In The Bath

Reasons why I love David Bowie #485

2011-06-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

On his mammoth 1974 tour to promote the album Diamond Dogs, David Bowie began the first leg with the usual Glam theatrics he was dealing in at the time (an over-the-top re-creation of 'Hunger City', the setting of the Diamond Dogs album; a cherry-picker he sat on which went over the crowd; singing into a telephone etc.) However, by the time the second leg kicked off in LA, Bowie had acted on his nascent obsession with Philadelphia soul music by transforming the show into more of a soul revue, stripping away any pretence and often featuring a stark white backdrop in front of which he almost carried out a one man show.

Changing the whole set and feel of a tour halfway through is pretty radical and something promoters of acts as big as Bowie (if there are any) simply wouldn't stand for today. The fact that many American concert-goers were expecting one thing but were given something completely different demonstrates Bowie's relentless imperative to act upon whatever took his fancy at the time. Also he managed to complete the tour on a diet of red peppers, milk and, most importantly, cocaine. What an engine.

The Magic of Rogers, Edwards and Thompson

2011-06-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

Stepping into the studio to follow up her self-titled 1983 debut, Madonna sought the help of Chic bandleader Nile Rodgers to propel her career to the stratospheric heights her psychotic (never mind blonde) ambition demanded.

Rodgers called upon his Chic associates Bernard Edwards (bass) and Tony Thompson (drums) to help create Like a Virgin (1984), an album which my mind instantly jumps to when thinking about what a great pop record should be.

An all-time favourite of mine, and one which appears on the album, is Material Girl, a track which demonstrates Rodgers, Edwards and Thompson as the impossibly water-tight rhythm section they were.

It's tacky, it's gimmicky, it's pure bubblegum and for these very reasons it's a damn fine single.

What's always impressed me with this song, however, is Tony Thompson's drumming. Rock solid for the verses, his snappy flourishes before the chorus puts one foot of this song in territory clearly marked 'Rock'.

Does it get more perfect than this?

Wake Up: A new found appreciation of Arcade Fire

2011-06-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

For a long time now I've tried my hardest to resist Canadian band Arcade Fire. I'm a stubborn bastard and their perceived infallibility mixed with the hysterical popularity they garner plays right into my hands. Hands that love to play devil's advocate.

But the devil will find work for idle hands to do and on being given all three of the band's studio albums to borrow I've found myself succumbing to their indefineable magic.

It's the passion. In an age which is one huge, non-committal shrug of the shoulders, Arcade Fire have a startling intensity about their music. It's rousing, it's enervating, it makes so many other mainstream acts sound like dilly-dallying time-wasters. You can hear that they mean every measure of tape they lay down and are no strangers to some good old-fashioned hard work.

There's not much more I can say, really, because I don't think they deserve to be ham-fistedly dissected by me. However, a current favourite is Intervention from 2007s Neon Bible. If this doesn't stir you, nothing will.

Now to try and like Animal Collective...

Semi-final Magic

2011-04-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

It's FA Cup semi-final weekend and I was looking on the Guardian's website at a great Joy of Six article highlighting some majestic semi-final moments. It's the sort of writing which makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up; dramatic descriptions of true footballing heroes and their super-human exploits on the field. (the segment about Bryan Robson is excellent.)

Ryan Giggs' bob and weave against Arsenal gets the inevitable mention but, despite being one of the great semi-final strikes, I put another on par with it.

Mark Hughes' volley against Oldham for Manchester United in the '94 semi embodies everything which makes Sparky one of my favourite ever United players.

The Guardian article cites context as being vital in the compiling of their list and this goal features the sort of heart-stopping drama which United made their own in the 1990s and beyond.

After a dull 90 minutes Oldham went ahead in extra-time when Neil Pointon stabbed home after an uncharacteristic Peter Schmeichel flap. With a minute left, and United running out of ideas, Brian McClair looped a desperate ball over his shoulder to ask questions of the Oldham defence. Muscling his way between a couple of defenders it dropped to Hughes who pulled the trigger on that pneumatic right foot of his to keep United's double dream alive.

It was so typical of the Welshman. He was a warrior, always ready for battle and always putting his body on the line for the good of the team, commitment never a question. Sir Alex Ferguson once said you could put your life on Hughes scoring when you needed a goal and here he drew on all his bravery and supreme vollying technique to take the tie to a replay (which United ran out 4-1 winners). God, I love Mark Hughes.

Lyric of the Week

2011-04-14T03:12:00.001-07:00

Clutching at straws? Most likely. But I've been listening to a bit of Nick Cave recently (both with the Bad Seeds and his 'other' band Grinderman) and it is on a song from Grinderman's second album, Grinderman 2, which has found me laughing to myself on the bus, getting a couple of odd glances in the process.

The song is Kitchenette, a classic Cave tale of adultery, lust and death, and the lyrics in question are:

I keep hanging around your kitchenette
And I'm gonna get a pot to cook you in
I stick my fingers in your biscuit jar
and crush all your gingerbread men...

Menacing enough, but the lines which have brought me much mirth are:

What's this husband of yours ever given to you
Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen
And a brood of junky buck-toothed imbeciles
The ugliest fucking kids I've ever seen

Synth Brittania

2011-04-11T05:17:00.000-07:00

Having dipped right into all that is synth- and electro-pop recently (I found Dare by the Human League at a car boot sale on vinyl) I decided to look up a documentary BBC4 showed called Synth Britannia.

I can't remember when it was first shown but it isn't on iPlayer anymore. Instead, I found it on Youtube and have pasted the links to all six parts. Don't worry, its only an hour and a half long (not long enough for me, though) and covers the genre's beginnings in 1970s industrial England through to inadvertently providing the soundtrack to the social upheavals of Thatcher's Britain. I think its a great documentary and expresses how significant, irreverent, varied, daft and creative the genre was (and still is considering the synthesiser has been reigning supreme for a number of years now). Enjoy.

My favourite album cover, like, EVER!

2011-03-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

There's something terribly unforgiving about the cover of the Human League's 1980 album, Travelogue.

The grainy lack of focus, the violently bright sun lurking ominously (is it rising or setting?), and the mysterious figure being transported across harsh arctic plains - all of these elements add to an overall picture of nihilism, of a bleak, solitary future (the League were constantly looking forward) where there is a lack of simple human connection. In short, I think it looks brilliantly chilling.

The cover also reminds me of the opening scenes of John Carpenter's re-make of The Thing, which sees an Alaskan Malamute running away from it's frantic Scandinavian masters after something has gone horrifically wrong at their research facility.

Unfortunately I can't find out who shot the cover. But in a weird way I don't want to know.

Live: Crystal Stilts - 24/3/11 - Audio, Brighton

2011-03-28T11:28:00.001-07:00

Judging by the scowls on their faces it’s difficult to tell whether Brooklyn noise-popsters Crystal Stilts like to be beside the seaside. The first show of their seven-date British tour sees them on the south-east coast in Brighton playing to a surprisingly sparse crowd.

All too often the band has not so much been accused of ripping off Joy Division but molesting Ian Curtis’ corpse. The post-punk pioneers are clearly an influence, but Crystal Stilts also take inspiration from the strung-out insouciance of Velvet Underground and the swampy mysticism of the Doors.

The influences come together seductively on Departure, a swirling broth of fuzz bass, descending chords and creeping, funereal keys. The song is drawn out, letting it have its way with the audience, and when it is brought to an end, punters shake their heads wondering what strange plane they had just been taken to.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. When it wants to their music can reach euphoric highs, as demonstrated on the spritely Sycamore Tree and the swaggering Through the Floor. This is as upbeat as it gets though as these moments are snuffed out quickly by a further dose of the morose.

For the most part the band look thoroughly disinterested but one gets the feeling that it would be a cardinal sin for them to look like they enjoy what they are doing. Does Lou Reed ever smile? Did Ian Curtis ever burst out into a beaming, ear to ear grin? Lucky for them their music has plenty of life in it yet.

Friday On My Mind

2011-03-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

Like 42.5million other people, my curiosity got the better of me the other day and I watched the video for Rebecca Black's Friday on Youtube.

I was typically reluctant at first as I had decided the song was going to be an atrocity. It was a purely instinctive reaction, but then I thought why not see how bad it actually is? Maybe its the masochist in me, he who writhes and squirms ecstatically in the horror, but I have always found terrible music highly comedic, no matter how earnest the performer is.

My opinion didn't change once I had heard it. Yes, it is a sorry piece of music, the aural equivalent of watching a dog with no legs trying to stand up, but is it really worse than anything else in the charts?

The top 40 has always been smattered with shit and as I write this it is no different. The Black Eyed Peas have their perennial place in there, this week with Just Can't Get Enough. Its as irritating and auto-tuned as Black's single. Another pot shot leads us to Tinie Tempah's Wonderman (featuring Ellie Goulding), which is as banal and monotone as listening to an old person talk about something which you simply do not care about.

What do we have here? Olly Murs' Heart On My Sleeve, a terminal ballad of euthanasian proportions; Alexis Jordan's Good Girl, one of the worst songs to enter the chart this year, yet it reached number six; and George Michael's butchering of True Faith, calling into question whether it is worth saving children in Africa.

Friday certainly isn't better than anything in the charts but with all the commotion surrounding it one could be forgiven for thinking that it was a recitation of the Nazi Party manifesto produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. With it's insistence on repetition and auto-tuning it is no different to the majority of the music in the charts right now. Take this as a warning: we haven't heard the last of Rebecca Black.

...But Seriously.

2011-03-09T08:43:00.000-08:00

And so today it was announced that Phil Collins is retiring from the music industry. I can't say I've ever cared for Collins' music except that he features prominently in my favourite book of all time, Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

Patrick Bateman's meandering paeans to stars such as Collins, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News are amongst the funniest moments in the book and go some way to demonstrate Bateman's sickeningly bland facade, masking the gnarled torment within.

In Mary Harron's film adaptation, Bateman (played by Christian Bale) entertains two prostitutes whilst informing them emotively about Collins' work with Genesis ("too artsy, too intellectual") and his later solo work ("more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way"). Engaging in sex with both women, it is to the soundtrack of Sussudio, Bateman's personal favourite, from Collins' 1985 album No Jacket Required. Its a perfect 80s pop song which, to anyone who has seen the film, is now loaded with gratuitous sexual imagery and Patrick Bateman's immortal line, "Sabrina, don't just stare at it, eat it."

Interview - Gruff Rhys

2011-03-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys' latest solo album, Hotel Shampoo, is based around his monumental collection of complimentary hotel toileteries he has gathered from years of touring the world. Rhys built a miniature hotel from the 500+ bottles of shampoo which was on display at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff and he is currently touring Britain, playing a series of dates in typically unconventional venues. I got an interview with him at St. George's Church in Brighton where he was playing on Saturday.

How was it getting the sound sorted in the church?
It was good today; we can hear each other. Sometimes it can be quite bad but today it seems OK. We usually trust the promoters to get a good venue.

Does touring fill you with as much excitement now as it presumably did when you started with the Super Furry Animals?
Yeah, in a different way, I suppose. When we (SFAs) started to tour the excitement was coupled with being on a long drinking session (laughs). Maybe now it's more about the music. When we were starting out it was a complete head expansion going to a new town. It was an insane absurdity. It was a lot of fun, y'know. We still have fun on tour but that's why we don't tour as often because our bodies can't...so when I tour on my own I'm very sensible. With Super Furry Animals we have a certain influence on each other...

After a series of collaborations, how is it just doing the solo thing?
It's about being...I think this record is about being in my comfort zone, which isn't necessarily the most adventurous thing to do. But you have to give up control over some things.

So you're not a control freak in the studio?
No. I haven't got the loudest voice. When I make my own records it's a lot faster. I'm not the most articulate so I'm not very good at explaining things to other people. It doesn't mean it's a better record. I can record exactly what I was trying to do.

The album was mainly recorded over here but mixed in L.A. Is that a bit surreal?
Yeah, a lot of it was recorded in other people's houses but I had one day in a big commercial studio because I didn't have a record deal. I recorded the drums in one day in a big studio.

Why L.A.?
To work with Mario Caldatto who has done albums with people like Beastie Boys and Tone Loc. He works in his own space, not like a big studio. We worked on his computer. He's got a load of old synths as well so I went round his house to do it. I took my family as well and stayed over there for a bit.

What's your favourite part of America?
I like the energy. It's like becoming a child again because everything is big. That's what I found exciting about touring because it keeps everything new and America is so big you still find something new every day. It seems endless. You could tour there perpetually.

You've said that you wanted to make a record of piano-led ballads but that didn't really happen with the new album. Do you feel your musical tastes have changed?
A lot of things that have gone onto this record are things I've been listening to since I was a teenager. It was very much about making a record of simple songs like you'd get with John Cale and Lou Reed records.

Do you take pride in certain songs more than others?
Yeah, I suppose the ones I'm happiest with are the ones that I had the least control over. Things like Shark Ridden Waters which almost came by chance working with Andy Votel. There's piano on most tracks but the piano on that song is by kids on a toy piano.

Should we expect any more collaborations any time soon?
Yeah, I've been turning a lot of things down. With SFAs we were extremely guarded for years and I was turning everything down until Mogwai asked me to sing on their record (the song Dial:Revenge on 2001s Rock Action), and I love Mogwai, love hanging out with them, and they asked me to go to Glasgow for three days so it was "Yeah, go on then" (laughs).

How was it working with Gorillaz (Rhys collaborated on the track Superfast Jellyfish on 2010s Plastic Beach)? I always imagined Damon Albarn to be a dictator in the studio...
But I suppose he's in his element in the studio - he's surrounded by the instruments he's collected over the years. I think all the money he's made from Gorillaz has gone back into Gorillaz.

Did they let you have much of a say in where the song you collaborated on was going?
For Superfast Jellyfish he had a bassline and we had a fifteen to twenty minute jam and he picked out two bars of it and then put the song together and then he wanted me to write a chorus. He gave me the title. Then I went away and didn't hear it for three or four months - by which time he'd edited my parts and De La Soul came in and did some rhymes which was crazy because I was buying De La Soul records when I was 19. It was, like, "Wow!".

Did you play Glastonbury with them? I didn't see them because I was off watching the Bootleg Beatles at the time.
No, I didn't, I was in L.A. at the time. It's a very unusual situation when I get asked to help headline Glastonbury and have to turn it down.

When you signed with Creation in 1995 were you witness to any of the madness of Alan McGee?
I think he was straight by then but they were extremely exciting times. My experience of Alan McGee was just someone who was extremely enthusiastic about everything he was doing which rubbed off on other people. When he first heard The Man Don't Give a Fuck it was supposed to be a B-side and he was going, "That's a single; lets release it next week". And people in the office were going, "No, Alan, it takes three weeks to manufacture a record"..."OK, lets do it in three weeks." He wanted to do everything straight away which was great.

How motivated would you say you are? Is it good to have someone like that behind you who is propelling you forward?
It's always good to have enthusiastic people behind you. Enthusiasm is an amazing trait to have.

Have you always been this laid back?
Yeah, I don't know if I am laid back...I think some people often mistake enthusiasm and creativity for madness, which is ridiculous when people just want to try things out.

Apart from bottles of hotel shampoo, do you collect, or hoard, anything else?
Yeah, records are acceptable. We're living in a very disposable age and our minds aren't cut out for disposability. I think we still instinctively want to keep hold of everything and we care about the objects. That comes from a time when people had so much less in their lives and they really wanted to take care of those things.

Do you still have your first guitar?
No, I've given those things away...

Out of generosity?
Yeah, people want things for raffles as well.

So you don't have rooms full of guitars at home?
No, no, as a musician I always wanted to be a drummer and I have no interest in guitars. I've got very little emotional attachment with them.

So do you have a few drum kits knocking around at home?
I've got one but it's been shared around half of Cardiff in various studios.

Sit down, Sir Mick

2011-02-24T12:36:00.001-08:00

I took a trip to the supermarket today to buy a pencil sharpener and paid a visit to the magazine aisle to have a look at the music rags.

