Sunday, April 22, 2012

THE TOP TOPHAM/JOHN IDAN BAND: THE YARDBIRDS AND BEYOND

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As regular readers of The Generalist will know I am a semi-pro music promoter in my spare time and was very fortunate to be able to put on this great band on Friday. By general agreement they were one of the best bands we’ve had at our local music club. The two frontmen – guitarists Top Topham and John Idan – carried the show with their brilliant playing, twin guitar action between a Telecaster and a Gibson, a beautiful marriage of tones. They were ably backed by Jim Mercer on upright bass and Ed Spevok on drums – both seasoned session musicians.

Jim Mercer has been a member of 'Paul Lamb & The Kingsnakes'  (1994-2000 ), the Gordon Smith Band, the Shakey Vick Band and the Johnny Mars Band.  He has also performed with Pinetop Perkins, Muddy Waters and  blues and boogie woogie piano player Daniel Smith.

Ed Spevok has been a professional drummer and percussionist for over forty years, performing and recording with such artists as Cat Stevens, Jimmy Cliff, Miriam Makeba. Bonnie Tyler, Jack Bruce, Pete Brown and Van Morrison to name but a few.

The band played a wide range of classic blues tracks with great finesse, skill and, above all, feel. Superb. The dance floor was packed and there was good vibe in the house.

In preparation for the gig, I did a long EXCLUSIVE interview with Top Topham. Top, as you will read below, was the first lead guitarist with the The Yardbirds at the age of 15.  Here are the key early line-ups of the band, from Pete Frame’s excellent ‘Rock Family Trees’:

No pics of first line-up

YARDBIRDS 1: June to October 1963: Keith Relf (vocals/harp), Jim McCarty (drums), Paul Samwell-Smith (bass), Chris Dreja (guitar/vocals), Tony ‘Top’ Topham (guitar).

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YARDBIRDS 2: October 1963 to March 1965: Eric Clapton replaces Top Topham on lead guitar

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YARDBIRDS 3: March 1965-June 1966: Jeff Beck replaces Eric Clapton


The Yardbirds, 1966. Clockwise from left: Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Keith Relf, Jim McCarty, and Chris Dreja (front).

YARDBIRDS 4: June – Nov 1966: Jeff Beck and Chris Deja on guitars with Jimmy Page on bass. Paul Samwell-Smith leaves the band.

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YARDBIRDS 5: Nov 1966- July 1968: Jeff Beck leaves. New line-up features Jimmy Page [on guitar) with Chris Dreja (bass) + Keith Relf and Jim McCarty]

This is a longer much expanded version of the article I wrote for our local monthly mag ‘Viva Lewes’. Hope you enjoy it.

TOP TOPHAM: BLUES IN HIS GENES.

Top Topham holds a unique place in rock history, namely Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page followed in his footsteps. At the tender age of 15, Top was the first of the four to play lead guitar with The Yardbirds -  one of the great R&B bands of the 1960s - from June to October 1963.

Top recalls that their first rehearsal was “unbelievably good. I don’t think anybody could believe it. It just gelled…and then it all happened incredibly quickly.” Within a couple of weeks they had their first gig supporting Cyril Davis (one of the fathers of British Blues) at Eel Pie Island followed by a gig in Harrow Wealsden.

“We were soon doing a whole evening on our own and then everywhere we went we got more and more popular. Giorgio Gomelsky (who was managing the Rolling Stones at the time) came and heard us in a pub in Richmond, signed us up  and within a couple of weeks were were playing at the Crawdaddy Club [Station Hotel, Richmond]. The Stones had left to go on tour and we took over. The place was just manic.”

