Edited by Joel Porter at Dot Dot Dot Productions.Script editing, additional writing, illustrations and production direction by Rosanna FittonNarration, additional audio editing, script editing, and production direction by Benjamin Fitton.To get early ad-free access, including Season 1, sign up for They Walk Among PLUS, available from Patreon or Apple Podcasts.More information and episode references can be found on our website https://theywalkamonguspodcast.comMUSIC: A Silent Request by Lost Ghosts At The Stroke Of Midnight by Adrian Walther Lord Of The Dead by CJ0 Cain by Cody Martin Far From Home by Cody Martin Illusion by Cody Martin Storms Coming by Cody Martin Winter Train Home by Featherland Those Lost by Moments Ocean Shadows by Chelsea McGough Sleep by Stephen Keech Distances by Salon Dijon The Space Between by Chelsea McGough To What End by Caleb Etheridge Dead Ends by Wicked Cinema SOCIAL MEDIA: https://linktr.ee/TheyWalkAmongUsSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theywalkamongus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Throughout July, All Things Considered will be coming from the ancient boundary between Wales and England – Offa's Dyke. Each week, we explore a different section of the border as we travel from Chepstow to Prestatyn, joined by voices from the borders sharing their stories of faith, encounter and identity.This week Jonathan Thomas explores the idea of ‘borders' and identity, starting at St. Mary's Capel y Ffin. Here Jonathan meets Father David Wyatt at the tiny 'chapel on the border,' a focus of pilgrimage for centuries and the source of inspiration for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Jonathan walks a stretch of the Offa's Dyke route with vicar and pilgrimage leader Simon Lockett. Starting at the Gospel Pass they head past Hay Bluff towards Llantony to discuss identity in the border lands. Jonathan speaks to pupils at Clyro Church in Wales School to hear their perspective on living on the borders. The children explain that they see borders as a point of connection, a place to forge new friendships and to hear different languages. Canon Dr Manon James of the St Padarn's Institute shares insights into her research into Welsh identity and border lands. At the end of the Offa's Dyke path Jonathan meets Baptist minister Rob Beamish to discuss journey's endings.

Karen (Kaz) Gratton works as an ordained Celebrant/ Minister – she has 20 years of experience of leading church, building community and supporting people on their journeys through life. Before moving back to Derby Karen led a church in Prestatyn, North Wales whilst there she took a number of funerals and found something she loved. Karen is also on the staff team of Festival Church and the chair of trustees of a local pregnancy crisis charity Talk it over. Karen loves being a mum to her two sons and all that comes with, even braving being a part of the school P.T.A. whilst in North Wales, she loves shoes and can run in high heels a skill she is most proud of. When she's not doing life stuff you can usually find her drinking tea somewhere probably with her head in a book or with friends catching up on their worlds. Kaz has been married for over 20 years and lives in Derby with her husband, two sons and the family cat.Contact Karen (Kaz) Gratton:www.uniquestory.co.ukFacebook page -Unique StoryInstagram - uniquestoryfuneralsDr. Kimberley Linert Speaker, Author, Broadcaster, Mentor, Trainer, Behavioral Optometrist Event Planners- I am available to speak at your event. Here is my media kit: https://brucemerrinscelebrityspeakers.com/portfolio/dr-kimberley-linert/ To book Dr. Linert on your podcast, television show, conference, corporate training or as an expert guest please email her at incrediblelifepodcast@gmail.com or Contact Bruce Merrin at Bruce Merrin's Celebrity Speakers at merrinpr@gmail.com 702.256.9199 Host of the Podcast Series: Incredible Life Creator Podcast Available on... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/incredible-life-creator-with-dr-kimberley-linert/id1472641267 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6DZE3EoHfhgcmSkxY1CvKf?si=ebe71549e7474663 and on 9 other podcast platforms Author of Book: "Visualizing Happiness in Every Area of Your Life" Get on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3srh6tZ Website: https://www.DrKimberleyLinert.com

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

October 25th - Show 986 The Chat We're back to our full complement of hosts this week...so that's nice.  We have a quick catch up during which I fill you in on my fairly stressful journey to Prestatyn last weekend in the face of storm Babet. Emergency Questions [...]

This week, join me for a special behind-the-scenes look into the first season of this podcast. We have a unique twist as my friend and colleague, Aly King-Smith, takes over the microphone and interviews me about my personal experience with podcasting and putting myself out there. In this candid and no-holds-barred conversation, we delve into what inspired me to start this project and the journey of experimenting and taking risks. My hope is that by sharing both the successes and challenges, you will feel inspired to step forward and pursue that dream role or project you've been longing for. During the episode, Aly and I cover a range of topics, including:Why I embarked on this podcasting ventureHow I go about finding guests for the showThe significance of 'unsaid conversations' and what it means to meReflecting on whether I would continue creating episodes even if no one listenedMy guest-turned-host, Aly King-Smith is Managing Director of Clearworks Coaching for leaders in STEM. She's also a writer and podcaster who successfully launched "A Listening Life" in 2022, to support coaches who are running out of steam commercially. (@alisteninglife on Instagram).  A life-long advocate for women's sport, Aly is in the process of launching her passion-project podcast "Older & Wilder" in Autumn 2023 to share stories of women in their 50s, 60s and above who are using the magic of sport and exercise to thrive. Her mission is to raise the profile of sporty, older women, to remind the world that they're here, and that they're wonderful. Aly's on instagram @olderwilder and will be crowdfunding the podcast in September by walking the 180 miles of Offa's Dyke Path from Chepstow to Prestatyn while getting noisy about older sporty women. Connect with Aly on LinkedIn: Aly King-SmithYou can also check out Aly's podcast, "A Listening Life," at Listening Life Podcast. Tune in to this insightful episode as I peel back the curtain on the podcast's first season, revealing the highs, lows, and valuable lessons learned along the way.Weekly newsletter | Ask Catherine | Work with me | LinkedIn | Instagram Big shout out to my podcast magician, Marc at iRonickMedia for making this real. Thanks for listening!