I thumbed through the latest issue of the NME (I know the NME polarises opinion but I had sent a live review to them and wanted to see if it had been published. It hadn't) and came across a pull-out magazine detailing 'The Greatest Frontmen of All Time'. It turns out Iggy Pop is the greatest frontman of all time. Well done, Iggy. What baffled me more, however, was a small section at the bottom of one page which showed those who hadn't made the list; essentially those who had fallen from grace. And who should I find in that list but Sir Mick Jagger.

Now, call me a romantic, but not only is Mick Jagger the greatest frontman of all time but how he didn't even make the list I'll never know. I think the NME's reasoning was because he started wearing Lycra in the 1980s or some shit like that. My thinking is that Jagger is the original Rock Star, prowling around the stage like an alley cat on heat, and without him and the Stones paving the way for snotty punks to piss off parents nationwide, Iggy Pop and the Stooges wouldn't have been let near a recording studio. And, besides, you can't drunkenly dance like Iggy Pop when you're at a wedding. You'd get blood everywhere for a start.

I might as well tag a Stones song on the end now, hadn't I?

rolling stones - start me up
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The Greatest Album Ever Made

2011-02-18T08:31:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you about the greatest album ever made. It is both polished yet flawed. It is dumb yet clever. It dares to dream yet is rooted firmly in reality. It is The Lexicon of Love by ABC.

During the late-Seventies/early-Eighties, Sheffield produced a handful of bands who spearheaded a new electronic era for British pop. The Holy Trinity of this Steel City explosion were the Human League, Heaven 17 and ABC.

Whilst the Human League and Heaven 17 embraced dynamic synths and other electronic sounds born from the undeniable influence Krautrock was having at the time, ABC were swayed as much by 60s Motown and the idealised glamour of 50s Hollywood as they were Roxy Music and David Bowie - no more so than on their 1982 debut.

The most recognised tracks on the album are Poison Arrow and The Look of Love, yet this is an album where every song, barring the 0:59 interlude of The Look of Love, Pt.4 (although itself a beautifully lush passage of heavenly harps), could have been released as a single.

With Trevor Horn in the control room, the band had one of the most creative pop brains in Britain adding an unashamed gloss to the album: the guitars are tight and choppy; basslines are slapped up and down the fret-board (like all good 80s pop); and string sections add a grand, dramatic sweep to many of the songs.

Where the album races ahead of its contemporaries, however, is in the lovelorn lyrics of Martin Fry. Possessing a voice which is full of painful yearning, once-bitten-twice-shy heartache, and innocent optimism, Fry's witty wordplay and intelligent observations are that rare thing - believable and relateable.

If I were pushed I would say the album reaches its zenith on Valentine's Day, which sees a bruised Fry looking both bitterly and regretfully over a past love. It also has the genius lyrical denouement:

And I'm shaking a hand and clenching a fist/If you gave me a pound for the moments I missed/And I got dancing lessons for all the lips I should have kissed/I'd be a millionaire/I'd be your Fred Astaire

This is simply pop music at its best: both clever and with a heart.

Track listing:
1. Show Me
2. Poison Arrow
3. Many Happy Returns
4. Tears Are Not Enough
5. Valentine's Day
6. The Look of Love, Pt.1
7. Date Stamp
8. All of My Heart
9. 4 Ever 2 Gether
10. The Look of Love, Pt.4
11. Theme from "Mantrap"

The White Stripes: The End

2011-02-09T06:51:00.001-08:00

Ok, ok, this is late but it's been on the back burner for a couple of weeks and I simply had to get it out of my system.

When I heard The White Stripes had split a small wave of melancholy washed over me. They were a band which my generation can confidently claim is ours. Along with other groups which a grateful NME rounded up under the banner 'The New Rock Revolution' (The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines etc.) The White Stripes were able to lift guitar music from the torpor of late-Nineties nu-metal (and I don't care what you say - guitar music will always be significant and its upkeep of massive importance) and swivel attention onto the blues - a genre to which rock and roll owes everything.

The genius was in the simplicity ("Blues is easy to play but hard to feel", said Jimi Hendrix). Suddenly, if you were thrashing around on your guitar in a garage with a friend who plays drums, you didn't need a bass player. Just a really loud amplifier. Jack White took on the role of judge, jury and executioner with his guitar and emerged as one of the most original musicians of the era.

Propelled by a bludgeoning distortion manipulated from analogue recording techniques, White's riffs could tear down walls. Coupled with his mind-bending solos, sounding more like the devil's morsecode thanks to some kind of pitch-shifting device, here you had something to really get your teeth into. Then there was that voice, a terrifying yelp delivered with the bug-eyed insanity of a pantomime villain.

"But she's a shit drummer". That's the response you are most likely to get when talking about Meg White's contribution to The White Stripes. I'm sure she would be the first to acknowledge that she isn't the most accomplished drummer but was technical prowess really needed for such simple songs? The Stripes had a childlike joie de vivre to a lot of their music (think of the kitsch ditties often appearing at the end of albums) and the reassuring, rock-steady backbeat of Meg provided the perfect foundation over which Jack could run amok. Vocally, her siren-like lead on In The Cold, Cold Night, is one of her finest moments.

Marvel at the videos. A testament to the importance they placed on appearance (the colour scheme, Jack's plastic guitar, the distinctly English aesthetic around White Blood Cells and Elephant, the number 3 - who, or what did it relate to?) their videos ranged from the rural to the clever, employing an impressive conveyor belt of directors (and I don't just mean Michel Gondry - although the following video is Gondry-directed). They are even more pronounced now due to the shockingly shite depths to which music videos have plummeted.

But how long could they have sustained the formula? The limits put on the guitar/drums combination were beginning to show around their fifth album Get Behind Me Satan. Whilst other instruments had been employed by this time (the use of a marimba on The Nurse), the visceral, scorched sound of previous albums had given way to more subtle, sparse touches. There was a return to electric blues on Icky Thump but, with Jack White's manifold other ventures gathering a head of steam, the White Stripes were quickly becoming a dot on the horizon.

I always anticipated each White Stripes release with great excitement. If they announced that the whole break up was a ruse and they were to release another album tomorrow, I'd be sure to have that breathless feeling rise up in my chest. Very few bands do that to me nowadays. I guess that means they adhered to the old showbiz mantra of 'leave them wanting more', finish at the top and all that.

The six albums they did release will remain the soundtrack to a time when the world opened up for me and I'll always listen to them with a lot of love and affection, never mind the sense of danger and menace they often induce in this listener. Funny, evil, baffling, cool - an utterly unique band. White Stripes, you will be missed.

Gary Moore R.I.P.

2011-02-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

I've just heard that former Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore has died at the age of 58. I've got great memories of the man because the first proper live gig I ever went to was with my dad to see Gary Moore at the Colston Hall in Bristol.

I was about 14 and really into playing guitar at the time. I still love to play but at that time it was everything for me. I remember being completely slack-jawed at the sheer talent Moore possessed. Me, my dad and a thousand-odd ageing rockers sporting well-worn denim jackets and leather trousers all left very happy.

Me and my dad went to see him the year after at the same venue and had tickets to Bath's International Guitar Festival where Moore was scheduled to play. When we got to the gig there was a huge sign outside which read 'Appearance by Gary Moore cancelled.' Me and my dad were completely gutted but, luckily, Moore's place was taken by another fantastic guitarist called Bernie Marsden. But it wasn't Moore. Zach Starkey was the house drummer that night.

I thought about putting a solo song of Moore's up but then remembered that he plays on one of my all-time favourite Thin Lizzy tracks, Waiting For An Alibi. Crank it up.

R.I.P. Gary Moore

Quitter

2011-01-30T10:52:00.000-08:00

This is a little bit 'Dear Diary', but I wanted to put out there that I'm trying to quit smoking at the moment and feel pretty darn good about it.

I started smoking when I was 15 (thats 10 years this year) and have tried a few times to stop but have now gone about a month without having a cigarette (I don't like to say the exact number of days; it puts a kind of unnecessary pressure on the whole thing) which is the longest I've ever done.

Usually I start again when I go out for a drink. As soon as I get a glass filled with alcohol in my hand my mind turns to cigarettes. And that's just after the first sip of the first drink. But recently I've been managing to go out, have a drink, and not smoke. It was touch and go on Friday when I had an unlit cigarette in my hand but I just really didn't want it.

One of the great things about having a real go at stopping is the money I've been saving. It's not like I'm flush with cash but my bank balance has been looking healthier.

Another great thing is that I've felt more energetic in the last month. Fortunately this has come at the right time because I've needed to pull some late-nighters due to exams recently.

The best thing about trying to stop, and going this long without a cigarette, though, is the sense of control I've felt. I no longer feel as though my day is dictated by rolling cigarettes and smoking them at regular intervals. My first thought in the morning isn't 'Do I have enough tobacco for today?' or 'Where will I get some smokes later when I run out?' and that feels incredibly good.

I'm not counting any chickens because, as previously mentioned, I've tried to quit a number of times now. This time around, though, I think I've given myself the best chance yet of stopping permanently.

All Things Must Pass

2011-01-29T12:22:00.001-08:00

Stress has been the order of the day recently due to the exams which are part of the journalism course I'm doing (I got my media law result back yesterday and got a B which means I'm not likely to get sued for libel any time soon).

One evening, working late in the college library, I had a look through the music section and decided to take out George Harrison's first post-Beatles solo album, All Things Must Pass.

For some reason I've never bothered with this album. There's something about the Beatles' respective solo work which rarely inspires me. There are flashes of genius here and there but I always feel listening to them, knowing they don't have the other three behind them, tearing it up, is like visiting a beautiful, famous landmark only to find that building work is being done to it. It's just not the same.

That's changed now. Harrison's album single-handedly saved me from losing my mind under a ton of revision notes. It's pure folk-rock and has the most incredible warmth about the production. Also, the lyrics shed light on the relief, but also the bitterness, Harrison was feeling about the Beatles' split. Whats more, he wrote most of the songs whilst the Beatles were still functioning, only to have them dismissed by Lennon and McCartney. Who knows, maybe they felt a hint of worry that George was suddenly threatening their empire with the superb material he was writing as the group were falling apart.

Anyway, below is a song from the album called Let it Down. Quite possibly my favourite song on the album, it's a perfect example of both the chaos and the calm felt after the group's split.

Pugilism At Its Worst: Gerald McClellan

2010-11-14T12:24:00.000-08:00

Boxing's latest farce saw David Haye beat a woeful Audley Harrison last night in Manchester. I was doing a bit of digging around on the internet and ended up finding information on an American boxer named Gerald McClellan.

McClellan was scheduled to fight Britain's 'Dark Destroyer' Nigel Benn in London way back in 1995. Benn was the overwhelming underdog as McClellan was pretty much in the prime of his boxing life. Ten rounds later McClellan was taken to hospital where he went into a coma. He emerged eleven days later with severe brain damage, the loss of sight in both eyes and significant loss of hearing. He couldn't walk for a long time but later managed to regain some mobility. He never regained his sight or hearing.

Benn couldn't be blamed for what happened; he was merely fighting for his career, trying to prove all of his doubters wrong in a sport which is more than willing to throw you on the scrap heap if you aren't earning enough money for promoters.

Typically, promoter Don King did nothing to help McClellan after the fight and it was up to other boxers to get together to help raise money for the guy. He got about $60,000 for the fight which destroyed his life but this paled in comparison to the $700,000 Benn was guaranteed.

Boxing is a barbaric sport which sees men put it all on the line in front of a pumped up crowd baying for blood. The promoters are manipulative hucksters, more than ready to put someone else's life secondary to a big pay day. My opinion of the sport has never been one of admiration and after reading up about McClellan I wouldn't judge Audley Harrison for getting out of the lion's pit and retiring with his head in tact.

Below is a video about McClellan. Its a bit of a patchy one I found on Youtube but demonstrates perfectly the horrendous nature of boxing and the pyrrhic lengths people go to in the name of sport. I certainly wouldn't judge anyone if they liked the sport as it carries its history like everything else and has its own catalogue of inspiring moments but I don't think I'll bother with it anymore. These guys deserve better.

Back For Good/At Least an Album and Tour

2010-11-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

You must have been hiding in a dank cave in the Middle-East if you didn’t know that Robbie Williams has rejoined Take That, returning the line up to its original five-piece for their latest album, Progress.

The clamour to get tickets for next year’s tour was staggering, even considering the success they have had since reforming as a quartet in 2006. Any thoughts that there would be a frigid response to Williams, the Great Betrayer, rejoining the group were soon laughed off as ticket sellers were rubbing their flabby guts with the money which had helped ship roughly a million tickets in a matter of hours.

When I was growing up my sister was a Howard Donald fan (she even stuck by him when he stopped showering and got the lank dreadlocks) but I always considered Williams to be the most interesting member of the band. It’s because he never played it safe like the others. He had that riveting unpredictability which would have everyone, including himself, unsure of what he was going to say or do next. Meanwhile, Gary Barlow would sit nervously in attendance, terrified that the applecart would not so much be upset but driven recklessly into a wall at high speed. Which it eventually was.

Williams’ decision to leave the band in 1995 showed that he had the balls to cut the tether which tied him to the biggest pop band in Britain and face the world on its own terms in the pursuit of artistic credibility. Whether he achieved that credibility is a moot point but, my word, did he have a hell of a time trying to find it.

Not remembering recording albums, overdosing in elevators whilst supermodels snorted the rest of his stash back in his hotel room, and all those stints in rehab (“I love a clinic, me”), the singer has gone through a picaresque journey which has now seen him come full-circle, albeit with a little more maturity and a smattering of garish tattoos.

He seems to have found solace in marriage and I’m actually pleased for him. What Williams will always have though is a cloud of capriciousness hanging over him. It’s all happy families with the band at the moment as the pressure is on and the need to play the game has never been higher, but it was his frustration at having to play the game which saw him leave the group in the first place. Watch this space.

Kraftwerk - Tour de France Soundtracks

2010-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

So, I was playing around on InDesign the other day (as that's something I do now, apparently) and thought I would find design inspiration through Kraftwerk and their aesthetic precision. I managed to mock up a double-page spread which I'm sure the varying members of the German electronic pioneers would have winced at, turning away in regal disgust, but more importantly I went home and listened to their last studio album, Tour de France Soundtracks.

Recorded in 2003 to mark the centenary year of everybody's favourite drug-fuelled cycling competition, the album is a collection of songs which, according to the group, is supposed to reflect the mechanical yet streamlined nature of cycling.

My favourite track is Tour de France Etape 2, a song which is so distinctively European that it makes you want to go to France, jump in an old Fiat (the band can cycle but I'm not), and drive along their autoroutes, guided by the neon rhythm of lit streetlights. Enjoy:

Kings of Leon - Come Around Sundown

2010-10-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

I feel a heavy responsibility reviewing the latest Kings of Leon album, Come Around Sundown. Such are the giddying levels to which they have been exalted I’m worried that if I reveal any cracks in their armour then I will be dragged off to the gallows by a couple of check-shirted heavies, screaming at the top of my lungs, “I think they’ve got progressively worse! They will never top Youth and Young Manhood! Death to Sex on Fire!”

My typically haphazard theory is that there are two types of Kings of Leon fan: Those who love their first two albums with sheer bloody stubborness and those who, in their delusion, think they define all that is great about the Indie genre. If you are of the former grouping Come Around Sundown will be another disappointment, another splintered wedge driven between you and the band you used to adore. If you are the latter, be prepared to part with your hard-earned cash as you will be buying this album. No, you will.

The most striking feature on listening to the album is that there is no progression from their previous two efforts. The vast, widescreen guitars are still there as are the soaring choruses and the meaty, slowed down drums. The album's title is almost beckoning the time of day when it should be played, preferably in a big field as woozy accountants sway from side to side wondering where they left their expensive sandals.

New single Radioactive is probably as good as it gets. Alongside the soul-pop of Beach Side, and the inbred funk of Pony Up, these are the real anomalies on the record. The rest of the album (yes, I am willing to lump a lot of it together) is so defiantly predictable as to be completely audacious.