[Top couldn’t remember all the gigs he played with The Yardbirds why should he, its almost fifty years ago. I found this complete Yardbirds gig listing here: It gives a slightly different chronology. Would welcome any reader feedback (particularly if you went to any of these gigs)and corrections/amendments

May 1963:  Eel Pie Island, Twickenham/ Railway Hotel, Harrow Wealdstone/ Crawdaddy Club, Richmond/Toby Jug, Surbiton/Studio 51, 10-11 Great Newport Street, London {no days given)

June 1963: Eel Pie Island.(30th)

July 1963: Eel Pie Island (14th), Railway Hotel (16th and 30th)

August 1963: Railway Hotel (6th, 13th and 20th) 

September 1963: Great Western Pub, Richmond (no day given), Railway Hotel (3rd), Studio 51 (6th, 13th, 20th, 27th and 29th), Crawdaddy Club (29th ?).

[This listing gives a different address for Studio 51, namely Leicester Square, London from this point on. I have never read of such a relocation for the club before and have been unable to confirm.]

October 1963: Studio 51 (4th, 6th, 13th and 20th), Crawdaddy Club (6th, 13th, 19th, 20th)

Top comments: ‘We played several gigs [at Studio 51] but the one I remember was an all-nighter with Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions. Rod Stewart was their vocalist. We used to do alternate 45-minute sets all through the night.”

I didn’t even have a proper electric guitar at the time, just an acoustic with a pick-up. Then I went and bought an electric guitar and then a Gibson amplifier, which cost me nearly a hundred quid, from Bell’s in Surbiton. You could have almost bought a house for that. We bought it on the HP and my father signed for it. When I left the band they didn’t return the amp and there was a bit of a do about it. I think a solicitor’s letter might  have been sent. When it came back it had to go back to the shop.”

Top left the band due to parental pressure to pursue a career as an artist, which was his father’s ambition for him. There seemed little chance at the time that an inexperienced blues band could turn professional and earn a living.

I was very, very talented at painting. I’d been on a scholarship from the age of 13 and had met Clapton at a school in Surbiton. When I left I walked straight into the adult class at art school..

“When I stopped playing I have to say  it was a blow. The carpet was just ripped away.  I probably went into quite a state of depression at that time…but I did throw myself into my work and I absolutely bowled people over. They put me up for the Slade when I was 16.”

There were other good things happening once I’d got over the initial blast of it. Duster Bennett was an old friend of mine from the age of eight when I met him in the Sea Scouts. He was always a bit of an odd guy. We had jug bands at art school and we played country blues all the time.

Then I had Chris Dreja turning up every five minutes. The Yardbirds were playing literally every night for a month non-stop. He was exhausted and in a terrible shape. He’d say I’ve got no friends, I’m so lonely and I can’t bear it. He was living with Clapton at the time. He  used to roll up in his new Mini with a brand-new Gibson 335 in the back looking terribly wealthy – which he was. He bought a home and invested in a business on the back of The Yardbirds and he was just a year older than me.”

Top did play occasionally with a band called The Grebbels but it was his friendship with Duster Bennett that, in the 1970s, led him back to serious playing and recording on Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon label.

Duster was an incredible musician who could play a bit of piano and guitar but also played Bach on his harmonica. I lent him that record ‘Bye Bye Bird’ by Sonny Boy Williamson and he came back in three weeks able to play the whole thing. We were always people who were seeking the ultimate blue note, the ultimate experience from that feel.”

  Duster Bennett, the original one man band

Source: 1001 Songs

I can remember we stood in a [record shop] booth in Richmond and listened to B.B. King’s ‘Live at the Regal’ – the single most important blues record ever brought out. It was literally the most awesome piece of music and we just stood there and cried it was so unbelievable.

We later met B.B. at the airport with our records when he first came to England and he was so kind and generous to us. He got us into the Albert Hall that afternoon. We were on Blue Horizon then but we were still like little teeny boppers. God that was a concert and a half, the most amazing concert. I had Janis Joplin sitting next to me on one side and Peter Green’s mum and dad (he was a postman) on the other. Everybody who was anybody was at that thing. BB King couldn’t believe it. He was in tears. I’ve never heard playing like it even now. It was out of this world.


