Field Studies

That's Great, It Starts with an Earthquake

2006-11-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

So there I was driving into work this morning when good old Radio 1 Newsbeat comes on to tell me what's happening in the world. Can you believe it's still called Newsbeat? They should go back to calling the station "The Nation's Favourite" too.

Anyway, Newsbeat starts and it made me laugh out loud - "And the top story this Wednesday morning, Britney Spears is to divorce. Other news includes the Democrats making huge gains in America's midterm elections."

I just love the fact that Britney's divorce was the first item. To the dogs, go we.

My Heart is Numb

2006-11-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

My relationship with Take That is quite a complicated one. Or at least as complicated as a relationship between a grown-up boyband and a grown-up pen-pusher is possible to be. Actually, forget that, my relationship with Take That isn't complicated at all. In fact, I don't have a relationship with Take That.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say, in this hopelessly fumbling manner, is that when I was young and serious I hated Take That. These days, however, I'm old and glib, and I think they're brilliant.

Have you heard the new single? It's a cracker isn't it? I have a great big stupid grin on my face just thinking about it. Some people have said that it sounds like James Blunt. These people are wrong.

Apparently, at the recent Q Awards, Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys said something along the lines of "I don't know many of the bands here today so I'm not sure how many deserved their awards, but even I know Take That were bollocks." Of course, in a lot of ways, he's right. But to dislike Take That absolutely is to dislike pop music. You will notice, of course, that Alex Turner is young and serious.

I think a lot of the reasons I still love pop music are captured in the video for Patience. Look at their hair! And the geysers exploding behind them! And their scarves! Frankly, if Take That walking around the wastes of Iceland carrying their mic stands, before meeting up for the last chorus on the edge of a cliff to sing their little hearts out doesn't make you feel a little bit better then you're dead inside.

So watch it here, and feel a bit better.

How Terribly Strange To Be 70

2006-11-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

So I'm approaching my 9 year anniversary at the company I work for. As for many people out there, it was never meant to go like this. I started here as a temp, they offered me the job on a permanent basis, I took it, and have been steadily and accidentally making my way higher and higher up the company ever since. It's peculiar. Every time I was nearing the end of my tether I'd either get promoted (in which case the extra money made me forget my dissatisfaction for a while) or I'd move into another department (and the novelty and new people would mask the dissatisfaction for a while.) I really am the classic Chandler worker. I've even been moved to Tulsa.

Having worked in the London office for 7 years and spent the 2 last years in the hinterland of our north west regional office I've started to realise, as my visits back to the London office have increased, just why it's so very, very different up here. It's all about time. The people in London never have any time. Not proper time anyway. They have meetings and occasionally pop back to their desk to check their email or have a bit of a chat. The days fly by and you have to stay late. No time. No thinking. There are no meetings up here. There are not enough people. So how do we fill our days? We need more work.

When you've worked for a company for as long as I have, you notice people growing older in a way that I can't say I've ever noticed with my friends. I mean, I know we all look older, we must do, but it doesn't register. On my last trip to London I saw a guy who I'd always pictured in rude health in a natty suit and designer specs like on the day we started. And he looked truly exhausted and, to be a little harsh, absolutely fucked. There's another guy who was something of a heartthrob when he started around the same time as me. I bet he can't even fit into the trousers he wore back then, such is his ever expanding girth.

Strangely, since I moved up here, people tell me I'm looking well. It must be the air.

The Friday Sitcom I

2006-11-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

FADE IN ON

JOHNNY’S lounge. There’s a large sofa and two battered looking leather armchairs. A huge widescreen TV is in the corner along with other hi-tech stuff. JOHNNY, OLLY, DERMOT, JOANNE and HARRY are sitting watching TV, there’s a pizza box on the coffee table and occasionally someone picks up a slice. All continue to watch the TV as they talk.

JOHNNY
Do you think I should buy a cat?

OLLY
What do you want a cat for?

DERMOT
I like cats, we always had cats in our family.

OLLY
I’m not sure about them.

JOHNNY
They’re clever aren’t they?

OLLY
When did cats pick up this reputation for being clever?

JOHNNY
I don't know.

OLLY
Is it because they’re clean?

JOHNNY
Maybe. I’ve always liked them.

JOANNE
I like them too - I like animals that look critical.

OLLY
I think that clean stuff is a myth.

JOANNE
Why’s that?

OLLY
I mean, they just lick themselves all over don’t they?

JOHNNY
Yeah?

OLLY
Would you think a human being was clean if they licked themselves all over?

JOHNNY
No.

OLLY
No. You show me a clean cat and I’ll show you a cat covered in spit.

JOHNNY
That’s beautiful.

HARRY
I’m not sure about single men with cats – is that an image you’re comfortable with?

JOHNNY
I need a companion – Olly and Kev won’t be here forever.

OLLY
Why not?

JOHNNY
Well, you know......

OLLY
You want us to move out?

JOHNNY
No not at all. (PAUSE)
Well maybe Kev.

OLLY
Because if you want us out then just say you want us out.

JOHNNY
I don’t want you out.

OLLY
Just say: “I want you out.” Be a man.

JOHNNY
(exasperated)
I don’t want you out!

OLLY
(sulking)
Then you can go ahead and set up your single man and cat lifestyle.

JOHNNY
Just calm down.

DERMOT
(to JOHNNY)
So are you close to be giving up your Kung Fu?

JOHNNY
No way.
(makes some kind of Kung Fu move and yelp)

DERMOT
You know it takes, like, ten years before you can kick someone’s ass?

JOHNNY
I’ve never felt better.

JOANNE
It’s killing you isn’t it?

JOHNNY
(admitting)
I can’t get out of bed the morning after the class – it’s brutal. But I’m nearly there – she will be mine.

KEV enters. He’s smoking a pipe (a big Sherlock Holmes one) and is wearing a deerstalker. He has a huge university scarf around his neck. Everyone looks at him but no one says anything. KEV walks past everyone and goes to the kitchen.

KEV
(annoyed)
The weather in this country. The only reason people fight at football matches in England is to keep warm.

KEV comes back into the room with a beer and sits in the spare chair, he hasn’t taken the deerstalker or the scarf off and everyone has followed him with their eyes. He puffs on his pipe a couple of times.

KEV (con'td)
(to everyone)
Alright?

JOANNE
You know Kev, you’ve got to get a job.

CREDITS

Out Of The Question

2006-11-02T12:24:00.000-08:00

We had half an idea to go and see Mumm-ra in Manchester this evening. Obviously we didn't. We're far too old.

But the single is very good indeed and I'm not yet too old to secretly listen to it. Listen to it yourself here.

In The Drunk Tank

2006-11-01T09:42:00.000-08:00

So, the most wonderful time of the year approaches with the hurtling inevitability of a Michael Owen injury. Sorry Michael. But I love almost everything about it. Buying a tree, the lights on the high street, the freezing cold day you take off work to try and find presents for people like your sister-in-law's boyfriend and end up getting him one of those tiny bottles of vodka with a scorpion in it from Selfridges. I even love the Christmas songs - my specially made CD will be going into the car pretty soon. Track one - Driving Home For Christmas. Fantastic.

But the one part of Christmas I just cannot get on board with is the office Christmas party. And tickets for my one can be picked up from today. God help us. This will be my 8th Christmas at the company, and I'm rather proud of the fact that my attendance at this annual monument to the incontrovertable colleagues+booze=humilation equation still stands at zero.

My workplace used to have a summer party as well as the Christmas one. I went to the final one before it was scrapped for "budgetary reasaons" (ie to stop people getting drunk and fighting and/or crying.) I was young, I didn't know any better. But I learnt my lesson, and all reports from each Christmas do I've missed suggest that I made a wise choice.

I just don't understand how it can happen every year. Every year; a fight over a girl, the toilets getting closed to clean up sick, a fight over a bloke, someone trying to walk home despite the fact that they live in Kent, a fight for no reason at all, an improbable couple snogging who will never speak again such is their shame, a manager who needs to be reminded of what he did by colleagues when he finally makes it back into work a few days later.

I mean, surely in this day and age we should be beyond this sort of nonsense? We've all seen The Office. Soon, magazines and newspapers will be full of their annual "what not to do at your Christmas party" articles. I've even heard one person say that all the roistering is faintly ironic these days. No it's not. What starts as an opportunity for everyone to get a little more acquainted always decends into an easy way for factional office warfare to come right to the surface, while people who's responsibilities normally preclude this kind of evening stumble helplessly around the hall with blood coming out of the corner of their eyes.

So I won't be getting my ticket and I won't be going. Scrooge was spot on with this one. Humbug.

Anyone Home?

2006-10-31T09:51:00.000-08:00

So it's been a bit quiet round here lately. I won't bore anyone with the details. But I'm going to have another go. So what you can expect is ill-conceived and barely thought through vignettes on films I've seen, TV I've watched, things I've thought, music I've listened to, and other self-indulgent ruminations on the quiet desperation of modern life. Sounds like a laugh, yes?

Anyway, there may be a few nuggets of insight here and there, and the occassional good joke I've stolen, but more often than not, it'll be rubbish. So why not stick around?

Such has been my sheltered life, I've only ever been to the cinema for free once. I used to write for my university newspaper and was sent to review the Sean Penn-Susan Sarandon knockabout, laugh-a-minute death row hootathon Dead Man Walking. I recall that I was a little over-earnest in my praise.

But the best thing wasn't the film, it was watching it in the private review theatre of the film company's amazing offices off Oxford Street. It was the comfiest, most lovely cinema I've ever been to - it must have had space for about 20 people tops, the seats were virtually lay-z-boys, the screen was enormous and the sound perfect, plus there was free booze. Unfortunately, it was 9.30am, and I've never really got to grips with drinking in the morning. That's probably a good thing. But I should have known then I wasn't cut out for the journalists life.

I suppose, looking back, I should have used the event as an opportunity to do a bit of networking. I remember when I signed my name on the - is it a guest list at the pictures? - that the list of attendees contained NMEs and Empires and what have you. But I'm the world's worst networker, so I sidled in and slinked out.

Anyway! I went to the cinema for free again this weekend. The Cornerhouse in Manchester were having a preview showing of a new French film - The Page Turner. The film's premise is extremely simple - a gifted young pianist has her hopes of entry to an elite school crushed by the thoughtless behaviour of the woman (a famous pianist herself) overseeing her examination. Many years later she attempts to have her revenge.

And that's it. You've got to hand it to the French sometimes haven't you? Such is the (pretend) sophistication of the film-watchers mind, I was constantly trying to second guess where the story was going, what the twist would be, whether it was all a red herring and we were being led down a blind alley. But nope.

Young girl fails exam. Blames examiner. Gets job with examiner years later. Plots to ruin examiner's life. As this is a mystery of sorts (in that we don't know what the conclusion will be) I'll spare anyone unfortunate enough to still be reading this any further expansion on the plot.

Enough to say, it's a very good film. And the music in it is brilliant. I am the worst film reviewer ever.

Although it's been said, many times many ways

2005-12-23T02:32:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone. Field Studies will be taking an extended Christmas holiday and will be back in the New Year.

I had intended to do an end of year poll, but didn't because

a) My choices are entirely predictable (Plans, Illinoise, blah blah blah)
b) I couldn't be arsed
c) There are a million blogs out there with lists, most with lovely MP3s, who will do a better and more thorough job than me.

I will endeavor to be more interesting in the New Year.

Friday (Extremely) Quick Links

2005-12-16T07:48:00.000-08:00

You Ain't No Picasso continues with the aces Christmas mixes (that have nothing to do with Christmas)

Here is the latest.

Have you noticed the blogs go quiet this time of year? Very little to steal and claim credit for.

You Forgot Cranberries Too?

2005-12-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

Still struggling on deciding a Christmas present for that person in your life who’s just impossible to buy for? And I’m not talking about this mysterious person who “has everything.” I want to know why we’re so concerned about the person who “has everything” in the first place. Well, if they work in a soul destroying admin capacity, why not buy them this! They can recreate their office in the comfort of their own home, and then pretend that they’re a giant trampling the whole organisation underfoot!

Or you could do them a mix tape! Or a mix CD or whatever. You Ain't No Picasso is doing a 12 days of mixmas countdown. Loads of good stuff to be had over there, as always. Before you go and buy the albums of course.

It Was Only A Winter's Tale

2005-12-13T13:55:00.000-08:00

As we move closer to Christmas, I find that we need more to occupy our paid working day. After all, no-one really wants to do any work in December do they? And so, in keeping with the altruistic nature of this blog, I'll be kind enough to point you in the direction of Questionable Content. It's a webcomic. Wait! Come back! I know what you're thinking, and I'm certainly not one for comics - print, web or any other kind. Are there any other kind? I know, I know - comics are for geeks. Well, this is the comic that is the exception that proves the rule.

Anyway, what I recommend you do is to go back to the first issue and read through it all, at your own leisurely pace. It's a bit like a drawn version of Friends (although I suspect the author would kill me for saying that), except with more indie-rock and a robot. You can read it for the gentle comedy, the romance or the obscure indie-rock references, but it's good stuff. The sidebars about goings on in the authors life are pretty entertaining too.

So there you are! That's at least a day closer to Christmas for you. You lucky, lucky people.

Gold Soundz

2005-12-12T13:34:00.000-08:00

When I originally ~~got off my lazy arse~~ had the idea of creating a blog of my own, I thought that it would be full of all the hot new bands I saw in Manchester. In other words, a ~~copy~~ UK version of all the blogs that I'm such a fan of. It didn't really turn out that way, evidently I'm too whiny and keen on navel gazing. Who'd have thought! Anyway, we saw these last night. They were great, why not give them a try? Better late than never I always think.

Lost Lektor

2005-12-10T03:00:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not talking about Hannibal here. I'll explain later.

'Lost' has just hit Polish television and I must say I'm hooked despite the plethora of beautiful people with their tangled and mysterious backgrounds. But I have some questions. Firstly, what is Merry doing there? Could his presence perhaps shed light on the terrifying beings lurking in the forest? Are they a lost tribe of Ents?

In fact the actor in question's career so far has had an interesting trajectory: 'Hetty Wainthrop investigates', a mid-nineties parochial crime series set in Lancashire, LOTR, obviously, where we all know him from (how many of us said when we saw him on 'Lost', 'oh look it's Merry!'), and then 'Lost'. Mm, what a strange journey to stardom, I mused, and then I realized the connection. Yes, he plays the young headstrong Lancashire teenager / hobbit / band member, who is forced to face up to their responsibilities and become the unlikely hero. In fact, I'll warrant that if 'Lost' becomes 'Found', and everything turns out smelling of roses, it'll all have been down to Dom's Northern common sense. Imagine the last episode. Everyone's sitting around, trying to figure out each others' labyrinthine pasts, we're tantalisingly close to a resolution, a satisfyingly dramatic denouement, when Dom pipes up:
'Right. Bugger this. You, you and you, chop them trees down, we're going to build a massive boat.' And there's Jack, tapping his forehead, 'Darn it, why didn't I think of that?' Roll credits.

And if you like Edam, check out his website, StarDOM (oh no). Any intended irony was entirely lost on me.

Anyway, back to the Lektor.

This is a means of rendering foreign films comprehensible which involves neither subtitling or dubbing. No. Instead the film is voiced-over by a single man (and it's aways a man), who reads out a translation at roughly the same time as the original lines are delivered. I say roughly, because it's never in sync. This results in the infuriating situation whereby you might catch a good half sentence of the original, before the Lektor kicks in.

The thing is, though, if you get used to this system, you become quite good at finishing off sentences to the extent that when you watch a film in the original, you no longer need to listen to entire sentences any more. This allows for maximum irritation, when you interrupt a vital piece of dialogue with a request for more Pringles.

Anyway, hope you had a good Christmas and I wish you (Lektor) wesolych swiat i szczesliwego nowego roku. And now you're thinking 'was that "I wish you...would all burn in hell" or "I wish you happy new year"? You see? Irritating, isn't it?

It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year! Part 2

2005-12-08T03:55:00.000-08:00

Best Gap Advert Video - Bloc Party - So Here We Are

Bloc Party have had quite a year, for a grumpy bunch of students. I was going to go and see them earlier in the year but lost the tickets. This is some interesting stuff eh? Anyway, I have a love/hate affair with the Bloc Party; in that I love some of their songs but hate others. "Two More Years" - brilliant. "The Pioneers" -brilliant. "Little Thoughts" - brilliant. Helecopter - nonsense. Quite a lot of the rest of the album - nonsense. "So Here We Are" falls into the first camp; it's a lovely soothing song, it's gently falling guitars lapping like gentle waves on the shores of angular indie-rock noisiness. I could do with more of this and fewer of the yelping, jagged "interesting" songs. I'm right behind Noel Gallagher on this one. The video looks like a Gap advert. Scroll down a bit to find it.

Best Unsigned Band - The Maple State

This lot are great. It's very rare that I see an unsigned band when I'm out and about that make me want to find out more about them. I saw the last song that this lot did when they supported Nightmare Of You at the Night n Day and thought they really were a cut above. There's hardly been a night since that I haven't visited their Purevolume page. Still, over 40000 plays suggests they might not be unsigned for much longer. Good song titles too.

Best Overblown Song Ending - Rilo Kiley - Does He Love You?

I like "More Adventurous" a lot. But I don't like it quite as much as "The Execution Of All Things." People also seem to think Jenny Lewis is some kind of fashion icon but, like Carrie Bradshaw, it just makes me think of Alan Partridge - "no-one will wear these clothes - they look rubbish." Anyway, the highlight of "More Adventurous" comes with this stampeding rocker with it's excellent narrative of a bizarre love triangle. It starts slowly and then increases pace like some desperately out of control stagecoach until Ms Lewis is bellowing to be heard above the increasingly frenzied guitar action - "let's not forget ourselves good friend, I am flawed if I'm not free, and your husband will never leave you, he will never leave you for me!" And then the orchestra comes in! Right at the end! They're leaving the kitchen sink for the next album. Lots of downloads, including Does He Love You live, here.

Best Album I Bought This Year That Didn't Come Out This Year - Kings Of Convenience -Riot On An Empty Street

God, I love this album. It doesn't matter what kind of mood I'm in, I'm always in the mood for this. Plus, it's currently filling that most essential job of any record in a collection - that of "the album I'll put on when there is literally nothing I want to listen to and how on earth did I get to this situation where I have so many records and not one of them is any good?" It's gentle acoustic loveliness is, quite frankly, the perfect cup of tea. From the "2 soft voices blended in perfection" er, perfection of "Homesick" to the stuttering pop of "I'd Rather Dance With You" it manages to tred that almost impossible path between being ideal background music and being utterly essential. It will be a sad day when I'm tired of this album.