The sluggish tempos of The Face, No Money and Mi Amigo all have the feel of songs which get undeserved airtime at a barbeque when nobody is manning the iPod. The End and The Immortals are likely to eat up stadiums such is their mammoth production. The album plumbs its most upsetting depth with Mary, a gammy carthorse of a song which could fester smugly in Rod Stewart’s back catalogue.

The point is it’s all so textbook. It is the sound of a band who haven’t been exposed to the danger which informed their first album so brilliantly, the sound of band who always get what they want. Musically, this is their Fat Elvis period The decline continues.

(Not) Time for Heroes

2010-04-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

With one eye on this year’s Reading and Leeds Festival line up I saw that The Libertines were getting back together to play their first shows together in four years over the August Bank Holiday weekend, reportedly being offered £1.5 million to do so.

I think its all overhyped bollocks though. Obviously I recognise the importance of the Libertines – they are the British indie band of my generation – but they also have so much to answer for.

Their debut album, Up the Bracket, is one of my favourite albums full stop; an album which is rightly considered to be one of the finest indie albums of the last decade. Capturing the scuzzy uncertainty of wasted youth, it’s abrasive, tragicomic, heart-on-sleeve stylings are what make it such an endearing album, all delivered by what many misled, trilby-wearing idiots would regard as the noughties’ Lennon and McCartney.

The relationship of Pete Doherty and Carl Barat is one of notorious love/hate. A brotherly bond played out like a skaggy soap opera, they were never far away from the cover of the NME. When they first blindly stumbled onto an atrophied indie scene back in 2002 they were viewed as a return to those jolly days of Britpop where life was a party to be enjoyed, a party where you didn’t even have to bring your own booze. They charmed their way through interviews, romanticising a bohemian existence which mainly involved doing drugs, enjoying the works of both Keats and Chas ‘n Dave, and not showering.

Then everything went wrong. Pete Doherty began his long-standing drug problems, his relationship with Barat breaking down in a misty haze of mental distortion and good old-fashioned betrayal. All of this coincided with the recording of their truly atrocious eponymous second album. I remember my enthusiasm evaporating like the dragons Doherty is so keen to chase as I realised that they had become a mere clone of themselves, just another pseudo-jaunty indie band where the music is an annoying distraction from the clothes and the lifestyle.

Never mind. Their eventual break-up began a period of solo projects; Doherty created the unreliable Babyshambles, a source of income for his smack and crack addictions, whilst Barat formed Dirty Pretty Things with former Libertines drummer Gary Powell, the band an embarrassing example of “Landfill Indie” if ever I saw/heard one.

I can understand the excitement for a lot of people that the Libertines are now reuniting: They were arguably the last band to mean something to indie music fans, a band whose charm came from their familiarity and accessibility. However, I can only view this reunion with cynicism. Money has yet again spoken.

Vaguely Obsessed

2010-03-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

I've found myself really getting into Roxy Music as of late, totally independent of the fact that they have announced dates over the summer (notably at Lovebox and Bestival). Not knowing a great deal about their back catalogue I decided to dedicate some time to find out more.

The album For Your Pleasure (1973) is a particularly brilliant piece of work and, for me, one of the many stand out tracks is In Every Dream Home a Heartache. The first half of the song is chilling, with Bryan Ferry robotically serenading a blow-up doll whilst simulataneously trying to find meaning in the empty materialism which surrounds him, but the real pay off is in the second part: a decadent descent into God knows what.

Doug Fieger, R.I.P.

2010-02-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

I read the news today, oh boy, and I saw that Doug Fieger, lead singer and songwriter with pop/rock gems The Knack, known for their number one hit My Sharona, had lost his battle with cancer.

Arguably the one hit wonder to end all one hit wonders, if My Sharona was Mr. Fieger's only significant contribution to the world of Rock and Pop then, by gum, it was a great one. Enjoy:

The Knack - My Sharona

Rab | MySpace Video

Awful Album Covers.....Part Two!

2010-01-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

Due to the runaway success of my last post (four people 'liked' it on Facebook and my sister said it was hilarious - I'm classing that as runaway) I thought I would drudge through the sludge that is the internet and try to find some more awful (amazing) album covers. Here be what I found...

I want to hug him.

They're queuing up...

I know.

...And thank you for the music. Oh, wait.

Tango'd.

Is that a jazz flute?

Awful Album Covers

2010-01-10T12:46:00.001-08:00

My Dad has three main hobbies. He enjoys doing jigsaw puzzles, he is a trainspotter and he is a stamp collector. I find it hard to muster any enthusiasm for the first two. His stamp collection, however, does hold some interest for me.

Since sending off tuppence to the Royal Mail as a young boy he has been sent their First Day covers ever since. The latest batch to come through were based around classic album covers and included, amongst others, The Division Bell by Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie. It got me thinking though. All of the albums which featured on these stamps were, in their own unique way, works of art. But what about the worst album covers, album art so lacking in taste and style that you can only marvel at their brutality? So, I had a little look on the internet to see what I could find and here is a small selection of what I found. Brace yourselves...

I don't know about you but I find this terrifying.

By request only, apparently. Thank God.

One can only imagine how many times

he's been punched since this was released.

I think this may be the greatest thing
I have ever seen in my life.

My favourite is the clinically obese one.

"We're going to have to ask you to leave, sir.
You're scaring the children."

I can only assume he didn't leave Glasgow alive.

"I told you to put the incense out before you went to bed!"

Germaine Greer's favourite album cover.

Have a look for yourself online. Believe me, there are thousands.

Cheryl Cole feat. Will.i.am - 3 Words

2009-12-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to hear that Cheryl Cole was releasing a new single. Her debut single, Fight For This Love, seemed such a singular, cataclysmic Event I thought that pop music as we know it was thus rendered obsolete aswell as making everything you and I hold dear seem pointless. Such was the foaming-at-the-mouth, piss-your-pants hoo-haa it caused upon it’s release one could be forgiven for thinking it had cured both AIDS and cancer in one diamante'd swoop. How wrong one can be.

Our Cheryl is set to release her follow-up single, 3 Words, on 20th December in what can only be assumed to be her stab at making Christmas Number 1.

The song, featuring album collaborator Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, is unique in its uniformity. It’s not distinctly awful in any particular way, nor is it jaw-droppingly progressive. Instead, it ploughs the steady, no-risk electro-pop field which has served Kylie Minogue so well for the last decade (I keep forgetting the Noughties are coming to an end. Scary stuff). I’d love to sit here with bile dripping from my fangs and lay into it with the venom of a pissed off pensioner but it just doesn’t rile those emotions. It is too darn comfortable.

If anything, the talking point of it's release is the video in which Mrs. Cole wears a blonde wig for a bit. Pop Music is eating itself again...

The Intros Round

2009-11-16T13:12:00.000-08:00

This weekend just departed I took a trip to Abingdon, near Oxford, to visit a friend for his birthday. Another friend of mine picked me up from Bath (ironically at a notorious dogging spot) and off we went down the M-something or other, music throbbing from the speakers of the car.

As we approached Abingdon the speakers began oozing the inimitable treacle of a Motown number. It was Heard it Through the Grapevine by Marvin Gaye. I turned to the driver of the vehicle and said “It has to be the greatest intro of all time”. It’s menacing yet seductive, unsure yet confident – everything all at once. It got me thinking about similarly majestic introductions to songs and here be a small list (Come on, I didn’t think about it all weekend):

Reach Out, I’ll Be There – The Four Tops: Four bars of windswept raw emotion from Motown’s hit machine, Holland-Dozier-Holland. Perfection.

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – The Rolling Stones: Despite having heard it almost as many times as Mick Jagger has paid off pregnant supermodels, it is probably the greatest riff of them all.

Help! – The Beatles: With so many to choose from it is impossible to pick just one but this 1965 single positively jumps out of the speakers with electrifying insistence.

20^th Century Boy – T. Rex: Guaranteed to blow any set of speakers when played loud, never have two solitary notes sounded so bloody raunchy.

This Charming Man – The Smiths: Johnny Marr’s riff dances merrily from his guitar on arguably the Smiths most recognisable track.

Be My Baby – The Ronnettes: Generally lauded as one of the finest pop songs ever written, it’s all about that beat. Not bad for a murderer (Phil Spector).

Wouldn’t it be Nice? – The Beach Boys: Yes, Good Vibrations is probably the better song but this sun-baked, stoned and skewered intro captures the simple, child-like essence which make the Beach Boys so appealing.

Once in a Lifetime – Talking Heads: Kicks in with all the bombast of a flaming hot, funky meteor landing in your lap from nowhere.

Fashion - David Bowie: I know, I know; my unhealthy addiction to David Bowie infiltrates every darn aspect of my life to the point where I only like people on the proviso that they like David Bowie but the synthy upbeat is an exceptionally wry observation on the mindless conformity of the songs subject matter. The listener is fooled from the off.

Wolfmother - Cosmic Egg

2009-10-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

Having garnered both commercial and critical success with their eponymous 2005 debut album, Aussie retro-rockers Wolfmother fell apart due to musical differences. Seriously. Even their break-up was heavily indebted to Rock’s golden era. However, singer/guitarist Andrew Stockdale clung onto the name, recruited three presumably passive musicians and made a follow up album, Cosmic Egg.

To say that Stockdale continues where he left off on Wolfmother’s previous album is like saying Hitler was a bit of a knob. By that I mean a grand understatement. This latest offering could easily have been packaged as a double album with it’s predecessor such are the similarities and continued themes such as sorcery, staring vacantly into oblivion’s still valleys, naked, having lost your clothes, and yet more sorcery.

In the intervening four years between albums it is instantly clear that Stockdale hasn’t been listening to any new music whatsoever. The inspiration and influences which helped shape the band’s debut are still ever-present: The White Stripes guitar stylings on New Moon Rising screech and scream like a banshee whilst White Feather is AC/DC at their most radio-friendly; elsewhere the colossal Zeppelin-like stomp of Sundial and 10,000 Feet strut cockily onward.

When it’s good the album is a force to be reckoned with. California Queen gallops forth into a tie-dyed sunset and Pilgrim piles on more Priapismic riffage. Ah, the riffs. There are some truly filthy riffs present throughout - riffs so mucky you’ll feel compelled to have a wash after listening.

However, when the album is bad it’s pretty nullifying. The record lets itself down on In the Morning, a self-indulgent track with a genteel introduction exploding into beaming power-chords before descending into a rambling guitar solo/wank. Far Away is a tepid stab at the power-ballad and the song “most likely to encourage holding lighters aloft”. It even has a bit of November Rain ivory tinkling at the end.

Final track Violence of the Sun is the album’s Altamont. A droning, dying beast, thrashing around in it’s own excretia with it’s last ounces of energy, it provides little comfort. In fact, it’s mildly distressing.

This isn’t groundbreaking in any conceivable interpretation of the word yet it is never meant to be. This is Guitar Music for the Guitar Hero generation; guitar solo as proof of ability, riff as king. A celebration of the glorious overblown pomposity of Rock music, Cosmic Egg is a stoned, shaggy album, tailor-made for beach parties whose attendees are Gap models with Rolling Stones tongues on their t-shirts. Tell Jim Morrisson I said Hi, maaaan.

Revolving Door Policy: Ever-Changing Faces in Pop and Rock

2009-09-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

As you may have heard last week the earth-shattering news was delivered that Keisha Buchannan, the only original surviving-member of British girl-group Sugababes, was leaving. She claims she was forced out, but that’s not the point. The point is that Jade Ewen, Britain’s fifth-placed singing doll at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, will be the seventh person to have “sung” in the group in eleven years – looking more and more like a political coup by the day: Founding member, gathering dust, ousted for fresher blood by the sexy, sexy underlings.

And that got me thinking. Music groups, just like groups of people in general, are inevitably going to have rifts and arguments and full-blown bust ups. New people will come and new people will go. In the music industry however, does the original line up necessarily mean the best?

It’s a tough one to answer. You may think John, Paul, George and Ringo had been mates for many, many years before encountering stratospheric success as the Beatles, but that’s not the case. John’s friend from art school, Stuart Sutcliffe, and drummer Pete Best made up the original line up during long days and nights, pilled up to the eyeballs in seedy Hamburg clubs. Sutcliffe was to later die from a brain haemorrhage, Best was replaced by the more showbiz Ringo Starr. Cue the changing of the world.

Then there are the Rolling Stones. If ever a band had a revolving door policy it was the Stones. Due partly to the fact that the list of musicians who have played on their records over the years is as long as Mick Jagger’s list of conquests (well, not quite) the Stones may pose for photoshoots as a quartet but really, since the late-sixties at least, they have always employed a wealth of backing singers and musicians. Original bassist Bill Wyman left in the early nineties. He was easily replaced. It is the role of Keith Richards’ guitar partner which has seen the most chopping and changing down the years.

Originally Brian Jones, his tenure was brought to an abrupt end after he drowned in his swimming pool. Replaced by Mick Taylor, the Stones then embarked on the most productive phase of their career, producing a string of albums which they have failed, often spectacularly, to top since. Taylor, like so many others, was drained by the vampiric nature of the Stones and their lifestyle and Ronnie Wood was brought in to fill the void. Keith Richards’ best buddy, Wood has been playing solid lead guitar with the band for the best part of 34 years now, yet in that time the Stones have failed to reach the exhilarating peaks of the Mick Taylor years.

A more contemporary look will lead us to Take That, reincarnated as Topman mannequins, all stubble, earthy tones and turtle necks. Their success in the early-nineties was founded on a blend of personalities: Gary Barlow as the homely songwriter; Mark Owen as the baby-faced cutie; Robbie Williams as the daft lad-about-town; Jason Orange and Howard Donald as, well, muscled dancers. When Robbie Williams left it also showed that he was the only one with the balls, or vision, to do so. Could you have imagined Howard Donald storming off in a maelstrom of cocaine and booze to venture into the unknown, into the land of the solo career? It took a lot of guts, I hand Williams that.

After plodding on for a few more singles the band finally split, only to re-emerge in the mid-noughties. People now said how mature they were to which I thought, “How could they be any less mature than what they were? In one of their earlier videos they were writhing around in jelly and ice-cream for heaven’s sake...” They are now more successful than they ever were. The screaming girls may be mothers now but the band can count themselves amongst British pop’s elite.

And then there are those dedicated, faithful groups, cohesive units closer than family itself.
One that instantly comes to mind is U2. Originally called Feedback, the band has been together for the best part of 33 years, lasting longer than a worrying amount of marriages. They, like every other band, have had their heated moments yet instead of anyone walking out or being sacked (not even bassist Adam Clayton was punished when he missed a gig in Sydney due to being drunk; instead the other members skilfully guided him towards spiritual enlightenment) they re-invented themselves from post-punk kids to stately, globe-harnessing rockers, via pony-tailed, religious charmers of America and nihilistic Rock Gods. This way they always kept things fresh.

ABBA are another group who, for better or worse, remained with each other until they stopped making music. You couldn’t imagine another member replacing one of the originals though, could you? For a start it would be dangerous to upset the cosy palindrome effect of their name: could you imagine ABAG? DBBA? ZBBA? This would make auditioning a new member a curious process (“Name must begin with an A...”)

Personality also plays a significant role. The Beatles, as John, Paul, George and Ringo were so distinct. The same applies to the core of the Stones; Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ relationship is one of Rock’s most treasured possessions.

Personality, in that respect, isn’t often mentioned in the same sentence as the word Sugababes. They are essentially backing singers mashed together like a hideous creature from the Island of Dr. Moreau. They are simply not loved enough for anyone to give a shit.

Top 10 Les Paul Players

2009-08-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Only within the last couple of hours has news filtered through that Les Paul, the creator of one of the most iconic guitars in music, has died at the age of 94 in New York.

Along with the Fender Stratocaster, the Les Paul is instantly recognisable as a design classic, yet it is the Les Paul which is favoured more among rock musicians.
So, here is a hastily compiled list of ten Les Paul players in the Rock idiom:

1. Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin, pictured) – With his Les Paul slung down by his knees, Page is the template by which all Les Paul users go by.

