It sure does, or it does its best when times are hard and the chips are down and cold and soggy from life's piss and vinegar and.... (Can you tell this is just made up off the hoof, the Braw Book's farewell tour, the old bones picking through the (e)motions one last time?). Where these blogs used to be thorough they're now just tho rough (as Daffy Duck'd say!). Anyway, enough of that already and how about a bit more of this....
The ever-busy USS ORB touched down on earth in 2025 with the release of Buddhist Hipsters, their umpteenth album, and a definite continuation of the Good Doctor's elder statesman prolific ambient flourish. Ignoring the terrible cover, it's actually not too bad an album. There's no doubt current whizzkid Michael Rendall's bag of aural tricks is beginning to show its limitations, the formula going a little stale - here's the same soaring synth arpeggios, the same fuzzed ambient at play throughout. But with an array of new/old collaborators - hello, Steve Hillage's stuttering guitar intro, goodbye, Roger Eno's ivory tinkling outro - it's a consistent and pleasing listen overall, a lesser photocopy that could simply be a mash of their recent glories. It's certainly not, as DRAP's press release tells us (in the hope we pay up/attention), anything remotely like the glorious UFOrb, but it's still a record Agent Rob'd happily sit through in its entirety. That's ambientertainment for yer....
The Orb - Doll's House
"My mind is strong and healthy.
I will not permit my mind to dwell on any thought or any thing that is not harmonious.
My mind is filled with love, joy, peace...."
Shame on Rob, but, yes, last year was truly the year of exploring the Eno, geez, a man whose delicate but colossal fingerprints are all over just about every album in this Agent's collection. Stick the ageing iPod on shuffle and you think, 'Hey, It's Boards of Canada or is it FSOL or maybe SOTL....' but, no, it's all Brian Eno, all of it, always, the absolute aural GrandDNAddy of them all! Music. For. Everything! I rest my case, m'lud....
Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)
Funnily enough Brian Eno also lends his light-fingered production touch to both Laid and its more experimental sister album WAH WAH by James, Rob finally getting around to exploring this old but intriguing suburb of MADchester, before taking the subway even deeper underground to check out fellow (gone) natives New Fast Automatic Daffodils cult album obscurio Pigeonhole, a sort of stuttered, groovy, snapping undercurrent to Happy Mondays rougher and readier chart take....
Other than that, precious 2025 eartime was devoted to the likes of The Heads fuzzed off Dead In The Water, Flying Saucer Attack's shoegaze into the Distance, the forlorn acid-tinged strum Michael Head & The Strands, Killing Joke's deeply, darkly (un)funny Killing Joke, the supreme alt-slices of Deerhunter's Halcyon Digest, The Blue Nile's quietly beautiful and haunting Hats, the heart on yer sleeve indie of Jact's Jact - from former Pusherman singer Andy "Nice nice nice L.A., smack, crack, never coming back unless it's with the tormentos" Frank - to Mogwai's pulsing soundtrack to Zero Zero Zero....
Retro-wise there was the spiritual leaning soundtracks to Nosferatu and Aguirre The Wrath of God from mood masters Popol Vuh, the spritely twang of Dillard & Clark's The Fantastic Expedition, Bruce Springsteen's stark and dusty The Ghost of Tom Joad, the soaring supergrouping of Manassas, to the jaw dropping, free forming, locked damn tight incomparable kosmische experimental grooves of CAN's Ege Bamyasi, Future Days and Flow Motion....
And ambi-techno side there was a clutch of classic early-era Dreadzone remixes, the sprawling ambient flush of Eluvium's Copia and Johann Johannsson's Fordlandia....
Boards of Canada - Reach For The Dead
....the retro futurism of Boards of Canada's shimmering Tomorrow's Harvest, the warm groove of Dusted's When We Were Young, and the sparse heart beatings of Seefeel's Pure, Impure....
If in 2024 it was the supervillain MF DOOM who provided hip hop's holy “quinity”, then 2025's buncha fives was easily down to the Wu-Tang Clan bringing tha ruckus with Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Liquid Swords (Genius/GZA), Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (Raekwon), Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version (Ol' Dirty Bastard) and IronMan (Ghostface Killah)....
