(Planet Me)

I'm With Stupid

2012-02-09T18:37:00.000Z

They are wonderful, aren't they?

Last week, I was carrying my son down the stairs in a shop. Well, I say carrying, but he is two years old. And he was in a buggy. So imagine, if you will, a thirty something man, carrying a child, in a buggy, down twenty or so stairs in a shop. (For a picture, it's one of these).

How long does it take to go down these steps? 10 seconds? Surely, you can wait that long. Unless..

As I had started on my way down, at the foot of the stairs, a male of advanced years - enough to be old enough to know fucking better, and probably a parent as well - walked into the shop, and looked up the stairs. Seeing me, and my son being carried in a buggy down the stairs, his first thought was, well - let's have a test, shall we?

a) run up the stairs and squeeze past the man, and the buggy with the baby in it.
b) wait until they come downstairs.
c) offer to help.

If you offered C) well done, you are a fully rounded, normal, considerate human being. B) not particularly helpful, but also, you're not a windowlicking mouthbreathing cretin. And A) then you're the kind of embarassment to mankind I encountered last week.

And thus, halfway down the stairs, Captain Stupid tried to push past me, with a buggy containing a human being. He raced up, and only stopped when he touched the buggy. I stood still for a second - after all, I wouldn't want the death-by-stairs of a stupid fucker on my conscience. He pushed again trying to get past.

"Could you go to the bottom of the stairs?" I said.
He pushed again.
"Get THE HINT". I hissed.
"I thought you said something else." he said. But the way I translated those words was not what he said, but what he meant. Which was "I'M A FUCKING IDIOT."

After a miniscule battle of wits - aided by the fact I have brains and he didn't - he went down the stairs, not, by the way offering to help a man carrying a buggy with a human being in it - so that when I got to the bottom of the stairs, my son (aged 2, and 1 month) said something.

"He's impatient isn't he?" Captain Stupid said and chuckled.

I thought for a second, and utilised the power of "FUCK IT."

"I wouldn't lecture anyone about impatience, if I were you." I said.

He laughed and walked up the stairs. I resisted the temptation to say anymore. After all, it's difficult to talk down to stupid people in a way they understand. Sometimes, not being an asshole is a curse.

Today, mind you, we were walking past the coach park after a meal.

I was distracted by the front coach, in which a shiny red can suddenly dropped to the floor. The coach driver, smoking a fag, had casually chucked his can of Coke out of the window onto the floor.

I walked up, picked up the can, and dropped it through the window into his lap.

"You dropped this."

To which, I charmingly was informed that I was a ...

"TWAT!"

.... but I'm not a littering twat.

"It's not my can!" Captain Stupid#2 pleaded.

"I don't care. Your coach, your can, your fudging problem."

Coaches do have bins on them, don't they?

Sheesh. People. I know they are stupid, but do they have to demonstrate this so obviously and completely unprompted with such stunning regularity?

The Midlands Will Rise Again.

2012-02-04T23:26:00.000Z

Due to an enormous change in my life circumstances, both somewhat unexpected, and beyond my control, I may - or may not - be changing the contents of this site, and may or may not cease blogging. Certainly, some subjects I will not be able to mention in any detailed way. Bit twas ever thus, anyway.

You will be pleased to know :

No one has died.
No relationships have ended.
Everyone is physically healthy and in good spirits.
We are still getting married.

Love,

M

The Way Life Is

2012-02-01T22:40:00.000Z

Boys cuddle over Christmas.

X has a camera!

Strike a pose, vogue.

X gives Luke a kiss before setting off.

The wind took a great big bite out of my roof when the speeds went up to 70mph last month.

We got accosted by cocks.

We pose on the train

Boy in the box.

Tube philosophy

JESUS JONES / JIMBOB - London Islington Academy - 28 January 2012

2012-01-31T19:57:00.000Z

“Welcome to the museum of modern music”, Mike Edwards announces, before Jesus Jones kick into another of their multitude of lesser known international bright young nineties pop hits, in this strange venue – a converted shop inside a shopping centre, opposite a clothes shop. Haberdashery, needles, spoons, and knives. Ground floor, shopper's paradise.

But first, the support act : JimBob, the acoustic version of Carter USM, has returned from a solo musical hibernation with new material and a bag of great songs that haven't been heard for a long time. Armed with just an acoustic guitar and a suit, JimBob plays songs new and old. There's no qualitative gap between the big songs of 1990-1995 and the smaller, more intimate ones : more that, without the muscle of a huge record company chartering jets and aiming for Number 1 albums, these records sell in the hundreds and not the hundreds of thousands. If anything, his songs – their deft use of language grounded in the minutae of British life – are a more specific brand of social commentary that shames Morrissey's finest moments, and shorn of the universal air of human self-pity. Or, another way, JimBob's closest peer would be a modern day Philip Larkin with a guitar. Songs well known - “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere”, “Bloodsport For All”, “Do Re Me So Far So Good”, “The Only Living Boy In New Cross” nuzzle up to recent gems such as “The Tesco Riots”. It's a short half hour, with the crowd receiving the older songs with joy and the newer ones with curiousity, laying the groundwork for a continuing journey through life as songs. After four years of high profile Carter nostalgia shows, it is a refreshing experience to have the solo songs return to life and live again in front of your eyes.

Half an hour later (and, at 8.15 prompt), Jesus Jones take the stage. For no reason other than they can, every three or four years, Jesus Jones get together for a week or so and pretend to be pop stars again. It's nothing more, and nothing less, than a thoroughly enjoyable romp through an under-appreciated bands back catalogue.

And, what seems alien now, is that it is twenty one years since their biggest record, the slender but nourishing “Doubt”. And no, it isn't a play-the-album-in-full gig. Nothing dates faster than a vision of the future that never came to pass, after all. For a couple of brief summers, this band, and Pop Will Eat Itself, and EMF, all occupied roughly the same place, welding the possibilities of drum machines and guitars and big pop songs : all admittedly with varying degrees of success.

We can laugh at the fashions now : what on earth were you thinking with orange shorts and purple leggings and huge red hats with a thousand fake legs poking out of them? Then again, the big flares or 1990, or the rat-tail jumpers of 1992 were also equally loathsome. And the big white jumpers and floppy Beatle haircuts of 1996. You don't listen to music with your eyes, anyway.

I've now passed the point where I've seen this band more in their reunion years than in their glory. And, to be blunt, they are probably better now than they were then. There's no qualitative difference, at the very least. And, whilst the set is made of old songs, it is no tired nostalgia show. Some songs you might expect - “The Devil You Know”, “The Right Decision”, “The Next Big Thing” - are absent, and instead rarely-played songs - “Blissed”, “Get A Good Thing”, “What's Going On”, are present. You may lament the loss of these songs, but a band is not a jukebox and whilst some of these songs may have paid for their houses, it is not a debt that anyone has to carry. Besides which, haven't bands performed some songs enough? I could happily live the rest of my life without hearing “Wonderwall” again.

They open with “Who Where Why”, which is probably the most enjoyably brash existential crisis I will hear all night. Sometimes its difficult really to connect the impressionistic lyrics with anything in particular : I'm not sure what “Move Mountains” is about, if anything, after twenty one years. Whilst – and in the best sense of the phrase – Jesus Jones were the indie Def Leppard, this is no insult. Words were created and used in the context of phonetics for the earlier records, and sounds were an unholy combination of technology and buzzsaw guitars. And, for a moment, Jesus Jones were huge in the music world.

Those days were different : neither better, nor worse, just utterly different : on the cusp of the analog transition into digital, and the move of our worlds into that of connected bits and bytes. When the future arrived, when computers on every desk became commonplace, and when Oasis ruled the world, Jesus Jones became obselete. We changed, grew up, or grew away, depending on who you listened to, and moved to the next stage. For some people, this music was a fad, locked into a box and replaced with television, Downton Abbey, cooking and home renovations.

Remember when you were alive? When blood flowed? When we jumped and sang and took the night by the horns? What would you know?

You could only buy hits in record shops, on vinyl, cassette, 12” picture disc with an extra song, and CD single. The charts were published weekly in inky paper, and the conduit was the monopoly of print and broadcast media.

That girl, that boy, is still here. International Bright Young Thing, is just such a song. A literate combination of pop at what were then, the boundaries, combined with something deeper. “Caricature”, a b-side that – finally – appeared on an album 21 years after release, goes down better than any other non-hit-single. Were anyone to take their heads out of their collective backside and write a definitive list of “20 best B-sides of all time”, this would be in that list.

Thankfully, it isn't just a case of “PLAY THE HITS AND FUCK OFF”, as Iain Baker's shirt says. Songs are resurrected back to live performance after two decades in hibernation - “Get A Good Thing” was rarely, if ever played, and “Nothing To Hold Me” and “Blissed” haven't been seen since 1991. The first time I saw this band, they disappeared, one by one, to the ghostly chorus of that song, adrift in dry ice and blues and reds that went like a freight train through your mind at 1am.

It's no lazy greatest hits exercise, but it is refreshingly honest to see a band unafraid to tamper with the formula and not just trot out every big song.

There's new stuff too : “The Message” and “Culture Vulture” from the last decade, and songs not played often since 1989.

The main set comes to a close with a four punch of a long lost indie disco. “Zeroes And Ones” was undoubtedly, the band showing their techy stripes – and with “Perverse” taking the unusual mantle of being the first album to be recorded entirely digitally with every instrument recorded and re-sampled – and a compelling romp towards the finish line. After “Bring It On Down”, and the rough and tumble of “Info Freako”, the main set comes to a close with “Idiot Stare” which – to me at least – is one of their finest songs, utilising the much under-appreciated dynamic of tension and release, combined with sweeping string motifs, and deft use of rhythms to bring the night to a crescendo.

And it's not even 9.30 : when I saw Guns N Roses they were still an hour and a half from taking the stage. Two songs later – the full-front Italian piano bongo frenzy of “What Would You Know?” and the aforementioned “Blissed” and it's the end of the trip to the museum of modern music. Cast out into the shopping centre, and with babysitters. Life goes on, but sometimes, for a little while, we can be whoever we were again. It is a mutual moment : Mike Edwards described Jesus Jones existence as “Going on a holiday for a week as pop stars”, and for the audience, it's exactly the same – going on holiday for a night. Last orders is still an hour away, for even if we aren't, the night itself is young.

Set :
Who Where Why / Move Mountains / IBYT /. Caricature / Real Real Real / Nothing To Hold M e/ get A Good Thing / Never Enough / Culture Vulture / All The Answers / Welcome Back, Victoria / The Message ./ Right Here Right Now / What Would You know? / Zeroes And Ones / Bring It on Down / Info Freako / Idiot Stare / What's Going On / Blissed

It's More Fun To Compute

2012-01-22T21:08:00.000Z

After last weeks two hour trawl with a dodgy UKASH virus, yesterday morning was.. all things considered, fairly shit. I closed the bonnet on the PC on Friday Night, opened it up the next morning, to find the blue boot screen was frozen. No log in, nothing. The system had hung whilst booting up, and I had no option but to hard reset and start again.

I know. Buy A Mac, it just works!

When the system rebooted, it became fairly clear that whilst booting up it got stuck on one particular element : the network registry was corrupt, and the audio drivers were failing to connect. In short - no Internet, and no sound. And even when I connected the hard DSL cable, the internet was not working. In the meantime, iTunes wasn't working correctly, Windows Explorer wasn't rendering correctly, and the webcam was also out of action. An hour or so later, and it was apparent I would have to format, reload, and reinstall the OS. Bums.

Yesterday largely involved error checking the contents and backing up the Hard Drive. I no doubt missed some files, but I don't know what they are. Today involved reloading, configuring and building the hard drive, then reinstalling all the non-OS programs. I have lost all my progress on Lego Star Wars, but I was only 2.4% in, so I'm not heartbroken yet.

In other news, Amazon provided new heaphones and a new vaccuum cleaner for review, so Sunday has recovered the utter shittness of Saturday and today is pretty ace. And I have a new coat. Small things make all the difference.

How are you doing, anyway?

yeah, yeah. Buy a Mac!

PET SHOP BOYS format

2012-01-18T21:30:00.000Z

The sequel, of sorts, to 1995's “Alternative”, “Format” is best seen as perhaps part of a very much a dying breed : The B-sides album. Over their quarter century (is it that long? It doesn't seem so, but it obviously is), the Pet Shop Boys have seen the dominance of the format, the plushing of the vinyl single, the rise, and hasty death of cassette, and the entire lifespan of the CD single : “Always On My Mind” was the first Number One Christmas single available on CD in the UK.

38 songs at a very affordable price in a double set : near enough every Pet Shop Boys song that hasn't been on an album. Near enough.

Now, the b-side is an anarchronism : there are no b-sides anymore. Physical singles are practically extinct : HMV in Oxford Street – the biggest record shop in Europe – contains a two feet of rack space for the CD single. Everything is available on your virtual storefront.

Taking perhaps a strange role then, this record, or box set, of something like 40 songs is a lavish, exhaustive two and a half journey through Pet Shop Boys back pages. Running from 1996 to 2009, from the bands out-of-time “Bilingual” to the largely successful commercial reappraisal of “Yes”, , “Format” is, by definition incomplete – missing the b-sides to the last three singles – and doing what most b-side albums do, which is sound exactly like a collection of songs that don't quite fit well together recorded many years apart.

To their credit, the Pet Shop Boys still bother with b-sides. For many bands, the b-side is now nothing more than a digital bundle of extra leftovers pared off and thrown randomly across the internet through several retailer-only exclusives, or perhaps, even worse, akin to the Depeche Mode remix record from the summer, where 25 extra remixes were only available from 7 seperate digital sellers.

For this band – Britains best songwriting duo – there is no such as a b-side, just a song that doesn't make it onto the album. And here they are. Keen listeners will know first few songs from the 2001 remaster set of “Bilingual”, with others from the various limited double-disc formats of the albums at the time of their release. Others – such as “The former enfant terrible” have only ever been seen as downloads. Not that this necessarily matters, for “Format” collects almost every non-album song from the second fifteen years of their lives, and places them in chronological order . Until such time as an exhaustive set of remasters and reissues slip out for their last few records, “Format” is the place to be.

It starts with “The Truck Driver And His Mate”, which is fine, chunky homo-eroticism at its finest, which perhaps, for the better or the worse, delves right into most stereotypical element of the bands catalogue : they are a gay band, and the opening song is about a gay love triangle for truckers. Beyond this, the rest of this are some of the finest songs you've never heard – 12 songs alone from the “Bilingual” record, including the under-rated remix/amped up re-recording of “Discoteca” which takes a mid-paced ballad and becomes a andrenalised stomper.

“Disco potential” and the somewhat lyrically slight “The View From My Balcony” (which is exactly that), are not the greatest Pet Shop Boys ever.

1999's “Nightlife” was, at the time, semmingly shorn of, and out of step with the world.A brash disco album with tinges of regret, the b-sides were oft overlooked : the band were at this stage, touring to half-empty arenas with a bankrupt Harvey Goldsmith taking the proceeds, and whilst their commercial stock was challenged, the record gifted some of the finest songs they ever wrote – whilst “Je T'Aime” with Sam Taylor Wood is missing, we do get the under-appreciated tussle that is the Chris-Lowe led “Lies”. Sticking with the chronological aim of the record, CD1 ends with “Sexy Northerner”, which is amongst the greatest b-sides of all time : unforgettable, daft and funny in equal measure. The key to happy living is not taking yourself too seriously, after all.

The second CD opens with 8 or 9 songs from the 2002-3 period around the “Release” album, where the bands commercial stock was as low as it has ever been, the material was presented with a somewhat realistic, organic approach and – whilst the relative “back to basics” approach of touring with a regular band of guitars, drums, and so forth and minimalist staging had a certain effect, the overall result was one of a drift from the world of big hits. As was expected, a consolidating greatest hits record was issued : the b-sides from period are both good, average, and somewhat unexceptional. You can see why songs such as “Always” - a midpaced, unexceptional, fogettable song – never made the parent album. And, despite being covered by Robbie Williams, the song “We're The Pet Shop Boys” (itself a cover) is perhaps one of the finest, funniest, and most enjoyable hagiographies ever committed to tape. Later, songs such as “The Resurrectionist”, and a retooled with-Elton-John version of 1989's “In private” are welcome additions and proof, were any needed that after twenty years, the band still had and maintained a certain, unique personality. The kind that if it didn't exist, you would miss it, and wonder where such artists wwhere in the world. By the end of the album, and the prolific “Yes” period, the b-sides of the first two singles are present : but many songs – the b-sides to the German “Beautiful people” single, the Christmas EP, “Together” are all absent without leave, and – time restrictions of the format aside – missing.

“Format” is what it is, both a dying breed of the compilation of the now sadly endangered extra track and b-side, and a compendium of extra songs that supplement and expand the previous five studio records with several additional songs each. Some of them are the finest songs the band have recorded : some of them not so. Some of them are songs that you will hold in your ears with a wonder as to where they have been all your life. Others not so. And, unless you bought a digital download from one specific website, others will be songs you probably didn't know existed. Designed for the casual, this weighty, popstuffed package is a value for money delivery mechanism for 38 songs that have, over the past 15 years, been a well-kept secret from pop music's back pages. We're the Pet Shop Boys, indeed.

FANTOMAS - "The Directors Cut" : New Years Revolution (Live)

2012-01-17T21:40:00.000Z

Fantomas are perhaps one of the finest bands most people have never heard of. Their strange and wonderful combination of ambient nose and jazz-thrash metal is about as commercial a prospect as cyanide pie. To me, however, and hopefully you, this music – largely shorn of chorus, discernible structure, or lyrics, is a manna from an angry heaven. Filmed one New Years Eve, Mike Patton – the voice of Faith No More, Mr Bungle, Tomahawk, Peeping Tom, and many others – leads this unholy quartet (with members of Mr Bungle, Mudhoney, and Melvins in his racous orchestra) through the entirity of their unsurpassed 2001 masterpiece “The Directors Cut”. For many, this band were a bag of rubbish. But this album, 13 themes from classic cinema recast and covered with a respectful irreverance, is one of the finest records I have ever heard.

The performance is immaculate and finely honed - it is, amongst all other things, a unit that cohesively glues together seemingly disparate influences to form a whole that is much more than the sum of the parts. And, given that the album they are performing in full explores the world of cinema, the visuals are bizarre. Taking a cue from the classic tricks of old, don't expect a fimmaculate Blu Ray presentation of a show at your local enormodrome. This mixes footages from phones, cameras, and treated formats, combined with a dded grain, distorted, and playfully applied visual tricks including blurred moments, ghosting, static cross fades, fake VHS interference, painted on glowing red devil eyes, and anything else you can think of treating the visual images as moving palette of experiments.

Then again, if you made it to the third paragraph of this review, you'll know Fantomas aren't exactly Linkin Park for the middleaged. You should expect more than the usual run-of-the-mill singer-points-and-everyone-goes-whoo experience you will get with your latest Madonna live DVD. Besides, it's not as if there is a giant robot about to emerge from backstage, or anything like that for your delection. Just four men (one in a hat) with a cacophony of noise for you to experience. If anything, there is little music in the world that requires such rapt attention, as tempos rise and fall, music becomes a form to used, abused, and left for dead. Opening with “The Godfather”, the set for me, peaks with the totally fucking bugnuts 2-minute race through Jerry Goldsmith's theme “The Omen” - during which Satan Worship has never seemed quite so appealing. The drummer is a frantic blur of limbs. Throughout the 70 minutes, the band roar and dip and play ; in the truest sense of the word, play – with the music with a sense of amusement and outlandish quirky whimsy with whistles, theremins, and grinding guitars wormed into an experience I can best described as the musical equivalent of extreme sex. As Maybe it's something you had to be there for, or something you had to feel in your guit at an insane volume in a crowded room. Fantomas are, like everything these musicians has been involved in, a labour of love, where music is made more with the idea of the glory of the noise instead of any eye towards key issues. Who cares how many copies it sells? Who cares about many tickets? As long as you don't have to do a day job as well, a musician can make music, for that is what he does and where his instinct takes him – often at the cost and sacrifice of pension schemes, medical insurance, or an affluent life, but with a richness far beyond that of any bank balance. A glorious continuation of the muse, and the music.

How To Remove the Ukash Virus.

2012-01-15T21:25:00.000Z

Yesterday I got hit with the particularly nasty malware scam. Though it took me about 90 minutes to solve, I found the whole thing was an awful lot of lead of faith and trial and error. If you've found me by a search engine, congratulations, you've probably got it. Stay calm. Get something with caffeine in. This will take about 20 minutes.

First off, you'll find your entire system is locked down so there are just two options. Task Manager, starting any new programmes, accessing anything in almost every application, all locked down. I could open .jpgs, so luckily, baby pics on a USB drive saved me.

The typical page looks like this. Yep. The usual, illiterate you were look at violence child pornography nonsense. How do you get rid of it? It's a wee bit techy, but not beyond anypne.

1. Insert a USB stick and open a file in Firefox or Chrome. (This is how I got to google the instructions to solve it and do the research). Navigate to google, and search the virus name.

2. You may have to do a hard reboot by yanking your power plug or holding down the "start" button for a few seconds. When the start page boots up, press F8 repeatedly. Boot in Safe Mode. From here, click on start. In the text box, type msconfig. From here, you will be able to see what programmes are in your start-up options when the machine boots under a normal configuration.

3. Look for a file that is a totally random string of numbers such as 08896765658807655.exe. It should be located in C:\Users\(Your Name)\AppData\Local\Temp. The manufacturer may be "unknown". Unclick the "Startup Item" box, so this will not start the program when you boot up. Tick "Apply". It was probably enabled about the exact time your system was compromised.

The virus will be called something like "Shark Fear Wait", run by The Orb Network, and have a modifed/installed date/time identical to when your system got locked down, in this menu.

4. Reboot in normal mode. Open Windows Explorer. Set it so it shows "Hidden files and folders". Navigate to the location you found the file (totally random set of numbers).exe in. Delete that file. Go to your recycle bin. Empty it. Clear out your cache, temp files, and internet history. Just to be sure.

5. Update and run a complete virus scan. Lots of people recommend Malawarebytes. I don't have a preference.

6. Reboot your system, you should now be clean.

What a ruthlessly executed idea - to lock down all your permissions apart from those needed to pay the £100 ransom demanded by a non existent police force that cannot spell. The intelligence and devious thinking demonstrated is certainly smarter than your average malware scam, and it probably wasn't cheap. Whoever coded this knew exactly what they were doing. And they didn't care about the effects on anyone apart from making money through theft.

Now. If only they'd used that to create something that wasn't a criminal scam.

Internet Addict

2012-01-12T22:03:00.001Z

Is Internet Usage An Addiction?

According to the The Independent, The United Nations, Internet Access is a human right. Certainly, over the past twenty years, the Internet has revolutionised the majority of human interaction. Twenty years ago, life was clearly defined by opening hours. Shops closed at 5.30pm on Saturdays, supermarkets were only open late on Thursdays, and if you wanted to pay bills you often sat down for an hour a month and wrote and posted cheques for every service you received. The only established dialogue between people was a one-way communication from the throne of the media to the populace in the printed form. The vast majority of the world was able to spread ideas to strangers through the letters page of the newspapers, magazines, and – occasionally – in photocopied fanzines. Life was expensive, time consuming, and the stressful tussle of a Saturday morning race around the local supermarket before the shelves were stripped bare by hungry people who worked for a living was certainly one of the least enjoyable parts of many peoples everyday lives.

Nowadays, you can click “repeat previous order”, and your shopping arrives (albeit with orange juice replaced by orange paint) at your doorstep.

So... is frequent Internet use an addiction? Absolutely not. With the transformation of the access the population have from print media to the internet, anyone in the country can, if they really want, set up a website about anything. And, be it derelict railway stations, or your wedding, they can and do. In order to participate in modern Britain, Internet use is practically a necessity. If you want the best prices and largest choice for your utilities, your travel, concert tickets, consumable goods (music, books, and film), the Internet is the broadband nipple you should eat from.

How could business be done these days, if you waited for the postman to arrive with the letters in the mid-afternoon? How could you work flexibily, from home, or caring for children or relatives, or stranded with cancelled trains in a suburban snow drift, without it? Slowly, and with incumbent delays, for a start.

Engagement in many aspects of modern life, culture, news, and my friends who live half way across the world, or work night shifts, is only practically possible through the time-shifting element of the Internet. Time spent working at home in evenings, and on the train travelling to and from work, is time I don't spend at the office until 10pm. For us who are relatively lucky enough to have jobs, albeit understaffed and with high workloads, the Internet allows me to leave work with enough time to give my children a bath and put them to put at night. For those of us for who love people where 8pm in their country is 4am in mine, or for those where the only opportunity for daily phone contact is to call someone in America on their lunch hour when it is 1am in Britain, the Internet is the only practical way to keep relationships alive. Ask any touring businessman, musician, or anyone whose parents are in Australia, for example.

Imagine a world where the only way to watch the news was at three set times in the day – 1pm, 6pm, and 10pm. Imagine a world where the only news you could read had been vetted and sanitised with the agenda of a set of shareholders and checked with a Paper Editor. Where the people involved, or accused, in these stories, were silent and voiceless to correct gross lies unless it served an agenda. Imagine if all you read about Hugh Grant, or Christopher Jefferies or Mllly Dowler was through the lens of a newspaper trying to shift product.

Certainly, the signal to noise ratio can be very high. More than once, the adage “Never read the bottom half of the internet” has been heard. But it is not Internet usage which is an addiction : the Internet is a portal, and like any machine – a car, a cigarette, pornography (42,337 of the 1,000,000 most popular sites are porn) – it is not what it is that is crucial, but the usage it provides. The Internet, like any machine, is not an end in itself. A car undriven is just a lump of metal parked somewhere. A cigarette unsmoked is just tobacco wrapped in paper. In the same way that people are not actually addicted to cigarettes – but to nicotine, the medium – The Internet – and the message and function are easily confused. A woman who starved her 3 year old baby whilst playing World Of Warcraft is not an Internet addict, but a World of Warcraft Addict. It is no surprise it is called “World Of Warcrack”, and there are “Warcraft Widows” the world over. The addiction is not to the method of delivery – the cigarette, the roar of an engine, the roar of the guitar or the orgasm of promisciousity or the thrill of the goal – but to what it does to human beings somewhere inside of us on a physical, chemical, psychological basis : a temporary, impermanent escape from the prison of circumstances that surround us.

Certainly, when real life itself is frankly, mundane, often boring, and frequently fairly joyless, the Internet can offer a vital opportunity for us to recast ourselves as who we want to be and not who or what the circumstances of our finances and social surroundings force us to be. And the Internet is, relatively speaking, a cheaper, and more reliable form of entertainment than almost all the other options. A film costs £8.80 and barely lasts two hours excluding adverts for mobile phone providers and caloriffic sugary products. If reality itself were not mundance and joyless, then a Washing-Up-Simulator App, or perhaps a Xbox Game called “Get To Work On Time!” (which involves, say 60 minutes of standing motionless and trying not to touch anything, which would oddly enough be similar to games such as Desert Bus! and Takeshi's Challenge) would be an enormous success.

All human addiction is a desire to transcend and escape reality. The key to any enjoyable activity is to knowing when you have to come back down to reality. The issue of Internet Addiction is symptomatic of something else : anyone who has been a sleepless, exhausted parent knows the temptation to reclaim an hour of time to be something other than a Mother- or Father-Unit shackled to a small child.

There is no such thing as Internet Addiction, as such. Like Food Addiction, modern life has become such that to fully engage in our world around us, we must partake in use of the Internet to pay our bills and interact : in the same way that a food addict must eat or starve to death. All addiction is not an addiction to the medium, but what the trigger creates in our mind : a distraction from the often less than amazing reality.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.", Philip K Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later".

Dear BBC

2012-01-11T23:37:00.000Z

TOO MUCH SPORT COVERAGE.

Both BBC1 (something about Freddie Flintoff) and BBC2 (Darts! Darts! Darts! zzzzzzzzzz) are both currently showing sports coverage. Sports? In the middle of winter at 11pm? Why? Can't you create a BBC Sports and just be done with it? I don't like sport, and having BOTH channels monopolised by middle aged blokes throwing objects at each other in competition is boring, boring, boring. I spend more than enough time at work bored out of my skull, or buried under a crying sleepless child bored out of my skull, to then find the BBC are subjecting me to cheap, allegedly "quality" programming about sport. I want a wider selection of programming than SPORT SPORT SPORT. If you must show pointless sports coverage then please try not to show it on all your terrestrial channels at the same time, because then I have to watch grim social realism dramas on Channel 4 or rubbish Hollywood blockbusters with Mel Gibson, and that's only tolerable because it's not middle aged balding fat sportsmen. Less sport please.

UNDERWORLD - A Collection / An Anthology 1992-2012

2012-01-10T23:26:00.001Z

Replacing 2003's now incomplete collection, “A Collection” and “Anthology” are, in effect two parts of the same whole. I despair though, of the release strategy for this. To obtain every song on this wonderful release, you have to buy both the single and triple CD versions. The new, post-Barking, 2011 recordings, including “The First Note Is Silent”, the Eno colloboration “Bee Bop Hurry”, and the download-only, unheralded 2009 single “Downpipe”, are only on the single disc, remixed/edited “Collection”. The single disc version is also the only place you can find any version of “King of Snake”.

For a more comprehensive overview, you need to plump for the full length mixes and broadband version that is triple-set of “Anthology”. Or, if you're like me, you have to buy them both. To the casual fan, it doesn't really matter which one you go for. They've all got “Born Slippy” on.

How far we have come since then. It doesn't seen 18 years ago that I loaded the phoenomenal “Dubnobassinmyheadman” onto the deck, fired up the Playstation, and played racing games, Doom, and GrandTheftAuto, on summer days with the summer sun streaming in and the sound of softly pulsing machines keeping my heart beating. It doesn't seem 15 years ago I danced all night to “Pearls Girl” in Manchester, London, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Chelmsford, Brixton, Stafford, and so many other nights knowing that whilst the morning was coming, even if it was dawn outside, the morning hadn't come yet. Steam rising from young limbs as we fell into the cold streets and rain at 2am. These songs, this band, those shows, were the ones that – like contemporaries Orbital, Aphex Twin, The Orb – were ones that are both of a time, and utterly timeless.

