The Number of the Bus

666 is the Number of the Bus. Going from Punggol Drive to Marina Boulevard, a total of 30 km, with 22 stops. Can you see what it's like to travel on Bus 666 via YouTube? Of course you can.

The Beatles Box

(Image from Wikipedia)

Back in 1989, when I was a student in Edinburgh with more curiosity than cash, I walked into a second-hand record shop looking for something to keep me company through late-night study sessions and long weekends with no plans. I walked out with a box set of The Beatles.

Not just any box set, mind — this was the Readers Digest version. Yes, that Readers Digest. The same folks who bring you Laughter is the Best Medicine and condensed novels for people who don’t have time for the full-length kind. Somewhere along the way, they also decided to put out a box set compilation of Beatles tracks, and the cassette version was what I forked out a tenner for. I'm guessing I was eating from the chip shop for the rest of the month. That was fine, I liked salt & sauce.*

This thing was... odd. It wasn't the full Beatles catalogue. It didn’t have the album covers, the lyrics, or any of the artwork. Just eight cassettes in a sober little box with a tracklist that hopped from "Love Me Do" to "Let It Be" with no regard for original album sequence or context. And despite this, or perhaps because of this... it worked.

See, for someone like me — who hadn’t grown up with The Beatles in real-time — this was my first real exposure to their music. And it was unusual in that I developed a familiarity with the Beatles songs without having the famous album covers in my hand as I did so. And come to think of it, that wasn’t all that unusual for those of us in Gen X. A lot of the music we first heard came to us on C90 cassette tapes lovingly, or sometimes lazily, compiled. There were no liner notes or cover art. Just handwriting that said “Side A” and maybe a few track titles scrawled across the insert card.

That kind of blind-listening shaped the way we took in music. You weren’t guided that much by an album’s imagery or to a certain extent by its cultural weight. In some ways, the Beatles Readers Digest box set fit right into that aesthetic. There wasn't much separating it from a bunch of C60s put together by one of your friends. Or, if you prefer a curated playlist.

Years later, I’d hear the albums in their proper form, discover the context, the covers, the controversies. And, of course, that added richness. I like physical product. But at the same time, there’s something to be said for first impressions that arrive stripped of the legend.

*Edinburgh reference, IYKYK.

Joy in Repetition - Finishing Maigret

Some people climb mountains. Some people run marathons. I’ve just finished reading all 75 Maigret novels by Georges Simenon — and honestly, I feel like I’ve done a bit of both.

It’s a strange kind of achievement, reading your way through a series of books that, by a lot of measures, are more or less the same. Same protagonist, most of tthe hem in the same streets of postwar Paris, same grimy cafés and sullen suspects (having said that, the weather changes; it may be possible to group the novels into Spring and Autumn novels more effectively than by decade). The motive may be singular, but the tune is familiar. And this of course is the point. There’s a real pleasure to be found in stories that return you to the same world over and over again — not despite their similarities, but because of them.

It’s not a series you rush through. I read them slowly, over years, helped by the fact that Singapore's public library had most of them available either as hard copies or e-books. Sometimes months passed between books. Other times, I’d read two or three in a week. But every time I returned, it felt like I was visiting someone I knew.

Some of the books stand out more than others. The Yellow Dog is pure atmosphere — a seaside town, a mysterious animal, and a fog that never quite lifts. Maigret and the Minister dips into politics and the anxiety of power. Night at the Crossroads is one of the strangest, most noirish entries — full of fog, confusion, and a wonderfully murky sense of place. Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse finds the Inspector moving through bourgeois respectability with his usual quiet skepticism. And Maigret in Vichy, another one of the later novels, is a beautiful change of pace — Maigret on medical leave, watching the world instead of pursuing it, a man slowly becoming aware of his own mortality. At the same time, I'd be lying if I could remember all of them: the titles Maigret is Afraid and Maigret's Failure don't ring too many bells.

