Many readers have asked me to tell more stories about my years in the Soviet music industry. It was a long time ago, but I’ve managed to come up with a few old photos to spur the memories. Unfortunately, the memories aren’t all pleasant, but then, neither is the music industry.

As I’ve said before, my first band, pictured above, was the Grostinkas, and we played Moscow cabarets and less fancy dives during the late 1960s. We quarreled often, mostly over creative direction.

I was unable to hide my disdain for the lyre players, but the band’s founder, former cosomonaut and national hero Yuri Gagarin, squatting opposite me on the left of the photo, was insistent, and he claimed to have the support of the Politburo. “Besides, those aren’t lyres,” Yuri insisted, “they’re chairs.”

As soon as the drugs wore off, of course, I could see his point, but by then I’d realised that my bandmates were way too serious anyway, and quit the group. I’d been invited to join Igor Granov’s Synthy Troupe, which was making good money at the time in Balkan nightclubs.

Igor had a five-man synthesiser outfit that specialised in very zippy renditions of Tchaikovsky, but he needed something to fill out the sound, quite apart from the constant barking of his father’s Great Dane. I suggested a bicycle bell, it added just the right touch, and a whole new career opened up to me.

We put out two albums and played something like 5,000 wedding receptions in the year and a half I was with the troupe, but in the end my bell-ringing thumb simply gave way, and a state doctor advised me to try a different instrument or risk permanent damage. I struggled on for a few more months, using my toes, but it was hopeless, and I gave up performing altogether for a full decade.

I turned my throbbing hand instead to designing album covers for other artists. Below are a couple of the ones of which I’m most proud.

Debytuka C Odrodseku was Georgian chanteuse of Hungarian descent who sang a wicked version of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” that was a huge hit in the midst of the sex scandal involving Brezhnev’s gay son.

I think the fact that I depicted Deby holding her own photo makes for a clever trompe l’oeil. There’s more!

Ian Hunter turned 70 this week. Happy birthday and don’t ever stop writing. This is “When the World was Round” from his last album, “Shrunken Heads”. He’s got the follow-up coming out this month. Wonderful animation here by Andy Doran of Menagerie.

Remember the kids in the playground, avoiding the bullies each day
Timing your life to the monsters, the monsters that won’t go away
And you win some, you lose some, you ain’t got much choice
so you choose one (what have you done)

Everybody lies ‘n’ we’re stuck in the middle
I think I liked it better when the world was round
There’s too much information but not enough to go on
I think I liked it better when the world was round

Now that we’re older and wiser
Now we got kids of our own
Timing their lives to the monsters
But the monsters won’t leave them alone
You win some, you lose some, you ain’t got much choice
But it’s gotta be done, yeah it’s gotta be done

‘Cause everybody lies ‘n’ we’re stuck in the middle
I think I liked it better when the world was round
There’s too much information but not enough to go on
I think I liked it better when the world was round
I don’t wanna put you off it
I don’t wanna put you off it
But I think I liked it better when the world was round
And I wish that I could change it
Yes I wish that I could change it
I think I liked it better when the world was round

Is it my imagination
When I look back thru the ages
Is it my imagination

You win some, you lose some
You only got two shots, so you take one
(what have you done)

‘Cause everybody lies ‘n’ we’re stuck in the middle
I think I liked it better when the world was round
There’s too much information but not enough to go on
I think I liked it better when the world was round
And I don’t think we deserve this
No I don’t think we deserve this
I think I liked it better when the world was round
Give me a reason to believe in
Give me a reason to believe in
I think I liked it better when the world was round
Maybe we can make it better
Maybe we can make it better
I think I liked it better when the world was round.

Michael, a visitor to one of my webpages — although I can’t figure out which one — informs me just in time for the 40th anniversary that the Led Zeppelin concert I had the audacious luck to see in Manchester, England, in June 1969 was on the 15th, a date I hadn’t manage to record.

Michael pointed me to the Zep’s website page about the show at the Free Trade Hall, which happens to contain a fair bit of information.

I redis- covered that, for the price of my £1 ticket, I got to hear “Train Kept a-Rollin’”, “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, “Dazed and Confused”, “As Long as I Have You”, “Killing Floor”, “White Summer / Black Mountainside”, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, “You Shook Me”, “How Many More Times”, “Communication Breakdown” and “Pat’s Delight”.

Manchester was the third night on a seven-stop English tour for the recently fledged supergroup, after Newcastle and Birmingham. Bristol, Portsmouth and Bath followed, and then they finished things off at London’s Royal Albert Hall on the 29th.

Along the way, Zeppelin hopped over to Paris to play “Communication Breakdown” on a TV show, the video from which is now widely available.

While I was at the website, knowing I’d laid out a full quid to see them live, I helped myself to a couple of mementoes.