Jumbo Ep:435 - 20.07.22 - Poorly & GiggingSupport me on Patreon at:www.patreon.com/Jumbowww.buymeacoffee.com/jumbowww.jumbopodcast.comYou can listen on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker and many others.Email: Jumbopodcast@gmail.comFacebook: /TonyJamesComedyTwitter: @TonyJamesComedyInstagram: @TonyJamesComedy

Welcome to the Football Bloody Hell podcast, a retro football podcast full of nostalgia, memories and recollections of when football was just a little bit better. In this podcast, we remember a trailblazing football team in the women's game. Prestatyn Ladies, a football club from a small Welsh seaside town. We hope you enjoy this podcast and please do share it with all your retro football-loving friends. If you like it, please do leave a review so we can climb the league table. It helps more people like you find us. Don't forget to check out our shop where you can buy amazing, iconic framed artwork and high-quality t-shirts. Right now we have free shipping on ALL artwork orders. Simply head to footballbh.shop. Also, don't forget to check out all the written content on the site over at footballbh.net. Today's podcast was written by Sarah Cooper and narrated by Roger T'Obor. We will be back soon with another short podcast for you to enjoy.

Kathy Barham from Book of You joined Craig K on Sound Radio 103.1 on Monday 14th February. Book of You is a North Wales based Community Interest Company who create online books that helps with reminiscence therapy, are creating a brand new “Community Book”. The ‘Community Book’ will be a collection of memories and stories […]

Andrew is joined by three recent ranking event winners on this week's show: Cameron Menzies, Kirsty Hutchinson and Shawn Burt. Cameron (0:34) discusses his Welsh Open victory, securing a return to Lakeside four years after his debut, mental health struggles during lockdown and practice sessions with Fallon Sherrock. Kirsty (13:59) explains why she chose to go to Prestatyn and not Barnsley for the Women's Series, her dream Lakeside opponent, struggling with social anxiety and her plans for the rest of 2021. Shawn (29:33) then talks about being in a tie with Rory Hansen for a spot at Lakeside, what he's heard from the WDF and the NDFC about resolving it, being nicknamed Mr Intensity, getting his Golf handicap down and struggling with jetlag on his previous visits to the UK. Enjoy!

James Roberts is a living testimony that disability is not inability. James has been fortunate enough over the years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012), to name a few. In this episode, James will share his sporting and coaching journey with us. Also, he will give us a taste of his thought-provoking perspective.  Listen into this episode as James tells us how he has managed to rise above the odds. Getting to Know James Robert Better  James was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia, a floating hip of the left leg, and scoliosis of the spine. He grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium, but resides back in Prestatyn, North Wales. He is a transformation coach by trade, but he was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. How James transitioned from Swimming to other sports James transitioned to rowing after being dropped from GB swimming programmes and went into rowing in 2006. In the same year, he participated in the World Championships in Dorney Lake, Great Britain and made the final, finishing 6th. 2007 World Championships Semi-Finalist, 2008 Paralympic Finalist (5th) and 2009 World Championships Finalist (5th). In 2012, James made another transition of sport, this time to sitting volleyball. From 2010 until 2012, he amassed 56 caps for Great Britain.   Timestamps: [00:59] James as a transformational coach and his sports journey [17:08] James transitioned from Swimming to other sports [47:35] How James remains positive Quotes “Socialism works to a point, but nobody wants to be on any playing field. Nobody wants to have the same thing.” “It's okay to go backwards to learn from that as opposed to being nostalgic.” “You can learn from things in the past, but don't live in it.” “Every athlete wants to go out on the nice shining horse and ride off into the sunset.” “We're kind of seeing where people have let things slip and are not taking care of themselves. The demons are coming out of the closet.”   Connect with James: Website: fitamputee.co.uk  Facebook Page: facebook.com/jamesoroberts11  Twitter : twitter.com/jamesoroberts11  Instagram: instagram.com/jamesoroberts11

August 18th - Show 872 The Chat Lee has put off his inflatable awning erecting till next week so is with us this week And I visited Prestatyn and didn't tell him...which makes him sad Emergency Questions Would you rather learn a lot about a little or a [...]

James Roberts is a wheelchair basketball player and Paralympic athlete based in Prestatyn, Denbighshire, Wales.Roberts was born with a disability called femoral dysplasia. He started out in his sporting career as a swimmer, and progressed on to other Paralympic sports, such as rowing and sitting volleyball. He competed for Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing, finishing fifth in the trunk and arm classification in adaptive rowing. He also competed for Great Britain at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, finishing 8th in the sitting volleyball. More recently he has begun playing wheelchair basketball for local side Rhyl Raptors. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

May 1st, 2019 - Independent electrician Lloyd Barton (36, Prestatyn) recalls his most memorable callout; a plug installation at a shipping container on a hillside in North Wales. Title announcement by Cliff Cumber. Music written and performed by John Tucker.

Welcome back to Planet Porky, there place where you can find Mike Parry and Lesley-Ann Jones rocking and rolling all night.Today they discuss: LAJ officially becoming a paperback writer, Boris and Carrie's wedding, choirs returning (or are they?), Piers Morgan's next move, retiring after the age of 65, Clint Eastwood, Prince Harry's mobile phone habits, Porky always being on call, Mick Jagger's genes, Jo Wood, why it would be impossible to date Liz Jones, approaching freedom day tentatively, sleep trouble, Bill Haley's Cumbrian roots, Porky's heritage, the boomerang generation, elderly drivers, Charlotte Church, and Prestatyn. It's the perfect accompaniment for a trip to the Welsh coast, it's Life on Planet Porky boyo. Follow the show on Twitter: @PlanetPorky or Mike is: @MikeParry8 while you can find Lesley-Ann: @LAJwriter.Or you can email us questions or comments to: planetporkypod@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you! 

