Self-Professed Polymath

The Best of 2011

2011-12-12T04:45:00.000-08:00

Well, here it is again: my top tracks of the year. And what a selection! Taking in a truly diverse cornucopia of rock, pop, metal, electronica and even classical from as far afield as Japan, North America and Europe, this is a snapshot of what's been sticking in my head this year. My tastes are so catholic there's bound to be something for everyone! I've also been listening to a lot of mix albums recently and so I've tried to sequence the tracks so they flow together as seamlessly as possible. The selection can be downloaded here - I hope you enjoy it.

1. Within Temptation - "Why Not Me" from the album "The Unforgiving"
This brief but potent spoken-word intro starts our selection with a bang.

2. Asp - "Wechselbalg" ("Changeling") from the album "Fremd"
This balls-to-the-wall melodic rocker is one of the most accessible moments to date from the German goths.

3. Martyn - "Popgun" from the album "Ghost People"
Probably the standout track on the Dutch dubstep maestro's eagerly-awaited second album. Anyone who can seriously say that this insanely funky tune doesn't make them want to shake their booty must either be deaf or have limbs made of lead.

4. Royz - "Still" from the single "Alpha"
Boasting one of the rubberiest basslines you are ever likely to hear, this track comes from what is, remarkably, only this young band's fourth ever release. For a band to be producing material of this calibre this early in their career, and to hide it away on a B-side, no less, is nothing short of astonishing.

5. Thursday - "Magnets Caught in a Metal Heart" from the album "No Devolución"
The New Jersey veterans finally transcend "emo" to come into a unique and fascinating style that is wholly their own.

6. Kaya - "Ophelia" from the album "Queen"
Forget Kylie, Gaga and Madonna: the greatest, most beautiful, most heartrending electropop song of the last decade is by a Japanese man in a fantastically elaborate Rococo dress.

7. Christina Lawrie - "Moment Musical No.2" by Sergei Rachmaninov, from the album "Piano: Rachmaninov/Vine/Brahms"
The young Dundonian pianist brings a remarkable deftness and lightness of touch to the Russian maestro's finger-busting masterpiece.

8. Heretoir - "Graue Bauten" ("Grey Buildings") from the album "Heretoir"
Next-gen German "blackgaze" heroes turn in a shattering work of heartbreaking melancholy.

9. Silverstein - "In Memory of..." from the album "Rescue"
The Canadian rockers fail to transcend emo but confirm themselves once again as masters of the form with this anthemic tale of tragedy.

10. Dir En Grey - "Lotus" from the album "Dum Spiro Spero"
The Japanese luminaries prove once again that they are one of the best bands in the world with this incredible chunk of art-metal which adroitly marries beauty and brutality.

11. The Gazette - "Pledge" from the album "Toxic"
The biggest visual kei band in the world moisten the eyes of teenage girls the world over with this gorgeous, heartfelt winter ballad.

12. Lou Reed & Metallica - "Pumping Blood" from the album "Lulu"
The thematic denouement of the year's most surprising collaboration. The final two-and-a-half minutes, where the titular character meets her fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper, is one of the most harrowing musical experiences ever committed to tape.

13. Prurient - "Palm Tree Corpse" from the album "Bermuda Drain"
Without a doubt the most spine-chilling moment on the cult noise artist's first foray into more "traditional" electronica.

14. Aicle - "Hirari" ("Nimbly") from the album "Ark"
When you're feeling down, bring back the sakura season at the flick of a switch with this insanely catchy, sugary pop-rock nugget.

15. Lynch - "Mirrors" from the single of the same name
An absolute piledriver of a song from the Nagoya rockers who justly secured a major label contract in 2010 after years in the underground.

16. Within Temptation - "A Demon's Fate" from the album "The Unforgiving"
The indescribably epic finale of the Dutch symphonic metallers' supernatural vengeance concept album, which came complete with its own comic book series.

17. Ólafur Arnalds - "Ágúst" from the album "Living Room Songs"
Written and recorded in just one day and streamed live from his living room, this elegiac chamber piece is a reminder of why the young Icelandic composer is held in such high esteem.

I love "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and I am not ashamed

2011-08-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

The other night I fished out my battered VHS copy of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (or, as I like sometimes to call it, "Barn Stormer's Darcular") and watched it again. In my opinion, the film (which astonishingly is nearly twenty years old) has held up remarkably well, and really is cinematically excellent. The combination of Coppola's direction (let us not forget this is the man who made the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now), a rash of A-list acting talent including Gary Oldman (whose stellar performance powers the film along), Anthony Hopkins, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes and the utterly gorgeous Winona Ryder, lush cinematography, fantastic special effects, freakish Lynchian dream-imagery, stratospheric production values and one of the best scores ever written (by Wojciech Kilar, who scored some of Polanski's early work), go together to create a modern classic.

Sure, the film has its detractors - and, to be fair, it has its flaws, not least among them Keanu ("Canoe") Reeves as Harker. His English accent is pretty much flawless - but he concentrates so hard on it that any small amount of acting prowess he may actually have had goes completely unused. He is literally like a lump of wood. The whole production also looks very studio-bound, doubtless because it is (there was no location work at all). But the film is superbly paced, constantly changing location and edited into lots of short, punchy scenes which keep the viewer gripped throughout, and is, by all accounts, very true to the book. I have never actually read it, but intend to correct this oversight in the near future.

Dream 10/05/11

2011-05-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

I went to have my hair cut by my favourite hairdresser who was young, petite, pretty and blonde. When I got there the tiny salon was filled with a whole Asian family and I thought I would have to wait for ages, but she said she'd serve me first as they were only her (presumably adoptive) family, and she shooed them out of the salon and told them to come back later. Halfway through cutting my hair she started kissing the back of my neck, and I reached up to touch her face, turned round and kissed her tenderly on the lips, whereupon I immediately felt terribly guilty. She told me she was in love with me and how she'd gone out on an enormous bender the night before with a friend who had just split up with her famous fiancé, and because she - the hairdresser - was so lovesick for me, she'd got totally plastered and depressed and had ended up sleeping with some random guy and had got pregnant, but she promised she'd take care of that. I ended up going to dinner at her family's house, where we were sat next to one another and she kept touching me under the table.

Then we went to a house party where I found myself in the kitchen with a whole bunch of rich artists, and felt very uncomfortable. One of them kept fussing over a pot plant, worrying that the hosts would discover he'd killed it. As we were about to leave, I found a laptop on which was playing a movie trailer depicting the precise events she claimed had happened the night before.