In fact, underground hip hop blew up big Braw-side in 2025, with quality booms and baps courtesy of The Goats' Tricks of the Shade, People Under The Stairs "O.S.T.", Edan's Beauty And The Beat, Masters Of Illusion and Deltron 3030, records worth a-deep a-diggin' through those, er, crates for....
Or what about a hefty puff of Cypress Hill's 'blunted beatz', which sure helped Rob inch over the finish line on those late winter Fridays, AKA 'The Suicide Watches', those harsh times when a silent slip into the Clyde's welcoming inky blackness under cover of darkness would go completely (and beautifully) unnoticed. Thankfully he always chose to inhale and float the other way....
Cypress Hill - Hits From The Bong
Rob also acquired two nice Polish pop albums in 2025, Patrick The Pan's To Nie Najlepszy Czas Dla Wrażliwych Ludzi (It's Not The Best Time For Sensitive People - no sh*t!) and (finally!) Mrozu's Zlote Bloki, home to the eternally brilliant and supremely catchy Zloto, the headliner of Braw's ever-expanding Polska Pop Picks playlist on Youtube. Bardzo Dobrze!
And, as inevitable as its coming around again, just like the turn of vinyl, Rob succumbed to the temptations of Record Store Day for a second time in 2025, tracking down a copy of Verve's Voyager 1 - thanks Assai Records! - a prized early live excursion that catches them at their soaring, roaring 'Mad Richard' best.
Verve - South Pacific
It's not like Rob didn't have a decent MP3 boot of the original boot, but, well, isn't this exactly what RSD's all about, selling the same old back to the same old (suckers for limited edition marbled splatter clear 180gram vinyl in a gatefold sleeve) at a vastly inflated price? At least this was a simple reproduction in itself, a carbon copy reissue, nothing more - just let the music do the talkin', man....
And, as per 2024, the CD has long gone the way of all things charity, fostering such diamond deals in the rough as Grateful Dead's eternal Live/Dead, the artful hip hop of Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, the drowning wooze of SOTL's Ballasted Orchestra, the late Brian 'SOTL' McBride's similarly soothing When The Detail Lost its Freedom, a very neat double cd reissue of David Crosby's 70s bombed out solo benchmark If I Could Only Remember My Name....
SOTL - Music For Twin Peaks Episode #30, Part 1
....to the sonic big bang of The Best of Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground, the zoned distortion of Spacemen 3's equally-ish influential Sound of Confusion, the Syd Barrett wired pop surge of The Pink Floyd's Early Singles, to the hushed thoughtfulness of Kingsbury Manx's S/T, all wrapping up with three essential compilations courtesy of the Virgin Ambient Series - A Brief History of, Imaginary Landscapes and Music of Changes - each jam packed with prime special spatial cuts guaranteed to itch parts of your mind other records can barely scratch....
This year was also a bit quieter on Bandcamp, but still we had the propulsive techno drive of Evan Mark and Steve Hillage's Dreamtime Submersible, another gently captivating outing from Bee Pieces....
....the warm ambient crackle of 2814's magical Birth of a New Day, the cut up indie innervisions of The Microphone's the Glow pt. 2, the guitar crackle of Duster's Stratosphere and the hushed ambient flow of Hiroshi Yoshimura's Surround....
....and never forgetting to copy and paste the endless drone blanket of Scotland's own Fordell Research Unit, the rattling post-everything of Boobs of DOOM and even a new-ish album from Agent Rob's own musical (misad)venture in the push and pull guitar melding of The Mind Robbers, or how about an old-ish release from his other creative outlet, the classic shifting post-indie 'strumentals of Welcome Racers! by Telemachus....?
The biggest reunion of 2025? Well, it certainly wasn't OASIS - tho against all (Rob's) odds they did absolutely clear up in terms of rave reviews - because it was in fact The Beta Band, those shape and genre-shifting misfits fae Fife (who opted to return with a Guy Ritchie country gangsters look). Yep, if anyone truly sold out their comeback in 2025 it was them (it's just a shame that they actually sold out their comeback to soulless music industry obliterating scum like Spotify and Ticketmaster, a verrrry far cry from their bloody-minded contrarian days of old - exactly the modern horrors you'd expect them to kick back against, not fully embrace....)