But part of the enjoyment is that even the “minor” entries are enjoyable. They don’t need to be materpieces. They just need to be Maigret.

Reading all 75 books isn’t about chasing a plot or unlocking a twist. It’s about spending time in a world where human frailty is treated with sympathy, where justice is important but never theatrical, and where smoking a pipe while thinking things through still feels like a legitimate investigative strategy.

There’s a kind of artistic tradition in this sort of repetition. P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle stories are essentially variations on a theme — imposters, pig thefts, romantic mix-ups, and Lord Emsworth in a fog. Yasujiro Ozu’s later films all tell the same gentle story: aging parents, dutiful children, life’s quiet disappointments and dignities. We return to them not because we’re surprised, but because they offer a sense of rhythm, of familiarity, and of quiet beauty in the expected.

Simenon understood that. He once said he didn’t care for plot, really — he was interested in people. That’s what the Maigret novels are: 75 variations on human weakness and quiet understanding, all wrapped in a fog of tobacco and red wine.

And when you turn the last page of the last book, it’s not a grand finale. It’s more like a quiet goodbye at the end of another long walk in the rain.

Tasmania: Land of Led Zeppelin Album Covers

 

I took this photo when I was on holiday in Tasmania about 8 years ago. It's taken from the boat cruise off of Bruny Island and I reckon it would have been a pretty good Led Zeppelin album cover, maybe between Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti.  

Denim & Leather by Michael Hann

In 1978,  Heavy rock had a certain look and sound. Open chords rang out. Musicians might wear silk or Spandex. Kimonos were not unknown. But by 1983, things were different, and what we now call Heavy Metal was set. Denim or Biker jackets, leather trousers, studded wristbands, and palm-muted riffs. The music got faster and a group of fans dispersed in unfashionable towns had became a tribe. Michael Hann's Denim and Leather is a history of the years that codified Heavy Metal.

You don't actually need to like the NWOBHM to enjoy the book. Reading it feels like flipping through a photo album of a vanished Britain — not the royal weddings and Margaret Thatcher kind, but the one with prefab estates, burned-out Ford Cortinas, and hand-drawn band logos scratched into school desks. Hann takes us back to the early ’80s, to a world where in the North of England bands like the Tygers of Pan Tang played working men’s clubs with sticky carpets and bingo on Tuesdays. There's an especially evocative description of the Marquee Club, complete with Lemmy on the slot machines.

One of then things I enjoyed was its discussion of the importance of Glam on influencing the NWOBHM. Hann’s interviews reveal just how many musicians were turned on by T. Rex and Queen before they ever heard Sabbath or Priest  (the number of future metalheads who cite one of their first singles being Queen’s Seven Seas of Rhye is notable). NWOBHM didn’t emerge out of nowhere — it evolved, often in secret, from teenage glam fans who found distortion. 

That tribal identity was held together not just by the music, but by a scattered but passionate media ecosystem. Kerrang! wasn’t just a magazine; it was a lifeline. The Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio 1, hosted by Tommy Vance, was a weekly communion. And then there was the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington. The description of the first festival is one of the book's highlights, as fan after fan remembers their awe at the size of the crowd and  realizing their were other people jut like them. These were the glue — the things that took a thousand small-town scenes and turned them into a national (and international) movement. And that international point is important, as by the mid 80s, the most important innovate bands were coming from the US and Europe. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal also became the Last Wave.

What Denim & Leather also captures — gently, without judgment — is the inevitable fade. By the mid-’80s, the moment had passed. The bands that didn’t break through disbanded. The music press moved on. Thrash arrived. Glam came back, only now it was American and glossy. The NWOBHM bands who didn’t adapt were relegated to footnotes and second-hand bins. But Hann treats them with respect — not just because they mattered, but because they still do to the people who were there. And to people who maybe missed it the first time but found it later — in old records, fanzines, or forums where people still debate the best Venom record ("In League with Satan").