2. Slash (Guns ‘n Roses) – Remarkable is the fact that he could actually put the thing on.

3. Mick Ronson – The Les Paul player in the glam era.

4. James Dean Bradfield (Manic Street Preachers) – Used a Les Paul thrillingly on the Manic’s snarling early records.

5. Jeff Beck – Now a Fender Stratocaster player, Beck was, in the 60s, synonymous with the Les Paul.

6. Eric Clapton – Like Beck, Clapton is seldom seen nowadays without a Fender Stratocaster, yet his early career saw him use a Les Paul replete with a Marshall amp and more tone and sustain to wave a stick at. Perfect for bludgeoning Blues.

7. James Hetfield (Metallica) – With a pneumatic right hand, Hetfield’s Les Paul takes one hell of a beating.

8. Marc Bolan (T Rex) – With that pout, perm and Paul (Les), who could possibly resist?

9. Neil Young – When rocking out, Young usually goes for a well-worn black number.

10. Nigel Tufnel (Spinal Tap) – “The sustain, listen to it...”

Peter Andre - Behind Closed Doors

2009-08-12T05:46:00.000-07:00

As Peter Andre continues his charm/nausea offensive following his split from Katie Price, this week sees him release the first single from his ever-impending album.

Behind Closed Doors is stodge-pop by numbers. It starts, it finishes. The bit in the middle has crunchy guitars, a beat which is an abhorrent attempt at creating Timbaland-style balladry, and a new approach to vocals from Andre. Gone is the over-sexed saccharine squeal, swapped here for a gruff, pseudo-mature husk which is as transparent as Andre is expendable.

Expect the lyrics to be interpreted as a looking glass into the Andre-Price’s pea-brained world. Expect everyone to like it in an ironic way too.

Coffee and Cake - 8th August 2009

2009-08-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

Addison Road in Kings Heath is quiet as the sun sits high above in an immaculately clear sky. Strolling down this street with a bag of cold beers, I was wondering where I was being taken for I was in the Midlands for the weekend paying a visit to a certain young lady and one of the things we had planned as entertainment was to go to something called Coffee and Cake. My host had been before and described the situation to me: Local freelance journalist Cassie-Philomena Smyth hosts a free, monthly event which showcases local musical talent in the serene setting of the back garden of her terraced house. Whilst some invites are sent out it also relies upon word of mouth promotion; ultimately you are encouraged to just come along and enjoy the music, all very relaxed y’know.

I am real nervous.

We finally reach the house and, tentatively shifting down a darkened side-alley, we make our way into the garden. It is a long yet narrow space with moderately tall fencing either side and a scattering of people are sitting on the grass, looking dreamily up at Tom Peel who is sat with just an acoustic guitar, the first act of the day.

There is a heady cocktail of utopian contentment, beaming sunshine and great music which grabs you by both hands, leading you towards the music, as soon as you enter (I was half-expecting someone to put flowers in my hair); everyone seems to be getting on well, plenty of smiling and woozy grinning, and the quality of the music is astonishing.

Despite many of the acts being restricted to the minimalism of acoustic instruments, the differing styles provide enough contrasts to keep the audience interested; from the loose rhythms of Tom Peel to the youthful exuberance of Tantrums, no act could be charged with sounding like the one before.

Goodnight Lenin! perform for the first time in front of an audience and deliver a highly confident set, binded by luscious vocal harmonies; Greg Smith’s self-deprecating humour wins the crowd over, his music a scuzzy, scratchy indie fare. We are then treated to some performance poetry from Jodi Ann Bickley whose sharp, funny and painfully honest observations (on the rockiness of love in particular) have the audience both captivated and howling with laughter.

Other highlights include Ali Forbes whose delicately measured vocals and guitar, receive rapturous applause from the ever-increasing crowd. By now the garden is a blossoming, bustling place as more and more people slip in. Anna Palmer (aka Little Palm) wows the crowd as she is accompanied by her electric keyboard and drummer (don’t worry, he is only using a snare drum with his bare hands – it hasn’t descended into MTV –style pseudo-acoustic wooliness). Her jaunty pop-jazz, coupled with her acrobatic vocals, provide yet more variety to the proceedings.

It’d be far too easy to compare it with something like Woodstock and its naive hippy idealism (and besides, the haircuts were far too edgy) but one certainly had a sense of being part of something whilst sitting there with what essentially was a small amount of people but enough to make the day feel like an event. Is this the future? Is this how all gigs will be in five, ten, years’ time? I can’t provide such answers, I’m only a humble farm-boy, but by the time it was dark and everyone was all fuzzy from drink, I found myself blabbering away to whoever was sat around, telling them how great I thought it was. No doubt I’ll see them there next time. A wonderful day.

Green Day - 21 Guns

2009-07-09T12:29:00.000-07:00

Hurray! Green Day are back to show us all how messed up politics and the world are at the moment. The problem is no one seems to have told them George Bush jnr. isn’t President anymore and that God’s cool older brother Barack is here to save the day (unless he ‘does a Blair’ and fucks it all up).

The song itself is a stagnant ballad if ever I heard one, a spluttering regurgitation of the previously-released Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It plods along in such a turgid fashion it makes a ticking clock sound like majestic fireworks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxsPVy7jbXA

Michael Jackson Memorial Service - Staples Centre, Los Angeles, California - 8th July 2009

2009-07-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

“They’re not taking his body to that concert, are they?” my mum asked incredulously as we watched Michael Jackson’s coffin loaded into a gleaming hearse which was soon gliding along a Los Angeles freeway bathed in beautiful sunlight, making its way to the Staples Centre for the King of Pop’s memorial service.
“Yep,” I said, with an acceptance only a child of the 90s could possess.

And so Michael Jackson was wheeled into a packed out arena for the lucky few thousand to mourn his passing and celebrate his life.

As expected, a whole cavalcade of ‘slebs shared their memories of Jackson. These fame-drenched admirers ranged from the over-achieving (Queen Latifa) to the genuinely genial (Berry Gordy – not realising the irony when he said Jackson “...was driven by his hunger to learn…to constantly top himself”), all the while giving their verdict on the man’s talents and legacy. The most interesting stories came from those who had known Jackson personally for a number of years, those from the Motown family (all of whom had an unsettling waxy quality about their appearance). Their stories offered an insight into Jackson the practical joker, the loyal friend, the dutiful young man. All of this was delivered in front of the Jackson family who occupied the front row; the exhausting amount brothers, each wearing a single spangled glove, sisters Janet and LaToya, mother Katharine and the villain of the piece, father Joe.

Others recycled the same crap which has been repeated, parrot-like, since his demise. Crap such as “He was a one off” and “He made the world a better place”. When Usher claimed “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Michael Jackson,” I thought to myself Then he has a lot to answer for...

The musical tributes were as patchy as the details of his death. Mariah’s hatchet job of I'll Be There, Stevie Wonder’s tender Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer (a voice of truest gold), Jermaine Jackson’s brittle Smile, Usher’s bog-fucking-standard Gone Too Soon; this was clearly not the time to celebrate his best music, the funkier upbeat numbers, but instead to wallow in melancholy and Jackson’s ballads.

A final Hey Judian hurrah ended proceedings with group singalongs of We Are the World and Heal the World before one of Michael’s children, Paris, spoke. For a child who had spent a sizeable chunk of her life behind a shroud or a veil for reasons of privacy, here she was, in front of thousands at the Centre and millions watching around the world, to deliver a simple message of her father. Only the most granite-hearted were not moved. One of the lesser Jacksons thanked the masses as the Jackson clan quickly exited stage right.

You may not believe me but such is the twisted, gnarled and horrifying world of Fame that Jackson once occupied as it's mad Overlord I was genuinely expecting him to somehow rise from his coffin and declare the whole thing a publicity stunt. I was also expecting dancing elephants, African tribesmen moonwalking in unison and lots of wind-machines. I certainly wasn’t expecting the brutally sombre affair delivered. Then I watched something else.

Franz Ferdinand ~ Can't Stop Feeling

2009-07-01T13:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, try to overlook the fact that the introduction sounds like a naff early-noughties Bacardi ad or the opening music to a chat show even shittier than Graham Norton’s. Now try to ignore that there isn’t really a chorus and that it’s stultifyingly cosy.

What you need to tell yourself is that it has a clammy charm, a tight-chested intimacy which is perfect for those sweaty bars and lurid clubs you frequent (yeah, I’ve seen you) and, above all, they haven’t lost it just yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1UErb1YzXs

Freemasons ft. Sophie Ellis-Bextor ~ Heartbreak (Make Me a Dancer)

2009-06-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

Sophie Ellis-Bextor's latest attempt to resurrect her 'career' sees her joined by chart-bothering dance production team Freemasons.

EB's plummy diction aside, one could easily imagine hearing this embedded somewhere in the middle of the Eurovision Song Contest, sung by a lovely Hungarian 'woman' or by a teeth 'n tits Latvian.

Summery enough, yet sounds as convincing as me telling you I'm fully clothed as I write this.

Brian Jones 1942-1969

2009-06-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

French philosopher Rene Descartes once remarked that the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues. This is Brian Jones, who died forty years ago on the 3rd July, in a nutshell. His death can be counted as one of the more mysterious rock deaths, but Jones has the distinction of being rock’s first major casualty – and the first member of the idiom’s notorious '27 Club'.

Born Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones on 28th February 1942 into a neat middle-class family in leafy Cheltenham, Jones found himself in and out of trouble almost from birth. Having fathered three children by his early twenties his rebellious, uncontrollable nature was matched only by a dazzling intellect, often excelling academically, as well as a prodigious musical talent which saw him gain an understanding of any instrument put in front of him.

After quitting school (not before getting his then fourteen year-old girlfriend pregnant) and nomadically travelling Europe, he returned to England, relocating to London in the late 1950s. It was here he met Michael Jagger and Keith Richards for the first time; the two of them hearing Jones in a London club, mesmerised by the boy with the perfectly conditioned blonde hair and crystal blue eyes, playing sensual, soaring slide guitar. Their mutual love of the blues drew the three of them together and, accompanied by Charlie Watts on drums, Bill Wyman on bass guitar and Ian Stewart on piano, they became The Rolling Stones.

And it was his band. He came up with the name, attracted all the women to the gigs when Mick and Keith were still just spotty, awkward kids and acted as the group’s manager in their embryonic state (Jones would often receive more money than the others for gigs, something he kept secret from them for years). Jones couldn't write a tune to save his life and it was only when Mick and Keith were forced by the Stones' eventual manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, to write their own songs that Jones lost control on the one thing in his life which seemed to bring him solace.

Alcohol, drugs, paranoia, busts and bust-ups; these were the thing which punctuated the latter years of Jones’ life.

Having been ousted from any position of real authority within the band, Jones found he had little to contribute as Jagger and Richards went about forming their rock-solid songwriting partnership, with each song building on the now runaway success of the last hit. He would often turn up to the studio blind drunk, stoned out of his mind or in a different state altogether thanks to the vast array of pills he used to wash down with bottles of brandy. Just about able to sit slouched on the studio floor he would drift in and out of consciousness, leaving the other band members to slyly unplug his electric guitar, a musical euthanasia which put him out of his, and their, misery.

He seemed to find a degree of happiness with Swedish beauty Anita Pallenberg, yet his capricious mood led him to frequently hit her. She wasn’t the first of his girlfriends he had beaten. When Pallenberg left Jones for Richards during a holiday the three of them took to Morocco in 1967, it appeared that this was the final nail in Jones’ fastly-approaching coffin.

Since he was found face down in his swimming pool, his death has been the subject of many lurid tabloid tales and is firmly located within the stained corridors of rock folklore, yet one thing is certain: Jones was an exceptionally insecure, narcissistic man who could treat people with both vulgarity and sincerity in equal measure. He was one of the first casualties of rock yet one feels he would have burned himself out eventually, rock star or not.

A Glimpse of a Wednesday Afternoon

2009-06-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

As I was on the bus earlier I eavesdropped on a conversation with a couple of old ladies. One said to the other, "I'm reading a lovely book at the moment. I forget what it's called but it's about a young woman who becomes pregnant before the war, but then her husband dies. Eventually she begins working in a cinema, and cinemas were privately owned back then mind, and she works her way up to become the manager. It really is a lovely book."

Then I thought about what I was currently reading: A book in which a class of 42 Asian students are selected by their authoritarian government to wage war on one another in a brutal and blood-soaked fight to the death until there is one remaining survivor who is cruelly labelled the victor. The book? Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. And it really is a lovely book.

And last, but not least: Criminally overlooked musicians in the modern era.

2009-06-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

You know the sort of moment I mean. That moment when you’re listening to a song you’ve heard hundreds of times before, a song which has tattooed itself onto your very soul, and suddenly you notice some new dimension to the track; something you somehow failed to notice yet which makes the song that much more revelatory. It happened the other day when I was casually listening to The Smiths’ Barbarism Begins at Home from their album Meat is Murder. The song is up there with the band’s funkiest moments but all of a sudden I found myself physically locked into the groove provided by the bass and drums. Sure, Morrissey’s lyrics are astoundingly astute and Johnny Marr’s slinky guitar gets the limbs a-movin’, but the rhythm section suddenly broke free, demanding to be recognised.

So, here is a hastily assembled list of criminally overlooked musicians who have struggled to muscle past chiselled frontmen or cool-as-fuck guitar heroes. Enjoy. (WARNING: You will have heard of all of these bands)

*Andy Rourke + Mike Joyce ~ The Smiths: Considering it was these two gentlemen who inspired me to write this it is only right that I begin with them. Unable to bustle past Morrissey’s ego and Johnny Marr’s arrangement prowess, these two likely lads provided an unshakeable rhythm section to the 80s most treasured peddlers of glum. From the happy-go-lucky bounce of the band’s more jangly moments to the soft, tender grooves of the more heartfelt numbers, Joyce and Rourke never let you down. They could rock it with the best of them aswell. Take the title track from The Queen is Dead: that rhythm section takes some stopping.

*George Harrison ~ The Beatles: For all the genius of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting, George Harrison was always on hand to deliver a preposterously cool riff or tasteful solo. Practically inventing the notion of the lead guitarist, his own songs weren’t bad either: just as the band were falling apart amidst petty arguments and messy legal wrangling, Harrison dug deep and wrote some of the bands most iconic songs (While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Here Comes the Sun). Never one to bask in the limelight, he was, as Dave Grohl once put it, “the secret weapon”.

*John Paul Jones ~ Led Zeppelin: You’re probably thinking Who? but Led Zeppelin wouldn’t have been the same without him. The heaviest band of them all needed a special type of bass player to work alongside John Bonham and that man was mild-mannered John Paul Jones. A former session man, his knowledge was as vast as it came. Simply, he could play anything. As quiet as a doormouse, Jones’ basslines made Zep that much heavier.

*Mick Taylor ~ The Rolling Stones: Stepping into a dead man’s pair of snakeskin cowboy boots can’t be easy but when Mick Taylor replaced Brian Jones after the latter had decided to go for an impromptu swim it heralded a rapaciously creative period for the Stones, arguably their finest era. Joining the band as an introverted vegan and leaving as a full blown junkie, Taylor always let his guitar playing do the talking yet it didn’t so much talk as sing the sweetest tune imaginable. His flowing melodies danced a merry dance over Keith Richards’ raunchy riffs to create a string of records not matched by the band since. And Richards will never find a better guitar partner.

*Carlos Alomar ~ David Bowie: When David Bowie put his glitter jump-suit back in his dressing up box and embarked on a romance with Philadelphia soul in the mid-seventies, he replaced guitar legend Mick Ronson with slick sessioneer Carlos Alomar. Alomar’s influence was immediate; steering clear of distorted riffs he instead helped Bowie move towards and altogether smoother sound, taking the occasional co-writing credit in the process. Arrangements were now grander and Bowie found a brand new audience with his album Young Americans. Alomar stayed on the Bowie payroll longer than any other musician and helped the latter push boundaries well into the 80s. Bowie never sounded funkier.