Certified Mama’s Boy Merch is NOW AVAILABLE! Shop now Become a Certified Fan! Help support the podcast! Vote for “Certified Mama’s Boy” in the Podcast Magazine Hot 50 Listen to my other podcast, “Kramer and Jess Uncensored”! Refer Certified Mama’s Boy for your chance to win $250 and prizes!   On Today’s Show: Everyone thinks they have Covid before Covid was a thing. Speaking Your Truth ASK MY MOM: I split with him...he didn’t split with me!! Today’s Quote: “Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.” – Stewart Udall   The Good News: Anonymous donor uses ‘Dogecoin’ earnings to pay adoption fees at Daytona shelter Dad woken early by son saves seven from Prestatyn house fire Made Me Think: What Oprah Knows for Sure About Living Your Truth Our Amazing Partners: BARE + BLOOM  The Nayel Family launched Bare + Bloom, a luxury skin and hair line, yet affordable and designed for everyone.  As an interacial couple, they found it hard to find products that worked for the whole family and were free of chemicals, so they decided to create their own using natural, organic ingredients while using sustainable production techniques and packaging materials. USE CODE “KRAMER” TO SAVE 20% OFF YOUR ORDER! TRIVIA STAR Trivia Star is a free mobile trivia game with over 60 different categories that YOU get to choose from, including Music, TV, Animals, and Celebrities. Just go to the Apple or Google store and search for Trivia Star. Download Trivia Star for free today, and get ready to flex your brain muscles! HELLOFRESH Get fresh, pre-measured ingredients and mouthwatering seasonal recipes delivered right to your door with HelloFresh, America’s #1 meal kit. HelloFresh lets you skip those trips to the grocery store, and makes home cooking easy, fun, AND affordable! Go to HelloFresh.com/12kramer and use code 12kramer for 12 free meals, including free shipping! BETTER HELP I want you to start living a happier life today. As a listener, you’ll get 10% off  your first month by visiting BetterHelp.com/Kramer Join over 1 million people taking charge of their mental health. Again, that’s  BetterHelp.com/kramer STORY WORTH StoryWorth is an online service that helps your mom, grandmother, mother-in-law, and every mother figure in your life, share stories through thought-provoking questions about their memories and personal thoughts. It’s a fun new way to engage with them, especially if you can’t be together in person. Get started right away with no shipping required by going to StoryWorth.com/kramer. You’ll get $10 off your first purchase! CONNECT WITH US: Instagram Facebook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sally Smart came in to talk to Sound Radio 103.1 with Craig K on Monday 12th April about a fundraising calendar that caught Craig’s eye on social media and no doubt many other peoples eyes too. Local photographer Sally has created a fundraising calendar similar to the “Calendar Girls” idea but featuring local business people […]

Craig K was joined on the phone by Vicci Holbrook-Hughes on Monday 23rd March 2021 during his afternoon show to talk about NSPCC Childline. The charity are currently on the look out for new volunteers to join their call centre team in Prestatyn. Take a listen to the full interview below where Vicci discusses how […]

Dr. Heidi Forbes Öste chats with James Roberts, transformation coach helping fellow amputees lose 10lbs + by trade. An elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. Represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few. James was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. He grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium, but now resides back in Prestatyn, North Wales. He is a transformation coach by trade, but he was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. James says that he has been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few. James started out my sporting career in swimming and was part of British Swimming's Potential Squad from 2003-05. During that time, he held the SB8 200m breaststroke and 50m breaststroke national records. After being dropped from the GB swimming programme, he moved on to rowing in 2006. The transition happened fairly quickly as he made his first senior international competition that summer at the 2006 World Championships in Dorney Lake, Great Britain, and made the final finishing 6th. 2007 World Championships Semi-Finalist, 2008 Paralympic Finalist (5th) and 2009 World Championships Finalist (5th). James made another transition of sport, this time to sitting volleyball. From 2010 until 2012, he amassed 56 caps for Great Britain. His first international was a surprise selection to compete at the 2010 World Championships in Edmund, Oklahoma, USA. James says that. he was lucky enough that his time with the squad, to have competed for Great Britain, at his only European Championships in his repertoire, as well as a Continental and Intercontinental Cup. James’ career calumniated at the London 2012 Paralympics were the GB sitting volleyball squad lost in the quarter-final to eventual silver medallist Iran. James says that having a disability himself, he completely understand the adversity one can face on a day-to-day basis. Also, he wanted to bridge that gap between mainstream fitness and disability, as there is not a lot of fitness topics, about and for people with disability, to widen their knowledge and/or to just improve their quality of living. Website: fitamputee.co.uk Facebook Page: facebook.com/jamesoroberts11 Twitter ID: twitter.com/jamesoroberts11 Instagram: instagram.com/jamesoroberts11 This episode is also celebrates Dr. Heidi Forbes Öste's, #1 Bestselling book, Digital Self Mastery Across Generations, Print edition now available from all on-line booksellers, and for order in local book sellers internationally. Your order will help support the Evolving Digital Self podcast. If you like it, please feel free to share it with your friends (both the book and the podcast :-)

We're bringing you another one of our Getting to Know special episodes this week as we have a great conversation with a JD Cymru Leagues legend. In this edition, Jamie Thomas speaks to Neil Gibson, the man who has just led his hometown club Prestatyn Town to their third JD Cymru North title. A great conversation with Neil touches upon his beginnings in management at an early age after stepping out of the professional game, his love for his hometown club and how Prestatyn went from a side content with being in Tier 4 and 5 of the Welsh game to JD Cymru Premier regulars, JD Welsh Cup winners and European hopefuls.  Hear more from 'Gibbo' and his conversation with Jamie in this latest episode of our Getting to Know series.