Tracks 1 to 12 are "Ascension Heights", his only album released on Blue Horizon Records 7-63857 in January 1970 (recorded in London at CBS STUDIOS in October 1969)  The album "Ascension Heights" has always been a £100+ vinyl rarity

Top played on some of Duster Bennett’s records for Blue Horizon and signed up with the label. He made a Christmas single  - ‘Christmas Cracker’ which features Mike Vernon singing on the B-side - and then recorded in two days a fine instrumental album of mainly his own compositions called ‘Ascension Heights’ (which is brilliant, incidentally). Amongst the musicians on the album are Herbie Flowers, Alan Skidmore and Pete Wingfield from Jellybread.

Top recalls: “I didn’t even know who most of the musicians were in my state of complete ignorance. I was pretty young and inexperienced and to suddenly go into a studio with all these horns, fiddles and other instruments… my knees were knocking. As I’m not a reader of music, I worked with an arranger and sang the parts to him that I wanted the horns to do.”

At around the same time as this, Top did six months on the road with the Christine Perfect band on the back of her big hit ‘I would Rather Go Blind’ and her being voted Britain’s No 1 Female Vocalist by the Melody Maker. “It was an awful band. Dreadful. It was like how to strangulate the soul out of blues music in one easy lesson.”

I knew Christine from years before. She was a chambermaid at a hotel in Swanage in Dorset and we got quite friendly and used to play a bit of music in the evening. Then later I came up to London and one night went to see this band called Chicken Shack and she was on keyboards. She nearly fell of the seat and I just couldn’t believe it.

Of course Christine’s absolute interest in life above anything was to get into Fleetwood Mac and she got married to John McVie. That was her way in.”

Top had got back in the game – then it all fell apart as he was seriously ill for almost two years. “Duster and I had plans for a fantastic band with people he’d found in America when playing with John Mayall but I was too ill and couldn’t do it in the end. So we went our own ways and of course he was killed which was terribly sad.”

[According to Wikipedia: ‘After performing with Memphis Slim on 26 March 1976, Bennett was driving home in a Ford Transit van in Warwickshire when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel. The van collided with a truck and Bennett was killed.’]

Top moved to Wales, dropped out of sight, and didn’t even own a guitar for 17 years until events took another turn.

“I was living in Brecon and had this sort of niggling feeling about music again and various things happened like meeting John Peel in Brecon High Street and Jeff Beck mentioning me in an article and I thought that’s interesting.

BOB BRUNNINGThen I went to America and went to a Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown gig down in St Petersburg in Florida. In the interval this guy got up and started playing Professor Longhair sort of stuff on the piano and I went up to him afterwards and he spoke in a Yorkshire accent. It was Diz Watson and when he found out who I was he said oh you’re in the Bob Brunning book [See Left] that’s just come out and he showed me a copy of it the following night.

“Then I found this paper about record collecting called Goldmine and in it was this advert for a Yardbirds’ World Convention in Cowley, nr Oxford, England [August 1987]. I thought that’s strange and when I got home I contacted Dreja’s mother and found he was actually working in Fulham. Within a few hours the phone was buzzing because everybody thought I was dead.”

At the Convention, Top met The Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty and they got together and wrote some songs and recruited bass player Louis Cennamo from Renaissance, a progressive rock band formed by Yardbirds’ vocalist Keith Relf.

(Relf died at his home on the 14th May 1976 at the age of 33. He was electrocuted while playing his improperly grounded electric guitar.)

We were looking for a singer and I was doing a part-time job at Andy’s guitar shop in London and this American kid came in and playing some rather nice Freddie King licks on the guitar and we talked. Somebody yelled out ‘Top’ and he said ‘You’re not Top Topham are you?’ So we met afterwards for coffee and I never thought any more of it. John was from Detroit and had been stranded in England because his Playboy model girlfriend had run away or some terribly dramatic story like that.

