Dom's Rambles

Special thanks to Mandy for providing the following photos. Apparently there are some more to follow which I’ll put up as soon as they arrive. As usual, click on the thumbnails to get the full size pictures.

First up we have the only live shot of the Mk 1 Lovechild line up that I’ve seen in close on twenty years! What the hell is going on with my hair?
Given my unabashed narcissism you’d think I’d have thousands of Lovechild photos. Unfortunately, most pictures of the band were taken by my girlfriends. One of the major responsibilities of fronting a heavy metal band was to be a lonely man who knew just what it meant to lose control and consequently much of your time was spent walking the streets of sin, looking for love like a shadow in the heat of the night. Women were regarded as disposable pleasures, I pissed a lot of them off and practically all of those photos ended up being ritually burned or used as toilet paper.

Next it’s me camping it up and doing my best Paul Stanley impersonation fronting the classic Mk 2 line up.

Doubtless all the superannuated Eighties rock chicks will be swooning at Libertin’ Lips.

A couple of shots of Hard Edge featuring Des ‘Bomber’ Barrett on drums and Steve ‘The Appendage’ Shipman on vocals. The band broke up after Des got in a fight with a load of squaddies from a local RAF base and bombscared said base on its open day in revenge. He got 18 months in prison for that. Steve once ‘followed me in’, as the saying goes. Although the girl in question had to admit that he possessed the most terrifying wang she’d ever seen, she also commented “…but he doesn’t know how to use it like Dom”, which made me smirk!

I can’t recall what this lot were called (if you’re reading this Skello or Dean let me know and I’ll amend the post).

Finally we have Lazers, looking every bit the dive it was.

I installed a new web stats package this week seeing as the one that comes with the web space is basic to say the least. Okay, I could see how many visitors I’d had, their network and IP number, which pages had been accessed and which files had been downloaded (although in neither case by whom) but that was about it. For someone with the kind of quasi-stalkerish tendencies I have this was grossly inadequate, so I installed a better one.

While we’re talking statistics, the blog and website combined average between four and five hundred visitors a day (the photobucket site where the pictures live gets double that and the highest monthly figure we ever had was slightly less than 50,000 hits during June of this year). This is modest to the point of insignificance by Friends Reunited standards but it still represents the equivalent of a capacity crowd at the Hallam FM Arena every month and twice the population of Lincoln in a year. I don’t think that’s too bad for an overwrought neurotic venting his frustrations into cyberspace (obviously this isn’t as articulate or cerebral an outlet for said frustrations as, for example, starting a pub brawl, but then I can only dream of attaining such dizzying heights of sophistication).

I’m still figuring out the intricacies of the new software and how to interpret the information it provides, but I have been able to ascertain a number of things thus far. Firstly the site gets a lot of hits from the networked computers on a particular American university campus and from this I have deluded myself into believing that I have a cult readership amongst the student body. Also, I see that at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon a certain Ms Harvey (or someone from her workplace) arrived at the site via a Google web search on my name. Really, I’m quite disappointed - and more than a little hurt - that you haven’t even got me bookmarked!

While I’m still writing this one up – and having tremendous fun doing so as I haven’t felt this smug for ages – I’ll give a little taster by saying that there was an ‘incident’ in the pub on Friday night. An incident which, I hasten to add, I did not instigate (the whole thing was captured on CCTV so as soon as I’ve persuaded the powers that be to let me have a copy I’ll post it here).
In the meantime let's just say that my recent bout of writer's block has been entirely cleared!

Thanks for that mate - and thanks for generating such a buzz about the Down & Out... website.