The Beta Band, 2025 - no style
The Beta Band, 1999 - inner meet me
So far so-so. The gig itself was more or less (more!) a rerun of their first time out (before their time out), nothing new at all, kicking off with a lazy ffwd big screen recap - if anyone ought to have the comedy chops to spoof the hoary old 'let's get the band back together' mantra it's The Betas, but evidently, scope and time aside, they just couldn't be arsed rustling up a 5 minute skit to bridge the gap, or anything better than the middling rehashed t-shirts on offer - a wonder bee stuttered across the big screen intro that would've been an ideal addition to their earlier EP tee-stylings. Equally dispiriting was that poor broken Gordon Anderson's projected cameo went unacknowledged while ex-Stone Rose Mani's* appearance on celluloid was greeted with whoops of applause....
I saw The Beta Band in 1998 and
all I got was this lousy t-shirt....
*This is absolutely no criticism of Mani himself, simply Rob's observation (of the audience) at that time, one that hasn't changed following Mani's untimely death....
But let's rewind a moment to Rob being near first in the door - thanks internet stage times fake news! - to join fellow fools in lucking out as KLF's Chill Out shimmered the Barrowlands in all its seismic entirety! What a treat, lapped up like that first glorious cold pint! Next up a chap in a ski mask (Steve Mason) took to the decks to air out his 2004 DJ set - only now folk can live Shazam his obscure cuts into playlists as they go along - before John Maclean took to the stage for, er, more of the same. (C'mon, The Aliens could've played for 40 minutes instead, made it a thrilling all-in....)
The Beta Band - Push It Out
For the actual gig the sound wasn't really the best (suited to their myriad sounds), a bit muddy in places, though the drums shone, and they're arguably they're not the finest of players - there's a definite appeal to The Betas rough and (not quite) ready lack of polish, all agreeably loose and shambling, but disarmingly charming with it. Early "hit" Dry The Rain was the obvious highlight, their best song inspiring a rousing crowd sing along. But unlike in 2004, the dance expanse of The House Song techno-ing us out just couldn't save Rob's evening - the curve's still catching up, no doubt about it, but this was a frozen reunion, a seen it all before experience (not that anyone's presently doing anything kinda remotely like it, eh?!)....
Kicking off a clutch of concerts in a week Rob caught another blinding Glasgow gig from Braw faves Rose City Band, again pushing the good shjip as far out as musically possible.... Those incredibly instrumental dynamics and tremendously tasty keyboards, mmm! How about docking again in, say, the next 10 months? Braw'll be there....
Speaking of instru'mental', next up it's was Mogwai's turn to hit the Barrowland Ballroom for 2 shows, Agent Rob bopping along to the second, eager to see the post-rock (behemoths in) action. Of course, 'God gets you back' just as the 'gwai said, the Saturday night prior's set being the stuff (Rob's) dreams are made of, Helicon 1, Fear Satan, Yes, I'm a long way from home (only the absence of Summer failed to make this an all you need quartet)....
Mogwai - Summer
....while on the Sunday, God's day of rest naturally, they opted to swap them out for the twin lumbering titans of Like Herod and My Father, My King, roof raising tracks for sure, quite at home in the live set(ting), but neither a match for Satan's grievous groove and thunderous drop... Maybe it's just age, but the once comforting leaden tub thump of post-rock drums and all consuming white noise is becoming something of a sticking point with Rob, the nail driven relentlessly home over and over to the point of weak aural submission....
And just perhaps the most understated of this seven day sonic trio, the duo of EARTH, was also the best (playing to a pitiful room of 500 while Olly Murs packed out 14,000 at the Hydro). Dylan Carson - from chubby lumberjack, his eyes rolling back in his head like a shark when he riffed, to sweeping emaciated Lemmy to hip bespectacled JAWS shark fisherman extra in the space of 15 years - simply a master of his instrument, hucking his guitar about like a toy while wringing a variety of amazing sounds from it, always in control.
Grateful he's not Dead
A sheer joy to watch, Rob suppressing the urge to shout "You made it Dylan!" in celebration of this grunge survivor who's since forged his own unique path, this wonderful one-man-genre....