She ended up going to America and so I went there on holiday with my dad to see her. We drove down the freeway into the city and visited a colossal Toys R Us where my dad insisted, wholly uncharacteristically, on buying a mountain of toys for the kids back home. Then we met with the hairdresser, who was waiting for us with her luggage on a vacant lot next to a lockup garage. I helped my dad get a massive green truck out of the lockup and when he started it up it lurched and nearly ran over her luggage. We all drove back in the truck to our hotel, and in our suite she and I started watching a three-video box set of a Lifetime Original true-crime drama series about a cop hunting some kid who had murdered his entire family, during which I fell asleep and dreamt that I was a character in the show.

Dream 21/03/10

2011-05-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

Everyone from work had gone to a conference in a country house hotel. One day it was raining and one of my colleagues went out for a walk in the woods with the woman I fancied and whom I wanted to see, so I followed. Once through the woods we came to a rundown cottage which had a café upstairs. I went up and my colleagues were there, so I sat down next to the woman I fancied; but so was my Gaelic teacher, who was sharp with me on account of a snide remark I had made about her class on a feedback form, and when I turned back the woman I fancied had got up and gone downstairs. Somebody told me she'd been saying "I want him to kiss me," so I followed her to a downstairs bedroom where she was sitting on the floor. I sat down next to her and we each put a piece of chocolate in the other's mouth before sharing a long and passionate kiss, a trick she had learned in her youth.

Later she had a shower, and allowed me to watch while she was dressing. Whilst doing this, she was telling me something really important, but I couldn't hear her properly. It was either that she was leaving her husband, or that she was pregnant, or both. I knew that if she was pregnant it couldn't be mine because I had never slept with her, but if she was leaving her husband I wanted her to be with me instead, and I got frustrated because she wouldn't repeat what she had said. Soon everyone had gone and we went out into the back garden, which had overgrown vegetable patches and a dilapidated shed. There we were suddenly attacked by a pack of wild dogs and retard children beating us with large sticks. We managed to escape and ran back out the front where a colleague had pulled up in his car. Before she got in and they drove off, I tried to talk to her again but she still wouldn't repeat what she had said.

The next morning I knew she would be at the cottage again for a meeting with the management and I went there early so I could speak to her when she arrived. When she got there I cornered her in the kitchen and tried to get her to tell me again what she had said, and she was just about to when the management arrived and she was called away to a meeting in the café upstairs.

Portrait of a girl I used to know

2011-03-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

Walking down the street the other evening I did a double take upon seeing a lassie who looked just like this girl called Ruth* that I used to go to church with. It got me to thinking about this girl for the first time in years. Now Ruth always seemed a little weird. To start with, her parents were ancient. I always assumed she was adopted, because her mother no way looked young enough to have borne her naturally. Then there were her clothes. Now Ruth was a grade A student, fearsomely intelligent, and probably a genius - I believe she now has a PhD - and, like many of that ilk, was both socially and sartorially inept. She was in her late teens when I was at the start of mine, but she always dressed exactly like an old maid. We're talking seriously antiquated garb here - frilly blouses with ruched collars that buttoned all the way up to the throat, and ankle-length, pleated, floral-patterned skirts. Plus she was hopelessly myopic and wore coke-bottle-bottom glasses with those petal-shaped frames that were still just about in fashion at the end of the 1950s. She was very tall and had long, slightly curly hair that always looked rather straggly, as though she couldn't be bothered to style it. Worst of all, she was a physicist, which meant that she was obsessed with stuff like quantum mechanics, but was unable to hold a conversation about pop culture.

Years later, I was amazed when my mother told me that Ruth had been sweet on me. I was certainly never aware of it at the time. Ruth was no great beauty, but she could probably have looked fairly decent if she'd ditched the 50s specs, styled her hair, and stopped dressing like a 70-year-old woman. But she still wouldn't have snared my attention unless she'd developed a bit of attitude and stopped simpering all over the place. Meek, submissive girls have never done it for me - I've always been attracted to bold, assertive women who know who they are and what they want. I was even more dumbfounded when my mum went on to tell me that Ruth is now married. I can't imagine how that happened - either she significantly smartened up her act when she got to university, or she met a guy who was just like her... what a thought!

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent... and the guilty.

Salome

2011-02-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

The other night I watched the New York Metropolitan Opera's 2008 production of Richard Strauss's Salome on DVD. I've been getting into opera for a little while now but this was a far cry from the bel canto stuff I cut my teeth on. It's also the first time I've ever listened to anything by Strauss - and what a place to start! This adaptation of Oscar Wilde's scandalous play is so much more than "just music"; the word Gesamtkunstwerk could have been coined for it. The music is dark, dense and dissonant, the leading role makes incredible physical and mental demands on the singer, and the opera's conclusion is just as shocking, and emotionally devastating, as when it premiered in 1905. The Met's production is stark and relatively minimal, letting nothing detract from the performances - and what performances they are. Surely few can ever have handled the lead role with such aplomb as dynamite Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, who dominates the stage for every second she is on it.

Whilst it may seem almost impossible, in light of its content, to believe that this work was written and first performed at the beginning of the last century, in other respects it is clear that the play, with its heady brew of religiosity, eroticism and self-disgust, could really only be a product of the Victorian era. Were Wilde alive today, he might be seen as a bit of a dandy; in his day, he was a dangerous subversive. The powers that be, and the literary establishment, were terrified of him because he represented a kind of liberation for which the world was simply not yet ready - and yet his ideas were perfectly in tune with other cultural and scientific advances of the era, notably the psychoanalysis of Freud and his contemporaries. Salome retains the power to shock both because it is peopled with archetypes and because it speaks to deep-rooted anxieties and desires we all share, but often dare not name.

Seefeel

2011-02-01T01:49:00.000-08:00

I went to see the seminal Seefeel last night at the fantastic new King's Place arts centre in King's Cross, a towering edifice of glass and steel with a vast atrium inside, an art gallery and two concert halls. The band have just released their eponymous fourth album, which is their first in almost fifteen years. They were famously the first band with guitars to be signed by cult electronica label Warp, and are essentially a live outfit with a rock setup, though the music undergoes digital processing in real time. The band now features a new rhythm section in the shape of bassist Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg) and former Boredoms drummer Iida Kazuhisa.

Seefeel's music, especially their recent work and especially their live show, can best be described as a cross between shoegaze, doom metal, dub, hip-hop and glitch. Sarah Peacock's looped, wordless vocals bear the unmistakeable influence of the Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser; and while the pummelling sheets and shards of guitar feedback, the massive, shuddering bass and high-intensity, watertight drumming are almost overwhelming, they leave room for the all-important ethereal melodies.