COVID-19 has left business, charities and organisations fighting for survival during the unprecedented time, but one group in Prestatyn is continuing offer escape during lockdown for its members Aimee Friday Art Group has been running for 5 years now at the Old Library in Prestatyn, the group offers a chance for adults to learn new […]

Sunny Prestatyn By Philip Larkin

We talk about Michael younger days playing in the WPL, talking about Europe and why he decided to join Connah’s Quay, he’s not surprised Connah’s Quay are doing so well, and why he re-signed for Prestatyn, and a few fire questions.

Today we spoke to Chris Hughes who is the manager of Cymru Premier side Newtown. We also spoke about his time at Prestatyn and also his future plans.

James Roberts was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. He grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E. (Casteau), Belgium but now resides in Prestatyn, North Wales. He is an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. James has been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and two Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few achievements as a professional athlete. He started out my sporting career in swimming and was part of British Swimming's Potential Squad from 2003-05. During that time, James held the SB8 200m breaststroke and 50m breaststroke national records. After being dropped from the GB swimming program, James moved on to rowing in 2006. The transition happened fairly quickly as he made his first senior international competition that summer at the 2006 World Championships in Dorney Lake, Great Britain and made the final, finishing 6th. He was a 2007 World Championships Semi-Finalist, 2008 Paralympic Finalist (5th) and 2009 World Championships Finalist (5th). James made yet another transition in his sporting career, this time to sitting volleyball. From 2010 until 2012, he amassed 56 caps for Great Britain. My first international was a surprise selection to compete at the 2010 World Championships in Edmund, Oklahoma in the US. He was lucky enough to have competed for Great Britain at the only European Championships in his career as well as a Continental and Intercontinental Cup. His volleyball career calumniated at the London 2012 Paralympics were the GB sitting volleyball squad lost in the quarter-final to the eventual silver medallist, Iran. James came on the show to talk about his journey, and the lessons it taught him about how we can adapt and succeed regardless of what's thrown at us. Key Points from the Episode with James Roberts: James is an amputee who helps fellow amputees control their health and wellness, with a particular focus on weight loss given the unique situation amputees face that others may not. He’s spent a lot of time looking at different diets and how they interplay with lifestyle, and has instead focused his approach on creating consistent, sustainable lifestyles through re-education and coaching. Restrictive diets only work while you’re restricting, but when you take something away, you lose something, and when you come back into your life post-restriction, you find out just what you’ve lost (and it isn’t weight). As we got into James’ background, we talked about limiting beliefs. He talked about people he works with who talk about knowing their limitations, which he is not sure we all know that about ourselves. The perspective and openness we have is where the limits truly are. If we believe our limit is X, then that’s what it is. James has learned first hand that we don’t always get that right. James is not technically an amputee, but rather has something called Femoral Dysplasia, which means he is missing his femur, has a small fibula and tibia (the lower-leg bones), which is attached to his hip. James was raised in a family with very old school beliefs around what’s expected of each individual – you need to fend for yourself and achieve by your own hand. As a result, James always looked at problems he’s faced as something he needs to find a solution for. As a young boy, he would stand on the side of the playground, and you could see his mind working on how he could adapt how he plays so he can join the other kids despite his disability. It was very rare for James to have a thought of, “I can’t do that.” He felt it as a teen sometimes, but sees that as a typical teen mental state rather than being tied to some specific limitation he felt. The place where that was strongest was in the moments he found himself trying to please other people, or live up to their expectations. In sports, he felt free to perform, while outside of sports, he sometimes found himself in social situation where he found himself caring about what someone else might think. Sports for James has been a wide-ranging list of activities for James, including those he’s played at the Paralympic level for the Great Brittain team. In the past 12-18 months, James actually started to face some mental health struggles that he opened up about. It’s a theme you’re starting to see coming out more and more with celebrities, entertainers and professional athletes. For James, he thinks part of this comes from the need to wear a mask and control who you are to the audience, which can be difficult as we think about who we are and how we relate to ourself. The mental health struggles were easy to play off early on as just being what happens – the stress you have at work, getting older, etc. And dealing with it is something many of us play off, as well. “I’ll deal with it when I get through X.” “I’ll face it when I retire.” That doesn’t ultimately work for us. He realized he should have faced it and dealt with it sooner, which seemed at odds with his role of having a strong, brave face all the time, which only made it harder to live with. It finally got to a place where he recognized that he had a problem, he needn’t feel like there’s a stigma about it for him personally, and it can be ‘normal’ to need to get help. Going toward the light rather than the darkness should never be seen as weak. For James being in the Paralympics, that was such a big goal and focus that coming out of it left him somewhat empty, so he understands where he got to mentally in the wake of that. Motivational speakers often share messages about how you have to endure the grind, but for the majority of people, this is setting you up to fail if you are getting into it for someone’s else’s expectations. In sports, James remembers why most kids get into it – because they love the sport. If it transitions into being something you don’t enjoy, then you should hang your cleats up, so to speak. That lesson applies to really anything we do in life, not just sports. Why did you get into it? Is that still the reason why you do it now? The place we’re in today with the desire for instant gratification is costing us. If we can get back into a place of being willing to do the work and wait for the reward, we’ll be better for it. Life is chaotic and will test us. It’s up to us to be ever-present, adapt and change. If we don’t adapt, it won’t get easier – the game will beat us. Looking for a quick fix is like using a cheat code in gaming. You may “win”, but you’re not beating it, you’re cheating it. Links: Website: fitamputee.co.uk Podcasts: The Mindset Athlete Facebook:  @jamesroberts11 His podcast's page  The Mindset Athlete Tribe Fitness, Nutrition and Mindset for Amputee Instagram: @jamesoroberts11 Twitter: @jamesoroberts11 YouTube Subscribe to The Do a Day Podcast    Keep Growing with Do a Day Get Bryan's best-selling first book, Do a Day, which is the inspiration for this show and can help you overcome your greatest challenges and achieve in life. Read Bryan's best-selling second book, The 50 75 100 Solution: Build Better Relationships, to tap into the power we all have to improve our relationships – even the tough ones we feel have no hope of getting better. Get started on your journey to Better with the Big Goal Exercise Work with Bryan as your coach, or hire him to speak at your next event