“Anyway he phoned me from America a couple of weeks later and said if you’re looking for a singer I’d like to come for an audition and I’ll pay for everything. He was a kid of 22 or something with a voice like Howlin’ Wolf. So he became our singer and guitar player and we started rehearsing and then gigging at the Station Tavern in Latimer Road off Ladbroke Grove and we were there every Wednesday for quite a number of years [late 1988 to 1991]. Everybody raved about it, it was the place to go – an amazing blues venue  running eight gigs a week. “

They band also toured abroad but Top left when he felt it was becoming too commercial. “I wasn’t interested in playing Yardbirds’ numbers which Jim was pushing me to do. It was what he wanted to do more than anything. He couldn’t use the name though because it was owned by Jimmy Page. Anyway they started doing Yardbirds’ numbers and Chris Dreja hopped in when he saw the opportunity and they formed The Yardbirds Mark II.

“John  stayed with them for 12 years or more and they toured all over, made albums and did their thing. It never really did anything sadly. They recorded on Steve Vai’s label with every sort of hot-shot guitar player on the planet but even that didn’t sell anything.”

[ Top is referring to the Birdland album which, according to Rolling Stone had guest appearances from a string of guitar players including Slash, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Brian May and even Jeff Beck on the song "My Blind Life." The group released a performance album four years later, Live At B.B. King Blues Club. ]

I went off doing really interesting things – played acoustic guitar all over the place, went to America and recorded and toured there. I had a good time.

Subsequently John and Top kept in touch and met and played once or twice a year, with Ed and Jim. This year unusually they are doing eight gigs which is quite new for them – as Top puts it, “something slightly organised”.

If you’re quick you can catch them at four gigs in the coming week: Eel Pie Club (25th), Keighley Blues Club, Keighley, Yorkshire (27th), Trading Boundaries, Sheffield Green,Nr Fletching, East Sussex (28th) and with Roger Barnes and Jive Alive at The Waggon and Horses,Twyford, Berks. (29th)

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LINKS:

Top Topham

John Idan

YARDBIRDS OFFICIAL SITE

ROLLING STONE: YARDBIRDS PROFILE

YARDBIRDS: THE ULTIMATE RAVE-UP

YARDBIRDS: VINTAGE PHOTOS AND VIDEOS

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

THE BEAST IS BACK

        

An echo from the past. More than 30 years – in mid-1979 to be exact – myself and my colleagues Mike Marten and Mikki Rain launched one of the world’s first animal liberation magazines. At that time, the movement was in its infancy; now its gone global.

Much to my delight and surprise, I got a message from Josh Harper that he and a team of volunteers at Conflict Gipsy – who are establishing an Archive and library of historical animal liberation and wilderness defence publications - had got together and scanned all 10 issues of the magazine to make it available once more to the wider world.

Their aim, says Josh, is ‘to give younger generations a better idea of our history in the hope that they would stop re-inventing the wheel and repeating old mistakes.’

The response to the posting had been good. Josh writes:   ‘ We’ve heard from activists in the 70s and early 80s… who are saying how great it is to have the collection available. One member of the Sea Shepherd staff has printed some of the issues to share around the ship. A professor at MIT wrote to say how mesmerised he is. The singer of the hardcore band Trial has been reading each issue straight through….I could go on.’

At some stage I hope to write at more length about the making of The Beast and will publish other material from the Archive. For the moment, just enjoy these issues from way back when.

Read the complete run of The Beast

Monday, April 09, 2012

JM ARCHIVE: THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

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(Left); Original Wired  magazine postcard (c.mid 1990s)

This is a short intro to the biggest string of posts THE GENERALIST has ever published, the result of a big spring reorganisation of all the material in the Archive on computers. telecoms and the digital revolution.  As a result I have been able to draw together all the projects and stories connected with these topics that I worked on during the 1990s. As you will see, I wrote some keynote pieces and interviewed many movers and shakers as events unfolded. We take it all for granted now but its been instructive to look at some twenty years of clippings and reports to remind myself how it all went down. Hope you find this interesting and useful.