The set was almost ridiculously short (fractionally over an hour), with no support bar an anonymous DJ, and no encore. But I didn't feel particularly short-changed, as I don't know if I could have managed much more at that punishing volume. I went up to the stage at the end with the other gear geeks and got a peek at the band's equipment as well - a baffling mountain of effects pedals, laptops and drum machines. Seefeel are an institution and no-one else sounds like them. Do yourself a favour and check out their albums for Warp, Succour and the new one. And if you're able to catch them live on their forthcoming tour , don't miss it - it's an awesome experience.

Dream 07/01/11

2011-01-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

It was the last day of school and we were all supposed to be going on a trip so everyone gathered outside the gates and piled their stuff up against the wall. I put my umbrella and coat there too and went off to find my mates, but then it was announced that the trip was cancelled and we could all go home, so I started looking for my coat, but couldn’t find it and became convinced that someone had nicked it. But eventually I found it with my mum, who had come to remind me that I had to meet her later at a restaurant for a big family party to which everyone was coming. Promising her I’d be there, I jumped on a bus, which was packed and was curiously being driven by my old mate from work, Pete. But he didn’t stop at the right stop and went right on to the end of the route, and everybody on the bus was irate, including me, as I realized I would have to walk about a mile back to the restaurant.

For some reason I seemed to have lost my shoes and socks, and the streets were littered with broken glass because there had just been some kind of parade. A wooden fence ran alongside the pavement and I found a gate in it which was ajar, so I looked through and saw it was the grounds of a ruined castle which had been turned into some kind of tourist attraction. It was grassy, so I decided to go in and walk along the inside of the fence. I found I was on the battlements and had to jump down from several walls, until I got to one which was too high for me to jump so I had to go down a long grassy slope which led to the main courtyard of the castle. I tried to leave, but two heavies barred the gate and told me that I had entered the premises illegally and if I wanted to leave I would have to pay the £23.50 admission fee. I explained what had happened, then tried to argue that they should have secured the site better, but all this fell on deaf ears so I decided I’d better just pay it so I could get away. The site was closing and I had no cash so I had to go back with one of the heavies, who was the manager, to his house, which was in the grounds, where he kept the credit card machine. But once we got there he got distracted by his baby son who was crawling around on the floor and I was able to slip out without paying.

The gates were now unmanned so I was able to get out and run down a grassy slope and found myself in a park. I ran through the park and back onto the street; I knew where I was now and that it was not far to the restaurant. But the streets had not yet been cleared and I got a bit of glass stuck in my foot, but I pulled it out and managed to limp to the restaurant just in time for the party.

The Best Of 2010

2010-12-20T03:04:00.000-08:00

I’m exceptionally proud to present the return this year of my annual year-end best-of list. Lovingly compiled and painstakingly sequenced by yours truly, this is the definitive selection of the tracks that have been floating my boat this year. As usual, it’s an eclectic, international mix: there’s sweet pop and next-level indie rock from Japan; epic, literate, melancholy metal from the United States; uplifting, euphoric trance from the Netherlands; a tragic tale of heartbreak from the highlands of Scotland; chilling mediaeval industrial from Germany – and more. There’s also the sound of a couple of bands most thought long past their prime coming back with some of their best ever material. In short, there’s something here for everyone with a musically open mind. The selection can be downloaded here. As ever, please feel free to comment!

1. Magnetic Man - "Flying Into Tokyo" from the album "Magnetic Man"
This gorgeous, filmic string instrumental was the most interesting and refreshing track on the dubstep supergroup's debut album.

2. DaizyStripper - "Trigger" from the album "Birth"
The indie visual kei band released not one, but two debut albums on the same day and this uplifting, propulsive pop-rock track is a definite highlight.

3. Kamelot - "Hunter's Season" from the album "Poetry For The Poisoned"
Epic, melancholy metal with amazing, cryptic lyrics which expertly balances melody with brute force.

4. Armin van Buuren & Sophie Ellis-Bextor - "Not Giving Up On Love" from the album "Mirage"
The "Groovejet" star returns after years in the wilderness with this standout cut from the King of Trance's new solo album.

5. School Food Punishment - "Butterfly Swimmer" from the album "Amp-Reflection"
Amazing, futuristic dance-rock from Japan, which sounds programmed but is, astonishingly, all played live.

6. Alan - "Kaze ni Mukau Hana" ("Flower Facing The Wind") from the single of the same name
This huge, Disneyesque ballad, sung by the velvet-voiced Tibetan pop star, is the theme song from an epic samurai movie.

7. Norma Jean - "Falling From The Sky: Day Seven" from the album "Meridional"
More cryptic, literate metal, the mellowest and definitely the most intriguing track from this great band's new album.

8. The Bug - "Skeng (Autechre mix)" from the compilation "Ninja Tune XX"
Futuristic dancehall reworked by the IDM legends into something cold and utterly inhuman, this is one of the most chilling things you are ever likely to hear.

9. Heimataerde - "Gloria Et Morte" from the album "Unwesen"
The Templar-obsessed German mediaeval industrial act return with this dark and haunting track from their new masterpiece.

10. Roger Shah & Signum - "Ancient World (long haul flight mix)" from the compilation "Magic Island Vol.3"
Pumping, hands-in-the-air trance with some of the most euphoric melodies of the year, this will take you right back to the summer.

11. Dàimh - "Mo Mhàili Bheag Òg" ("My Little Young Màili") from the album "Diversions"
This absolutely heartrending song from the Gaelic folk supergroup is narrated by a soldier awaiting trial for the murder of his wife, having accidentally killed her in the mêlée when a squad of soldiers came to arrest him.

12. Ash - "Insects" from the album "A-Z Vol.2"
One of the very best ever songs from the Northern Irish indie rockers, who this year released a new single every fortnight.

13. Korn - "Oildale (Leave Me Alone)" from the album "Korn III: Remember Who You Are"
Another blistering return to form from the Californian nu-metal pioneers, who went back to basics on their raw and cathartic new album.

14. LM.C - "Bokura no Mirai" ("Our Future") from the album "Wonderful Wonderholic"
Wonderful, epic, heartbreaking, beautiful pop-rock from the visual kei duo featuring guitarist Aiji, late of the sorely lamented Pierrot.

15. 9 Goats Black Out - "Heaven" from the album "Tanatos"
One of the most gorgeous, otherworldly visual kei songs ever written, this seven-minute monster captivates from beginning to end.

16. Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli & Blake Neely - "Honor" from the album "The Pacific"
This rousing, deeply emotional piece for brass and strings was the theme for the acclaimed TV series about US operations in the Pacific theatre during WWII.

