In 1977, I became an avid, perhaps obsessive, fan of a Canadian rock group called Rush.

30 years later, the band are still recording records and touring, on an occasional basis. Today, they released another studio album, their first album of original music for five years, entitled Snakes & Arrows.

I didn't expect it to be very good; the band's creative powers have been in decline for many years. And indeed, it isn't very good.

Much is stale filler, flattered by vigorous, skilful playing and an interesting production. There are a few inspired moments, and some enthusiastic, energetic playing - but most notably, this record is blighted by an appalling vocal performance by bass-player/singer Geddy Lee. He's never had the most elegant of voices, but at one time he used to at least manage a coherent vocal melody.

Not any more. On Snakes & Arrows, as on Vapor Trails, the band's dreadful 2002 effort, he seems to throw the words on as an afterthought. It is as if he is making it up as he goes along, with his fingers in his ears. He manages a few coherent bars in a chorus here and there to be fair, but mostly, he warbles atonally over the music like an amateur improvising while hearing it for the first time.

Whether his task is made harder by excessively verbose lyrics I'm not sure, but somewhere along the line, Geddy Lee has lost the ability to integrate a vocal into a piece of music. To make matters worse, his voice has taken on a rather unattractive whining quality, and for maximum irritation, it's been doubletracked by producer Nick Raskulinecz.

Happily, there are three instrumentals here, unmolested by Geddy's tonedeaf whining - a lovely solo steel-strung guitar piece reminiscent of Jimmy Page's acoustic work in Led Zeppelin called Hope, a spirited, funky jam with some sublime bass playing called Malignant Narcissism and an energetic, aggressive piece called The Main Monkey Business.

In places, in the remaining numbers, there are some interesting musical moments, too - but for the most part, these songs have been crucified by the most half-baked, awkward, embarrassing vocal performance you're likely to hear this side of hymn practice at a special needs school.

Ah well. Even without the Geddy Lee Cringe Factor™, this would be at best a below-average postgrunge rock record that sparkles rarely and mostly falls flat. As it is, it's a dog.

Why do bands persist in stretching out their careers decades past their sell-by date? Because suckers like yours truly are still prepared to fork out for their records. Call me sentimental.

I came across this interesting photo on the World Wide Web, the other day. The odd-looking wardrobe-sized cabinets, pictured sometime in the late '50s, are computer disk drives, made by IBM. They weighed over a ton, but they could store 5 megabytes of data - enough for roughly 1600 pages of A4 text, for example - which must have seemed quite a lot, back then. So must $50,000, which is what one of these would have cost you in 1956.

Things had improved a bit by 1980. By now, you could buy a 10 megabyte drive in a much more compact unit that would fit on a desk and store about 3200 pages of text. You'd only need to shell out a few thousand dollars, as you can see from the advertisement above - but that was still a sizeable quantity of cash in 1980.

A few weeks ago I bought a flash drive (essentially a hard disk, with no moving parts), very much like the one in the photo above in a music shop in Newcastle. Its capacity is 1 gigabyte (about 1000 megabytes, or 200 of the cabinets in the first picture). It's mostly made of plastic, about the same size as a disposable lighter, and designed to be used as a keyring. It cost £12, which I think would be less than $2 in 1956 money, but you can find one for less than £10 now if you shop around.

If I wanted to, I could store 320,000 A4 pages of text on it. However, I use this particular drive for storing photos from my digital camera; it holds about 2000 images. I could get roughly 10 images onto one of the IBM cabinets in the first photo, in the unlikely event that I could hook one up to one of my computers. The main, internal hard drive in my desktop PC has a capacity of 250 gigabytes, or 50,000 IBM cabinets. It would store eighty million pages of text, or half a million images from my digital camera. It's about the size of a paperback, and I expect it would cost about £70 to replace.

By the middle of this century, I expect my keyring will seem every bit as quaint and primitive as those IBM disk cabinets.

I've just heard that George Sewell died at the weekend.

George was a versatile actor who appeared regularly in British TV roles during the '60s and '70s in particular, and on the cinema screen in British productions such as Get Carter, This Sporting Life and Robbery, often as a villain.

His career peaked with Special Branch, a popular '70s TV detective series in which he played the lead part, Chief Inspector Alan Craven. Many will also remember him as the long-suffering police superintendent in charge of Jasper Carrott and Robert Powell in The Detectives, twenty years later.

To me though, he'll always be Colonel Alec Freeman, the down-to-earth second-in-command of SHADO in Gerry Anderson's UFO.