A treasure trove of Kings Of Convenience.

It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year! Part 1

2005-12-07T04:36:00.000-08:00

Lists! Q Magazine couldn’t get by without them! Every blogger worth his salt is currently compiling his end of year best of! There’s just been a bit of an internet kerfuffle about whether the NME’s end of year list is influenced by commercial as well as artistic interests! It’s all very, very exciting! Over the next few weeks I’ll be periodically telling you about some of the musical highlights of my year. Christ on a bike, you lucky, lucky people.

Best Song About Wibbling Rivalry – Kings Of Leon – The Bucket

I’ve never really been one for the swampy southern rock and the Kings Of Leon had always left me cold. But the lead track from the most phonetically pleasingly titled album of the year – Aha Shake Heartbreak – pricked up my ears immediately. The bassline that seemingly stays on the same note for the entire song, the clever minimalist riffing, the tom tom drumming all frame a perfectly constructed lyric about brotherly love in a band on tour. “I’ll be the one to show you the way, you’ll be the one to always complain, three in the morning come-a bang bang bang, all out of fags and I just can’t wait.” It’s just a pity you have to look up the lyrics before you’re entirely sure what they are. Extra points for most of them shaving their beards off. Well done.

Best Unexpected Chord Change – Coldplay – Fix You

I like Coldplay, and I don’t care what you think. This, Chris Martin’s trendy vicar song to end them all, suffered from the dual problem of being horrifically over-exposed and so good that you wanted to hear it again and again until you were bored to death of it and, frankly, couldn’t care if you never heard that bloody song again for the rest of your life. It definitely needs to be put to bed for a few years, allowing it to return triumphantly when people have forgotten how good it is. Despite being obvious in it’s “With Or Without You” stadium ambition, the minute Johnny’s electric guitar comes in and they crank the song up a notch I can’t help but smile. But the real money moment for me is the chord change on “learn from my mistakes.” It’s dead simple, but, to my ears, complete genius. Now relax, Chris.

Best Song Title That Became An Excellent Pop Rumour – Gorillaz – Dare

Damon Albarn still seems to take himself a bit seriously doesn’t he? But there’s no doubt that he cares. Or that the tunes come out of him like water from a knackered tap. In a dream pop world, Damon and Graham would make up and Blur would release an album entirely made up of their good songs and none of their stupid ones which, for me, have blighted their later albums. Anyway, I actually prefer “Dirty Harry” to this song, but that song doesn’t have an excellent pop rumour attached to it. In case you haven’t heard it, the rumour is that the song was called “There” until Shaun Ryder still couldn’t pronounce it correctly after about 100 takes.

Best Song Heard By Accident Prompting The Absolute Realisation That I Would Love This Band – Stars – Ageless Beauty

I’d downloaded “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” from somewhere or other and played it to death for a weekend. Then I went on the Arts and Crafts website to find out a bit more about these Stars characters and “Ageless Beauty” came racing out of the speakers on my laptop. Its pure adrenalin charged ecstatic pop brilliance made me order all of Stars’ albums immediately. Plus, we went to see them live and they seemed like a right bunch of weirdos!

Disintegration

2005-12-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

I got this excellent book a couple of days ago - The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard The perfect stocking filler for the music nerd in your life. It's a fairly lighthearted book full of mini essays on the 52 songs in question. I was especially pleased to see that, besides the usual suspects like "Love Will Tear Us Apart," it had songs that I genuinely consider to be horrifically depressing - songs like "Tell Laura I Love Her" and, the key one, "All By Myself." I mean, obviously the song is just horrible, but the lyrics read like a middle aged persons suicide note.

When I was at university our magazine did a feature about "The Most Depressing Songs of All Time." Each one of the music writers chose a song. It was, as you might imagine, made up of The Smiths and The Wedding Present. I remember one review started "I've never lived in a bedsit, but my brother's friend Alan has...." Ah, great days. I chose The Winner Takes It All by Abba - it's a depressing song because it's true. These days I'd go for Old Friends by Simon & Garfunkle - just for the line "how terribly strange to be 70." It's brutal.

One of the best bits in the book is the analysis of Prayers For Rain by The Cure. The author simply lists a word from each line of the song. The words are:

shatter
dull
kills
stifle
infectious
hopelessness
rain
suffocate
dirt
nowhere
desolate
drab
killing
fracture
stale
strangle
deteriorate
drearily
tired

Brilliant!

Human

2005-12-06T00:24:00.000-08:00

So it seems that everyone at my work has had an attack of conscious this Christmas. I've just received about the 8th email telling me that a person won't be sending cards this year, but will instead be purchasing one of these alternative presents. Obviously it's all very worthy and noble and, of course, on every moral and ethical level it's something to be encouraged. But I know that a lot of them are doing it in the same way as George makes donations to his ficticious organisation "The Human Fund" in that episode of Seinfeld just to get out of buying cards and gifts.

Friday Quick Links

2005-12-02T04:49:00.000-08:00

Most bands who split up eventually reform don't they? Even the Pink Floyd decided to bury the hatchet for half an hour earlier in the year. Brett and Bernard kissed and made up. Billy Corgan continues to work tirelessly to bring the Smash Pumps back together again. So I guess it's no surprise that every year there are stories of a Smiths reunion. It will never ever happen. Ever.

A few weeks ago I posted about a lovely song being used on the Sony advert with all the coloured bouncing balls. Quite a few people visited here thinking that I knew the answer to who the song was by. I didn't. BUT! I have since discovered that the artist in question is one Jose Gonzalez. You can listen to the song - Heartbeats - and 3 others here. Perfect night time music. What is it with these Scandinavians? They're ace.

The Guardian wonders about the phenomenon of the UK Christmas number one. I think it's a shame that bands don't write Christmas songs anymore. How good would it be to see Franz Ferdinand or Kaiser Chiefs or whoever come out with a top notch singalong Christmas classic. I think we can all agree that it would be brilliant. I was even prepared to quite like The Darkness for 5 minutes just for making the effort to write a Christmas song.

Some comedy.

And finally, something random and bizarre that I quite enjoyed.

Incidentally, you may notice that there will be some new people posting on here. I hope you enjoy what they have to say.

Postcard From Poland

2005-12-01T09:31:00.000-08:00

It's brilliant going to the hairdresser's, isn't it, especially when you don't speak the language too well. These days I sometimes pretend I don't speak Polish when I go to the hairdresser's, just so I can experience a haircut without ANY obligation to say anything. I sit there, soothed by the gentle caressing motion of the hairdresser, brain only just on stand-by, as my workaday worries are snipped away. None of that banter about holiday plans or the weather, just a half hour of peace and quiet.

It's also brilliant going to the hairdresser's when you're short-sighted, as it adds a dangerous element of ambiguity when you can't see your hairdresser's face properly. Somehow it makes it OK to smile flirtatiously. Does she reciprocate or is she scowling? I'll never know, so it's inconsequential.

What's not brilliant when you go to the hairdresser's when you're short-sighted is the fact that you can't see what they're doing. This can lead to a nasty shock at the end when you slip those spectacles back on.

I think on balance it might be better to buy some contact lenses. I have a girlfriend so should clearly stop flirting with the hairdresser anyway, and also, it really would be nice to be able to see what they're doing... But then I do need a bit of risk in my life. Such a dilemma.

I just realised I'm now older than Withnail. For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I feel this may be significant. The other day I watched it for the first time in years, and was struck by the film's sexual tension and pathos. When I watched it as a student, we laughed at the 'panorama of degradation' that was their Camden flat, and chuckled in disbelief at the alcohol consumed, and the witty banter of Withnail and Marwood. But the film's emotive side somehow passed me by. It's strange getting older.
But at least I haven't got a sole flapping off my shoe...

Truth Hurts

2005-12-01T05:41:00.000-08:00

So should anyone be logging on to this nonsense on a daily basis to see what rubbish I've posted, you will have noticed a brief period of radio silence. Fear not, I haven't got bored of this blogging lark, I've been on a training course in London and away from the internets.

The course I was on was to do with database programming. It was quite hardcore. My brain hurt at the end of it all.

As a friend said to me on learning about the courses I've been on - "yes, I remember when we were 15, all you used to talk about was the hope that one day you'd become database administrator."

And I died a little bit inside.

Occupy My Time

2005-11-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

This genuinely made me snort coffee over my keyboard at lunchtime today. I need a holiday I think.

Title Track

2005-11-23T06:45:00.000-08:00

Reasonably interesting article about Madonna's debut TV appearance on The Tube, with recollections from a couple of those involved. Alas it fails to mention what I regard to be the best moment of the evening when Peter Hook tried to get Madonna to play a second set with a bribe somewhere in the region of twenty pounds, and she told him to fuck off.

And since we're on the subject of Manchester's finest (maybe we're not but who cares) I'm sure you've all seen the Mozzer tracklisting for the new album. Here's something funny about the song titles. It reminds me of an article in the now defunct Select magazine about how Morrissey was throwing away the element of surprise by using his best lines as song titles. Their argument was basically that The Headmaster Ritual wouldn't have been as good a song had it been called "Belligerent Gouls Run Manchester Schools."

Jonny, Don't Point That Gun At Me

2005-11-22T06:13:00.000-08:00

While this blog is entirely devoted to things that interest me, I'm aware that I hardly ever write about sport. I'm not really sure why that is; I can get as worked up about sport as anything else.

Anyway, during my lunchtime reading today I came across this excellent interview with Jonny Wilkinson. I've got a soft spot for Jonny, not just because he helped to win us the world cup, but also because he seems to be on the boarderline of sinking into a depressive episode in all the interviews and articles I've read with him. He has had a difficult time of it - to go from winning the world cup with practically the final kick of the game to being pretty much constantly injured for 2 years must be hard to take. The killer quote in this interview, which I think all us 20 and 30 somethings can relate to is:

"As much as I've tried to stay away from this kind of 'why me?' bitterness, I'd still hate to end up as one of those people who is fine as long as they're busy but as soon as they sit down alone they start thinking about what they never achieved. That's where the panic is rooted. I never want to end up as a 'What could have been ...' person."

I have virtually said that word for word in the past. It's like looking into a mirror. In fact, there is almost no difference between me and Jonny. World class sporting prowess aside. And a willingness to get off his arse and do something about it I suppose. And maybe a commitment to achieving his goals that lasts longer than a fortnight. But other than that, we're identical.

I Think Of Crosses That We Mean As Kisses

2005-11-21T07:25:00.000-08:00

One of friday's links, which the world and his wife has linked to, was a Guardian article about the 89 albums we should all own. I'm sure you've read it.

Anyway, a conversation arose out of this to do with so-called classic albums that are a must for anyone's collection. I was a sucker for this when I was at university - the number of albums I bought from the 60s and 70s because they were "classics" and I really ought to like them. And then took them off after a couple of listens to play something exciting and new. As I amble slowly into middle age I realise that there's just no point in forcing things. Yes, I like Pet Sounds, no I don't really like David Bowie. That's why iTunes is so good - I can buy The Killing Moon and not have to bother with all the other "probably sounded better when the album first came out" songs.

Anyway, what came out of this was what I considered to be the 20 albums that I would recommend everyone own. So here they are

New Order - Technique
The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism
Simon & Garfunkle - Bookends
The Beatles - Revolver
The Beach Boys - Surf's Up
The Sundays - Reading, Writing and Aritmetic
The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
The Afghan Whigs - 1965
The Cure - Disintegration
Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs
Radiohead - OK Computer
Madonna - Like A Prayer
Pet Shop Boys - Discography
James Iha - Let It Come Down
Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister
Red House Painters - Ocean Beach
Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque
Depeche Mode - Violator

I really am quite the indie-bedwetter aren't I?

Friday Quick Links

2005-11-18T05:21:00.000-08:00

Its about that time of year when people start talking about their end of year lists. John Harris in The Guardian talks about it. Pleasingly he mentions a few things I've blogged about in the last six months, giving me an unwarranted feeling of smuggness.

Imformation Leafblower asked all the cool bloggers to name their most important bands currently working in America. For some reason, I wasn't asked for my view. An administrative oversight presumably. For no-one in particular's record, my own, entirely predictable, top 5 would be

1. Death Cab For Cutie. For not disappointing me with Plans.
2. Sufjan Stevens. If all he'd done this year had been John Wayne Gacy Jr he'd still be here.
3. Nightmare of You. I can't stop playing the album. Definitely contructed in a secret pop bunker by evil Scandinavian scientists.
4. The Killers. I had to put this in because they're a favourite of Mrs Studies. Plus, it's the album I reach for when I can't decide what to listen to.
5. The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers. For making me listen to their song "Lisa" on repeat for an entire train journey from London to Manchester. I don't have time to look for an mp3 but you must track this song down. It is the saddest song I have ever heard.

Lots of people have already linked to this Guardian article about the 89 albums you should own. I actually have a worryingly high number of them. And yet regularly listen to relatively few. Does anybody listen to Rubber Soul anymore?

Proof popjustice was funny years ago. See No. 17 especially.

And finally some nonsense you've probably already seen about Lindsay Lohan.

Idioteque

2005-11-17T08:25:00.000-08:00

Time for another English-centric TV post/rant. Has anybody out there seen the new quiz show on BBC2 at 6pm - Eggheads? I've accidentally seen a few editions this week and it would appear to be one of the most futile and ridiculous quiz shows ever devised by man or woman.

The basic concept of the show is quite simple - 2 teams answer questions on a variety of trivial pursuit like subjects. The inventive twist on this show is that one team is made up of genuine pub quiz geniuses and the other team is made up of fucking idiots. The pub quiz geniuses - the eggheads of the title - are the permanent team and each evening a new team of idiots try and beat them.

Now I have a particular bugbear about people with very little general knowledge who appear on any type of quiz show whatsoever. I mean, what do they think they're doing? They're just making themselves look stupid. I'm by no means a trvia expert, but some of the answers these people were giving to questions were embarrassing. To make matters worse, the pub quiz geniuses answer every question they're asked immediately, seemingly without thinking about it, often giving some extra information to the host - Dermot Breakfast News. Last night for example, there was a question about which one of the following three names was Julius Caesar's first wife. The idiot didn't have a clue. The pub quiz genius started his answer by saying "well Dermot, only one of the answers there was actually a wife of Julius Caesar." Who says no-one likes a smart arse?

The idiots can choose who they play against in the head to head round, but the eggheads have no weaknesses. So you end up with the absurd situation that unfolded the other night where a cocky young bloke is beaten on a head to head sport round by what can only be described as a little old lady.

This is a show that you watch open mouthed, amazed at the utter, utter pointlessness of it all.

And If You Don't Love Me Let Me Go

2005-11-16T03:41:00.000-08:00

So! It was The Decemberists last night at the Academy 3. Ah The Decemberists. Of all the bands I like that I try and get my friends into, The Decemberists have been the hardest sell. They were practically falling over themselves to get DCFC’s back catalogue, they enjoyed Stars, liked Rilo Kiley, but The Decemberists have been met with at best reluctance and at worst outright hostility.

And I know why – its Colin Meloy’s voice. And I can completely understand what they mean. I cannot listen to records by Nick Cave for exactly that reason. And to be honest, I don’t really like Joy Division all that much – completely because I don’t like the sound of Ian Curtis’ voice – to my ears it’s flat and tuneless. Same with Nick Drake. I’ve had a problem in the past trying to get people into The Afghan Whigs – they listen to an album and say “but he can’t sing.” Mrs Studies gamely joined me at the concert last night, despite claiming that Colin Meloy’s voice made her “feel like someone is sawing at the back of my head.” She didn’t enjoy the concert much more than the albums, claiming that the harmonies on show were like “two people trying to whistle at the same frequency.”

But anyway! I like The Decemberists very much. I have no problem with his voice, or with their strange tales of Victorian barrow boys and chimney sweeps or with their sea-shanties about dear loves lost at sea. I think they’re inventive, clever and extremely good humoured. A lot of gigs in Manchester, especially with new bands, have a vaguely unpleasant undercurrent between the band and a few people in the audience. But The Decemberists are so charming and jovial that it was all a bit of a love fest. Still, they don’t do much on stage, so a gig is really just a chance to see them in the flesh and be impressed by their musical skill.

I have a proud record which was continued last night by The Decemberists – concerts by bands I like not featuring my favourite song by said band. Some examples off the top of my head – New Order – Leave Me Alone; Idlewild – Let Me Sleep Next To the Mirror, REM – Find The River, Belle & Sebastian – Century Of Fakers, The Wedding Present – Heather, Pavement – Trigger Cut, Blur – Blue Jeans. And to add to the list we now have The Decemberists – The Gymnast High Above The Ground. And I know that when I finally see Death Cab they will not play Title Track. I just know. Oh well.

Decemberists website.
Download some lovely free MP3s here. I implore you, if you haven’t got any Decemberists, to try ‘The Engine Driver’ at the bottom of the linked page – if any song will get you into The Decemberists it’s that one. Even Mrs Studies likes it.

The Twist Of Separation

2005-11-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Take That eh? They're back you know. But not for good, just for a bit. And of course without Robbie "I just want to be loved, somebody....PLEASE" Williams. Who are we supposed to turn to for comment on this monumental return? Obviously
Popjustice for sober analysis and Popbitch for the slagging.

The usual laugh out loud popjustice moment comes with this comment on new song 'Today I've Lost You':

'It does, however, include the line "on my clothes I still smell your perfume", which is so lipstick-on-cup-tacular that you will immediately collapse to the ground a CRY REAL TEARS.'

I cannot compete with writing like that.

It's So Easy To Laugh

2005-11-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was on TV last night and I sort of watched it while I was doing other things. I was one of those for who the rabid annual excitement of a new part of the trilogy being released simply passed by – I’ve never even read the books; I’m not really a fantasy fiction kind of guy. Never played Dungeons and Dragons either. My geekdom takes different forms. I kind of enjoyed the film, it seemed to be a kind of medieval epic but with goblins and stuff. Clearly, the elf who’s shit-hot with the bow and arrow is the Han Solo of this piece.

Anyway, I mention the film simply because it reminds me of something that happened at work when Return of the King came out at the cinema. And it’s sort of funny, and that’s what blogs are for. A member of my department was a fully paid up member of the Lord of the Rings Appreciation Society (should that exist). He proudly claimed to have read the trilogy hundreds of times, knew every nuance and shade. And somehow he’d managed to get tickets to one of the first screenings in the UK. He was so excited that I sometimes thought, as the magical day drew ever closer, that he might simply pass out and die such were the imbalances of toxins in his brain. He was crossing off the days. No really, he was crossing off the days on a calendar on his desk.