JM ARCHIVE: COMPUTER GRAPHICS BOOK: A NEW PICTURE OF REALITY

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Cover design by Richard Adams (ADCO). Image by David Zeltzer/Ohio State University.

This is a book I produced in 1984/1985 for the British publishers Secker & Warburg. The edited manuscript and all the pics were delivered ready to go. For reasons that were never quite clear, the book never saw the light of day and the manuscript and all the picture material have been in a storage box ever since.  COMPUTER ART9139

Researching and producing such a book at that time was a more formidable task than now. No computers, no internet, no fax – only the post and the phone. The whole book was elaborately storyboarded in pencil

Those were early days to be producing such a book. Computer graphics were in their infancy compared to their ubiquitous presence today in all forms of media, science, business, defence and many other fields. The images I was collecting together then were primitive by today’s standards. Now they look intriguing and have a great deal of interest and charm.

I corresponded with places like the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the University of Utah, numerous corporations, institutes and individuals. Tron had recently come out and I interviewed Judson Rosebush, one of the co-founders of Digital Effects, the first commercial computer graphics company in New York, who had done the titles and animated BIT for the film. Also John Halas, the veteran animator who had, at the time, recently completed his first computer-assisted animated film. The intro for the book ran like this:

               COMPUTER GRAPHICS             

is an account of a voyage of discovery to a world where the real and the unreal meet, where words run out and pictures begin, a place where the only limitation is your imagination.

COMPUTER GRAPHICS

is about a new pictorial lan­guage which we can use to simulate reality with stunning exactness or create imaginary landscapes. Visual represent­ations of mathematical formu­lations they provide a window into the world of the comp­uter.. Like Cubism and the camera, they provide the eye and,brain with a whole new way of looking at the world and will have equally radical implications.

COMPUTER GRAPHICS

will take you on a journey to the electronic battlefield, on a trip beyond the rings of Saturn, to visit the last great airport in the world, inside a virus, across the largest single-span bridge, to the Hall of Scientific Art and the Factory of the Future and beyond...into the 4th Dimension.

Popular in style, pictorial, fast-paced-this is a new kind of book on computers which. is not for the experts but for the ET/Star Wars generations, the new electronic culture. Above all for the broad, general readership who realise that a base understanding of comp­uters is essential in the modern world.

This is a book for people who are interested in the future.

CG2114 [Back cover image: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Caption from their booklet reads: ‘A computer graphics color system that gives an easily specified range of colors is available to users of LASL’s Central Computing Facility. The pattern was generated while experimenting with color variations on circles of varying sizes and positions.’

Not exactly a high school textbook! Here are a few images and original copy from the book which I hope you enjoy.

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Pictured is CASSIM (the Cardiff ship simulator at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology), the only computer-generated imagery simulator of its kind to be equally committed to both training and research. It contains mathematical models of eight ship types, ranging from a general cargo vessel of 18,000 tonnes displacement to a loaded VLCC (very large cruise carrier). New scenarios and backgrounds are continually being added and updated and new scenarios introduced. Helicopters, ferries and lighthouses are just some of the extraneous detail available.

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Source: Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

Like some strange species of jellyfish or an interstellar craft, this is a computer image showing structural details of the tomato bushy stunt virus.

What you are looking bat is a hemisphere of 90 of the 180 amino acid subunits that go to make up the protein coat. The subunits – atoms of oxygen (red), carbon (dark blue) and nitrogen (light blue) -  are in turn made up of hundreds of chemically identical amino acid chains. One such chain is shown in yellow, each of its spheres representing a single amino acid. These chains link the virus together.

To produce such an image requires a powerful computer and complex software. The program is called ATOMILL, a sophisticated development of the ATOMS program developed by Bell Laboratories. It contains a hidden-surface algorithm which compute what surfaces fo which spheres will not be visible to the observer as the image moves and the spheres overlap. These are then deleted.