Dean Jones and Marc Webber review the latest twists in the Cymru North, with comment from Porthmadog, Prestatyn, Flint and Rhyl.  Previewing the weekend ahead.  And a tribute to a North Wales football legend

I was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. I grew on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now reside back in Prestatyn, North Wales. I'm an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but I was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. I've been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few.

My guest this evening is joining us from across the pond. James Roberts was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. He grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now reside back in Prestatyn, North Wales. He is an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. Over those years he has represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few. www.fitamputee.co.uk     www.instagram.com/jamesoroberts11 www.twitter.com/jamesoroberts11 www.facebook.com/jamesoroberts11  Thanks for Listening. https://anythinggoesproject.com  Please hit the subscribe button, tell a friend, or give us a rating. It helps the show to be seen. The show can also be found on Itunes, Google Play, Castbox, Spotify, TuneIn, Podbean or anywhere a podcast can be heard. You can view some of the shows from our Live Stream here: https://www.youtube.com/user/AGPfacecast Don't forget, we have a phone number for you to leave a voice mail. 361-433-5739. If you have a story, call in and tell it, we will air it on the show. As part of our new segment, Anything Goes Project After Dark, we will be discussing the strange, weird, and paranormal. Definitely share your story with us. If you want to be old school and drop us some snail mail, you rock and can send it to the address below. Also, remember if you need to get rid of an item that you think maybe haunted, don't throw it out, mail it here: Anything Goe Project P.O. Box 455 Lolita, Tx. 77971 If you are interested in being a guest on the show, contact us via email, the hotline number or simply fill out this guest intake form. https://forms.gle/51hdeLJ8ymcdQGw29 Today's episode is brought to you by M&C Designs and The Wizards Workshop. Music is by XTaKeRuX and from his Beyond The Grave Album

Mark Jonah Jones and Dean Jones join Marc Webber to look ahead at the Welsh Cup weekend, with manager and player interviews from Afan Lido, Caernarfon, Colwyn Bay, Connah's Quay, Newtown, Prestatyn, Rhyl and Swansea University.

Prestatyn and Porthmadog bosses tell us what they want for Xmas and we preview the week before Xmas. 

Series 1 Episode 5 - People's Chosen Poetry - Philip Larkin - Sunny Prestatyn Dan shares his memories of hearing Sunny Prestatyn by Philip Larkin at school for the first time. People's Chosen Poetry is a bonus episode each series in which someone not necessarily affiliated with poetry chooses and discusses a poem that means something to them.

Marc Webber and Dean Jones plough through a Super Saturday of Cymru North games, with comment from Llangefni, Llandudno, Prestatyn and Rhyl. 

Marc Webber and Dean Jones discuss some of the games in this weekend's first round, with manager and player comment from 1876 Bangor, Nantlle Vale, Mynydd Isa, Holyhead Hotspurs, Coedpoeth, Mold Alex, Prestatyn, Queens Park,  Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, Rhydymwyn and Brymbo

Prestatyn boss on style of performance today, challenges on Rob Hughes and injury news ahead of Welsh Cup.

Marc Webber and Dean Jones review a feisty encounter between Flint and Prestatyn, and look ahead a weekend of fresh action.

Neil Gibson post Flint

Today on The Best Version Of You show we are joined by Paralympian sensation James Roberts. James was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. He grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now resides back in Prestatyn, North Wales. Currently he is an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but before he took up his passion for coaching he was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade and has represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few. He started out his sporting career in swimming and was part of British Swimming's Potential Squad from 2003-05. During that time he held the SB8 200m breaststroke and 50m breaststroke national records. After great success in the GB swimming programme he moved on to rowing in 2006. The transition happened fairly quickly as he made his first senior international competition that summer at the 2006 World Championships in Dorney Lake, Great Britain and made the final finishing 6th. 2007 World Championships Semi-Finalist, 2008 Paralympic Finalist (5th) and 2009 World Championships Finalist (5th). If rowing wasn't enough he made another transition of sport, this time to sitting volleyball. From 2010 until 2012, he amassed 56 caps for Great Britain. His first international was a surprise selection to compete at the 2010 World Championships in Edmund, Oklahoma, USA. James was lucky enough that his time with the squad, to have competed for Great Britain at his only European Championships in his repertoire as well as a Continental and Intercontinental Cup. Finally, his career calumniated at the London 2012 Paralympics were the GB sitting volleyball squad lost in the quarter-final to eventual silver medallist Iran. Today, James helps people all over the world with similar disabilities by coaching them online. He knows what it takes to build a strong character and a solid mindset to be the best version of himself. Something he spends his time doing to coach other people to do the same. I'm sure you'll agree, athletes and people like James, really are what makes Britain GREAT! ** If you enjoyed today's show please don't forget to leave it a 5* review on iTunes. It really does help the show reach so many more people the more positive reviews it gets, thank you! **

Looking ahead to another weekend of JD Cymru North with Dean Jones, plus comment from Prestatyn, Llanrhaedr, Rhyl and others.

Webber and Jonah review a round of midweek shocks in the Nathaniel Cup, including post match comments from Prestatyn, TNS and Carmarthen. 