Wonder what I did with my own ticket?

This 6MB animated GIF, a quick clip from the French TV taping, will take a few moments to load.

The “Music in Dorseyland” pages start here.

Jimmy Page pops up in Bangkok in 2008.

Photos from Bangkok promoter Bec-Tero

I have now seen Rod Stewart live in concert twice. The first time was in Toronto with the Faces in October 1975. The second time was this week, in Bangkok, on March 4, 2009. Thirty-four years. We’re both still doing alright.

Here’s my review of the latest show, published in much-abbreviated form in the incredibly shrinking Daily Xpress.

Trailing history and superlatives behind him, Rock’n'Roll Hall-of-Famer Rod Stewart gave a sold-out Impact Arena a snoot-full of both Rockin’ Rod and Karaoke Rod on Wednesday night, and the crowd would have loved to hear a whole lot more.

A couple of months ago the man who’s sold a quarter of a billion records joined the “When I’m 64″ club, but he showed little sag as he piled on the hits and served up a few surprises for Bangkok, including yielding the stage to his 21-year-old daughter Ruby for a couple of numbers.

In the end, though, Stewart left without a final goodbye, leaving the audience and his band to finish off the last choruses of “Sailing”. It seemed an abrupt ending to a thoroughly enjoyable but oddly uneven show.

Things got off to a magnificent start with Rod at his charming best on “Some Guys Have All the Luck”, “It’s a Heartache” and “You Wear It Well”.

He turned up the heat with Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party” and then sang “Rhythm of My Heart”, which ended in a stunning set piece with his three back-up singers taking cues from him one by one to unleash some serious vocal stretches.

Julie Delgado, Natasha Pearce and Esterlee Nicholson are the ladies he’s kiddingly called “the Lap Tops”, a pun on lap dancers and the Four Tops, but musically they carried a heavy load, muscling through Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” on their own later and, in this number, building expectations as high as they were going to get.

Then technology stepped in to wreck things. The giant central screen at the back of the stage, which had been adding much to the fun with a spoof Hollywood teaser and Motown video clips, went berserk. Half the imagery was obliterated in a pixel firestorm that ruined all of Stewart’s “Downtown Train” (with the help of an ill-advised double-drum solo).

The technicians struggled to douse the electronic fireworks as the band carried on with Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest” and a lacklustre “Reason to Believe”, but the screen continued to pulsate like an immense, menacing robot refusing to be ignored.

They finally just pulled the plug on it in time for Ruby Stewart, Rod’s daughter with former long-time girlfriend Kelly Emberg, to give the old man a rest and perform Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and “Rescue Me”, the soul hit by Fontella Bass.

Ruby’s a fine singer and drew cheers from the audience, but her participation only added to the concert’s gradual unhinging.

Interestingly, Ruby’s four-year-old step-brother Alastair wasn’t far away. Rod has brought along on this tour his wife Penny Lancaster-Stewart and their son, Rod’s seventh child.

Their dad came back onstage, gave his first of two assurances that the screen disaster wasn’t his fault, sang his stomping version of “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?”, a tune that was plaintive when John Fogerty wrote it, and then took a break.

He soon got things back on track, though, with “Forever Young”, “Twisting the Night Away” and especially a lovely rendition of “You’re in My Heart”. A massive crowd response greeted the Van Morrison classic “Have I Told You Lately”, and the evening headed deep into karaoke territory.

It was absolutely amazing how many people in the arena were ready and able to provide the vocals for “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”. Stewart twice silenced the band so the fans could pretend they were him. It was quite moving, and a lot of fun. There’s more!

It’s been five long years now since the Rolling Stones left me holding the bag in Bangkok and I haven’t heard a word of apology from them. Keith’s got magnums of time to make pirate movies, and I see that Mick is lately dragging his granddaughter around other people’s shows in London, which makes for some pretty horrifying pictures in the press.

The above “souvenir” card was one of thousands distributed in Bangkok ahead of what would have been the band’s first concert in Thailand, on April 10, 2003 (even though the card says April 8 — an early slip-up forecasting trouble).

History has lumped that show’s cancellation in with a string of others and tagged it with the SARS excuse — the sub-pandemic of November 2002 to July 2003 that killed 774 people, mostly in Hong Kong. That was indeed the reason given for the Stones making a detour around Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, but that’s not why they backed off Bangkok.

Officially, at least — who knows what might actually have happened? — the band had roared across Australia and played Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Singapore, Bangalore and Mumbai and were ready for Thailand next when their roadies’ airplane was grounded in Mumbai on April 9 “due to a technical problem”. No sound, lighting or stage crew could get airborne.

And that is supposedly why 11,000 people holding tickets to get them into Impact Arena in Muang Thong Thai in Bangkok’s north end didn’t get licked by the Rolling Stones on their “Licks” world tour. There’s more!