Gavin Scott | Pop Culture
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The Beatles Revolutionary Year

I’ve just read Beatles ’66, The Revolutionary Year, a terrific book by Steve Turner about what changed the Beatles between December 1965 and December 1966 as they made the leap from Rubber Soul (1965) via Revolver (1966) to the extraordinary achievements of Sergeant Pepper in 1967. On Rubber Soul, Turner points out, 13 of the 14 songs were about love: but on Revolver, 9 of the 14 were about other things entirely, starting, of course, with Taxman. And then came Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields … Most of the book is...

04 April, 2017 / 0 Comments
18th Century Movie Mogul

This amazing drawing by an eighteenth century French artist called Edme Bouchardon reveals a woman who was clearly going around Paris in the reign of Louis the Fifteenth showing movies. She’s winding a barrel organ and carrying a portable projector on her back - and presumably a portable screen in the box. Here’s one of the actual projectors from that era she might be using, and another with the slides inserted. #AgeofOlympus @TitanBooks And we are talking about movies: if you slid the glass plate back and forward it did look...

08 March, 2017 / 0 Comments
The Dangers of Metaluna

During my visit to San Diego's Mysterious Galaxy bookstore this weekend to promote The Age of Treachery I unwisely bought a model of Metaluna, the monster from the great 1950's sci fi movie This Island Earth.  When I brought him home, however, while my back was turned he not only attacked a San Francisco cable car, but did grievous bodily harm to some of the most beloved characters from fantasy and science fiction.  What would have happened to these two poor oblivious kids from Autopia if I had not intervened, I dread to...

09 May, 2016 / 0 Comments
Wrestling with Ursula le Guin

I was recently asked to write an article about my adaptation of two of Ursula le Guin's wonderful Earthsea fantasy novels for television: and this is my painful confession. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/04/guest-post-gavin-scott-wrestling-ursula-le-guin/ ...

27 April, 2016 / 0 Comments
The Lone Ranger tours McCloud

I was recently restoring one of my sculptures which hangs in the magnificent Wild West era McCloud Hotel,  near Mount Shasta in Northern California. While I was at work one of the characters in the sculpture escaped and was only recaptured after many adventures, as I think these pictures prove ...

11 April, 2016 / 0 Comments
More Wonderful Old Pan Paperbacks

Here are four more of the memorable if artistically challenged Pan paperback covers from the 40's and 50's, such as might have been read on trains by Duncan Forrester, the hero of The Age of Treachery.     #pan paperbacks #age of treachery...

21 March, 2016 / 0 Comments
Aunts (1946) Part III

I have received many eager requests for the answer to the question mentioned in the previous post, which was Here is the answer: Which allows us to move on to question Number Five. But I think we are not ready for question Number Six. We must pace ourselves. Mustn't we, people? ...

17 March, 2016 / 0 Comments
Strange Scene

Every now and then I find two or three items from my collection of juvenile ephemera (otherwise known as toys and games) that demand to be put together in the same narrative. Here is the latest, for which the legend reads THE GIANT DUCK OF TOPEKA HAD CLAIMED YET ANOTHER VICTIM PS IF THIS AMUSES YOU, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SHARE IT WITH PEOPLE YOU THINK MIGHT LIKE IT TOO!...

14 March, 2016 / 2 Comments
Aunts (1946) Part II

Another installment of the enthralling form by H.F. Ellis from 1946. Coming soon: the answer to a question which might be troubling some of you.   PS IF THIS AMUSES YOU, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SHARE IT WITH PEOPLE YOU THINK MIGHT LIKE IT TOO! THE SHARE BUTTON IS AT THE TOP ...

10 March, 2016 / 0 Comments
George Martin & Nellie the Elephant & Me

I was a fan of George Martin long before I was a fan of the Beatles – though I didn’t know it until just now, when I read Mark Lewinsohn’s extraordinary Tune In, the first of his projected three volume biography of the band. What I learnt there was that in his role as head of the EMI record label Parlophone, George had produced some of the records I’d adored as a child in the 1950’s – including Nellie the Elephant (Off she went with a trumpety trump, trump, trump...

09 March, 2016 / 0 Comments
The Beauty of Pan Paperbacks

When I was growing up Penguin books were ubiquitous, elegantly presented and cheap. But also a little bit austere and even - for the under ten set -forbidding. For sheer excitement, on the other hand, Penguin's rival Pan went all out to make their books irresistable on the bookstand, and I still take great delight in their cover art to this day. Even if - perhaps even because - some of the draughtsmanship is rather gloriously bad. Here are three from my collection of Pan books dealing with World War Two adventures, of which there were...

07 March, 2016 / 0 Comments
A Train called Thomas

Among the cultural event of 1946 we must not forget the appearance of a small blue railway engine. Duncan Forrester did not buy the first in the series, a book called Three Railway Engines by the Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry, when it was published in 1945: at that moment he was driving a stolen German motor cycle along a mountain road in Bavaria. But he was back in England for the publication of the Rev. Awdry’s second book, Thomas the Tank Engine, in 1946, and saw it in Brown’s Book Shop,...

04 March, 2016 / 0 Comments
I Know Where I’m Going

I've been giving some thought to the movies which might have been seen in 1946 by Duncan Forrester, the hero of The Age of Treachery, the detective thriller set in that year which Titan Books and Random House are publishing next month. One of the first he saw, had in fact been released in 1945, but he was still able to catch up with it in early 1946 at the Astoria cinema on Holderness Road in Hull, where his mother lived. The film was I Know Where I'm Going, written...

02 March, 2016 / 2 Comments
Gold Confetti!

Having had an exclusive preview, I can confidently say, this is extraordinary music. Joyous, mind-expanding, sometimes eerie. A major new talent coming into its own....

16 June, 2014 / 0 Comments
Fascinating find at the Long Beach Flea Market

Splendidly drawn top-shot/floor plan of a house in "Mr. Ree" - a 1937 precursor to "Clue" (1949). Beautiful colors! Here's what boargamegeek.com says about it: This game is planned to give you all the thrills and excitement of a true detective mystery. More than that, the game gives you an opportunity to play an exciting part in the creation of the plot, and the thrill of actually playing Detective; an eagerly sought opportunity to solve a baffling crime committed right under your very nose. And, amazing as it may seem, the plot...

16 June, 2014 / 0 Comments
Imperial Mammoth strikes again!

Check out my daughter and son in law Laura and Leonard Jackson's amazing new song "Little Earthquakes" https://soundcloud.com/imperial-mammoth/little-earthquakes-2...

07 May, 2014 / 0 Comments
Rupert Bear in Space

One usually associates Rupert Bear with Nutwood, but in this marvelous images from a 1960's annual, here are his pals, pigs, badgers et all, gliding across the surface of a new planet as if they belonged there. And Rupert himself, of course, supervises from his personal UFO.   Who else Albert Bestall and his heirs could have made space seem ...

12 March, 2014 / 0 Comments
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