Some of the many weird things about visual kei

2010-12-09T01:15:00.000-08:00

OK, so I've been into this visual kei stuff for quite some time now and I'm still getting my head around some of the really weird things about it.

1. They all look like chicks. The aesthetic is meant to be "androgynous" but to me, that means you can't tell whether they're men or women; you look at these guys and they just look like women. That's not androgyny, people.

2. The concept. Every band has to have a "concept", and all their looks, lyrics and music are supposed to stem from this. Why? Why can't they just play music? Why can't they write about whatever they want, whenever they want?

3. Everything is released in multiple editions. Now in the West, you'll often see two CD versions of an album, one of which will be more expensive and will usually include a couple of bonus tracks and a DVD featuring a few promo videos and/or live clips. In Japan, it's not just albums, but singles as well - and often there are three different versions. It's not just the majors that do this, either - the indies have got in on the act as well.

Singles still sell in Japan for the simple reason that they are always new material. The idea of releasing tracks as singles that have already been released on an album, like they do in the West, is incomprehensible and anathema to the Japanese. Why would you? (I have to say I'm with them on this one.) So for instance, you'll get a single with two tracks, released in three editions: the first will include a DVD featuring the promo video ("PV") for the lead track; the second will include a DVD with a PV for the other track; and the third ("regular") edition will be CD only, but will have an additional track. So if you're a "real fan" of the band and you want both the videos on DVD (rather than just watching them on YouTube), and the extra track, then you "have to" buy all three versions.

Then they'll do this with the album as well, filming PVs for two non-single album tracks for the DVD versions, and putting an extra track on the third version. And people will buy them all! Me, I don't give two hoots about music videos or bonus DVDs, so I like this arrangement - I just buy the regular edition; it's cheaper and has an extra track.

4. Engrish. Not only will you get single words of English dropped randomly into song titles and lyrics for aesthetic effect, you'll get entire songs written in what is basically gibberish, where the guy has thought it would be über-cool to write a song in English even though he clearly can hardly speak a word of it. Then there are the appalling liberties taken with case and punctuation. Because the Roman alphabet is so novel to the Japanese, they just switch between lower and upper case as they please, inserting random punctuation wherever they feel like it...

5. Tags. Which leads me on to the thing I get most irate about - the absolutism that the fans have about this. They insist on tagging the files in the exact same manner in which the song is written on the sleeve (wonky capital letters and all), and woe betide you if you write it different. The people on Last FM are the worst culprits for this, even going so far as ordering people to retag their files.

6. The major labels. In the West, when a band signs a major label deal, their fans brand them sellouts. In Japan, they rejoice. "Going major" is a cause for celebration and is what every band is working towards from day one - and every indie label, because unlike in the West, the band doesn't leave their old indie label and sign a new contract with the major; they remain signed to the indie, who basically license them to the major label, making a fat fee in the process.

Another weird thing is when a band goes major, their career starts over from scratch; even if they've recorded like five albums, the major label will never make any mention of this - it's like it never happened. Their first album for the major is their "first album", period. And what's more, they make a really big deal out of how many releases the band has had ("Ayu drops her 34th single!"), as though pumping out "product" is the name of the game.

7. The specialist vocabulary. English words take on bizarre new meanings in Japanese. For instance, a gig is known as a "live" (because, presumably, the band plays live). This is a textbook example of wasei-eigo in action. Then, if a band is sufficiently popular, they'll get to play "oneman" lives - where they play without a support act. What gets me is that western fans insist on using this terminology as well. "Live" is not a noun of English, people!

8. Their gigs have names. I can understand a tour having a name, but in Japan, the individual gigs, especially one-off shows, have names as well. Why?

Croydon

2010-10-11T03:57:00.001-07:00

I've recently moved back to Croydon after five years or so of living in Wimbledon and I've already noticed some weird things about it. Technically, Croydon is part of London (it was incorporated in 1965), but it sure doesn't feel like it. For such a big place, Croydon has a peculiarly parochial, small-town feel (much, as I'm led to believe, like Kingston-Upon-Hull). One of the possible reasons for this is that Croydon grew out of Surrey, not London, and has been a town in its own right, with its own distinct identity, for hundreds of years. People seem never to be able to leave. My new next-door-neighbour (himself not a native Croydoner) is well acquainted with several people who were in my class at school - people who grew up there and have lived there all there lives, or, in some cases, even gone away to university and then come back. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Croydon really, but I can't imagine spending my whole life there.

Perhaps the weirdest and most disconcerting thing is the way people look at you. There's an unwritten rule of etiquette in London that you notice people, but you do everything in your power not to let on that you've noticed. In fact, the more noticeable the person is, the more effort you make not to let on. To do so is considered terribly bad form. The maximum length of time you will look at someone for is about half a second. In Croydon this simply does not apply. People's gazes linger for seconds at a time. Some people blatantly stare at you as if you have two heads (like the teenage girl in Ikea yesterday with a bizarre bush of hair who gaped at me for ten whole seconds like I was a Wild Man of Borneo). People will even turn around at the sound of your voice, even when it's patently obvious that you're not addressing them. In London, unless you're absolutely certain that you're being addressed - and sometimes not even then - will you turn around. I'm tempted to start asking people if I can help them, but I doubt they'd get it. Perhaps I should just start staring right back.

I'm the sort of person who gets called a "faggot" on Lambgoat

2010-10-07T02:58:00.000-07:00

If you fancy a laugh - and are not easily offended - you should log on sometime to Lambgoat, a news website for hardcore and metal music that prides itself on its "reviled forum", click on any news story, and read the comments. Even better if it's a story about somebody dying. It all probably started with a couple of knuckleheads dissing everyone who didn't like tough-guy hardcore, but now the site has a reputation to uphold, and anything is fair game. Anybody and everybody from the most brutal genres of music imaginable are dubbed "faggots" at every opportunity; cheesy puns and rejoicing are made over people who have recently, tragically died; and death is wished on innumerable bands, usually in the form of a "van flip". Woe betide any band who has their gear stolen, or who then commits the cardinal sin of putting up a Paypal link that people can donate to! It's all deeply distasteful, but often side-splittingly funny.

A Picture Of You

2010-10-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve got a picture of you somewhere in the back of my mind. Earlier that day, in the park, you wore a long, cream-and-purple woollen scarf wrapped around your neck, and a matching hat pulled down to your eyes. You were bundled up against the cold, and as you stood watching the birds in a nearby tree you smiled, and your breath smoked away into the chill air. Now you’re standing at a floor-to-ceiling window on the eighteenth floor of a hotel, smoking a cigarette as you look out at the night. You’re wearing a red silk dressing gown and your blonde hair hangs loose around your face. In the Potsdamer Platz, the trees are laden with snow, and lights blink silently on the roofs of buildings as taxicabs flit through the streets like ghosts. Just for a moment, I think you see me; then he appears, a shadow at your left shoulder. He puts his arm around you, and you turn and disappear, back into the darkness.