*Stuart Copeland + Andy Summers ~ The Police: Don’t worry, it’s still cool to think Sting a twat, but his cod-Jamaican vocals would have sounded infinitely dafter were it not for messrs Copeland and Summers unique playing style. The former’s drum prowess borders on the genial, providing the clipped, syncopated rhythms to which the foot cannot help but tap to; the latter’s guitar technique was probably considered too technically accomplished in post-punk Britain. The band broke up hating each other, so nothing new there then. Then they got back together in 2008, but who didn’t?

Rest easy dear friend, I’m sure you are raging at that the fact that there are others who should be on this list but who aren’t. If so, then feel free to send me your suggestions. I would naturally be interested to be enlightened to more fantastic musicians.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz! (2009)

2009-05-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

When I first saw a picture of Karen O, spoon-faced singer of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I entertained unsavoury thoughts such as I reckon she knows how to service herself with an empty beer bottle. I couldn’t help it, she just had that look about her. I then had the pleasure of listening to the band’s debut album, Fever to Tell, and found that the songs were about things like, well, servicing yourself with empty beer bottles and non-committal oral sex. Not that that was a bad thing, mind. Instead Ms. O’s manic, often hysterical vocal style aligned itself perfectly with the scuzzy, grimy New York sound produced by two geeks who looked like they still lived with their mothers, creating a revelatory vacuum of noise.

Then something peculiar happened: Karen O suddenly found an otherwise unrealised maturity and started singing about ethereal subject matter as the band ‘grew up’ on their second long-player Show Your Bones. Maturity – the moustachioed bastard antagonist of Rock. But wait, it didn’t matter because the songs were still as stylish as before but they were just a smidgen more evenly produced. Gone were the chainsaw guitars and walls-came-tumblin’-down drums, replaced instead by vast expanses of synthesizers and ‘Big’ drums creating monstrous, unoccupied canyons into which you could jump gleefully.

I’m now told it is 2009 and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs ride into town once more on their spangly horses, brandishing ten new songs on their new album It’s Blitz!

If you haven’t heard album opener Zero by now then I’m afraid you are a Philistine at best. What an opener though! Exploding with a euphoria designed purely for sweaty dancefloor encounters, the song can easily count itself amongst the tracks of the year already. Following this dizzying tirade, Heads Will Roll entices the listener in with its vacuous synths before the guitars pound along with muscular abandon keeping the party mood afloat.

The band have always insisted that they can pull at the heart strings with the best of them but all of a sudden, three songs in, they throw a couple of maudlin bad boys on the listener. Not that they’re bad songs: Softshock is a beautifully intoxicating number, continually gaining frenzied passion and makes a convincing case of being the album’s highlight, whilst Skeletons mines the dewy-eyed tenderness of Maps to great effect.

Then it all gets a little muddy as the band seems to run out of ideas, relying upon predictable riffs on Dull Life and the safety net of the quaint ballad. That’s not to say that it’s a clear-cut, black and white album of two halves. There are still magical moments to be had: Shame and Fortune has the menace of one hundred schoolgirls brandishing kitchen knives, whilst Runaway harnesses icy feelings of loneliness with expertise. Dragon Queen gets all funky and sounds like CSS (remember them?) but, for fuck’s sake, there it is again. That voice. Whilst Karen O has one of the most distinctive female voices in modern rock, don’t you just wish she belted out a few numbers from time to time like her protégé Beth Ditto? (Although I’m informed Karen doesn’t have the range, darling).

The album parts with the ears in unremarkable fashion: Hysteric is a sunny pop song whilst closing number Little Shadow delves into the irritating ‘Look-How-Fucking-Quaint-And- Smug-We-Can-Be’ hamper one last time.

So, is the album a glorious success or a failure ne’er to be mentioned upon these shores again? Well, it’s neither really. It seldom sounds as visceral as they once were, nor does it appear to break any new ground: ultimately it sounds like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs making a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. It seems to wrap itself up nice and tightly in a purgatorial fur coat and just feels damn good about itself, which is a shame because for an album that starts with truly unbelievable promise it ends up not putting up much of a fight. Why do people have to grow up?

David Bowie - Young Americans (1975)

2009-04-02T11:48:00.000-07:00

No one does re-invention quite like David Bowie. After moving from hirsute Folk-Rock to trashy Glam in the early-seventies, his next move would prove to be his most shocking yet. Confounding his Glam disciples he re-emerged as a smooth operating practitioner of Philadelphia Soul with the album Young Americans. True, the transition had been coming; embarking on the second half of his infamous Diamond Dogs tour in 1974 the Philly influences were apparent – a slicker sound, grander arrangements – as Bowie had absorbed blue-eyed soul music like only he could: by drowning himself in the music and its concurrent scene.

Always, always, surrounding himself with the most brilliant musicians Bowie’s dalliance with Soul yielded a remarkable album that proved he was capable of mastering any field of music he turned his hand to. Opening with the lusciously lucid title track the listener is treated with a design of things to come: a big, confident sound full of yearning emotion. The elegant ‘Win’ is as heartfelt as you are likely to hear whilst ‘Fascination’ (co-written with Luther Vandross who is part of the sumptuous backing vocal group throughout) delivers a funky bounce as infectious as the bubonic plague.

Elsewhere, ‘Right’ delivers a cool latino shake and the opulent ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ is delivered with religious fervour, played in the funkiest church you’re likely to visit this side of Suffragette City.

Was his version of the Beatles' ‘Across the Universe’ a wise move? That’s for you to decide but it certainly is a valiant attempt. The delicately poised ‘Can You Hear Me’ makes amends and could easily be sung by Dusty Springfield or any other soul great.

The album closes with the highly-stylised funk of ‘Fame’. Co-written with guitarist Carlos Alomar and John Lennon, the song takes a wry look at globe-eating stardom and, ironically, delivered Bowie his first US no. 1.

The music here is distinctly upbeat, positive and relaxed, something which was incongruous with Bowie’s whirlwind, drug-addled life at the time. Ditching the theatrical wail of his glam period and instead mining his sumptuous baritone, Bowie’s voice lends the songs here an almost soothing quality yet fortunately it all verges just the right side of easy-listening. A gloriously intoxicating album and one which furthered his ever-rising star.

Lady GaGa - Poker Face (single)

2009-03-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

Who the hell does Lady GaGa think she is? Actually, who the hell is Lady GaGa? You turn your back from the pop scene for thirty seconds and suddenly a new peroxide-blonde upstart is wearing a bin bag and gyrating your way on screen. This latest pop offering releases her second single, Poker Face, on Monday and you just know the song is going to be played in Turkish discos.

Drawing that great parallel between gambling and love (whether to stick or twist, keep your cards close to your chest, blah blah fucking blah) the song betrays GaGa’s Wild Child image and opts for cosy synths and a particularly limp chorus. Alternately it could be about oral sex – try and picture the boisterous geezers on dancefloors shouting “‘Ere, I’d like to Poke ‘er Face! Oi! Oi!”

She’ll probably be huge because I just don’t know anymore.

Iggy Pop - The Idiot (1977)

2009-03-28T05:57:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to imagine just how fucked up Iggy Pop was back in the mid-seventies. As the Stooges crumbled in a murky swamp of drugs and death Pop found himself a broken shell of a man, the result of an intense heroin addiction. After an ever-increasing series of embarrassingly pathetic incidents, both on-stage and off-, he checked himself into a mental institution where he claims his only consistent visitor was David Bowie, something of an old acquaintance from headier, bygone days in London after Pop re-located there after yet another Stooges meltdown. It is fair to say that Bowie helped Pop tremendously in his recovery from his serious problems yet Iggy returned the favour, assisting Bowie through a period of crippling cocaine use.

So, as Bowie absorbed the Pop into his now-downsized inner-sanctum, the two set about writing and recording an album to be known as The Idiot. It certainly holds its own place in Rock history: it was the album Ian Curtis listened to when he decided to hang himself. Contrary to Curtis’ dramatic reaction to the record it is, in reality, a mighty fine offering from the pint-sized rocker.

Partly recorded in France and Germany (Bowie’s fascination with Krautrock present throughout) the album is notable for Bowie’s role as producer and co-writer. It says something so deliciously apt about Iggy Pop, the perennial almost-was, that one of his finest, most focused and personal albums has someone else looming ominously over proceedings; here it is Bowie as puppetmaster. Despite some mystery over who features on the album it is generally perceived that the music is practically all Bowie’s whilst Pop deals primarily with lyrical duties.

The album opens with 'Sister Midnight', an exercise in measured funk courtesy of Bowie’s superb rhythm section of Dennis Davis and George Murray complimented by the grandly talented Carlos Alomar on guitar (here taking a writing credit).

From here the album wears it’s electronic, postmodern influences on its sleeve, most notably on the clunky 'Mass Production' and the post-punk classic 'Nightclubbing'; the latter is as sleazy and lecherous as you’re likely to hear, its lobotomized beat and stabbed synths creeping along with menacing detachment . The creepy 'Baby' sees Pop’s croon at its most melancholy and features the delightful line ‘Maybe there’s nothing to see/ I’ve already been down the street of chance’.

Delving deeper, Pop casts a nostalgic eye back on his days in the Stooges with 'Dum Dum Boys', a song which exposes the singer as a lonely soul, abandoned by his brothers when he most needed them. Shouting, ‘Where are ya now I need ya?’ he sounds battered and bruised, yearning for a simplicity the past, and drugs, have laid waste to.

The albums centrepiece, however, is the impossibly brilliant 'China Girl'. Far superior to Bowie’s glossy attempt six years later, this version grooves around euphoric melodies before Pop adopts a pained, strained vocal as the song gallops away into the distance, leaving this listener slack-jawed in awe. A breathtaking song.

For those thinking that this is some sort of ‘rehab’ album for the Motor-City native, they are grossly mistaken; he was still battling many demons during this period of his life and the album chronicles a man merely picking up the pieces. Generally overlooked in the Iggy Pop canon, The Idiot is a pale, anaemic album (check out the vampiric 'Funtime') which rarely looks optimistically on proceedings. It does, however, chronicle a particular flux one of Rock’s most inimitable characters was going through and the listener can’t help but root for him throughout. Just don’t mention car insurance.

The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (1970)

2009-03-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Live albums can often be patchy affairs. Live Rolling Stones albums are often patchier. However, one thing which can be said about them is that they certainly reflect the particular phase the band would have been going through at the time. From 1982’s Still Life when they just didn’t care anymore to 1991’s Flashpoint which captured them as the well-oiled money-making monster we know and love(?) today, the evolution of the band has always been caught on tape. The quality of the recorded show is also dependent on Keith Richards’ own dependence on drugs.

The Rolling Stones first official live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, was recorded in late 1969 as part of an American tour, their first tour anywhere since the halcyon days of 1967 when the band couldn’t hear themselves over the screaming girls who would leave auditoriums stinking of piss. The band now faced a different challenge: the audience were there to actually listen to their music, so the band bumped up the amplification, the length of the show, everything.

The album begins with the band’s now-trademark recording claiming them to be ‘The Greatest Rock ‘n Roll Band in The World’ – first used on this tour – and, on listening to the album, one really can’t argue with the claim. Capturing a band embarking on the peak years of their career as both a live act and as a recording group the album is drenched in the sex and death blues which they so excelled at.

The tracklisting isn’t instantly recognisable for fans expecting yet another run through of 'Satisfaction' or 'Get Off of My Cloud' – but doesn’t that make it all the more exciting? Here the Stones flex their blues muscles with renditions of Robert Johnson’s lonesome 'Love in Vain' - sounding like one of those perfect concert moments where time and unexplained emotions are perfectly crystallised - as well as the creeping 'Stray Cat Blues'. Yet it is the utterly menacing 'Midnight Rambler' where the true magic of the album lies. Stretched out to nine minutes Keith Richards’ raunchy riff (does he know any other?) is gradually replaced by a bluesy breakdown, the essence of the blues dripping from Richards and Mick Taylor’s fingers.

For those who possess a sketchy knowledge of the Stones there is enough here to remain satisfied. 'Jumpin Jack Flash' is played with heady abandon whilst 'Honky Tonk Women' is dispatched with glorious enthusiasm. 'Sympathy For The Devil' bounces along intoxicatingly as Mick Taylor screams and wails on his Les Paul (his playing deliciously gorgeous as usual) and the welcome inclusion of 'Live With Me', including a fantastically bum note right at the start of the song, harks back to the band’s R ’n B roots (never has a group of skinny white cockneys sounded like a troupe of black Chicago natives). There is of course a couple of Chuck Berry numbers, 'Carol' and 'Little Queenie', to keep Keith Richards happy.

They were the baddest band on the planet during this epoch, a time when hippy idealism was being booted in the head, and no band anywhere possessed such an inherent sense of danger or a knack of backing it up. The performance recorded here captures a band in fine live form and, more importantly, having a hell of a time on stage. And to think Altamont was just over a week away...

Late of the Pier + Support - Komedia, Bath - 23.02.09

2009-02-26T12:10:00.000-08:00

Standing across the street from Bath’s shiny new Komedia club I puff on my cigarette. The red neon sign bathes the pavement and washes over those in the respectably hefty queue. An aesthetic dominates: angular haircuts and fine facial hair for the boys, similarly geometric haircuts and shimmering, multicoloured leggings for the girls. I think I spot someone who is over 21.

Komedia’s neo-classical opulence appears better suited to opera than sweaty Rock ‘n Roll but no one minds as groups of students and teenagers huddle in groups in front of the stage, no doubt exchanging tips on what shampoos to use (or not, in some cases).

‘Thank you for clapping; people sometimes throw things at me after the first song’, says Connan Mockasin, standing alone with his guitar. Flitting from the psychedelic to the haunting to the unashamedly catchy, he manipulates his guitar like a Hawaiian Jimi Hendrix, bending and twisting notes out of all recognition. His songs take off properly when he is joined by his drummer, gaining a ramshackle bounce which would make Jack White proud.

Four young men walk on the stage looking like they’ve just spent the day in Topman. They are Post War Years and they are criminally ripping off Foals. It is so painfully predictable, so painfully now that half of the audience are resigned to obligingly pay attention whilst the other half lap it up like Pavlov’s dog as the band lay on synths and clipped guitars over jarred, fidgety drums. Keep looking interested and move slowly towards the bar...

As the house lights go down, a wave of clammy anticipation washes over the venue. Late of the Pier launch headlong into singles 'Space and the Woods' and 'Heartbeat' and the sound is thunderous. The brittle synths and keyboards are replaced by thick zaps of sound, the bass threatens to bring the walls down and my nostrils actually start quivering.

Looking like the confused offspring of Gary Numan and Freddie Mercury, they are dressed in capes and binliners as they storm through Fantasy Black Channel. The band whip the pit of teenagers at the front of the stage into a hot, sticky frenzy; 'Focker' is a particular highlight grabbing the audience by the neck and refusing to let go until it has its way. Which it does.

As they play their final song, 'Bathroom Gurgle', the band is looking drained. Vocalist Samuel Dust is sitting on one of the speakers dangling a beige dap on the end of a hospital-thin leg out towards the audience who are trying to get a touch of their hero. They don’t quite reach. They never will.

David Bowie - Low (1977)

2009-02-17T13:28:00.000-08:00

Ask someone what 1977 represents in music and the answer is invariably the explosion of Punk. Punk Rock’s primary policy was to bulldoze the Establishment into touch yet David Bowie was always aloofly separated from the Establishment despite his stratospheric success. Whilst Punk was gobbing away in London, Bowie had set up shop in Berlin with Brian Eno to begin work on a set of albums which would come to be known as his ‘Berlin trilogy’.

However, this was no holiday. After spending the first half of the seventies in a vacuum of cocaine, Bowie’s move was a type of rehab: shutting himself off in a bleak and fractured Berlin wrought with social and political tension, he was rid of the slimy hangers-on, the yes men and (the majority of) his drug dealers which had been following him for the previous five or so years as his star rose and rose.

Low was the first album of this new musical path. The album could easily be viewed as an apt metaphor for Berlin itself; an album split into two distinct halves – the decadent and the bruised.
If Bowie was experiencing a new clarity of mind then it is obvious from the off. Opener Speed of Life (one of four instrumentals on the album) strides forward triumphantly with the determined optimism of someone who thinks the only way from here is up. The perky Breaking Glass follows with its strolling funk, showing that Bowie had lost none of his precision showmanship.

