Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

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!

My brother and I finally finished mastering my new tune "Franky" a few weeks ago. Check it out here on SoundCloud:


https://soundcloud.com/iain_buthchanain/listed-buildings-franky
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.