If Underworld didn't exist would anyone invent them? Of course not. The idea of two fifty something technogeeks pulling out three hour sets of relentless, dense, and intelligent electronic music, and celebrating the utter silliness of the world would baffle people. After all, they started out as a lumpen semi-Simple Minds, turned into part of Debbie Harry's backing band, and then reinvented themselves. Certainly, over time, Underworld evolve, change, mutate, but also, always at their heart are the same thing : a great big lump of machines making a big noise. The story is told chronologically. And whilst “ A Collection” runs backwards through time, opening with the new material – all of which stands up next to the better known 'Big Hits', the fear here is that the band put the big stuff at the end so people don't reach for off/skip button when the future starts being the recent past and not the distant past of futures unlived. Certainly, there's wonderful bursts of chemically-enjoyable breathless pop with “Scribble”, the under-stated slink of “Crocodile”, and following a mid decade absence of five years from the record scene – punctuated only by the odd vinyl, Japanese only live album, or soundtrack release – we drift back to “Two Months Off”. “A Collection” concentrates on the big numbers, “Push Upstairs”, “King of Snake”, “Jumbo” (bafflingly, a miniscule hit at the time, the pop equivalent of a 'sleeper hit'), all capture the way a big night might sound the morning after. Not the chemical rush, the crash of eyes, the brush of skin, the moment your nose fills with the smell of her midnight hair as you stare to the ceiling, and you dance, dance, dance, and wonder could this be love? Could this be The One? Who knows? The words surround and enscapulate, capture the confusion, the waitress, the red and yellow, the lager, the lager, acid ted, blonde boy and this is now and here and all happens around in your ears. And if you are listening to this on your iPhone at the station, or walking down the road, or even doing the washing up, whilst our bodies may be here, in Meatspace, we are all somewhere else, dancing in our minds, grabbing a cab home with a stranger or a lover, the music, and the gentle sound of a Sunday morning. And this is where, like The Shamen and so many others, where Pop met the dancefloor.

Certainly at one point, Underworld, like New Order, Depeche Mode, Orbital, and everyone else, changed – and became dance music for people that didn't go dancing until dawn anymore. But did this hurt us? No. You cannot remain the same forever : let that crown of thorns sit on the heads of AC/DC, who have remain frozen in some kind of musical amber since 1977. The joy, the power of this, the importance of this is not just how they were, but also how they are now, how they have tracked their lives, changed and evolved and grown up and become something else.

As “A Collection” races backwards, the listener is faced with the odd sense of the record speeding up – faster, more intense, as we race to the end. But it doesn't really matter. The cutting, sawing, heart racing “Cowgirl” doesn't mean anything, but in this rush of noise and confusion and clusterfudging, it means everything.

For “Anthology 1992-2012”, it present a more cohesive set, a wider overview : split from the necessarily evil of the pop format, here the songs live and breathe to the full extent, over three hours of material designed for cycling, dancing, or some kind of intense physical activity – an orgy, perhaps – where the mind loses itself in the body and you achieve, as I have rarely felt, but treasure, where we transcend the mind and the boundaries of known perception fall away and we are perhaps best known, in ourselves, just being, no lonmger doing, or thinking, but exploring, in our own universe. Over two discs, the mind can wander : much like those rare moments in my life – particularly seeing Pink Floyd do “Echoes” - where everything goes away and I am somewhere, someone else completely.

But the three disc set is also short shrift. “King of Snake” is not on this at all. Neither are the three new songs. Neither are the later singles such as “Dinosaur Adventure 3D” or “Always Loved A Film” or the re-recorded 2003 version of “Born Slippy.Nuxx”. Aside from the obvious, and blatant value-for-money aspect of the keenly priced, three hour set, the draw for me is the third part, which collects 80 minutes of rare, previously uncompiled material from deleted singles, compilations, ancient vinyl and elsewhere, and brings them together as a mini-rarities release in its own right. Some of this is better than their huge selling big hits. Underworld never wrote hits, or albums tracks, or b-sides. They just wrote songs. Lots and lots of songs. And they are still here. And in ten years time, they may still be here with us. Growing older, growing spiritually, mentally, and going somewhere. Just like all of us.

In either case, the music is unquestionably strong. “A Collection” is more for the pop fan looking for a short and quick hit of glorious pop. "An Anthology" a large unit of direct, weighty electronic music of deservedly renowned gravitas.

An anthology? A Collection? All of these, and more – A Life.

The Unquenchable Light

2012-01-07T23:12:00.000Z

Midlife Crisis? Probably not. Life's fairly brilliant for me in many ways. Not perfect. But rarely is life brilliant. Mind races with the things unsaid. The letters never sent. Well. I don't know anymore. Many things I don't get. I'm fairly sure I lost a friend a while ago, as they listened to an Ex that was full of shit. My side, her side, the truth somewhere inbetween. Who hasn't said or done something stupid twenty or ten years ago when were 18 or 20 or 22? Who wants to be defined by one incident fifteen years ago? I know I shouldn't care about this. That life is fundamentally unfair. Some people look at me and see another dumbfuck they can rip off and abuse and steal from or treat like shit. Well, people have the right to be wrong. Me too. Life is what it is.

Still, it's imperfect. With many great friends and wonderful things in it. The internet is big and has a long memory. So do I. I'm a lucky man with where things are. A girl who I never thought I would actually be with, and who every day, amazes me with the smallest things. Two lovely boys. And everything else that is pretty good. The world, and many people in it, are assholes. And every day, someone, totally unprompted, often demonstrates to me how stupid or cruel people can be. The trick is not being one of THEM.

I don't blog about politics anymore. The fact is there is too much to discuss there. It feels as if I am trapped in a society that is setting fire to itself because it is cold, without wondering about putting a jumper on. I've never liked the world I live in, but my part in the world is to try and make it a better place in any way I can.

And, thus, the first week of the year is done. Now we have the rest of our lives to live. Ah fuck it. Music anyone?

The world will not impose its will. I will not give up and I will not give in.

Away From The Internet

2011-12-30T18:05:00.000Z

Well, not really. It's been Christmas, and a very busy year. There's been love and laughter and tears.

2011 was a good year. Better than 2010.

I was nostalgic for old cinemas and wrote some words about growing up and about identity. I was looking for career progression, and found out there are no points for second place, and I made second, out of 550.

Sadly, I think Dreams are not for your children. But then, some glorious summer, April happened. In May <we saw the rare Axolotyl of Hastings. Wow.

I wrote about my first marriage and then my second marriage.

In momentous news, (I resigned). And it is hard to believe that it is now four years since I almost jumped from Beachy Head.

Our adventure has been long and strange, and in August Moby complimented me on my suit. How bizarre. I went back to Birmingham for the first time in three years.

September brought an an epic complaint with my train provider which almost put me on the BBC, briefly. A month in pictures, shows little of my commute and my work.

2011 is hard to believe, but it is 20 years since I went to Leicester Polytechnic, and time flies. I rounded off the year with New Order and I had a special evening together and The Manic Street Preachers said goodbye for a while.

It's been a busy, hard, glorious year.

THE WONDER STUFF - "Never Loved Elvis" - London Shepards Bush Empire - 16 December 2011

2011-12-21T21:25:00.000Z

It's not every day a band gets a new guitarist. It's also not every day this band gets a new guitarist. After 25 years, Malcolm Treece – alongside Miles Hunt the sole remaining link to The Wonder Stuff's original lineup – has left the band. It's no longer the band that made those records. But the singer from that band, and another new band. Perhaps it might be time to stop trading on past glories, and create new material again.

It certainly feels different ; and not entirely right – but not wrong. But it isn't The Wonder Stuff. Not in the way that you recognise them. With Malc gone, it's Miles Hunt and a band – and a good one, that has slowly evolved over time. Mark McCarthy has been on bass eight years, Erica Nockalls on fiddle for seven years, and Fuzz Townsend (last seen in Pop Will Eat Itself) on drums and backing vocals. Joining them, and with barely six weeks notice to work up 29 songs, is Jerry De Borg of Jesus Jones. As it is accurately described, it's not The Wonder Stuff, but Jesus Will Eat Stuff. Certainly, the band that make the records we are celebrating, and the one that people came to see is not the same one on the stage. It is difficult to keep a working relationship with anyone for 30 years, let alone in the field of the creative arts. So many bands fall into a sort of stasis and eventually, even, disappear forever. And you miss the songs, the memories. One day all these bands will be gone and no one will sing these songs.

But these songs. They sound the same and feel the same. But the band that lasted seventeen years before the final split in 2003 no longer exists in any way anymore. The Wonder Stuff is the name for the band Miles Hunt sings in, playing songs he wrote twenty years ago. Put like that, and of course this is The Wonder Stuff. Put it another way, that the only common member between the band I saw in Walsall in 1991 and Hammersmith in 2003 and now is Miles Hunt. But it sounds the same, and would you – if you'd never seen them before, think that you were missing out? Probably not. It's not the brazen and shameless creation of an entirely new band with only a singer, using the same name of an older and better band to generate goodwill. Had Miles started a new band called The Wonder Stuff with Dave from Dyson Vaccumcleaner, Bob from Bogshed, and someone from Kingmaker, perhaps the use of the name would offend and be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act. Instead this band may only share a singer with the original lineup, but it has been a slow and considered evolution over time.

These songs set in our hearts – well some of us anyway – twenty years ago. Some of them - “Sleep Alone”, “Play”, “Inertia”, “Maybe”, “Grotesque”, “38 Line Poem” - are ones the band haven't played in ten or twenty years. With Malc absent, the band have had to rearrange longstanding performances, with Fuzz and Erica taking over backing vocals, and Keyboard/fiddle/mandolin parts replicated by Ercia on violin. It still sounds the same. Sometimes, it sounds different, but even then it sounds the same. These songs still sound wonderful.

Not that anyone really notices. People have come here to see the songs, and the names of the respective members are somewhat sidelined compared. The songs, the body of work, is bigger than any one individual. Given that he has been in the band less than a few weeks, and Malc's departure was officially confirmed four days before the shows, the fact these shows are even happening at all is the product of intense work and invention for the band to inhabit and recreate these songs. Jerry stands mostly stock still, concentrating on an entirely new recipe of songs and striving to reproduce them faithfully. In the meantime, if there is any confusion or consideration that The Wonder Stuff as is exist as the name of a musical unit with no lineage to the original partnerships, then that is certainly not mentioned here. Whilst the evolution of the band has been a whole and clearly traceable, slow path that has taken a decade, it still remains a band that performs, to a man, songs that are, at their youngest 18 years old. These songs can have sex, drink alcohol, get married, and join the army legally.

With the “Elvis” songs completed, encore time sees the same songs the band have always played. They are by any standard superior, clever songs. But after 1,000 times, surely it gets a little.. predictable to always do the same songs? This is the albatross that hangs over every band though – the songs the people came to see. “Room 512”, “Redberry Joytown”, “It's Yer Money”, “On the Ropes”, “Golden Green”, “Don't Let Me Down”, “Unberable”, “Give Give Give.” These are still the same spiky, witty, irreverent things that they were a quarter century ago. But if you think Metallica don't get boring doing “Enter Sandman” for the 1,588th time you really have no idea about what it is like to be in a band.

There came a time, a while ago, when a friend of mine – one of the many who I frequently see at these shows and has hit over 100 shows (tonight is my 143rd Wonder Stuff show) – said that he doesn't come to see the band anymore, but to see his friends. Not only is this about the music, but also, it's about catching up with friends the world wide who are all brought together by great taste in music. Perhaps what matters is that we are all here, still doing this, loving the world, loving each other – and that is more than the idea of any shared lineage between now and then. The night comes to an end in a frantic pop kid rush, a keen and excited night of jumping up and down and forgetting the house and the kids and the wife and the lies and everything else that comes with it. And then, I suppose, it's time. To the bus stop or the station or the car, to get home before the babysitter goes into doubletime, and back to the world the way it is. Maybe it doesn't matter who is in the band anymore, or what happens next, and it is just these songs and what they meant that matters. For some, certainly, the final link between then and now has been lost, and that is the end of the journey. What is more important is that, four days after confirming a new guitarist, that the Wonder Stuff performed, more than ably, and the songs will live on as more than memories. But what has changed? Everything changes. Nothing stays forever stuck, frozen in amber, for the world goes on ahead of us and the band itself moves through time, as we all do. You can't go back anymore. And for me at least, I don't think I want to.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS - “A Night of National Treasures” - 17 December 2011, London o2 Arena

2011-12-20T22:38:00.000Z

20 years. 38 singles. 40 gigs. It's been a long journey. When the Manics came into my life, they were three singles old : “Motown Junk” was my entry point. Their entire discography consisted of nine songs. I was the shy, scared virgin. At lost in a world I neither liked, nor understood. A cruel land that was made of poverty and little joy. A typical teenage world then. In many ways, not much has changed since then.

Ten albums, two marriages, two divorces, two children, ten homes, fourteen jobs, countless funerals later, and here we all are again. I never thought, when they first pounced on the stage to 400 people at Leicester University on 30th January 1992, that 239 months, 7,263 days after I first saw them, I am still here. Still as excited as ever.

I never thought I'd be watching them in the biggest indoor venue in Europe, selling out, and performing a three hour set of 38 singles. I never thought I'd be nudging 40, jumping around, and shouting “rain down alienation - leave this country” as if it were still part of my very soul's DNA. The world changes, and we change the world with what we do, but also, we make the best of the world we can. How few songs ever capture so utterly the complete contempt with which I percieved the world as a child, and also, the same complete sense of betrayal with human potential that still is within me. Certainly, every agent defects, every artist sells out, and everyone is changed in small ways (at least), the question is how much one changes, and how much one resists the creeping tendrils of conformity. Yes, I may wear a suit, I may recognise I cannot instigate intellectual revolution, but I still want more than the world is prepared to offer, and much more than the world wants the future to be.

If this is a goodbye, then what a farewell this is. A defiant victory or something.

After 20 years though, and easily 10 years since their peak, the Manics have become almost just another band : yes, they make records and play live and sell T-shirts, just like other bands. But they are not like other bands. Even at the time of the chronically misunderstood “This Is My Truth”, the first concept album about depression and inertia and the failure of ambition to bring contentment (a charge echoed narrowly by Pulp's equally obtuse “This Is Hardcore”), when the band frequently toured arenas with enormous staging, even then, it felt like a kind of aberration – that the band would be so big and yet still strive to reach each of us. In the first ten years their rise was unstoppable. The final ten, their decline was palpable. Each album sold less, and featured more and more unessential material. After twenty years, you start to run out of things to say and exciting ways to say them. You have to keep trying. And here, the Manics recreate for one night, perhaps as a bookend, the kind of essential, pinned-to-the-wall fervour and relevance they held for so long and also, if this is the end, to go out in one final, defiant act of celebratory glory before they disappear. At least we had this.

But the O2 can be a soulless lump of a venue. Designed to resemble each heavily sponsored American Photocopier Arena from the off, this venue, buried inside the heart of a crudely designed entertainment complex of bars, restaurants, cinemas, is a machine designed to extract money in return for entertainment. And this, though presented as entertainment, is so much more than that, some populist art that communicates a world. The O2 meanwhile, is a frosty cavern, with 4,500 people thrown through each entrance every 45 minutes (100 people per minute, or 3 seconds per person per line). I arrive at 7.00, and the queue snakes around like some kind of bizarrre, glitter laden post-Christmas Harrods sale. Home made, paper thin t-shirts and skin made of cold bristles. People of all ages, from the once-in-a-lifetime thirteen year olds who've never seen them before that will speak of tonight with reverence in 20 years time, to grizzled fortysomethings for whom this is the inevitable splitting-up gig that we all know must one day come for each band we love.

20 years after I first saw them, and 330ml of plastic-bottled Pear Cider costs more than the first ticket I bought. 20 years after I first saw them, and the audience is still a mess of eyeliner and feather boa's. Yes. We're mostly older and not always wiser. Time has changed us. And some of our contemporaries, barely older than I, are ruining the economy, gifting the undeserving poor more poverty and suicides, and failing to learn the lessons of history. Some of the people who voted for the uncompassionate “Christian” values of the elected government are in this room. They know the words to all the pretty songs and they like to sing along. But they don't know what they mean.

At the start of this band's life – 25 years ago – this country was no different from now. Under the rule of the Conservatives, admidst riots, strikes, and decimated towns shorn of hope. Little has changed. Too little. Time is not infinite, and every day without change us a day further away from all this world can be.

After ten years, give or take, in a career wilderness of decreasing sales and slowly less-inventive records, the Manic Street Preachers are, for now at least, putting their memories to rest with this, a one-off celebration and farewell. Who knows when or if they will be seen again? This is history – we are living through it and often forgetting that key fact. One day, the New York Dolls put it, it will please us to remember even this.

In terms of 'historic' shows in the Manics calendar, this is one of those shows that you had to be there for. The longest show they have ever played by far (38 songs, three hours and ten minutes long). Every single hit. And quite a few singles that fell limply into irrelevance. But also, given the fervent reaction, the passionate delivery, the fire of the evening, it is also the best Manics show I have seen since the 1999 T in The Park performance. It may be an impersonal arena in London, but this is the Manics coming home, for home is wherever their constituents are.

Eschewing the idea of playing the singles in order, the Manics therefore avoid a mass exodus at a certain point in the evening when they ceased to be of such stark relevance and became just another – albeit superior – pop group.

However, the uneven pacing of the set – hit singles from the 90's sitting next to not quite so good, or so popular, singles from the 00's – manifests itself in an often uneven experience. Pockets of furious jumping start for songs such as the glorious incendiary and beautiful “From Despair To Where” suddenly followed by a mogadon “AutumnSong”, which is an inferior copy of “Design For Life” in key, tempo, bassline, drums, and all but words and chorus. It is, frankly, boring.

Over time, The Manics fire dimmed. Not every song they ever release can be an absolutely essential document of the human existence. Latter singles such as the dreary “Autumn Song” - the chorus is what have you done to your hair? for fucks sake – are the sound of musical tedium chasing it's own tail and imitating past glories with none of the honesty or power. It's a slight return to the pastures of “A Design For Life”, the gap between watching pornography and being in love. An imitation of dignity. Sandwiched between these damp squibs are some of the finest songs ever writen.

And for me, this is not a funeral, but a bonfire of the vanities, a final glorious affair, before the inevitable comeback in 5 years time. The lights fall, the sirens wail, and the band appear from behind a curtain. For the first time in fifteen years, James Dean Bradfield is wearing a sailor suit. I know it's only clothes. But these things matter.

It starts with “You Stole The Sun”, which commits the greatest sin of any rock band. It is a dull and boring song about the perils of touring. It may be a fun vaccous bouncy-bouncy song, but it's not the way to start the defining gig of your decade. Luckily, it's out of the way at the start. It's followed by “Love's Sweet Exile”, which was, as far as I can remember, last played when John Major was Prime Minister and before the Internet was invented. It sounds the same as it always did.

So yes, they really are going to do it. Play all 38 singles, but not in order. “Motorcycle Emptiness” is gorgeous. Shorn of it's iconic Rumblefish visuals though, the song lacks the connection with the same film, the air of lost, youthful and doomed romance – but still resonates. Half my life later, and the words “This wonderful world of purchase power”, which entered my life when I was 18 years and 7 months old, still mean as much as they ever did 19 years and 10 months later.

And the lyrics. You forget the lyrics. But you never forget the lyrics. They are still in here. Hundreds of lines that shaped my world, and how I see the world. “A morality obdient”. “I don't want to be a man.” “There's nothing nice in my head : the adult world took it all away.” “Gorgeous poverty of created needs”. “If you stand up like a nail, you will be knocked down.” “I laughed when Lennon got shot.” These shaped my world view. I saw the world though their eyes. Though eyes just like mine. Eyes hungry, and aware, and shut out, dispossessed. I was just little people. At best, then, I hoped for change. I got a job instead. Libraries gave us power. And then work came, and made us free.

Followed with the first single from last years “Postcards From A Young Man”, the first set, like the whole night, is frustratingly uneven. Lesser known songs barge inbetween better songs and result in sporadic moments of cathartic furious exorcism through jumping around, and mild breathers as yet another, later-years midpaced ballad appears forgettably. Certainly, some of these songs - “Empty Souls”, “Let Robeson Sing” (sung by Gruff from the Super Furry Animals) are under-rated, but others : “Autumnsong”, “Indian Summer”, “Some Kind Of Nothingness” are the sound of boring complacency.

Can anyone write a protest song? In this day and age, the most turbulent and unhappy political landscape I can remember since 1985, we need angry songs that peel back the foreskin of capitalism and show this world for what it is, and what it isn't. Shopping won't make us happy. Commercials kill our sensitivity.

And in this, the rarely performed songs - “She Is Suffering” that was last seen about ten years ago. The performance is far from perfect – perhaps to save his voice for the 30 songs yet to go, James Dean Bradfield misses verses out of songs and undersings them : there is no angry cry of “I don't want to be a man!” in Life Becoming A Landslide.

And “This is the Day”. In probably the only time it will be played in public. Strange it is, and my eyes damp, to think of the sentiment behind it : not only do I recognise the footage shown in the background, but I was there at those gigs. I remember those scissorkicks with my own eyes. But this, all of this leads up to today. You cannot reach the future without living through the past.

“You've been reading some old letters. You smile and think how much you've changed.All the money in the world couldn't buy back those days. “

Some people don't listen to words. This band was – is – my truth. I connected with these people. Barely older than me, too, living in a town seemingly without much hope. We may have been relatively rich, we had food, and beds. But that is not all a man needs. The Manics grasped this nettle, and squeezed until it stung the life out of complacencey. Even the first handful of single, not featured here, made the point. “Hospital closures kill more than car bombs ever will.” And This Is The Day draws the line between then and now, and the linearity of history. It can only be understood backwards and can only be lived forwards. We move forwards because that is the nature of time.

There are 38 songs. Not every one of them can be brilliant.

“The Everlasting” is a song that saw the Manics at a crossroads. Only seven years into their existence, and already, they were showing nostalgia for what they had lost. It's been a long time since I have heard this song live : and even longer since it sounded so good. Here though, it is utterly and correctly of its place – in a set that is entirely made of looking back, this captures the air of regret and joy that often comes with the passing of time. The O2 is bathed in a mirrorball. The lyrics speak of knowing your history. At the time of its release, I was barely 25, and yet, also, keenly aware of time, precious time, slipping away, of opportunity passing. “The gap that grows between our lives, the gap our parents never had”. Which now, now we are adults with mortgages and children and careers, and our parents – if they are alive, til death us do part – are together, and we are the divorced, the broken, the hoping still.

And during much of the first set, the band perform with a last-chance saloon passion, before an audience that could be cut up and sold as hamburgers.

It's a night of many emotions. Too many in fact in many instances. My mind races from regret and sadness, to joy, and furious indignation. After 20 years, we, mankind are still here fighting the same fucking battles. Have we learnt nothing? Gone all this way yet ended nowhere ?

At the interval, we tinkle glasses, and some people eat Pringles. The lights dim at 9.15, and the band start their second, nineteen song set, to a roar of sirens, and then – the frankly pedestrian “Australia” : for some reason, this strangely popular song is one the band still play. But it is boring stadium rock, with mediocre lyrics, and like a Bruce Springsteen b-side. It's followed by “La Tristesse Durera”. Who else would do a single, quoting a French philosopher as its title. This song. THIS song.

“Life has been unfaithful. And it all promised so much.”

A song that captures my life in itself. A song that changed my life. When I was sitting in unheated rooms. When I was sitting with too much month at the end of my money. When lovers betrayed me. These songs were here. They kept my soul warm. These songs were comfort sometimes, and others like it, when life itself was disappointing.

Even “There By The Grace of God”, a song that live often fell flat when performed live, here, achieves a status of almost elegant calm. The screens behind the band fill with images of Dungeness and Derek Jarman's Garden – which is my favourite place in the universe apart from my bed. But again, as per the rest of the night, the response is uneven, fast, slow, slow, slow, new slow single, die of boredom. And then, as “Some Kind Of Nothingness” fades into nothingness itself, the evening finally seems to jettison the mediocre or the middleaged and aim, headlong and heartfirst into 14 non stop, stonking hit singles, one after the other.

My soul may always be young and hopeful, but it is now I forget the past twenty years existed. Because these songs speak to me as much now as they did then. I wish they didn't, but so little has changed in this world. If you stand up like a nail, you will be knocked down. And then... not played for ten years - “Revol”. The most obtuse, and somewhat brilliant lyric I have ever heard, which details the sexualisation of politics in the same way that pop, and films are sexualised, through the iconography of ideas. And, at one point, 20,000 people are staring at a screen saying “STALIN” in huge letters. It sounds immense, huge perfect. Few bands have ever meant so much to someone, anyone. Even at this late stage in their career, the band are still writing defiant statements of intent : “The world will not impose it's will : I will not give up. And I will not give in.”

Time may change you, but I can change time.

Behind and around all of this, the etheral presence of absent guitarist Richey Edwards is untouchable but tangible : his visaqge mouthing the words to “Roses In The Hospital”, his words running through at least half of the songs, his presnece and his ethos in every moment, as the band claim back the sense of life, of fury, of existence, from these songs, as if being in a state of resistance and awareness were a justification for life itself. We know we are alive, because we do not accept but we resist.

Nina Perrsson appears for “Your Love Alone is Not Enough”. A strange, and unusual title for a song. It's a fun romp. But the kind you could see and hear being sun by anyone. There's not enough individuality in this song.

Followed by the first-time-in-a-decade “Slash N Burn”, which is executed – and executed is the word – ruthlessly with a keen eye to getting to the end as fast of possible, with a shitload of cowbell. At least they don't have that crap second percussion player they did in 2002. It's not the best song they ever did – at best, it was a unholy mix of Marx and Motley Crue – but it was perhaps their most accessable attempt at combining knowingly-stupid rock and knowingly-clever words. The set starts to end with the most precise, furious, condensed, best ever, white hot, “I-laughed-when-Lennon-got-shot” of “Motown Junk”. Steam rises from the crowd.

For three minutes, everything makes sense again.

The evening closes with the rote, but still glorious “A Design For Life.” It may be that, like having watched Star Wars too many times, repeated exposure has made this song – the national anthem this country should always have had – has dimmed the shine a little. But it is still one of the best songs I have ever heard, a song that encapulates the nature of class struggle, class structure, and the fine art of getting drunk in one precise four minute adrenaline hit. As always, the song comes to a rousing chorus, the huge venue smiles and sings and dances, and we celebrate the end of our grand little dream that maybe once, we could have been contenders. As. We. Are. Told. That. This. Is. The. End.

The venue empties. Feedback rings in our ears. The Manics are gone. Maybe for now. Maybe forever. And I am glad that I was here for this. I've seen this band 40 times in 20 years. I've not seen them quite so engaged this millenium. One day, today, it pleases me to remember this. We were there. We saw this. We tasted history as it went past. We are all part of history. And this band, these moments, this passion – that is something to look back without regret. In a life filled with regrets, this isn't one of them.

Setlist :

You Stole The Sun From My Heart / Love's Sweet Exile / Motorcycle Emptiness / (It's Not War) Just The End Of Love / Everything Must Go / She is Suffering / From Despair To Where / Autumnsong / Empty Souls / Let Robeson Sing (with Gruff Rhys) / Faster / Life Becoming a Landslide / Kevin Carter / Little Baby Nothing / This Is The Day / The Everlasting / Indian Summer / Stay Beautiful / If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

Australia / La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh) / Found That Soul / There by the Grace of God / Some Kind Of Nothingness / You Love Us / Suicide is Painless (Theme from MASH) / Revol / The Love Of Richard Nixon / Ocean Spray / The Masses Against the Classes / Roses in the Hospital / So Why So Sad / Postcards From A Young Man / Your Love Alone Is Not Enough
(with Nina Persson) / Slash 'n' Burn / Tsunami / Motown Junk / A Design For Life

The Thing

2011-12-19T23:50:00.000Z

Ah. The summer of 1982. What a gorgeous summer it was. What other summer could provide ET, Poltergeist, Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing, and Tron. In a summer like that, it's no wonder that John Carpenters “The Thing” sank like a stone. A harsh, bleak, superviolent, and utterly disgusting psychological sci-fi horror that extracted hope with a surgical precision in the summer when the only alien anyone wanted to see was E.T.

29 years later, and perhaps never really considered or wanted, but definitely appreciated comes a remake and prequel of the box-office bomb that was “The Thing”. To some – especially the purists this film is an abomination. To me, sick and tired of dull and tedious films designed for teenagers, horrified by the idea that a “Horror” film can only consist of blood, guts, screams, disposable and thin characters, lazy plotting, and eye wateringly embarrassing stupidity, “The Thing” is a refreshingly old-school, traditional and intelligent horror film that compliments the 1982 film and dovetails in very neatly to the beginning of it.

Perhaps because so many people came to the 1982 film at formative years – my first viewing wa a late night Tv showing when I was 12 (and I turned out fine) – and the paranoia of the time, where the threat of nuclear extinction hung heavy over every moment, the fear of the Russians, the invisible enemy permeated our lives, and, in my life at least, I felt that my world internal and external could be rent by invisible and unpredictable enemies like divorce, the IRA, and redundancy at any time, it struck true to me. How did I know, when my parents argued, that one of them wasn't (at least temporarily) possessed by a Thing? An alien in someone else's body?

The fear people have is that the “1982 Thing” is a work of flawless genius : it is. But this film takes nothing away from the 1982 film, and adds perhaps to the 1982 film in small, subtle ways. Certainly what it does is provide a slightly different mythology. In the 1982 film, the Norweigen crew (apparently) blow up the monsters habitat. Here what we see is that they didn't blow it up, but blew a small tunnel through to it (which is, realistically a lot more likely). People have made assumptions on the 1982 film, and it is these assumptions this film challenges and why people think this film isn't any good. But think about it. There's a big reveal at the end of the film (think the word “engines”), which shows that maybe it wasn't the Swedes (“They're Norweigen, Mac”) that blew up the ice after all.

What “The Thing” does differ from Carpenters 1982 version, is that by knowing where the chips land, the outcome is predetermined. Mary Winstead's character – for some reason never fully explained – is choppahed in from another unknown location after a personal visit in a scene that answers a question no-one was asking. Why would you, if you'd discovered an alien and a spaceship, leave the base and get help? Just radio in. If you can't radio, you certainly can't choppah yourself in either. There are occasional flaws in logic, but overall, this film dovetails in neatly with the 1982 film so well that even the environments are precise. I compared the 1982 mise-en-scene with the 2011 film and as far as I can tell, the two matched up precisely. Apart from the snow goggles in the closing scene.

As a film though, it is an experiment in crazed replication that I can only think of having been matched by “Star Wars : Revenge Of The Sith” which this film comes close to matching in insane ambition.But living up to the original is an impossible task, as well as unrealistic. What the filmmakers have done though, is a near heroic act of cohesion.

Where this film does suffer however is in the lack of an inherent human quality. The characters in this are, almost to a man, bearded Norwegians with unfamiliar names in jumpers. Aside from the acidic and unnamed British radio operator, and the teleported-in female lead, these bunch of happy idiots show no discerning individual characters, and might as well be called Redshirt#1, Redshirt#2, and so forth. Thus, when they (mostly) get turned into some kind of mush, it's hard to care. Characters are thrown aside with no consequence, set aflame, and forgotten about. But they are different characters, going through a different experience. In the 1982 film, the creature is known from the first 20 minutes to be some kind of monster. Here, they've just discovered a fucking alien, and they all want to take the credit for it. They have no idea what they are exactly about to experience. The fear and paranoia haven't been grasped, because they haven't got a clue what they're dealing with at all.

There are other flaws. The humanity of the characters themselves is sketchy from the off. Unlike the 1982 film, the Norweigan's show none of the signs of the irritable claustrophobia of the original. In this, you feel that the whole crew have been here possible 3 or 4 days, equipped with copious amounts of alcohol, happy to play ukueles and sing drinking songs until it all descends into some kind of compromising prison-sex gay love-in. There's little sense of the pent up tension of lots of males in a confined space, nor it seems, any recognition that it takes a certain kind of person to live on an Artic base for months on end in the middle of winter.