Anyway, the day eventually arrived and we discussed how breathlessly excited he’d be the following day when he came in and gave us a full report. Sure enough, he was gushing. After he’d gone on for five minutes or more about Peter Jackson’s triumph in every aspect of bringing his beloved work to life, one of the department, a Scotsman who never ever got involved in our TV, music, film discussions – just sat their silently judging - said

“What are you talking about?”

“The new Lord of the Rings” said fanboy.

“Ah right. (long, long pause) I hate all that wizard shit.”

I’ve never seen a single comment so deflate another human being.

It made me laugh anyway.

Friday Quick Links

2005-11-11T05:20:00.000-08:00

More links from Popjustice I'm afraid. The writing is just brilliant, especially if you remember Smash Hits' glory days. These two posts made me laugh out loud at my desk and this review of the new Girls Aloud album is fantastic and preposterous all at once. Sample quote - "This lasts for 42 seconds and in that short time manages to be better than Bob Dylan's entire career." They also really understand that capital letters make things funny.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah get their first mainstream UK press coverage in this Guardian article on the internets revolutionising of the music biz. Hope taping is killing music.

This BlaggBlog post appeals to the romantic in me.

UPDATE! The always splendid Gorilla Vs Bear has posted a Christmas Mix Tape. No Thanksgiving to hold back the Christmas fun here in England! Deck the halls!

Why Won't You Say What You Mean?

2005-11-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

So it was Nightmare Of You at the Night n Day Cafe last night. It was only a week or so ago that I told you how good the album was and that you should really go out and buy it so I'll keep this short.

- The show was a little surreal. I can never accurately estimate numbers at gigs but I reckon that there was between 30 and 50 people watching the band. That's not very many. Weird to see a band this good in such a small and, lets be honest, empty venue. They need better publicists.

- Brandon the singer was grumpy. Apparently he'd been beaten up/mugged/hit in some way the day before and was angry with Manchester for this. He kept calling it Shankchester. At least I think that's what he was saying. I didn't really understand it anyway.

- They really do have some tunes. Surely they're gonna be big? Really very, very good indeed.

- Support came from local boys The Maple State. I thought they were impressive too - and quite fully formed for a new band. They had an many fans (mates?) down as NOY.

- That's it.

Square Eyes

2005-11-09T03:58:00.000-08:00

It’s strange, given my obsession with music, TV, film and popular culture in general, that we only have the 5 standard regulation TV channels. We don’t even have a Freeview box. It’s like we’re living in the 50s. But I sort of like the simplicity of it – you know how when you visit the house of someone with all the music channels and you notice that they’re basically all just playing the same songs? Only having 5 channels forces you to make choices – you can only channel surf for so long before you have to watch something or turn off the TV and go out and do something less boring instead.

Tuesday nights have long been TV night in our house. I think it had something to do with Tuesday being the most horrific day of the working week – without Monday’s relief at just having the weekend off and with the end of the week still an unappealingly long time away. Last night was no different – 5 channels, red wine and a load of rubbish to watch.

7.30 Eastenders.

OK, so say you’re Chrissie. You’ve murdered your husband and the police are on to the fact that it was you and not the poor sap they originally had banged to rights. Do you
a) Leave the square suddenly, quietly and without fuss
b) Leave the square suddenly, quietly and without fuss under the cover of darkness
c) Have one last stroll around the square in broad daylight taking in all the old haunts and saying goodbye to people before casually packing and leaving in an extremely slow moving taxi.

I’ll leave you to guess which one the writers went for. Eastenders is so bad it makes me sad for everyone involved.

8.00 Holby City

Ah Holby. Why on earth do I watch you? I really don’t know.

9.00 CSI Miami/Trial and Retribution/The Last Tommy

We had a bit of an England vs America police procedural double header here. CSI Miami had a girl killed by a massive boa constrictor, Trail and Retribution just plodded along in the usual British police show way – with the police solving nothing until it was too late.

So in an ad break I switched to BBC1 and found the most fantastic show about veterans from World War 1. There are only 4 left now, all well into their hundreds. Obviously, all wars are terrible and all wars are very sad – but WW1 somehow makes me feel sad like nothing else. It’s to do with a lot of things – the complete pointlessness of it, the fact that it was a point in history where the old fashioned way of fighting wars – basically running at the enemy – ran headlong into machine guns and artillery, the fact that the troops originally went off to war thinking it’d all be over by Christmas 1914. God, it’s just terrible.

10.30 The Daily Show

OK, this isn’t on the 5 channels, I watch the best bits on the internets.

11.00 Something about Madonna on channel 4

Madonna’s imperial phase was just so good. Into The Groove, Crazy For You, Live To Tell, Papa Don’t Preach, Cherish, Dear Jessie, Who’s That Girl. Now those are pop songs.

I Think I'll Miss This One This Year

2005-11-08T09:56:00.000-08:00

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Actually, Marks and Spencer in Manchester have had a Christmas section since mid-September, and when we went to John Lewis 3 weeks ago they had their tree up. But hey. It's only a tree.

But there's been a noticable change in TV advertising in the last week or two, more perfume, more luxury goods, more electronics, fewer washing detergent commercials. Last night I saw an ad for this. And quite frankly, it's a disgrace. If anyone out there is even thinking of buying a compilation album called 'Housework Songs' for any of their loved ones they should be ashamed of themselves. Of all the pointlesslessly created gifts.

Oh and by the way, if anyone reading this knows who does the song on the new Sony advert with all the multi-coloured balls bouncing down the street, do let me know. Commercial Breaks and Beats is not my friend.

6 'o clock Already

2005-11-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

Music eh? Isn't it great. Laura Viers' album is good isn't it? Yes. Some tracks are here. Why not download them and then buy the album? Go on.

Or maybe you prefer The Rakes? "22 grand job, in the city it's alright" they say. And who can argue with that? Not me, that's for sure. Some tracks from their album are here.

So there you are. Some music. Music Monday.

Friday Quick Links

2005-11-04T05:42:00.000-08:00

I really don’t know what to make of this. People have too much time on their hands (says blogger, universe explodes through irony).

A broken heart never heals. Link via Lindsayism, who always has good stuff.

Some interesting interviews in today’s Guardian.

- Pete Doherty continues his slide towards a seemingly inevitable death.
- Will Young. In trying to praise the new album, the interviewer claims that “If Jay Kay were younger and gay, this is the album he might have made.” I am already running for the hills.

America is just starting on the Arctic Monkeys. MP3 here.

Sad Songs Say So Much

2005-11-03T03:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterdays aside about Morrissey’s sad song made me think.

I know a lot of people couldn't care less about lyrics. I used to be like that I think, but I now find myself struggling to happily sit through a song with bad lyrics. As good as Krafty by New Order is, the lyrics make me twitch slightly.

A song rocking the iPod on an almost daily basis at the moment is Pills by The Perishers. These are the lyrics:

I hope my smile can distract you
I hope my fists can fight for two
So it never has to show
And you’ll never know

I hope my love can blind you
I hope my arms can bind you
So you’ll never have to see
What we’ve grown to be

One may think we’re alright
But we need pills to sleep at night
We need lies to make it through the day
We’re not ok
One may think we’re doing fine
But if I had to lay it on the line
We’re losing ground with every passing day
We’re not ok
But that’s one thing
I would never say to you

Now, granted, they’re not life changing or anything, but look how sad they are! And for those who haven’t heard it, it’s made even sadder by the fact that the first verse is taken by a guy, the second by a girl and then they duet on the chorus. And that got me wondering about whether the writer of the song (Ola Klüft, fact fans!) was writing it from his experience or his imaginings. And does it matter?

Does the fact that Robert Smith has been happily married for most of his adult life make Disintegration any less involving? Does Ben Gibbard laying his cards on the table and telling us that “this is fact not fiction for the first time in years” make A Lack of Color more moving – that we know that he did actually call at 7.03 and on her machine slur a plea for her to come home? Is the new Wedding Present album, post relationship break-up, a sadder experience than all those heartbreaking (invented) tales of messed up romance that David Gedge based his career on in the first place? And when Mozzer sang “Love is natural and real, but not for me my love,” did we believe him?

I don’t know really, I think in the end it probably doesn’t matter if it’s fact or fiction, all that really matters is that it means something to someone. That’s probably the best that anyone can hope for. Let’s be careful out there.

Oh The Alcoholic Afternoons

2005-11-02T07:17:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog (God help you) will have noticed that I have a rather large soft spot for The Smiths. How anyone can not think their albums are some of the most amazing music ever commited to tape is a view too wacky for my feeble mind. Both Johnny Marr and Morrissey's post Smiths output have been somewhat patchy, albeit often touched by staggering works of heartbreaking genius, but the Mozzer returned triumphant with his last album and the tide of the media still seems to be flowing in his favour. Some stuff about that new album here.

Incidentally, does anyone else think that the lyrics to I Have Forgiven Jesus are just too sad? All that stuff about 'Why did you give me so much desire, when there is nowhere I can go to offload this desire' at the end of the song? Bit too real for me Moz.

I'd Love To Turn You On

2005-11-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Not much today, but does anyone know whether this is real or just a massive and elaborate practical joke on the world? Or is it a film or a future comedy show? It truly is bizarre. Anyway, if anyone reads this and knows what the score is then do let me know.

Friday Quick Links

2005-10-27T06:13:00.000-07:00

Despite virtually everyone I know and most of the world's media organisations telling me that I'm wrong, I just haven't been able to see the attraction of the Kaiser Chiefs. Yes, they seem like good guys, the story of their rise to fame warms the cockles and I find myself accidentally singing I Predict A Riot while I'm waiting at traffic lights, but I have always considered them to be a bit of a poor man's Blur. Until now! New single 'Modern Way' is very very good indeed and the video that accompanies it is genuinely interesting. Watch it here why don't you? Singer Ricky Wilson explains it's genesis.

Chromewaves beat me by a day linking to this article from Pitchfork about indie-pop. I was at university with a bloke who was a Sarah records completist, and it pains to to admit that for a couple of months at university I could occassionally be seen in a Sarah Records t-shirt complete with cardigan. Oh dear me. The indie-pop record I couldn't do without is 'Unisex' by Blueboy, a record I have on vinyl and still one of the records I would put on if I was doing the washing up. Around this time they also released a single called 'River' which featured the absolute classic lyric 'sadness is a way of life for bitter me.' Blueboy fansite for those desperate to know more. Their song Also Ran is the saddest song of all time - and it's an instrumental!

20 years since The Goonies? That is deee-pressing.

UK fans of Lost? DO NOT CLICK HERE.

Best news story of the week.

Learn To Fail Without Regret

2005-10-27T03:58:00.000-07:00

And so we round up our music week with an indie-rock hard luck story. A band who seemed destined for great things but whose triumphant musical voyage was run aground on the evil, sharp and unforgiving rocks of record company duplicity, bankruptcy and media indifference. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you have no idea who I’m on about. Well I’ll tell you – Lowgold.

I’ve mentioned them before on here, but to sum up – they were my favourite band for a good few months back in the year 2000. I went to each and every London concert they did, seeing both their own gigs and them supporting Coldplay and Grandaddy. I bought every release – I even have their ultra rare NME single of the week debut ‘The 108 EP’ on two – count ‘em - formats! But then just after they’d had their first top 40 hit with the Graham Coxon remixed ‘Beauty Dies Young’ it all went horribly, horribly wrong.

In 2003 they attempted a comeback with the lovely ‘Welcome To Winners’ album, but the public didn’t seem to want to know. To be fair, the public didn’t really know they existed – unless they were big fans before and had kept an eye on the Lowgold fansites. Hands up all those people? The album was snapped up by the Lowgold hardcore but then it all went silent again, and the fans presumed that it was, finally, all over.

But no! Lowgold are made of sterner stuff, and they will not give up. Encouraged by the continuing interest in the band on their website, they’ve created their own label and have just released a bumper double album of b-sides, rarities and the odd new track called, with customary Lowgold wit ‘Keep Music Miserable.’

As I’ve said, I was a bit of a Lowgold obsessive for a time, so there isn’t much stuff on the album I haven’t got already, but for the 99.9999% of the population who didn’t buy the early EP and singles, there are many delights here. The great lost single ‘Can’t Say No’, the heartbreaking ‘God Willing’, the almost comedic ‘If People Were Vinyl.’ Plus there are a couple of live tracks showing that Lowgold knew how to end a set and the marvellous new single (according to Steve Lamacq) ‘Every Train.’ Being a double album there are a few moments of throwaway studio nonsense that, although probably highly amusing for the band, could probably have been left in the bin.

Lowgold are a very good band who make very good indie-rock records. I bet in their quieter moments they do a bit of soul searching about why they haven’t been more successful. If it had been me I think I would have been completely overcome with bitterness and frustration by now. But they have soldiered on, the music remains, and deserves your attention.

Lots of music and video here. I particularly recommend In Amber and Less I Offer.

Special, Like A Rocket Through Me

2005-10-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

Music week day 3 – Mew. I’ve been putting this post off to be honest, mainly because I find it virtually impossible to describe both what they sound like and why I like them so much. I’ve described them before as the missing link between My Bloody Valentine and Abba, but that’s a typically nonsensical thing to say when you can’t really explain what they sound like. They’re Danish, their lyrics are often bizarre (in a pleasingly Scandinavian way) and for this new album they’ve transformed themselves from sensitive looking indie-boys to Peter Hook circa 1987 rock-pigs. Blimey. And the album cover is rubbish. Who do they think they are, Queen?

Anyway, their first official worldwide album, 2003s Frengers, remains one of my most loved and most played records and I regard their December 2003 ULU show as The Best Concert I’ve Ever Seen. And now, after a fair wait, they’re back with the suitably peculiarly titled “Mew And The Glass-Handed Kites.” That wasn’t what it was originally going to be called – it was going to be “The Saviours Of Jazz-Ballet.” Do you see what I mean? How do you talk up these people?

You know how some bands seem to have a musical alchemy that goes beyond the individual members and their respective instruments? Well Mew have that. I don’t think they’d be nearly as good if one of them left. Of course, most of the attention focuses on the angelic vocals of Jonas Bjerre, but it’s the fact that his dreamy warbling floats above music that switches from impossibly beautiful to strangely brutal that make them so difficult to pin down. And the drummer is unbelievable. I really do feel that they don’t sound like anyone else – the best I can do is maybe Sigur Ros if Sigur Ros wrote actual songs and sang in English. And even then I’m not even close.

Frengers was made up of rerecorded highlights from their first two Denmark only albums, whereas this one is entirely new material So I was interested to see how they approached coming up with something new after playing the same songs for quite a few years. Well obviously they’ve approached it in a typically grandiose way – all the songs flow seamlessly into one another, so when you’re thinking “this is a long song” you look at your CD player and you’re on track 6. And strangely, although this works brilliantly, this is still an album for dipping and flicking through – so if you’re not in the mood for J Mascis’ whiny guest vocals on Why Are You Looking Grave? It doesn’t upset any flow or anything like that. It’s possible of course that their might be some kind of concept behind this, but the lyrics are so often brilliantly nonsensical that, if there is, I’m too stupid to notice it.

So, a week in, it’s not quite got the immediate brilliance of Frengers, but its delights are revealing themselves slowly over time. So buy this album. And if they’re playing live near you, for the love of God go and see them.

Assorted music, videos and other excitement here and here.

You're A Shining Star, You'll Do Great in LA

2005-10-25T05:47:00.000-07:00

For reasons lost in the dull daily grind of a north-west business park, I tend to buy my albums in groups of four. And because there hasn’t been much music on here recently, I thought this week would be music week – so I’m keeping all my rants about Eastenders to myself for now. So anyway, yesterday was DM, today is Nightmare Of You.

Avid blog readers may have got the inside scoop on NOY a long, long time ago. The band have been mentioned on Ultragrrl’s blog for months now and indeed their first tentative release came through there. The only song I’d heard prior to the album popping through my letterbox was “My Name Is Trouble,” a song so perfectly constructed in a mid-naughties post-Killers 80s influenced electro-indie-pop way that I initially thought it could only have been created by evil Scandinavian scientists in a secret pop laboratory.

But no! The album is full of similar delights, albeit more traditionally rockist and guitar based than the mighty “…..Trouble.” What’s the best comparison I can come up with? I suppose there are similarities to The Killers but there are far less synths than with Brandon’s mob. It’s quite squarely aimed at a pop trajectory – many of the choruses are so catchy that you’re singing along by the final run through the first time you hear the song. And I love guitar parts that you can whistle. This is not difficult music by any stretch of the imagination – it’s for making you smile, making you dance and making you sing along. But then, just as comedy is the most difficult film genre to get right, then surely credible pop must be challenging for that position as far as music goes? And more to the point, I like pop music. So there.

But before I make this sound like the first McFly album, the lyrical subjects are often decidedly adult. In fact, the more times I’ve listened to it, the more the interesting lyrics have come out. Let’s just say - lots about death.

Anyway, first single “I Want To Be Buried In Your Backyard” (I told you) is a singalonga classic – video here. Other songs, including the monolithic “My Name Is Trouble” here. Website here.

I'm Taking A Ride With My Best Friend

2005-10-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

I have only ever done 2 rock and roll things in my life. One was falling down the entire length of an escalator at Bond Street tube station (I might tell you about that another time.) The other is the story I’m about to tell. It concerns Depeche Mode.

There’s a whole generation of people out there for whom Depeche Mode are slightly more important than your average band. At my school they were the coolest band in the world. They ruled the school. You were no-one if you didn’t like the Mode. God help you if you tried to turn Violator off the common room jukebox. So the anticipation for Violator’s follow up - Songs Of Faith and Devotion – was frankly, beyond a joke. I remember taping “I Feel You” off the radio from it’s debut play (these were the days before internet leaks 3 months before the album was released) and bringing it in to be marvelled at. It was a bit of a letdown, but you didn’t try and tell that to the rabid Mode fans. You’d be shunned.

Anyway, if the expectation for the album was off the scale then the announcing of tour dates was close behind. And then they were announced – one date at Crystal Palace Athletics stadium. Bear in mind here that, at this point in our story, we are located in the north west of England. And Crystal Palace is in London, a long long drive away. And a few of us had just passed our driving tests. I’m adding a bit of colour here you see.