Queen Of The Desert

2010-10-06T05:05:00.001-07:00

In her dark eyes there's the whisper of the desert
In her curls the heady scent of jasmine blooms
In her tears the taste of a long-sought-for oasis
The memory of dusty silent rooms

At her touch the serpent and the scorpion slumber
Her voice is music sweet as sighing strings
The silver coins that form her headdress tinkle
And onyx glisters in her golden rings

She reclines on carpets woven by her fathers
In tents with her herds dotted round about
And her men, their faces swathed in white scarves
With scimitars drawn stand silent guard without

Your laugh disarms, your voice charms and beguiles her
She hangs upon your every tender word
She silently yearns to surrender and be held
But love's a luxury that she cannot afford

Brighter than the lustre of the hardest diamond
Brighter than a thousand desert moons
Her empire stands upon the river delta
And stretches far beyond the furthest dunes

But when it all is gone she'll choose
The serpent's burning kiss upon her breast
And inside this stone sarcophagus she'll wait
While the dust of ages settles on her face.

A Woman's Body

2010-10-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

The parts of a woman's body
that inflame my greatest ardour are not
those you might expect;
nor those of cliché.

The line of her jaw
or the small of her back,
or the soft flesh of her upper arm
peeking from a short sleeve,

Can send through me an electric charge
and make my heart pound loud;
The more seductive because
no attempt is made to hide them,
nor thought given to that they are displayed.

Facebook

2010-07-01T05:33:00.000-07:00

After years of refusal, a couple of weeks ago I finally crumbled under the pressure and got myself a Facebook account. I've had a Space for years but have never been the least bit interested in its "social networking" aspect, choosing instead to view it exclusively as an easy and free way to distribute my music. In actual fact, when I first discovered MySpace, I had thought that it was solely for musicians to use to promote themselves. Imagine my horror when I discovered that there were hundreds of millions of "ordinary" people on there too, with no appreciable talent of any kind, using it to illiterately broadcast to the world every banal triviality that happened to pop into their heads.

When Facebook appeared on the scene, an immediate generation/class gap opened between the adults/middle classes, who used Facebook, and the kids/chavs, who used MySpace (and then there was Bebo, for those for whom even MySpace was too intellectual, but we won't even go there). But I shied away even from this, deciding that it was better to have a handful of friends in real life whom one actually met face-to-face, and went for real drinks with in real pubs, than 500 "friends" most of whom you probably didn't even actually know, and wouldn't like even if you did; and besides, even Facebook seemed to suffer from a sort of debilitating infantilism, with its litany of superpokes, time-wasting games, throwing dead sheep at one's friends, and other such nonsense.

When, a year ago or so, I realized that I had somehow accrued a circle of actual friends - who were asking why I wasn't on Facebook - and was actually interested in what they were up to, I started getting my fiancée to add them to her page, but eventually she got so sick of this that I caved in and got my own account. In the first week or so, many hours were lost tracking down people I hadn't seen in years, seeing what my friends were up to, writing about what I was up to and generally trying to get my head around all of Facebook's various features - and the etiquette of its use.

One of the nice things about it is being able to hide from your news feed the people who write loads of stuff you have no real interest in. The downside of this is, of course, that other people can hide you too, and you have no way of knowing whether they have done so. The irritation comes from realizing that you could be blindly posting your thoughts away into the ether, with the possibility that not a single person is actually looking at them. It becomes disconcerting and, ultimately, dispiriting when no-one comments on what you are writing - so much so, in fact, that I've already pretty much given up and rarely post anything on there anymore.

The verdict? Facebook is all right. Most of what's on there is rubbish, but it's pretty useful if, as I do, you have lots of family or friends who live far away and want to feel a bit more connected to them. The novelty soon wears off, however.

Yasmin Levy

2010-02-25T05:25:00.000-08:00

I went to see Yasmin Levy last night at the lovely Cadogan Hall. Levy is an Israeli-born singer based in Spain who sings in Spanish and Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews of Spain - now severely endangered with only 150,000 speakers. Her music combines the raw emotion of Ladino traditional song with the passion of flamenco, incorporating Middle Eastern, Turkish and - on her new album Sentir ("To Feel") - jazz influences. Blessed with sultry good looks, great stage presence and possessed of a simply astonishing voice - deep, smoky and powerful - Levy is now a genuine star of world music.

Photo by Ali Taskiran
© 2009 World Village

She took to the stage looking stunning in a fantastically gothic black and red flamenco outfit, surrounded by her five-man band in uniform red shirts and black trousers, and proceeded to wow the sold-out crowd with an hour and a half of absolutely fantastic songs. This is music that comes straight from the heart, that speaks of yearning and longing even if you don't understand a word of the lyrics. Some aspects of her performance seemed self-consciously mannered: the slow-motion flamenco moves; the rambling between-song monologues; the mawkish duet with a recording of her dead father; the dismal attempt to lead the predominantly white, late-middle-aged audience in a singalong during her Spanish cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (disparagingly described by one critic as "superfluous"); the truly weird, shuddering vocal style in the copla (popular traditional) song La Hija De Juan Simón ("The Daughter Of Juan Simón") - introduced by Levy as "the saddest song ever", it's about a gravedigger who has to bury his own daughter - which is obviously meant to evoke heaving sobs but came off simply as melodramatic (the version on the album is more listenable). But hey, maybe it's a Spanish thing, and in any case these are purely cosmetic complaints, none of which can detract from the quality of the music.

Sadly, she didn't perform Porque ("Why"), for me one of the undisputed highlights of Sentir (it's recorded on the album as a duet with gravel-voiced Greek diva Eleni Vitali, but I feel sure she could have carried it on her own), but I wasn't too disappointed, as she performed her signature song Nací En Alamó ("Born In Alamó"), also sometimes known as "The Gypsy's Song" and originally written and recorded for the French film Vengo. It is one of my all-time favourite songs and simply has to be heard to be believed.

When, during a couple of uptempo numbers towards the end of the night, she finally cut loose into some proper flamenco dancing, her sexy moves set pulses racing among the late-middle-aged males in the audience. I must confess that although she's a good-looking woman I didn't actually find her that attractive, perhaps because the more I looked at her, the more she reminded me of my company's "bubbly" former head of sales. Although at the end of the gig I heard one couple saying that they couldn't take their eyes off her, for more than half the set my attention was fixed on her band, who were uniformly excellent and a truly international bunch - Scottish and Indian guitarists, one of whom also played mandolin; an English double bassist; an Armenian reeds player who received some of the biggest applause of the night for his frenetic soloing on the duduk; and on percussion, Levy's Israeli manager - and husband - Ishay Amir, who sat on and played what can only be described as a large wooden box.