And, on reflection, the key element of the 1982 film that I miss the most is the sense of paranoia. Where anyone could be anything at all. Nobody knows each other, and in this film, the mystery to be solved is “Who's The Monster?” as if it were some kind of genocidal, furious jigsaw, and not the far more terrifying and all pervading idea that anyone could be anything and capable of anything at anytime and anyone could be murdered gruesomely by anyone and no one can possibly be trusted. This film ponders less on that, and perhaps on the race to get the monster, and kill it.

And the monster isn't that intelligent. Very possibly, each of The Things is its own personality, it's own identity, it's own seperate cell – an idea not really explored in the 1982 film – that thinks in an individual way and approaches matters differently to other Things. And, on the basis of a late-period reveal, The Thing doesn't seem to know who else is a Thing or not. If it does, it doesn't seem to care much. (An assumption confirmed by Stuart Cohen from the originals production team here ) And with that in line, each infections attack pattern and method is individual and unique.

Two words : The Helicopter. By all logic, The Thing should sit tight and wait for it has all the time in the world. But maybe what critics don't realise is that The Thing has no experience of this reality, and when it landed here, it was all a pre-industrial backward shithole. It may also be that The Thing hasn't yet completed it's full process, and thus, needs to reveal itself, held together barely by the strength of will and ambition. You do have to remember this is a omnipotent alien in an unfamiliar world – it doesn't necessarily need logic, when it has power.

The problem with this is that it is all moving to a known conclusion : a helicopter chasing a dog in the snow. And that's an outcome that doesn't make sense in the context of this film, because The Thing here has not yet learnt the art of patience. The Thing does stuff at a time that serves the narrative, not itself, and The Thing may not be the most intelligent creature there is : the Thing is learning where it went wrong. By the events of the 1982 film it certainly has a more mature and more intelligent attack vector. In the 2011 film, there's little sense that the creature is doing much beyond blind replication, and at a couple of key points – a scene in a helicopter, the creatures initial reveal – the Thing seems a little stupid. What it lacks in intelligence (and the Thing of the 1982 film was clearly paying attention to the flaws of the rest of it's species – hence a slightly more considered approach in the 1982 film), the creature makes up for in unapologetically gruesome effects.

Perhaps the biggest victory is that The Thing is not the same as it's peers : it demonstrates more than a modicum of intelligence, the soundtrack is not stuffed with generic rap, and it succeeds in its intention to complement the 1982 film, and make us want to watch that again. In fact – first thing I did when I got back home was pop the 1982 film in the player and let it roll for 40 or so minutes.

Think of it another way : if Carpenters film hadn't existed, we'd all be lauding how great this unrepentently graphic film is in the midst of a huge amount of dreck clogging up our cinemas and multiplexes. Better this than “Saw8”. The brains I want in horror are not about to be eaten by zombies.

NEW ORDER London Troxy 10 December 2011

2011-12-12T19:43:00.000Z

The nostalgia circuit is a fate that bands as majestically stubborn as New Order should always avoid, and one that – for almost all of what you might laughably called their haphazard career – on the evidence of a frostbitten Saturday night in East London, is also one that will elude them.

It is not New Order's style to cycnically reform just for money : nor once reflected in their often sublime songs. Instead of some strangled reinvention of the name – the curse of many a band turning up after a long absence – tonights appearance feels, sounds, and is, an authentic experience. If you fear you are missing out because Peter Hook isn't here, well, fear not. This – Hooky or not – is still New Order. Different yes, but the same.

After a thirteen year absence from the group caused by serious illness in the family and her own battle with cancer, Gillian Gilbert takes to the stage. Bernard Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris are joined by Phil Cunningham (who replaced Gillian), and the new bass player, Tom Chapman – borrowed from Sumner's short-lived post New Order band Bad Lieutenant round out the lineup, that is as much New Order as one can hope.

But is it New Order? Yes. Undoubtedly. And despite the juvenile ranting from the former bassist who'd rather the band struggled on whilst seriously ill families suffered at home, the same bassist who has vowed to “Fuck Over The Band Any Way I Can”, and calls his former band “NEW ODOUR” on his website, also vividly bemoans the fact the band haven't called him to play bass (though, to be honest, I wouldn't if I were them), the fact is that he is not missed at all.

Therefore, longstanding, estranged, and publically bitter former bassist Peter Hook is absent. Aside from the barely-noticed hole where he stood – and to most people it would've been irrelevant – there's little sign of anything other than business as usual. Tom Chapman ably plays the parts with a distinct and individual style that remains true to the songs, but not in imitation of the big boots to fill.

The evening opens with “Elegia” (which was last played in the UK at Glastonbury in 1987). From there, the set is a determindedly fun romp of perverse, perfect pop. Whilst the majority of the set is 20 years old, the songs themselves haven't aged and are as relevant now as ever. And, with an audience ranging from 20 year old French girls to 60 year old Brits, it's fair to say that these songs matter across the human spectrum.

And a lot of 40 something, slightly podgy, slightly balding, fat Disco Dads – myzelf included – are very happy about tonight. We bounce and jump and sing. Songs appear for minutes at a time, then disappear. The words and the melodies form, in our minds, worlds – beautiful ones I prefer to the one I live in. The opening chords of “Regret” are a time machine, but also, a world where happiness, and sorrow, co-exist, built with the edge of optimism we need to survive. In short succession, songs that haven't been heard on these shores since Manchester in 1988 (“Age Of Consent”), Glasgow in 1987 (“586”), or Birmingham in 1989 (“1963”). And they are glorious. The songs have been (mostly) redesigned, reprogrammed, reconstructed, and thus, they sound the same... but different. “586”, particularly, when the songs breaks down into just a clattering ehythm and a cacophony of guitars, before swooping back, and I used to think that the day would never come. I used to think I would never see New Order at all. Or ever again. Let alone be like this : With Bernard, Phil, and Gillian strumming a triple pronged guitar assualt on “Ceremony”.

Unlike the 1998-2006 era New Order, this is no band that stands firmly in the shadow of their former incarnation – Joy Division – but one which unapologetically wrests back long lost songs. They even look as if they are enjoying themselves, which is unlike them.

It might be a sense of reclamation. With the bitter Hooky touring small rooms across the world performing 30 year old Joy Division songs in a tribute to himself, these songs – New Order songs – are being reclaimed by the minds that made them. I must admit, brilliant as Joy Division were, seeing New Order neglect their body of work and perform a multitude of songs by another band was getting boring.

But then the band strike up the metronomic, gorgeous “Bizarre Love Triangle”, or the thundering reworked “True Faith”, or the squealing roar of frogs that is “The Perfect Kiss”, or the whole crowd as-one singing the keyboard lines and live adlibs of the glorious “Temptation”, and it does not matter. Debt, divorce, deception, all these adult things fall away. We have music, we have hope, we have glorious noise, and beautiful things happening. Tom Chapman swings away on bass as if he has always been there, Stephen Morris pounds drum as a human robot, Gillian tinkles chords, the band themselves create a wonderful storm of sound : the kind that makes my world a better place.

Who would've thought this would've happened? Five years ago, with the band just split up, and the future seeming to consist of nothing but maudlin reissues and very public bickering, tonight seemed an impossibility.

And it still is. It's New Order, Jim, but not as you know them. And Pop music may be by its nature shallow, fragile, fleeting, happy and sad, like life itself, but Pop Music is one of the things that saved my life. And New Order are still one of the best live bands I have ever seen. I wouldn't've missed a night like this for the world.

GORILLAZ - Singles

2011-12-11T16:28:00.000Z

Ten years - eleven actually - after Damon Albarn's joke band stumbled forth, and somehow, they are still doggedly selling records, playing out big places, and with this, releasing greatest hits. But whats to get? Gorillaz aren't a band, but a piece of shallow, mostly meaningless egostroking for Damon to exercise his brain and stave off the kind of boredom that comes with financial security. Couldn't he grow cheeses instead? The idea of a grown man capable of great work felt-tipping his teeth black and pretending to be a cartoon sixteen year old is more absurd that Michael Douglas still having sex appeal in Hollywood blockbusters.

Oh, I forgot. It's the music, isn't it. That's what we are all apparently bothered about. (Are we?) This, being either a celebration of the first ten years, or the bookend funeral of Gorillaz, whatever it is. It opens with music : on the face of it, a direction you probably wouldn't have seen hinted at in the slightest in Albarn's Blurworld. In the past ten years, Albarn's frantic reinvention has diluted his name and his brand. Not content with making it big in Blur, and making the best record of his life - "13" - Albarn ripped it all up and threw it away. For what?

For the safe, unemotional, rote gibberish of "Gorillaz", sure this is 'good' music that if what you want is entertainment. If what you want is not music of power and force, but music for chilling ouit in the car and for the iPhone and for walking down the street. It is lacking in the essential status of necessity : you can take, or leave, this music, live as you will. Sure, there's hits, there's memorable tunes - "Dare", "Stylo" and "Clint Eastwood" are quite good, entertaining even - but there's no compulsion to listen again. And the music is, shorn of the angular guitars and underplayed keys of his other bands becomes, well, a bit of a amorphous mass. On the other hand, if you really do believe that this is the work of anything other than a bored rich man, playing with his toys, surrounded by hired hands and his mates - yes men, all - going along with his muse and his ruse. They may very well believe this, and enjoy it, but just does not provide the things I would expect from the music I love. It's just pop : disposable, meaningless, shallow : and in it, shards of beauty can sometimes be seen. But that isn't enough for these ears.

Everyday Is Exactly The Same

2011-12-06T21:55:00.000Z

A recurring discussion at home is that of work. Life as it is, is hard. The house is always a mess. It cannot be anything but. We have a boy who isn't even yet two years old. We have jobs. There is always something to do.

Clothes get dirty. Toothpaste gets onto shirts. Dishes get dirty. Sauce crusts in. Glasses get dirty. The carpet gets grapes ground in. Milk stains sofas. Toys get flung behind tables, televisions. DVD's are taken from cases, smeared in jam, and thrown into books. Books with red buttons make incessant meowing noises. Small plastic ambulances nee-naw at random. Toys with no off switches squeal. Clothes need washing, hanging, drying. Shirts need to be ironed. There needs to be enough socks. Shoes are distributed at random across the house. Small plastic blocks strut out waiting for feet to bash them. Nappies need to be changed. Bottoms wiped. And then, every six hours, it's time for food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. And the washing up. And the vaccuuming. Beard grows.

Outside the grass grows. I need to cut the grass at some point soon enough.

Need to take the bins out as well. Have a shave. Wash your face and armpits. Get a haircut. Charge the mobile phone. Cut your fingernails. Shine your shoes. Change a nappy.

There is no peace.

How can you keep a grasp upon all this and stay sane?

And then, at 6.45 the alarm goes off. Time for work. Time for breakfast. Get dressed quietly, and tiptoe out of the house so as not to wake the children. Try not to make the lock click loudly in the door. Let the cat in. Is it raining? Do I need to change my coat? Have I forgotten my ID card? (Yes, today, I have).

And out of all of this, and in no bad way, there's work, which puts me out of my house for at least half the day five days a week. It is a rare day that from 6.45am to 7.30pm my life is not defined by my job : either by doing it, travelling to and from it, or the exhaustion that comes with it as well. My partner finds it hard that I am out so much. So do I. But what other option is there? Is there anyone else who would be able to find a better way? Millions of people live like I do. It is not easy.

And of course, if she wants me to go out at 9.00am and come back at 5.00pm, that's not an economically viable option for me or anyone else. I could work closer to home, but there are no jobs available and any job would not pay enough money for us to be able to live without moving to a one bed flat. We have a mortgage and that is, now, slightly more expensive just than renting : but the mortgage will stay fixed and rents will always increase. In the six years I have lived here, rents have gone up about £200 a month, even if the properties are still mortgaged to ten year old prices. Give it another six years, and in the age of hyperinflation, rents will be higher than my mortgage. Come the end of my mortgage period, I'll be 57, and I will own the house. And I need not be scrabbling around to find rent every month when I'm 82. Not only that, but the total life cost (including inflation) of owning is far lower than renting with a far higher return.

In my life there was only a small window – maybe a year or two at most – where I was able to get a mortgage given my circumstances. Not that they were extravagent, but I had student loans, divorce debts, and a career that was always rising not-quite-as-fast as insane house prices. Given income multipliers, I was able to get a mortgage at what was, then, five times my salary with no deposit.

There was no way I could have got a deposit. At the time, including servicing my unavoidable debts, I wasn't making enough – especially after tax – to have a few grand lying around. Still ain't. I don't live extravagantly. No fast car. No foreign holidays. My passport expired six months, and I'll get another one but I'm not sure when. Next year, probably. Our son got hold of it at one point, and god knows where it is now.Buried under a year old decomposed orange, probably.

The crazy thing was that I was paying more for my flat than I was in a mortgage. But the mortgage was too risky in the eyes of the banks ; even though by an absolute margin, paying rent was and is far riskier. Paying rent cost more and I got less, but paying less, and making a bank an enormous amount of money as an unavoidable consequence wasn't – apart from a very short period of my life, around a year or two – attractive enough to the banks. I dread to think now about the prospects for some many people barely younger than me, living in a world where wages are low – and allegedly “market competitive” - where house prices are often, on average at least seven times the average net salary – and where banks won't lend.

And thus, twas ever thus. Property values here are relatively low in some circumstances. And salaries are relatively low as well. There's often little in the way of careers and jobs. The commuter train keeps the economy running because millions of people travel to London every day to keep the capital running. I am one of them.Everything is being cut. The high streets are dying. We were sold an adequate dream and it is becoming a pisspoor reality.

The misery is nothing special, or unusual. We are like millions of others. Young Married Couple In Debt, Ever Felt Had? Shopping is meant to be my sport according to the adverts.

Hundreds of pounds a month goes to support my ex-wife – one day this will stop. One day eleven years and four months away. Hundreds of pounds in debt – one day these will go. Hundreds of pounds just to get a train to get work to earn money. The days are long and hard, the nights broken with a child, and the house trashed by little fingers that tear wallpaper off the walls and thrown toys into televisions. I never thought my life would turn into this at all.

I always hoped I'd find a better way. But that door never opened.

Much as we have tried – much as anyone has – it is a hard life. “What is the purpose of life? To make it as painless as possible”, was a sign in Philip Glass' apartment that the camera dwelled on in a documentary I watched a while ago. And that is true. Life as it is is not always an easy or fun place. The point of it, as much as there is a point to anything, is that pleasure, love, fun is fleeting and rare. You take joy where and when you can, for it is often hiding.

THE CURE "Bestival" (Live 2011)

2011-12-06T21:37:00.000Z

Being the first Cure live album in nineteen years, there are inevitable cries of rip-off, despite it being very competitively priced - and two and a half hours long. And like the last two Cure live albums, with artist royalties going to charity.

It's also the first Cure live album shorn of the usual rota of album-tour-album, capturing a one-off outdoor show three years after their last studio record, and also, the first that covers in its entirity one of the (rightfully legendary) epic concerts that have made the bands name. Other live records have been promoting a specific album, loaded with material from the then-recent release, and missing huge chunks of the evening. This is the first live album that features songs from their entire body of work, instead of promoting one specific album. And it is a glorious romp through the thirty year history.

Is this The Cure? For this album the band front yet another lineup (their fourteenth in thirty years), and also it is this configurations first public appearance. And yet it is unquestionably The Cure. Simon Gallup on bass has 30 years in the band, Roger O Donnell first played with them in 1987, and Jason Cooper joined on drums since 1994. It is not merely a case of Scary Bob and Some Blokes, but an fluid identity presenting one of the richest back catalogues there is.

From the opening “Plainsong” to the final “Killing Another” (using the slightly revised lyrics Robert has been singing since 2001), it is wonderful stuff. A journey through the bands entire canon, with many songs – such as the fun mini-set of 1979 era material at the shows climax – that have never been officially released on a live record.

Given that this is the first time The Cure have played outside of the twin guitar line up since 1982, the sound – especially on some of the heavier songs such as the triple-guitar “Open” - can be a little sparse. The production is open, lacking the dense soundscapes and textures that have been the bands trademark for thirty years, with a wider, more spacious sound. There are elements where O'Donnell ably recreates guitar textures with his keyboards (“Fascination Street”, and later “The Only One”, for example), but what is missing is the bite of duelling guitars. Gallup and Cooper meanwhile, having played together for 17 years, lock into a rhythm of near telepathic sense and (seemingly effortlessly) dispatch the songs with a warmth, almost unthinking precision.

But then the songs start. The band tell a story throughout these songs, opening with a bleakness, moving to an overall optimisim, before the inevitable heartbreak. With the exception of the under-rated “Bloodflowers”, and 1996's “Wild Mood Swings”, every album is represented here, ending in the explosive trio of misery that is “One Hundred Years” / “End” / “Disintegration”.

Then it's encore time, with a flurry : the first encore is a short greatest hits of songs the band play on good days - “Why Can't I Be You?”, “Lets Go To Bed”, “Caterpillar”, Lullaby”, “Lovecats”, “Hot Hot Hot!”, “Close To Me”. The Cure are unfairly derided as goth, when really they are just a clever, multi-facted pop band that do happy and sad.

This is why I love music. It unlocks in me the emotions that are often too hard, too raw, to process any other way. How can one know joy without it's opposite? Love, without anger? You wouldn't be a human being, but a one-dimensional game show host.

The brief pop thrill that The Cure became is visible again, and the fans that grew up on these songs and became bank managers and housewives rise as one and dance a little bit. Two hours and twenty minutes of music since the opening chimes of “Plainsong” and the band are rampaging through “Killing Another” as if it were the last song they will ever sing.

As “Grinding Halt” powers through, I'm reminded of Robert Smith saying that it was so long since he wrote those songs, and the band has changed so much, that they are practically cover versions with Smith being the only constant through the band's existence. But it doesn't sound it. Even though many of the band may not have been on the studio recordings made before Thatcher came to power and when there was only one “Star Wars” film, this band have inhabited these songs for so long now, they own the songs in a way the original lineup never did. Time, whether we know it or not, is running out, the end is nearer than the beginning. Not that this necessarily matters. This, here and now, living through history, and captured for your ears for ever.

Scandal.

2011-12-04T08:29:00.000Z

Gorman gets stolen - another case of a newspaper stealing someone's online blogposts and printing it without paying them or telling them. In this case, Dave Gorman. Cretins. The papers really need to learn some manners.

Newspapers, ask me, pay me if you want my content. Call me or email me (very easily done) and then agree a price with me. That is all. I'm cheap, and it's cheaper to do it this way than it is to piss me off.

I know I've hotlinked to Dave G's .JPG, but he's not bothered about stealing content, and seems to approve of it when corporations do it so why should he be any different when I do?

The Great Adventure Of Cinema

2011-11-27T21:42:00.000Z

Every once in a while, X and I go to the cinema. It may not mean much to anyone but he and I, but for us, it is an event. He remembers them all. The walks to the cinema. When we went to see Megamind, and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, and Up, and Cars 2, and yesterday, when we went to see Tin Tin : The Secret Of The Unicorn.

yesterday, as the credits scrolled, I fought back tears, and hugged him. In the deserted cinema, with just he, and I, and the dark, and the stairs, we had a magic moment. I remember the sense of wonder myself, when I was his age, when I looked up to the back of the cinema, and I saw the flickering at the back. The glass lens of the projection booth. The sea and rain of dust projected through the light bulb. The images in an out of focus microcosm of the film. It was magic, that through that window came my dreams and my nightmares and the images I cannot forget. The moments that have defined my life. I saw almost all of them in a room like this, a moving picture projected my dreams, nightmares, memories and heroes.

"A man makes a picture. A moving picture. Through the light projected, he can see himself up close. A man captures colour. A man likes to stare. He turns his money into light to look for her."

And X, not even 7, stared at the projection booth in wonder and joy and fascination, and I felt my voice well up, and tears run down my face. For I remember this moment myself, thirty years ago, when I stared up at the screen in wonder and fascination. I remember this exact moment, when I was like him. I held his hand. We walked up to the booth, to see the stained, illuminated light in the dust of the air, and then to the screen, to see our shadows eat into the screen, the tips of our fingers at the bottom of the screen.

I told him about film, and sprockets, and projectors, and reels of film, and why it is called film, and when he is older, that his children may not ever experience this the way he does. I held his hand, and cried quietly with joy.

Sons become Fathers. The memories we had become the memories our children have. Life in a circle, our lives becoming memories. It's beautiful. He remembers the days and the things we do. I used to look up to my Dad as a hero. Nowadays, I hope he may do the same to me. We walked the bridge with sticks that were our wands, casting spells upon the cars below, and holding hands in the cold.

Life is amazing.

Outrage!

2011-11-26T23:52:00.000Z

Frankie Boyle touches on a few issues in this interview in the Guardian, but for me what stands out is the huge gulf between who most people are... and who the mainstream press tells us we should be.

Read the press, and we should be horrified a Tory MP once took drugs, or an adult male had sex with more than one person at the same time. As Boyle says, it's a pantomime : a mock horror mixed with envy, that expresses the moral straitjacket that no human being alive should have a life worth living. I'd much rather have an MP who'd taken drugs than one who was too scared to. The sense of distant moral outrage and hypocrisy staggers me : most human beings, if they're honest with each other, say and do stuff that would see us crucified in the press for being responsible for the fall of mankind and worse than Sodom and Gommorah. Truth be told, I want my public figures to have interesting lives, ones that satisfy them, and I don't care who Steve Coogan puts his penis into as long as it isn't me or my partner. It is completely irrelevant to my life. Same with Gideon Osborne.... though if he is managing the economy whilst coked off his tits, it wouldn't exactly surprise me at the moment.

And if he is, well, frankly. It's not just the economy. It's my economy, and yours as well.

MICHAEL JACKSON "Immortal"

2011-11-25T23:27:00.000Z

FRANKENALBUM!

Winning "Most blatantly untrue album title" award is this latest, somewhat bizarre interpretation of how to keep Mr Jackson's dimming legacy alive. Death may, as a consequence, perhaps be seen as a good career move. Certainly, in the two years, since his death, Jackon has released more records than in the decade previous : a best of/soundtrack, a fascinating documentary about the-tour-that-never-was, an album of reheated 'new' material, and this.

In the light of Kurt Cobain's shotgun sandwich, within an hour, the record company were on the phone : have we pressed enough records?

A two hour remix/compilation of unreleased versions, newly-created remixes, and old material all mashed together in some kind of bizarre hybrid Frankenalbum. Some of it - the melding of "Is It Scary/Threatened" and "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" are quite exciting, by virtue of novelty, - but overall, this is yet another fairly lame reheating of old stuff - and very well known old stuff : sure, there are moments where Jackson's keen ear for rhythm and production shine through, as the wordless stutter of "Remember The Time", and the precise beats of the later material demonstrate. But some of the moments are cringeworthy : Jackson's spoken word moments can veer on the creepy, and even sinister, especially when he talks in tear-choked words about the innocence of children which seems theatrical and vaguely threatening. The huge gap between his vocal timbre of the early 70's stuff, and his later, more grown up, fuller songs seem almost jarring : as if Jackson was replaced by a near identical soundalike in 1978 who had hair on his body parts.

Ultimately though, "Immortal" is a somewhat redundant record : the combination of material lacks any sense of structure apart from being some kind of bizarre, Michael-Jackson only DJ set made of frequent mashups/remixes and deservedly unknown out-takes. It's not bad, nor is it particularly good, but a way of extracting from a sense of nostalgia and regret some more money and a vague fragment, or imitation of something new. Artistically redundant and musically unexciting.

Deluxe Edition

2011-11-23T21:51:00.001Z

I was absentmindedly, for a fraction of a second, eating my rock n'roll sandwich yesterday at work. The 21st Of November. It was, for those of us who keep an eye on the dates and times and passing of years, a date of note for me and one other person in the world.

20 years ago, on the 21st November 1991, I started my first adult relationship. We lasted just a shade under 7 years. Started at 18, and finished at 25. I entered it a hurt and hopeful boy, and ended it far more of a man, with a career and a far stronger sense of myself than I had at the start.

We all products of our experiences, and to be honest, I was mostly well looked after by that girl as indeed, I did my best to be a good boyfriend for her. I wasn't perfect, and I made mistakes. Mistakes come with the territory of being young. You make mistakes, and then you find out that mistakes have consequences and hurt people. And then you either repeat your mistakes because you're a prat. Or you don't, and that's how people grow up.

(I have no recollection of this photograph)

I always thought she would make someone a wonderful wife : even if, at a certain point in our fourth year, I knew that maybe that someone wasn't me. I could've had far more turbulent starts to my adult life.

She sent me an email last night. Nothing too sentimental, just a “I can't believe it's 20 years! Hope all is good.” That's nice to see. Our lives have gone in very different ways since we seperated, and from the little I know, it seems everything has worked out well for her.

So many people go through horrific breakups. Not that 'World's Worst Breakup!” is a competition you ever want to win. I've never understood in my mind how you could go from loving someone to wanting to destroy them financially, or emotionally, or physically. In every breakup I've ever had I've always wanted to disentangle myself in a manner that is as quick and amicable as reasonably possible. How horrendously boring of me, but when couples seperate, you (well hopefully, never you, dear Reader, he said breaking the fourth wall, but the “Royal You”) are already facing the end of a relationship, the seperation of a life, the change of the dreams you have made together. All the dreams that you shared, the children unborn, the futures unlived, the guiding narrative of a life together that hasn't happened, all those no longer exist. I understand that it hurts : but hurting the one you loved doesn't make it easier. Assualting people, changing your number, giving some bullshit excuse, stealing loads of money, driving off when you're at work, those things don't work. They are cruel and broken actions of the immature and unformed prepared to ruin others for the fleeting moment of ease or some vague revenge they never see. Ex's of mine have exacted cruel, and unjustified revenge in seperations of on occasion, almost demonic cruelty. Which is why they are my Ex's, after all.

(Pretending to read "1984" in my bedroom at Number 21)

When JPL and I seperated, well... There were many times. We were always breaking up, though I admit it was almost always not my decision. The end of it though was, to all intents and purposes, signalled a long way off, even if both of us were not necessarily aware of it. Cracks appeared. Sometimes cracks do in the everyday course of our lives. Often, they slowly heal. Other times, relationships cannot survive the cracks.

We met at University. The first time I met here was in a pub, through mutual friends. There was a girl she lived with who liked Saint Etienne and seemed far too exciting to be bothered about boys. JPL, on the other hand, liked the bands I did, and was from Cardiff. In my incredible naievte, I asked if that was in Scotland. Because I had never actually been, and she had a weird accent. Lovely, sing songy. On the other hand, I had an accent too, being from BURMENGHAM, after all. And I thought her name was Karen, because I didn't dare ask when I met her, and hoped to pick up as I went along. The second or third time we met was in a pub, or a corridor, or the stairs in a lecture hall, or something. I remember thinking, being 18 and single, “I wish she was my girlfriend”.

The context was relatively straightforward. I was an 18 year old boy living on his own in a house without central heating in Leicester, paying the grand sum of £25 a week for a room. I was on one of the last years of a student grant, which was a paltry £690 three times a year, supplemented by a student loan – one I eventually repaid about ten years later. It was not, by any standards, an extravagant lifestyle. I walked everywhere, bought my small record collection second hand, went to clubs occasionally, read a lot and listened to the radio. I cooked my own food – absolutely appallingly. For the first week, having never cooked for myself, I ate fish and chips. I soon realised this wouldn't last. I went for Orange Squash, own brand supermarket biscuits, and wrestled the lost art of cooking. As a culinary autodiadact, I managed not to kill myself.

(On a scratchy sofa in 1994)

Though I admit, I would never let anyone eat my sausages. Twice I forgot to impregnate my sausages with a fork : it wasn't written on the packet of frozen food, after all. I learnt to cook by reading the back of bean cans and sausage wrappers. I grilled sausages so they were black on the outside and frozen on the inside. I had, for at least the first six months at University, a near permanent cold. My nose became a Niagra Falls of snotted dribble.

From time to time, I would pack up my life into a bag, and travel all over the country to see bands. Middlesborough, Sheffield, Birmingham, London, Cardiff, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Rugby, and yes, Leicester, towns big and small, all over Britain I went.

I arrived at Leicester through clearing. Originally I had an offer for English Literature from Sheffield. I needed 24 points in a certain configuration ; I forget exactly what. As it stood, being heartbroken through finding someone I trusted balls deep buried in my first girlfriend, I sat my exams with stinking hangovers and a justified sense of absolute rage. I got 24 points, which, in the circumstances was practically superheroic.

(Christmas 1996 - on the rocks)

Sheffield however, didn't want me. Which actually, when analysing the male:female ratio ( 3 males;1 female), the existence of Def Leppard, and the enormous amount of engineering students at Sheffield made me overall, not heartbroken. I still had Morrissey, after all.

Leicester on the other hand, was a Polytechnic. Technically, that was a disadvantage. But I could live with having “Polytechnic” on my degree course instead of “University”. I wasn't going to waste a year of my life trying again and waiting to get accepted by a “University”. I took Leicester. And, with its male: female ratio of 2:3 (that is, 2 males for 3 females), given the large number of arty types there, I reasoned that by probability, I wasn't going to spend the next three years of my life masturbating furiously and cursing charming Engineering students with big blonde hair and Poodle Rock t-shirts for stealing girls from sensitive indie boys like me. I stood a halfway decent chance of meeting someone at some point.

These are decisions of major importance, after all.Especially at 18.

(with another girlfriend in 1997)

And thus, the first few weeks were a case of very much, being buried in the deep end. University taught me far more about life than I thought it might. It taught me about love, indie discos, dull Sundays, and paying Gas bills. The whole getting-a-degree business seemed absolutely incidental. I joined am-dram socities, saw bands in pubs, went to clubs.

I walked the streets of an autumn Midlands town, hoping for love. I found good friends. We bonded over Morrissey t-shirts. We would wander in shops and occasionally buy second hand music or books. We would sit in cheap pubs in grotty coats – my long black, thin, trenchcoat, my bright blue denim jeans and band t-shirt – and what has changed since then? We would sit in living rooms, eating toast and drinking pop and watching television or horror films on video. I would scribble furiously and relentlessly bad poetry. I would crawl to bed late and cold, and wash my clothes in a spin dryer that stank and ate socks like a hungry ghost. I rang my mum from a phone box.

I would scour shops for bargains, new music. I would buy the NME and Melody Maker every Wednesday. I would read books, and iron, and count my days out in 12” vinyl slabs. I would go without lunch to survive the stretched bank account. Every other day, my brother would send me a letter in his scrawl, telling me the records he had bought for me, and the ones for himself.

(May 1993, my brother came down to see New Model Army)

We got to the point of Agenda Letters, so we could have dozens of simultaneous conversations at once. It would read like the minutes to an angry, long distance Open University debate on indie trivia. I would think nothing of walking for miles in sub zero temperatures because there were no buses, and if there were, I didn't have the 50p to get it.