Prestatyn boss speaks ahead of Cofi encounter

Ptfc boss post match 

Prestatyn keep on scoring, but it's still close in the top four of the JD Cymru North and all teams have at least a point. Marc Webber is on his own to listen to comments from Llanrhaeadr, Llangefni and Rhyl

Marc Webber and Dean Jones look ahead to the Denbighshire derby between Rhyl and Prestatyn as well as the rest of the JD Cymru weekend.

A new manager at Ruthin...and Colwyn Bay and Bangor start their new season. All the latest from the Cymru North with a weekend preview from Dean Jones, plus manager and player interviews from Rhyl, Gresford, Llangefni, Prestatyn and more.

On the podcast, I talk to James Roberts. He is an online training and nutrition coach but was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade.James was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine.He grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now resides in Prestatyn, North Wales.He has been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few.He started out in his sporting career as a swimmer, and progressed on to other Paralympic sports, such as rowing and sitting volleyball.He competed for Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing, finishing fifth in the trunk and arm classification in adaptive rowing.He also competed for Great Britain at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, finishing 8th in the sitting volleyball. More recently he has begun playing wheelchair basketball for local side Rhyl Raptors.That’s an impressive resume.But James has also suffered from feelings of low self-worth around his body, and anxiety.As a teenager he would hide his disability avoiding wearing shorts in summer and would struggle to explain his disability to others.And a recent health scare found him struggling with anxiety. Through daily meditation, concentrating on his breathing to get in touch with his thoughts and emotions he has learned to see his thoughts just as thoughts passing through his mind.

This is a message given in Prestatyn, Wales, UK on Tuesday night, June 18, 2019.

Welcome to the second That's The Bottom Line Podcast!Join your host Zak as he takes you through BWP's latest event that was held in Prestatyn, North Wales.

This week's podcast guest said some really profound things, as we giggled our way through recollections of everything that is funny about wild swimming - including trying to put your wetsuit on inside out and hopping around in car parks trying to get dressed. The first profound thing she said was "you'll always find a friend wild swimming." How true is that? Both in terms of the lifelong friends we find through wild swimming, and the friends for a day we find as they emerge from the lake we are about to get into, or who stand nervously next to us at the start of a mass participation event. Those friends, be they with us for a reason, a season or a lifetime, are a gift of wild swimming. The second profound thing Beverley said was "wild swimming saved me that year" as she reflected on the mental breakdown she had had. Both the cold water and the small group of friends, known as the Callander Coven, who had regularly accompanied her to swim in it, had acted as the most profound form of therapy. It had been an essential lifeline. It always feels like a privilege when virtual strangers (or new instant friends as I like to think of them) share such personal experiences with me. It feels like my job, as host of the podcast to stay quiet, to leave the space for the guest to speak. And yet when we move into such emotive, personal and brave territory, staying quiet starts to feel like a small betrayal. Leaving a friend out there alone, exposed. Maybe I'm over thinking it. We talked about books about wild swimming that explore the healing power of the cold water and the community of wild swimmers who surround us and help to keep us afloat. For Beverley, Leap In by Alexandra Heminsley really resonated. For me, I've Found My Tribe by Ruth Fitzmaurice and The Salt Path by Raynor Winn both touched me and connected with some of my own pain and vulnerability. Beverley is lucky enough to live in a part of the world where around 7 lochs are within a few miles drive, leaving her spoiled for choice and able to outwit the weather gods! Without really intending to, she cleverly summed up something of the magic of what is created when cold water in a beautiful setting combine with good friends - swimming into rainbows. While this actually happened to her, for me it is a glorious evocation of what wild swimming means to me, and why I do it. Things we talked about Aberfoyle, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, Helensburgh Pier to Pier swim, Loch Ard, Three Lochs Forest Drive, Loch Venachar, Loch Lubnaig, Great Scottish Swim, Great Manchester Swim, NOWCA, Wild West swimmers, Crannogs, Loch Tay, Rabbie's Tours, Glen Coe, Loch Leven, Ballachulish, Rhyl Suncentre, Prestatyn, Aphrodite's pool, Swim Trek, Scottish Open Water Swimming Association, New Cumnock outdoor swimming pool

James was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. I grew up on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now reside back in Prestatyn, North Wales. I’m an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but I was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. I’ve been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012). Thank you so much for your interest in this show of Exploring Mind and Body, if you haven’t done so already please take a moment and leave a quick rating and review of the show in iTunes by clicking below. It will keep us delivering valuable content each week and give others an opportunity to find the show as well. Click here to subscribe via iTunes (and or leave a rating)  

Neil Fitzmaurice is back from sunny Prestatyn for his latest Poetry in Motion podcast and, joined by Paul Wheelock and regular sidekick Joe Rimmer, the trio assess Liverpool’s flying start to the season.Virgil van Dijk was the star of the show at Selhurst Park on Monday night and Fitzy admits he is fast running out of superlatives – and expletives – for the centre-back. Paul likes van Dijk’s ‘arrogance’ while Joe goes further in his admiration of a player he sees as already being in the Sami Hyypia class.Talk then turns Naby Keita, another Reds player catching the eye, only for Fitzy’s mum to unexpectedly cut the conversation short.With phones now on silent, the focus switches to Roy Hodgson and a choice analogy and great story involving Billions star – and big Liverpool fan – Damian Lewis and a special night with Sir Kenny Dalglish.The lads then lavish praise on the ‘machine’ that is James Milner and argue why there should be no concern over summer signing Fabinho.Manchester City once again look the team to beat this season but does their new documentary underline Pep Guardiola’s fear of the Redmen? Fitzy certainly believes so.And another must-listen podcast ends with predictions for the Brighton match. We’re not giving the game away when we say there is every confidence the Seagulls will be on the end of a hiding.Enjoy.  For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