Levy left the stage to a standing ovation but she loses points for charging £15 for CDs at the merch stall - presumably at a posh venue like Cadogan Hall they figured they could get away with it, selling to people who have no idea how much CDs are worth. It's a measure of how impressed I was with the evening that I'm going to buy one - but I'm going to do it on Amazon.

Inspector Chang

2010-01-22T01:50:00.000-08:00

I finally finished a screenplay treatment for my story Zach which I wrote about here and I've been getting some people on the movie team at work to have a look at it for me. Anyhow, it got me to thinking about another character whom I created many years ago and plan to revive in the future - Inspector Chang.

This character, who was, in essence, a pulp superhero, was one of my first forays into writing original fiction. I created him, together with a black American kid called Rayner Enyong, when I was at school in Africa. The character, or at the very least many of his exploits and the grotesquely over-the-top, grand guignol violence in the stories, was heavily inspired by a supremely trashy pulp action-adventure novel Rayner and I read, which was part of an ongoing series featuring a character named Richard Camellion, the "Death Merchant", a brutal mercenary who spoke in corny one-liners and was a health freak who drank milk and ate raisins.

Chang, despite being ostensibly a New York City Police Department detective inspector, obviously worked - for reasons I cannot now remember or explain - under the auspices of the CIA or some other such clandestine organization, as he was forever being sent round the world, James Bond style, to battle some criminal syndicate or terrorist group or other, most of which were doubtless inspired by the evil Cobra organization in G.I. Joe. Chang was a martial arts master who had been trained from childhood by a semi-mystical order of Buddhist monks, the Silver Star, to be an unstoppable killing machine.

Rayner and I even attempted to write a Chang novel and, a few years later, before we came up with the story that would form the basis of Zach, my friend Bill and I tried to write another one called Rubber Nails And Glass Hammers. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not much better than the original stories, but it did give me the confidence to believe that something could seriously be done with the character.

In my new Chang reboot, the action is transposed to 1930s New York, where Chang is a brilliant young police detective who has had to confront both racial prejudice and corruption to rise in the ranks. When a sinister series of slayings grips the city, Chang's investigation leads him to suspect that the Silver Star may be involved - and that they may not be everything he believed them to be. Don't hold your breath, though - it won't be going into production anytime soon.

ReBoot

2009-11-19T03:14:00.000-08:00

While we're on the topic of cult TV shows, I'm going to move onto another forgotten gem, ReBoot, a Canadian animated series which ran for four years between 1994 and 2001. Set inside a computer where the principal characters were programs, sprites and viruses, had names like Dot Matrix and were subject to the godlike whim of "The User", who forced them to participate in games that could lead to their deletion, it was notable for being one of the very first productions to be entirely computer generated, predating the iconic Toy Story by a whole year.

Dot Matrix
Image © Rainmaker Entertainment

These days CGI is so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine a world without it, so it's simply impossible to overstate the impact the show had when it first aired - at the time it seemed almost unbelievably innovative, groundbreaking and futuristic, even though the graphics, before they improved dramatically in the third season, were relatively clunky and already look preposterously dated.

One of the major reasons for ReBoot's success was that it was unafraid to outgrow its target audience. Although it remained ostensibly a "children's show" to the last, it grew progressively darker in tone, and some of the writing was decidedly near the knuckle; how the vicious anti-religious satire in "Daemon Rising", where the angelically beautiful super-virus Daemon subjugates skeptical sprites through the insidious, brainwashing power of "The Word", got past Broadcast Standards & Practices I'll never know.

Daemon
Image © Rainmaker Entertainment

After many years off the air, ReBoot relaunched last year with an unprecedented and utterly innovative concept. On a new website built almost entirely from user-generated content, five stories were picked from fan submissions and were then voted on by the public; the winning team would go on to turn their story into a webcomic. My personal favourite was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the very darkest one, set 17 years in the future, where the heroine has been forced to marry the villain, who rules over the whole system, and their rebellious teenaged daughter discovers that the hero, now a homeless bum living in the city's streets, is her real father, and becomes a resistance fighter. Sadly, this one didn't win; the public went for the safe option instead, although the winning entry, the wonderfully titled "Paradigms Lost", was perfectly respectable. At the same time, it was announced that ReBoot was being turned into a trilogy of feature films for theatrical release, the first of which is due to hit cinemas next year.

This model of involving the fans deeply in the rebirth process of the show stands as an inspiration to me in my quest to revive The Dreamstone. When fans have a genuine emotional investment in the property, they are that much more likely to follow it through many incarnations. Some balk at the idea of a Dreamstone webcomic, CGI series or feature film, preferring instead to wallow in woolly, cosy nostalgia. To me, no idea is too outlandish, no option can be ruled out, in the service of ensuring that the property lives again.

The Dreamstone

2009-11-18T05:33:00.000-08:00

Well, one of the things I said this blog was going to be about was cult TV shows and you can't get much more cult than The Dreamstone, a British animated series that aired for four years between 1990 and 1995 and currently ranks in my top five favourite TV shows of all time.

The Dreammaker & Albert
Image © Dolphy

Zordrak
Image © Mike Jupp

The show can genuinely be called a global cult phenomenon: a completely original concept with fully realized, lovingly rendered characters including a truly horrific villain, a complex and involving mythology, and an epic, fully orchestrated score by Mike Batt (the man behind "Bright Eyes", one of the most haunting and moving pop songs of all time); superbly written, animated and voice acted, it aired in a number of non-English-speaking territories including Germany, Brazil, Israel and Russia, but sadly never broke the States despite an alternative pilot made for the US market featuring the voice of one Christian Bale. Despite the astonishing statistic that at the peak of its popularity five million people were tuning in to watch it every week in the UK alone, it sadly petered out after four seasons, became mired in rights issues, has never been re-aired and has slipped inexorably into obscurity.

The internet age has brought about a resurgence of nostalgia for old TV shows through sites such as Toonhound and tv.com, and a small but die-hard fan community for The Dreamstone has sprung up with several fan sites, the above-referenced Wikipedia article and even an IMDB page. The main hub for fans of the show is the personal forum of its creator Mike Jupp, who in my opinion can only be described as a visionary genius.