The biggest crisis of my life was when they put the price of stamps up.

That, and when the girl behind the counter of Rock-A-Boom mentioned a boyfriend. How dare she.

Perhaps, of course, the most shocking thing, is that I met this girl, and she let me kiss her, when I had an ill-advised bout of bum-length hair. As is expected, this time of your life generally involves experimentation with various things, including hair, and thus, I tried that for a while.

(in London, 1997)

In June 1992, around the 20th June, I had my hair cut off, without sentiment, or regret. I was fed up of carrying the mane and the weight of it for the past two years, and thought time to set myself free of it. So I did. I hated waking up most mornings on my back, and having to flip my whole body over so I didn't endure the excruiating sharp sting of hair trapped under my back being pulled hard within seconds of consciousness.

Those first weeks at University were a blur. I flirted fearlessly like the terrified boy I was. I kissed a lot of girls and slept with a few. They were wonderful people, but in all probability, just as insecure and silly as I. For whatever reason, our lives joined briefly, then went seperate ways. Some of them I only met once. Others I had short relationships with ; a week or two at most. I can't remember most of their names now, and they were never anything more than dabbles or mild amusements. I wish them all well. No doubt they are also, like me, almost all, in long term, stable loving relationships, with children and jobs. We become who we thought we never would with small steps. You don't have to grow up, but you do have to grow old.

And in this, I found JPL. We had seven wonderful years, but it couldn't last. But without her, those years would have been awful.

What happened in those seven years, is a different, longer story. My life changed for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, but most of all, my life changed in me. Twenty years is a long time. But I won't be reissuing the album, or reforming the band, anytime soon, or ever, on that chapter of my life. History is for the books, after all.

(On Holiday 1998)

Inside Nature's Giants

2011-11-22T22:10:00.002Z

Ideally aimed at the slightly curious Christmas Market, Inside Natures Giants is a large, glossy, hardback book that will sit on coffeetables and bookshelves without ever being a favourite. The pretext is that of a shint autopsy of some of the world's biggest, and strangest creatures – such as the Giant Squid, Polar Bear, Crocodile, and so forth. Whilst there is plenty of text and photography, both are somewhat slender in substance. The Giant Whale, for example, gets a fold out with a skeleton illustration drawn over it, but by and large, it is not a fascinating read. On a base level, whilst you are spared the undoubtedly revolting smell, there are photographs of dismembered animals that are just now lumps of meat which is somewhat gruesome on occasion, though never quite overdone.

On the other hand, if you are a curious child (say aged 10 or 12), this is is an ideal book to flick through on Christmas morning and consider that there are animals in the sea three times the size of your £400,00 London flat.

All The Devils Are Here

2011-11-22T22:07:00.000Z

Yet another financial thriller that is the real-life tale of the less than ethical world of predatory finance, these books set their stalls clear with a graphic of a suit/hat with devil horns coming out of it. Not really a book as such, more a very extended magazine article that details the history of - and downfall - of the complex financial instruments that were created to imagine money and prosperity out of nothing more than an idea and ambitious greed. It's a story we all know, to an extent, where the rules for lending were relaxed, the demand remained static, house prices rocketed to where owning a property was an absurdly impossible ambition for most people, doing most jobs, and the whole shebang is more of a grand conceit where a few people used their abilities to hoodwink the rest of the nation.

Told in a measured, exhaustive style, "All The Devils Are Here" contains plenty of fact and evidence, but little, honestly, in the way of judgement. As if the facts swear for themselves. To an extent, it is puzzling how many times this tale can be told - with a multitude of angles, from one person, the foreclosed, or perhaps the now suicidal Madoffs - but this presents an overall view of the entire sorry debacle that has brought all of us to our financial knees and many of us to our graves. Perhaps more balance, and with a wider overview than many of its peers, if you don't come away from this book angry at the obvious injustices of corporate financial abuse, you probably don't have any sense of right and wrong.

Career Coach

2011-11-22T21:49:00.002Z

Always be wary of career advisors who had stepped outside of the career path and are now running their own businesses. Most of us do not have the time or money for such bravery. On the other hand, when you read the somewhat self-congratulatory "Didn't-I-do-well" intro for books like this, I cannot help but wonder how perhaps an ordinary career might look to the writer. In the form of a "workbook", this is a sort of self-certificate of employment health, an assessment of where you are and where you want to be. If you want to be the kind of person who insists on having the perfect husband, job, house, baby and kitchen by a certain age then you'll probably be disappointed no matter what is happening in your life. On the other hand, it is good to have goals and ambitions. This is no magic bullet though, for it requires a sense of self-awareness and application if you want to fulfill the aims set for you within. For me however, the most important thing, and one sadly under-rated in this world, is happiness, and if you are at peace with who you are and where your life is, everything else is somewhat debatable. The contents are clearly and easily common sense, the kind of questions you should be asking yourself at all times and all points in your life : this book is a useful shortcut to thinking for yourself about your career and allows you to gain a sense of where you are in relation to everyone else, and if you want to be there.

The Boredom Of Conformity

2011-11-20T23:15:00.000Z

I'm bored with modern culture. The world needs a new direction. Modern culture is tedious, bland, and utterly utterly bereft of anything worth doing. Take, for example, the turgid drivel of X-Factor and Adele. Every day a pile of spot faced gimp hopefuls are paraded as circus freaks on television, and those stupid, and alive enough, to drink alcohol, take drugs, and kiss girls to make them cry, are banned or fired.

Kirstee Allsop goes on about knitting and craft as if it were the most exciting thing in the world ; which it isn't. (Everyone knows, hunting wild animals with the aid of flamethrowing tanks and remote, airborne robot drone planes is far more exciting).

Adele pointlessly drones on about a boy with music that makes commuting seem exciting.

Downton Abbey is a bunch of upper class people centuries old debating the terrors of being unfeasably rich.

We haven't got in the full flow of the utterly numbing : the Olympics. Oh look, its people who can do stuff with their bodies. I too, could run or throw or teleport 100 unicycles to the end of the Stadium, were I determinded enough to be master of a trivial physical characteristic. On the other hand, I have spent those years drinking, meeting girls, reading books and seeing bands. (Which is exactly what I did, and I had a blast doing it).

I don't get why the new prudes want people to be ashamed of their pasts. Louise Mensch apparently took drugs with Nigel Kennedy. No big deal. So did Frankie Cocoooza or whatever his name is on X-Factor. Again, no big deal. I'd far rather the world be full of people who have had lives worth living, made mistakes and learnt lessons, than shrinkwrapped, boring goons who have never ever done anything exciting in their lives.

I'd rather have a disgraceful life worth living than conform to someone else's blinkered morality. Which is wonderful, because these are our lives, to live our own way. And I've never known a time in my lfie where there has been so much about this world to be righteously angry about.And in this time of great turbulence and anger, in my life, I've never smiled more.

CARTER USM London Brixton Academy 19 November 2011

2011-11-20T19:39:00.000Z

Here we are : five years, and 12 shows, since the first Carter reunion, and for me, having seen them 7 times since then, I'm starting to feel that maybe Carter and I are growing apart. Even the last time I said it was the last time, the last time, and maybe, with two years apart since the last show, I thought, maybe I'd go back again. See what it was like.

Tickets went on sale in March and I thought to myself, I'll do it again – albeit with reservations. Eight months later, and those reservations are still here. What more can I get now, doing this again? No new songs, no changes, just the same songs, in the same order. The same sense of gnawing predictability I had two years ago hasn't gone away. JimBob's wearing the exact same red shirt he was wearing three years ago. It's a nostalgia for the 2007 reunion, as well as the 1990-1993 glory years. The years that weren't all that anyway.

Sure, some of these songs are fabulous things. The words to the songs are ingrained within me. At times, material such as “While You Were Out” hasn't sounded as relevant in twenty years ago. Living in an austere age where everything costs too much, nobody has enough, and everything that the state is doing is cutting, closing, dismantling, and hurting the poor, then the averagely well off, and finally the rich, I was struck, vividly, that Carter always sound more relevant under a Government that is at war with all but the rich. Yesterday they took away our bus stop. Today they'll try to take our happy home.

And that, how come, two decades on, we're still fighting the same old wars, against the same old dumb motherfuckers? It's not about politics to me. It's about fairness. About a world where the financial and social inequalities are so brazen that there is, seemingly, not even the veneer of any equality at all exists : the only career aspiration there is is to win X-Factor or marry a footballer.

But this, the endless repetition of the same stuff, the same staging, the same old, same old, it's boring. I'm there, and I'm enjoying myself, but it's rote, repetition, predictable, and there's nothing new, no unique experience I'm getting from this, and it could be 2007, or 2008, or 2009, and for me, I want – no, I need - my music to go somewhere new, not live in an old world forever, and I'm bored of living in this past : it would be foolish to forget the past, but if you're always looking to what happened a long time ago, you'll miss the future and everything that beautiful that is happening around you now.

Goodbye Carter. I loved you, but we're through.It's not you. It's me.

THE CURE, "Reflections", London Royal Albert Hall, 15th November 2011

2011-11-16T22:35:00.000Z

Apropos of nothing in particular, but a vague sense of passing and an anniversary – The Cure come to one of the finest venues in the world to present a one-off of their first three albums, the relative b-sides, and a handful of other early singles. Well, when I say one-off, there's a total of seven shows in four cities, each of which with a capacity between 2,000 and 5,200. Tonight is the only European show, and the only time that many of these songs have been performed in public in Europe since 1982.

Yes, tickets are eye-wateringly expensive and significantly oversubscribed : from £25 to something like £150. The band aren't doing this for money (if they were, they'd be a lot more shows in lots bigger venues). But also, the band aren't doing this for free : I estimate the average price, and total ticket net for tonight being around £600,000. There's one European show for the whole 'tour'. Despite all things, there is an air of privilege and exclusivity, neither of which are really characteristics I've ever associated with art or The Cure .

Is this The Cure ? For tonights performance, the band front three seperate lineups – Robert Smith, longserving Simon Gallup (at 32 years in the band), and Jason Cooper (a relative newcomer at 17 years), for “Three Imaginary Boys”, as well as Roger O Donnell (25 years on keyboards), and – for “Faith” and later material, Lol Tolhurst on drums, percussion and keyboards. To an extent, The Cure is a revolving door ; members may go, but often they come back. Lol's return, however briefly, is perhaps most surprising. Two decades ago he was suing the band left, right, and centre. Tonight, he is back on stage with his schoolfriends. It is a recreation of an era that never really existed, but also, utterly, and unquestionably The Cure.

The first part of the set – starting at 7.48 and over a merely thirty six minutes later – is the whole of the 1979 debut “Three Imaginary Boys”, in order. Songs not played in thirty years or ever, such as “So What!”, “The Weedy Burton”, and so forth are played with a definitive precision that these songs feel as if they have been part of the band's set forever. Smith is, for the first time since 1982, the bands sole guitarist, but the sound is as dense as ever. The absence of the versatile Porl Thompson is not apparent. Certainly the performance has an element of restraint, in so much as the intense highpoints of the early records are tempered slightly with the knowledge that, a song such as “Play For Today” comes with two and a half hours left to go.

But who ever thought “So What!” or “Foxy Lady” would be performed again? Let alone sound so glorious. One thing that shines through all night is just how under-rated, and integral to the bands huge sound is Simon Gallup's bass. Huge chunks of low frequencies rumble through the hall that underpin the songs. Gallup prowls the stage with an enthusiasm that I've rarely seen, especially on the earlier, faster material. As “Three Imaginary Boys” powers through, I'm reminded of Robert Smith saying that it was so long since he wrote those songs, and the band has changed so much, that they are practically cover versions.

A ten minute intermission, whilst the keyboards are established, ushers in the second part – a complete recreation of “Seventeen Seconds”. The rarely played songs, such as “M”, “The Final Sound”, “Reflections”, “Seventeen Seconds” may not necessarily be the first choice of a representative Cure setlist, but here, they fit. The room sways and voices as one the wordless chorus to “Play For Today”, and then shakes for a thunderous, but truncated, “A Forest”. Often, Cure concerts are celebrations, of audiences on their feet for three hours, in the aisles. Here, it's more reflective ; the majority of the evening each of us, myself included, are lost in a inner world soundtracked by these songs. Some bands I would insist on standing for : The Cure are one of the few I would consider sitting and soaking the music passively all night long.

Where tonight differs from other nights, is that the band perform the albums. The live interpretations over the years – the headfirst, extended jams of “A Forest”, the ramped up, faster “Charlotte Sometimes”, the layered and extrapolated concert version of “Faith” - are absent. These are the band covering their own songs and performing the studio versions, warts and all, live. Therefore, the versions are shorter than almost every live version I've heard in a long time.

Visually it is sparse. The projections and space is dispensed with in favour of a true-to-the-era approach of lights and smoke. Most of the night Gallup looks like a bass welding god arising out of purple clouds. The sound is precise and clear. Smiths vocals lack the insane intensity that comes from the end of a tour. Some nights the motifs in songs such as “A Forest” are pushed and pushed to Smith's vocal limits. Here, he holds back. It might be his voice is changing over the years.

The other thing that very much stands out on the early material is just how integral, and under-rated, the bass is. The keyboards add colour and texture. Roger O'Donnell's presence completes the band. It adds the final piece to the puzzle. Adept at almost any keyboard part you can imagine, he conjures a bank of long lost sounds that makes this an authentic Cure and not, as some might think, some kind of ongoing habit.

I agree with Robert. Jason is the best drummer The Cure have ever had. Over the course of 195 minutes and 44 songs, every note is precise. But more than that, it feels right. When the band return for their third set, 1981's “Faith” in full, songs I never thought I'd ever see, holy grails of Cureology, breathe before my eyes. “Other Voices”. Or the unique “All Cats Are Grey”. Often imitated, never bettered, rarely heard. And, for the third time in the history of the world, “Doubt”.

I count 27 cameras in the standing section alone during “All Cats Are Grey”.

The band bring the main set to a close at 9.58pm – over two hours after taking the stage – with “Faith”. “Faith” at the Albert Hall. The last time that happened was over a quarter of a century ago. This is why I love music. It unlocks in me the emotions that are often too hard, too raw, to process any other way. The venue itself, the huge, delicate Victorian classical hall, takes on an atmosphere. Not reverent, but intense. The whole room seems lost, for a moment, in emotion and reflection. Where I sit, up in row W of the fourth tier, I'm too engaged : taken to a place only I can reach.

Someone has thrown sand in my eyes, for my cheeks are damp. Dammit. Why?

1st encore is a compilation of singles and b-sides from the first album. The trio of Robert, Simon and Jason power through “World War” (it was rubbish then, and is now), “I'm Cold”, and the underwhelming “Plastic Passion”. And then, its a big pop thrill as “Boy's Don't Cry” and “Killing An Arab” squeal and roar and bring the whole room to its feet. Breaking with tradition, and ending first encore perhaps on a slight diversion, “Jumping Someone Else's Train”/”Another Journey By Train” meld into each other, before a second encore.

“Descent”. A song more deserving of relegation to b-side status the world has not seen. Certainly, it would have been easy and quick to whip out all the hits you don't get tonight, but there is something wonderfully perverse and obstinate in playing an instrumental thirty year old b-side. Aside from the fact that most of the room, even those who have flown across the world to see the band, appear bored. Encore two also sees “Splintered In Her Head”, the practically-extinct “Charlotte Sometimes”, and ending on the dense howl of “Hanging Garden.”

At 10.39, the band then return for their third, and final encore, that brings the chronological journey through their first five years to a close. The final three (somewhat strangely pooh-poohed by the person next to us as 'too happy'), are “Let's Go To Bed”, “The Walk” and “Lovecats”. The brief pop thrill that The Cure became is visible again, and the fans that grew up on these songs and became bank managers and housewives rise as one and dance a little bit. Smith smiles and laugh and promises, “See you on the next tour.” Three hours and ten minutes since they started, forty five songs later, and The Cure disappear. Time, whether we know it or not, is running out, the end is nearer than the beginning. Not that this necessarily matters. This, here and now, living through history.

Even to the regular Cure fan (I've seen them countless times over the past twenty years, from Holland to Manchester), tonight was a moment of rare beauty. Over half the songs performed tonight were ones that I've not experienced before. Old songs, old friends. Worth staying up late for.

An hour earlier, The Cure performed “Faith” at the Albert Hall. And I knew, same as I did half my age and twenty years ago, that moments like that, like this, like right now as I listen to it, that music isn't some fad, some passing fancy. This is for life, and a life in itself.

Or perhaps, to summarise, um, wow.

"Three Imaginary Boys" - 1st set: 10:15 Saturday Night, Accuracy, Grinding Halt, Another Day, Object, Subway Song, Foxy Lady, Meathook, So What, Fire in Cairo, It's Not You, Three Imaginary Boys, Weedy Burton.

"Seventeen Seconds" - 2nd set (with Roger O'Donnell): A Reflection, Play For Today, Secrets, In Your House, Three, The Final Sound, A Forest, M, At Night, Seventeen Seconds.

"Faith" - 3rd set (With Roger and Lol Tolhurst): The Holy Hour, Primary, Other Voices, All Cats Are Grey, The Funeral Party, Doubt, The Drowning Man, Faith.

1st encore: World War, I'm Cold, Plastic Passion, Boys Don't Cry, Killing An Arab, Jumping Someone Else's Train, Another Journey By Train.

2nd encore: Descent, Splintered in Her Head, Charlotte Sometimes, The Hanging Garden.

3rd encore: Let's Go to Bed, The Walk, The Lovecats.

SISTERS OF MERCY - “XXX” - London Camden Roundhouse – 13 November 2011

2011-11-14T21:57:00.000Z

Thirty years since they thundered tinnily into the arena and nudging (if not past) 50, The Sisters Of Mercy – the name for the peculiar rock vehicle Andrew Eldritch has commanded all his adult life – can still, 21 years and 21 days since their last album, bring 1,800 people to London on a cold Sunday night. And for the few that still care, The Sisters are still one of the most important bands that ever existed.

“What do they sound like?” asked my partner, whose tastes are perhaps slightly more modern. I stumbled and said “Motorhead backing Leonard Cohen”. After her initial curled lip, I suggested maybe “Lemmy fronting Leonard Cohen's backing band?” hesitantly. Whatever they sound like – an explosion in a factory narrated by God – they sound glorious to my ears.

Were this a new band, would you like them? That's the question you should ask yourself of every single old band you love. Some older bands – those I never mention anymore – I can say I wouldn't. Those bands have become forgotten postcards. I was carried away then, by time and youth. This lot, yes. Absolutely. They still burn like they did back then.

As Eldritch wrote more than once, its the band where you can lose or find yourself in the space just below or on the stage. Where the colour flash and the lights blind, where smoke obscures, and where guitars roar. Tonight is everything that brought me to the band over twenty years ago and kept me there. This band are a gonzoid amphetamine filth hit of pure, dirty, clever rock. Albeit, rock done in a very singular way : defined by huge guitars, lights, drum machines and words. There is a genius in the idiocy of rock. A particular cleverness in their brand of big dumb guitars. An intelligence in the way one wields a mike stand or points into the crowd during the choruses.

And it is, to the learned ear, as good as their legendary-if-you-were-there Birmingham show of summer 1992 which stands to many as a high watermark of their live existence. I keep coming back because The Sisters can be a wonderful experience in the right circumstances, where the lights are low and the guitars set on high. Tonight is pure, undiluted, concentrated Sisterness.

The Sisters have played some awful gigs over the years – and some stonking hours of music that go like a freight train on fire through your quiet village. The Astoria five years ago still rests as legendarily limp. There the sound was far too quiet, technical problems plagued the mix, and the vocals were an apologetic muble. Here, the Sisters roar. Guitars serrate. The vocals are sharp, passionate, and correct. Eldritch preens and poses and even, at one point, smiles. Behind him, songs are executed with a ruthless precision. And the songs. It might be the same band, but this a far stronger version. HULK SMASH.

Anyone expecting a carbon copy reproduction of 1985 must be dreaming. The Sisters may never be a museum piece ; albiet they evolve slowly. These are the songs of the past thirty years reinterpreted for here and now – years of performance honing them into the same songs, but different. Some of them have never sounded so good.

The somewhat predictable Sisters setlists of the past have also been revamped : For the first time in twenty six years, London gets “No Time To Cry” and “A Rock And A Hard Place”, whilst new covers of “Pipeline” and Red Lorry/Yellow Lorry's “The Gift That Shines” are present and correct. “More” and “Logic” have also been absent from most setlists for over a decade, so their welcome return is greeted with open arms. With five songs each from each album, as well as a couple of classic early singles, two covers, and four new songs, even though it is all over in 100 minutes, you would never feel shortchanged.

Everything changes, even the Sisters. And nothing changes. The lineups we long recognised dissolved 18 years ago, and the current configuration – Eldritch, Chris Catalyst on guitar, and Ben Christo on guitar – is the longest, most stable line up the band have ever had. And the songs may remain the same, but each is moulded in the image of the here and now.

In a state of absolute radio silence, The Sisters are a band that don't do interviews often, play live with a frightening regularity, and release records in dimensions that don't exist to mortals. Having washed their hands of the corrupt and incompetently asinine industry, the band are a cottage industry. The only way you can legitimately hear their canon of new work is if you get to stand in a room the same time as The Sisters, and they feel like playing it. And when Eldritch introduces the band as “We come from Leeds. We live in space.”, perhaps he hints that this is no ordinary band.

So. The Sisters Of Mercy are my favourite unsigned band of all time. Existing outside of the system, fiercely independent in their workings, intolerant of the wretched trench of the music industry and pursuing a touring ethos that would shame lesser, and younger bands, The Sisters are their own nation. As song after song falls from the stage – the relentless “Lucretia”, the utterly timeless “Vision Thing”, and the final, obligatory “Temple Of Love” - The Sisters disappear having accomplished again their mission, and we are spat out into the cold Camden streets on a Sunday night. As the T-shirt says : “Entertainment Or Death”.

First And Last And Always
Ribbons
Train
Detonation Boulevard
Crash And Burn
Marian
Alice
No Time To Cry
The Gift That Shines
Arms
Dominion /
Mother Russia
Summer
A Rock And A Hard Place
Logic
This Corrision
Pipeline
Neverland
Flood II
Something Fast
More
Lucretia
Vision Thing
Temple Of Love

R.E.M. - "Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011"

2011-11-14T21:34:00.000Z

The cover art says it all : cassette, 7”, 12”, compact disc, then Wi-Fi. How we consume, eat, enjoy music may have changed, but two things are the same : all music is made by people, and all music is absorbed by people through their ears and minds. Part Truth, Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Garbage is the summary of a life, an existence told through music, charting life under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. From youth, to adulthood, to the close.

As it comes to an end, so the epitah. Unlike many bands, the undignified holding on endlessly, R.E.M mark their demise not with a whimper, but a bang. So many bands demean themselves : not knowing when to leave, outstaying their welcome, or perhaps mistaking saying something with having something to say. But if you don't need to do something, and you don't want to, or don't enjoy it, then why would you? To please others? Surely there is a time where each of us look at our lives, and think “Enough”. No more of being subject to certain people, or circumstances. No more of being tied to people, or to places, or to jobs we no longer love or get enough from. After all, spending our whole lives with the aim of happiness, you either change to meet the world, or change the world to meet you.

And with this, R.E.M abdicate, of a sort. With a new set of top brass at the head of the Warner Bros. Tree, the pressure must have been to try and co-erce good old R.E.M, having been around a while – a sort of credible Bon Jovi – into climbing the old circuit of album/tour/interview to sell records and provide a cash injection to the dinosaur whilst the rest of the world goes around downloading the stuff for free. How many times have you been around the world? What new is there to see after being round the world three times in five years? What is the point of getting up early, sleeping less, travelling more? How many millions of miles has the band spent in meatspace, moving from Stadium A to TV Studio B to Interview C to Stadium D for half their lives? What new do you get from headlining Hyde Park, or Madison Square Garden for the 14th time? If you aren't getting enough out of it to make it worthwhile then why do this at all? So here it is. No big splits, no major arguments. Just not enough reasons to keep doing it again and again and again. R.E.M have nothing to prove to anyone after thirty years and fifteen records and over 276 songs and several hundred shows.

Never again will R.E.M. Be seen, surrounded by neon lights, in Arenas and Theatres. Bringing songs new and old. Taken for granted. Lost sometimes in habit, endlessly repeating themselves in new ways of performing the same old tricks. Yes. R.E.M made that mistake in 2004, with the maudlin, mogadon, and now rightly unloved Around The Sun. And they fixed that lack of focus with the final two records of their life. Being at a certain age, in their forties, we change, as they did, and came to a way of thinking. Why does this if you don't believe it? If you cannot give your all to your art, then do something else? How can it mean anything to the audience if it means little to the creator? And here, this is where R.E.M were at the creative epicentre, with Around The Sun and with a record in need of editing and excitement. R.E.M came back from that with a vibrant, indian summer that became their grand finale. It started with promise, dulled to complacency, and then, before a terminal decline became irreversable, left exit smiling. It was writ large in “Collapse Into Now.” The first record with them on the cover, Stipe waving goodbye. In “All The Best”, Stipe explaining obtusely that maybe time was out.

It was glorious. And now it is over. Now a memory. In a beat they went from a band that might be holding on to the bitter end beyond their time, a band that perhaps left at just the right time : just long enough, with the knowledge of a strong and imperfect but worthy set of statements behind them. Clearly on here, perhaps is the thought of R.E.M. As three bands, all with the same name, the same core members, but seperate phases of their lives. The first captured in the first third of this, runs from roughly 1980-1987, which saw R.E.M. As an angular, embroyonic band, growing into themselves, into some form of maturity, experimenting, trying new worlds and new approaches, becoming themselves. Working with a form of words and sound to be a band both in the footsteps of their influences (certain bands styles are writ large over the earlier songs), and also, at the same time, absolutely themselves. These early songs, starting with “Gardening At Night”, were a band that became legendary and, had they scattered like leaves twenty five years ago, would be feted, legendary, and the best cult band of their decade. They dared to continue. Beyond the confines of angular, obtuse, but also strangely direct and human. The first third of this collection, from 1981 to shows the bands as they were on IRS, moving to a greatness, and, then, moving beyond.Songs such as “So. Central Rain”, “Fall On Me” and “The One I Love”, wether they sold 20 copies or 20,000,000 are still songs that it is hard not to love.

The second, best known, is the band R.E.M were from 1989-1997 : enormous rock behemoths aiming for an intimacy even in the biggest setting, a band that became huge despite themselves : they saw the precipe of acceptance, and just made great records which resonated with the public. Like a Velvet Underground that stayed together and became huge, for example. Starting with “Orange Crush” and “Stand”, the band settled on their second phase, a more understated, and nuanced act, with material that shows both human fraility and beauty. And, in the shape of the sorely under-rated “Monster”, decided to subvert the form of their art. The five records this period covers – from “Green” to “New Adventures In Hi Fi” were R.E.M at their most precise and accurate ; where ability and vision met perfectly. Before complacency, and the limitations of the format of rock had been fully explored, varying from the whimsy of “Man On The Moon” and stark “Losing My Religion” to the incongrous “Electrolite” (which came at the same time as Oasis ruled the world, chalk and cheese). R.E.M were never afraid to show themselves for who they were, demonstrate their depth or their weakness. Showing weakness is a form of strength. Hard to believe now, but then REM were as big as U2 and better at it as well.

Finally, from 1998 to 2011, saw R.E.M in a slow but defiant decline : Bill Berry had retired, and thus, the trio of remaining members continued, exploring the worlds of electronica, programmed sounds, and songs not propelled by rhythm. Here, perhaps, the debate is most obvious : the tracklisting sometimes fails to make much sense to met. Wither “Daysleeper”? “Tongue”? “Strange Currencies”? “Lotus”? “All the Way To Reno”? With this section R.E.M prove that, whilst they may not have been universally loved by all or accessable to many, they still strived to reach The Great Beyond and make new music that explored new areas. Even if those areas may have not always resonated with much of the public. But aside from the “Automatic Alligator Antimatter Autopilot” which still holds the mantle of worst REM song title ever, it's solid, and to the end, still striving to be inventive. The album ends with three new songs, including the pointed title “We All Go Back To Where We Belong” which rounds the collection in a circle.

If money was all that interested them, if furthering the brand and the logo and selling it on waffles in stadiums were their aim, R.E.M could – and for a while, did – very successfully, make this a job and a business. Naturally there are cries of, and demands for, the farewell tour, but would you spend a year doing something you no longer wanted to to please someone else for their transient memory? … and should you, if you don't have to? Ultimately R.E.M's dismantlement is the last chapter in their integrity : to leave on their own terms, head held high, knowing that even the last act was true to their own tune. And that was probably why they meant so much to so many for so long.

SIGUR ROS - "Inni"

2011-11-14T21:24:00.000Z

Another end this week as well, in the same week in November 2008, both Sigur Ros (for now) and R.E.M (for ever) ended their live careers, and this - “Inni” - named, probably, after the prevelant type of belly button in homo sapiens – is a fitting end. There are words people use to describe this band : words such as glacial and majestic, and ethereal. Words used by critics listening with their heads, not their hearts.

A sequel of sorts to 2006's live “Heima” set, which was a live record made, mostly, without an audience in sparse Icelandic landscapes, this is a different type of live release : the way most people would have experienced Sigur Ros live would have been this way : in large, quiet buildings, set in a spell, as conventional instruments made glorious summer in our ears. But these songs. Similar bands have done similar things, but few have ever achieved what these men did : a soundtrack for the internal meditation. When I listen to this music, I, you, cease to exist, and the whole of the universe becomes a unifed incoherent, beautiful whole. The music helps me think, lets my mind wander. The nearest comparison to the effect Sigur Ros have to me is the same experience when I saw most of Pink Floyd perform “Echoes” at the Albert Hall : where the mind goes to somewhere else, and I explore innerspace with this music as my guide.

It starts with a soft pulse, a gentle tone of precise feedback, a build to : the sound that makes the closing moments of some of the more experimental songs by huge bands is their raison d'etre. The use of layering, timing, and an unhurried reach to the material is how Sigur Ros present this. We have all the time in the world. Deadlines do not really exist in any tangible way anymore. “Glosoli” is the nearest thing to anything real, as it sounds as if the song is being played on a crackling vinyl disc – quite how that can be achieved with instruments baffles me. At the heart of it, the songs shows that the band understand the conventional rock dynamic as much as anyone else, and with clarity, choose to follow their own template instead. The audience claps at certain points, but the editing is judicious, the noise never interrupts into the experience, the spell of sound.