These calculations were done on a CDC 7600. Colour shading and highlights were calculated n a Sperry-Univac V75 minicomputer and plotted on a Diocomed D48 colour film recorder.

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At the Washington University Medical Center in St Louis, a surgeon and a radiologist with experience of computer graphics combined forces to tackle the problem of converting CT brain slices into a 3-D image. They linked up with a computer graphics system at nearby McDonnell Douglas, used by the company for designing aircraft, and were able to generate a three-dimensional contour map of the skull. The McDonnell computer was linked directly to an NC milling machine that manufactured a model skull out of aluminium sheets.

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Source: Evans & Sutherland

A CAD visualisation of one stage of the cycle of operation of a four-stroke engine.

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Source: Boeing Software Support Center

A computer simulation of an air-launched Cruise missile. This scene, showing depth, colour and realistic detail was created entirely on a VAX 11/780 computer.

JM ARCHIVE: WILLIAM GIBSON (1990/1993)

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Having swallowed whole the concept of cyberspace and eaten up the novels and short stories of William Gibson in the 1980s – Burning Chrome and the Sprawl trilogy – Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – I finally got to phone interview him  in 1990 and then meet him in the flesh ( with Bruce Sterling), at the Groucho Club,  for  the launch of their co-authored steam-punk classic The Difference Engine. Three years later he was back in town for the launch of Virtual Light, at which time I conducted a video interview with him  in the offices of the tv production company Kudos. It has yet to see the light of day. Read my extensive accounts of both encounters here:

http://hqinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/generalist-archive-william-gibson-bruce.html

http://hqinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/generalist-archive-virtual-light.html

JM ARCHIVE: ELECTRONIC ESQUIRE (DECEMBER 1993)

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I took the idea of doing a supplement on the digital revolution to Esquire, then being edited by Rosie Boycott. She put Michael Watts in charge of the project and I wrote the opening essay – which begins on the cover. I believe this was the first such supplement in a British magazine. (You may know better !)

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A year later, my Son Alex and I worked together to produce an early ‘Best of the Web’ piece for the December 1994 issue of the Electronic Esquire.  It took us hours and hours. No search engines in those days. Just logging onto a website took forever. An exhausting process.

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JM ARCHIVE: PETER GABRIEL CD-ROM (DEC 1993)

The revenge of the talking head

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‘CD-Rom: one day all records will be made this way. And Peter Gabriel is already off the mark with Xplora 1. John May talks to him’

[The Independent. 9 December 1993]

Read Full Text: PETER GABRIEL: DIGITAL PAST AND PRESENT

JM ARCHIVE: COMPUTER CHESS: MEETING GARRY KASPAROV (23rd May 1994)

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In 1994, I was commissioned by The Telegraph to interview Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player of all time. I was interested in the man vs machine chess battles that were going on. How I got to Kasparov I can’t remember. The finished piece never appeared. The interview took place in his room at the Conrad Hotel in London’s Chelsea Harbour. Our conversation roamed over chess, computers, the information highway and Kasparov’s political ambitions. Here is the relevant extract from the longer 1,500 word piece.

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‘Kasparov was fresh back from Munich where, at a special World Chess Express Challenge, he and other grandmasters played against a computer programme called Fritz3 and lost at least some of their games.

This statement needs to be qualified. First, they were playing 'Blitz' chess - in which a player has only five minutes to complete all his moves - where computers have an advantage. Even here Fritz3, driven by a Pentium chip five times more powerful than that the previous 486 generation, lost 4-1 in the play-offs with Kasparov -  who earned $20,000 for his time and trouble.

To set this in context, the machine vs man chess battle has been raging for years and, in fact, dates back to the building of the first chess-playing automata. When Kasparov played Deep Thought [winning both games in 1989], then the world's most powerful chess playing computer, (it's now Deep Blue), he was quoted in Time saying: "I have to challenge it in order to protect the human race". Garry likes to put himself under pressure.