But the tickets were bought. The majority of my year decided it would be best to go on a coach. But ten of us decided that driving was the way forward – 2 cars, 5 people in each, walkie-talkies for between car communication (no mobile phones you see – virtually cave people). Not only that, the hardcore moders in our party wanted to be there when the gates opened so we could be right down the front to marvel at Dave Gahan’s moves, Martin Gore’s guitar heroics, Alan Wilder’s multi-instrumental genius and Fletch waving a bit. So we were setting off at midnight.

So to sum up, this was what happened on the day of the gig– set off from Blackpool at midnight and drive through the night. Get to London at dawn. Start queuing. 3pm gates open, get to the front. 6pm school friends from coaches arrive and join us at the front. 10.30 Depeche Mode come on – we had been standing for seven and a half hours. Midnight DM finish, we all agree it was the highlight of our lives. Now you might be wondering about what is so rock and roll about this story. Well it’s this – we left the concert, got back in our 2 cars and tried to drive home. And to recap – we’d been awake for more than 40 hours. I got in my designated car and fell fast asleep.

The next thing I was aware of was some kind of crackle like an out of tune radio, interspersed with garbled voices. I rubbed my eyes and looked around the car. We were on the motorway. And everyone in the car, except me now, was asleep. I was in the middle back and passengers either side of me were dead to the world. The fellow in the passenger seat had his head on the drivers shoulder. And the driver, though clutching the wheel with both hands, had his head on his own lap. And we were drifting ever so slowly across the lanes of the motorway. I know this sounds like an exaggerated story but I swear it’s true. And the sound I could hear was coming from the walkie-talkie on the guy in the passenger seat’s lap – it was our friends in the other car basically going “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WAKE UP! Crackle crackle crackle. YOU’RE ALL ASLEEP! Crackle crackle crackle. OH JESUS!”

I guess it must have been at this point that I woke myself up and shook our driver awake, whose reflexes caused him to pull the car back from it’s doomed trajectory. We woke everyone else up, wound the windows down, and froze all the way back to Blackpool at about 40 miles an hour. So remember kids, always take the coach.

The reason I’m telling this story is that DM are back. The album is fine enough, the single Precious a real corker. But their time has gone. I love the Mode - their back catalogue is an almost never-ending basket of delights – try Black Celebration – but if I can’t get worked up about a new album, then I don’t think many non-fans will. That said, when the tour dates were announced, the emails from friends who don’t go to gigs anymore started – had I got tickets to DM yet?

This is an excellent review of Playing the Angel. I especially like the explanation for why bands with long and distinguished careers end up making less vital albums than they used to. And go here to watch the Precious video.

Anyway, that’s enough for today. I have so much to say about DM and so many DM related stories than I could literally start a blog called DM related sories. Hmmmm.

Friday Quick Links

2005-10-21T05:30:00.000-07:00

All album reviews should be written like this. Maybe some day they will be.

A good friend of mine managed to get the ungettable tickets for Arctic Monkeys in Manchester last weekend. His verdict? "Overrated." I think that puts the Arctic Monkeys to bed then. Make up your own mind here.

I assume we all love Red House Painters, yes? Of course we do. Mark Kozelek's latest project is an album of Modest Mouse cover versions. Download one of them here.

Pete Townshend's got a blog. Good lord.

And finally, a quick dip into Paul Daniels' blog for some classic Alan Partridge style life (these are real I promise)

"Debbie's Charity Tea Dance at the Royal Opera House was brilliant, even if I don't dance. I enjoyed it enormously. It's great to hear a big band live. I do wish they wouldn't call two or three lads with guitars a band. They aren't. They are a group."

"Then we got dolled up and went to the Prostate Cancer Research Charity Fund Raising Dinner. Adrian Walsh did the cabaret and had some really good gags. I sat with some laboratory technicians/researchers/organisers and learnt a lot more about cancer than I knew before."

"I had a meeting cancelled today so I was able to get work done. It was a bit disappointing when it was cancelled because I could have gone to the Danny La Rue tribute luncheon that the Water Rats had organised. We got dolled up again and went to draw the raffle and present the prizes at the Reading Multiple Sclerosis Centre's Golf Day."

"The evening of the day I drove back from Nottingham we had a few friends round for dinner. Isn't it surprising how quickly it is getting dark nowadays."

Now that's magic.

Every Time I Think Of You, I Always Catch My Breath

2005-10-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

Someone emailed me this today. Curse them. I’ve worked it out now but, man was it a headscratcher. Apparently, it’s a Chinese IQ test given to workers at various companies over there. I don’t believe that for a minute, but it’s a nice story and certainly sounds better than “a random piece of the ever increasing internet detritus from God knows where.” The rules are simple – the raft can only hold 2 people, only the mother, father and police officer know how to operate it, the father cannot be left alone with the daughters, the mother cannot be left alone with the sons, the thief cannot be left alone with any members of the family. Try it for yourself – click the big blue button.

It’s just occurred to me that this post has, by accident, turned into that scene from The Office – “why hasn’t the farmer got a wife?” “Because he’s gay.”

Anyway, the real reason I posted this is that it’s sort of tied together a post that’s been lurking in the dingy corners of my brain for quite a while. I remember that Super Furry Animals provisionally entitled one of their albums “The Mobile Phone Is Killing The Concept Of The Pub Quiz As We Know It.” And in a similar way, the fact that everyone has the internet at work has ruined those brilliant quizzes what used to periodically pop up in your inbox – song lyrics, movie quotes and what have you. These days, when they do come along, any lyrics that are refusing to reveal themselves – just type the line into google and there you go. It’s much easier than waking up in the middle of the night going “It’s from Footloose! Of course!” Or maybe that’s just me.

I don’t recall many days at work with fondness but I remember one afternoon when me and a co-worker tried to remember the lyrics to the seminal 80s power-ballad “Missing You” by John Waite. I retain an unhealthy and inexplicable affection for this song to this day. When we’d finally remembered it all, there really was a sense of peculiar triumph.

So, to sum up, I’ve still no idea what this post was supposed to be about. It’s something to do with profligacy of information creating laziness and a get out from having to think things through and solve the problem yourself. But that’s a load of rubbish, to be quite honest.

By the way, next week is music week, I promise.

Paperback Writer

2005-10-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

Anyone out there read this small piece of genius from William Goldman? If you've ever got a lengthy plane or train ride ahead of you then this is the book to get. Anyway, one point he makes in the book is how important it is for writers to protect their writing time - he talks about one novelist who writes for an hour every Sunday morning and thus produces a book every eight years. I would have no idea how to do that. Similarly, and famously, Graham Greene would write a specific number of words per day - 300 - and when he reached the magic number he would down his pen and start again tomorrow, even if he was in the middle of a line. I've been trying to protect my writing time as much as I can, but sometimes things take over. Like today, WHEN MY IPOD STOPPED WORKING AND NOT ONE OF THE SUGGESTED TROUBLESHOOTING REMEDIES HAVE FIXED IT. I knew it had to happen one day. I'm feeling a little better now, thanks for asking.

In other news, I occassionally check where visitors to this site are coming from. You would not believe how many are looking for lyrics to that stupid song I ranted about the other week. GO TO A LYRIC SITE YOU MORONS. Oh alright. They're here. But this is the last time I'm helping you.

Watching Your Youth Drift Away

2005-10-18T05:18:00.000-07:00

This is the last of the semi-serious personal posts for a while. It’s back to indie-rock and pop culture tomorrow I promise.

As I said yesterday, I’m in London for two days doing a series of briefings for staff at my company (it’s currently lunchtime – last 2 this afternoon if you’re interested). I was completely exhausted by the end of yesterday so I headed over to the hotel I’d been booked in, to watch a pay-per-view movie (not porn), order room service and fall into a blissful sleep. But the movies weren’t working and the menu looked more than a little unpleasant so I headed out into London town for the famous table for one. I can never decide how I feel about asking for a table for one – is it liberating and rewarding – some quality time with me? Or do you look like a sad friendless bastard eating dinner on your own? I’ll get back to you when I’ve decided.

Anyway, I’d bought the NME to read while I ate and had a couple of beers. As an aside, I love people watching in restaurants – especially those you can tell are on early or first dates. There’s something terribly awkward but at the same time quite endearing about seeing people on dates trying to get to know one another – it appeals to the part of me that thinks You’ve Got Mail is a pretty good romantic comedy. So there I was sitting back after my delicious food and finishing my beer when I thought I might have a look who was playing live in London. And there it was – Monday 17th October, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Sufjan Stevens. I could not fucking believe it.

Now I’ve found a lot of brilliant new music since I became a regular blog reader, but Sufjan Stevens is by far the best. Come On Feel The Illinoise! will be there or thereabouts for my album of the year – and his back catalogue doesn’t offer too many disappointments either. And he was playing live in London tonight! But, of course, I’d long since stopped checking London listings. So I phoned the venue – sold out. Of course it was.

It was here that the beers kicked in. “Hang on” my slightly fugged brain thought, “you can go down to Shepherd’s Bush and buy a ticket from a tout. How much can it possibly cost? Arctic Monkeys were going for eighty quid outside the Astoria at the weekend apparently, so Sufjan can’t be anymore than £50. Right! Let’s go.” So I paid my bill and was off to Shepherd’s Bush!

But then I stepped out of the restaurant and onto the pavement and the cold night air hit me in the face and I thought this: “Nope, you’re not going to Shepherd’s Bush. £50 is too much. You can’t afford that. Plus, you’ll have too many beers, you’ll get back to the hotel at one in the morning, you’ll have a bad night’s sleep, you’ll wake up with a hangover, and you’ve got 4 more presentations to give tomorrow. You will regret it.” So I stood and thought for a moment longer, shrugged, and headed back to my hotel.

And the funny thing is, I know I made the right decision. I would have been cursing myself today if I’d have gone – as much as I love Sufjan Stevens and would love to see him play his wonderful songs live. This is what happens as you get older, kids. Or what happens to me anyway.

Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?

2005-10-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

So I'm in London again today and tomorrow giving a series of eight briefings on a new database I've developed for some staff at my company. You know, when I write it down like that, my job almost seems pretty swanky. But today was one of those days where, sitting alone in a conference room waiting for the next lot of people to come in and pretend to be excited about what I'm telling them, you catch yourself thinking "what on earth am I doing?" But then you shake it off because you know deep down there are worse things you could be doing and just because you're not really enjoying your job it's no reason to resort to the usual navel gazing. Plus, you're going to whine about it on your blog at the end of the day and read Golden Fiddle to cheer yourself up.

Friday Quick Links

2005-10-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

One of the worst things about being an English person who overdoses on American culture is that you're inevitably going to be behind on most things and can spend your life like The Likely Lads in that episode where they try and avoid finding out the football score. Aha! You American's won't understand that reference! Revenge is mine! Anyway, the interweb is awash with gossip, rumour, innuendo and, frankly, plot spoilers for those of us on this side of the Atlantic only a little into the first season of Lost. AND I DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS! I WANT IT TO BE A SURPRISE! If you feel the same as me, then don't read this. I'm enjoying all the fake websites that are popping up though. What can it all mean? I DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

Gibbard and Walla interview. Long and good.

Central Village counts down his top twenty albums of the Jewish Year. Top quality downloads to be snaffled while they're still up.

The House Is Not For Sale

2005-10-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

So here I am back at work after 6 days away. The trouble with moving house, as far as your working life goes, is that you get all the downsides of being away from the office but none of the good bits of being on holiday. So, I’m twice as knackered as I was before, I have no idea what’s going on in the world having had no internet for a week, it’s difficult to catch up on my daily blog and internets reading because of all this work I’ve got in my in-tray, and the number of emails I have to respond to is, frankly, beyond a joke.

Other things that have happened since I’ve been away include:

- Lots of people coming to this site after looking for Katie Melua lyrics. What they got instead was a poorly conceived rant.

- Finding out that the doorbell is not something to be afraid of. Keen readers may be aware of the phenomenon of the London Doorbell. That is, the feeling of uneasiness and confusion when the doorbell rings. Because anyone you want to see would have called ahead to make sure you were in before making the minimum 30 minute trek to your door. So that means that ringing your doorbell is either a religious type trying to get you to join their cult, a representative of an energy company trying to get you to switch to paying for your electricity through them or an acne ridden idiot in a cheap suit trying to suggest you need new windows and doors. Well! Our doorbell rang just after we’d moved in and it was our new neighbours, saying hello and offering a bottle of wine. Unfortunately, it was Californian Merlot. I was going to say something, but remembered it’s not cool to quote certain movies.

- There has been an increase in the firewall security at work meaning I can no longer read Popbitch, Liquid Generation or ANY SITE FEATURING VIDEO during my paid working day. This sucks.

So Much To Answer For

2005-10-06T06:07:00.000-07:00

So today is our final day in the flat in Manchester. As I was making my daily way from the flat to the train station this morning it occurred to me that it’s strange how something constant and consistent can be there one minute and gone the next, without any explanation. For the last ten months I’ve made my way to the station, passing the same people every day at the same stage on my walk – the girl with too much make-up dressed as if she works on a cosmetic counter and is always smoking; the indier-than-thou guy in ridiculous clothes who has hair-clips to keep his ludicrous mop in order but is always, rather incongruously, eating a pie; the older lady with the three 20-something blokes who always look like a strange group – do they work together?; the couple who look a bit like 2 of The Magic Numbers and are always laughing; the people in the coffee shop who know my order without me telling it to them. And as of tomorrow I’ll never see any of them again. Well, probably never.

This triggered all sorts of thoughts – like whether or not anyone notices me at any stage in their journey (not in an egotistical sense – in a “oh I’m at this corner and there’s that bloke coming the other way as usual”), and of how many people I pass in the morning who I don’t notice enough to remember. I imagine that I would fall into that category for most people. And of what people are doing and where people are going. And knowing that it’s impossible to know the answer to either of those questions from appearances only. I’m sure that the people who see me on the train every morning don’t imagine that a lot of the time I’m sitting there thinking “what on earth am I doing?”

Anyway, that’s enough of that. These have evidently been around for ages, but I’ve only just discovered these three brilliant spoof trailers, because I’m slow like that. Fantastic examples of how a trailer can turn a film into whatever it wants it to be. The bit where the Peter Gabriel song comes in on The Shining trailer is priceless.

Titanic
West Side Story
The Shining

Last Night I Dreamt That I Was You

2005-10-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

And so it is on slow work days that we head over to songmeanings.net. Have you ever visited? Oh you should. It’s basically a site where song lyrics are listed and then people discuss what they mean. It’s one of those clever websites where the site’s meaning is conveyed through the site’s name.

There are a few reasons why it’s worth 10 minutes of your paid working day:

- You can look up song lyrics on it! And who doesn’t love that?
- Occasionally, you look up a song and it has a really quite interesting and insightful post after it. For example, I didn’t realise that in Death Cab’s ‘No Joy in Mudville’ Gibbard is dreaming about being Lou Reed. You see? Clever stuff.
- Reading arguments between overly serious teenagers.

Now this last point may not appeal to all, but some of them are priceless – especially if you look up something vaguely emo like Weezer or Dashboard Confessional. The righteous bile on display is a joy. They go something like this.

by tallgrrrrl
This song is awesome. My fav by them but I love them all.

by IHeartNerds
I agree. IT ROCKS!!!!!

by Jude89
This is their best song. FCK YEAH!!!!!!!!!

by TheWiseMan
And what about the meaning you idiots? The site’s called songmeanings.net.

by HandsDown
I think this song is about someone who wants to be with a girl but can’t tell them.

by Rockboy66
No shit genius.

by Scene05
Rockboy, there’s no need to be rude. The lyrics are some of the most beautiful and pure I have ever read.

by EmoGuy2005
I love this song. It’s totally about me and my girlfriend. I loved her from afar for so long, I didn’t know what to do about it. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I was just miserable. Then at a party we got totally wasted and she said that she thought I was cute. God, I’m so happy.

by Rockboy66
You’re all gay.

by Scene05
What is your problem rockboy?

by Pinky
This song is the soundtrack to my pathetic teenage life.

by TheScientist
hahahahah! this is such a cool song! It’s really different and fun! Just the sound of this song is amazing.

by MayBeTheWorst
I like the way this song expresses all the human emotions at once – love, lust, confusion, sadness. It makes me cry every time I hear it.

by TheWiseMan
Those are all the human emotions are they? Asshole.

What are you waiting for? Clickee.

See The Mess I'm In Tonight

2005-10-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Few things make me as happy as a new release from Greg Dulli. The new Twilight Singers is full of his off the cuff brilliance. Listen to some of it here.

More info here.

Everything you could ever want or need to know about Dulli, Twilight Singers, The Afghan Whigs, and any related projects is here.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the Greg Dulli Appreciation Society. Thank you.

Sleeping Is Giving In

2005-10-03T04:14:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the UK album chart?

#1 – Katie Melua – Piece By Piece
#2 – David Gray – Life In Slow Motion
#3 – James Blunt – Back To Bedlam
#4 – Jamie Cullum – Catching Tales
#5 – KT Tunstall - Eye To The Telescope

When did this revolution occur? Is that what we’re listening to as a nation? God help us.

Of course, there are much more worthy targets for hatred, and really, I can’t get that worked up about it anymore. But the one person on this list who drives me insane is Katie Melua. I’m sure she’s a very nice young lady, and her inoffensive jazz influenced acoustic balladry seems to be floating the boat of a great deal of this country’s population. But come on people! How can you watch those adverts without wanting to take a baseball bat to the TV?

Her last album had the advert with her singing that ‘Closest Thing To Crazy’ song. If this advert ever came on when the remote control was not at hand then it was a mad dash to the power button every time. It wasn’t the song so much, it was the way she sings “twenty-two”, pronouncing every bloody syllable so perfectly. Oh my God. I can’t even think about it.

But she’s outdone even that with her new one. “There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing, that’s a fact” she sings. Oh, it’s just awful. Don’t get me started on her voice, which I just find horrible to listen to. Really horrible. The way she sings “that’s a fact” somehow conveying rank sentimentality and arch smugness in three words. And is it a fact? It seems an awful lot of bicycles to me.

I looked up the lyrics to this new one. They’re so bad I feel sorry for her, and everyone else involved. Look at this:

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing – that’s a fact
That’s a thing we can’t deny
Like the fact that I will love you ‘till I die.

And this!

We are 12 billion light years from the edge – that’s a guess
No-one can ever say it’s true
But I know that I will always be with you.

And tops it off with this!

There are six billion people in the world – more or less
And it makes me feel quite small
But you’re the one I love the most of all.

Can you believe that nonsense? Because I cannot believe that nonsense! If your 10 year old son or daughter wrote that for you you’d worry about their emotional development.