Over 2 discs and a concert DVD/Blu Ray, the enormous Sigur Ros experience, as best as it can be experienced without standing there, is conveyed – four men working hard to tease out of their instruments strange and unusual sounds, with songs made of dynamics that go far beyond the conventional 4/4 rock of verse/chorus/verse into something else, where, like the greatest art the music exists as a gateway to another way of thinking. On the film, audience shots are minimal, for this is not a performance, or showmanship, but a presentation, a creation of a certain atmosphere. And, as such, “Inni” is a success, in evoking an emotion, a feeling. For art without meaning is nothing, and for this, perhaps, it's success comes in the ability to evoke in the audience something, even if that something is intangible, untouchable, and different for each of us.

the survivors

2011-11-10T19:30:00.000Z

One day soon
there will be no more memories
no more words written
no more lies
the last survivors will have fallen
the last of us who knew their lives

a B17 with a flaming wing
falling out of the autumn sky
to the fields, leaving behind
burnt skin and broken arms
of the heroes who just survived
who did not speak of what they saw
for no words can taste the bitterness of war

we may have made it out of the trenches
but not out of the past
let the Prime Ministers fight their wars on horseback
and let that war be mankind's last
for old age has claimed the survivors
and words are all that are left of the past

Asleep

2011-11-07T22:16:00.000Z

Life in our house is ruled by children. We try, as do all parents, in controlling, shaping, guiding the way in which we live and how we live. Our lives are often held hostage to the wills of others. Little people, often unable to fend for themselves, are in our care. We must bring them up and raise them to be people. But now, it's so hard.

Luke won't fall asleep in his own bed. He will wake up every couple of hours, and will not rest, until he has someone he can cuddle in bed with him. I know he feels safe, and he needs us, and looks to us, but he will not settle for me. He will not sleep in my arms. I've tried to hold him in the night so my partner can sleep in her own bed, but it's well on a year now that we haven't woken up together. Sometime around March he wouldn't settle for me in bed, and it's now eight months that every night he's woken up only Tina will do.

He falls asleep in the living room, and so, to keep him asleep, we sit in our living rooms in near perpetual darkness every night, careful not to make noise and not to make too much light. We have learnt the hard way that should we take him upstairs, it is often seconds before he wakes up. I have not sat in my living room with the lights on for near two years. We have not woken up in the same bed for near two years. It's the hardest thing. But we are making it through this.

But goddamit. We really want to switch the lights on at night and kick back from time to time. We will get our life back. But it may take a long time.

moby. destroyed. deluxe edition.

2011-11-07T22:13:00.000Z

The Moby battleplan is becoming obvious. Release a bare bones album, and five months later, a superdeluxe edition with a live DVD, documentaries, loads of videos, and a a whole album of new music. Which makes me wonder why I should ever bother buying the first release, because five months later I buy it again. (In fact, I'm not buying the first release for any other purpose but to listen to the contents for a few months before the superduper version comes out).

"Destroyed" itself is yet another Moby record. A sort of sad, electronica Neil Young, Moby puts out a new record every two years or so, tours frequently, and now mines a fairly refined template : in the DVD that comes with this expanded version, the secret is out - these are often songs written and recorded in the middle of the night in hotel rooms across the world. "Destroyed" is another solid Moby album, much like the previous twelvty or so he has put out. A record with a handful of upbeat disco material, then moving to a more considered, reflective late night comedown. The template, and his sound, has barely moved in a decade since "Play".

With the death of the physical single as all but a fetish object has made this release the only way to obtain the extra songs we used to call b-sides. Here, on the second CD, are eleven songs from the thousands Moby has recorded over the years, mostly unheard - there's also a beautiful orchestral version of "The Day" (and alternate mixes of "Lie Down In Darkness", and "The Broken Places"). On the other hand, some of these new songs do outstay their welcome. "Washing" is at least two minutes too long, riding as it does on sparse instrumentation that becomes well, as boring as washing itself. It is, in effect an album in itself ; not a release made of the often ill-thought padding-for-the-sake-of-padding of dull and tedious remixes

The Amazon version of this package is the one to get : it contains an Amazon-only live recording on an audio CD shrinkwrapped to the package that contains an hour of live Moby recorded in at the iTunes Festival in London. The live material shows the individual recordings that make up the parent album in a new light, being the sound of living, breathing human beings jumping up and down and playing. The songs are the same, but livelier, brighter, and a refreshing change from the occasionally sterile studio versions in an effective greatest hits set. It rankles that the performance was only for competition winners, but that's part of the inherently elitest nature of it all. On the other hand, there's 14 live songs and over an hour of music, so it's no opportunistic flimsy bonus, but a worthy and enjoyable live release.

The DVD is a good value for money package : however the live material is frustratingly short - only 26 minutes recorded live in France. There's a short acoustic session, and the rest of the set is bolstered by videos / short films for half the album and alternate versions of other songs to around 17 or 18 videos. There's also a 20 minute interview, and behind the scenes footage. There's little weighty to wrap your teeth around, but there's plenty here to nibble on. The Interview meanwhile, is useful, showing the literary allusions that Moby has used for his song titles, and exploring a perhaps generally unseen depth to some of the material.

Overall, this is a worthwhile and value-for-money package. The DVD comes to around 3 hours in all, the album itself - and the second deluxe CD - add to around two hours of music, and the Amazon-only live set make that a further hour, so, for around £12, this is a great value binge of new Moby music. Let your ears invest in this.

Without Your Customers, You Are Nothing.

2011-11-06T21:22:00.000Z

I bought a ticket to see New Order on Friday. There was a miscommunication at home. Though, to be fair to me, Christmas is always an incredibly busy time, and tickets for this show went on sale only 5 weeks before the gig. If I were to rank bands in order of how much I want to see them, the two ones I am keenest to see, the bands I love, are also the ones that went on sale after I bought tickets for bands I like but not love. It's a busy few weeks. If I had to choose to see just one of the bands I am seeing over the next two months, it'd be New Order. I saw them so rarely, and for a decade after I discovered them in 1988, they were my Holy Grail. The band I would never see.

So, come time tickets go on sale, I have six browser windows open. Incidentally, its the exact same minute the Red Hot Chilli Peppers put on sale 240,000 tickets for Knebworth. On the venue website I add ticket to the cart, and the ticket "sells out" whilst I am typing in my card details. The other one goes straight to the balcony. The third one offers me a standing ticket, and I purchase it. It is only in my haste I do not realise there's a pre-ticked box for "INSURANCE CANCELLATION FEE". £1.50.

It's the first time I've seen one of these, and so I don't know what I was looking for. Now I do. (It's a "Dark Pattern", and there's a fascinating lecture/talk here about the use of human psychology to generate revenue and piss off people. The creation of these dark patterns uses human beings and our ways of thinking to decieve us with their ways of working. The method is called Sneak Into Basket. And whilst it cost me £1.50, primarily because I was in a hurry, and I've never experienced this mechanism before, what this means is that my already subterrean experiences with SeeTickets (as briefly detailed here, whereby they took the money and canclled the ticket, and the time they delivered my tickets to my old address, that was signed for by someone who clearly wasn't me, and pretended it was nothing to do with them.

So, now, I'm going to try and find someone else to buy my gig tickets from. If I ever have a chance to. How fucking dare they sneak items into my basket, and charge me money for something I never actually wanted. I'll buy my tickets from someone else.

All The Best

2011-11-04T22:41:00.000Z

Not that long ago, my ex-wife announced she was pregnant. (Well, she didn't announce as much, but asked me about baby stuff I might have left over, and could she have it - very passive/aggressive, in my opinion, which is just one opinion of millions in the world).

A few years ago, when she found out our baby had died unborn, she told me - and the date of 16th April 2009 is seared into my mind - that she was glad our baby died. Those exact words.

I have no idea how anyone could get to that way of thinking - to say such a thing about the death of a child, unborn or not. An example, as such, of the huge distance between her and I.

Later on, when I told her that we were expecting, she wrote something on the internet that used the exact words "they have spawned". (Spawning, by the way is the thing that insects do, not a thing that two people very much in love do.)

As it goes, it looks as if in March my eldest son will have a little sister. That's great news for everyone. There's a baby girl in my ex-wife made between two people who have been together about three years, and I hope she, this little baby, and they all have great lives. This baby is innocent of all things, and blameless of the things that other people have done. And for my eldest son, he loves hanging out with babies and being silly and being big brother, so that's great for him.

I wish them all the best. Life is beautiful, and strange. And with each day is gets stranger and more beautiful. And I wouldn't want it any other way. Would you?

ERASURE Camden Roundhouse 25th October 2011

2011-11-04T21:46:00.000Z

Sono Luminous / Always / Just When I Start To Break It All Down / Blue Savannah / Fill Us With Fire / Drama / Be With You / Ship Of Fools / Chorus / Breathe / Victim Of Love / Alien / Love To Hate You / I Lose Myself / Whole Lotta Love / Breath Of Life / Chains of Love / Sometimes / A Little Respect / Oh L'Amour / Stop

At 50, Erasure are still the same. It's surprising really. How little they have changed since they started. The shows are still the same. Admittedly, it's taken me twenty five years to actually get round to seeing them. And I don't feel as if I've missed anything.

Some bands are the same, always, unchanging. AC/DC, for one. U2's recent tours have always had a back end that feels the same for the past 20 years : “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “One”, “Where The Streets Have No Name”, and “With or Without You” have occupied roughly the same setlist places for the past two decades.

With Erasure, it is roughly the same,: a moment where the band ceased to evolve beyond a certain template, and where a body of work stayed on the cusp of being ever more refined instead of going anywhere. 1994 was probably the year zero – no longer a touring concern, retiring from live appearances for half a decade, and overtaken by the obselence of the genre, Erasure became ghosts between 1992 and 1997 : two studio albums tumbled out without a live show to their name, and coupled with a best of, and the rise of Oasis, made their work dated by the mid Nineties.

Especially when the albums became patchier and less essential : most of them aren't represented here, with only a handful of songs - “Alien”, “Always” and “Breathe” - dating from the twenty year period between 1991 and 2011. The stalwarts that bulk up most of their set are all 20 years old :and the ones that appeal to the very particular audience that Erasure share with similar acts such as The Human League and, to a lesser extent, Pet Shop Boys : the disco MILF. We – and they – frug and bop on a cold Tuesday night in Camden to the strains of such symphonies as “Blue Savannah”, “Drama”, “Ship Of Fools”, “Chorus” , “Breathe”, “Victim Of Love”, “Love To Hate You”, “Chains of Love”, “Sometimes”, “A Little Respect”, “Oh L'Amour”, “Stop”. And with hits like that, who needs Who Needs Love Like That? It's the same old set Erasure have been playing for long over two decades, and, apart from the haircuts, nothings changed.

Vince Clarke stands behind his Apple Mac, mounted inexplicably on a plastic dragon, and presses a button. Drinks a bottle of green German beer. Occasionally he picks up an acoustic guitar for the illusion of variety and plays chords I cannot hear to keep the rhythm – and himself – interested. Visually it's a dry set, made of lights, two dancers / backing vocalists in angel wings, and a singer preening and laughing. As a front man, Andy Bell – two hip replacements and still rockin' – is a a cross between a man blessed with a great voice and some semblance of art, and a highly bemused, curious jester playing with the world for their own amusement. Hard sometimes, it is, to imagine him as the punk/disco-fan in the ash end of the three day week in a hard-bitten world. But sometimes you put on the slap, and bare your teeth in a smile, and show the world it has not yet dimmed your shine.

Not that this really shows : the lyrics have barely moved on from a quarter century ago – still about boys and girls and love and loss and the usual problems, as well as, striking couplets about eurodisco which, surely at the age of 49, one must think you've grown out of late nights, nightclubs, and hard sex come easy with someone new, and where has been the progression and the natural evolution to something beyond the recreation, the hedonism, the sense of grappling with life and what it means to be alive. But aside for this, the moments when the set drops into the new material, the audience takes the moment for a text/iPhone/Twitter break before the hits come back in. Oh! Look! It's a song from the Eighties. Let's dance. At the end of it though, it's a gloriously silly pop night out, stuffed with choruses and warbles and dancing and a sense that maybe, just maybe, this whole being alive business isn't that bad at all. A Life In Pop, indeed.

U2 - "ACHTUNG BABY" (reissue)

2011-11-03T22:40:00.000Z

Do you remember a time, before "One" by U2 existed?

From the moment I heard it, I fell back in love with U2, after seperating myself from them in early 1990, tiring of their po-faced, hat-wearing, world-saving, holier-than-thou ubersincerity.

If you think they are po-faced and preachy now, you should've seen them then. Dull as dishwater, hectoring. Good at what they did, brilliant at what they did, but what they did wasn't brilliant. And U2 always wanted to be the best at what they did. Ambition bites the nails of success. "Achtung Baby" was the album where they took their ambitions and the accessable, stadium rock band they always wanted to be, played with the idea a bit, and reset themselves as something a little less obvious.

You might be expecting a classic rock album. The type that "Nevermind" was going to make obselete. U2 went somewhere else. Somewhere beautiful. Opening with a squall of feedback, a distorted burst of static, a clattering, keen drum attack. "Zoo Station" was where U2 discovered the ability to let go of everything but what they could be. The ability to be silly, stupid, flippant, and also use humour and playfulness to reveal the deadly terror of heartbreak. So "Achtung, Baby" was perhaps the right title : the warning of danger of relationships, children, and beautiful women that leave wreckage in their path. Achtung! Baby.

At the heart of it - the delicate arpeggios and searching rock gestures - it was still the same band, the same heart of it in new and strange clothes, still wanting to be accessable and resonant and popular. U2 have often chased relevance at the cost of being interesting. "The Fly" was a clarion call of intent. This radical invention saw the band set themselves as leaders. The following years the bands that wanted to be the next U2 - Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and a thousand other wannabe's - all went dirty and got "real" instead of living the dream. Here though U2 tackled, in a loose form a concept : the gap between reality and illusion, between love and lovelessness, the place we all live. Lyrics became suggestive, almost erotic, human, and real. This record that shaped my healthy distrust of the world around me. "The Fly", where a guitar solo is backed by an orchestra of car horns, and Bono sings like a soul diva, was the sound of four men chopping down the Joshua Tree, taking the tools they had, and playing with it.

As an album though, it achieved a greatness few others ever have. Each song sat thematically together with the rest of the work. Musically the songs channeled a progression through the 12 pieces, from the roar of "Zoo Station" to the exhausted howl of the searing "Love Is Blindness". Inspired by the bitter divorce of guitarist The Edge, the lyrics resonated with me then and now : about love and hope and trust and betrayal, both personally and in another respect, politically, the gap between perception and reality. This record made sense of an often senseless world. When one is trying to find their place in the world.

On this enormous deluxe edition, the band offer immense value, with six audio CD's - including the album itself, followup "Zooropa", two discs of b-sides and unreleased versions, and two discs of the numerous remixes and reinterpretations that showed them very clearly playing with the form. There's gold in those hills. Plenty of gold. Though, I admit, also, plenty of lost nuggets during the period covered in this set : two furiously prolific years that saw two albums, eight singles, 32 remixes, 9 b-sides, 3 home videos, 153 live shows and a band creatively in abandon and overdrive. As "Zooropa" proved U2 should think less and do more.

Quite why "Zooropa" is bundled in here baffles me : it's U2's strongest, strangest record and one that is worthy of a standalone release. The extra songs shelved during it's rushed creation would also surely fascinate : you could easily make a deluxe edition for this album in itself.

The extra tracks are the key draw here : Disc Six - "Kindergarten" - shows the album in an embryonic version. Most of the songs are roughly constructed, but the lyrics are all over the place, the arrangements in different places ; "One" is more of a classic folk song, "Trying To Throw Your Arms Around The World" is a busk, the rest are insights into the number of variations a song evolves through before it is born. Nothing from the much bootlegged 1990 tapes is here as such. On Disc Five - "Bsides And Bonus Tracks" - contains six reworked songs from the bootlegs, rerecorded, redubbed, remodelled and polished - but not a note of the original tapes are still here. The B-sides are strong pieces, but compiled in a haphazard fashion with seemingly little attempt to make a listenable body of work out of it. Not helped with "Oh Berlin" having some of the worst lyrics Bono has ever thunked or speechifyied, about the terror of angels. "Down All The Days" - the demo of "Numb" - shows what an enormous difference a different vocal melody can make to a near identical song as the backing tracks are 99% the same thing. A fascinating insight into the creative process.

This deluxe edition is incomplete : "Night And Day", "Can't Help Falling In Love" and "Slow Dancing" are missing (though the first two are included in lesser, remixed forms). Alternate versions of several songs that appear on film soundtracks and singles are absent. The two remix discs contain between them, 6 remixes of "Mysterious Ways" and miss at least four key remixes ("Stay", "Dirty Day", "Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car" and the highly-sought after, not to say excellent, Perfecto remix of "Numb"). There's 53 minutes of unused space across the 4 bonus CD's as well, so the reason for these baffling exclusions must be deliberate or an incompetent oversight.

There are four DVD's : a (already released) live show which is therefore, pretty much pointless, an fascinating TV special with several live songs from the 1992 tour, promo videos and a retrospective documentary. The documentary will benefit a standalone release, however as it is, "From The Sky Down" is an indepth look at the U2 creative process on some of the key songs in the album, bolstered by interviews, archive video, and contemporary live / rehearsal footage that shows U2 and where these songs are now. It carries a huge implied knowledge - the bands key alumni such as manager, producers, and engineer are not introduced. It covers the creation of the record in a learned depth, though, somewhat oddly, feels as if it is still missing some key points ; Edge's divorce that inspired the lyrics is not mentioned once, nor are many of the albums songs.

Overall, this is an exhaustive, immense package. For the price the content is certainly value for money : though certainly imperfect and missing many important tracks of musical trivia that would provide a complete, definitive overview of the era. As far as deluxe editions go, this one sticks strictly to the music in a huge binge of about 14 hours of music. Achtung, Bank Accounts.

RADIOHEAD TKOL 1234567 RMX

2011-11-02T23:05:00.000Z

On the embers of the underwhelming, determindedly uncommercial “The King Of Limbs”, Radiohead venture to the remix album. From a slender 34 minute record, this is nearly four times the length of the original, and an unessential addition to the canon. Compiling the multiple remix 12”s released to please the trainspotters, the remixes here follow the avenue of experimental – in so much as they jettison the concept of listenability – without necessarily being anything other a tedious diversion.

The old world of the remix was to pay another artist to warp your song : either to pad out numerous multi-formatted singles, create a few quick b-sides, make an OK song a hit, or to extend the lifespan of a song or album. Here, it's presumably to drag out a slender album into something else. Smaller artists – the kind of estoteric creators that often count few amongst their patrons – are endorsed by the big names, and given a leg up. Really though, with the 'remix' as is, these days, being so far removed, they are often independent pieces of work, interpretations, repaintings, reboots, cover versions, with fragments of the originals one. The Mark Pritchard mix of “Bloom” contains barely anything more than a distorted vocal of the original : the Harmonic 313 mix is a shimmering instrumental with only a shadow of the parent song. Perhaps the remixers have different ways of looking at these works. For me, the finest remixer creates material does the best of their abilities and vision on the grounds of the original. Sometimes though, the best remixes are nothing to do with the originals.

If you are expecting something that expands upon the parent album, or enhances it, you will be lost here. The fine non-album songs ; including “Supercollider/The Butcher”, are absent. Some of the mixes are memorable, worthy – but none unforgettable : Does the world need 5 remixes of “Bloom”? 3 of “Morning Mr Magpie”.? The whole album is presented here in a revised form, but one that bears no relation to Radiohead anymore. Slender portions of Yorkian vocals come in and disappear, occasional sound effects and twangs from the instrumentation ghostly rear their presence then are gone. The nearest, most recognisable one if Four Tets version of “Seperator”, retaining the seperated, art-for-arts-sake air of the original. But over this exhaustive two hour excursion, there's little sense of a thread or a join : just a bunch of unconnected tracks, sharing little but Thom's vocals and a vague sense of atmospheric unease. It's nothing more than a curio, a mild distraction. The record fades out with no sense of a journey or a result, just an end. Next stop doesn't matter.

MANIC STREET PREACHERS - "National Treasures"

2011-10-31T21:55:00.000Z

I came to this, originally, with the jaded smile of the grizzled and middle aged man. It wasn't that I changed, as such. It's more that the more I saw of the world, the less I liked it, and the world, wether I wanted it to or not, changed me. Over time, I trusted less. Believed in less. And all we need is something to hold onto.

Other bands may have meant more. But no band ever meant so much. I came to them in 1990, or early 1991. “Snub TV”, or “Rapido”, or the late night ITV 3.30am broadcast “Transmission”. I would set the tape to record by timer. I would watch the 625 lines of video. I would absorb. This music that gave me a world beyond the mundane and inane. The NME was my time machine. My gateway. And there, in the middle of it all, was this. 3 minutes of something. I had no idea exactly what was happening. Four spray painted Welsh punk throwbacks. But dammit. This was mine. Nobody could take this away from me.

And the lyrics. You forget the lyrics. But you never forget the lyrics. They are still in here. Hundreds of lines that shaped my world, and how I see the world. “A morality obdient”. “I don't want to be a man.” “There's nothing nice in my head : the adult world took it all away.” “Gorgeous poverty of created needs”. “Dumb Flag Scum.” “If you stand up like a nail, you will be knocked down.” “I laughed when Lennon got shot.” These shaped my world view. I saw the world though their eyes. Though eyes just like mine. Eyes hungry, and aware, and shut out, dispossessed. I was just little people. At best, then, I hoped for change. I got a job instead. Libraries gave us power. And then work came, and made us free.

Some people don't listen to words. This band was – is – my truth. I connected with these people. Barely older than me, too, living in a town seemingly without much hope. We may have been relatively rich, we had food, and beds. But that is not all a man needs. The Manics grasped this nettle, and squeezed until it stung the life out of complacencey. Even the first handful of single, not featured here, made the pint. “Hospital closures kill more than car bombs ever will.”

And the production? So few people mention how immaculate the Manics have always sounded. The mid point between The Stooges and Queen, the Manics have been – always will – always wanted to be – a perfect rock band. Angry, articulate, political, and above all, keeping the flame of human goodness burning in a world made of liars, losers. “All we love is lonely records”, as I heard it.

But no one person can stay still forever. Pathetic, it would've been, had the Manics remained preserved in a rock amber since 1991. Twenty years without evolution is an artistic grave. They started as the cross, a hybrid between Guns N Roses, and Marx. They ended, perhaps without knowing, as elder statesmen. National Treasures. The name of this album.

A career spanning, twenty year, chronological anthology of the Manics singles. It is an imperfect list : lacking “Suicide Alley” and “New Art Riot”. Lacking, in later years, the “God Save The Manics” EP, the one-off “Christmas Ghost”, the limited edition “Underdogs”, “Umbrella”. By no means complete.

But it holds within it a central thread. A rage against the complacency of modern society. Where shopping is entertainment. Where questions are blashphemy. Each of these 38 songs is an anthem. A progression. A slow movement from one state to another. The album starts with the coiled snake of “Motown Junk”. It ends with “This Is The Day”, the Manics doing The The, middle-aged men playing songs from their childhood. Inbetween The Manics were underdogs and hasbeens, Britain's biggest band and Britains most laughable parody. But these songs. They saved my life. Somewhere else in the world, someone else had read the books I had,. Someone else had gone through their copies of the texts, underlined the words, and decided that yes, that sentence was good enough to go on a record.

Over time, the Manics changed. We all did. They took the focus of the eye, and moved it to themselves. With the disappearance of Richey Edwards – proudly listed as a member on the sleeve - the band became circumspect. They changed. Would anyone have expected them to continue the insane fury of “The Holy Bible”? And survived? Of course not. “Everything Must Go” was, compared to what came next, an unexpected moment. Even if for nothing else that it existed. Let alone be so good. Instead of focusing on the world around them, The Manics became introspective. And rightly so. It changes you, life.

To follow this up with their biggest record, a concept record about depression which brought up a number one about the Spanish Civil War, was some coup. Looked at from a remove, “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours” is still too long, too stumbling, and, in places, boring (“You're Tender And You're Tired”, “I'm Not Working” were subpar b-sides that somehow landed on the record). But also, this record covered, for me, at the age of 25, the sense of premature awareness of the passing of time, a feeling that has always dogged me, that time is short, that the future is running out, that whatever happens, we are just passengers in the wave of time. The singles from this record were bland, especially the excerably rote song-about-touring “You Stole The Sun From My Heart”.

Having mined this maudlin avenue to the point of near irrelevancy, the next album “Know Your Enemy” saw The Manics, almost, in retreat. After all, how many records can you make? How many statements can you make? How many times before the indian summer cools to the winter of our discontent? The bands touring schedule was truncated to a short six months (compared to the previous 18 month stretches), and the Manics were in danger of looking like yesterdays men. The shock of the new was over. The attempt to reinvent failed, and the band rarely, if ever acknowledge this record ; supported by the release of a greatest hits and accompanying tour that, for the first time, saw them looking back, and sounding for the first time like a band in artistic remission. The videos for this period too, showed the first signs of a lack of vitality. Look. It's three blokes, miming to a song, in a room, shorn of context and with no artistic content. Back then, videos used to mean something. The Manics stopped trying to change the world. Stopped trying to make people think. The videos were blokes singing songs. Not the geometry of contempt bookended with imagery that made one think. To me, this period was the band at their lowest ebb.

“Lifeblood” continued the decline artistically. The singles were OK - “The Love Of Richard Nixon” was a strangely political take on New Order's 1985-86 mesh of rock and electronic. But the band had played themselves into a corner. Perhaps the most important element was that the Manics were evolving, always moving, and part of this was coming to terms with what life must be and not what life might be. The world changed the band, not the band that changed the world. By this point, the band had run out of things to say. A natural end point, a natural pause to refresh, rethink, decide if they even wanted to come back at all was the only step now. When art becomes habit, the question must be that is this a bad habit? If art communicates nothing, is it useless?

The return then was “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”, part of the bands rebirth. Again, though, the video is three men playing a room. How dull. The Manics were in danger of becoming dangerously normal, safe. Lyrics that communicated on the personal, losing touch with the rest of the world around them. Then again, when Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is mostly met, when the realisation dawns that the world most people change in any way is very small, and when the battle, for the reward, is not always worth it, its easy to find your comfort zone. The parent album - “Send Away The Tigers” was by no means bad, but again, how many times does a band say the same things? Thankfully the follow up was “Journal For Plague Lovers”, which contained not one single at all. (The DVD version of this contains the promotional video of “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”, possibly the strangest title of any record ever).

On this best of, there is then, a leap, and from “Autumnsong”, to three years later, and “It's Not War (Just The End of Love)”. The young punks became parody, the songs were good, but they no longer grabbed your soul by the lapels, and demanded, now, TO BE HEARD. What came next? More of the same.

At the end of this, those, The Manics were in danger of becoming just another band, searching for the thing that made them so great, forever on a journey. 20 years is a long time. It is difficult, artistically, to always remain relevant and vital in 20 years. If anything, this shows how artists evolve, find a kind of peace with what cannot be changed, and how we change over time. These songs are postcards, first from young men, and then from older, wiser (perhaps) old dogs. Time chips at us, makes us different. Many artists hit a vein, and mine it until it is dry forever, before becoming a parody. The Manics were different. They may have made records that sometimes were lacking in the essential fire of creation, or perhaps, became close to being of importance only to themselves, but if nothing else, this record is 2 hours, 20 minutes of songs that saved my life and songs that charted the change from children to parents. The Manics are national treasures. Sometimes I think the world doesn't need them anymore. But when they aren't around, my world will be poorer.

A Study of Reading Habits, pt 2.

2011-10-29T23:59:00.000+01:00

The clocks go back to winter time this weekend. An archaic throwback to heightened daylight savings time to increase production on munition in a war from 100 years ago. A war my grandfather lied about his age, and fought in the trenches for.

Eleven years ago this weekend, I knew exactly where I'd be right now. In all probability, I'd be in a nightclub in Birmingham City Centre with four or five regular friends, after having held court for a few hours at a Wetherspoons, and now waiting to just about pay to get in, or hanging up coats in cloakrooms before planning nightbuses, or maybe waiting for a cold cider and the dancefloor to play a song from a few years previous to that when I was still vaguely connected to whatever the new trends were in pop music. Hard to believe sometimes how many people I have kissed.

A few years ago, I'd be thinking "Ace! Clocks go back, an extra hour free on the town!". Now, I'm thinking "Arse! Kids will be up at 5.15 in the morning."

In the time I have had this website, which became a blog, much has changed. Two weddings, two divorces, two children, deaths, a nothing-to-declare number of sexual partners, four homes, four jobs. And so much more. I won't declare the number of sexual partners, even though I remember a lot about everyone I've slept with, the dates, the rooms, everything to do with every touch and push and kiss. All of these lives, they came together for a moment, a few hours, a night, a few weeks, months, and then they went in a different direction. And, with the small world of the internet, and Facecrack, often you find them without wanting to, with mutual friends, of shared interests, and find that they've got married, they've got children, now we're fully grown.

The binges of sex. the infidelities. the stupid risks. the people who I thought I might have grown old with and very quickly realised in the morning that I couldn't, for reasons not related to them, or to me, but to combinations of circumstances, of where I was in my life, where they were in theirs, where the world was in all this.

The women I clubbed with sex! Larkin wrote. Where are they now? Married with children. And isn't that amazing? They may not have looked at me and seen who I thought I was. Maybe they saw who I actually was. Maybe what they wanted from this life was something I could never give them. I was thinking this. These days I am one of the millions. As indeed, I always was, even if my ego wouldn't let me realise it. But for everyone I've ever kissed (probably) they are the centre of someone's world. Someone else's wife, or husband. What an rare thing that is. How beautiful it can be.

But these long nights, sleepless nights, that became mornings, and hangovers, and regrets. The long dark nights of the soul. The moments where we did and said things, stupid, young. For so many years my life was without an essential narrative, but a bunch of events that happened. For others, who were lucky, they met their partners earlier in their lives. They got to start that journey sooner. They got the better house prices. They didn't get the ex-wives, the divorce settlements, the motherfuckers at the Child Support Agency hounding the mostly honest men of this country. I'm not jealous or better. Maybe I started a little late, but at 34, when my life partner and I started our great adventure together, I still have moments now, sixteen years after I first met her, when I look at her and think damn, she's the most amazing girl in the world. And that's the greatest feeling in the world.

And everything else that ever happened lead me here, so I cannot regret it. If it had changed, I wouldn't be here now. Love is the greatest adventure of all.

THE MISSION / FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM London Brixton Academy 22 October 2011

2011-10-28T23:51:00.000+01:00

Here it is. 21 years to the day since the launch of the final Sisters Of Mercy record and the final record by the 'classic' Mission, and The Mission are here, headlining Brixton, supported by The Fields Of The Nephilim for what is, undoubtedly, the single highlight of the year for people with lots of dark shirts and big boots. The cavernous Brixton – last played by either of these bands in late 1990 – reverberates with something. Arriving at Brixton at 7.30, the queue snakes around the entire venue, and joins itself at the front in a lap 5,200 strong. I have never seen a queue so long for this venue in my life : a Goff Human Centipede where the tail and the head join each other.

A sea of old T-shirts for the bands – black, naturally, where the three biggest names for tonights leisurewear are well, the two bands playing tonight – and Pop Will Eat Itself, who are also playing across the same city the same night.

