Other people will probably disagree, but I found this a fairly fiendish Anax puzzle. The structure of the grid with all the down clues in the top-half having only their second letters (which were mostly vowels) crossed made it quite difficult to finish and I didn’t quite manage it, being left with a couple I couldn’t quite work out. Having said that, there were some easier clues like 19 and 21, so it wasn’t impossible to get started.
| Across | |||
| 9. | English flower and the old returning blight (7) | ||
| Eyesore | (E + rose + ye)< | ||
| 10. | Jesus recalled black man’s height (3,4) | ||
| The Lamb | (B(lack) + male + ht)< | ||
| 11. | Power behind photograph(5) | ||
| Plate | P(ower) + late | ||
| 12. | Somerset town of note (5) | ||
| Frome | From E | ||
| 13. | A bend on a river (3) | ||
| Ure | U(-bend) + re(=on) | ||
| 14. | Crossword setter‘s success with homophone (5) | ||
| Wynne | Hom of “win”. I’d never heard of Arthur Wynne, but obviously all crossword lovers owe him a debt. | ||
| 15. | Explore hotel C (3) | ||
| Doh | Do + h(otel). Doh is the first note on the standard musical scale, so equivalent to C. |
||
| 16. | Body has small bones near back (5) | ||
| Draft | I’m struggling a bit on why body should be draft but the rest is Dr (bones is a nickname for a doctor, so Dr is a small bones) + aft. | ||
| 17. | Bland(?) Midlands area (3,5,7) | ||
| The Black Country | B(lack) land = black country | ||
| 20. | All 22 preceding lines (5) | ||
| Every | Eve (22 is Day, so the day preceding is the eve) + ry (abbrev. for railway) | ||
| 22. | Actress in play forgetting lines (3) | ||
| Day | Da[ll]y – most likely refers to Doris Day. | ||
| 24. | “Mars”, physicist said (5) | ||
| Hurts | Hom of Hertz. | ||
| 26. | Shed tears for unpopular person (3) | ||
| Sob | DD – SOB being son of a bitch. | ||
| 27. | Solo singer’s cooking exhibition (5) | ||
| Salon | Not entirely convinced by this, but my parsing is S(olo) + Al (Jolson?) + on(=coooking) | ||
| 28. | Sounds old, car in front (5) | ||
| Audio | Audi + o(ld) | ||
| 29. | Model designer, a scholar (7) | ||
| Diorama | Dior + a MA | ||
| 30. | Star turns had come out (7) | ||
| Emanate | Name< + ate(=had) | ||
Down |
|||
| 1. | Small orchestra opening gardens, creating comic impact(6) | ||
| Kerpow | Kew around RPO (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra). This was one I failed on, the “opening” to indicate containment still throws me – I’ll have to try to remember it. | ||
| 2. | After modelling break, one did more reading for less? (11,4) | ||
| Remaindered books | (Break one did more)* – remaindered books are surplus books being sold off cheaply. | ||
| 3. | Divine trading tips from the hills, they say (8) | ||
| Foretell | This one defeats me, I’m afraid. | ||
| 4. | Covered in greenery, grassland’s grazed (6) | ||
| Leafed | Lea + fed | ||
| 5. | Actor worried about one of our setters showing emaciation (8) | ||
| Atrophic | Actor* around Phi – always slightly dangerous to use the names of other setters, I think, because you could alienate new solvers. | ||
| 6. | For one boarding sub, a key (6) | ||
| Legend | Lend(=sub) around E.G. (for example = for one). | ||
| 7. | Energy product football team argued about, bewildered by score(12,3) | ||
| Manufactured gas | Man(chester) U(nited) + argued* in facts. I’ve never seen bewildered used to mean containment before. | ||
| 8. | Forgetting as BSE analyst struggles with distraction(8) | ||
| Absently | (BSE [a]naly[s]t)* (as is forgotten i.e. removed). | ||
| 17. | Area of north-east‘s seediest resort (8) | ||
| Teesside | Seediest* (interpret resort as re-sort) | ||
| 18. | Car maker designing software poorly, about to be rejected (8) | ||
| Cadillac | CAD (=designing software) + ill + ca< | ||
| 19. | A pH value that could cause chaos (8) | ||
| Upheaval | (A pH value)* | ||
| 21. | Desire to welcome officer, a bootlicker (3,3) | ||
| Yes man | Yen around SMA, which I think stands for Sergeant Major of the Army. | ||
| 23. | Eccentric nerd chasing call over there (6) | ||
| Yonder | Nerd* after yo, as in George Bush’s famous “Yo, Blair” (although apparently this was a misreporting and it was actually “Yeah, Blair”). | ||
| 25. | Second home, roughly clear of debris? (6) | ||
| Shovel | S + hovel. I think the roughly belongs with the home, as a hovel is a rough home. | ||
Thanks Neal
Perhaps we should reveal the theme 😉 . 20, 22, 24ac is the title of a Sad Café tune which reached No. 3 in the charts in 1979. The opening line was: “I saw the lamplight from your window” for which a rough homophone appears in 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 &15ac. Just to add to the fun, the initial letters of the down clues read SAD CAFE FACADES – Facades being the title of the album which included Every Day Hurts.