The album’s first single Sound and Vision continues the upbeat mood with its rubber drums before Be My Wife (verging on self-pity) and Always Crashing in the Same Car (a sombre admission of clumsiness, both physical and emotional) ease the listener into the album’s more textured landscapes.

The tracks co-written with Brian Eno have the ubiquitous producer’s mark stamped all over them. Warszawa is a grand gesture complete with primal howls whilst Art Decade is unsettling and haunting; both songs perfect for a German Art-House flick never released in a cinema (not one near you anyway).

The album has something of a futile, limp ending. Weeping Wall comes and goes without kicking up any fuss whatsoever whilst Subterraneans meekly rounds things off (although it does feature some cool smoky sax).

Bowie’s glam disciples were thrown off track with his previous effort Station to Station, yet these were the same fans who felt bemused at his foray into ersatz-Soul. Low heralded a new era of experimentation and furthered artistic restlessness and the album shows an artist unafraid to confront demons and forge new musical expression. It alienated fans even further but by this point Bowie had more than earned his right to do what he damn-well pleased. (8/10)

The Human League - Dare!

2009-02-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

Question: What happens when two of your original band members leave to form their own group?
Answer: You recruit two schoolgirls you find in a disco as backing singers and create a genre-defining masterpiece.

By the end of 1980, having released two albums, the Human League had fractured after singer/songwriter Phil Oakey and co-writer Martyn Ware fell out due to differing ambitions for the group; Oakey wanted to pursue a poppier, more accessible pathway whilst Ware was insistent on furthering the group’s more experimental facets. With a UK and European tour perilously imminent Ware finally left taking other member Ian Craig Marsh with him (both going on to form Heaven 17).

Oakey remained the sole survivor of the Human League and was all but written off by the music press. That is until he hired two musicians to replace the departed Ware and Marsh but, more importantly, recruited two 18 year-old schoolgirls, Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley, as backing singers/dancers, giving the seemingly moribund group a galvanising injection of glamour.

After completing an often tumultuous tour (the integration of Catherall and Sulley was not a smooth one due to an adverse reaction from some hardcore fans) the band went into the studio to record Dare!, the pop-influenced album which Oakey had wanted to record yet which had cost him his partnership with Ware. Cue huge success.

The album is an impressive display of crisp, hygienic production which, seemingly against the odds, manages to possess a degree of warmth and depth. Oakey’s heartfelt croon and intelligent lyrics lend the songs a passion which complements the album’s otherwise distant, often alien sounds. Unlike electro’s common tendency to sound like the artist in question is just discovering new sounds on his synthesizer and laying them down before your very ears, there is not a great deal of ostentation here; everything is in its place for a reason.

By the time you reach the album’s final track, the world-eating Don’t You Want Me, the ears have been tended to by ten crafted pop diamonds, each with their own story to tell. The kitsch boogie of The Things That Dreams Are Made Of is a cloudy-eyed paean to materialism; the elegant Darkness a fearful, paranoid cry for help; whilst I Am The Law is told from the perspective of a controlling lover (it’s chorus is the creepiest passage of music on the album).

Elsewhere, you can almost see the disco lasers swish and chop before your eyes on Do Or Die and the plaintive Seconds casts a nostalgic eye on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The soap opera of Don’t You Want Me is still a superb pop song after all this time, despite Oakey’s initial reservation that it was merely an album-filler (thank God for record executives going behind artists’ backs and choosing the singles themselves).

A pre-requisite of any great pop album is that each song sounds utterly unique, creating it’s own individual imprint in your mind. In this department Dare! does not fail. Whilst it occasionally sounds like an 80s porn soundtrack there is a real sense of innovation throughout the album. It often sounds so simple, like the majority of great pop should, yet if you listen closely the construction of the album is meticulous and one can imagine Phil Oakey obsessing over what sounds should be where. It is fantastic pop music in all its catchy, hummable glory and despite being held to account for creating all manner of awful 80s electro groups is as big an influence on modern pop imaginable.

U2 - Get On Your Boots

2009-01-25T14:02:00.000-08:00

Brace yourselves. U2 are back and we all know what that means: Bono’s beady eyes and big ol’ snout peering out menacingly from the front of music magazines across the world, lifetime achievement awards limply handed out by Industry Folk and a plague-like saturation of radio stations and yer MTV.

This new single from those four salt-of-the-earth Irish lads is an inevitable rocker falling flaccidly from the Vertigo cast. Full of crunchy guitars and smug swagger we can assume this will be the least sanctimonious cut from the album as Bono sings I don’t want to talk about wars between nations (for all of three-and-a-half minutes). Also, try and listen out for the Arctic Monkeys-style drums - they stick out like Wayne Rooney in a public library.

Ultimately it’s an aimless exercise in Rocking Out but, dear reader, this is a warning: U2 are back and Bono is telling you to Get On Your Boots. I can only assume he means ethically traded, crafted-by-the-hands-of-self-sufficient-Peruvian-tribesmen boots.

Televised Crimewave Popular Workshop *Section K - Moles Club, Bath - 22.1.09

2009-01-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

Gigs are like a box of chocolates yada yada yada...

Section K baffled the audience before they played a note. With the guitarist in a lab coat, the bassist in full judo attire (only a red belt though) and chief synth/knob-twiddler dressed as Cruella DeVille’s sexually-confused nephew the audience braced themselves for some Uber-Eccentricity. Uber-Shite was unfortunately what they got. Clanking industrial drum-loops, vocal samples courtesy of some dull science-based radio broadcast circa 1954 and the murky guitar and bass sounding like incoherent tramps arguing over who gets the last can of Special Brew it appeared they were pretty much making it up as they went along. If you want to hear three mates fuck around I’d suggest this highly, otherwise just do it yourself.

Popular Workshop brought the audience in towards their warm, reassuring indie bosom with a jagged attack of feedback and askew, off-kilter guitar from their greasy-haired Italian frontman. Funniest moment of the evening: In an attempt to get the audience roused their singer/guitarist shouted defiantly into the microphone ‘BARACK OBAMA!’, only for the mike stand to impotently fall down.

Televised Crimewave's distinct brand of Northern-Goth-Nihilism evaporated any trace of the word ‘refund’ in the minds of paying punters. With a genuinely interesting frontman their songs are loaded with a hidden menace which always threatens to rear the ugliest of heads. Backed by a bowel-rattling drum sound and ersatz-50s echo these guys are Bloc Party’s Friends In The North playing their own soundtrack to a British horror flick not yet written.

The Bohemian Embassy - The Horseshoe, Bath - 17.1.09

2009-01-18T13:38:00.000-08:00

The Horseshoe is a pub about a hundred metres along the road from me and is about as traditional as it gets. With an interior that refuses to let go of the Seventies, the walls are covered with paintings often found plaguing car-boot sales, decorative plates and basically anything which can be stuck to a wall.

At best you can expect to see about a dozen people in there at any one time yet when I walked in to watch Bath four-piece The Bohemian Embassy I was greeted by at least 30 youths drunk on cheap vodka and lager. However, they weren't there solely to see the gig. They were from the local private school; the boys were getting drunk trying to forget the promises they made with their form-masters whilst the girls were dangerously drunk, dangerously blonde and dangerously young.

Eventually we were all let through into the pub's long, thin skittle alley where everyone was scratching their heads realising that this wasn't thought through. Because of the narrowness of the room people were finding it hard to get a glimpse of the band at the far end. 'It's my local,' I thought, 'to the front I go!'

As for the band themselves they proved good entertainment for the evening. With the singer/rhythm guitarist and lead guitarist looking like rejects from an indie Rocky Horror Show, the drummer as ostentatious as Keith Moon and, um, a bass player, their sound is of the punchy indie sort which doesn't seem to understand the concept of slowing down or pausing to think about trivial everyday things. Every chorus seemed to sweep you up in it's fiery wake before letting you tumble to the ground until the chorus mercilessly came back round again...

As the band exited through a fire escape into the raging night, everyone vacated the alley and returned into the heaving, pulsating bar. Managing to catch the landlord's eye the drinking began. Well, you have to support your local, don't you?

BBC Omnibus: Cracked Actor

2009-01-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Filmed on David Bowie’s 1974 Diamond dogs tour, this 53-minute BBC Omnibus special follows the man himself as he floats around America, paranoid and uneasy, on a blanket of cocaine.

A brief history: Bowie had recently stuffed Ziggy Stardust back in his dressing up box and after recording the album Diamond Dogs embarked on a tour of America to promote said record. His new guise was that of a seasoned ‘showbiz’ performer playing Philly Soul complete with an elaborate stage show which gradually lead to his Thin White Duke persona.

Between footage of Bowie performing in the Universal Ampitheatre, Los Angeles, we get him coked up in his limo blabbering on or looking pensively out of the window, coked up at a service station and coked up backstage taking the film crew through his wardrobe and applying makeup. David’s dependence on the white powder at this time was huge and he is frequently seen sniffing violently, zapping up any stray flecks of coke which didn’t make it to his racing brain.

Like anyone who is on cocaine the man obviously loves the sound of his own voice and everything he says is so brilliantly Bowie: teasing, coy, confident, profound, bollocks. Crouching on a floor taking the film-crew through his cut-up method of creating lyrics (writing sentences, cutting them up and re-arranging them to create new sentences) he imparts with the gem: “I tried doing it with diaries...it would predict things or tell me about my past.” (My italics, brother).

The concert footage is testament to his unparalleled innovation and artistic restlessness; gone is the sleazy lurch of Ziggy, replaced with a slick display of plastic showmanship and artificial pizzazz. Moonage Daydream becomes an excercise in funk; Diamond Dogs a power-gallop; whilst John, I’m only dancing is re-moulded into cabaret – Full-Blown Hot Night Cool Breeze Copacabana Malibu Cocktail Cabaret .

Bowie’s overhaul of his music and image to what it is here alienated a lot of his Glam disciples and made them cry tears of glitter yet it shows how utterly unique he is as an artist. To have an insight into his world is a treat which you can’t help but feel you don’t deserve but, hey, it’s decadence all the way in David's kingdom.

Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel

2009-01-04T13:15:00.001-08:00

It must be terrible being so darn creative. Just when you think it’s probably best to move back into a verse there’s Brian Eno dressed in a latex Devil's outfit perched on your shoulder whispering in your ear to double the tempo and go in for a flute solo.

Such is the dilemma on Late of the Pier’s debut album, Fantasy Black Channel. The thirteen songs here are as experimental and schizophrenic as you are likely to find yet it occasionally sounds like someone tripping over their own multi-coloured high-tops.

The album introduces itself with Hot Tent Blues, just over a minute of bloated synth lines which manages to sound like both a beginning and an end. It could well be pumped gloriously from the blood encrusted p.a. systems the day after The Revolution as it could be the soundtrack to the last days of Rome (2059 A.D.).

And then the odyssey begins. For that’s was this album is – an odyssey. We are taken through a universe where the clouds are matt grey and dangerously low whilst the horizon is an explosion of Technicolor; a world where the nihilism is crisp, occasionally sprawling and lasts about three-and-a-half minutes.

The highlights? Space and the woods is a futurist fantasy driven by thunderous, hi-energy synths whilst VW is an impressive nomadic electro journey sans lyrics; single Heartbeat is good value too with a most gloriously dizzying chorus.

A special mention has to go to the song Whitesnake. Whilst the notion of pomposity is intrinsic to the band it seems that when they try too hard it becomes plain embarrassing. Mining the quirkiness which made Sparks such an irritating band the song is avoidable at best but, if you’re like me and enjoy listening to the occasional song for it’s comedic crapness, then be my guest.

The kitchen sink mentality and lofty ambitions of the band can only be admired and provides an album which is never dull, yet this can be problematic in its own right. They probably won’t release a second album for a good few years because all of their ideas have been thrown into this long-player. It’s about pacing yourself and that would imply having one eye on the future – a place I thought the band couldn’t remove their gaze from...

2008-12-28T11:26:00.000-08:00

18.12.08 - Moles club, Bath

PURR Presents:
*KAPUTT
*ROSE ELINOR DOUGALL
*EL WRISTO

Purr toyed with us all on this crisp December eve, giving us three bands from vastly different chapters of the indie handbook. El Wristo opened the evening, offering us poor souls their paint-drying rock sound. Distortion don’t maketh the band, dear reader, but being able to write a tune does and whilst they embraced the former with all the zeal of a dog who has just stolen a string of sausages from a butchers, they spectacularly fell short of the latter. They seemed so middle-of-the-road as to be a one-way street.

Once everyone had woken up ex-Pipette (it’s gonna be on your gravestone, dear) Rose Elinor Dougall offered us her luscious, tender musings, with danger always lurking beneath the cracked smile of her tunes. Embracing a Year-Zero mentality, gone is the saccharine veneer of her former outfit, replaced with introspection and the jaded maturity of jilted lover. Still quite dull, mind.

And what about Kaputt I hear you scream. Well, sucking from the teat of all the correct indie Mothers they had this reviewer making shapes on the dancefloor like a smitten buffoon, all wriggly squiggly like. Their jarring guitars and rampant stomp sounded like it never gave a shit, drenched in abandonment and wearing a juvenile sneer. Life is worth living after all.

2008-12-28T11:22:00.001-08:00

10.12.08

Moles - Bath Battle of the Bands 2008 Grand Final

Warning: Those of you in the Bath area look away now. Your city has the creativity of a brussel sprout.

Peppermint Hunting Lodge started with a song about a sandwich or something before frolicking around with a set which was very much an emo/hardcore affair. It’s all very shouty and vain and during the third song their lead singer was trying to eye up a girl just in front of me whilst getting all emotive with oohs and aahs. But, to indulge in some Sting-like psychobabble, there was a definite ‘Energy’ about them.

Exiles were an indie-by-numbers affair, combining futile guitars with moribund beats wrapped up in such an unconvincing manner that their name spoke volumes. But why Bath?!

Psalms were next, bringing their industrial stomp to the table, licked into shape with funky chemical synths. I wouldn’t usually go near this type of thing with a ten-inch dildo but compared to the previous acts they seemed utterly comfortable in their own skin, not taking themselves all that seriously which was a welcome change from the previous double-dose of pretension. They could be huge. In Germany.

1987 lit up their synth-laden set with rather a sweet, geeky charm. The Killers are obviously in there but the old ‘87 boys seemed to look like they were having fun, unlike Monsieur Flowers et al.

The Dusty Stars arrived soon after with a contrived eccentricity and an Englishness which was, frankly, embarrassing. Their brand of Fratellian jauntiness stuck in the craw although they certainly looked the part (and that’s all that matters, innit?)

To finish was El Wristo. I assume this means ‘Leave Now’ in Mexican or something. I was amazed. It actually sounded like paint drying. It’s so Middle-of-the-Road it’s a one-way street. As I dozed in and out of their set I found myself wondering how on Earth they had progressed so far.

The Winners? Why, The Dusty Stars of course. ‘Grand’ final? Try Bland instead.

2008-12-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 4th December

PURR presents:
Piney Gir
Betty and the Werewolves
Colliding Lemons
Ill Ease.

To kick off what turned out to be a gloriously inconsistent night in Moles was Brooklyn’s very own Ill Ease. A combative little tomboy, her drum-looped, bass-heavy sleaze had all manner of body parts a-shaking, constantly winking suggestively towards Elastica, Peaches and the Gossip through the grinding guitar and tick-tock bass. She looked like she was having the time of her life, like a child who’s just been given their first handgun. Such a charming lady it felt like watching a mate from school triumph, without those all too familiar feelings of resentment. Stopping mid-song to comment on a walking sore thumb’s gaudy Warner Bros. jacket, it felt, if only for a nano-second, that I was in a skaggy Brooklyn club (in the best way possible).