At 8.15 – sharp, ladies and gentleman – the Fields of The Nephilim begin. A dull roar, and each respective member takes the stage to a place where all you can see is ice, smoke, and colour. Shilouettes lock into a groove, and a uniform of battered grey, sunglasses, hats.If anything, the Nephilim remind me of The Sisters Of Mercy ; a band of fluid members, a common identity that transcends the individual, big smoke and lights and roaring guitars. Sure, Nod, Tony, Rod & Bod may not be part of the band anymore, but they haven't been for over twenty years. What matters is not who is making this noise, but what the noise is.

At a certain point, the Fields Of The Nephilim ceased to exist in any tangible way, but became a brand, an idea, a concept, achieved through a united presentation, a philosophy, and not around the identity of the players. This fourth incarnation of the band, having gone through three bass players and three guitarists in four years and thirty shows, is still identifiably the same band, albeit different. Averaging one show a month – and normally in a far European city – they perform as if they were the headliner : an exact representation of a full length Nephilim show. Drummer Lee Newell hides behind an enormous kit and dispatches hits with a ruthless execution, guitarist Gavin King plays fluently. Snake on bass, anonymously fires off grooves as if he were a human sequencer, the rolling, swooping undertones that pin the songs with a fierce rhythm.

In the midst of this, the one constant is Carl McCoy, taking his weekend job as an occasional rock star. To an extent, such a clearly defined – and easily mocked artistic identity – can be a swift route to a creative straitjacket. But it is just one of many masks a man wears ; lover, father, worker, rock star. In the meantime, this band are locked into a tight groove, as lights explode and smoke blinds, and a voice commands “Look Up. Look Down. Look STRAIGHT TO THE LIGHT”. I'm not quite sure what exactly he is singing about if anything, but it's a tapestry that allows you to project whatever you want onto it, being meaningless, meaningful, or simply just meaning something. In here, we lose and find ourselves in another world. Thankfully, at least half the set is drawn from their more recent records – the under-rated “Mourning Sun”, “Fallen”, and “Zoon” - which quickly dispenses with the fear that this is a nostalgic revisiting. Sure, plenty of the set is older, classic songs such as “Watchmen”, “Moonchild”, and, for me at least, a moment ticked off my bucket, the stellar, transcendatory “Psychonaut”, which is eleven minutes of searing guitars, heavenly keyboards, relentless bass, and McCoy intoning chants that go beyond words to some other place where the language is sound is all we need know. It's fucking glorious. Sure, it's not THE Fields Of The Nephilim, but it is A Fields Of The Nephilim, and a convincing recreation of something that may not ever have really existed except in our imagination anyway.

The Mission meanwhile,offer no such relevance - nor would they – four years after a final split / retirement as any form of active entity, the original 1986-91 lineup (or as much as health will allow) has reformed for a short 25th anniversary tour. From the off, the band have been vocally clear that tonight is clearly, and solely, the currency of nostalgia : nothing beyond their initial flush of success, nor any new material. Every song here is at least twenty years old. A travelling museum of music.

To many, The Mission were one of the finest live bands in the universe : at their peak, where Arena tours were commonplace – they were voted best live act by a newspaper umpteen years in a row. And perhaps deservedly so, but part of their appeal then had no relation to the records, or the music on the stage, but something else. The sense of community, of belonging. With the lights up, the music blaring in your ears at speed, and on speed, the crowd then – teens and twenty somethings and grizzled road warriors – were united in a place where we could lose ourselves, or find ourselves, depending upon how you looked at it. Here, we were who we should have been or who we wanted to be, and always wanted to be, dreamers, lovers, whatever. Then, the world, as it was, went away : the world of mortgages, children, childcare, bills, debt,ex-wives, Child Support, commuting, deadlines – these were for other people. The fools who questioned nothing and went to the office everyday in a suit. We became them.

But maybe 14 years previous, John the Finance Director was a punk. Maybe he'd be one of the Johns. Maybe there was a photo of him in an old Sounds newspaper with safety-pin ears and grey newsprint mohawk. Twas ever thus : we all come from somewhere. Who would've thought that the kitbag army would've turned to this? Queuing in shops, and not overthrowing the world? Managing budgets, running hospitals, and being fathers and mothers? That was the other people. And with every day we compromised a little to survive, and then compromise became a way of life.

Everything changes over the time. Then, we thought we were the first, the unique. Just the same as everyone else. What made this generation different – and every generation different – is we compromised in our own unique way.

But The Mission were from a different generation. Then, success wasn't being number#1 in the download chart and selling out Wembley Stadium. Then, success was being in Sounds and Melody Makers, making #38, and selling out the Folkestone Leas Cliff and the Leicester DeMontfort. The music didn't come to you ; you found it, and the new songs weren't on YouTube the next day, but traded eagerly on cassettes in the post recorded with Sony Walkmen in boomy Scottish Village Halls. There was a time when even “Wonderwall” was a 'new' song, and I remember that world. It was neither better, nor worse, just different, and the only constant in our lives is ourselves and our memories, whomever and whatever they be.

These days, The Mission coming on at 9.42 and finishing at 11.25 is a problem. There are trains and buses to catch. Tubes to connect to the suburban last exit. No drinking if we're driving once we get to the suburbs. By the final encore, the space at the back of the hall is vacant. Admittedly, not to the degree there was when Guns N Roses stormed off at 1.20am on a Thursday morning, but it's a thinner room. Not that that matters. 25 years is a long time. Much changes.

This is the first tour since Finsbury Park 20 summers ago that The Mission – Wayne Hussey, Craig Adams, Simon Hinkler – have all shared the same stage. Not all of us are here : Mike Kelly is on drums. (Which makes this the fourth drummer, third bassist, and third guitarist I have seen in this band). Of The Mission which split in March 2008, no one is the same bar the singer, even if it is The – definitive – Mission on stage. The band that made those records people bought a long time ago. When people bought records a long time ago. The Mission changed over the years, yet remained the same, and when Andy or Richie was on bass, or Mark or Rob or Tim or Malc or Etch on guitar, or Scott or Steve or Mick on drums, or Rik or Antony on keyboards and saxophones, The Mission was an idea more than a band, a band that performed, albeit fluently, other peoples songs, relived other people's glories. But a job's a job. It's better than working in an office, I suppose. This though, this is The Mission the way we remember them.

With nostalgia, celebration, as currency – as Mission shows so often were in the past decade – the band return as heroes, not as struggling survivors desperately plugging moribund new material. Reborn for a night, not trying to etch out a living in a hard world. A few days, every few years, now. Not that this is the first time, because after about a decade together, The Mission tend to split up for three and a half years, then come back again. But for the first time in a long time, this is the band that made the records, not a band made of a singer and some blokes. And I suppose, its good to see them back. After many years of holding out hope for diminishing returns – and some truly awful gigs – I gave up in early 2002 after a shambolic mess of shows early in support of the underwhelming “Aura” with a last minute guitarist in rooms where the human towers touched the low ceiling. Creatively, the band followed it up six years later with the risible “God Is A Bullet”, before vanishing out in a haze of half-attended shows in small towns and one final blowout at Shepards Bush.

None of that matters now. From the opening march, the band return to the stage in a set that may have been beseiged by sound problems and a guitarist slamming his thumb into a bus door loaded up on painkillers, but nonetheless it is for me, the best Mission show since the last time I saw this trio. Initial reservations are well founded, for the sound is poor at Brixton.

“Beyond The Pale” is an ambitious song : it soars and roars and pounds and pulses. Hinkler crunches down on guitar lines as Adams, and his immense Thunderbird bass sound, swallows planets. Drummer Mike Kelly is a showy, flashy player who adds bangs, crashes, and cymbals at strange places – not helped by the appalling drum sound in the hall that makes “St.Anger” sound like a work of genius. It takes some time for this sound to gel in my ears : the powerful, precise drumming of Mick Brown is missed. Until “Butterfly On A Wheel”, this enormous show disappoints for a number of reasons, but most of them come down to a blunt hammer of percussion.

On the other hand, the band perform admirably. The audience receive the short 60 minute headline set with no lack of love. With nothing but old songs, this is – barring the absence of the lyrically embarassing “Into The Blue” - a solid greatest hits set of ancient, good selling 7” singles with portentious titles, meaningless words, and huge rock gestures. If anything, that The Mission were ever seen as anything but an ambitious rock band is a little baffling now : the huge sweeps of “Tower Of Strength” and “Blood Brothers” would've perfectly slotted into any old Led Zeppelin setlist. In other places, especially songs such as “Butterfly On A Wheel” (which is, to all intents and purposes “With Or Without You”), and “The Crystal Ocean” or “Deliverance”, are the natural progression from U2's early work : had U2 not discovered irony and a sense of humour, and the world not changed irrevoicably around them, The Mission were, at one point poised to join them at the table of enormous rock bands. Circumstances out of their control were against them.

Given that this is a celebration, the setlist ends in 1990 – with the exception of the last 'major' Mission hit in “Like A Child Again”, performed solo. No need for the dreaded words 'new material' or, a song from the albums that nobody bought. The set is a determined barrage of old, classic rock songs, all present and correct in a living, breathing greatest hits before your old eyes. Despite being older, fatter, wiser, you can look at the stage and see the guitarist and it is exactly the same as it was on the back of old singles and live DVD's. Hands reach for the sky. Human towers are built. It's entertainment, it's a valiant reclamation against the world of something. Even the bar staff are dancing around the booth. “I remember this lot from the first time”, the barman says, before reminiscing about Motorhead.

“Tower Of Strength” raises and falls and rises again. Brixton fills with smoke. Lights blare. It's a blinding, deafening rock Vietnam. Hands reach to the sky above the roof of this Victorian Theatre. For a moment, we forget who the world makes us be and become who are. Nothing exists but this. And isn't that the point?

Nephilim : Shroud / Straight To The Light / Preacher Man / From The Fire / Watchman / Moonchild / Penetration / Zoon / Psychonaut / Last Exit

Mission : Beyond The Pale / Hands Across The Ocean / Serpents Kiss / Naked And Savage / Severina / Garden Of Delight / Stay With Me / Butterfly On A Wheel / Wake / Wasteland / The Crystal Ocean / Deliverance / Like a Child Again / Like A Hurricane / Tower Of Strength / Blood Brother / 1969

One Month In My Life.

2011-10-23T21:24:00.000+01:00

A mile from home.

Last of the summer.

Boy and girl.

Walking by the seafront

The greatest adventure of all is love.

Two boys on the beach.

Aged 6.

The Sea.

Luke loves reading.

The guys.

Playing in the park.

Part Two

Pink Floyds pig flies over Battersea for the first time in 35 years.It's not everyday you get to see a classic album cover happen before your eyes.

Animals.

On the train, having an adventure.

I love these guys, but I hate the dirty, fagburn mouth.

Luke and penguin!

The boys play on the rocks

Us. Again.

Me and X

METALLICA/LOU REED - "Lulu"

2011-10-20T19:55:00.000+01:00

What has been heard cannot be unheard. What has been seen cannot be unseen. What has been known cannot be unknown.

This is forbidden knowledge : something I wish did not exist, and I wish I had not known and can now never forget. Like The Stone Roses live, it is an … experience. Each song on this record – all 87 minutes of its blunt hammer of sexualised pensioner-age pretentiousness – is a dull, po-faced, and tired litany of atonal, self-important rubbish.

Surely at some point someone – now unemployed – should've taken the band to one side and asked a question - “You're serious about THIS? Lou Reed & Metallica do an 87 minute double concept album based upon an unfinished 1895 German opera?”

It's worst record Metallica have ever made. The worst record Lou Reed has ever made, and that's a tall order. The most ill-concieved release I've heard in years.

No doubt they think this is art. It isn't. It's crap. Long, droning, pretentious bullshit with barely a fragment of melody, as Metallica perform largely formless jams. Lou talks utter shit throughout every song in his atonal growl about pumping blood, tables, Jack I beseech you, blood in the tearoom, a colored mans dick, I'm a woman who likes men, a little dog with a puny body and tiny dick, I AM A TABLE : I kid you not. Jesus Lou, why are you so obssessed with penises? I've got one, and mine is awesome. But I'm not talking about it loudly on a globally released, major label album.

This is a man with nothing to say saying it very loudly. If, at the age of 69, the artistic statement you want to make is to translate someone else's vaudeville musical into a bloated late 70's metal concept album, you have no relevance to anyone but yourself anymore. Why can't bands make a concept album, where the concept is to make a good album anymore? Wouldn't the thought of the aging Lou Reed facing mortality, and Metallica, making a record facing the passing of time, been almost bearable? (Almost).

Occasionally fragments of the competently heavy band that Metallica can be come through : when Lou Reed shuts his stupid mouth long enough to let the music breathe, there's some OK Metallica songs here – though each one is a few bars of quite good, promising riffing repeated endlessly. “Mistress Dread” rolls on a fine backing over which, sadly, Reed talks about being a mistress and love, and romance, and blood and sex over it. Every song, near enough, is built on Reed and a droning guitar, cousin of “Metal Machine Music”, and an average Metallica song buried in the mix. Lars Ulrich sounds like he's having a fun time playing these songs. That makes one person in the whole world. The bass appears for one bar in the third song before becoming part of the tedious, swamped whole. Lou Reed sounds as if he's barely tolerating this. Then again, that's Lou's role : to sound utterly bored of everything in the world and the whole of his life is an unbearable affront to his self-appointed sense of dignity.

At times it's the heaviest Lou Reed record of all time. Other times, such as the laughable “Frustration”, where the ancient Lou Reed gravelly intones about licking your thighs, it's embarassing. Grow old with some dignity, Lou. This makes “The Raven” look good. Especially when “Little Dog” is 8 minutes of droning, acoustic guitar, and offkey growls about canine penises.

I wish I were making this up. I do. The next song, and I use the word song only to describe the vaguely structured noise ears can be exposed to has Lou talking about “Dismissable objects that can be fucked with”. And so it goes on, endlessly, until finally it stops and I breathe a sign of relief in my ears. At last, it ends. 19 minutes of “Junior Dad”, and then you're done : since “Junior Dad” is mostly instrumental, its largely the best thing on the record by far, though it rolls at a tedious pace and remind me of the closing track on “Reload”, played at half the speed – and bookended by nine minutes of feedback and strings

At the very least, the band have finally got a half-decent producer in : this is a combination of the finest production and mastering Metallica have had in 14 years (learning the lesson from last decades clattering “St.Anger” and brickwalled,obnoxious and incompetently mastered “Death Magnetic”.), and the worst songs (and singer) they have ever had.

This should have stayed on the pages of The Onion where it undoubtedly came. “Lulu” is easily the worst Metallica album ever made and one of the worst I have heard in my life – it's not a crown any record wants to win. Avoid this.

WATERBOYS "An Appointment With Mr Yeats"

2011-10-20T19:47:00.000+01:00

Permanently resurrected it seems, the ever changing Waterboys, the visionary Mike Scott accompanied by whomever is in the room with him at the time, bring their vision to a long-discussed set of Yeats poetry. Scott's usual lyrical bent is still here, in the most obvious way – and aside from the twist of language to using archaic and obselete words that have fallen out of popular use – there is little to indicate this is anything other than a full, complete record of original Waterboys material. Put it on, and it sounds the same, a complete continuation fo the journey, to who knows where.

These songs are, to all intents and purposes, Waterboys songs with a different lyricist – not that you would necessarily notice. The familiar themes Scott has been mining the past thirty years (can it be so long?) are here – the earth, the moon, spirits and visions – and the currency of the work is the same as before ; the palette of instruments, the wayfarer seeking a truth, though “Politics” walks in the footsteps of a cheap Casio horn synth, and “An Airman Forsees His Own Death” veers closely to the same kind of histrionics you get in the hands of the shrivelled Whitney Houston at her nadir. Pathos, when that alone is the aim, is meaningless without a valid context.

“Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid – love has blinded him” he sings in the frankly ridiculous 'News From The Delphic Oracle', as if passing on the secrets of life – in one of the albums slight missteps, a incongruous and affected piece that sounds like something shorn from a dreadful musical that set my Pretentious-O-meter to Danger : aside from this, the vast majority of the songs are worthy additions to the late Waterboys canon – taking the line from “Universal Hall” and “The Book Of Lightning”. With a few minor dead ends into oompah oompah and whimsy, “An Appointment With Yeats” is a another statement, a new vision thing, from the searching spirit. Lacking in the urgent and unstoppable, infinite quest that characterised The Big Music, but still a wandering the earth of now and then, looking for some kind of answer.

COLDPLAY mylo xyloto

2011-10-18T20:55:00.001+01:00

Am I going to buy this? Of course I am. But with the nagging sense of guilty pleasure that I shouldn't. A far cry from where they started, Coldplay have now melded into the kind of band that were they around 22 years ago, I'd despise with every fibre in my body, with the pretentious wank album titles, in foreign or imaginary languages, and production by the ever less interesting Brian Eno. Taking their cue from U2 of the Eighties, Coldplay have mastered the art of unchanging lineups, a predictable album every few years that is both abundant in Coldplayisms and lacking in anything like fun, and general limpness.

The whole thing opens with “Hurts Like Heaven”, and it could be exactly the same as any song on any other album of theirs in the past decade. The problem with Coldplay is they always try for the uplifting apology of a song that challenges nothing, and tells you that your commute is going to be OK. Chris Martin has sunk into a world of bland, and dull truisms, and near meaningless lyrics as if it were his only language. How can heaven hurt? It doesn't. Why write a song called “Hurts Like Heaven”, unless you are either a) recovering from a painful operation or b) a illiterate buffoon. For my money, Chris and the Sleeperblokes probably don't know exactly what they are going on about, and baffled by why their blandness could be so offensive. It's hard to image Coldplays entire recorded output demonstrating the passion of one minute of an average Metallica b-side.

At the very least if you must copy U2's career so slavishly, you could get an edge, as The Edge himself is busy. “Paradise” for example, is another bland, midpaced bit of crooning from a male (not a man) who cannot believe his luck that a movie star is married to him, the soft sap. There's nothing but bland, dull, tedious, apologies for songs here. If they wrote a song called “Invincible Badass” you can still bet he'd up apologising to the listener for being so strong and exposing the rest of the world's unbearable wimpiness. What a limp noodle.

“Charlie Brown” is practically aural sludge designed for people who think they like music, but don't. On a generic, recycled riff – you can sing 2005's “The Hardest Part” over the musical backing perfectly, as the two share the same key, tempo, and structure. No doubt this song will see a glorious O2 at Christmas, festooned in confetti. Is that the point? To comfort the listener, and tell them everythings gonna be OK, listen to this, pretend you are alive?

It's art made by people who don't understand artistry. There's a much wider world to this. I can't imagine the band ever having that moment – the same as great bands do – when they realise they've written a great song and the world must hear it now. That's surely what makes all the flying around, the TV shows, the early mornings and late nights and mansions worth it : the money, sorry, I meant the music. At a time it becomes a habit. This is an album made by a band that have settled,comfortably, into dull alcohol soft middle age, and lost sight of what makes the reason d'etre, what makes it all worthwhile : good, essential music.

“Every teardrop is a waterfall” is OK, build on rising/falling cascades of chords, but again, fails to break out from the self-made prison of Brian Eno, clean guitars, piano chords, and soaring-like-an-eagle-MOR-vocals. What is the point Chris Martin is trying to make here? Words matter in songs, and this one is awash with dull and lyrical vapidity, a nothingness of sound. I'm sure that the band have a great ball making records like this, but it doesn't engage in any meaningful way, just being platitudes and cliches. Bono may be a pretentious numpty, but creatively he's miles ahead of Martins neutered apologies and half-baked philosophies.

What Coldplay need to do, if only for their own amusement, is get a sense of humour, a sense of irony, a sense of something other than being a uber-sincere set of green-trousered pop peddlers speaking only in mid-paced, Brian Eno produced cliches and do some kind of radical rethinking and or reinvention : if not, a career as the MOR-stadium Def Leppard for people who think Led Zeppelin are a bit noisy is the summary of a life. With that much money and success, Coldplay can do whatever they like next : and what they want to do is be boring and dull.

BJORK - "Biophilia"

2011-10-18T20:29:00.000+01:00

That Bjork ever troubled the charts can be seen to be some kind of bizarre moment, a brief five year glimmer in the eyes of the world, where a wayward muse collided with a open media, and a handful of very good pop songs brought her to a world larger than the Sugarcubes. With every release of the past decade, from “Selma Songs” to now, Bjork has moved ever further into her own orbit, including the ultimate alienation of the minimal “Medulla”. With great money comes great freedom, including, for Bjork, the freedom to do whatever you like surrounded by employees who agree with you. Perhaps a somewhat harsh perspective on the circumstances, but then again, Bjork has clearly gone way into her own world.

“Biophilia” is an organic record : the breaths between the words are not excised, the warmth of the room shimmers. With minor exceptions where machines whirr and drums pulse and electronics throb, this album is the product of a mostly extinct age – unique, custom-made instruments and bizarre technology, coupled with esoteric, disconnected melodies and verses – and though Bjork's voice is a thing of wonder, and as an instrument it is just another ingredient on the largely featureless landscape that is the album ; made as it is of ethereal, detached, barely-memorable songs that no doubt have been crafted exhaustively by an artist following their muse, it also gets boring – a selection of endless, somewhat identikit songs with barely discernable lyrics, unmemorable vocal melodies, and fractured glimpses of whatever Bjork brought to popularity fifteen years ago. The recent Bjork material, with the emphasis on woodwind, pipe, and ancient tin clattering, leaves me cold and even, to be honest, bored. There's little of this music that has any relevance to anyone but herslef and her shrinking, self-sufficient community, where perhaps great artists exist in isolation – but being in self-chosen exile isn't always the place you want to be.

JANE'S ADDICTION "The Great Escape Artist"

2011-10-17T22:26:00.000+01:00

What are Jane's Addiction these days? An industry? A brand? A band? More than anything, perhaps they are an idea : “The Great Escape Artist” is only their fouth studio album in twenty five years ; though the debut “xxx” counts to me, and the band have hardly been shy at activity over the years, with two rarities compilations and a large number of sometimes brilliant, sometimes boring solo albums. Three years after reforming, and two after Eric Avery jumped ship, the band have completed a new studio record with, respectively, TV-On-The-Radio's Dave Sitek, GNR's Duff McKagan, and longstanding second bassist Chris Chaney on various songs.

How does it compare? It's an album, not a selection of 79p downloads for your ears : 10 short songs and 40 minutes. Not here are the glorious, vast epics, but instead a boatload of compact, but equally visionary rock songs helmed from the Jane's mould – shifting tempos and keys, guitars that sound like the mouth of God coughing off immense riffs, and a sold, rolling bass. In fact, I'm not sure that Jane's have ever sounded so good on record : the tones Navarro bleeds from this are probably made from the dying breaths of giant carniovres. When the songs hit a certain pitch, end of the first verse, then the song shifts gears, moves to a hypnotic mantra, drums pounds like some kind of tribal death chant, and no matter how the song is played, Stephen Perkins cannot play the same from bar to bar – the drums hold the enormous groove, whilst the vocals soar ; if nothing else Perry Farrell does enormous, aspirational, classic idealist rock lyrics better than anyone. “Curiousity Kills”is the kind of song that I never released I needed until I heard it, and now I cannot live without it.

In some ways, its a smoother, softer record than the gonzo bonkers rock squall of the late 80's high watermarks that made this bands name : but again, when you get to something like “Irresistable Force”, it's more the kind of lifechanging token you hold through a world ; “We became a big business – god isn't real” ; and then Perry, and a million coiled orchestras inform us of “The irresistable force, the immovable object.” and what happens when these events collide. In the ears of Coldplay, this song would sound like a sorry apology for existing. Here, Jane's go for the frank, and confident, defiance.

Either you like Jane's Addiction. Or you don't. There is no feeling in the world like being in the same room as them, when thousands of voices reach into their hearts, and thousands of arms to the air, screaming 'all of us with wings!'. Much of the material here is an evolution, the middle point between Jane's as was, and the more cerbral, but equally vital solo material from Farrell such as the out-of-step “Song Yet To Be Sung”, and the later, much under-appreciated “Satellite Party” : as the record comes to its conclusion, some of the material may flag slightly, (“Splash A Little Water On It” reminds me of the rubbish “Dogs Rule The Night” from the second Porno For Pyros album), whereas “Broken People” is relatively mellow, but also, openly fragile and human.

Bonus points go for the deluxe edition, which contains a full length live performance by the band taken from this years pre-album tour, mixing material new and old into a cohesive whole. What more can you ask for? A new record, and a live album, all in one – a result, by any standard.

IGGY AND THE STOOGES - "Live In The Hands Of The Fans"

2011-10-17T22:20:00.000+01:00

After forty years, Iggy And The Stooges take the 'Raw Power' album out for a spin in the eyes of the world. At the time, “Raw Power” was a silent army, a fierce record that hardly anyone bought. The band went death of glory, and came back without the glory. Its a well known story.

“Raw Power”s reputation baffled me slightly : a great record that suffered from cheap, limp production. A tiger in a cage. And complicated by the multitude of extra songs from the period that were released on a dozen compilations in a million places.

When The Stooges reformed, there was – for some – a confusion that the band weren't doing anything from the “Raw Power” album. That was a different band ; the same, but different. Here, James Williamson, former Vice president of Sony Technical, has returned from retirement to give these songs a new lease of life – “to finish the job”, as he put it. “Live! In The Hands of The Fans” is the first official release from this band.

There's a lot of dodgy bootleg rubbish out there : this isn't it. It's six amateur filmmakers, who happen to be fans with HD cameras, let loose at a Stooges show in Montecello. Unlike your average rock DVD, there isn't a reliance on jump cuts, fancy pans, boom arms, or any of that rubbish. Here we get what it was like to be there. The advantage is that all the footage (with the exception of one camera behind the drumkit) is all shot from the crowd. The minor drawback is that there is little in the ways of closeups or traditional camera angles from the photo pit. But that's a minor fact.

Iggy and the band weld their instruments like machine guns, open the big box of rock riffs, and spring out of the trap as if in a war. James Williamson, who appears to have aged as sleekly as a prime rock athelete, effortlessly twirls his fingers. And the field erupts in a sea as “Raw Power” assaults our ears. And it is glorious. On this disc, Mike Watt barely moves on bass – then again, having a major knee injury and being in some kind of steel leg cast would do that. Rock Action on drums lays down the beat with metronomic, military power.

And these songs have never sounded better : the guitars, drums, bass – all muscular and powerful. Exactly the way these songs have always meant to be. Like the roar I always had in my head.

The first half of the set is mostly Williamson-era material (that is, from “Raw Power” and the associated period). There's “Seek And Destroy”. “Gimme Danger”. A stage invasion at Iggys behest. The snake hipped pensioner that is Iggy wisps on stage, commands the stage, prowls the crowd hungrily, and behind the rest of the band offer a thunderingly heavy, monolithic, hulk of pure raw power. By the second half of the set it's a home run, albeit strange that the band perform the never-officially-released “Cock In My Pocket”. Though “1970”, “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, “No Fun”convince all. Who can argue with this array of weaponry? And, best of all, the stunning song that single handedly launched 80's thrash metal - “I Got A Right”. Often copied – never bettered.

When “Raw Power” comes to a close, its time for The Stooges to tear through the body of work. Sadly, there's nothing from the reformation albums “Skull Ring” or “The Weirdness”, but there's plenty here to sate you, including a song or two from the post-Stooges album “Kill City”. .I would hate for this band to be a touring museum, and would be overjoyed if they added to their legacy with new material and finished versions of the vast legacy of unreleased stuff from their fiercely prolific 1972-74 period. On the other hand, this is a better band than nearly every other on the nostalgia trial, because it is no mere erstasz imitation, but an authentic band fulfilling a promise.

Aside from the strong and intimidating live performance on the disc, the extras are worthy : a 46 minute interview with Iggy, James and Rock Action held by the film-makers, a couple of TV spots, and short pitches from the film-makers. It's a good value, well made package that sits head to head with the best Stooges live stuff there is. This might even be the definitive Stooges live release.

As live acts go, Iggy is rightly considered a god amongst men. He plays harder, faster, and better than bands half his age – and half as alive. How do you follow Iggy And The Stooges? The answer is you don't. They performed with a biting precision few bands ever achieved in their prime, let alone forty years later.Iggy And The Stooges are rock terminators, timeless, ageless, unstoppable – not even death can slay them – they cannot be negotiated with, or bargined with, and will not stop. Ever.

NOEL GALLAGHER'S HIGH FLYING BIRDS

2011-10-17T22:09:00.000+01:00

Does the world need a Noel Gallagher album? Probably not. To be frank, he should've sacked the lot of them, and gone off out under his own name thirteen years, with “Be Here Now” as Oasis' sad implosion, before they became just another band. Now, too late, to be honest, the one with talent comes out and makes his first solo album. Solo hell. From here it's all respectable, steady sales and second on the bill at festivals but never, ever headlining Wembley Stadium again. But who wants that?

What this album is though, is Noel Gallaghers solo album. The split from Oasis certainly wasn't musical. You could imagine an album made of half this, and half Beady Eye, as the next Oasis album, and you wouldn't know the band had split. Gallagher's voice is perhaps, the voice of a talent who needs a rock edge : Gallagher is easily the brightest spark in his former band, and this album is yet more proof. The strings swoop and sing, Gallagher repeats his meaningless/meaningful lyrics like a child reading out from a book without knowing whats going on, but that's not a bad thing – the listener can come to this and project their own world onto the aural canvas here. “Everybodys On The Run” is the kind of song that his former band would effortlessly earmark as a mid-album lighter-waving classic. Though, perhaps known to fans in trading circles, “I Wanna Live A Dream In My Record Machine” and “Stop The Clocks” are well known, and not really as good as anyone thinks. Ultimately though, this record is a midcareer release from a songwriter who, were he have gone solo a long time ago, would be revered by a select few – like the Buckleys, Neil Young, and so on, and songs such as “Dream On” would've easily sat on any one of the dozens of Oasis singles as an average b-side – that is a very good song dwarfed by an a-side that was probably Godlike in scope : and that this, like Beady Eye, is the sound of an artist almost incomplete : there's good work, and lots of songs as good as anything Gallagher has released, but perhaps, the world doesn't need a Noel Gallagher album anymore – its the soundtrack to a night out,árms around your mates, wishing you were 15 years younger on a week night, not drinking too much because you have to go to work tommorow.

Well... that's a harsh interpretation. Gallagher has made a good album that sounds like a clutch of Oasis b-sides – true to form, I suppose : and that suffers only because Oasis a-sides were so damn strong.

PiL Live At The Isle Of Wight Festival 2011

2011-10-17T22:06:00.000+01:00

18 months into their continuation – and Public Image Limited issue their second live set : 2009's “AliFe” covered the first few dates of their first tour in seventeen years in a fledgling, tentative reading of some of the material : this covers what is hopefully the end of their nostalgia period. Within this is no song – barring the solo colloboration with Leftfield “Open Up” - less than 22 years old. But what songs.