The Horrors brought their gloomy new album to the QMU in November, rattling through track after track. To look at them you'd expect an evening of static glum but this couldn't be farther from the truth - this is a band that gives it their energetic all, throwing themselves (literally) into the live experience. If only Rob could shake that nagging feeling that they're somehow underwhelming otherwise - the guitar just.... just seems to be missing, as if it's not quite there, not cranked up to full volume, rendering all that hugely impressive thrashing about somewhat redundant (when it should be exploding Nick McCabe style, shattering the chord cosmos). Maybe try 11 next time out, eh? Again, as with EARTH, Rob had to suppress the urge to shout "Agent Johnny lives!" when Sea Within A Sea concluded.... Now all we need is for them to join forces with fellow indie thrashers DIIV and hit the road. Now that would be some double header indeed....
Which brings us neatly to another double header, the first of The Orb's two 'joint' tours of 2025, Ozric Tentacles playing second fiddle - The Orb just sample them and have likely never seen one! - from about 7:30 till 9, coming across as especially enjoyable when they found that dubby groove, less so when they went that serious dnb-ish uptempo. Still, at least the Ozrics seem to have hung on to most of their original members while in The Orb's case it's their 1990's hard drive, as they graced the stage from 9:15 till 10:35, presumably playing about as long as their laptop batteries last....
The Orb - Arabebonics
As ever they were just alright, roadtesting a few new Buddhist tracks throughout, following a strong beginning with Earth (Gaia) and a kinda Perpetual Dawn/Towers of Dub mash up. It was all just a bit too much stop/start, tho it was hard to tell if it was tech glitches or deliberate on the players part and geez, Alex, let's turn that knob that makes the beat go tinny (again!).... Unfortunately just as Rob started to think 'this is actually gonna be ace!', they ditched the roomy groove and spacious dynamics and from a blundering Pulsating Brain onwards it was (for Rob) mindless 4/4 that honestly could have been absolutely anything. Mind, for taking a punt on a ticket the day before it was alright - not as good as 2024's QMU, tho that was also a bit 50/50 for much the same reasons, so....
The Orb round two saw Dreadzone tag along for the ride, the pair entertaining another room full of old bald blokes with glasses who should know better than to attempt to dance (oh, me hips!).... and that includes Alex Paterson. (Still, it was over by 10pm, so slippers, book and bedtime by 11 for all concerned.) Tho there was fat chance chance of dozing off at The Orb's early evening 4/4 thumpathon, as they aired 5 tracks from their new album, admittedly a recent set rarity as they tend to go for the nostalgia jugular - long since bled completely dry (in Rob's opinion) - every time....
Dreadzone - A Canterbury Tale
Headliners Dreadzone are more an actual performing 'band', reverting (understandably) to rousing dub bangers but (sadly) leaving little room for their inventive and beguiling ambience - far better would have been a halfway house (music) between the two acts, if they met in the middle and mainlined a chilled and balanced bliss....
It seems only fair to wrap up our wrap up by going round, round, round like this sensation I've found in my soul, and back to the beginning, signing music off with a look at The Charlatans long-awaited-ish and well-timed-ish new long player, We Are Love. Of course, through the different days between albums Tim Burgess has become very much a singular star in his own right, with books, solo albums, listening parties and all sorts keeping the bowl cut busy, so much so it's hard to shake the feeling this is one to another solo effort with the old band dusted off and tacked on.
The Charlatans - Deeper And Deeper
Certainly, the music and lyrics are much more grounded, the former not nearly as switched up as his stretching solo adventures - The Charlatans classic sound is there but pulled back, panned and spaced out - and the latter in keeping with the same. Tim's just more mired in the mundane now (watering plants and piling up dishes), a far far cry from the glory days when he was just lookin' and just thinkin' (and, honestly, we were all actually listenin'). Below is Rob's own cheeky We Are Redux, based loosely around the running order of debut Some Friendly, shuffling the 'singles' and the superflous (Salt Water) to 'side one' to make for a more balanced two sides to every album, keepin' it old skool as ever....