I tried to make something relevant out of row 12, which could give ‘sobs alone’ with ‘audio’ being a homophone indicator but this doesn’t fit in with the lyrics. There may be more in the grid relating to the theme that I have missed, but it is outside my area of expertise and I can get no further help from Wikipedia.
Thanks Neal and Anax,
I thought this was tough too, but very satisfying (despite missing the theme).
I think FORETELL is two different hills (tor and fell).
Phew! Is there no end to this man’s fiendishness?
I had already put this down as one of Anax’s cleverest puzzles before Gaufrid’s brilliant revelation – many thanks! [Anax has used that initial letters of the clues device before but that didn’t make it any easier to spot. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway, because I’d never heard of the band.]
The long homophone is hilarious – shades of Muir and Norden at the end of ‘My Word’. Anax must have had great fun with that.
I, too, was puzzled by ‘draft = body’ and by 3dn, so thanks for that, Muffyword, and thanks, NealH, for a great blog – I don’t envy you this one!
[My puny contribution is that I think the A in 21dn comes from the clue.]
I thought my admiration for Anax’s ingenuity couldn’t get any greater but he has astounded me once again. Huge thanks to him for a thoroughly enjoyable work-out.
Yes, a pretty fiendish bank holiday puzzle. I think “draft” is synonymous with “body” when they relate to something like an intake of troops. The Sad Cafe theme went completely over my head.
I actually managed to parse most of this unaided, including FORETELL, but I needed aids at the end to get LEGEND, although in retrospect I should have been able to both see the definition and parse it.
Good lord did I get the easier blog today, Sad cafe stuff sadly sailed several feet over my head, so thanks Anax, Neal and others.
Really enjoyed this, nice challenge for a Bank Holiday Monday. The theme utterly passed me by even though I was CERTAIN there would be a theme with it being Anax on a Monday, but doubt if I would ever have discovered it! Many thanks.
Thanks to Anax and NealH,
Yes, missed the theme by a million miles but still v. enjoyable, if a bit tougher than the usual non-holiday Monday fare. I couln’t really parse 27 either but your suggestion seems plausible. My favourite was 13 – maybe obvious in the end, but one of those brief answers that took a frustratingly long time to cotton on to. “Dr” for “bones” had had a bit of an airing recently, ? here and certainly at St. Elsewhere’s, but still took me ages to see it.
Thanks again.
incredibly annoyingly, I bought that album when I lived in the Middle East in 1981 and went to see Paul Young a few times in his Mike and the Mechanics days and that song was part of the set.
Never came close to spotting the Nina.
Thanks for the great blog Neal and to all for your comments.
‘Every Day Hurts’ never got to #1 (reached 3, I think) but seemed to stay in the charts forever – it certainly got almost constant airplay on Radio 1 and I didn’t mind a bit; despite punk being at its height, this lovely rock ballad was a huge favourite when I was in my teens. Others who bought the single at the time may remember that a huge number of pressings were faulty, with a very noticeable second or so of crackling over part of the intro.
Although I never met any band members, they were (like 10cc) regular clients of Sounds Great, a music shop in the Heald Green area of south Manchester. It’s a shop I still use quite frequently. That’s not why I dedicated this puzzle to the song, of course; mostly that was because of the SAD CAFÉ / FACADES anagram, which is the sort of thing that will always earn the gratitude of a setter! Still, I couldn’t use SAD CAFÉ as an answer – too obscure – so the tortured pun was a humorous alternative.
There is no additional thematic stuff beyond that identified by Gaufrid. I was glad enough to get the pun and the song title in the grid! The initials of the down clues were just an add-on when I noticed there were 14 down lights to match the band name and album title.
Thanks to Neal and Anax.
Excellent stuff.
I spotted ‘Every Day Hurts’ and the ‘Wynne Doh” part of the lyric homophone. I didn’t spot the initial letters of the down clues though and, although I remember Sad Café and the song well enough, I hadn’t remembered the lyrics at all.
One small quibble at 15ac: C for Doh is somewhat loose as an equivalence. Doh is indeed the first (tonic) note of a scale – also known as the keynote. But it could be the first note of any key. So Doh could just as easily be C sharp, D flat, D, D sharp, E flat and so on. C is only the Doh in a C scale. And even the C major scale (only one of several with C as keynote) isn’t really ‘the standard musical scale’ even if it might be the easiest to learn (and to play, on the piano at least, because it only uses the white notes).
Well, this needed a lot of help to finish but I got there in the end. Totally missed the theme, of course. But well done, Anax, for clueing 3dn without recourse to Spooner.
Thanks, Anax and NealH
Once again we had to finish the crossword the next day!
Devilish cunning! Unfortunately we were not familiar with the band or album but Bert spotted the track. However, after searching we still failed to spot any other thematic devices.
We had 16a and 4d pencilled in but couldn’t parse them until we checked they were correct. We failed on 7d which we should have solved given that we had MANUFACTURED in as the first word! We’d also never heard of WYNNE.
Thanks Anax for the challenge – serves us right for thinking that your last puzzle was a tad easier than normal!
Thanks NealH for the blog which we really needed today!
Pandean@10
Just a footnote. Most pianists will tell you that, with its flat topography, C is the hardest key on that instrument. It is the easiest to read of course. Chopin used to start his pupils off in B or E, since they fit the hand much better.