Friday Quick Links

2005-09-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

Thom Yorke can't decide if he wants to go and see Tony Blair. Pictures like this unlikely I imagine.

Meanwhile, The Guardian tells us who decides what we like and what we will all like next year. Everyone says The Arctic Monkeys. They are so last week.

So who was your favourite Busted member? I must say that I was quite the Busted apologist a year or more ago, telling people that I quite unironically liked their albums. I've since seen the error of my ways, not through any attempt at achieving some hipster cool (I gave up on that many many years ago) but through the realisation that, well, they're a bit shit really. Still, no-one can deny that they had at least 6 good and possibly great songs and I'm here to tell you that songs like Who's David sound excellent played in a country and western style on acoustic guitar. Oh yes. Anyway, James (the little talented one) is Back! Back! Back! with his new band. They're called Son Of Dork. Their album seems to be called Welcome to Loserville. This is misjudged. Who approves these things? Anyway, website is here. Read the biogs for casual amusement. The Q&A includes "most loserish thing you've ever done." Answered this question mate.

The music press continues to foam and froth over the new Franz Ferdinand. The Guardian is the latest, after 9/10 in NME this week. We await Pitchfork. I'm going to have to go back to the album again to try and see what all the fuss is about. I mean, I like Franz Ferdinand, I like their image, I like their interviews, I think it's important that we have pop stars like them. I just don't like their music. I just don't get it. I'm hoping for some Road to Mandalay type conversion very soon.

Out Of Time

2005-09-29T03:34:00.000-07:00

There are many things in life that I would like to accomplish. These include

- Learn a language (German or French preferably)
- Learn website design. And not just your html and ccs, but proper mysql and php and all of that malarkey.
- Write a book. A bestseller would be lovely, but just to actually write a book would be an achievement really.
- Go to the gym more than once every three weeks and get healthy.
- Learn about wine so I can base my selections on more than special offers and scribbled notes in Oddbins.

However, I have never seen a single episode of the following:

- The Sopranos
- 24
- Six Feet Under
- The West Wing

And the boxsets are calling out to me.

So you see my problem?

Like Dylan In The Movies

2005-09-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

So everyone and his wife are blogging about the Bob Dylan documentary. And why should I be any different? After all, you’re not here to stay one step ahead of the pop culture zeitgeist are you? Of course not.

Cards on the table here, I’m not much of a Bob Dylan fan. I’ve got the main albums, and I like them well enough but I’m certainly no completist. Still, I can recognise that he’s one of the most important artists of the 20th Century and anything about him and the 60s is going to be pretty interesting. And so it proved. There is acres of webspace being used out there by Dylan aficionados providing insightful and slightly overlong views on his legacy, his discography, his genius and it would be an exercise in futility to try and link to them. Of the 2 documentaries, I enjoyed the second one more – especially all the archive footage of him turning electric and the furore it caused. So here are my barely thought through observations on it:

- What were “music journalists” like back then? Unbelievable. Some of the questions. Especially enjoyed the bloke who was forced to admit he’d never heard a Dylan song and was there to interview him “because it’s my job.”

- Bob Dylan looked good in the 60s. Even with his silly hair.

- Joan Baez seemed quite sad about how everything turned out.

- People seemed angrier then, whereas now they’re complete blanks. I love the idea that the folkie guy was going to take an axe to the electric cables to stop Dylan playing electric.

- Actually, is that true? People are probably just as angry now, they’re just equally confused and adrift.

- But imagine if James Blunt on tour turned the second half of his show into a Squarepusher style sonic experiment. Or even better, a My Bloody Valentine style “lets see if we can make our audience’s ears bleed” hour long feedback marathon. Would people boo? Or would they walk out? Or would they patiently wait for him to do “You’re Beautiful” as an encore?

- Lots of people hate Dylan’s voice. I can see what they’re getting at. I had to mute the TV during Maggie’s Farm.

- Bob Dylan is nobody’s fool. And no-one really will know that much about him, even after a 4 hour documentary.

All The People

2005-09-27T07:10:00.000-07:00

As Sam Cooke said, I don’t know much about interior design. However, one thing I will always investigate when visiting a friend of a friend’s house is their CD collection. I don’t think this actually tells me anything about a person, but it’s interesting and opens a whole world of possibilities about what the person is like in their quieter moments. We visited some friends at the weekend - they are both extremely normal and seemingly well adjusted people. I snuck a peak at their CD collection – it was wall to wall nosebleed techno. I found this quite odd. I asked about the collection – apparently it helps him concentrate while he’s working.

I was doubly surprised to find this collection, because I had them down as classic easy listeners. I was expecting to find Blunt, David Gray, Cullum, Joss Stone. I could see them picking up the new Katie Melua album while doing the weekly shop in Tesco. And that reminded me of one of the most interesting CD collections I’ve ever seen – a collection that comprised solely of the bestsellers.

It went back several years so was extremely consistent, but consistent only in it’s bizarre but unstinting devotion to album sales. So it was Dido, Coldplay, Keane, Justin Timberlake, Norah Jones, Scissor Sisters, Robbie Williams, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Oasis, Westlife, Stereophonics, Steps, Gabrielle, Travis, Destiny’s Child, Beatles, Craig David, Texas, Shania Twain, The Corrs, George Michael, The Verve, Spice Girls, Radiohead, Alanis Morrisette, Blur, Simply Red, Celine Dion, Madonna.

Can you imagine having a record collection like that? I can’t. It was as if the person in question had bought the number one album on a monthly basis for the best part of 15 years. And the other strange thing about it was the fact that, for the “alternative” acts, they had the best seller, but not any others. So they had The Man Who but not The Invisible Band. Parklife but not Blur. OK Computer but not Kid A. It’s amazing really, just buying what’s there at the supermarket counter.

Still, these people probably have lives and aren’t remotely concerned by this type of thing. Ah well.

You Know You Should Be Glad

2005-09-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

I know that the concept of "the new Beatles" is completely pointless, but the idea is still quite exciting. The trouble is that these days, the worlds of pop and indie are both completely at odds and completely intertwined. I will always remember something a friend said to me after we'd watched the Brit awards and seen Take That premier Back For Good. Everyone was going on about how great the song was, which it was, and he said "just imagine if they'd all come on playing instruments with a song as good as Strawberry Fields Forever. The world would have been theirs." An exaggeration possibly, but you can't deny it would have been amazing - the biggest pop band suddenly going "hello world, look - we can do this!"

That paragraph was possibly the most rambling and nonsensical introduction to an interview with McFly that you will ever read. But my point still stands - imagine if McFly came out with something that the hipters could not deny was absolutely brilliant. Ah what a world that would be.

Can you guess who this statue is of? It's completely ridiculous.

I am constantly declaring things to be the bottom of the barrel in terms of reality TV, and still the production companies come up with new abominations that suggest that we are still some way from hitting rock bottom. However, if there's something worse than Channel 5's 'Trust Me I'm a Holiday Rep' then I honestly do not want to even know about it, never mind see it. If the concept - celebrities spend 10 days trying to be holiday reps in Ayia Napa - isn't mindless enough then the so-called celebrities are taking the piss frankly. To give you an idea of how bad they are, the two who I recognised were Syd Little and Jordan from New Kids On The Block. As I often say, I literally cannot find the words.

How Low Can You Go?

2005-09-21T04:44:00.000-07:00

So last night I went to see The Aristocrats. I’ve just written and deleted a couple of long paragraphs about what this film is about. It’s highly unlikely that you don’t already know and if you really are at a loss then just go here and read the explanation. It’s far better than I can do. So now that’s out of the way I can get on with my observations about the film.

I have never seen so many people walk out of a movie in my entire life. Much is made towards the end of the film that the joke is now rather tame and people aren’t really offended by this kind of thing anymore. If you’d have told me that before I went to see it, I’d have tended to agree with you – but judging by the rush to the exits of at least half the audience last night – foul mouthed descriptions of unspeakable acts performed with your family are enough to test the sensibilities of plenty of people yet.

Paul Reiser comments in the film that the joke is ‘front loaded’ – that all the good stuff is towards the beginning and the punchline (if you can call it that) is beside the point. The same could be said of this movie – once you’ve sat through 45 minutes of filth, the second 45 are a little dull. The movie does try and push the boat out towards the end, discussing areas that even this most depraved of jokes in which supposedly anything goes cannot go, but they don’t stay there for long – getting back to the matter in hand.

In a lot of ways The Aristocrats works, and there are several tellings that had me doubled up with laughter while at the same time covering my face in borderline disbelief at the thoughts conjured up. Kevin Pollack’s version as Christopher Walken is worth the price of a ticket, the young guy telling a short version on the street is very funny if not a little like getting punched in the face, and the first version seen in the film, by George Carlin, builds awful image upon awful image while still, compared to later versions, being fairly tame. Interestingly, another of the funniest versions comes from a silent mime, which perhaps proves that a good deal of the humour in the joke comes from the audience’s imagination rather than the words used by the comic.

But there are plenty of bits that I didn’t enjoy. Many of the comedians are so in thrall to their own comedy genius that they almost need to preface the joke by saying “OK, here’s the joke, you will not believe how funny I am….” Similarly, comparing the joke to jazz is both pretentious and obvious, plus I hate jazz. The ventriloquist was, by some distance, the worst ventriloquist I have ever seen. And I was also disappointed by the supposedly definitive version told at a Friars Club Roast, but maybe I was just exhausted.

Laughter, as we know, is the best medicine, and if you have no problem with the foulest language available to mankind (there is no obscene word not used in this film) and are curious to see what these comics consider to be pushing the envelope of taste then you’ll surely laugh at this movie a great deal. But I would never recommend this film to anyone, because judging by the walkouts, there are plenty of sensitive souls left out there.

Trailer Park

2005-09-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

As far as ideal jobs go, there is a clear heirarchy. Obviously the dream stuff stand proudly at the top:

- musician (or pop star if I'm drunk)
- screenwriter

I guess these dreams are fairly common. As Pavement said, special new bands start up each and every day and judging by the thousands of dollars and pounds that Robert McKee charges to attend his screenwriting seminars, there are no shortage of people with a killer story they want to tell. Or maybe people like me, who can write dialogue until the cows come home but find coming up with an original story almost impossible.

Anyway, as for the second tier (of ideal jobs - thanks for staying with us), they're more specific to me:

- person responsible for the soundtrack of movies (is this even a real job?)
- working on movie trailers

I love movie trailers. I always feel kind of cheated when you rent a film and there are just a couple, or worse still, none at all. What are they playing at? Do you not want me to rent more films? Can you imagine how much fun you'd have working on them? It doesn't matter if the film is good or bad, you can cut it up any way you like to make it look good! And the greatest thing about trailers is that you don't even have to want to see the movie, the movie can look like the biggest load of nonsense, but you can still enjoy the trailer.

So here's a selection of trailers online at the moment for future films. Understand that I don't necessarily want to see all of these films, but they all have an attraction of their own:

The Baxter. Looks like a harmless but slightly offbeat romantic comedy. This trailer really makes use of the technique where lines that clearly are from different scenes and have absolutely nothing to do with each other are run together to create a narrative for the trailer itself.

Bee Season. I think I can safely say that I will never see this movie, unless I'm on a plane or something. It seems to be about a father learning to love his family through the medium of a spelling bee. It looks extremely silly and overly sentimental. But when the music comes in at the end I was grinning like an idiot as the trailer maker tried to convince us that this film will warm our hearts and that anyone who doesn't see that is dead inside.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. You get the impression that all the good bits of the film may well be included in the trailer. A dangerous game. Plus marks for making Val Kilmer look really quite amusing.

Prime. I liked this trailer because the story seemed quite inventive and Meryl Streep was funny. I doubt I will ever see this film.

The Constant Gardener. I enjoyed this solely because it reminded me of the English Patient episode of Seinfeld.

Finally, I haven't seen this trailer. But I can't imagine anyone in the world watching it voluntarily. That is the worse poster I have ever seen.

More trailers here.

For Tomorrow

2005-09-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will note that I generally prefer stuff from the other side of the Atlantic. Even during Britpop’s glory years my favourite records were by Pavement and The Afghan Whigs. I don’t know why this is. Despite this, there’s no doubt that the UK can occasionally throw up a band to compare with the best of them – The Smiths and Blur say. And from what little I’ve heard so far, there might be a new one on the horizon – The Arctic Monkeys. But what a rubbish name.

Part of the problem with new bands in this country is that the hype is so extraordinary to begin with that when it dies down there doesn’t seem to be all that much left. NME has a great track record of bigging up the flimsiest of bands – anyone remember Terris? But even by the hyperbolic standards of our august journals, the story of The Arctic Monkeys seems almost impossible to believe. If you believe their website and reports in the press (and why wouldn’t we?) their gigs so far have been populated by people who’ve driven hundreds of miles to witness a band who hadn’t even released a record. The whole Arctic Monkeys buzz was created by their own home made demo which was passed from fan to fan or downloaded from t’internet.

I must admit that I’d seen mentions of the band in various places but had thought it another build-em-up knock-em-down story so hadn’t really paid much attention. But I heard a single on the radio last week and decided that there may be a little more to this band than most. On downloading their demo, I can see what all the fuss is about. Plus, they’ve signed to Domino, who are a proper record company.

The single “Fake Tales Of San Francisco” starts of as a slightly stuttering Brit-rock song with some interesting and amusing lyrics, is elevated by a great call-and-response chorus and then suddenly morphs into the Pixies at the top of their game and even has chance to throw in a classic “Yeah yeah yeah yeah!” It really is something. Their other songs seem to follow a familiar pattern – all stuttering verses, terrace chant choruses and state of the nation lyrics, all sung in a thick Yorkshire accent. In fact, whether people take to the Arctic Monkeys will largely depend on whether they take to not just the lyrics and the accent, but the frequent use of dialect – songs where ‘stomach’ gets rhymed with ‘summat’ and ‘Mondeo’ with ‘say owt.’

It’s still far far too early to be proclaiming these to be anything other than an excellent new band who could well be something important. But the songs I’ve heard so far point to great things.

Anyway, make your own mind up by watching the new video or by going here and downloading the demo. If the demo link no longer works then a google search will most likely turn up most of them for you.

In other news, McCartney gets the Observer music monthly treatment.

Friday Quick Links

2005-09-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

Many people said that New Order's latest album 'Waiting For The Siren's Call' was a return to form. Anyone who thinks that it comes anywhere near Technique, Brotherhood or Lowlife are kidding themselves frankly. But they can still be relied upon to come up with at least one unimpeachable classic every "campaign." Here's the video to the title track from the album - out in a couple of weeks. It's easily New Order's best single since Regret and is almost comedic in it's New Orderness. Hooky's bass is there right from the off and Bernard's lyrics come good for once these days. For me, the final verse is everything that's great about New Order - especially the bit "how many times must I lose my way, heeeeey!" Potentially disasterous but they somehow pull it off.

Meanwhile, from the young pretenders - 'Two More Years' video from Bloc Party. I'm still not convinced by their album. It's got some brilliant stuff on it but a lot of it just passes me by. This new single is a cracker though, complete with rubbish backing vocals. Much more pop too, which is a good thing.

This week's obligatory Death Cab link. Loads of live performances from their recent MTV appearance. Most of it from Plans but worth a visit even if you've joined the backlash to see a brilliant 'Movie Script Ending.' What a song.

A brief review of The Lemonheads' recent gig in London playing 'It's a Shame About Ray' in it's entirety as part of the Don't Look Back festival. Other bands playing a seminal album from start to finish include Dinosaur Jr and Belle and Sebastian doing If You're Feeling Sinister. Now that would be brilliant. No word yet on whether Bros will reform with Ken to perform 'Push.' I've been racking my brains trying to come up with something unusual that I'd like to see at this festival. I reckon James Iha's 'Let It Come Down' would be a good one. But there'd probably be only me and a few confused Smashing Pumpkins diehards in the audience.

Finally, something that I had to cut and paste from the Popbitch message board just because it made me laugh out loud. After someone announces that they'd recently seen Anthony from Big Brother on Oxford Street they get the response:

"A request
Can we please no longer count seeing Antknee as a celeb spot? He should only be mentioned when Craig inevitably guns him down before turning the gun on himself, shouting "If I can't have you, no-one can", possibly at the make-up counter of a posh shop."

You're Gonna Carry That Weight A Long Time

2005-09-15T06:50:00.000-07:00

Right, enough of the sad wanker woe is me pull yourself together stuff, back to the music.

Of all the people in the world that I feel sorry for, the strangest has got to be Paul McCartney. I’m sure the fact that every year he gets closer to billionaire status and is internationally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters ever to have lived must make things a bit easier to take, but that still doesn’t change the fact that, for all his wealth and acknowledged genius he’s commonly perceived as a spent force who’s main job is to get on stage every few years and play the hits.

And even with his critical and popular reassessment of the last few years, the cool kids see him as infinitely less cool (and good) as Lennon, the one who wrote the chirpy throwaway fab four songs, and who then spent 30 years churning out middle of the road nonsense sometimes involving cartoon frogs. This assessment, as anyone who knows anything about anything will know, is complete rubbish. McCartney was the genius in the Beatles, he had most of the ideas, his songs are better and even if his post-fab stuff was never quite as good (and how could it be?) it would still mark him out as a colossus of popular music. So there.

Nevertheless, here we are with his new long player and it’s clear that McCartney, for all his seasoned pro interviews and mountains of easy-life inducing cash, really cares what people think about this album. He wants to be relevant, to be someone people still talk about as being more than a historically important influence. But there’s pop music rule #23 to deal with - You have it, you lose it and you never get it back. Of course, some artists are still able to pull a classic from the fire now and again – where on earth did Elton John get This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore, one of the best songs of his career, from? But McCartney has a ridiculous legacy to live up to. So how has he done?

Pretty well. There’s been much talk of producer Nigel Godrich challenging McCartney’s comfort zone leanings – telling him to do away with his band and play everything himself, and questioning whether certain songs were really the best he could come up with. But Godrich’s production certainly doesn’t take over – there are no sound effects like a laptop dying and for all the clever touches that I’m sure he brought to the studio, the record is fairly traditional – whether it stands or falls is entirely down to the quality of McCartney’s songs.

A generation of Smash Hits readers know him as Paul “fab wacky macca thumbs aloft” McCartney. But we all really know that he’s at his best when he’s feeling a bit melancholy - see Yesterday, For No-one, You Never Give Me Your Money. In fact, one of his best and best loved is almost Smiths-like in it’s Bleakness – Eleanor Rigby. So here he turns up the sadness, At The Mercy and Riding to Vanity Fair especially tugging at the heartstrings. There are plenty of nods to his past to go with it – the strings of English Tea and the pure Beatles harmonies of Promise To You. A lot of reviews have mentioned that Jenny Wren is a close relative of Blackbird from The White Album – and it is, in as much as any song that features just McCartney and some gentle acoustic finger picking inevitably will.