Oddly enough, and again thanks due to Assai Records, Agent Rob took himself off to an exclusive-ish album launch gig at Oran Mor that wasn't the track by track run-through he anticipated, rather a belting micro greatest hits that he'll now run down in numbers (cos he honestly can't think of anything better). Looking 4ward to it. Band on at 8. Band off by 9(:10). Ticket a mere £10 (as part of cd bundle for £23). 12 track setlist. 15 years (since he last saw them, the late Jon Brookes being anything but Some Friendly to his kit). Album #8 (in the charts). Truth be told, it was an infinitely better evening with... than Rob expected - "30 of those gigs or 1 OASIS?" texted a pal. The band were surprisingly tight and groovy and, of course, how could they fail when rolling out ever(Sproston)green favourites like Then, Weirdo, Toothache(!) and Just When You're Thinkin' Things Over....
Heck, but Rob digs Joel Gion - why, turns out the pair of them love the Columbia b-side by OASIS!- the goofball glue that (mostly) holds The Brian Jonestown Massacre together, and in the excellent In The Jingle Jangle Jungle he hit home with his 'be yourself'' mantra, instigating a summer of Braw band t-shirts, fighting back against staid societal norms and the dead eyed acceptance of blanket brand/bland conformity (hello, The North Face, Represent and White Fox)....
Joel at the soda fountain
We all know John Miller flew his freak flag high - geez, it was staked right outside Ice Station Zebra! - while Agent Rob tends to keep his furled up deep under wraps, where it steadily eats away at him, forever the unassuming sap, this former/failed writer, scriptwriter, comedian, musician and comic artist who now works away weekly, meekly and weakly in a slow death office job with no one but himself to blame - you can hear precious life tick away with every click, every cough, every clack of keyboard....
Even more astounding was Daniel Rachel's enlightening Too Much Too Young, a fascinating insight into the birth and life of 2 Tone Records - Jerry Dammers, just wow! - which traces the span of The Specials and all those who gratefully swirled in their 2 Toned orbit. Even if Rob's not so hot on much of the music itself - tho he did manage a truly inspired vod-ska powered dance to Message To You Rudy at a wedding - this book is an absolutely essential read, one that delivers on so many levels....
The Specials - Ghost Town
Again in 2025 Rob's page count continued to drop, equal parts eyesight and exhaustion*, but that didn't stop him enjoying master fictioneer(?) William Boyd's The Predicament, another slender but slick thriller featuring his character Gabriel Dax....
*Much like this blog's word count! Perhaps Braw should adopt the Douglas Adams approach, just up the font every time, the bigger text keeping the books looking the same length on the shelf while disguising the paucity of ideas therein. Keen readers may find the fifth Hitchhiker's Guide** in the Large Print section of their local library....
**And Another Thing... It's very likely the sixth (Eoin Colfer) book is still to be found in Poundland.... that is, if you still have a Poundland....
....and Leonard Nimoy truly was! He invested himself so deeply in the character, and in the wider Star Trek universe to the benefit of all. It's doubtful that, had he not taken such a firm hand in steering the movie franchise, whether the show would be as well remembered and revered to this day. The ears have it indeed! True old school gent Roger Moore also gets 007 out of 007 for his excellent My Word Is My Bond autobiography - just don't ask what Tony Curtis thought of Joan Collins!
While not really being one for, well, "books on things" (he'd much rather just watch or listen to), Rob has to admit there's nothing really much better or more definitive than Howe, Stammers and Walker's Doctor Who trilogy of The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties (even if that last decade itself was a bit bleh)....
Indeed rounding it up to an essential quartet is Timeframe: The Illustrated History, a whizz through the decades in memorabilia, comics and, in the most "burned into the childhood mind's eye", the glorious covers of the Target novelisations that fuelled the formative frenzy....
Do judge a Judge by his cover!
Another year, another few Dudley Moore lps salvaged from the ever-expanding MISSING Records and a few more final facts about him gleaned from (mostly) depressing reading about Peter Cook. In 2025 it was all about (first wife) Wendy Cook in her (mostly) sixties swinging (until it was punches!) So Farewell Then, which absolutely puts Peter on the map as the 'Father of modern satire', a man firmly in the driving seat until his faithful passenger, the aforementioned Mr. Moore, eschewed the increasingly dangerous (and drunk) driving and bailed, pretty much taking the career map with him and leaving Cook all but directionless. Say no more! (Sorry, wrong scriptwriter)....
"In 1979 Peter had offered to tape a television programme that Christopher (Booker) was making for him. A few months later they both tried to find the relevant tape in Peter's collection: 'There were three or four hundred videos,' says Christopher. 'We watched blank screens. Buzz and crackles and nothing. We tried for about 40 minutes and found nothing. It was a very good image of what had happened to him."