James was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. James' grew up on a NATO base in Belgium but now reside back in Prestatyn, North Wales. He is an online training and nutrition coach by trade but he was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. He has been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few. He started out his sporting career in swimming and was part of British Swimming's Potential Squad from 2003-05. During that time, I held the SB8 200m breaststroke and 50m breaststroke national records. After being dropped from the GB swimming programme, he moved on to rowing in 2006. The transition happened fairly quickly as James' made his first senior international competition that summer at the 2006 World Championships in Dorney Lake, Great Britain and made the final finishing 6th. 2007 World Championships Semi-Finalist, 2008 Paralympic Finalist (5th) and 2009 World Championships Finalist (5th). He made another transition of sport, this time to sitting volleyball (aka now Para Volley). From 2010 until 2012, he amassed 56 caps for Great Britain. His first international was a surprise selection to compete at the 2010 World Championships in Edmund, Oklahoma, the USA. He was lucky enough during his time with the squad, to have competed for Great Britain at his only European Championships in his repertoire as well as a Continental and Intercontinental Cups. James' career calumniated at the London 2012 Paralympics where the GB sitting volleyball squad lost in the quarter-final to eventual silver medallist Iran. In this episode, James discusses:  Overcoming adversity Seeing himself as more than an amputee Seeing himself as more than an athlete  For more information visit: fitamputee.co.uk https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDdcgbvE5f3W07br0EEQ9bg Follow James on Instagram: https;//www.instagram.com/fitamputee  https://www.facebook.com/jamesrobertsfitness  https://twitter.com/jamesoroberts11  

On this episode of the Healthy Wealthy and Smart Podcast, James Roberts joins me to discuss disability and fitness. James Roberts was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. James grew on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now reside back in Prestatyn, North Wales. James is an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. James has been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few. In this episode, we discuss: -James’ exciting career as a multisport Paralympics athlete -Bridging the gap between disability and fitness -Are people with disabilities underestimated? -How to reach your ideal clients through social media -And so much more!   Growing up, James always challenged himself to never let his disability limit his development, asking himself, “Well how can I adapt this simple and mundane task now so that I can integrate with my peers.” As a result of his perseverance, “I’ve learnt different skill sets and it’s made me the person I am today speaking to you.”   James tailor’s programs to each of his client’s goals and not to their disability as he is, “Looking at what’s this person’s ability and what are they actually capable of and pushing them to those extremes.” When working with client’s with disabilities, he stresses, “Treat them no differently than you would treat an able bodied client.”   For more information on James: I was born with a congenital disability called femoral dysplasia and a floating hip of the left leg as well as scoliosis of the spine. I grew on a NATO base in S.H.A.P.E (Casteau), Belgium but now reside back in Prestatyn, North Wales. I'm an online training and nutrition coach by trade, but I was an elite Paralympic athlete for just over a decade. I've been lucky enough over those years to have represented Great Britain at countless World Championships and 2 Paralympics Games (Beijing 2008 and London 2012) to just name a few.   I started out my sporting career in swimming and was part of British Swimming's Potential Squad from 2003-05. During that time, I held the SB8 200m breaststroke and 50m breaststroke national records. After being dropped from the GB swimming programme, I moved on to rowing in 2006. The transition happened fairly quickly as I made my first senior international competition that summer at the 2006 World Championships in Dorney Lake, Great Britain and made the final finishing 6th. 2007 World Championships Semi-Finalist, 2008 Paralympic Finalist (5th) and 2009 World Championships Finalist (5th).   I made another transition of sport, this time to sitting volleyball. From 2010 until 2012, I amassed 56 caps for Great Britain. My first international was a surprise selection to compete at the 2010 World Championships in Edmund, Oklahoma, USA. I was lucky enough that my time with the squad, to have competed for Great Britain at my only European Championships in my repertoire as well as a Continental and Intercontinental Cup. My career calumniated at the London 2012 Paralympics were the GB sitting volleyball squad lost in the quarter-final to eventual silver medallist Iran.   So why the website?   Having a disability myself I completely understand the adversity one can face on a day-to-day basis. Also, I wanted to bridge that gap between mainstream fitness and disability, as there is not a lot of fitness topics about for people with disability to widen their knowledge and/or to just improve their quality of living.   Resources discussed on this show: Fit Amputee Website Mind Set Game Podcast James Roberts Facebook James Roberts Instagram James Roberts Twitter James Roberts YouTube Fit Amputee Resources Fit Amputee Media   Thanks for listening and subscribing to the podcast! Make sure to connect with me on twitter, instagram and facebook to stay updated on all of the latest! Show your support for the show by leaving a rating and review on iTunes!   Have a great week and stay Healthy Wealthy and Smart!   Xo Karen    

Alan Morgan gives his first interview hours after being released by Llandudno. There's comment from Prestatyn, Nomads, Bala, TNS, Barry, Carmarthen after the weekend games. Plus the world's oldest McDonalds employee speaks to us. Weekend previews. And there's a number 1 from 92 to end the show.

Webber and Jonah look back at the Top Six teams and forward to how they will do next season, plus new sides Barry and Prestatyn.

TNS get the gong, but they're not the only ones up for an award as we reveal. Webber gets Jonah in trouble with the FAW, there's praise for Prestatyn and we preview the weekend's WPL games with Dafabet.

It's 50 shades of Huws Gray in this week's podcast as half of the last 8 in the cup are from that league. Webber and Jonah preview the action with contributions from the managers at Prestatyn, TNS and Bangor. And we have a women's football update from Abergavenny and Llandudno.