With the final throbs of bass still running up and down my inside-leg, Colliding Lemons were on. All attractive ladies, I initially assumed they were having a Girls Night Out, enjoying multi-coloured shots whilst keeping a trained eye out for trilbied indie fops. How stupid did I feel when they started playing?! With enough giggly charm to warm the most celibate of hearts it was as if five female cast members from High-School Musical drank two bottles of cherry Lambrini and decided to form a band. Their set was drenched in gleaming 80s Powerpop, a heady blend of Roxette, the Bangles and Kim Wilde, and an overall appreciation of finely-honed tunes. In a bizarre, polished, nauseating way they could go on to make billions of dollars to fritter away on gold hairbrushes, diamond-encrusted jacuzzis and pink Lamborghinis.

As the full moon rose, out came Betty and the Werewolves. They were so pretty I almost wept. With beautifully conditioned hair they slammed headlong into their infectious set. Slow songs? No chance! Maudlin numbers? Forget about it! Their raucous, garage-rock sound always threatened to fall apart at any moment yet they always pulled clear of The Edge delivering two-and-a-half minute slices of cool, tense abandonment which burns the fingers and fries the brain . "I'm a school teacher," Betty later told me, "...but none of my students know I'm in a band."

After another damn mesmerizing routine from Purr’s Panthergirls, ending the night was Piney Gir. I don’t know what it means either. As the band started playing, Miss Gir (?) emerged from backstage with a female companion grinning like a Cheshire cat. Their set attempted to bring skiffle and country into the 21st century, with mixed results. They were a supremely accomplished band yet their breezy songs started to cloy after the first couple of numbers. With sound affects courtesy of a child’s toy box (you’re a bit Quirky, we get it) their songs about sticks and stones and paper and glue made me feel like I was watching a living, breathing iPod advert. At one point I was pretty sure the backing singer was playing a bottle of Merlot as percussion. After such a previously galvanizing set from Betty et al maybe they should drink more of that Merlot and just get down with it. Don’t be shy.

In the Eye of the Hurricane

2008-10-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

This past week I've been working in the newsroom of my local paper, the Bath Chronicle, as well as it's sister papers the Somerset Guardian and Somerset Standard, on the sports department. I got the weeks' work experience through a contact which I think I mentioned in my previous post.

I turned up at their offices on Monday morning with that all too familiar feeling: Nervousness. After being let in via the telecom outside I walked up to the newsroom with sweaty palms and jelly legs wondering just what I was going to be doing for the next week.

After meeting my contact (that sounds a bit MI5, doesn't it?) I was taken over to the sports department. To get there I had to walk through pretty much every other department and I cast a keen eye over all that was before me. Rows and rows of desks lined the large office area, all with nattily dressed journalists going about their jobs and television screens with news channels on them. I was shown to my desk, given a couple of newspapers to pour over and then given a list of tasks to do. I had the feeling that everyone assumed that I knew how a newsroom ran and I tried not to let on that I had no idea whatsoever.

My first task was to edit an abundance of match reports emailed in to the papers by various amateurs like myself. I learned my first lesson instantly: edit like you were working for the Nazi propaganda machine. I could see where they were coming from; a lot of the articles sent in concerning local football, rugby and hockey teams were by biased fans who seemed to have a suspect grasp of the English language. However, at the back of my mind there was the issue that these people were like me and they had probably stood through a couple of hours of largely mind-numbing amateur sport to write out 200 words or so. I felt cruel hacking away large chunks of their reports like an Amazonian explorer, changing sentences and basically re-writing them, but this was the method and who was I to argue?

Despite sifting through reports on sports which I am not all that interested in (including OAP bowls' tournaments which included what sort of cake they ate afterwards) I was thrilled to be there and each report took on the significance of a World Cup final, even if it was hockey match between Devizes and Melksham.

Once I had completed these I was given three telephone numbers to call. They were the numbers of local football managers whom I had to interview with regards to their teams results over the weekend. Now, this might surprise you but I was quite nervous about ringing people up who I had never met and asking them questions about their sides' performances - what went right, what went wrong, how the team was feeling confidence-wise for the next game et cetera - so I picked up the phone, hand physically trembling, to call these would-be Sir Alex Fergusons. The interviews were fine, the managers more than willing to talk in cliches about their team, although what I found most difficult was writing down what they were saying as they were saying it. After each phone call I looked at my notes which just looked like I'd been doodling on the paper. I then had to write these interviews up, selecting key quotes and dropping in the odd bit of information about the teams' recent run of form. This was pretty much my first day.

My second day was similar to the first although by this time my nerves had wained somewhat and I now felt comfortable about making phone calls.

On the Wednesday I was asked if I would like to go along to a press conference at Bath Rugby with another journalist with regards to their next game. For those who aren't that into rugby (and I count myself amongst you) Bath are currently top of the Guinness Premiership, England's Premier League of rugby. The club also has a distinguished history, being the Manchester United of rugby in the late 80s and 90s (i.e. bloody good)

I wasn't expecting the conference to be all flashbulbs and macho sports journalism but I was excited to be going along. Once we were there there were a number of local journalists chatting to various players and also the head coach was sat at a table in the middle of the room, just prattling on about this and that, with anyone able to come over, sit down and place their dictaphone in front of him. It wasn't particularly long but it was interesting meeting some of the players, shaking their hands (although they were more like shovels) and generally feeling physically inadequate.

Once we got back to the newsroom things were starting to get a bit panicky. The paper is out on Thursday and the deadline for it going to print was looming like a starved vulture. It was a totally different image to what it was on the Monday morning with people working in their own relaxed rhythms, casually chomping on apples and laughing through the day. By Wednesday afternoon people were pacing around, printing off drafts of pages, swearing, huffing and puffing, and possessing a manic look in their eyes. I was given the duty of proof reading some pages which probably sounds quite easy but the days were taxing on the old noggin and although I might have read something 100 times I would go back to it again and see a comma out of place or a slight problem with the layout, and this, in the world of journalism, is Unacceptable.

One exercise I was given on Wednesday afternoon was to come up with headlines for the sports articles. At first I thought it would be relatively easy but it soon became apparent that there was such little space, page-wise, to work in and I realised there was an art and craft to this otherwise taken-for-granted aspect of the newspaper.

And so it came to Thursday. I picked up some newspapers by reception, took them to my desk and starting to look for the pieces I had written as well as the pieces I had edited and greedily claimed as my own. There was an immense amount of satisfaction seeing the end product after putting time and effort into it and it was the biggest sense of achievement I've had since finishing my degree. To see my name next what I had written gave me a distinct feeling of triumph and although it was what the people around me do for a living, this being just another paper for just another week, it meant a lot to me to see that I could at least hold my own in that environment and muck in without making too many mistakes or having to be carried by someone else.

More midweek sports reports soon came in and I was back re-writing them but because the sports department mainly deals with things that happen at weekends, it was quiet on Thursday. At one point during the day a lady from the news department came over to my desk and asked me if I could write a small piece for her. In the local papers there is a 'Down Memory Lane...' type feature which involves people sending in old photographs and asking readers if they know any of the people in it or otherwise just sending them in for purely nostalgic, Hovis reasons. The particular photograph in question was of a football team from 1930 sent in by a gentleman called Brian Morris. Along with the photograph he included the names of the players and what trophies they had won but it was my job to ring him up and try to coax more information out of him. I rang him up and started chatting to him, asking him questions such as why he was sending the photo in, who he knew in it et cetera and because he was old and, I assume, lonely, he started talking to (at) me about all sorts of things. A typical answer of his, after asking him if he had any information on the players, was 'Well, Burt Saxton was the local milkman and Eddie Jones was a miner and played the trombone.'

'Was he any good on the trombone?' I asked, for no apparent reason.

'Oh yes, very...'

Today (Friday) is my day off as the guy I arranged the week with doesn't go in on Fridays. It has been a great week and one which has given me an even greater appetite to write for a living. I still feel like I'm undecided about the sort of publication which I would be interested in writing for but the thrill of working for a newspaper has left me feeling good. When I look to the future my confidence about writing for a living peaks and troughs but right now I'm feeling quietly optimistic.

A Break of Some Sort

2008-10-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

Within the past few weeks I've managed to secure my first 'gig' as a writer. Those who know me would not really associate myself with the world of which I'm writing about but bear with me nonetheless.

Along the road from my house is my local rugby club, Combe Down RFC, and after chatting to the right people, making a couple of phone calls, I am now the club's official match reporter. Like I said, I don't think many people would associate me with the rough 'n tumble world of local rugby but having played a little bit at school I like to think I know enough to at least write about it.

Although I've only reported on two matches the reports are posted on the club's website for all (who's interested) to see. Despite it being unpaid - I get free drinks at the end of the game so I guess that's payment of sorts - I consider it to be quite a tidy little project to get myself involved with and a necessary step in my undoubtedly arduous journey into journalism.

What I am most proud of, however, is that the first match report I did ended up in my local paper, The Bath Chronicle, after I sent it in to their sports department. The local paper is weekly and after frantically searching through the pages of the sports section there it was. My first ever published piece. 150 words of solid fact and limited elaboration. I've only just sent in the one from this Saturday and will flick through the sports department with similar gusto this Thursday.

Next weekend I am reporting on my first away match for the club. I think this might involve me going on the team bus and having to listen to dirty rugby songs whilst being assumed to be something of a pansy due to my reporting and also my refusal to wear something resembling a tracksuit. Despite this near-inevitability I managed to talk to some of the players after the match on Saturday and they're not all typical rugby lads. In fact they all want me to put in a good word about them in my reports so I'm not going to have my head flushed down a toilet just yet.

http://www.pitchero.com/clubs/combedown/

Vinyl Riches

2008-09-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

Last Bank Holiday weekend I went to Birmingham to visit friends from those golden University years of mine. It was a great weekend and one which I sorely needed as we wined, dined, danced and pranced our way through the weekend. Unexpectedly, however, I found myself inspired by my former housemate's random vinyl collection.

If a weekend were to ever have a soundtrack then it was this one. The music in question? Just a pair of seven-inch singles - Hit me with your rhythm stick by Ian Dury and The Blockheads and I'm too sexy by Right Said Fred. I know what you're thinking: Hit me with your rhythm stick is a superb song, for sure, but I'm too sexy? I guess it was one of those You Really Had To Be There moments, all self-mockery and homo-eroticism...

Flicking through my friend's vinyls got me all excited. His collection was varied, random and silly and made me want to put an old turntable I had back home in my room, trawl through my parent's old LPs and start a similarly odd and eclectic collection of my own. My last day in Birmingham saw me and my friends mooch into the city centre, my intention being to find some cheap charity-shop vinyl. Unfortunately we didn't have the endurance to traipse around for such shops but we did go into Zavvi with the scrap of hope that they would have some records. Sure enough they did and I purchased an album by the 80s New Wave group Men Without Hats and also the superbly baffling Pavarotti's Greatest Hits, Volume Two (the album cover is quite something - Pavarotti in a clown suit posing with a massive drum).

Once I arrived back in Bath I set up our old turntable in my room, dug out my parent's old records and started syphoning out the one's I was interested in. I did exactly the same many years ago when we had a turntable in our front room. It was through this that I first heard The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and the music which I consider to have changed the course of my life for the better. I can remember listening to The Beatles' Strawberry fields forever and thinking So this is what It sounds like.

The next day, after I had finished work, I popped into Bath city centre on the hunt for more vinyl. I went into one of the Oxfam shops and started sifting through their deceptively large selection of albums and singles. I could not believe my luck. One of the first records I came across was the twelve-inch single of The Right Stuff by New Kids On The Block. If ever a slice of boyband perfection existed then this surely was it. It screamed of the daftness, irreverence and the ridiculous so much so that I bought it along with the equally naff-yet-brilliant Straight Up by Paula Abdul. I also bought Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Pretentious, I know, but I had just re-read A Clockwork Orange and was desperate to hear it. It's actually quite good.

There is always that earnest debate as to whether vinyls sound better than CDs. I'm not entirely sure; I like to think that there are some artists who do sound better on vinyl than CD, one such artist being the inimitable Nat King Cole. I found the undoubtedly rushed-released best of, 20 Golden Greats, in my house and that takes some beating on the turntable, all candlelight and crackle.

Typical with other things in my life, I seem to be moving backwards. Instead of buying an iPod I put a turntable in my room. However, the unpredictable excitement of going into a charity shop, digging through their stale smelling records and buying something you've never heard of or haven't heard for a long, long time is far more thrilling than going into HMV and buying yet another CD or downloading music from the internet.

Vinyl has got me all excited. I think it's the start of a beautiful friendship.

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

2008-08-18T06:19:00.001-07:00

It is considered a joke within the literary world just how prodigious Anthony Burgess was during his career. His fecundity yielded all manner of novels, reviews, journalism, orchestral scores, stage productions and pretty much anything else you can think of which requires pen, paper and mind. However, of all these works his 1962 text A Clockwork Orange remains his most well known contribution to the world of literature, a fact which gnawed at his conscience up until his death in 1993.

Burgess started writing the novel after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and told he only had a matter of months to live. Once he was informed of his imminent death he went about writing furiously, the beginning of his vast output of work, owing to his desire to make enough money for his wife to live on once he had died. He ended up living for another thirty years as it turned out, yet no worked defined his life as much as A Clockwork Orange.

The book will always be synonymous with Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation which lead Burgess to concede that he would be forever known as 'the fountain and origin of a great film', yet he would also dispute the view that Anthony Burgess was a creation of Stanley Kubrick, insisting that the reality was quite the opposite.

The novel, or novella considering its slim size, is often categorised as Science Fiction due to its Dystopian vision but is somehow exempt from this classification when located in bookshops. Sure, the book, like all great Science Fiction, is pertinent to today (gangs, a bumbling Government, a hypocritical Police force) yet one can only imagine that the setting and the bleak vision of the future is merely a foil for the larger themes Burgess presents us. The primary question at the centre of the novel's black heart is asked by the prison chaplain on page 71 and is simply this: 'Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?' Despite its slender appearance this book has got itself some Big Ideas.

One of Burgess' main achievements throughout is his use of language. Alex, the novel's narrator, speaks in a tongue known as Nadsat, a Russian based language which is prevalent amongst the wayward youth of the novel (Burgess wanted readers to have a Russian dictionary at hand when reading). At first challenging, the language is eventually a colourful, playful experience and becomes easier to follow (assuming you get past the first few paragraphs without scrunching your face up with confusion).

Phew. The plot. Alex is a teenager in a broken society in the not-so-distant future. He and his Droogs (his gang) help contribute to this diseased carcass of a society as they rule the night, thieving, fighting and raping their way through the midnight hours. However, Alex is dichotomous at the best of times as he enjoys Beethoven and 'Ultra-violence' in equal measure, leading Burgess to ask the question as to whether High-Art civilizes or not. One beautifully written section sees Alex describing the classical music he is listening to in his room:

And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers.

Alex, as leader of his fellow Droogs, seems to have an existence which satisfies him greatly. Everything he wants is available to him one way or another and he is in a constant cycle of sating his urges. However, one night he is set up by his gang and is taken to jail where he is told the woman they were sexually assaulting has, in fact, died. He is sentenced to jail where he enjoys reading The Bible (for the sex and violence, the good bits) and seems to be 'getting better'. He then hears of a new medical technique which can cure a man forever of his subversive impulses and offers himself to be a guinea pig. It is known as the Ludovico Technique and, sure enough, he is cured of his violent impulses - whenever he feels the need to inflict pain he grows violently sick.

Soon enough he is let back into society where he is rejected by his parents and society in general. He is taken in by a writer whose wife Alex and his Droogs gang-raped (the writer not able to recognise Alex due to the Elvis mask he wore during the attack). The writer is a political revolutionary, trying to oust the oppressive Government, and feels that Alex can be used as an example of the stifling nature of the Government. However, things don't pan out quite like that, and Alex soon becomes a political pawn in a fragile society.

After a failed suicide attempt, Alex is in hospital and is visited by the Interior Minister, offered a stable job as compensation for the Government's failed experiment. He accepts this deal but is soon found back with a new set of Droogs. It is this last chapter which is omitted from Kubrick's film and has caused much debate since the film's release. For this reader the final chapter is beautifully realised with a pathos which, although incongruous with the rest of the book, is both optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. Unfortunately, I'm not going to tell you all that happens in that final chapter - your just going to have to read it for yourself.