From So Farewell Then, The untold life of Peter Cook by Wendy E. Cook
Oddly enough, 2025's life affirming quotes of choice came not from film or fiction - though there's a few nice one liners to be found from various sources much further down - but from The Great Movies by the late film critic and expert Roger Ebert....
Again, how could you choose?
"When has a film so subtly and yet so completely captured nostalgia for happiness? The movie is about the simplest of human pleasures: the desire to get away for a few days, to play instead of work, to breathe in the sea air, and maybe meet someone nice. It is about the hope that underlies all vacations and the sadness that ends them. And it is amused, too, that we go about our days so intently while the sea and the sky go about theirs."
"When you see anyone - an athlete, a musician, a dancer, a craftperson - doing something difficult and making it look easy and a joy, you feel enhanced. It is a victory for the human side, over the enemies of clumsiness, timidity, and exhaustion."
Ah, Eddie Campbell, delivering two superior slices of topsy turvy autiobio-comics in the playful shapes of The Fate of the Artist and The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell - even if his recent digital artwork is less satisfying than his bygone inky goodness, he's still able to successfully subvert the medium like no other and deliver the quite unique goods....
Other comics of note were smattered all across the medium, from 2000 AD's Rogue Trooper to Spumco's short-lived Comic Book, to Doom Patrol: Crawling From The Wreckage, to (various variable) Batman(s) - The Cult, Arkham Asylum, Death and the Maidens, Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? - via the Japanese twins(!) of Hell Baby and Hayao Miyazaki's masterful Shuna's Journey, landing in and around the simple pleasures of blink-and-you'll-miss-him Bill Watterson's near peerless Calvin and Hobbes (itself an influence on Braw's own Buckfast Lane, didntcha know, as Rob tried to inject effort and skill back into the increasingly lazy tropes of the generic copy and paste webcomic?)....
....while homegrown hero Frank Quitely contributed several suitably wild illustrations to Frankie Boyle & Charlie Skelton's irreverent but relevant A Short History of the Apocalypse and the late John Byrne shone ever on in a rather lovely charity copy of his splendid Tutti Frutti tie-in book....
The arrival of Jez Jerzy in Part 2 can only mean one thing, another trip to Poland, kicking off a strange summer mired in gloom.... Witness the kids' birthday party that had couldn't have had a more funereal atmosphere, parents huddled under sodden gazebos while the world threatened to end outside and in - huge US Airforce jets circling, air raid sirens doubling up for the Polish fire service (phhh!), whispered talk of strategic infrastructures and frank, fearful conversations, "Should I be afraid? Should I run?" as the dogs of world war continue their long, low howl, tugging at everyone's trouser leg....
Not that this cloud of disquiet took the sheen off everything, and there was much to enjoy in Bielsko-Biała's Studio Filmow Rysunkowch, a loving assembled museum paying homage to their ongoing contributions to the world of animation....
Indeed, akin to Dundee, the city is peppered with several statues on a trail celebrating the many wonderful characters - as writ large in many Polish childhoods as Dennis and Minnie are in Rob's - that form a proud part of its cartoon heritage....
Better still (if that's possible?), let's go back to the future via the astounding Atomium and the city of Brussels with its 80 or so murals of (Franco)-Belgian strips, Tintin thru Corto Maltese via Asterix The Gaul, The Smurfs and Lucky Luke, a simply breath-taking trail around this fabulous city (especially if accompanied by their nice A5 guide that doubles up as an informative mini encyclopedia of bande dessinee to boot!), while the many museums and superior shops are just mindblowing, displaying a diverse range of absolute masters of their art at work! Saving on words - honestly the preferred option from both sides of the Braw coin - here's 37,000 worth in pictures. Keep on scrollin'....
Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese
Michel Vaillant's racing car
Even the plethora of merchandise is tastefully done (in a let's not just slap a Bat-Symbol on any old piece of worthless crap and flog it on at inflated prices kinda way)....
