Rick Brindle

  Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard,  the third novel in the Cold Steel series, is free to download from Amazon for a limited time. Get your free copy now! Cold Steel are back! Their new album has just been released. Their previously cancelled Spanish tour dates have been rearranged, with the female trio and Spain’s biggest metal band, Damas Infernales, supporting. Cold Steel’s biggest asset though, is Johnny Faslane, their brutally talented manager. But even Johnny can’t fully eliminate Cold Steel’s innate ability to spectacularly destroy their prospects, and even before their second concert ends, the tour is scrapped after an ill-advised trip back to the eighties, and the band are put into creative deep freeze by their record company. Only an unprecedented event and a lot of money can possibly turn their fortunes around. Like a five hundred year old treasure hoard that a long dead pirate once offered in return for his life, treasure that has never been found. Cold Stee...

  Well, it didn’t happen to me, but one of my mates told me this story, and I absolutely love it. So, my mate’s doing a night shift on a surgical ward, and he has to wheel an elderly lady to the toilet. He parks her on the loo, shuts the door and then goes back to the nurse station and waits for her to buzz. A few minutes later, and she calls for a nurse. My mate goes back and helps her clean up and rearrange her night dress. ‘This can’t be much fun for you,’ she says, ‘looking after a useless old woman like me.’ ‘No problem,’ replied my mate, ‘it’s my job, I’m here to help.’ ‘I bet you wish you were working on the gynae ward,’ said the patient, ‘’all of them young pussies!’ It was the absolutely last thing my mate was expecting to hear, and he still says it’s the only single thing he remembers about the whole shift. It's Not For Everyone Cold Steel on the Rocks We Are Cold Steel Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard

  My favourite all time band are  Dio I started getting into music in a big way in the early to mid eighties, and my tastes veered towards the heavier spectrum. I was around a friend’s house and he played The Last in Line, and I was sold. And even now, after all these years, after owning every album that Ronnie sang on, and loads more besides, it remains by favourite album, by miles. The music, the lyrics, sand the imagery are just amazing. And I know everyone obsesses about Holy Diver, and yes, it’s a great album, but for me, that was just a dry run and The Last in Line was where a classic chemistry lineup pulled out all the stops and achieved metal perfection. My first concert was Dio, the Sacred Heart tour, where I saw a ruined castle and a fire breathing dragon onstage, all of which was shedloads better than the lasers, which, a year earlier would have raised the roof. With bars set this high in my metal induction, nothing else was coming close. Dio were one of those bands...

For me, i n first place, from personal use as much as anything else, British Disruptive Pattern Material (DPM). A groundbreaking camouflage pattern that possibly influenced the French CCE (Camouflage Central Europe) and the American Woodland pattern. I stand to be corrected, but it was also possibly the first camouflage pattern to be issued to all troops within a nation’s military. In the RAF Regiment, it was called DP, and some would say that was because DPM was one letter too many for them to use in one sentence. I used it, and I liked it. Interestingly, four years before the Gulf War, Britain sold its desert uniforms to Iraq, so come Op Granby, they had no appropriate gear to issue to the troops. What they came up with pretty quickly was a desert version of DPM, although, again, us in the RAF Regiment simply called it, desert DP. Other patterns that I liked were the Rhodesian pattern. Camo aside, the Rhodesian troops themselves were the absolute dog’s bollocks. The camo pattern was ...

  Tony Iommi was pretty much the boss of Black Sabbath Steve Harris is Iron Maiden’s main man Ritchie Blackmore was definitely the go-to guy in Rainbow And Johnny Faslane for Cold Steel, who’s not even in the band, he’s their manager. Cold Steel on the Rocks We Are Cold Steel Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard It's Not For Everyone

I served in the RAF Regiment from 1989 to 1992. For most of Basics and on posting to my squadron, an SA80 was my personal weapon. The L85A1 version, to be precise, and I had a positive opinion of it. For the first six weeks of training, I used the SLR. And then after that it was the SA80 all the way. At that time, everybody, and I mean everybody, was a total SLR fanboi. They loved it and they simply wouldn’t hear a bad word said about it. And when I went to Catterick for Basic Gunner training, with the SA80, they obsessed about the SLR even more, and totally hated on the SA80. My time with the SLR was admittedly limited, but here’s my take on the two. The SLR was meaty, solid, everything about it was big, much bigger than the SA80, and it was also really, really long, 114cm if you’re running metric, 3ft 9 inches if you’re not. And for getting in and out of vehicles, moving around buildings, especially when you’re being shot at, it wasn’t the easiest to handle. It fired the venerable 7....