If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that too often he goes for an unusual note or an odd chord change, when it’s crying out to go the way we all want it to go. Whether this is Godrich’s influence, a desire to be more experimental, or simply the fact that he’s written so many songs he must often think “I can’t put these chords together again” is open for debate. But in his defence, when you’ve written as many dead-eyed classics as he has, he’s well within his rights to play whatever chords he likes thank you very much.

So Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is often lovely, sometimes sad, often straining at greatness but always interesting. And for a multi-millionaire in his sixties who really doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone and certainly doesn’t have to put himself up for criticism anymore, that’s no mean feat.

Go to NME.com to stream the whole album.

The Optimist

2005-09-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

A few years ago when I still worked in London, I was on my way to work when I saw someone I’d been at university with. I caught up with him at the top of the escalator and we exchanged the usual pleasantries and caught up on what we’d been doing since we graduated. He’d become a lawyer for a media firm and had very recently taken part in a conference call involving Keith Richards. I was not doing anything like that. As the conversation wound down he said “So this is where we exchange business cards” and handed me his. I took my used rail ticket out of my back pocket and wrote my email on it.

Is the glass half full or half empty? As we all know, the glass, in actual fact, is broken.

It’s thoughts like this that go through my mind all the time. I know exactly what kind of person I am – I’m naturally pessimistic and prone to extreme bouts of nauseating self pity. And I don’t want to be like that. I want to be a sunny, optimistic you never know what’s round the corner type of person. But of course, we all know what’s round the corner – death.

This post came to me as a result of my night out in London last night. As I’m down here for a couple of days work in our London office, I took the opportunity to go out with another old friend from university. We had a great evening – London is such a fantastic city anyway, but somehow coming back to visit makes all its charms so much more appealing and meaningful. The things you took for granted when you lived here are magnified to ridiculous sizes and the things you no longer can do take on extra poignancy.

And it was this that got me thinking about which direction I was and am going to take. Am I going to be happy with what I have, or am I going to take the easy route and moan about what I don’t have, all the while doing fuck all to change anything. See opening paragraph. Another example -

- my friend works a stone’s throw from St James’ Park, I met him at his office and we walked through the park to a succession of lovely pubs passing loads of those blue ‘former Prime Minister Disraeli lived here for a bit’ plaques. I work on a business park in the north west where there is nothing to do except walk around a succession of car parks.

Can you see the self pity creeping in already? Why do I not think “I have a decent enough if hardly exciting job who occasionally need me to go to London which is something of a perk" Because it’s easier to make out you’re hard done by, that there’s no justice in the world, that you haven’t got the things you deserve, that it’s who you know and where you went to school that matters, that ultimately there’s nothing we can do to change things.

And to be honest, I do believe a lot of that a lot of the time. Nature, nurture or Nieztsche? It’s so much easier to believe in fate and think that anyway all the chances to change things have long gone. So can I be more positive? I realise that this is all coming across a not a little pompous and really quite “Man in the Mirror” but there we go.

In other news, I found out today that Alex Kapranos is 33 years old. This, for reasons I won’t go into here, is fucking brilliant.

Ashes to Ashes

2005-09-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

To be perfectly honest my brain is a heady fog of euphoria since England finally clinched the Ashes yesterday and overturned a generation of Aussie dominance. I'm actually working from our London office today and the Australian's here are taking it all with their customary humour and good grace. So anyway, there's not much today. Just some interesting links.

NME.com gets a facelift, much for the better. The old site was appalling.

Pitchfork has a very interesting (if a little too scholarly and pitchforky) piece about the post-post-punk movement and runs down it's choice of 40 important tracks. Loads of good stuff in there which should be in anyone's collection.

Pop Skill

2005-09-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve got a bit of a thing for Top of the Pops. I think it’s a national tragedy that it’s been moved to Sunday nights at 7pm. It’s like locking an embarrassing uncle in the cellar. It’s almost impossible to emphasise how important it used to be. An appearance would make your record go up the charts! Plus, in the days before blanket media coverage and the interweb saturating the world with information, it was often the place to see whether the band with the new record you liked looked as good as they sounded. I remember Blur doing “There’s No Other Way” and thinking “Oh yes, we’ve got one here.”

Of course, the solution to the ills of The Pops is quite simple – move it back to Thursday at 7.30pm, ditch all the rubbish gimmicks, and get people in the charts or about to be, or even just outside if needs be! to play on the show. I don’t care if they’re playing live, in fact I don’t even care if they’re singing live, just get them on. Easy.

Occasionally, a freak Top of the Pops turns up out of nowhere to remind us what could be if only they tried a bit harder and got rid of the songs where it’s basically a middle age bloke pretending to be DJing while some dancers writhe about in front of him. A glorified Hot Gossip if you will (ask your dads). Anyway, excluding the reruns of David Bowie and Ian Durie (pleasant but inessential really) the line-up was:

- Franz Ferdinand. Textbook comeback so far, and they’re wearing matching clothes, which as any pop scholar will tell you, is a sure-fire way to make it big! Even if the song is a poor relative of Take Me Out, they’re still more interesting than most. Plus, as I’ve said before, they look younger than they did first time around – presumably because they can now afford expensive anti-aging creams.

- The Arcade Fire. Yes! On telly! What next? Obviously they were brilliant and bizarre in equal measure (the audience looked a little scared when the bloke whose main role appears to be that of cheerleader with a drum jumped into the crowd and danced about) but this is what music TV is supposed to be like!

- Jem. A bit dull obviously, but she’s in the charts so she’s every right to be here.

- Foo Fighters. The nicest man in rock plays one of his big rock songs and shows off his excellent beard. Lovely stuff.

- Depeche Mode. Yes! They’re back (etc) with their best song for ages. Plus, Dave Gahan is no longer rocking the ‘Al Jorgensen played by Mr Bean’ look and has returned to his late 80s image. They really did look like sensible pop elder statesmen.

- Sugababes. God these were rubbish. I’m all for pop music but this song drifted by in a void of nothingness except for an horrific spoken word interlude during which I had to cover my ears.

- Pussycat Dolls. Number one. You can’t have everything can you?

And the charts are not exactly a barren wasteland at the moment are they? So what’s stopping next weeks show being something like this – Coldplay, KT Tunstall, Goldie Lookin Chain, Doves, Kano and Sean Paul. We’ll be back as the nation’s favourite in no time.

Look At The Stars

2005-09-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

So last night was Stars. It must be kind of peculiar for them to be doing this UK tour. After all, they’re three albums into their career and their star (arf!) is rapidly ascending across the Atlantic. So from going to playing the summerstage in Central Park supporting Death Cab and The Decemberists to a few weeks later a tiny little club in Manchester must be strange. And, as luck would have it, Elbow are playing a homecoming gig in town tonight, so all of Manchester’s hipsters are over there – leaving Stars to entertain 75 or so of Manchester’s hardcore indie-rock devotees.

Their latest album ‘Set Yourself On Fire’ has been out for just a few weeks in the UK, although it was easy enough to get an import copy from the US. And while the album is certainly full of shiny pop gems and a couple of potential genuine proper hit singles, I was really there in the hope that they’d dust off some of the nuggets from 2003’s ‘Heart’ – to my ears at least a slightly better collection of songs.

I’ll tell you one thing about Stars. They’re weird. They look less like a band than a collection of disparate work colleagues who've somehow found themselves on stage with instruments. You could spend 500 words describing singer Torq’s stage manner - as it veers from maniacal committed testifying, to looking like he’s about to be sick, to scrunching up his face like a goblin as he makes the high notes, to quietly thanking us for being there, to turning into a potty mouth with some mid song banter. Plus, bassist Evan looks like a Liverpool player circa 1982 complete with perm and moustache. But they don’t half make a big noise. The best I can come up with is a slightly less twee Belle & Sebastian with added musical muscle and fewer songs about sexually confused teenagers. The shiny New Order style production is obviously diluted live, but Stars make up for that with some honest-to-goodness rocking out.

Alas, we were treated to only the monumental ‘Elevator Love Letter’ from Heart, but I can let that one go seeing as it’s the best song on there. The rest were fairly faithful versions of the new stuff with standouts like ‘Your Ex-Lover Is Dead’ (dedicated to ‘the person you hate most in the world’) and a storming ‘Ageless Beauty’ (one of the songs of the year easily). It was good stuff, so good in fact that a wag in the crowd was moved to shout “You’re quite good” in a mid-song break. For once, the band looked lost for words. But then what do you say to that kind of thing?

Listen to the whole album here. Then buy it.

Maybe you're crazy in the head

2005-09-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Today I passed my driving test. I'm quite happy about this. So now begins years and years of making up for all the lifts I've blagged. But first, tonight we have tickets to see Stars. I'm quite happy about this also. So I'd have to say that today was a good day. And I didn't even have to use my AK.

Incidentally, the irony of this short post on a day when I'm not at work is not lost on me.

I'm a bird (and £20000 richer) now

2005-09-07T05:19:00.000-07:00

A few months ago there was a show on BBC2 called Dragon’s Den. Its premise was that entrepreneurs with a fantastic idea but no money to make it happen went before a panel of millionaire business geniuses (the Dragons – do you see what they’ve done there?) to ~~beg for money~~ show how fantastic the idea was and acquire investment. Anyways, aside from the fact that one of the Dragons’ businesses has since gone bankrupt, the guy I remembered most was the bloke who wanted to start his own new luxury magazine. He managed to convince one of the Dragons to invest and the first issue is about to hit the newsstands! And the great British public can hardly wait let me tell you. The website is here, it’s really something.

“Wonderland will entertain, challenge and inform - assisting the reader rather than dictating to them, so that they may decide how to spend those two most valuable commodities: their time, and their money.”

Can’t you just feel the quality? I best he's quite angry that the magazine shares it's name with McFly's new album.

Some top quality linkage today.

Death Cab Soul Meets Body video. Pretty good really. Given that they look like NASA scientists from the 70s the video is quite interesting.

Bonus track from Plans.

Anthony and the Johnsons win the Mercury Music Prize. Will they do a Franz Ferdinand or a Talvin Singh? Make up your own mind by watching his new video. Glad I didn’t put a bet on my hunch KT Tunstall. Even gladder my hunch was incorrect. Still no-one knows who Polar Bear are.

Ever stuck for a pithy and amusing retort? This biblical curse generator should help you.

Stranded In Nostalgia

2005-09-06T06:49:00.000-07:00

Can you remember the last time you couldn’t stop laughing at something that wasn’t funny at all? Discount giggling in meetings or in other public situations where, because you’re getting funny looks from co-workers/commuters/strangers, the hilarity only increases – that doesn’t count. I’m talking about near hysteria. The moment when something flips in your brain and you degenerate into a quivering, babbling wreck unable to do anything except ride out the gradually reducing waves of unexplainable and uncontrollable laughter. I say laughter, but there isn’t any really, just bizarre wheezing, lengthy exhaling and silence. Like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit when his bath falls through the floor.

I was reminded of the last time this happened to me today. I was working in a video shop in central London and had been there for 5 months. I worked 6 days a week, usually from midday to midnight. There were no breaks and no food allowed in the store. While I was there I lost loads of weight and ended up looking pretty ill. The manager of the shop and the company itself were slave driving bastards with an attitude that was essentially “if you don’t like it, quit, there are loads of people who’ll do this job.” And of course, they were right. When I write these things down I wonder why I stayed there for so long. Of course, I know why really – I was attracted to the romantic idea of working there. What an idiot. It was a strange, strange time. Anyway, I can remember the incident like it was yesterday. It was about 12.30am and me and the assistant manager were cashing up, desperate to finish and catch our nightbuses back to the outskirts of London. If we were lucky we might just get home by 2.30am. This was the conversation:

Him – Do you want some chewing gum?
Me – No thanks.
Pause.
Me – Actually I will have some.
Takes chewing gum and puts it in back pocket.
Him – Saving it for later?

I don’t think my words can ever adequately explain what happened at this point. We both sort of looked at each other and started giggling and then started laughing and then were absolutely and completely overcome by unwarranted and unbelievable hysteria. I remember at one point being doubled over shaking uncontrollably, unable to do anything except breathe out forever, while he was laying on the floor actually beating his fist into the ground. Occasionally there would be some kind of snort or scream as our bodies desperately tried to take in some air. I guess it was a mutual appreciation of the ridiculousness of the situation we found ourselves in – graduates cashing up in a video shop basement in the middle of the night following another terrible day in a job we hated. And I swear to God that this went on for a good 20 minutes. After the laughter had stopped we were both more than a little freaked.

After that incident he handed his notice in a couple of days later and I stayed for another 2 weeks. I suppose some people might say that we had a sort of breakdown, but I look back on it with a kind of rose tinted fondness now. I don’t really remember how weird it had felt to be laughing uncontrollably at literally nothing. I just clearly see us trying not to look at one another because we thought if we carried on laughing for much longer we might die, but then another wave of hysteria followed and there was nothing you could do. Weird.

What reminded me of my brush with madness was this appearing on the BBC website. Listen to “The leg over clip” and laugh.

You Don't Need To Fill these Silences

2005-09-05T06:06:00.000-07:00

Unimportant and not terribly original things I learnt this weekend from watching telly:

- The final gasping death throes of the original best music show ever – Top of the Pops – are painful to watch. I can’t imagine anyone watching last night’s show and thinking it worthwhile. Complete overhaul needed.

- ITVs “theme-night” about sharks was about as badly conceived as TV gets. Just because you’ve made a show called “Celebrity Shark Bait” (and don’t even get me started on that one) doesn’t mean you can stick on a couple of bought-in sharky documentaries and Jaws and call it “Shark Night.” I predict that a crocodile night featuring a croc doc, Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee already in the pipeline.

- No, in fact I may as well seeing as I’m here. Is there anyone, ANYONE?, who wants to see Richard E Grant, Ruby Wax, Colin Jackson and someone who used to be in Emmerdale diving with sharks? Sweet baby Moses. All the celebrities survived.

- The Ultimate Film – UK Cinema’s Official Top 100 Movies was slightly handicapped by the fact that more people used to go to the cinema than they do now. Leading to Spring In Park Lane (no, me neither) coming in at #5.

- T4s “T4 will eat itself” competition about becoming a presenter on T4 (stay with me here) is a lot of what’s wrong with the modern world. These people want to be “presenters.” What does that even mean? Is that a genuine career?

- Eastenders is rubbish.

- So is Hollyoaks.

- I cannot even bring myself to watch X-Factor. I try for about 30 seconds but then I feel myself wanting to jump out of the window.

- Shaun Ryder does not look good in that Gorillaz video. Plus, did he write anything in that about from the “I never did no harm” bit? Just wondering.

- I watch too much TV, even when there’s nothing on.

Friday Quick Links

2005-09-02T06:45:00.000-07:00

Paul Daniels has started a blog! Oh yes indeed. I’m not going to link to it here because, frankly, if you’re that desperate to read about the life of Paul Daniels then the least you can do is head over to google and find it yourself. For those readers who are unaware of the greatness of Paul Daniels, he is the most famous UK magician EVER! More famous than The Great Suprendo and Ali Bongo put together! He now appears on television infrequently and seems to be a little bitter about it. He also used to go on and on about how David Copperfield was giving magicians a bad name with his ‘illusions’. But obviously that was pure jealousy and rage about the fact that he had never worked out how to make the Statue of Liberty disappear, walk through the Great Wall of China, escape from Alcatraz, or fly. Copperfield can probably do all of those things in his sleep by now. I bet he’s already working on alchemy. Anyway, here’s a bit of Daniel’s blog:

“Last night, after another golf event, I went down the Cobham Hilton at the request of Rick Wakeman to do a bit for his SPARKS event. This was a great night and if ever you get the chance to see Bobby Davro do his thing, grab the opportunity. What a great entertainer.”

How good is that? I can’t even find the words. The other great thing about his blog is that his username is ‘thepauldaniels.’ He will have no imposters posting on there!

Animals that look cute but would rip your face off given the opportunity #236 (in an irregular series.) PandaCam!

Lesley from Big Brother sells her BB suitcase on eBay! Reserve price already met apparently. Who would buy that? Seriously?

A secret website to do with Lost. I don’t understand how it works.

Is this the best magazine cover of the year? Popjustice thinks so.

Every Time It Rains You're Here In My Head

2005-09-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today’s post was going to be about Kate Bush. Inspired by the news that her new album is almost ready, I was going to link to some of my favourite things she’s done. I’m not a massive fan actually, but there’s no denying that she’s been touched by genius on several occasions during her long, long career. Plus she seems to be a bit crackers. Unfortunately, however, the interweb is a barren wasteland when it comes to my favourite Kate Bush things. So now it’s just a list of things. Which frankly is a bit rubbish. Anyway:

- Cloudbusting. Not only is it a crackerjack of a song, but the video is aces, with Donald Sutherland playing Kate’s father being arrested by the government after inventing a rain making machine. You don’t get songs like that anymore! And the cover of it by The Afghan Whigs is the best cover version of all time.
- This Woman’s Work. Again a lovely song, also featured in John Hughes’ She’s Having a Baby, his last film before he decided that children overcoming hapless adults via cartoon violence was the future of movies.
- Wuthering Heights. Everyone loves this don’t they? Again matched by a bonkers video in which she plays out the song via the medium of mime. The Decemberists have done a fairly faithful cover of this live which I recommend you track down. I found it once, but cannot find it no more.

Kate’s new album ‘drops’ on November 7th, preceded by a single ‘King of the Mountain.’ Presumably what you become after a lifetime running up that hill. Sometimes I amaze myself with these jokes.

So seeing as it appears that Kate Bush’s songs make excellent cover versions, here’s The Hounds Of Love by The Futureheads, another cracker.

You Smoke Too Much When You Talk Too Much

2005-08-31T06:06:00.000-07:00

So the new Idlewild album Warnings/Promises is getting its US release. A lot of people think Idlewild peaked several albums ago with 100 Broken Windows. I’d say that The Remote Part is a better album myself, but I will agree that this new one is slightly disappointing. You can make your own mind up here. There was a time around The Remote Part when Idlewild were flirting with being my new favourite band, but something never quite sealed the deal. And their new haircuts for this release just aren’t doing the business. That said, Roddy Woomble’s lyrics always really strike a chord with me – the lack of connection to where you’re from, of your youth drifting away while you wonder what to do next. Basically the classic late 20s crisis.