The lineup offers little in the way of continuity with the pervious PiL eras, being most of the band that toured 1986's “album” and made 1987's under-rated (and expensive, long deleted) “Happy?”, alongside permanent alumni and visionary John Lydon. The production, and sound of the band, as well as the performance is tight, immaculate : possibly the best band Lydon has ever worked with – as songs such as “Open Up” become so much more than a three minute electro romp and become, definitively, a PiL classic. The guitars are precise, the playing is note-perfect, but spirited. This may not be the nostalgic vision of PiL many of the purists want, but it is a band that lives and breathes the songs and performs them with a commitment.

On this set mind you, PiL offer a clearly warts-and-all performance : the band are plagued with tehcnical problems in “Religion”, and “Home”. “Home” stumbles and falls to pieces before our ears as Lydon berates the clearly wayward sound and the band – unable to hear each other – struggle before capitulating to the elements. Gremlins are fixed by the fouth song, “Albatross” and the band pull out a strong, and worthy set. “Death Disco” is possibly the best version I've heard, and “Warrior” is, as always a fierce statement of disco intent

And only 80 minutes and 18 seconds though, you could wonder why this comes on 2CD's : presumably it was pressed onto CDR's at the venue, and these versions are slightly more elaborate silver, factory pressed CD's – a first for the label. Overall though, given the on-the-fly nature of the recording and the immediacy of the recording, this is a worthy purchase for the PiL fan and certainly, a very different experience from their other live releases.

IGGY AND THE STOOGES - "Sadistic Summer (Live 2011)"

2011-10-17T22:03:00.000+01:00

The first official Stooges live record in 7 years, and the first official Stooges live album of the recent 'Raw Power' live shows, this album reflects just what the roar that is The Stooges is. Hard to believe that the average age of this band is past 60. They sound like teenagers in a garage. Only perhaps a sneer of experience within Iggy's vocals betrays that this is an album from a band that is anything over 21. Damn. I wish I'd written songs as good as this by his age.

Rock Action pounds the drums like a human hammer. James guitar bites like a tiger. Steve Mackay adds Sax and slink, and Mike Watts plays bass like he has never been anything other than a Stooge. And it sounds marvellous. Few of these songs are represented on the last Stooges live release - “Telluric Chaos” (which sounds awful), so here we have the official live debut of most of “Raw Power” and the subsequent numerous stray songs such as “Beyond The Law”, and “I Got A Right.”

At a short 60 minutes though, you could wonder why this comes on 2CD's : presumably it was pressed onto CDR's at the venue, and these versions are slightly more elaborate silver, factory pressed CD's – a first for the label. Overall though, given the on-the-fly nature of the recording and the immediacy of the recording, this is a worthy purchase for a Stooges fan and certainly, a very different experience from their other live releases, reflecting the flavour of the Stooges final recorded output alongside a greatest hits precis of “1970”, “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, and “No Fun.” : this is utter rock action, raw power. Get a hit.

Growing Into Myself

2011-10-16T23:47:00.000+01:00

How are you all doing? I blog less about my life than I used to, more about the abstract, about concepts. Ideas fly into my brain and I try to grasp them, explain them and they go away - as tangible as a cloud.

These days are harder than they have ever been, and my life never better since I was a child. All my life has been leading to this momentous decision : bed, and then work tommorow.

Me Vs. SouthEastern Trains

2011-10-13T23:06:00.000+01:00

Dear SouthEastern

I write in relation to the disgusting, unsanitary toilet conditions that you expose your 'customers' to. The word 'customers' is used incorrectly. A customer has a choice. People taking your trains to work generally don't.

I'm currently on the 5.41 on 13th October 2011. The toilet is out of order. This is the first stop on this services journey – and therefore the train has been judged as fit to run. It is not fit to run.

I was on the 8.02 on 12th October 2011. The toilet was out of order.

The day before I was on the 6.41 on 11th October 2011. The toilet was out of order. This is the starting stop of this services journey – and therefore the train has been judged fit to run with an inoperable toilet.

On Thursday 6th October I was on the 7.47am, and there was a pool of water, piss and overflowing shit running all down the carriage.I have no idea if the toilet was out of order, as I wasn't going to get close enough to find out. Since the train had left Ramsgate some 45 minutes previously, I imagine that it had left the depot in this condition.

It is disgusting. It is inhuman. Under EU rules, cattle for slaughter probably cannot travel under such conditions, and they are only fit for death.

If I wasn't paying for tickets, I wouldn't mind so much. You get what you pay for, apparently. But I'm not getting anywhere near enough for what I pay for. And you know it, and don't care.

You might want to remind yourself of the National Conditions Of Carriage, regarding the fit and acceptable running state of the rollingstock. I do not think at any point these state that continually and habitually running rolling stock in unsafe conditions is acceptable. Not only that, but failing to honour these conditions (and those of your franchise to run acceptable quality stock) may deny you the legal authority to run these services, and charge for tickets.

You may also wish to review the terms and conditions of the contract under which SouthEastern were awarded the franchise for operation. I doubt any such contract would contain a clause that stipulates most rolling stock should have locked and inoperable toilet facilities for journeys over two hours in length.

Running such rolling stock presents not only a clear health and safety risk, but is also expensive for SouthEastern : come the Vomit Express late at night, passengers who are undoubtedly intoxicated and need to relieve themselves may not walk up and down the length of a twelve carriage service to relieve their bladder pressures.

Despite what the Transport Secretary says, getting a train is not a “Rich mans plaything.” The only rich men who see trains as “Playthings” are the people who run SouthEastern who use it as a way of extorting enormous amounts of money from the people who actually do the work and keep the South East running. SouthEastern should be ashamed of the disgusting state it operates its stock in.

Whomever inspects and certifies your stock as fit to run is incompetent. Your trains should not be running in this condition. In March, I was on a train that had been running for a month without a working toilet – I complained and didn't even get a response to my phone call. Same in August. (I've put pictures on Twitter. I know, you're so scared). Just keep cashing the ridiculous fares and cream off the profit. Your customers are sitting in rivers of shit and without working toilets, but as long as they keep paying, who cares? They should count themselves lucky they have jobs to commute to.

As a regular commuter, I pay £5,000 a year to your company to provide me with a service. The service is unfit for the price charged and not fit for purpose. And unless I get into a car and drive up to London and back, or walk for 26 hours a day, or cycle for 12 hours a day, I have to get a train. Believe me, if I could find some way to avoid your appalling company I would. Almost all of your livestock, - sorry, I meant to say passengers – feel the same way.

SouthEastern clearly think that instead of investing in your infrastructure, you think it acceptable to strand your passengers in a snowdrift overnight with ravers glowsticks and foil blankets like some surreal horror film. Are you out of your mind? If your passengers freeze to death, the Health & Safety Executive will have you for corporate manslaughter faster than you can say “Gross Negligence.” It's only a matter of time. Still, that profit ratio and balance sheet will keep you safe when passengers start dying and returning home from work at 6am after being stranded on trains in sub zero temperatures for twelve hours. (You may wish to look up the legal definition of “unlawful imprisonment”).

Sadly, I don't have a choice. You know it. And therefore, I pay you £5,000 a year (and, at 40% tax rate, that actually works out at £7,000 a year – or well over 10% of my salary) just to get to and from work. It is a disgraceful state of affairs.

Your staff are also rude and obnoxious : mostly. Very keen to check tickets, demand monies, and threaten passengers, but very reticent to provide anything like a decent quality of service. I saw one of them tell a commuter to “Fuck Off” on the 6.00pm to Ramgsate on September 7th 2011. I'll be complaining about that seperately. Your ticket collectors are almost all rude, inflexible, and authoritarian robots lacking in any customer skills at all. That's beside the point. Shut up, be happy you've got a job, take a glowstick and a blanket, and freeze to death overnight.

The point is I pay you £5,000 a year and almost every train I ever get doesn't have working toilets. I take 440 journeys a year with your company. . And because the law tells you you can, next year that's probably going to rise by £400. I don't get good value out of that. Nobody does but your shareholders. It's blackmail : until I can find a job where I don't have to use your repugnantly incompetent service, I don't have a choice.

If you think you can justify an 8% fare rise, the only defence you have is a legal forumla. If your only guide is to whether the law will permit it – and if you raise fares by the maximum amount permitted by law every year without fail and without investing in your rolling stock, infrastructure, or working toilets - then your company has no concern or care for anything whatsoever but making a healthy return to the shareholders. I understand companies are not charities. I don't mind a company making a profit. After all, if it doesn't, it goes out of business. But how much profit does SouthEastern have to make? And at what expense?

Every year you put up fares by inflation (5%) plus 3%. Does SouthEastern realise this is actively hurting the local economy? People don't spend money in the local economy – in shops, and on products – because SouthEastern puts the fares up by £500 a year. Every year. And what do we get for that? Do you expect me to go into my boss and say “I want an 8% payrise or you're out of business?” Of course not. He'd contemptously laugh at me. And SouthEastern contemptously treat every single passenger – the people that pay for your continued existence – as prisoners to be abused. Have a glowstick and a foil blanket.

Not only that, but every time you raise fares you are stealing money from the famillies of every person who has to use your service. With most people not getting a pay rise at all, and the NHS getting a three year pay freeze, every time you raise fares, you are making the people of the South-East poorer and poorer, and people will have to cut their standards of living, and stop spending money in the local economy. You are putting the local economy at risk by raising fares. Who cares about that? It's an externality! Let's make some more beautiful profit. MONEY MONEY MONEY.

SHUT UP, BE HAPPY, HAVE A GLOWSTICK!

Here I am sitting in a carriage, with my third journey in three days with no working toilet, overjoyed that I don't have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), or a health condition, or a baby, because then I'd have to soil myself where I sit because the toilet doesn't work. It's unsanitary, dangerous, and unacceptable. And expensive.

Every conversation I heard between passengers on the 7.17 to Maidstone on Tuesday 11th October was from people who hate SouthEastern. You have a serious PR problem. Nobody likes your firm, or your service, or the prices you charge. Two Sixthformers were moaning about how much it costs to get from Charing to Maidstone. Two relatively well-off commuters were complaining about how much it costs. And how long it takes. And how poor the service is. They are right. Your customers are trapped in an abusive relationship with you. If we had choice, we'd use it and choose someone else.

I could live with a massive fare increase if I got something tangible to demonstrate that I was getting value for money. I'm not. Services are always late. Or don't have working toilets. Or shortformed. Or, to stop fines, don't stop at loads of smaller stations – because it's a race to the destination before the fines kick in – not a service. Doesn't matter about the smaller stations. People shouldn't live in such hick towns anyway. Only losers take the train, anyway. Southeastern gets worse and worse, and the fares go up and up, and the only people that are happy about it are your shareholders.

I'm getting distracted.

You cost too much money. Everybody hates you.

And you run far too many trains without working toilets. It is abusive, disgraceful, disgusting, and a risk to public health.

This situation is generating a lot of public unhappiness. Not that you care.

Therefore, I am complaining because if I spend £5,000 a year on something, at the very least, I want it to have working toilets. If not, I am happy to escalate it to the highest level repeatedly and without mercy until you do something about it. Or maybe I should bring my own bucket onto the services, and urinate and excrete into it, then deliver to you at my destination for you to dispose of?

Look on the bright side. Less civilised people would just piss onto the door of a locked toilet, and you are making enormous profits. Who cares about us? We're just chumps. And you? You are hated by everyone who ever uses you : and rightly so. What better way to demonstrate your contempt for us than to charge us £5,000 for not even a toilet?

No doubt you are bored by this latter – but I assure you, no more bored and fed up than every single person who has ever boarded any of your expensive, shortformed, late, and not-stopping-at-every-station trains that stinks of urine and excrement and doesn't have a working toilet, at £5,000 a year.

I suggest Southeastern take remedial action immediately to ensure that all trains that run have a full compliment of working toilets. For the amount of money I – and millions of others pay you – a year, at the very least you can treat you with something other than the clear contempt which you are demonstrating to all of us every day of our commuting lives.

Failure to respond will result in escalation. I am prepared to accept financial compensation for the immense inconvenience your failure to provide rolling stock fit for human use has caused, and reserve the right to refuse if the offer is not acceptable or proportionate.

BRETT ANDERSON black rainbows

2011-10-13T21:39:00.000+01:00

Reinvigorated by an unexpected Suede reunion, Brett Anderson returns with his fourth solo album in four years – and the first in several years to bring back the sound and trademarks perhaps best known for in his first creative life. Over time, his career – though one might be callous to call an artistic life a career – has taken many routes and many paths. Far removed from 2008's “Wilderness”, and 2009's “Slow Attack”, the prolific Anderson – at 19 years and ten albums into a journey – is moving away from the sparse effects of his later work, to the kind of expansive, ambitious, larger songs that, with “Black Rainbows”, come closer to the somewhat unashamedly artistic excess of “Dog Man Star”. Material such as “Unsung” and “Brittle Heart” may be a world away from the adrenaline rush of Suede's better known hit singles, but who has stay immortalised forever in formaldehyde, imprisoned by the songs you once wrote? These are strong songs that the listener wants to return to, to explore. In the production, there is that rare quality ; the need or desire to hear those songs again.

It's not easy pop, but the kind of music that requires more than hearing but listening : an involving work with layers and structures that rewards repeated exposure.

Resembling the kind of dense, but airy production that characterised mid 80's Siouxsie And The Banshees, and the first few Cure records, with immense drum sounds and spidery, thin guitar lines and orchestration, “Black Rainbows” is a confident, unhurried work, that creates with it an air of experience. Far from the brash pop thrill of the early Suede records, it is a record that is very much the work of a man. Clearly, there have been lives, loves, and moments of loss here, in the lyrics and melodies reporting back a world that is more lived than observed. There's a maturity to the melody and the words that demonstrate an artist growing instead of regressing. The songs themselves don't have to prove anything – and are a welcome return to the more accessable and immediate songs that perhaps were missed in the obtuse and delicate work of late last decade. There's an essence here that, like some of Anderson's contemporaries, shows an artist evolving and changing and becoming much more than originally thought. “Crash About To Happen”has a small, but unforgettable set of motifs ; combined together, the songs rest on short codas and melodies that, when placed together, make a record of great moments held together by a glue of something more than the sum of its parts, with every song

In some ways, “Black Rainbows” is a rebirth, a third wind, if you like, for Brett's career, and one that opens up an exciting avenue for future releases. If Suede are to continue their reformation then this promises an exciting direction for Suede to become more than the pop machine many people wanted to them – and if not, Brett Anderson is on an exciting artistic journey. And if you were perhaps, wondering what happened after Suede split, you can comfortably begin the process of discovery here.

POWERLINK CYBER BLAH BLAH tested on humans for irritancy

2011-10-13T21:33:00.000+01:00

I'd love to review this product for you. It always baffles me when manufacturers fail to put suitable DVD player software in their machinery - and my Toshiba system has a baffling setting where the inbuilt software can only render if you use Microsoft Aero set to a certain resolution which is frankly ridiculous. I've been working with a desktop configuration that has prevailed for about 20 years, so when I buy a new machine I customise the look and feel to a mechanism that I grew to understand half my life ago. (Under this setting, the Toshiba inbuilt DVD player cannot work, which frankly, is Toshiba's shortcoming - not mine).

The installation process is somewhat labourious, insomuch as the installation for me stalled at a certain point unless I clicked on a popunder which appeared invisibly and unexpectedly - and unnoticed for half an hour or so. Eventually I realised that it wasn't just a moribund piece of installation and a design flaw, I finally opened the secret tab, clicked accept to "Moovie Live!" (which is both illiterately titled and has a juvenile logo), and lo and behold my

installation

eventually

finished

Tabbing between options and using the application whilst the disc is playing is a ... less than optimum experience. Redraw and rerender times are boring when half the screen becomes a silent grey blob for long periods of time - I wasn't running any other applications aside from this review, and it became unresponsive. The design of the playing screen is unnecessarily busy - occupying a large portion of the visual footprint with huge tabs and buttons - why not a 'light touch' option that offers minimal, transparent buttons on the played media. When I clicked the "Video" Tab unintentionally it stopped what I was watching, grey screened, and then I had to reload the disc to return to what I was originally doing. Ctrl+Alt+Z my life. The disc eventually was offered a "resume" option, but got caught in a loop and didn't play, before returning to the main menu and whitescreening for three minutes. The dealbreaker for me on this frankly useless software was that the playing area could not be shrunk on the device screen to any less than approximately 60% of the total screen size. My normal use for a DVD player on a PC is to create a small screen probably occupying 10% of the total screen size whilst I perform other operations - such as writing this accurate but unfortunate review - and one where all the useless tabs, buttons, and options you don't need when just playing back are minimised. I'm sure when you look under the hood of this programme that it is marvellous and can make buttered toast and herd cats, but as it is, it seems a vital part of the programme - the graphic user interface - has been crucially missed out of the design process and replaced with an intrusive set of crude and thoughtless emphera. A potentially stunning product let down by a tiny, but crucial failure in understanding the difference between what this product can do, and what it should do. Products are only as useful as the uses they are given by their users, and this is a very expensive box for me to put on the shelf. If I had paid for it I'd be expecting a refund.

An ideal for living.

2011-10-09T23:36:00.000+01:00

This is me, standing next to Tulsaman, in November 2004. Aged 31. Seven years ago. It seems like a different life, a different universe. There's so little of my life from then that's still in my life : a different partner, a different home, two children, a mortgage, three jobs ago. Life is never easy. But sometimes does it have to be so hard?

Well. Sure is. On Facebook it suggested I be friends with my brothers ex-wife. Her profile pic is of her wedding. This presents one fuck of a dilemma : not because I would add her as a friend, but because I'm given news I don't want to know and didn't know, and I am torn between not wanting to hurt and needing to be honest. I cannot unknow this.

Some people, they live their lives not knowing how blessed they are - others seem to find every day a world war. Some kind of life with the edges taken off. Sometimes, and they are lucky, they meet the person they can co-exist with at school, be together, go through the life without the evil of seperation, heartbreak, betrayal, the stateof being pushed back, always, with each broken relationship, there's the sense that what you once had, you have to rebuild, and also, that you are being pushed back, further back, away from a future, or a mortgage, or a sense of direction. It's a long walk. It's easier when there is someone to talk to on the way.

No regrets. No nostalgia. Life can only be lived one way, and understood - if there is an understanding - at the end when it is too late to change anything through action. Life is an adventure. The greatest adventure is not climbing a mountain, but finding a life worth living.

RED STATE

2011-10-08T21:40:00.000+01:00

"Red State" is Kevin Smith's tenth film. Not that you would know it looking at the hodge podge, genre mishmash on screen. It starts off Hostel, goes all crazy Fire-And-Brimstone bonkers gorno, then takes a massive left turn into some kind of bizarre ultraviolent, grindhouse style urban western. Oh, and then, finally, something awesome happens, that - two minutes later - stops happening and makes the whole film a dreary, and boring anticlimax.

There isn't honestly enough space in the world to describe exactly what is wrong with this film.Where to start? The setting is cliched and boring. The plot is dull and predictable. Almost all the main characters are assholes with few redeeming features, if any. Only John Goodman, and a small role by Kevin Pollack show any promise. Aside from one, unnamed character, who has no dialogue, and whose sole purpose is to die gruesomely, I'm rooting for everyone else to die in this film. I get my wishes granted.

Every moment of this film screams to me that the script is first draft and the cut is not a final edit. Scenes drag on too long, or not long enough : dialogue is blunt, and characters are often hollow ciphers that exist to forward the plot, as well as outlandishly drawn. Events occur in a string of improbable coincidences. Now, most films contain an element of the overblown and unlikely, but the string of coincidences become far out of probability : who thought these events would happen at those precise moments, and not just once or twice, but six or seven times. It quickly descends to bullshit. If anything, this film undoes the rest of Smiths reputation : it looks like a not-very-accomplished debut from a mediocre film-maker, that far outstays its welcome, with extraenous scenes - especially an extra couple of scenes at the end that add nothing but running time to this slender films baffling existence.

Not only that, but the trick of being a great film-maker is show don't tell : here Smith spunks his gift with great reams of exposition and useless chat. It's boring. About the only good role in it is the main "bad guy", who commands the screen but exposits again and again and again the same old stuff - oh! You got me monologuing! - though John Goodman holds up well ; and the violence is expertly edited, albeit boring. This film is too long, a one-note riffola that is unengaging intellectually, populated with unsympathetic cardboard characters, poorly edited, narratively unsatisfying, and utterly tedious.

I haven't seen a film this dull at the cinema since Battlefield Earth. Red State? Comatose State would be a better name for this waste of celluloid.

ERASURE Tomorrow's World

2011-10-05T22:22:00.000+01:00

At some point in history, perhaps imperceptably, Erasure turned from a glorious pop act to something resembling a kind retro-futurism – a world that could have existed but never quite did. The chart troubling days of a string of number 1's and 8 nights at the Birmingham NEC or the demolished London Docklands Arena long gone. The question is – like many bands of a certain vintage – is how do you stay relevant? (and if not to anyone else, how do you stay relevant to yourself?) Or.. does the act of making music become a habit, a job, and mistaking saying something with having something to say?

“Tommorow's World” - Erasure's umpteenth album – goes no further in answering this. People and culture changes over time : Erasure moved down one avenue. The world went down another. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but the Spinal Tap world of an ever more selective appeal is imminent. A glorious future behind them, Erasure are now a heritage act. How many times can you say the same thing? How many ways? Before perhaps you run out of places to go and things to say?

“Whole Lotta Love Run Riot”, for example : placed at fiftth / halfway in the albums running order, this is the place in an album which is traditionally the strongest non-single track : instead we get a somewhat cheesy, generic instrumental that wouldn't've sounded out of place in a early Nineties rave disco, with a forgettable Andy Bell vocal over the top. Andy has one of the grandest voices in pop, but only when it's used the right way, and in the past decade, Erasure seem to have lost the art of writing classic pop songs. There's nothing wrong with the songs here, but there's little maturity in songwriting or melody shown here – no progression beyond a certain template. It could be that what Erasure do has peaked and reached an apex – that there are no other directions for them to go. After all, Vince Clarke is a genius, but rarely extends beyond his palette (and could you really the difference between an early Mode song, a Yazoo song, and an Erasure instrumental?), and Bell seems to return lyrically to an old well : should a 50 year old man write about going to the disco and techno monophonic sounds? What about the life journey? Or should an artist stay forever in aspic, defined by who they were at 25? And do we really change ever, anyway?

Perhaps for me, it's the sense of life at a crossroads that is worth considering. “Tommorow's World” is another Erasure album – neither a glorious return to form, nor an awful late-term slump, but a solid consistent record of pop songs. Were these songs badged up as the latest X-Factor winner's soaring disco anthem, would anyone notice? Possibly not. On their own, these are all fine strong songs - “Fill Us With Fire”, and lead single “When I Start To Break It All Down” stand up to anything in the recent Erasure canon, but what this record is missing is a sense of need, of urgency. Whilst, with this record, Erasure have produced a strong, solid, dependable record made of pop thrills and jaunty moments, it is ultimately a somewhat hollow experience, lacking perhaps in a centre, but hoping for the same ecstatic moment where we forget everything but who we want to be – and isn't that the purpose of most music? To help us get nearer to who we want to be?

Post 6,000

2011-10-03T23:19:00.000+01:00

Wow. 6,000 Posts.

Above is a picture from January 2007 : a lot has happened in the past five years. Lost friends, gained friends, lost a love, gained an amazing love. Motherfuckers tried to keep me down, and I kept refusing to bend to their well : and here I am now, something some people never wanted to be and something that I knew I could be.

Happy? Well, almost, and very close to it. What greater ambition can anyone have?

POP WILL EAT ITSELF "new noise designed by a sadist"

2011-10-01T23:04:00.000+01:00

25 years after their formation, 7 years since the inevitable, shortlived, and glorious reformation, Pop Will Eat Itself – or a band called PopWill Eat Itself – release their first album of new material in 17 years. But is it Pop Will Eat Itself? Well, yes, and no. Of the band you may have known and loved from way back when, only one member – Graham Crabb – is here. VileEvils, the band formed by Graham, Fuzz, and Adam after the reformed PWEI collapsed, were 60% PWEI. This Pop Will Eat Itself is only 20% old PWEI. And before anyone gets too far into mathematics, so much of the PWEI personality is here, and also, so much is utterly absent.

Pop Will Eat Itself weren't just a name : they were a band. Five friends who went to the same pubs, saw the same bands, walked down the streets together. This? It's a calculated attempt to use a popular brand name to sell records and tickets using the name of another band and playing other people's songs live, taken by one singer. The final 1995-96 era lineup of the band contains not a single person who is in this lineup or on this record. To all intents and purposes, it's one-fifth of the band recording a solo album and putting it out under a band name. Much like, say, Peter Hook forming a new band called NewOrder, and not discussing it with anyone else in that band : at least one member of the former PWEI found out through the press release. And this sounds far from the sonic furrows the band were exploring on their previous studio records : the irreverent humour, and the sense of sheer crazed joy that comes from using and abusing a wall of noise, all absent in a dense, and roaring selection of angry but directionless songs. The particular guitar tones, open drum barks, the fluid bass and well-placed sonic textures that made Pop Will Eat Itself much better than some of the competition have gone away, Mrs Torrance. It's not Pop Will Eat Itself, but PWEI V2.0, PWEI-2011, a variant on Classic Coke with new, unfamiliar ingredients in an old can. Boys wil be boys, and play in a punk rock band. And, as a result, it still sounds like Pop Will Eat Itself : but not the way you remember them. A good band, a good record, but not awash with the classic sounds or songs you will be pining to hear in a setlist.

Not all of these songs will be new to the trained ear : “Nosebleeder Turbo”, “Oldskool Cool”, “Wasted”, “Seek & Destroy”,”Mask” and “Equal Zero (RetroDreaming)” have all been recorded by VileEvils, and have been re-recorded and remixed from their unreleased album : not only that, but some of the finer songs - “Council Housed And Violent”, “Demon”, “RetroDreaming” are also lost in action : and they are certainly stronger than some of the material on here . There's plenty of strong material, designed for jumping up and down in British clubs and at gigs, and some fine versions here : but they sound like a dour continuation of the bands 1994 album ; not anything new, nor exciting, nor worth a 17 year wait. The spark, the need to go back and hear this great record again, RIGHT NOW, is gone. Not because of time, or our changing lives, but because this band isn't as good, and the songs not equal to the work of the past. This is a good band, a good record, but it's not Pop Will Eat Itself. Its looks like PWEI, quacks like PWEI, but look closely and it's a great tribute, a more than passable imitation : but not the real thing. On the other hand, judged on just its own merits, its a strong and enjoyable record that has many glorious moments : but its not the band you remember. It's a new millenia, a new music, a new noise – go into it expecting the same but different, and you may just enjoy it. It's Pop Will Eat Itself, but not as you know them.

Step Back

2011-09-21T22:45:00.000+01:00

Oh. What about the posts about my life, instead of the ones about pop groups, about software, about books? What about my life? Existence, well what does it matter? I exist on the best terms I can, as Joy Division had it.

More correctly, my life is busier than its been for a while, in and out of work. There's loads of stuff happening, some good, some bad, but most importantly, it's not a bad life. Some days I am astonishingly unhappy. Others over the moon. You try to make life easier, and help people through this thing, whatever this thing is, and thats what life is : getting through it.

I'm taking a step back from blogging, not in any conscious, or excluding way. There's just other stuff going on as well.

Audio Essentials

2011-09-21T22:10:00.000+01:00

This multipackage suite of Audio, Video and Image Editing Tools is useful to the individual who wants a set of relativelyt unsophisticated but advanced options and tools ; though one could, very easily spend forever choosing between the various options. There are multiple suites within the package ; a Video File editor and convertor – useful for those obselete playback files, and lots of audio options. WavePad is the main draw for me, but the rest of the packages can acquit themselves ably.

MixPad Audio Mixer is useful for layering existing files, and creating basic multitrack audio – though it doesn't necessarily lend itself well to creating full musical tracks, as the full set of editing options on each track is awkward to control without a huge monitor setup though you can create individual effects chains for each stem. .

Sound Recorder is an adequate recording device with basic options ; nothing particularly advanced, but certainly does the job – of recording audio – with no small amount of flair and aplomb. Zulu DJ Mixer does much the same job, but allows cross fades, cuts, and pitch/speed options to speed-correct and beat match material.

PhotoPad is a more than OK, basic set of image manipulation tools ; layering options allow some bizarre results, and the controls are intuiative, easy to use, and quick to layer. Layers are also stacked so you can remove an effect added several steps ago without needing to rework the rest of the image. If you are expecting some high end professional image work here, you'll be disappointed but for most uses and applications this is a more than capable package for the home user.

WavePad Sound Editor is a fairly useful piece of audio manipulation software ; albeit more for experimenting with finished material instead of constructing individual or original material and mixes. Loading times, even for low bitrate spoken word MP3's are high (as are saving times), though the interface is intuiative, and relatively straight forward. A minor bugbear is, in terms of conversion options, Real Player Media from the dark ages of the dreaded early internet doesn't seem here. Other tools (basic stuff such as pitch and speed change, edit and manipulation) are not always well designed – primarily the submenu buttons are in a intensive point-and-click menu and not a real time graphic interface so there is a lot of labour intensive tabbing and switching to hear the outcomes of experimentation. The experimentation is not real-time either, so you cannot punch in a setting and see an instant change in sound ; the whole file is processed before playback, and this inevitably accrues a delay in use : though you can use a preview button to hear elements of the work. The dynamic range compressor allows sonic manipulation (you too can sound as bad as “Death Magnetic”!) whilst, especially on the spoken word material the 'reduce Vocal Noise' option allows the playful to turn it into a haunting silence, or musical material into near instrumental glory. Perhaps for the best when one considers how bad some singing can be.

The sample track I used for vocal reduction was U2's “Mofo”, a fairly dense bit of work from 1997. However, on music tracks it presents a very odd and bizarre result that can often reduce the rhythm volume considerably and present an insight, though perhaps not always usefully, into some of the subsets of production. Backing vocals are not always adequately removed : in the end it sounded like a b-side vinyl only remix. The gain, delay, effects pedal switching are useful though the effects are stepped and not graded ; and whilst this will be useful in create home masters of existing tracks, it doesn't lend itself well for creation of an album to all but the most patient.

However as a fairly advanced suite of multipurposes audio, video, and image manipulation tools, this is a capable, strong package that would suit almost all your non-professional needs with more than flair and style.

Michael Moore. Here Comes Trouble

2011-09-21T22:07:00.000+01:00

Perhaps the story least told is that of Michael Moore's life since he became Public Enemy Number One. And apart from a handful of fragments and pre and postscripts - "Here Comes Trouble", a semi-fictionalised memoir - does not reveal this. Should you want a self-aggrandising life story from Moore's obscurity years, then this is the one for you - and, with the way they are told, Moore omits some key moments, often the ones that define our lives, such as those relating to money, love, food and sleep. With all his achievements, culminating in being for a while the most hated man in America, you would expect Moore to detail how he cured cancer, solved unhappiness, and got Guns N Roses to release "Chinese Democracy", so a sense of false modesty would not become him. The verbose 400+ pages are just snapshots, anecdotes on paper to an extent, and whilst they are fascinating, a good book such fragments do not make. The overarching narrative, the sense of purpose, the raison d'etre are absent and instead we get a rambling, somewhat directionless lead to the moment that Moore hit upon, and released his first film, the low-key "Roger And Me", that showed little of the promise he eventually delivered upon, and for many of us, myself included, where Moore became more than a footnote and someone worth investigating. Or, as Sir Henry Jones said in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade - "You Left Just As You Were Becoming Interesting!"