Although a couple of DVDs have been released, most of the show's episodes are unavailable, although several have been upped onto YouTube. One of the most interesting fan productions has been the contribution of the graphic artist DS_Dreamer who has created a level for Little Big Planet based on the show, as part of the coursework for a computer game design course:

I believe that I may be one of only a handful of private individuals in the world to have almost every single episode of the series on VHS tape, and I've just bought a video conversion gadget with the aim of digitizing the whole thing. I've recently been watching it again with my eight-year-old daughter, who loves it too - proof that the show's quality endures. (I've recently discovered, much to my dismay, that I am missing just one episode: "Auntie Again", the first episode of season four. Does anyone have a complete copy of this episode and would they be willing to do me a dub of it? If so, get in touch!)

I've also been posting on many of the above-mentioned sites in an attempt to see the show revived in some fashion. Mike Jupp himself has said he would love to do a new CGI series, but as the rights to the show are currently owned by Cookie Jar, who seem to have no interest in it, any forward motion is stymied. I urge anyone who has fond memories of the show to get involved - join Jupp's forum, post positive comments on IMDB etc., and petition Cookie Jar to a) re-release the whole series on DVD and b) sell the rights back to Jupp so he can make a new series. A show this good doesn't deserve to languish in obscurity.

Julie Fowlis

2009-11-16T05:49:00.000-08:00

I went to see the sublime Julie Fowlis in concert at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith a few weeks ago and I have to say I was absolutely blown away. This was by far the best gig I have ever been to - better even than Rachel's at the Union Chapel. Fowlis, who sings exclusively in Scottish Gaelic, is renowned for her beautifully sweet, clear vocals and her virtuoso whistle playing, and she absolutely did not disappoint. Showcasing material off her new album "Uam" ("From Me"), together with her band she tore through a set of raucous jigs and reels - despite clearly being heavily pregnant - as well as presenting some of the saddest songs in the world. It was her only London date of the year and the venue, one of the smallest on the tour, was wonderfully intimate. Fowlis literally has the voice of an angel; the entire audience, most of whom could not understand a word she sang, were enraptured from beginning to end. The sheer quality of the musicianship on show was undeniable - the whole band had that effortless brilliance that comes from having played since they were old enough to stand, and what shone through was their sense of humour, the fact that they didn't take the music too seriously and weren't stuffy or precious about it at all. Sadly my copy of the album had not yet arrived so I wasn't able to take it along for her to sign, but I did get to meet her after the gig and try out my Gaelic on her. She was ever so nice, and my classmates were green with envy! Fowlis deserves every single bit of the praise and adulation that has been heaped upon her, not least for single-handedly raising the profile of Gaelic worldwide. Watch this short film about her new album...

...and then buy it immediately - you'll be doing yourself an enormous favour.

Franky is finished!

2009-11-16T05:32:00.000-08:00

My brother and I finally finished mastering my new tune "Franky" a few weeks ago and as promised, I upload it here for your delectation. Please be patient - it takes a little while to load, but it does play eventually.

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It's in my classic usual style of bright pop-rock juxtaposed with exceptionally dark, blackly comic lyrics, which in this case are inspired by the German cannibal killer Armin Meiwes who cooked and ate a man he met on the internet. Meiwes was originally acquitted of murder on the grounds that his victim Bernd Brandes volunteered to be killed, but was later convicted in a retrial. He is currently serving a life sentence. The story, both horrific and tragic, continues to fascinate me and I wrote this song from Meiwes's point of view, using only his own words in order to make it as real as possible; in this sense the song can be regarded as "autobiographical" even though he didn't actually write it himself. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it, please comment.

I strike a blow for international freedom of speech

2009-10-07T05:30:00.000-07:00

This morning I went onto the Belgian-based online music magazine Side-Line, one of my favourite sites for news about electro-industrial music, and was shocked to discover that they had made it impossible for anyone other than Facebook users to post comment on their news items. Being, as I am, an opponent of the corporate might of Facebook and other "social networking" sites, which I view as intrusive and unnecessary, I immediately sent an email to them to complain, denouncing the move as a dangerous and ill-advised attempt to curb freedom of speech. I felt this tremendously ironic given that the site has long held itself up as a bastion of that very thing, even refusing to condemn the extreme right-wing views of Croat rocker Marko "Thompson" Perkovic. Shortly thereafter I received an email from Side-Line's chief editor Bernard Van Isacker, whose rationale for the move was that "it avoids that people hide themselves behind anonymous accounts like what was the case in the past on Side-Line and where Side-Line was the only one to take responsability [sic] for comments that appeared on the site". However, after I argued that he was denying the right to comment to the many people who do not wish to have a Facebook account, he changed it back, with the caveat that "if abused it goes down immediately", which I thought was perfectly reasonable. Ultimately, however, his argument just doesn't wash with me. Everyone who leaves a comment has to give an email address, which I accept could be fake, but I see no reason why Side-Line should have to "take responsibility" for comments that appear on the site - surely they could just have a corporate-style disclaimer saying something like "All views expressed in comments are posters' own and do not necessarily represent the views of Side-Line and its affiliates". I suggested this to Mr Van Isacker, but have yet to receive a response.

Ash charge fans £130 for double album

2009-10-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago Ash, the Northern Irish rockers once touted as saviours of British indie, announced that they would no longer be making albums and would only release singles instead. They have held true to their word and starting next week they are releasing a series of 26 seven-inch singles, one a fortnight, and doing an A-Z tour of obscure UK towns from Aldershot to Zennor. Each of these singles has one track (the B-side is etched) and retails for £5. This means that if fans choose to buy them all, they will pay £130 for a double album's worth of material. Way to screw your fans, Tim! Now I lost interest in Ash years ago but even if I was a fan I would stick two fingers up to this shameless cashgrab and download the whole lot for free just to teach them a lesson, which is exactly what I hope happens. And what's the bet that at the end of the year, all the tracks will be released on a double CD retailing for a tenth of the cost of the vinyl? "Oh, it's not really an album," they'll say. "It's a compilation."

The trouble with Gaelic

2009-09-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

People are always bemoaning the fact that young people don't want to learn Gaelic. Well I'll tell you why - it' s because they're not seeing anything in Gaelic culture that they can connect with. And when the pinnacle of Gaelic popular culture is these guys, who can blame them? What is needed is something ultra-hip and trendy, that kids actually like. To this end I have decided to write and produce a Gaelic pop-trance tune in the style of All Around The World Records called "Cuan Eadarainn" ("An Ocean Between Us"), have it sung by an attractive young lady and shoot a sexy video for it. The kids will lap it up! Is anybody interested in getting involved? To start with, my friends in my Gaelic class are going to give me some help in translating the lyrics (as my Gaelic isn't that great, I've written it in English first), and then I'll be looking for a vocalist.