A couple of good trailers for you –

Shopgirl
Good Night and Good Luck

Shopgirl especially looks to be my kind of movie. Good romantic comedies are hard to find these days.

Do people really want Smiths lyrics on their bedding? Still, at least it’s not the lyrics to Asleep.

Our December Sun Is Setting

2005-08-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

I know that this is the point of NME. I know I shouldn’t get worked up. I know I’m being baited. I can’t help it. Here’s NME’s review of Plans:

'Emo goes huge-o. Yawno.
Death Cab singer Ben Gibbard's favourite joke is: "How do you make God laugh? Make a plan." It was the inspiration for their new album title and chillingly prescient considering DCFC's 'sudden' quantum leap from slacker underachievers to REM-sized stadium contenders.
Was there a 'plan' there, then? In retrospect tours with Blink 182, DCFC's endless namechecking on posho US teen soap The OC and subsequent major label signing to Atlantic Records seemed more calculated than a Kerry Katona 'crisis' with PR courtesy of Max "I never saw a penny, m'lud!" Clifford.
So, can emo 'do' major label? Well...no, not really. 'Plans' is produced within an inch of its shiny, whitebread life and the Cutie seem to have lost their faux-naive subtleties, becoming the non-thinking man's Coldplay along the way. But don't worry - the new series of The OC starts soon...'

Now let me just say that I couldn’t care less if people don’t like Death Cab. There are infinite possibilities in music and people can enjoy whatever they like, be it Tibetan Nose Flutes, The Crazy Frog or even Razorlight. “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.” I can’t remember who famously said that, I think it was Elton John.

Anyway, before I lose my thread entirely, it’s not the opinion that bothers me so much. It’s the review. NME is supposed to be a music newspaper in which the artists of the day have their latest releases appraised by knowledgeable writers. Well, what this review says to me is “I’ve got absolutely no idea about Death Cab, but I’ve got their press release and I hate all that OC shit.”

Could you tell me what Plans sounds like from that review? Whether it might be a good album if you like indie-rock? It doesn’t even mention a single song! Coldplay? Is that the best you can do, compare it to Coldplay now they’re not cool anymore? All the while bigging up the likes of Athlete and whichever latest bunch of crack addicted rock n roll oblivion wannabes are letting you sleep round their flat? Emo? What on earth are you talking about?

NME used to have the best writers, and a bad review of your favourite band was just as entertaining as a good one, because it was done with wit, style and the outlandish idea that the reviewer had actually listened to the record. This review is lazy, lazy journalism - hastily cobbled together from the few touchstones the journo could garner from 5 minutes interweb research (major label – check, emo – check, The OC – check, use the word faux – check) and with no interest in anything other than getting to press on time. Plus, the joke in it is rubbish.

I know NME is a comic for teenagers these days, and I know things change, but I for one miss the days when NME was a stepping stone for the best writers in the country. Those days are long gone.

UPDATE: Pitchfork listen to the album before reviewing it. Pretty fair review really.

Friday Quick Links

2005-08-26T06:33:00.000-07:00

The first lot of Plans reviews are surfacing and so far they've all been relatively positive. here, here, here and here.

Empire continues their countdown of the 50 greatest independant films. In their opinion.

Misleading titles #831 (in an irregular series). NME claims to have the scoop on a new album from Oasis. Title of article - "Oasis Plan New Album." Article reveals album not due until at least 2007 and possibly 2010. It's amazing how Oasis, despite not having released much of note for years, are still interesting. Mind you, I can't believe we're talking about 2010! It's like we're living in the future! Those flying cars and underwater bubble cities must be right around the corner.

How Do I Feel About My Shoes?

2005-08-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

Changes are no good. Or so say The Stills. But that’s clearly not what the geniuses responsible for new TV shows believe. Looking at the TV schedule, you’d think that all everyone in the world wants to do is change. Something, anything. Just change. Then I’ll be happier.

These shows seem to me to fall into 2 distinct categories

The Vapid (What Not To Wear, 10 Years Younger, What You Wear Can Change Your Life). Experts from London pick your dress sense apart, humiliate you in the street, make you cry and then give you a decent haircut.
The Worthy(Supernanny, You Are What You Eat, Would Like To Meet). Experts from London try and sort out people with real problems like devil children, usually succeed.

I have discounted the shows like Extreme Makeover where desperately unhappy people attempt to turn their life around through frankly ludicrous and barely affordable lengths rather than losing weight by exercising.

This thought was prompted by a new show on BBC2 called The Week Of Dressing Dangerously. This show is the sound of the bottom of the barrel being not only scraped but hacked to pieces with a massive rusty axe. The idea is that the women on the show want to bring out sides of themselves that their friends and family don’t know are there, so this idiot fashion journalist dresses them up like a nightmare and makes them go out in public. People point and laugh and it does them good. They cry themselves to sleep.

This is taken from the BBC website devoted to the show. I swear to God it’s real:

“Fiona feels like a wilting wallflower who never gets noticed and just blends into the background. She has low self-esteem and doesn't think she is attractive.

The look: Angela dresses Fiona in a plunging white top and matching leather mini skirt, complete with white stilettos and blonde shoulder length wig. She sends her to the pub to meet mates for a game of pool.

Fiona feels like a doormat as she is not in control of her life. She needs to feel more assertive and be able to lead rather than follow. She needs to be in the driving seat of her life.

The look: Angela dresses Fiona in a shiny black PVC dominatrix outfit complete with a whip and a black-bobbed wig.”

You know what? I can’t even find the words to express just on how many levels this is wrong wrong wrong. Has it really come to this? I'm all for people sorting their lives out and making changes, but for the love of God get a grip.

This show is a hopeless apology for half an hours TV.

Coincidentally, my morning blog reading produced this gem. Link via Lindsayism.

Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now

2005-08-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

Inspired by a Stereogum post, I’ve just had a moment of clarity about the most ridiculous, disingenuous and frankly false statement in popular music today. Yes, it’s “music from and inspired by…..”

What does it even mean? That these artists were so impressed by the movie that it inspired them to write a song? So they saw a rough cut or an advance screening did they so that they had time to write their “inspired by” song in time for it to be released on the soundtrack? What a load of balls.

Why don’t they just tell the truth and say “music from, plus songs we commissioned for the film that are frankly a bit shit so we didn’t use them, plus some songs we’ve managed to get the licenses to which might help us sell a few more copies of this creatively bankrupt release.”

Meanwhile, while we weren’t looking, Turkmenistan has banned miming! I’m sure the President of this fine nation has never seen New Order’s performance of Blue Monday from Top of the Pops in 1983. Have a look for yourself. In fact that link is almost worth a post of its own, such are the riches on offer. If I were on my own in the office today, that would be my afternoon gone right there. They've got Bros doing Sister! And Depeche Mode doing Blasphemous Rumours! Come on!

A more terrifying picture and accurate caption you will never see.

The Blog Will Eat Itself

2005-08-23T04:39:00.000-07:00

Lately, a few people have been pointed in the direction of this blog by their friendly neighbourhood search engine. But alas, this blog was a false hope for them, as the goodies they sought were not to be found here. So, on the off chance that those people are still looking and accidentally come back here:

- Person who was looking for "colin meloy death cab go your own way mp3" should head over to either Stereogum, Central Village or You Ain't No Picasso. They won't be there for long though.
- Person who was looking for "mew glass handed kites track listing" I suggest you head over to their official site here. Some cracking titles await you - Circuitry Of The Wolf and The Seething Rain Weeps For You for starters.
- Person who was looking for "Derren Brown" I can only apologise that you were cruelly led here.

Also, Die Prinzessin has been kind enough to add this blog to her list of "Desperate Guys." I'm hoping that's a reference to The Faint rather than the contents of this blog. So this is me saying thanks and suggesting you check it out yourself.

Did anyone see much of the V Festival over the weekend? Or even, good lord, attend? I'm getting increasingly concerned about Franz Ferdinand and how much younger they look now compared to around their first album. Pictures in the attic I reckon.

A Meaningless Movement

2005-08-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Count of Monte Cristo was on telly last night. The recent one with Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce. I really quite enjoyed it – it was pleasingly old-fashioned, the actors seemed as though they were having fun, some swash was buckled and there were even a few decent jokes. But those who were expecting the plot to turn out as it did in the original novel will have been left disappointed. The Count got his revenge alright, but he also ended up with the girl, and I can imagine the squeals of disapproval and familiar sneers that Hollywood tacked on another happy ending where one wasn’t needed. In fact, 5 minutes of internet research has shown that, yes, people were not happy about the new ending. But let me ask you this – what’s so wrong with a happy ending? The poor guy has been wrongfully imprisoned for 16 years - didn’t he deserve a happy ending?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for movies that reflect life. I’m quite happy for the hero to die at the end of Gallipoli, for Withnail to be performing Hamlet to London Zoo’s wolves alone in the rain, for the kid to get electrocuted at the end of The Ice Storm, for Bill and Scarlet to part at the end of Lost in Translation. In fact, possibly my favourite movie ending is possibly also the saddest – Al Pacino sitting alone at the end of Godfather 2 without a friend in the world, having sacrificed everything for his ‘power’.

But Jesus Christ, can you imagine if all movies were like that? If Aliens took over the world and killed everyone. If the meteor heading towards the earth hit. If Jamie Lee Curtis took off with the money at the end of A Fish Called Wanda. Where’s my noose?

I remember going to see Love Actually and, as we were coming out feeling all aglow at the feelgood sentimentality of it all, my brother said to me “you know, we’ll probably get mugged on the way home to remind us what life’s really like.” And that’s the point. I want a bit of escapism in my movies, I want to think that things could turn out OK as I head back towards my life. So I want Harry and Sally to end up together thank you very much. And I want Cameron to decide to stand up to his dad without Ferris! I don’t care if it’s not realistic; I want to be uplifted dammit. I’m not asking for a desperate schmaltzy piece of fluff ending to be added to everything, but I’d like to believe that, sometimes, things turn out OK.

Here’s an interesting suggestion about what Bill says to Scarlet.

Look up your favourite movie to see if there’s an alternate version.

Friday Quick Links

2005-08-19T05:08:00.000-07:00

My vote for the perfect teen movie soundtrack would go to Pretty In Pink, just for Molly Ringwald making her prom dress to New Order’s Elegia.

With this in mind, there seems to have been a common thread to the songs I’ve discovered this week – they’d all be perfect for the soundtrack of my yet to be written romantic comedy. (See plot outline). Follow links for video/mp3.

Laura Veirs - Galaxies - would be good for the opening credits.
Nightmare Of You - My Name Is Trouble - for unsuccessful courting in bars/speed dating/some other plot device scene.
Mew - Special – where the characters have their reversal, like her ex-boyfriend comes back to town or he gets transferred overseas or something.
M83 - Teen Angst - for the bit where the guy is rushing to the airport before the girl leaves him forever.
British Sea Power - Please Stand Up - for the closing credits. Everyone leaves happy.

Central Village has some pictures of the indie-yuppie love fest in New York last night. Looking forward to "Go Your Own Way" turning up somewhere soon.

The worst movie poster of all time race hots up with this new entry. I think the bar has been raised. Here's how it should be done. I must read the book before the film comes out so I can say that the film isn’t as good as the book.

Pitchfork reviews the new Franz Ferdinand single in a way I just don’t understand. I don’t mean I disagree with their opinion, I mean I just don’t understand what on earth they’re talking about.

Finally, a lot of people seem quite excited that Chris Martin copyist Thom York has started a blog. Productshop NYC says something funny about it.

Plot Not Yet Lost

2005-08-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

So everyone’s watching Lost then? Three episodes in and it’s shaping up nicely. The fear of it being simply “good looking passengers survive plane crash on idyllic tropical island and show off their pilates bodies while spearing fish” has so far proved inaccurate.

Last nights episode (episode 3) set up what I assume will be the pattern for the rest of the run – focusing primarily on one character on the island while fleshing out their mysterious backstory through flashbacks. This simple structure allows us to gather enough information to want to know more but always teases us with the big revelations as if to say “come on, there are 24 of these, do you think we’re going to tell you what she did in episode 3? You’re having a laugh.”

It’s been pretty well written so far, with plenty of characters developed enough for us to be hooked into wanting to know more. I’m presuming by the way that all the passengers on the plane who were just on holiday didn’t survive. So!, Why did the square-jawed heroic doctor want extra booze on the plane, what’s going on with the strict oriental guy and his silent but thoughtful wife (I’m thinking Yakusa here) and when are they going to start speaking in English, are the brother and sister carrying on (of course they are!), what’s the deal with the old backgammon playing guy and is the fat funny one the one who’s going to die?

Because although its genesis is some kind of Lord of the Flies meets Alien, it’s really just about us finding out the passengers secrets. In one of the first episodes a pivotal moment was one of the characters asking another “Do you want to know a secret?” and then the camera cutting away. Now that secret could be “I’m not wearing any underwear” but that’s not the point. Even the action on the island is based on us not knowing what the hell is going on – why are there polar bears, what is “the monster?” In a lot of ways, this could be the shows Achilles heel – because as soon as one of these mysteries is explained away unsatisfactorily the audience will say “Oh fuck off!” and that will be that. In a lot of ways it’s the same as Twin Peaks, except you got the impression with that show that even the writers didn’t have clue what was going on.

The main, very modern, problem with this type of storytelling, especially in a TV show, is that it would take me 5 minutes to find out what happens. We don’t have the advantage of those seeing it for the first time in not having any choice but to wait another week for answers – I could log onto a Lost site right now and spoil my fun very easily. So you see Lost not only functions as top quality entertainment but also as an exercise in self-restraint. People love a mystery, but can we wait for it to unravel?

Scandinavians Rule

2005-08-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

I've just finished re-reading Naive. Super by Erlend Loe. It's about a 25 year old guy in Norway who, concerned by his inability to find any meaning in his life, quits his Masters and thinks about how best to live life. Sounds like I hoot eh? It really is brilliant though - funny, affecting and true. And further proof that the Scandinavians have some of the best stuff. In one of my favourite chapters the narrator ruminates on why he's emotionally attached to certain companies, associating them with something good without having any idea why.

I thought it'd be fun to think about my list. So here goes: Apple, Audi, Bang and Olufsen, Camper, John Lewis, Innocent, Loewe, North Face, Waitrose, New Balance, Heal's, Diesel, Peroni, British Airways.

Not sure what that says about me really. Probably that I'm a complete loser I imagine.

What about Madonna falling off her horse eh? Popjustice has something typically clever to say about it. What are here chances of full recovery? Borderline. Oh my sides! She should thank her lucky star. Sorry.

Perhaps to cheer herself up she could watch My Lovely Horse from Father Ted.

The BBC website looks back at the great year of Britpop. I almost got teary eyed.

Manchester vs NYC

2005-08-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

Who's playing in New York this week? Sufjan Stevens, Death Cab, The Decemberists, Stars, and plenty more. Who's playing in Manchester this week? Feck all. Well obviously there are 50 bands I've never heard of but the majority of these will be Oasis/Joy Division/Damien Rice wannabes.

Harsh but fair. Still, at least all the New York ones are sold out.

Interview with Colin Meloy here. Via Daily Refill.

Whenever I'm watching a sporting event that involves a team I support, I'm reminded of Peter Cook's method of having his cake and eating it. He used to place a substantial bet on the team he didn't want to win, thereby ensuring that should his team lose he would at least be financially compensated. Of course even this foolproof method has it's flaw - as when England drew with Australia in the Ashes yesterday. There you go, I like cricket. And I liked it before all these so-called fans! Were they glued to their rolling newsbar in 2002? Of course they weren't. I'm telling you, Cricket will be selling out, appearing on The OC and signing to a major before the summer's out.

Mars Attacks!

2005-08-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

I finally got to see War Of The Worlds at the weekend, so if you’ve stumbled upon this blog looking to stay one step ahead of the game in your thirst for the very latest in pop culture then you’ve certainly come to the right place. You lucky, lucky people.

I was looking forward to it - I’m not entirely sure that I’m the exact target audience for this film, but I must be pretty close. I like Spielberg – I sat quite happily through the first half of The Terminal before the boredom took hold, I can watch a film with Tom Cruise in without wanting to tear my eyeballs out, I’m as partial to a summer blockbuster as the next man, and we all need a bit of tension and suspense in our lives from time to time. So after a couple of ‘personal projects’ failed to set the box office alight, despite being perfectly passable popcorn-munchers, Spielberg is back to what, apparently, he does best – ratcheting up the tension to unbearable levels as heroic everyman, women and children battle to escape a merciless, unfeeling enemy.

I’m sure that there are, to paraphrase Blackadder, tribes in the Amazonian rainforests as yet untouched by civilisation who are aware of the plot of War of the Worlds – aliens try to wipe out the population of earth, catch a cold, die. But this being a Spielberg film, this is all seen through the eyes of a divorced father, his tetchy emo-son and his precocious daughter. So the audience is left rooting for this trio, while nameless faceless many are zapped by Martian death rays or sucked into giant harvesting machines and sprayed all over the earth like some alien Groundforce experiment.

So Tom and his kids run away from the aliens for about an hour and a half. Tom has not been a good father. The aliens try to get them but they run away. His kids think he’s a loser. The aliens try to get them but they run away and then hide. Tom begins to realise what it takes to be a good father. The aliens try to get them but Tom bests them with a handy belt full of grenades using the old Luke Skywalker on the AT-ATs trick from Empire. The aliens catch a cold and die.

And to be perfectly honest, it was all a bit dull. And that’s no-one’s fault in particular – the film is certainly tense and the characters are always in severe peril but you’re left with a feeling that it’s all rather pointless. Why do the aliens want to exterminate us? Or is the point that aliens without motivation are all the more scary? And the way the aliens are ultimately beaten just feels wrong. I know it’s in the book and it’s probably trying to be some big statement about fate or invasion or something but it just leaves the audience thinking “ho hum.” Still, it’s better than Jeff Goldblum crashing the alien’s mothership by uploading a computer virus, that was just stupid.

The most pointless scene is in the basement of crackpot survivalist Tim Robbins, where a long snake-like alien probe ferrets around looking for humans for no reason other than to create yet more audience tension and remind us of the raptors in the Jurassic Park kitchen. Surely the aliens would have just blown up this insignificant farmhouse like they were doing to everything else? This scene also reminds us that aliens, like dinosaurs, can be fooled by the simple employment of a mirror.