Until recently, it seemed inevitable that computers would out. Now a new picture is emerging; computers will win in some kinds of chess but may never overcome humans in the main game. Kasparov explains.

" I think that in maybe two years, computers will get the upper hand in Blitz. Blitz is played by emotion. You don't have time to calculate, have time to see the consequence of your decision. It's statistical. The number of blunders is very high. Computer doesn't care about pressure, about heat, about the public, about the noise, about position. It's just looking for the best move. But it does make mistakes.'

Garry then goes into a high-speed and complex dissection of his encounter with Fritz3. It was like Arnie Schwarznegger giving a technical account of his run-in with T-2. Full of lightning, shiny metal, bombast and oratorical innuendoes.

Kasparov may have conceded on Blitz but he has his eye on control of the bigger game. "I don't believe we can overcome [in Blitz] because we do not control the pace of the game. The way to beat a machine  in speed chess, is to control the character of the game. We can do it as human beings. We can change the strategy of the game. Our strategy would be based exactly on the human qualities. We can also devise strategy that will be the most unpleasant for the machine."

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Kasparov went on to play IBMs Deep Blue in Feb 19996. Although he lost the first game, he won the series with three wins and two draws.

In 1997, he played an upgraded version of Deep Blue, which defeated Kasparov 3 1/2 to 2 1/2. Even after five games, Kasparov was crushed in the 6th. The result was highly controversial as Kasparov challenged the outcome of the match on several fronts – there’s even a documentary about it: Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine

In January 2003, he played a six-game match  against Deep Junior – a chess  engine that could evaluate three million positions per second. The results was one win each and four draws.

This is Kasparov in November 2003 playing with 3D glasses and a speech recognition system, in his match against the program computer program X3D Fritz.  The result: one win each and two draws

Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on 10 March 2005, to devote his time to politics and writing.

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According to ‘Beyond Deep Blue: Chess in the Stratosphere’ by Monty Newborn

More than a decade has passed since IBM's Deep Blue computer stunned the world by defeating Garry Kasparov, international chess champion. Following Deep Blue's retirement, there has been a succession of better and better chess-playing computers, or "chess engines," and today there is little question that the world's best engines are stronger at the game than the world's best human players.

Source:  Chesscomicscrosswords

JM ARCHIVE: THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION (3rd September 1994)

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This is certainly the longest piece of journalism I have ever had published in a major newspaper and is also one of the most important stories I have written. It announced the up-coming digital revolution in no uncertain terms just before the World Wide Web took off, and sketched out the effects it was already having in politics, business, education, entertainment and beyond. It owes a great deal to the energy, thoughts and ideas of Steven Alexander. I had already discussed the ‘information highway’ with Al Gore when I met him in London in 1992.

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JM ARCHIVE: DIGITAL JOURNALISM (1995)

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ONLY CONNECT

‘John May, author and cyber-communication specialist for the Telegraph, introduces our Networks issue with the social and political arguments over global connectivity, Despite the fears, all will be well if we recognise that this us the chance to redesign society.’

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DIGITAL JOURNALISM13152

  A series of pieces for ‘Network Europe’  - a special section of The European   - from August 1995 – January 1996.

DIGITAL JOURNALISM12151       10-16th August

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    WINDOWS 95 OPENS ON-LINE BATTLE 17-23rd August

UK LEADS THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION: Britain is at the forefront of moves to remodel the television industry. 31st August-6 Sept

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28the Sept – 4th October

DIGITAL JOURNALISM16155 30 Nov – 6th December

DIGITAL JOURNALISM17156 21-27th December

ESCOM GIVES LEASE OF LIFE TO COMMODORE’S AMIGA: Four million users have been cheered by the German firm’s purchase.  18-24 Jan 1996