A few of these all at the same time, bit like London buses all coming at once.
Sir Clive Sinclair 16/sep/2021 aged 81. I share a surname with the man which was fun when you develop an interest in electronics as a child and see your name in the adverts in Practical Wireless and Practical Electronics. And a pain in the bum as people blamed me as if I was related or involved in his company as often his products had “issues”!
An enigma was our Clive. He did produce all sorts of neat stuff and lots of poorly produced / manufactured junk too. He was quite an astute business man buying out of spec transistors by the pound weight not by value in the 60s to use in his products. He had a range of Hifi which were not very Hifi. His tiny radio which sort of worked. Two miniature TVs, I have one with a 1in CRT tube in it. Calculators that were a fraction of the price of many on the market at the time. Computers, MK14 (I fixed plenty of these in my Saturday job), ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum (and derivatives). I became oh so familiar with how to produce a viable bulk mastering tape for cassette duplication with the Spectrum as part of my 1st job out of University… Then there was the QL which really was junk TBH. That’s the 1st time I met the man… we were contracted to produce some games for it and I met him when we went to get 8 pre-production QLs from Cambridge. The C5, less said the better. His Z88 notepad computer was quite good though.
Many of his products were clever but just unreliable in use / ownership. The design over function was high so he made tiny calculators that ate through batteries quickly. Or microdrives which would be the last thing I’d commit important date to!
In later years he married a rather pretty dancer from a night club who was less than half his age. The pointed jokes of the time going like “Tell me what first attracted you to the bald, ginger, 70 year old
multi-multi-millionaire Clive Sinclair?”
Still his computers kickstarted untold numbers of people in to a tech career so he gets a 
from me.
Alan Lancaster, 72, bass player from Status Quo in the 60s-80s. I’m not a big Quo fan, they have quite a few decent songs and a lot of so-so dross. I did see them play Edinburgh around 2011 which was thoroughly enjoyable concert but Alan had left when they had an less than amicable split in the 80s. Alan and the drummer John Coghlan were “let go”. So I saw their replacements. They did a reunion tour in 2013 which patched up some of the differences.
Quo, however, was about the only music that wasn’t crass disco pish or awful pop or bloody ABBA that was played on UK TV and radio when I was a teenager. Bit of a Hobson’s choice. However, the Quo did release Caroline in 1973 which is as simple as rock songs go but probably one of the best songs of all time. Yes, it really is. So here is the original from 48 years ago. Still sounds as fresh as when I first heard it.