Season 2.5, Episode 4. We're still running up to Safe As Milk Festival at Pontins in Prestatyn (why, is it coming out?), and in this edition, Mike & John are burying their heads in Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force, GAIKA, and, as you may have gleaned from the episode title, Grouper. Prepare for more musical commentary, Mike losing his bottle, John's big manly thumbs, plus a really unseemly Star Wars joke. Want more? Hit up our Listening Notes Tumblr: http://ayppodcast.tumblr.com and follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/ayppodcast #Music #Review #Podcast #MarkErnestusNdaggaRhythmForce #GAIKA #Grouper #ForceKin

The Road To Safe As Milk, Season 2.5! We're taking a significant enough divergence from our regular format to warrant calling this a between-season season, and this is a season of pure research in the run-up to our Anniversary Episode, which will be recorded at the Safe As Milk Festival! Held in the same place, at Pontins in Prestatyn, we'll be reconvening to talk about the acts we've been enjoying at the festival, just like we did last April. However, before that, we've taken it upon ourselves to listen to all the acts on the bill - IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER. Listen on, as we listen to Actress, Ata Kak, and Brainbombs, and don't answer the door - it's Celine Dion. Don't forget, if you like us, subscribe, follow us on Twitter at @ayppodcast, and check out the Listening Notes at http://ayppodcast.tumblr.com #Music #Podcast #SafeAsMilk #Actress #AtaKak #Brainbombs

We head to Prestatyn, on the north coast of Wales, for this edition of the weekly UK True Crime Podcast.  We examine the events of 2012 leading to the deaths of five people - including three young children - in an horrendous arson attack.  The culprit was Melanie Smith, their neightbour in the flat downstairs. We look at the troubled history of Melanie Smith and the events that shaped her life leading to her horrendous crime. We also assess the devastation caused to so many people by her actions.    

The conclusion to our reportage of the Stewart Lee-curated ATP weekend in Pontins, Prestatyn. Recorded on Monday 2nd May, we discuss Stage 3 (and the difficulty of entering therein), Ex Easter Island Head playing outdoors, Boredoms, Sing-Along-A-Wicker Man, and Mike and Alice's brief foray into chalet parties. Featuring Alice, John, Matt, Mike, and a text from Gordon. #ATP #ThanksBarry #Music #Festival #SingAlongAWickerMan

The Sitcom Club spends a hot day in LA/cold day in Prestatyn at the cinema, with three 1970s big screen adaptations of TV sitcoms.

It's that time of year again, time to jump on the UNOD bandwagon….. only one more day to go……. No deep snow this year only lovely spring sunshine so pack your bags and come on down to Prestatyn for a dance.TracklistDigitaldubs ft yt – soundsystem cultureVersionOverproof Soundsystem – king stepVibronics – flc dubJah Warrior – ain't gonna be put down versionDub Dynasty – 9 years dubJah Tubbys – jah jah dubKing Earthquake – dub tapeMajestic Warriors – wormholeKanka – Marrakech dubKing Earthquake – Babylon dubDub Dynasty – monsoon dubKenny Knots – power dubMichael Rose with Ranking Joe – money dubRSD – cuss cuss refixJah Tubbys – call on jah dubDJG – late night blues bootlegBongo Herman ft Capleton and Burro Banton – drum song

The Saturday Early Morning Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Sherry Grace

The Saturday Worship Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Lawrence Dorsey Snr.

The Saturday Bible Study Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Kirk Thomas

The Friday Power Hour Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Errol Nembhard

The Friday Communion Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Simon Martin

The Friday Health Presentation from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Dr Chidi Ngwaba

The Friday Devotional Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Dr Charles Wesley Knight

The Thursday Health Presentation from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Dr Chidi Ngwaba

The Thursday Devotional Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Maureen Rock

The Thursday Early Morning Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Sherry Grace

The Thursday Power Hour Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Errol Nembhard

The Thursday evening Commitment Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Lawrence Dorsey Snr.

The Wednesday evening Commitment Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Lawrence Dorsey Snr.

The Wednesday Early Morning Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Sherry Grace

The Wednesday Devotional Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Anthony Opoku-Mensah

The Wednesday Health Presentation from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Dr Chidi Ngwaba

The Wednesday Power Hour Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Errol Nembhard

The Tuesday Devotional Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Mick Smart

The Tuesday Health Presentation from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Dr Chidi Ngwaba

The Tuesday Power Hour Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Errol Nembhard

The Tuesday evening Commitment Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Lawrence Dorsey Snr.

The Tuesday Early Morning Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Sherry Grace

The Monday evening Commitment Service from the 2013 South England Conference Camp Meeting in Prestatyn, North Wales. Presented by Lawrence Dorsey Snr.

I'm jumping on the UNOD bandwagonThis selection of dubs is for all those who are heading to the United Nations of Dub weekender in Prestatyn this weekend. Less than 24 hours to go and I for one am really looking forward to it. Shout out to Mr Steve JarvisTracklist 1 Lee Perry - Cloak & Dagger intro2 Light of Saba - Lambs Bread Collie3 Vin Morgan - Red Ash4 Tommy McCook + Aggrovators - Lamb's Bread Herb5 The Mighty Two - Mad Mad Skank6 Chariot Riders - Solomon Instrumental Version7 Rockstones + Niney - Jah For I8 Human Cargo - Carry Us Beyond 9 Prince Fari + the Arabs - Hello, Love Brother10 Jah Tubbys - Call on Jah Dub11 Ras Michael - Jah Jah Children Dub12 ? Drum Song Riddim13 Bush Chemists + Love Grocer - East Of Jaro14 Disciples - Addis Ababa 15 Dub Creator - Dub The Nation16 Iration Steppers - Wat Dem A Go When Di Right Time Come Dub17 King Earthquake - Hard Dub18 Manutension - Tribute For Prince Fari19 DJ Madd - Rizla Dub20 The Groove Corporation - Drunken Master

Video#31 Gareth Jones On Speed Presents: Chicks Dig Cars by "Lou Road". North Wales, sunshine, a coupé, clear roads ......and the story of Mickey the Stick Man