Rick Brindle

  Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard , the third book in the Cold Steel trilogy, is free to download 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 Steel find a ...

The Selous Scouts, now there was a top drawer miliary unit, and well worth a recap on what they were all about. As the picture shows, it was a multi-racial unit with black and white soldiers serving and fighting alongside each other, and promotion was based entirely on merit, not colour. If the rest of Rhodesia had been a bit more like that, it could have been a different story, but that’s a bit off-topic for this question. Anyway, the Selous Scouts’ official role was to track the insurgents and bring the Fireforce units in to eliminate them. The selection course was brutal At one point of the training, a dead monkey was dropped off at the recruits’ camp, and the choice was this: cook it right and you’ve got a meal, cook it wrong and you’ll get botulism. And as much as tracking was their ‘cover’ role, they did actually do that, and they did it exceptionally well. They also did ‘pseudo-ops.’ That involved them pretending to be insurgents, gaining their confidence, and either luring whol...

  I bought Seventh Star in 1986, and I thought it was amazing. At the time, I was just getting into metal, and really, I didn’t know jack about the history. I knew that Ozzy was a thing, but I didn’t know he’d been Sabbath’s first singer. I was also liking Dio’s second album, The Last in Line, but again, had no idea at the time that he’d been in Sabbath, either. All I knew was the music, and if I liked it, I listened to it. I also loved listening to Rainbow’s Finyl Vinyl. And all of that added up in my mind to one thing: I really didn’t care  who  was in the band, just as long as they played music I liked, I was happy. On that, I’ve never changed. I didn’t really know much about Glenn Hughes, didn’t pay much heed to him being fired by Black Sabbath, and by the time that Eternal Idol came along, I’d also bought, listened to and loved the Dio era Sabbath albums. By then, I knew the history with Ozzy, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that I bought the albums from that era. It’s...

Not really. If anything, it’s made the debate pretty toxic, and intentionally or not, it’s thrown trans people under a bus. Basically, if you were born with a nunu, you can call yourself a woman, and the law will see you as a woman. If you’re born with a willy, you’re a man. And that’s it, black and white. Okay, that’s pretty clear and unequivocal. However, for the best guess absolutely maximum 262,000 trans people in the UK, half of one per cent of the population, that’s a bit of a problem. Let’s just repeat that, an absolute maximum of half of one per cent of the UK population. It’s worth saying that even the Office of National Statistics thinks that might be an over estimate. Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Because as clear as it may be for the vast majority of people, for the trans community, it just isn’t that clear. Imagine being born male or female and simply not identifying with that gender. For trans people, that is their life, and it is very real. Anyway, zoom...