Presumably that is reserved for the inevitable sequel.

NIRVANA - Nevermind. Corporate Rock Whores.

2011-09-18T16:27:00.000+01:00

Can it really be twenty years already? It seems so recent. Surely it is not already time for the recontextualising, the fetishising, and the merchandising of memory. Faded, beaten memory, which was experienced even in our youth, is now reframed. As glory years, which they never were. We were young, and stupid, with no real direction, living out of backpacks and fumbling through life. And so, does this album deserve a mammoth, 4 CD, 1 DVD, “Super Deluxe” Box Set?

No.

Would not this super deluxe set be the very antithesis of everything Kurt Cobain wanted? Maybe 20 years ago. Still. Dead Rock Stars can't say no, and leave it to their estates to embezzle the memory and exploit the remaining fragments of property. Of course, there is no possibility of this product existing were Cobain alive. Not only would he have blocked its coffee-table memorobilia stench. But also, Nevermind – whilst remaining a seminal album of its genre – would've faded into a vague millstone, as Nirvana ploughed on in the endless cycle of Verse/Chorus/Verse/Album/Tour/Album, to a dull irrelevancy, a rolling, touring nostalgia museum appearing every few years at Festivals and the O2, releasing occasional records of ever decreasing quality, before becoming the Grunge Black Sabbath.

As it stands, and remains, “Nevermind” is undiminished by time. It sounds as fresh as the day I picked up the 12” vinyl from Rock-A-Boom in Leicester. The raw, inarticulate, melodic rage – specifically targeted at a clearly unjust world run by corporations, inarticulately aimed at everyone in some form of Primal Scream – is as potent as ever. I imagine in forty years time, people will still be drawn to this benchmark.

But at the time? This was just stuff. £6 tickets for cancelled shows. TV appearances viewed through poor reception on the Jonathan Ross show, Friday Nights at the student bar where the whole album was played between 9pm and 2am. And it came to this? The same set of slowly betrayed ideals that our parents had, turned into just another bloke on a bus going to work listening to “Never Mind The Bollocks”. This stuff doesn't need to be merchandised. All that is left, all that matters is the music. Not the fold out reproduction Smash Hits poster from a tatty British pop mag. I wasn't interested in that empherea then, and I'm not now. It was perpiheral rubbish then, and now. Nor a glossy book. It's a quality printed and classily presented reproduction and presentation of archive material, but it's too soon, and it was never that good at the time anyway.

Stripped of the cultural zeitgeist, that thankfully made Warrant redundant and Bang Tango an endangered species – and how callously bands like Def Leppard tried to reinvent themselves into tatty, torn jean, authentic rock bands with a humiliating swiftness - “Nevermind” is a strong, pwoerful, no – brilliant – record that betrays a hard pop heart wrapped inside fuzz and glisten.

And to think Geffen thought this would only sell 50,000 copies.

But what happened next? Beyond the album, the rest of the set contains all the B sides from the album singles. Live tracks, and all. The second disc contains oft bootlegged and rough demos, alternate mixes, and early takes of songs that were scattered around the bands discography. An interesting curio and appendix, but not essential. If it was, it would've come out at the time.

On the Super Deluxe Version, CD 3 is a set of rough Butch Vig mixes. They add little to the experience.

Final draw is a CD and DVD of the bands performance in Seattle on 31st October 1991. The footage is well known, several songs being on the 2004DVD that is part of the “Lights Out” box set. Its some of the finest Nirvana footage out there, and the performance is powerful. But perhaps, not worth paying £75 to experience.

Overall, this Super Deluxe Box Set is a tragedy and a travesty of Cobains ideals. It's exploitation of memory and 1991 music at 2091 prices. For the cash conscious, and the principled, there are alternatives and – barring the Butch Vig mixes only in this set – you can get all the music elsewhere for much less than half the cost.

Third World America, Huffington

2011-09-14T22:33:00.002+01:00

The Huffington Post has a great many things to answer for. Not least, the fact that it expects many of its contributors to work for nothing, for glory and recognition, and not for money. You can eat glory. You can make rent with recognition. Why then does a profitable (and it would still be profitable if it paid its contributors, I am sure) operation that is one of the most recognised voices still too skinflint to pay the people who manufacture its main attraction : the words?

Who knows. But Huffington fails to address this in her polemic. Designed for the same kind of market as those who chinstrokingly read Michael Moore and are convinced I AM RIGHT! (and often they are), Amanda - or perhaps, her unpaid ghostwriter - demonstrate a scathing polemic of the failure of the American Dream. The world where, for the first time, the living standards of the generation behind you are going to be lower than yours. And in ever decreasing circles, an aggressive feudalism will consume your way of life. The gap between the rich and poor is wider than it has been for 80 years. The median income has shrunk. Those without medical insurance are becoming an ever bigger army of sick and old and poor. When America said "Give me your sick and your poor, your tired and your weary..." it never finished its promise : and I will exploit them to their unmarked grave.

Viewed from the prism of the rest of the world, every line of this tome carried with it the kind of shocked arrogance that no longer applies. The rest of the world has long been used to being exploited by big business - ask the Bhopal survivors, for a start - and for America finally to rue what it has sown is sadly, no surprise. The phrase that permeates every line is that "It Couldn't Happen Here - but it just did."

Every chapter is wrought with sad, common, heartbreaking tales of the cruelty of unemployment, of the fact that the game is rigged to wage slavery, and that of leaving university with enormous debt, no income certainty, no pension, and no hope of getting on the property ownership ladder until your parents die, and what is one expected to do? Riot? That's just rampant, mindless criminality. The battle is laid clear, though somewhat brazenly, that there is a war between who will serve and who will eat and no amount of articulate rage will solve the problem. Paying your writers, on the other hand, will.

Ready Player One, Ernst Cline

2011-09-14T22:31:00.000+01:00

This guys knows his kill screens. If technology permitted, it's very likely that he - like many of us - would have a USB port fitted in a chestplate hooked up by WiFi. The future is where we're spending the rest of our lives. The Internet is how we communicate. Relaity is so real, and so vastly underwhelming. And, Cline takes to it with the summation of thousands of years of human evolution that is so.... Airwolf.

Melding a cromulent embiggening of language with fluent geekspeak, every word of this speaks the code of Basic, the rendering of the sprite, the language of the total pop culture Whovian. This - computers, internet, video games, Tv shows and memes, are where Cline clearly lives. This is utter nerdgasm. RP1 meanwhile, offers the possibility that, in our own lives, who we really are, is the person who we make for ourselves. Our virtual avatars, being extensions of our own reality, the self made men. And what is not the biggest game of all than our own lives? Where we create versions of ourselves that live online are merely our own representations of who we want to be, or who we are, or the middle ground between the two? And RP1 takes this idea, and makes it so much more than that - Wade Watts is not only an avatar for us, but also an avatar for himself, and as the tale moves, evolves, and concludes in a transparent and versed geek language, Cline deftly emigrates from the man who wrote the dreadful "Fanboys" to the reforged, new and improved Death Star II of his own mind. From Padawan to Jedi Master. What this novel does show clearly is firstly, you have to be well versed in the Nerdgasmic world of pop culture to get everything, and secondly, Cline is so utterly Airwolf that a new, and promising voice, has moved from comic to writer. Thankfully, Cline would rather join the cast of Battlestar Galactica 1980 than make a musical with Queen, so the future is still so bright, he gotta wear shades. Well, in the world of the Oasis anyone. One to watch. Continue? Insert more coins.

Jew

2011-09-14T22:29:00.000+01:00

To call this Kafkaesque is to insult Kafka. If the purpose of a novel is to tell a story worth telling, it must also be somewhat improbable. And after all, a novel based on your everyday life would be quite dull and very long. "I scratched my chin absentmindedly again, as the screen ticked over to say the 7:37 was now due at 7:44. I checked my Blackberry and listened to the podcast."

What an improbable set of events this book tells ; a naked man, with a case of rare and absolute amnesia, waking in a mass grave, during a religious war? Four unlikely events in one. You may as well say he woke up a giant mansized cockroach with a liking for Amish Death Metal.

Whilst undoubtedly written with a conviction, and an Author's Message, and no small skill in language and phrase, Jew is perhaps aiming for an audience that is small, and niche. And what can be said on the matter that Primo Levi did not? A small amount. That is the measure of a man's worth.

slipping away

2011-09-10T23:38:00.000+01:00

Life is slipping away. Over time, your circle of friends changes. All of ours do. And, on a day to day basis, the longest successful relationship I have in this house - the only one that's lasted over five years - is with my oven. Jobs, lovers, friends. All have changed.

Friends too. People I've known for twelve years and never had a cross word with have silently defriended me on Facebook without even the balls to say so. It may have taken me a week or two to notice - but they never said much anyway, and I was busy with children and jobs and commuting. That sense of a complete, and enabled lack of accountability, is quite annoying. I'm not sure what I said or did, if anything at all. Life goes on. But, in my eyes, I'm a wonderful friend (though I am probably not), and thus, how dare they? Blogs get deleted, friends disappear. They decide they don't need me, or their lives are not enriched by me, or maybe that I represented a part of a period of their life they no longer had any connection with, or desire to remember. Certainly, many parts of my life are no longer relevant to how I live my life on a day to day basis : but I wouldn't pretend they never happened.

The way to survive is to take the same approach as one does with anyone you find yourself in disagreement with. They are probably wrong, and it's their loss. I'm going to continue being me forever.

Nonetheless, I miss my friends who have gone onto other things. I wish them all well and the best of luck. (with only a handful of deserved exceptions). And the rest of you I don't see enough of - I miss you and its good to catch up even if only via the Internet.

In retrospect, I should have titled this post Hold Onto Your Friends, but You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side anyway. Well. Enough Morrissey song titles for now. How are you all anyway?

PULP – London Brixton Academy 01 September 2011

2011-09-07T22:45:00.000+01:00

Your first question is always Do You Remember The First Time? And the answer is yes. The second, and best, is always Could It Be Magic? And the answer is yes. It is as good as the first time. And in fact, even better. Yes, that good.

Has there ever been a time when the world needed Pulp more? For their sins, little as they are, Pulp always thrived under the Conservatives. Their songs, a clarion call of the articulate poor steeped in nostalgia for a time that never really existed (except in our collective imaginations), have quietly sat in our memories. Waiting for a time.

Whilst the rabidly undeserved nostalgia for Blur threatened to topple humanity two summers ago, Pulp's relatively low key return as a touring act may not have set the world alight, but what is important is not how many tickets you sell, but how much you mean. Blur? Good, but not great. Even at Blur's reunion shows, Albarn was half-busy distancing himself from the Blur identity, and it felt that Albarn was playing the role of Blur singer who happened to have the same name. Pulp? Every ticket in this room means more than almost any other ticket for any other band on the reformation circuit. This is here and now. This is real.

And thus it begins. The penultimate night of Pulp's 2011 Tour at a rabidly sold out Brixton Academy. Sold out in less than an hour. At 8.58, the lights dim, a curtain lights up with lasers and – over a torturously extended, ambient shimmer through “Common People” - a stream of near endless text begins. Are you ready? Do you want to see a dolphin?

“He said so you've gotta go home?” Jarvis sings. And it begins. The whole world is taken back, but also forward. These songs always meant something – not just because of the meaning we gave them, but also because they were songs obviously about something : no single Pulp song existed without having a reason or a purpose. Do You Remember The First Time? meanwhile rolls on the premise that maybe every time is as good as the first time, maybe better, and each first kiss could be the last first kiss of your life. And the best first kiss. There is no point in this life settling for second best.

And its no mere nostalgia show. Whilst Pulp topload material from their glory years (arguably, Pulp are one of the few bands that hit a commercial and artistic peak at exactly the same moment), the set stretches back as far as “Countdown” from their rampantly unsuccessful Fire Records years, to three songs from 2001's unapologetically rural, and poor selling, “We Love Life”.

Perhaps, about the time the moment hits me that this is as good as, no better, than the first time, was “The Fear”. For most people, it was the sound of Pulp drifting away from mildly introspective pop anthems. For me, it was the connection – for life itself is not easy, or fair, and for me, at that time, the late twenties was the moment in my life when the party came to an end. Though I always felt I was born old, and went straight from some kind of innocence to some kind of jaded disappointment in the course of one single week in 1989, I was no longer searching for beauty or love : just some kind of life with the edges taken off. This was my heroic quest – to find life OK, to find life worth living. This was The Fear. A song that sits within my top handful of songs that communicates the meaning of my life. It may mean nothing to you, and if it does, I hope there is something else that – in art – evokes as much as this does for me.

This was Pulp : not just the lipgloss, the razzamatazz, the disco 2000, but also the fear, the day after the revolution, the bad cover version. For there is no yin without yang. No light without shade. No Morecambe, without Wise. But there is also a determination for death or glory. To go out trying.

There's no shame in my eyes going wet. In the day to day of life we try to survive, to get through, to drag ourselves to the end of another month, and know that its one less month here on this earth, one more notch on a sordid bedpost on the bed that has seen it all, and also that life is just this stuff that happens around us, and we ride a wave and hope we make it to the end of the storm. When the crescendo of “Disco 2000” hits the intellectual gut, all the rationalising and thinking ultimately is meaningless in the face of emotion, in the face of recognition. Look how we've changed. How much we have grown. And how we are also, still, who we are, just different. Pulp 2011 is the same ; but different. Older, and wiser, and still, forever young inside.

By the time “Something Changed” fades into the ether, Brixton fills with smoke and lasers, and “Sorted For E's And Wizz” - maybe, unconsciously, an attempt to cross the void between rave and indie with a hangover, captures an air of the celebratory, arms-aloft, end of the night that was sometimes bookended by The Waterboys “Whole Of The Moon” being a post-rave 6am anthem 20 years ago. Already so far, there's been a comprehensive overview of most parts of Pulp's latter day career. The sense of a moribund, and unrewarding, replay of the whole of “Different Class” thankfully avoided in a set that pleases both the hardcore and the disco : 14 singles, from the barely heard “Countdown”to the dying moments of “Sunrise”, and a scattershot of obscure album tracks : “Sorted” turns into a white noise squall, and then, what I hoped, and feared I may never experience – the glory of the legendary “Sheffield : Sex City”. The city is a woman, a sophisticated lady.

Jarvis – as was always his forte – narrates a tale of the kitchen sink/bedroom drama : the ones that we actually live, and not the falsified, alienating broken drama. Lyrics fall from his mouth of suburban fucking and beautiful love in terraces and tower blocks and the teeth of Park Hill. In this world, a kiss could be a widscreen explosion of desire, and something as simple, as commonplace, as thrilling as a couple holding hands becomes an expression of hope. Tempered with a gritty social realism – think of an optimistic Ken Loach – these songs are our own acrylic afternoons. The worlds we live in. Albeit, set in the brown and pink of our childhood.

The artistic ethos of Pulp on stage is that which perhaps more than anyone, is the impossible. A world of once-kitsch seventies fashions, of neon and formica, set in the world of our childhood, the late seventies and early 80's, of whites and browns and plastic, where we were concievably, almost, living in a future that almost – but never quite – came true. You brought us up in the space age, and you expect us to clean toilets? When we've seen how big the world is, you expect us to live like this?

Rarely is music so meaningful, or so direct to the thoughts. Whilst we've changed now, we're fully grown, with babies, and jobs, and the fear of monday mornings, we still remain in some way connected to who we were – our inner teenagers, our hidden selves. As “Sheffield Sex City” melds, effortlessly into a thematically-complementing “Babies”, and then, the chaste “Live Bed Show”, in an extent there is a microcosm of a relationship from rampant passion to children to sexless resignation. I've been there, done (and didn't do) that.

In the line up tonight, the original lineage of Pulp – Jarvis, Nick Banks, Steve Mackey and Candida Doyle, are complimented by Russell Senior, Mark Webber, and where appropriate, Senior's replacement Richard Hawley for some of the latter songs. It's not just some form or reformation, but a genuine recreation of the players on the original songs. Aside from Leo Abraham who ably assists on almost every instrument known to man, this is the 100% original Pulp in all their mature eras. Candida even smiles at one point. Russell Senior proffers setlists made of paper planes.

The main set draws to a close with the ever-bitter, vibrant “Common People”. A song that meant more to anyone that loved it and understood it than any Wonderberlinwall. Because as Jarvis rightly point there are no common people – we are all people. They key element of the Pulp canon. No one better or worse than anyone else. The room sways, sings, bellows, its middle aged, rented-with-children-and-no-final-salary-pension-heart out. There are, to an extent, no words that could convey the importance of the song itself better than the songs own.

Encore time : “Party Hard” from the phoenomally underrated “This Is Hardcore” squeals and squalls and stays – deliberately - just outside its welcome. The enforced happiness of celebration ends in that bitter taste of being at a party just a minute too long. And then, for the faithful (though it kills the atmosphere), “Countdown”, where Pulp finally became a butterfly and not a pupae – a key moment where a decade of part time aspiration became a full time realisation. It was, as part of “Seperations”, probably the first finished Pulp song in the form that Pulp became loved. In front of me, two beautiful people live out the hand gestures that they have been demonstrating - early in the night at retro clubs named after 90's songs - as if they have just minutes left to live.

And then, perhaps another of the finest outsiders-scream moments in the underdogs-articulate-growl : “Mis-shapes.” By now it's 11.15pm, and Pulp have been on stage two and a quarter hours. If you didnt come to party then why did you come here, after all? It may be a Thursday at the fag end of a limp British Summer, but this is, for now - and possibly ever – the final Pulp performance on British soil, and, for that, it shows that some art is linked forever to a time, some fades in relevance to selling memories, and some – this – creates new memories, and a fresh line between the then and the now and the core of whatever being me is. Maybe the saddest fact is how little has changed truly, and how much at the same time.

The room empties slightly. But its still time for one more. One last dance. To “The Wicker Man” : a ten minute journey through the Yorkshire countryside for the seven strong band and their backing singers that leave an emptying room . At this point – 11.20pm – I can feel the band and audience start to seperate slightly. But life is a journey, we can't always go the same way forever.

Everybody's reforming nowadays. Even if nobody knew they wanted them. Can't Shed Seven get the hint? But if this is the last time for Pulp, we had this. As good as ever, and, as the best always does, meaningful. Stuff like this makes life worth living. It may not be the band, the musicians, but the recognition within ourselves, the meanings we give the songs, the community of mis-shapes that gives us a sense that perhaps, we are all common people and not alone in this world. It bodes well for the future. If Pulp were a once-in-a-lifetime return, an Indie Halley's Comet, then better to be remembered like this, burning as bright as ever, then any other way.

SETLIST

Do You Remember The First Time?

Monday Morning

Razzamatazz

The Trees

The Fear

Disco2000

Lipgloss

Something Changed

Sorted

Sheffield Sex City

Babies

Live Bed Show

This Is Hardcore

Sunrise

Bar Italia

Common People

Party Hard

Countdown

Misshapes

The Wickerman

___

PETER HOOK AND THE LIGHT : Unknown Pleasures, Live In Australia, 2010

2011-09-07T19:07:00.000+01:00

30 years after Ian Curtis suicide, and it is time (allegedly) for the band's former bassist to tour the world with a new band, reflecting in the glory of a band that breathed its last three decades ago. Taking away from the Joy Division legacy, this recreation / celebration of the debut leaves a taste in the mouth, as desperation takes hold. What more can be said about Joy Division? Not much, anymore. A brief lifespan that went from an embryo to a memory in three years, two albums, a handful of singles, and about one hundred gigs.

Is there a time in your life when you start looking back, more than looking forward, the time in your life when you become nearer to the end than the beginning? Is this then the first admission that Peter Hook's glory years are over, and now it is revision, merchandising, nostalgia? An industry of memory? I would never deny a musician the right to perform or to make money from their work, but sometimes, the respect the musician treats themselves with is far less than they deserve.

Probably. In it's absolute form, this record is a strong collection of excellent songs performed ably. Were they always sung by Peter Hook, you would never think that perhaps this band needed a different singer. But they weren't always sung by Hook. And to me, the connection between this band, performing these songs, and the songs themselves is thin. Hear the original bassist not play bass, but sing! Hear... absolutely no other original members of the band on this recording. I was prepared, and understanding, of Roger Waters - who sang and played bass and guitar - singing and playing bass and guitar with lots of former members of Pink Floyd, performing Pink Floyd albums. But when not one member of the original band is performing the original instrument it's a tribute band with one original member. Even New Order, and latterly Bad Lieutenant, that feature more than one member of the original band performing Joy Division songs felt a little generous / tenuous, but this is nothing more than a somewhat generous interpretation of nostalgia, with a slender connection to the original material in lineage and lineup. Sure, they're Hooky's songs (but not just his sole property), and he has the right to play them - but what happened to the ideals - the integrity? He has the right also, to not play them. Perhaps, were he touring a set of all his old material instead of a recreation of one album, and perhaps were he also performing a cross section of songs from New Order, Joy Division, Monaco, Revenge, Freebass, for example, it would feel a lot more comprehensive, and a lot more honest : here, the cult of Joy Division (and brilliant as Joy Division were, they are over-rated), is thematically broken. Peter Hook was but one quarter of a whole, and for one quarter to take the body of work and appropriate it wholesale (albeit under a different name), when not even performing the original instrument, and singing when not being the original singer, takes liberties with the interpretation of credibility and legitimacy.

If, on the other hand, you want to hear a competent and spirited covers band performing the early part of Joy Divisions legacy then there are few finer ways of doing so than this. The live re-creation of the sound conjours up an authentic atmosphere, with the character of the original songs retained. The passion of the performance cannot be faulted. But it is erstasz, imitation, Diamondeque, a passable fooling : like going out with a girl who reminds you of your first love, but perhaps, not quite so good. And in your heart, you know it. But you want that again. You want to feel what you never can experience a second time, for the time is gone. And, at the time, it was probably imperfect with rough edges - which time has smoothed.

Is this worth buying? If you clamour for new music, even if it is old music, then yes. But buyer beware. The vinyl edition features two extra songs as last minute "Bonus tracks", though for no apparent reason (the songs being "At A Later Date", and "Ceremony"). The CD edition has plenty of extra space left on its running time, so in practice, anyone who doesn't the vinyl edition is being penalised for preferring other formats for no adequate reason. I never get time to sit in my house on my own and listen to vinyl LP's. Sure, I could listen to this exclusive, elitist-pleasing bait by needledropping the vinyl, making MP3's, and then retagging them into my iPhone/iPod/iWhatever. But I don't have time or inclination for such nonsensical and unneccessary practices. In the day and age where anyone who actually pays for music is a weirdo, and a CD is just a set of MP3's in a box, anything that treats a customer with anything like contempt is a dangerous move. It's easy to find the bonus tracks by looking. Deliberately removing value and slicing songs off a release is madness. Don't give people less reasons to buy the product. There will be people that don't want to buy truncated product when the full show is only available in vinyl fetishist format. I can't listen to vinyl when I'm out of the house. And that's where I listen to most of my music. Not in front of a vinyl deck, fighting off a hyperactive cat and a grabby child.

If there is a valid reason (such as a lack of space on the CD) I understand not including songs on the CD release. The exclusion of material when there is space for them on the CD is baffling. "Percieved Value" is important here : people are prepared to pay for something when they feel they are getting value for it. When you remove value, and take off content, that lowers the value of the product. It's up to you. I'll just add the missing encore tracks off an audience bootleg of the respective show and live with the drop in quality. There's no reason to take the songs off the CD release, apart from pleasing vinyl-sniffing nerds.

Formatting aside, and in conclusion, "Unknown Pleasures Live" is one member of Joy Division and his mates playing 30 year old songs in small rooms, being a tribute band featuring an original member. If you have a fervent need to experience a properly recorded set of Joy Division material, then by all means, experience this. But don't forget what Peter Saville said, that this is just the merchandising of memory. This is a recording of a fine band recreating something that never quite existed except on vinyl, tainted by the notion of integrity - and ignoring it. But time then, to let it go. Go forward. Not back.

(mostly) baby pictures : not necessarily interesting to you

2011-09-03T20:00:00.000+01:00

A month ago, this Squirrel and I had a five minute stareoff in St James Park

X and I, about to go to the cinema.

Running around a park near the sea

Smiles.

Luke at home, with me.

Tracy Emin bear at Folkestone station.

Luke on the beach, 10 minutes before a storm.

Cuddles.

Boy giggles before bedtime.

Big Boy on train.

Crawling in Tenterden.

Detail, of the kind of shirts, I like to wear. Retro.

JANE'S ADDICTION - Camden Koko - 30 August 2011

2011-09-01T09:56:00.001+01:00

Many years ago, Jane's Addiction were a dream to me. Split, gone, burnt, ashes. The fragments of memory existed on records, videotapes. A band I would never see, experience, feel, or taste, except through records. And if you've only experienced Jane's Addiction on record, you've tasted less than half of the banquet. And then, the inevitable reformation. Some bands should split up. Some bands should never reform. Some, you wonder, how did you live without them? Like a colour blindness, having never known a world of green, for example. Jane's Addiction are one of the primary colours of rock.

After two cancellations in a row – disappointing fans at the Reading and Leeds Festival with throat problems – there is doubt that tonight will happen. Text messages, webpages, and emails fly across the country : flights and trains and babysitters are nervously booked and boarded. Even as we stand outside the venue, the crowd files in, the tickets are stamped, there is doubt. Is tonight going to happen? Is Perrys Voice still shot?

We could all do without this. As bands age, the idea of packing everything up into a kitbag and trawling all over the country just seems impossible. Weddings, children, jobs, mortgages. All the things we swore we would never do. Or all the things we never thought we would get to be old enough to do. Live for today, for tommorow is a mystery. In these days, a gig is a rarity – not a regularity – and the moments that we live and breathe and love for, when everything else goes away, and when all that exists is a joy.

I admit. I play air drums. And air guitar. No shame. Forget that other people can see you. I don't care what I look like when wrapped in this music. I care about how I feel. Better than sex? Well. Maybe. What I know is that the horrendously crammed Camden Palace – you can call it Koko if you like, but it's the Camden Palace, and we all know it – and that this music is transporting people to a world that is, in all probability, much better than the one we live in. A world made by dreamers and not businessmen. All of us withw ings. All of us with wings. And Stephen Perkins whips up a frenzy of drums, and the songs ebb and flow, rise, and fall, tension and release, Dave Navarro coiled and poses, speaking the language of LA Hair Metal, but different, better, with a visionary approach to chords and structure, whilst Perry Farrell – an aging 52, but svelte and looking more like Al Pacino than ever, bends the fragile vocal chords through a bank of phasers and pedals, playing his own voice like a guitar, rousing a chorus.

Opening with “Pigs In Zen”, Jane's dispatch a salvo of old, but not dated songs. These may very well sound this frabjous and sparkling in a hundred years time. “Aint No Right” is followed by – for the first time on British shores – a full, electric scream through “Just Because”.

As is customary, Jane's have brought a new old lineup back to the stage. After a five year hiatus in the middle of last decade, a brief reformation with original bassist Eric A came to a close. Tonight, the mystery bass player is Chris Chaney – first seen with the band nine years ago, at my first Jane's Addiction show. Lineup aside (and Chris is a perfect fit to the band) – there is also new material, though only “An End To The Lies” is played tonight. Given Perry's fragile throat, it may very well be that the set is shorter than usual (75 minutes). Not necessarily that this matters – the last time I left a gig and had to buy a new t-shirt due to a tide of sweat was New Order in Wolverhampton in 2006. And then, it's “Mountain Song”.

Perhaps more than anything, tonight was a restatement of the obvious. I've never seen Jane's Addiction play anything less than a captivating, committed set, never anything less than being lost in a moment and meaning this. This is who we are ; not suits, not commuters, not indebted wage slaves. We are beautiful creatures in a world run by the cruel.

Been a long time since I've seen a reaction quite this : balconies swaying. Hands reaching to the stage. A thousand voices chanting the same words, the same songs, lost in the same moment. If only we could bottle this power. We could rule the world. We could change the world.

Photos by Alex Wilson, as my camera focus broke in the pit. Thanks Alex!

A Cromulent Life

2011-08-28T18:34:00.000+01:00

I am on holiday. It's all facebook this and twitter that. How are you?

If In Doubt, Quote Oscar Wilde.

2011-08-23T22:56:00.001+01:00

Fashion is temporary. Style is forever. And thus, five years ago, I was described as "King of Quirky Shirts" by the woman who I now share my world with. Wherever I go, whatever city, I always have two thoughts in mind - where's the record and book shops? and where can I find cheap, old unusual shirts?

Though it may not be apparent, I try to have a sense of style. Wether we mean to or not, we judge other people by what they wear, how they walk, and how they talk. Over the years, and probably in the last decade, my sense of style took a huge leap. I used to take things quite casually, and thought nothing of spending most of my life in jeans and a faded tour t-shirt for a band that had split up. A band that, in all probability, hadn't been split up quite long enough to go round the accordian of uncool to being retro again.

If I had to describe my style it would be thrift store retro. I don't see any point in wearing the same clothes as anyone else, looking like everybody elese. And whilst all our clothes are far from unique, they are made in factories and produced in the hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands, it is how we work with these elements that defines them, and therefore us. I scour shops for second hand, used, obscure clothing, looking for a very particular imagery and colour palette that no longer exists : shades of cream/brown, stripes, red and pink, a look that can best be described as 70's Communist Party HQ Wallpaper.

I don't want people to walk down the street and know I buy stuff from a certain place. It's easy, and obvious, and yes, it's lazy. I want my clothes to look unique and not part of the same world as everyone else to an extent. It won't always work. But a lot of the clothes I have, I never seen more than one of. Ever. Though i did see someone with a shirt very similar to one of my Classic Brown numbers the other day, and it really pissed me off. How dare he! .... but then I thought, that's a guy with taste. There's some cliche about flattery, I'm sure.

Reflected in the Harrier at the Tate

You can't necessarily see here in the reflection, but there's a thin line of brown in the cream on this shirt, which combined with a tie, and a watch that only shows the time when I press a red LED button, and I'm suddenly a 1970's bloke, without the 'tache or the Capri. There's enough of agap between then and now for me to feel unconcerned by what is and isn't fashion, only what is stylish. (Moby complimented me on my suit three weeks ago, which was unexpected).

In T-shirts, I'm wary of the ones with allegedly witty slogans : I'm not as thunk as you drink I am. Oh, I laughed. I look for something more than that. A subversion of the usual. At the very least something that demonstrates a vague sense of cultural awareness and style. Whatever style is. Something that is more than just a t-shirt with the name of a fashion house written on it. I may not get it right ; there's still the odd Iron Maiden one with a silly monster on it, for example, but, by and large, I look at T-shirts as walking billboards for graphic design. But also, they say something about me, and what they say is, I'm The King Of Quirky T-Shirts.

Rocking a certain shirt, at Paddock Wood