One has to accept that the film will always eclipse the novel. One also has to accept that the film is quite sensational. But we're not talking about the film, we're talking about the book. It is both amazing and frightening to think that Burgess produced such an intelligent book in a matter of weeks due to his thinking that he would soon be dead. The true depth of the novel is hidden amongst the scenes of bloody violence and rampant criminality, yet its message of personal choice and freedom resonate with today's societies like a great bolshy trombone. Its the sort of book you go back to when you get bored with fiction and there are always new things to find within. Despite Burgess' disgruntlement that it was his most famous work, it's not a bad one to be remembered by.

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

2008-08-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

It's about time, don't you think?

Abandon all hope ye who enter here is the first line of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho. It is taken from Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy where it is inscribed on the gates of hell. Here it is scrawled in red spray paint on a wall in an extension of hell itself - 1980s New York City.

It's protagonist and narrator is Patrick Bateman. Bateman is a Wall Street yuppie of the most cartoonish proportions (sickeningly rich and good-looking in equal measure), yet Ellis doesn't so much throw a spanner in the works as a rusty, bloody chainsaw - Bateman is a psychopath with a thirst for gruesome, vicious murder.

Despite sounding like a distinctly disturbing novel, Ellis is able to put down some truly comic observations of New York City's rich and vacuous. It is that rare thing which authors often find so difficult to achieve; it is both a grotesque yet funny novel, although many female activists didn't, and still don't, see it that way. When it was released the misogynistic content ruffled feminist feathers, to say the least.

The cast of vapid, over-privileged twenty-somethings concern themselves with being seen in the right clubs, the right restaurants and all the while in the right clothes. Any description of another character by Bateman will see him meticulously pick apart the other person's outfit whether it be Gianni Versace, Jean-Paul Gaultier or Louis Vuitton. Appearance is everything, right down to the finest, nauseating and most irrelevant detail. The novel casts a satirical eye over American attitudes in the 1980s, namely mindless consumerism, and picks apart the ultimately pointless, directionless existence of those who like to spend spend spend.

Throughout his body of work Ellis' influences are for all to see. The minimalist modes of Hemingway and Faulkner are rampant in the majority of his novels yet American Psycho throws away the proud simplicity of these literary cornerstones and sees Bateman survey New York with the meticulous eye of a pre-Raphaelite artist. This can often be funny (Bateman describing his latest hi-fi system; laying down his robotic morning routine) but also highly disturbing (the death and sex scenes mercilessly leave nothing to the imagination). In the novel's more stealthier moments, between the blood and the sex, Ellis writes with a sensitivity which is delicate and subtle in its presence. When Bateman and his fiancee leave the social cannibalism of New York and retreat to a friend's beach house for a holiday, Bateman leaves small affectionate notes in her handbag, revealing something resembling a humanity which is otherwise NOT THERE. However, such moments of tenderness are not without the macabre lurking in it's shadow. On the same holiday Bateman finds himself stood over his sleeping wife, ice-pick in hand, gripped by his madness.

Those of you who know me will be all too aware of my feelings towards this book. I often find it amusing myself how highly I rate this novel. At its best it penetrates with an execution one can only marvel at, slack-jawed; at its worse it is one of the sharpest American novels of its time. I have actually judged people solely on their opinion of this novel and have surely lost potential friends for it but those I know who value it don't just like it. You can't just like it. You can't just like Christmas, you can't just like your birthday, you can't just like it when Chelsea lose. The novel gives you something.

To many people it is a punchline to a literary joke. To me it is one of the greatest books I have ever read.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to return some videotapes.

Kingdom of Fear - Hunter S. Thompson

2008-07-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

On the 20th February 2005, Hunter Stockton Thompson committed suicide after shooting himself in the head at his notorious Colorado compound, 'Owl Farm'. In a nearby room his daughter-in-law accompanied his grandson whilst Thompson's own son was also in the house. It was the end of a remarkable life, one lived above the speed limit (in every sense of the phrase) before finally going over the Edge he so fondly spoke about.

Thompson's autobiography, Kingdom of Fear, is typical of the man himself. Never one to play by society's mundane rules or to adhere to vapid normality, his life here is presented as a series of letters, newspaper clippings and anecdotes which would make the most seasoned raconteur green with envy (and sickness).

The autobiography is notable by its absence of Thompson's childhood. He only ever mentions his formative years in brief, blink-and-you'll-miss-it sections and it would appear to the reader at least that life truly started when the art of writing took hold. We get accounts of his time in the army where he honed his writing skills before moving onto a variety of newspapers and magazines, sent to report on obscure sporting events which he seemed to embrace with relish.

The cast is pretty much as expected: enraged lawyers, colourful prostitutes, violent foreigners and famous actors, all of whom had their lives changed, for good or ill by Thompson, like a drop of LSD in your morning tea. However, for all of Thompson's vibrant stories, he saves his main reserve of energy attacking George Bush Jr's administration. Published in 2003, Thompson has a lot to aim at; post-9/11 America was ample fodder for Thompson's bile, a country led by a man who he calls 'the child-president' and a 'whore beast'. Indeed, it would seem that Thompson, a man who had seen and reported on Richard Nixon's tempestuous Presidency, felt more aggrieved by Bush's shambolic pastiche of a Presidency than any other he reported on - and that was quite a few, earning him his stellar reputation as a fine political writer.

Now to the good stuff. The autobiography features a selection of booze-, gun- and drug-fuelled tales. Amongst the more memorable is his late-night excursion to Jack Nicholson's house, celebrating the Hollywood rogue's birthday. From a vantage point overlooking the actor's house embedded in an Aspen valley, Thompson decided to set up an amplifier and proceeded to play a tape of a pig being eaten alive by bears. At 119 decibels. After the lights went out in the Nicholson home, Thompson opted to make the small trip down to the house and place his present on the porch of the movie-star - a bleeding elk's heart. The next morning Thompson received news that his good friend Jack was in trouble. Apparently in the early hours of that morning there were sightings of a crazed stalker lingering menacingly around the Nicholson compound, intent on committing barbaric acts on the Nicholson clan...

Other moments include Thompson and his vicious Dutch friend, Geerlings, beating up the Brazilian war minister's son in Rio de Janeiro, a lion (yes, a lion) finding itself in his convertible and on the receiving end of Thompson's impeccable decision-making, his infamous campaign running for Mayor of Aspen, his time reporting on the Vietnam war and his well documented court case involving a rather interesting feminist in the porn industry (what really happened in that hot-tub?).

Despite the abundance of hilarious tales, I found the book failed to deliver on what Thompson is ultimately defined by: his lifestyle. Those who have read his works will find this hard to digest. For all his brilliant writing, be it political journalism, sports journalism or first-hand accounts of the scaly underbelly of America, Thompson is best known for his 100mph lifestyle. If anything, there were not enough drug stories, trouble-making and general bad behaviour, but maybe I'm just one of many who have bought into the Thompson myth, setting standards for the man which, in reality, are beyond the capabilities of most men. Although I enjoyed reading his autobiography and experienced a sense of a life lived to exhilerating extremes, I felt that it revealed a rather uncomfortable truth: that his life is dominated by obsequious myths which are part and parcel of any larger-than-life character. A fun, multicoloured read, but to quote the great man himself, 'It never got weird enough for me'.

The Dark Hype

2008-07-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

Excuse me for a few minutes whilst I get something off my chest.

I don't think I can take the eternal gushing poured forth by people over the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, any longer. Firstly, I must point out that I haven't seen it. Secondly, I have no desire to see it. Frankly, I thought Batman Begins was a teensy bit over-rated. I was, and still am, truly amazed by the amount of people who used such adjectives to describe it as 'dark', 'brooding' and 'deep'. The hype surrounding it was dispelled for me as soon as the first in a vast volume of one-liners was delivered. And was I the only person who found Christian Bale's voice, when in full Batman regalia, absolutely hilarious to the point of depression?

When it comes to The Dark Knight, I have often found myself telling people that I am looking forward to seeing it. This is a complete lie. As with many other films and television series, around which people organise their lives, I am simply not interested (just like people I know who aren't interested when I tell them they have to read, for example, The Collector by John Fowles. But that's just a book and not a $999bn film). Dismissing such amazing must-see events can make you come across as a miserable old fart, but in terms of not kidding yourself it is a small price to pay.

A bit about Heath Ledger. I know it is wrong to put a man down when he is not here to defend himself but I have only ever seen him in one film, A Knight's Tale, which was a largely forgettable affair. Yes, I've heard that he is fantastic in Brokeback Mountain and that 10 Things I Hate About You is a bit of fun, but I can only judge him on the one film I have seen him in and my judgement is that he is neither here nor there as a actor but really really really good-looking, so thats ok. I wonder, if an uglier actor died in the same circumstances, would there be similar outpourings of grief (from females between the ages of 16 and 35)?

Maybe I'm just a bitter soul annoyed with the world-at-large, unable to focus my bile anywhere else except at something which brings joy to a lot of people. Maybe the ghost of a Generation X-er has infiltrated my bones, telling me to fight against the masses purely on principle and at a cost of discovering new things. Whatever the case, I keep hearing the echo of Johnny Rotten in my head, singing the lines 'Don't be told what you want, Don't be told what you need...'

Five go Paintballing

2008-07-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I received a message on facebook from an old school friend who I hadn't seen for quite some time. In his message he wrote that because another friend of ours was getting married in a few weeks he had organised a Stag event for the following weekend. He had booked a day of paintballing.

When I saw the word paintballing I instantly visualised packs of sweaty men running around a wooded area shouting and barking in a mist of testosterone and atavistic rage. Intense physical exercise isn't one of my favourite pastimes but because it was for our friend I decided to cast my reservations to one side and said I'll be there.

For the next week I kept getting rather apprehensive about the whole thing. I had been told that it hurts when you get hit by a paintball and that some people take it quite seriously. I disguised my worry with light-hearted banter, telling friends that they'd better watch their backs and making the point to one friend in particular that I was going to hunt him down like the dog that he is.

The night before, me and a few friends went into Bath city centre for a few drinks and discussed what the next day might yield. After a few drinks I started to feel incredibly excited about the whole thing and couldn't wait for the following day.

I was picked up from my house at 8:45 the next morning on the orders that we needed to be there at 9:15 with a 9:30 start. I didn't feel too hungover but I got the feeling that was because of the grip of nervous energy. Once we arrived I thought my nightmare had come true. Shaven-headed, surly men were wandering around the entrance of the complex in camouflaged overalls and mean, black boots. You don't have to be on the front-line, you can always lay low, I told myself.

After dealing with the administrative side of things (collecting our overalls, goggles, dog-tags et cetera) the mass of people were separated into three smaller groups. Our group was placed with another two parties who, to my relief, were of similar age to us and also didn't look like serious paintballers.

And so to the actual paintballing itself. It was fantastic. Not for a long time had my heart beat with such reckless abandon nor my poor legs been tested so much. There was the sweat, the scrapes, the agony and the ecstasy, and in the mini-games we played I usually ended up behind a barrier of some sort, exhilarated by the swarm of paintballs whizzing overhead whilst popping up sporadically, like a meercat, to let off a few paintballs at the opposition. My crowning glory, the zenith, of my day came when I had a one-on-one shoot out with a mystery opponent. I was behind a tangle of branches and logs whilst he was under an old Jeep. I kept poking my head and my gun around the side of my cover whilst he kept waiting for me to do so before firing at me. Eventually I managed to shoot him and take him out of the game. The satisfaction came in shooting him in the head, a direct head-shot. Once you were shot you had to make your way back to the safe zone where you would wait with your fellow wounded for everyone else to come back. When I entered the safe zone after this particular game it emerged that it was one of my good friends who I had shot in the head, leading to a bout of Immodesty.

I hit a few people and was hit a few times myself (no, it doesn't hurt - its like being punched on the arm/shin/lower back by the big kid at school). After all was said and done, we paid up, compared war wounds and parted ways, arranging to meet up in town later for drinks and a session of reminiscing. The whole day was a huge amount of fun and something I would suggest anyone to do. There was such a vast range of people there (rotund males, young children, svelte girls), meaning there was no danger of exclusion or being singled out due to inexperience.

The next morning I could hardly get out of bed such was the lethargic weight of my legs, but it was worth every hobbled footstep around the house.

Roper Rhodes, or, A Funny Old Week.

2008-07-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

This past week I managed to get my claws into some temp. work courtesy of the agency I signed up with last summer. I got a phone call from them asking me if I would like to work at a company which sounded like Rofer Rowe. They described the job as simply re-packaging bathroom furniture and accessories. Being incredibly skint I said I would and was even more happy to hear that it paid £7 an hour. I eventually got an email clarifying the details such as where it was, what time to turn up, who to report to et cetera. The company turned out to be called Roper Rhodes.

On the Monday morning my Dad gave me a lift down to this place which was on the way to the hospital where he works. They were expecting me to turn up at half past eight but I turned up fifteen minutes before just to give a good impression, to give the illusion of zeal. I was waiting in the reception when a man walked in. He asked me if I was a temp and after I told him yes, he said he was temping for the week aswell. His name was Steve and he was forty-eight. He had an almost cartoonish cockney accent and, as we continued talking, it turned out he was from Milton Keynes and had only recently moved to Bath. Eventually someone from the company came in and asked us to sign a contract before telling us that the actual warehouse where we were working was just along the road and not part of the more admin. bit that we were currently in. The guy from the company asked if I wanted to get in his car for the short drive to the warehouse but Steve offered to give me a lift instead. In his car I noticed that he had two Brian Adams cds to which I thought Shit, this week is going to be terrible.

Once we were in the warehouse it turned out that it would only be me, Steve and another man named Paul who would be occupying the whole warehouse. Paul would be driving the fork-lift truck around whilst me and Steve would be tucked away in the far corner of the warehouse. We were shown what to do with regards to the job. It was impossibly easy work which consisted of opening large boxes, sticking labels on the smaller boxes within and adding labels to tap display stands. The tap models had names like Aero, Wessex, Storm, Neo and Insight which made them sound more like Gladiators than taps. We were eventually left to get on with the job in hand.

After getting to grips with the work I asked Steve what music he listened to apart from Brian Adams. He wondered how I knew he liked Brian Adams and seemed briefly unsettled by my knowledge of this before realising he had left the cds on display in the car. It turned out that he, like myself, was a Beatles nut and was similarly obsessed with them. He also was a big fan of David Bowie and told me that he went to see the man himself in an Odeon theatre in Chatham when he was 12. We talked about The Beatles a lot, comparing albums, discussing the impossibility of choosing a favourite track and also talking over various myths and legends which surround the band. We got on really well and he told me that he thought I was born forty years too late.

For the rest of the week we got to know each other more and more. He told me about his failed marriage and two children and how he believed he was going through some sort of a midlife crisis, whilst I told him about my lack of direction and various worries. We talked a lot about football aswell. He was a Chelsea fan and the mickey was subsequently taken.

Throughout the week we were crossing our fingers that they might offer us some more work, something to tie us over the week after. On Thursday the same guy who had shown us the basics came in and told us that there wasn't any work for next week. Once he left Steve said that they should have told us that tomorrow, on our last day, because now (and he had taken the decision on behalf of both of us) we were going to do next to no work on our last day. I was fine with that. We had also been listening to the radio all week and it was starting to grate. It was the same songs everyday, each sounding more like the last and there was great irony in that over the cacophony of some dance song we would talk about whether disc one or two was better on the 'white' album. Late into Thursday afternoon, after we had been told we weren't needed next week, Steve suggested that tomorrow should be a Beatles Day and that we bring in some albums to listen to. I told him not to worry and that I would bring in some albums tomorrow.

On our last day I brought in about eight Beatles albums and the best of David Bowie just for good measure. The Beatles albums were played chronologically, in keeping with Beatle diplomacy, and by the end of the day we had just about enough time to listen to some Bowie.

That week would have been a lot less bearable if it wasn't for Steve. On our last day we went for a couple of drinks after work and swapped mobile numbers. I like to think that I made a friend amongst all that monotony and that was the last thing I was expecting.