Visual Kei

2009-07-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

For a couple of years now my favourite genre of music has been visual kei, a form of rock music from Japan. “Kei” translates variously as “type”, “style” or “system”. As you can probably imagine from the name, the look of the bands is pretty important. It’s probably best described as a cross between glam metal, goth and new romantic, with some of the bands wearing ridiculously elaborate stage costumes. 99.9% of the bands in the scene have exclusively male members but the aim seems to be to look as "androgynous" (read: feminine) as possible. This is probably because the target market for the music, in Japan at least, is predominantly teenage girls, who, presumably, fancy men who look like teenage girls.

However, as far as I’m concerned, music is an auditory medium, not a visual one, and it’s what the music sounds like that matters. Many suggest that VK is not actually a single genre of music at all, that it’s more like what I have called a “virtual genre” like emo, nu-metal or clicks ‘n’ cuts – that is, a catch-all term for a number of essentially unrelated genres that just happen to be thematically linked in some way. I beg to differ - you know immediately when you’re listening to a VK band. What I like best about it is that unlike in the West, there is no taboo about mashing different genres together, so you can have pop, punk, metal, industrial, electronica and Japanese traditional influences right next to each other, even in the course of the same song. Also, lines or even single words of English will be randomly dropped into the lyrics, presumably for aesthetic effect. In my opinion, the very best bands are those who balance the darkness and power of modern metal with the melodic immediacy of pop. When it’s done right, it doesn’t sound at all forced, but natural. At these moments it becomes obvious why this is swiftly becoming my favourite genre of all time. Watch this space for regular updates on the new VK albums I’ve bought, along with my views.

Tha beagan Gàidhlig agam

2009-07-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

I've been learning Gaelic at City Lit in London for the last year. It's the summer holidays now, but there's one more year of the course left, which I'm going to sign up for. I'm really enjoying learning it; I think I caught the language-learning bug after studying German for four years as part of my linguistics degree at Birkbeck. As a Celtic language, Gaelic is quite hard to learn if you're used to learning Germanic or Romance languages like most people in this country do in school. It has verb-subject-object word order, which means the verb usually comes first in the sentence. It also has some weird idiosyncracies, such as having no verb "to have", which means that if you want to say you have something you have to say it's "at" you or "on" you, and if you want to say that you are something, you have to say that it's "in" you. There are loads of these prepositional constructions and in addition, all the prepositions can combine with all the pronouns to create scores of "prepositional pronouns" which you also have to learn. Having a linguistics degree is a definite advantage because then you understand how languages actually work and fit together. It's a real challenge but hey, I like that sort of thing and there are loads of resources to help, most prominently BBC Alba, the BBC's Gaelic-language TV channel. I've also joined two fora for learners, Fòram na Gàidhlig and mygaelic. Despite a recent increase in institutional support, many people (primarily Scots, I'm sorry to say) seem to feel there is no value in learning Gaelic. I am proud of my Scottish heritage and I think of Gaelic as a link to my ancestors, who would have spoken it. But it is also an intrinsic part of the culture and history of the British Isles and as a linguist, I will fight tooth and nail to prevent it from going the way of the dodo.

Recording

2009-07-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

I was in the studio with my brother the other evening working on recordings for my new tune "Franky", which will hopefully appear on the debut release from my long-lived, on-again-off-again musical project Listed Buildings. Hopefully I'll one day get around to finishing the band's website; in the meantime I'll post regular bits about it here. My brother is the former frontman of sadly defunct Croydon indie rock band Free Flights Up and is friends with a guy who has built a fully-functional studio at the bottom of his garden and lets us use it for free. Recordings are going well, this was our third session and we've pretty much done most of it - only the guitar solo, keyboard and backing vocals left to do. Hopefully we'll finish it next time and then I'll post it here for your delectation.

My bro at the mixing desk...

...on the acoustic guitar...

...and me in the vocal booth. Attractive, eh?

Nicola Roberts

2009-07-15T05:09:00.000-07:00

The members of Girls Aloud were in the paper again last night for some reason or another. After careful deliberation, I can categorically state that Nicola Roberts, the "ugly" one, is the only genuinely good-looking member of the group.

Yoga

2009-07-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

I've been doing yoga for about six months and I went again last night. I don't do a great deal of exercise so it's a chance for me to get a good workout. The first time I went I thought "Oh this'll be easy, it's just bending and stretching" but at the end of the class I felt like I'd been hit by a truck! Last night wasn't so bad but it was still a workout - my teacher is very sweet but she's a hard taskmaster! My favourite pose is probably kakasana, a.k.a. "the crow".

Other poses I also like are the fish, the camel, the bow, the half moon and the warrior II, images of which can also be found on Ann Pizer's yoga guide. I like yoga because as well as increasing "supplety" and muscle strength, it has the spiritual dimension of a martial art, but without all the bowing and scraping ("Hai, Sensei.") I did jujutsu for a few weeks a while back but they all loved it too much, it was like the evil dojo in The Karate Kid.

Yoga is definitely more up my street!

Zach

2009-07-13T05:30:00.000-07:00

I have enjoyed writing creatively for many years and I'm currently working on my first screenplay, a thriller tentatively entitled "Zach". My mate Bill and I came up with the characters and the story about 15 years ago and since then I've been trying to turn it into a novel until I realized that I simply don't have the patience to finish a novel. Screenplays are much cooler - although you don't get so much control over the finished product, they're a helluva lot easier to write because you don't have to write 500 pages, you only have to write about 120 pages and most of it is dialogue. I've been using an online thing called Scripped Writer which is really nice 'cause it does all the fiddly formatting for you, allowing you to just write the damn thing. However you do have to be online to use it so I'm looking into an installable one called Celtx as I do a lot of writing on the Tube and you can't get internet access underground (yet). Once this one's done I'm going to try to sell it on WordHustler while I set to work on some more, I've got I think about twelve stories lined up so I'm not short on ideas. At the moment I'm finishing my story treatment and will soon be able to start blasting the thing out in earnest - I'll keep you posted.

First Post

2009-07-09T05:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally did it. After literally years of agonizing over whether it was worth getting involved in blogging, I finally decided to take the plunge, having decided that there was just too much interesting stuff going on in my head, and not enough people in "real life" that I felt I could share it with. This will be my forum for talking about any and all of the stuff that fascinates, amuses or repels me. Take a look at my profile to get an idea of the things that I like (they're many and varied). I like to think I have an interesting mind - if you have one too, start following this blog and prepare to get bombarded with a totally random collection of cool and interesting stuff.