This isn’t a film without some memorable and striking imagery – Tom comes out from the basement of a house he’s hiding in to find the remains of a plane crash, a train careers through a level crossing with flames pouring from every window and the initial alien induced storm is satisfyingly eerie. But ultimately, this is by no means a classic. Of course, if it was on telly on a rainy Tuesday then it would happily pass an hour or two and if you were thinking of going to see it I’d probably say go ahead, but it’ll be on no-one’s end of year list.

Friday Quick Links

2005-08-12T05:04:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves Cameron Crowe movies, yes? As I’ve said here before, even Vanilla Sky does it for me. Here’s the trailer for his new one, Elizabethtown. I don’t know about anybody else but I’d go to see it just for the poster.

Big Brother ends tonight and much as I’ve enjoyed it, I’m glad it’s over. An hour a night for more than 2 months is too much of a commitment and in fact thinking of how little of it I've missed makes me feel slightly ashamed. Remember Jon Tickle from BB4? He has some interesting things to say about this series here. Time to read some Rousseau and learn to speak German or something - I'll get those braincells back dammit!

Meanwhile, the Popbitch message board goes into overdrive discussing suggested contestants for the next Celebrity Big Brother. My favourite so far is David Blaine, Paul McKenna, Derren Brown, Paul Daniels and Ali Bongo. Although I also like the person who said that “anyone would make this lot look like Umberto Eco and his clever mates.”

Empire continues it’s countdown of the best independent films of all time. Usual modern bias indulged - The Descent at number 40 anyone?

Roger Ebert again proves he’s the best movie reviewer around with
this review of The Aristocrats. I’m intrigued by this movie’s premise – a documentary about a single joke.

Drowned in Sound goes slightly over the top with their review of The Rakes’ album.

I was going to write something about the 10 year anniversary of Britpop, but then I read this article online this morning and decided that John Harris can do it far better than I can. Plus Graham Coxon won't return my calls. I’m particularly loving his use of Neil Tennant’s famous “imperial phase” comment to describe Oasis at the peak of their popularity. I hadn’t heard that for a while and it always makes me smile at its cleverness.

Finally, this is my last word on Death Cab (for a while). My internet super sleuthing paid off last night when I managed to find the 5 tracks from Plans I was missing. 'What Sarah Said' has the best melody I've heard all year, it's classic classic Death Cab. But 'Someday You Will Be Loved' for some reason puts me in mind of the villain's song in a musical. I just imagine him creeping round the stage while he sings, possibly stealing valuables or something, having tricked his way into the heroine's house. It needs a big evil laugh and cymbal crashes at the end.

Faking a smile with the coffee to go

2005-08-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

I was at the gym last night (that’s right baby!) battling away on the treadmill when ‘Bad Day’ by Daniel Powter came on MTV Hits. As any of you gym goers out there will know, anything barely listenable that promises to kill another 3 minutes of treadmill or bike induced torture is a blessed relief. Now I don’t know much about this Powter character but he seems to have one hit wonder written all over him. I could be doing him a huge disservice of course, and the album could be full of similarly bittersweet Radio 2 pop gems. The other thing we know about him is that he’s bald. Or should I say, we don’t know that but, The Edge style, he wears a hat ALL THE TIME – in his video, on his TV appearances and in every single publicity shot of him. What other conclusion are we supposed to draw?

Anyway, much as the song is nice enough, the video is absolutely fantastic. I suggest you head over to here right now and watch it. I was there running (alright walking, but I had the machine on an incline) with a big stupid grin on my face at the sheer genius of it. The basic premise is that a girl and a boy who work in skyscrapers that face each other are having a series of endless bad days, sitting in boring meetings, dealing with objectionable colleagues, going through the same places in the city but just missing each other, wondering if love is out there for them, until they bond through their amusing and harmless graffiti on a subway poster. The video ends as the girl comes out of her office in the rain, hails a taxi and the guy comes out of his office and holds an umbrella up for her and they know immediately that they’re perfect for one another. It’s perfect – it honestly looks like the song is advertising a John Hughes film from the 80s – it’s that good.

Talk about knowing your demographic, I imagine that when the video makers and the record label watched the final cut of this video they were cracking open the champagne before the second chorus. The girl and the guy both work in jobs that allows them to wear just cool enough indie clothes, the girl is the one from The OC who went out with Seth Cohen for a while. My favourite bit is when they’re on their trains home and both focus on couples sharing their journey home. Basically, the whole message of the video is ‘as long as you’re with someone you love those bad days won’t seem nearly so bad.’ Love is the answer and you know that for sure.

I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff, it appeals to the part of me who thinks that Andrew McCarthy doing that thing where he wipes the collecting tear from his eye before it has time to fall down his cheek is a classic movie moment - Christ I even think You’ve Got Mail is a pretty terrific Christmas romance. I only wish that the video was made up of clips from a film – I’d be first in the queue. Maybe I should write it.

Plans

2005-08-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

So as I was saying yesterday, the new Death Cab album has leaked and the interweb is alive with discussion on its merits or otherwise. This being Death Cab’s first album on an evil bloodsucking creativity-killing major label, there’s an awful lot of indie snobbery doing the rounds. I’ve heard 7 of the 11 tracks so far and they sound great to me, a progression from Transatlanticism, faint echoes of The Postal Service and a world away from We Have The Facts… in sound and production values.

Something I always come back to as bands with a long career become progressively more popular is my bafflement at the hipster snobbery about increasing popularity, major labels and “selling out.” I just don’t get the fact that a fan who recently discovered something is somehow less of a fan. Of course there will be people who jump all over Death Cab because their friends like it or because of their OC connection or because some hip bible declares them to be what all the cool kids are listening to, but amongst the new fans will be people who genuinely do like it for what it is rather than for what it represents.

The hipsters who hate this new record and sneer in disgust about this not being the same band who made “Something About Airplanes” without even giving it a chance are just as bad as those who like it because of some deluded notion of cool. I recall the idie-yuppie discussion on Stereogum when some bright spark defined hipsterdom as "listening to a new CD secretly praying you'll like it." I think that’s the trouble really - a lot of people don’t like stuff for what it sounds like, but for what they think it says about them as a person.

The debate rages (!) on Stereogum. After someone posts in the comments that they like the new album and so what there’s this reply:

“I know you've got it bad for Mr. Gibbard and all, but it doesn't make the music any better. Have you heard anything from Death Cab's rock & roll era? Were you listening to them then? Perhaps you came late to them thanks to an appearance on the O.C. or maybe a shining recommend in "Allure."

I think that sums up the indie snobbery pretty well don’t you think? It’s got everything really – condescension and presumption, bitterness about liking them first, angrily dismissive of ‘popular’ culture. Picture the righteous indignation as they type! Basically, until you come to realization that your favourite band will let you down, this will always go on. It’s why, 10 years after Pinkerton, Weezer fans pour vitriol on every successive release in the hope that Rivers Cuomo will read their words and think “you know what, they’re absolutely right, I’m going to go and write Pinkerton 2 right this very minute! I can’t believe I’ve been so blind!”

Your favourite band will change, split up or lose it and never get it back. Such is life.

Update: Has Death Cab jumped the shark?

Odds and Ends

2005-08-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

Fluxblog has another track from the new Death Cab album. That's three now. According to Stereogum the album has already been leaked and is on soulseek but I'm afraid of filesharing.

There are lots of new Blurs about these days aren't there?

The Rakes' album got 9/10 in NME last week so I had a look at what was on their website. According to their biog "there's some confusion over how The Rakes actually came to being. Ask them and they'll talk of a show of solidarity outside a local Weatherspoons, or of fights in the library over who was going to borrow some novel or other." Who writes this stuff? Especially considering they have some pretty good lyrics about modern life being rubbish. The website has the video for the new single "Work, Work, Work (Pub, Club, Sleep)" which could be a state of the nation address if you're in a particular mood. Hot on the heels of last single "22 Grand Job." Do you see the theme?

According to NME, the album is "a gory autopsy of Binge-Drink Britain. A great pop record that makes you forget all those shitty spreadsheets and dance like no-one's earning more than you." That's often what I think about when I'm dancing. Dear oh dear.

Jury Still Out

2005-08-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

So I was away on our yearly team bonding session with work on Thursday and Friday. In the extremely unlikely event of anyone actually reading this, that was the reason for the lack of posts. Anyway, obviously Monday morning at work following 2 days away brings the usual overloaded inbox and backlog of exciting tasks so all there is today is the new Coldplay video. One of my friends remarked that it looks like it was cobbled togather in a "right we've got tonight to make this video, what are we going to do?" kind of way. I think he's right.

Bluntman is Chronic

2005-08-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

So where did this James Blunt character come from eh? I mean, I know that I'm not a complete obsessive compulsive when it comes to keeping up with the hot new talent, but I keep my ear to the ground and there are few things that pass under my radar. But before I knew what the hell was going on, he's all over the place and bestriding the charts like some kind of sensitive acoustic guitar wielding colossus. And I want answers.

According to his predictably vague website, he left the army, made a scratchy homemade demo and within 2 minutes had secured himself a lovely big record deal. I hate those kind of biogs - it can't have been that simple! I want answers dammit! How long did it take? Did they sign him on the back of no gigs? What the hell is going on? It also says that he hooked up with Linda Perry in LA. As you do. Linda Perry by the way is the woman responsible for 4 Non Blondes (you may remember their hit What's Goin' On being one of the worst singles of all time and you'd be right).

The next thing you know, there are adverts for his album on in the middle of Coronation Street. These ads contain expensive looking videos for songs that NO-ONE HAS EVER HEARD. And now, his single is the first one in a hundred years to enter the charts, start going up and then go to number one and bloody well stay there. This is unheard of! What next? Super Furry Animals new single starting at number 32 and then starting a slow inexorable rise to the chart summit rather than in with a bang at number 17 and out the next week?

My own particular take on the extreme popularity of this song (apart from it being quite a pretty melody) is that it's been taken to the bosom of wedding DJs everywhere. It's a bit of a classic for first and last dances. I bet so many people have claimed it as "our song". How many drunken snogs have taken place because of this song? You've got a lot to answer for Blunt. It's a bit like the song "You're Gorgeous" by Baby Bird a few years ago. Now there was no reason on God's green earth for that to be as popular as it was. But people love to tell people that they're gorgeous. And people love to be told.

Of course, this will all be proved wrong if the Bluntmeister's next single does the same. But I doubt it will.

Anyway, for those in need of a new singer-songwriter with a bit more class, I'd point you towards here for all the acoustic balladry loveliness you'll need.

And I feel fine

2005-08-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

Not much hppening today. Those fearing for the future of civilisation should have a look at some of the the threads on the Popbitch message board:

- Joan Collins, Roger Moore and Michael Caine all buy their meat from the butchers counter in harvey nicks. Joan is partial to a nice bit of fillet steak whilst Michael and Roger both prefer a nice beef wellington.

- Lewis Collins was in The Bill about a year ago, christ it was painful. He just looked like a fat Bodie with grey hair and even less acting ability.

- crap sleb spot - Beppe Di Marco, kensington High St, yesterday at 8pm. He looked quite good, if slightly furtive and BALDING.

- Family Affairs is being axed. Has anyone ever watched an episode?

- What do you give the metallica fan who has everything?

Sweet baby moses. I mean, obviously they're all quite funny in their own way and the threads that spring from them can easily pass a half hour at work, but it does sort of make me think HAS IT REALLY COME TO THIS?

By the way, those who are not too ashamed to admit to liking Big Brother should have a look at some of the highly dodgy threads on there.

Oh the alcoholic afternoons

2005-08-01T05:35:00.000-07:00

So Friday's post about Top of the Pops got me thinking about The Smiths. One of the things I can remember most clearly from growing up was seeing The Smiths on "the pops" doing This Charming Man. I can quite clearly picture myself sitting in our lounge watching the telly and thinking "this is rubbish, why is the distressed looking man moaning tunelessly about nothing. And the music's rubbish too. When are Wham! on?"

Obviously, as soon as I got to 6th form I discovered that they were brilliant and they became my newfavouriteband. Now one thing you'll hear about The Smiths is that they were depressing - usually from people who haven't really ever listened to them and who swallow the popular misconception based on tracks like Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. I have always got quite het-up about this and remarked (with not a little pompousness) that there are just as many Smiths lyrics that are funny or hopeful or full of good advice. This, clearly, is nonsense. They're really really depressing. I was listening to Hatful of Hollow at the weekend and it's bloody unremitting. "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" is one of the bleakest songs I've ever heard. And this morning on the way in to work, Meat is Murder was rocking my iPod. Here are some lyrics from each song -

- The Headmaster ritual: "I want to go home, I don't want to stay, give up life as a bad mistake
- Rusholme Ruffians: "a schoolgirl is denied, she said: "How quickly would I die if I jumped from the top of the parachutes?"
- I Want The One I Can't Have: "he killed a policeman when he was thirteen"
- What She Said: "I smoke 'cos I'm hoping for an early death"
- Nowhere Fast: "and if the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie in the middle of the street and die."
- That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: "when you laugh about people who feel so very lonely, their only desire is to die."
- Well I Wonder: "Gasping - dying - but somehow still alive."

Cheery stuff eh? And yes, pedants, I have missed out Barbarism Begins At Home and Meat is Murder. One track about domestic abuse and the other featuring the sound of mooing cows in an abattoir.

That said of course, they're still brilliant.

Friday Quick Links

2005-07-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

I had for a long time considered this to be the worst movie poster of recent memory. But there I was innocently checking what new films were out in the states this weekend and saw this monstrosity. Cusack. What are you doing?

Anyone watching Big Brother? Here's what three of the contestants looked like in pre 15 minutes of fame days. Two words. Eye candy.

Top Of The Pops, once the greatest show on earth, has now been squirreled away on Sundays evenings on BBC2. Someone over at the BBC has decided that the way to recreate it's former all-conquering glory is to have a co-presenter who CLEARLY DOESN'T BELONG THERE. Last week it was Jeremy Clarkson. I mean for the love of God. Anyway, here is a look back at those halcyon days. My own personal favourite was during a long forgotten single by Sam Brown called "The Kissing Gate." It had a bit of an instrumental breakdown in the middle where all the music stopped for a beat before everything came back in. During that brief moment of supposed silence a member of the audience can clearly be heard to shout "Bollocks." Which is fair enough really.

Time Wasting

2005-07-28T01:47:00.000-07:00

Blimey, the blogs have gone crazy this morning, so just in case anyone is reading this in a valiant effort to waste a large amount of their paid working day here's some top quality linkage.

- I don't know if this is a joke but it's brilliant either way. If you get a chance, watch the advert with sound - it is literally unbelievable. When I think of Alan Cumming I think of two things - Bernard and the Genie and "I am inwincible!"
- Stalking reaches previously unheard of levels. It's actually quite funny when you read it.
- The two links above come from Best Week Ever, always a good read on a rainy Thursday morning.
- PopJustice weighs up the merits of Gang of Four and G4.
- Welcome To The Midwest has a new track from the forthcoming Death Cab album. It's absolutely lovely.
- You Ain't No Picasso compiles some indie covers of top 40 hits.

I could go on, but I think I've embarrassed myself enough.

Don't you just love goodbyes?

2005-07-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

Last night was a rare opportunity to see a decent band. It’s not that I’m jealous of all the New York bloggers who seem to manage to get into at least one ‘secret’ show a week (after all, for all my big talk I know that if I went to too many gigs I would be destroyed by tiredness after the first month – rock and roll) but for a fan of indie-rock there’s not much to keep your gig-muscles ticking over. Rilo Kiley at the Night and Day sold out seemingly before it was even announced.

Still, Mew came to Manchester last night to play some classics and give us a taster of stuff from the new album Mew And The Glass Handed Kites. Those crazy Danes and their weird album titles! I’d seen Mew once before at ULU in December 2003 and it was hands down the best show ever. And last nights show, if not quite reaching those ceiling scraping heights, would really make a lot of bands take a long hard look at themselves and, as someone once said, sort their lives out and start making changes.

There’s none of that “Hello we are [insert band name here] and this song is called Live the Dream” while the guitarist tunes up on stage. Mew put on a proper show. As befits a band who met at film school, each song has an accompanying film projected onto the whole of the wall behind them – how they manage to synchronise the films with the music I’ll never know – and songs merge into one another seamlessly. And the noise they make is quite extraordinary – it can’t be just 5 people. The only thing I can think to compare it to is Depeche Mode on their Songs of Faith and Devotion tour. Obviously it sounds nothing like that but it’s the size of the sound along with the amazing visuals that basically make it a stadium show in a pokey little room in Manchester.

Of course, if you haven’t got the songs none of this would mean anything. Fortunately, Mew are the missing link between My Bloody Valentine and Abba. And, just like Roxette and A-ha before them, they prove that English not being your first language is a bonus when it comes to a good turn of phrase. How about this for a perfect Scando-English pop verse from the new single Apocalypso - “In northern time, I lost all my pure feelings.
The psychiatrist posing as psychologist. When fear predicts, then darkly the mind suffers. Are we talking? White is the winter.” Brilliant!

Just like last time, they encored with Comforting Sounds, possibly the only 9 minute song that seems too short when it’s finished. As each instrument comes in sequentially the band come back onto the stage one at a time – guitar, then vocals, then bass, then drums. They must have done this hundreds of times but it still seems like a brilliant and original idea. If there’s a better song to close a set, I’ve yet to hear it.

For added excitement, Mew actually came and had a drink in the bar my wife and I were in before the gig, which is clearly a real bonus. I didn’t talk to them obviously, that’d be daft.

If you need to know more about the mighty Mew then this is the best place to look.

Take Me Out

2005-07-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

Todays post was going to be about something else but in the course of compiling it I made a discovery. I'm sure you all use google images to source all the lovely pictures your heart could possibly desire. And so do I. So imagine my relief when looking for a picture of everyone's favourite Scottish popsters Franz Ferdinand this was the first image google presented me with:

Which proves that World War One is still considered to be more important than pop music. What a relief.

Looks aren't important

2005-07-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

As Lamarr has so shrewdly observed, sometimes there is no justice in this world. My favourite band are Death Cab For Cutie. They look like this:

Imagine how popular they'd be if they looked like this:

Ah well.

Friday Quick Links

2005-07-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

Are you a good person? Are you going to heaven or hell? Don't know? Then take this test and find out! The great thing about it is that there is no way to ever be a good person! The options continue to be narrowed down until the only thing you can click on is "yes, I guess you're right, I have sinned and am going to hell." The only way out of it is to send money. Just as I remember from Sunday school.

If you're not a good person, but everyone thinks you are, you can send a postcard to these lovely people. It's always an enjoyable read, although some are way to near the knuckle frankly.