Franquin's Gaston Le Goof
Gaston's Le Taxi
Franquin's Marsupilami
And just how had Rob never heard of Franquin, an absolute comic genius, his crazed, energetic style putting most Brit cartoonists of the same era in the shade - thankfully Cinebooks have dedicated themselves to The 9th Art, translating many of his works, and that of so many talented Eurothers, and bringing them to a hitherto ignorant English speaking audience....
Another revelation was the work of Claude Renard which just so happened to be on special display at the Comic Art Museum - yum! There was nothing for it but to stump up for Metamorphoses, pretty much collecting all of his strip art into a single handsome volume...
Oops, two simply immaculate panels from the same page of original comic art as snapped by Rob. And, yep, in true modern fashion he didn't even take the time to make a note of who the artist was. 'Nul points!'
And now, as the images above show, it's time for things to 'braw to a close', coming full (fool?) circle - yes, keen readers will know Rob's used that phrase before, hence.... Why there's JAWS and Popeye, Porco and and V making appearances, and a copy of Le Pony Express, a comic album Rob last flicked through in French all of 35 longshort years ago....
You'd likely be going back almost the same number of years to when The Incredible Hulk was at the top of Agent Rob's 'must read this month' comic book list, and so he was sad to hear of the death of writer Peter David in 2025. It must have been about 1991 or 1992 that Rob got him to sign a plain wee postcard (long since lost) at a Glasgow Comic Convention and, yes, he did look somewhat bemused....
La Di Diane!
The loss of Diane Keaton was also keenly felt by Rob, reverberating back 30 years or so, stirring up long lost memories of student days and a strange mixture of feeling and admiration. Everyone needs a muse at some point, ay?
And what else to say other than Gary 'Mani' Mounfield broke into heaven, the heart of The Stone Roses - he brought the suss, fashion and flair to Squire and Brown's previously laughable punk goth outfit - as well as the band's biggest fan, his sudden loss a complete shock to us all!
John Squire's 1000 words
Here's hoping he's been reunited with his late wife and Rob Collins, his only fishing partner from back in the Rockfield days, while in Rob's mind he'll be forever stoatin' out of Nice N Sleazy's one sunny afternoon to astonished cries of "That's Mani!"....
The Stone Roses - Daybreak
Ah, dear Futureshock, about as indicative of the state of the Glasgow comic scene, indeed Glasgow itself! in this shocking future, as Rob can think, a once glorious melange of inspiration and ideas simmered and beaten down to its bare and barely depressing bones (much like his own once creative mind now he comes to think of it)....
Agent Johnny.... Hail Odin!
And what of the new John Miller books? Well, the stop-start (mostly stop) Braw production machine has been busy behind the behind the scenes - what you see below is the workings of The Second John G. Miller Scrapbook, the pages all scanned and in order in their print template files ready for their 'digital transfer'....
It's not an easy process chipping at 350 pages worth of art and getting it into good order across three publications, but with the right amount of early morning shifts, the right amount of canny focus, it can be done! Preparation for print will proudly begin next month (March)....
"Why, halo there." The Saint's Volvo P1800
A Braw Book - Life in the Buckfast Lane
Right, winding down to wind up, it's time for those favourite things, beginning with a clutch of quotes that captured a moment....
“Sufficient to have stood but free to fall.”
William Boyd, Stars and Bars
"Congratulations! Failure's one of the basic freedoms”
The Fourth Doctor, The Robots of Death
"A man is what he thinks about all day long."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And finally let's dot our ayes and cross our tees with Rob's favourite things of the year sawn by. How about John Martyn showing us all how it's done with the Visual Guitar Solo, or perhaps a bit of a freedom jazz dance from Jim Jarmusch's languid Permanent Vacation, or (just glimpsed here in the trailer), a kooky moment of instantly in lovable acting from Time And Tide (at 00:15) or the young girl walking up into the sky in Studio Ghibli's sweetly nostalgic and evocative Only Yesterday...?
But the clear winner has to be this clip of The Beach Boys from the rather strange It's OK tv movie, caught on the box a few months before the death of Brian Wilson, which also features Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi. Just watch at 00:40 to see a look of pure love pass between Brian, then just returning to the stage, and his drummer brother Dennis. A bolt of feelgood vibrations from the blue!
The Beach Boys - It's OK
And so here's to life disappearing in the (increasingly fuzzy) rear view mirror while the future that lies ahead looks just as wobbly. R for Roger, over and out....
