A Box Of Raincoats

2009-05-11T10:29:00.003+01:00

For the foreseeable future, I'm going to be over here. Hope it works out.

Thank you, and goodnight

2009-03-04T19:06:00.004Z

(I drew that. It's supposed to be a heart-shaped Tetris block.)

May all your trespasses be forgiven, and all your pastures green. See ya.

Goodbye, John.

2009-01-29T23:27:00.005Z

It'd take ever such a long time to explain that John Martyn was one of the most important musicians and songwriters in my life, that he showed me that so many things I felt guiltily drawn towards was not only 'alright' or 'acceptable' but could actually be everything I imagined they'd be--so playing guitars through tape-delays, playing fingerstyle, singing softly, swinging rather than strutting, writing songs that don't necessarily have choruses--and what's more, that there was such a brass-balled courage in being the person you were rather than what you thought someone else wanted you to be. To be empathic, to care, to hurt and love and, yes, to risk looking like a fucking idiot for the privilege of doing so.

It'd take such an awful long time to tell the story about how I played "May You Never" on my brother's guitar in the sitting-room of my grandmother's house the day after she was killed, and kept on playing it until my Dad had fallen asleep.

Some of us live like princes
Some of us live like queens
Most of us live just like me
And we don't know what it means
To take our place in one world
To make our peace in one world
To make our way in one world
To have our say in one world

It'd even take a long time to explain how I drove home from work one night during the most torrential rainstorm I have ever seen in this or any other country, the skies lit up purple, the drains frothing and fountaining as they overflowed, the pavement submerged along with the road, and how I had to ford two feet of flood water a mile out from home that left me parking up outside the house with the entire engine steaming, and how I was listening to "Outside In" from Live At Leeds the whole way home, and how I'll remember that until the day I die.

It'd take a long time to explain that I saw this, immediately below, when I was eleven years old, and that it pretty much changed my life.

John's music has gotten me through some tough shit. I have no doubt it'll continue to do so. If this is your first acquaintance, I'd like you to be friends.

Edge of the horizon

2009-01-19T07:51:00.004Z

I suspect this blog may be nearing the end of its useful life. I'm not dead or even resting. There's no cause for alarm.

For the last six years - seven years? - I've been trying to convince myself that I have been rehabilitated from the miserable things that happened to me.

This isn't helping.

I don't want to talk about it. Sorry.

Whatever. The future resonates with possibility. Fuck it. Onward.

These are the gayest band names

2008-12-23T14:00:00.002Z

In descending order of gayness:

1. U2
2. Deep Blue Something
3. HiM
4. Archers of Loaf
5. My Dying Bride
6. Taking Back Sunday
7. Neutral Milk Hotel
8. Dragonforce

All of these are inferior to the two straightest-named bands ever: Huey Lewis & The News, and Morris Day & The Time.

Classic albums I haven't heard.

2008-12-22T15:36:00.002Z

Kimono My House by Sparks ∗
Curtis by Curtis Mayfield
Scott 3 by Scott Walker
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill_ ∗∗
Symbolic by Death
Blue by Joni Mitchell
Maxinquaye by Tricky ∗∗∗
Roots by Sepultura
Kim Wilde
Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys ∗∗∗∗
Meat Puppets II
Actually by the Pet Shop Boys ∗∗∗∗∗
Pink Flag by Wire
Funeral by The Arcade Fire ∗∗∗∗∗∗
Midnite Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest
Bummed by the Happy Mondays
All Saints & _Saints & Sinners by All Saints ∗∗∗∗∗∗∗
Reign In Blood by Slayer
FLM by Mel & Kim.

∗ I have no idea why I hold off on this: I finally drank the Sparks Kool-Aid earlier this year with #1 Song In Heaven, and this one has "This Town...", which I've loved since I was about eight years old.

∗∗ No excuse, really, for not having brought this into my home: everything I've ever heard about the premise of the record makes me salivate.

∗∗∗ Nor this. Surely this is a full-blooded, reptilian parent to those Burial albums, saying what they cannot, going where they dare not? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with me?

∗∗∗∗ Whereas this is so much of a quote classic unquote that the prospect of it actually listening to it fills me with a kind of dread. 'Perfect pop' or whatever this is supposed to be bores me rigid: I'd rather listen to pop that's been knocked out in an afternoon. I want to like things because I like them, not because someone says I should.

∗∗∗∗∗ There's a point where the squeaky-voiced me certainly went off the Pet Shop Boys, after liking them throughout my childhood. It might have been when they started getting more housey (I seem to remember "Go West" as a tipping point), but from a speculative eye all the songs on this record are mint, and I should hear them at once. And then go and listen to the rest (the implications of #1 Song In Heaven at work again.)

∗∗∗∗∗∗ Just about everyone I know has repeatedly assured me how profound, great, meaningful, etc, this record / band is, and that's arguably the thing that now puts me off. Moral: I'm a miserable bastard.

∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ When I eventually realise that this group's slight body of work constitute some of my favourite songs by anyone anywhere, with the sort of dynamic, utterly self-possessed singing and productions that aren't afraid to leave great big spaces for the listener to crawl inside, and when I eventually realise that this group pretty much invented Röyksopp et al about five years ahead of schedule and did it better, well, then I suppose I'll just have to finally buy both of these records.

encounter

2008-12-13T18:17:00.001Z

i was unprepared, i must admit, was for the last twenty minutes or so of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to have me on the verge of tears.

it's that one impossibly optimistic tone row that they hopefully beam back to the flying saucers; the conversation that follows between their synthesizer and the mothership. even the tracking close-up on the synth operator (who, in fact, is Philip Dodds, chief engineer at ARP Instruments, Inc., who built the synthesizer used for all the alien conversations).

and here i am, quietly resurrecting a client database that ran out of space over the weekend while i sit here watching this with my parents, trying not to cry into my t-shirt.

drukqs

2008-12-08T09:26:00.002Z

Drukqs is a troubled and troubling record. Much of it sounds to me like the work – or diary – of someone who is acutely depressed and attempting to escape into their work. It’s difficult to listen to at times, especially the first disc, because the various attempts at escaping gravity never quite come off until the beginning of the second one – the frenetic, too-fast pace of something like the “St Michael’s Mount” track has awareness of its own futility written all over it, even before it breaks down into broken-up, blistering dashes of sound. That said, the final ascent through ‘Meltphace 6’, ‘Taking Control’, and the last pair of electronic tracks are exhilirating. The final piano piece adds a delicious sense of completion.

This is the only way I can make sense of the record in its issued form, and while it took me a while and it’s 90% conjecture and bullshit, I’m rather satisfied with it. There are enough strange, half-hidden things that happen in the audio itself – all the piano pieces are recorded in very definite spaces, and in several of the pieces the spaces themselves change – to suggest forcefully to me that there’s a concealed meaning there somewhere. After all, most of his albums work as ‘stories’, even a self-professed compilation like I Care Because You Do.

He was in a bind, it seems to me, because the enduring legacy of the ‘Windowlicker’ and ‘Come To Daddy’ releases was that a significant quantity of people were expecting the next sensation from him, the “I want something I’ve never felt before, something better than the last one” problem. Drukqs seemed to piss enough people off that he’s felt free to retreat to the Analord/The Tuss thing, which I haven’t heard enough of to reach an opinion about.

You can, of course, as I did and still do, treat Drukqs as a leisurely scrapbook of singleton pieces, pull out all the brisk drum-machine songs and load those into an iTunes playlist. Nothing wrong with that at all. But at the end, there’s something vaguely unaccounted for, something somehow unsatisfactory, and if you’re anything like me, you end up coming back to it again and again.

(P.S. The thing I really like, though, is the suggestion towards the end of the record – and I didn’t really pick up on this until I finally knuckled down and listened to the whole bastard thing in one sitting – that things really are ... "getting better". That last electronic piece - ‘ziggomatic’ or whatever it’s called - becoming finally and unambiguously joyous. Gorgeous.)

discover America

2008-11-21T11:12:00.004Z

A disk drive arrived in the post today with a bunch of data on it. It's plugged into the front of my computer now, with the cardboard box and bubblewrap laid over the workbench. I'm checking that it survived the trip, that the light still lits and the spindle still spins.

It's a terrible sensation when someone's data has been lost, or corrupted, or is otherwise immediately unavailable. Because the circumstances are always extraordinary. A disk has overheated, for instance, and the coil that drives the heads back and forth across the platters has burned out. Or Windows simply crashed and went into a restart in the middle of the night on a weekend and never came out of it again. Or there is some database system someone's been faithfully plugging quotes and orders and information into for the last seventeen years, and the system they bought in 1990 was based on technology last revised in 1982, meaning that no-one possesses a manual and anything that you can begin to understand in it is based upon what you can figure out from eight hundred filenames labelled things like "SFDXQNBT.P".

It's an extraordinary situation. We're not often asked to confront it today: we exist in a leisurely place where the compulsive archival and cataloguing of our recent past is just something that happens in the same way that bricks just don't float airily above the ground. Today it's about what we've done, achieved, experienced, consumed, purchased, investigated, 'favorited', twittered, scrobbled and blogged.

There's something to be said for loss. I'm not sure what. I've always wondered about Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burning their royalties on Jura. Whether they wouldn't rather have been burning the master tapes to their deleted back catalogue. It wouldn't have taken as long. Perhaps I should found the Warburton Society, dedicated to promoting the transience, incident and irrecoverable loss of history and culture. Maybe. I'll think about it. It should have a website full of blue-bordered broken image links and HTML 2.0. o< "OPTIMISED FOR NCSA MOSAIC!!£LTTTTT£">>>>>

Whenever I have someone attempting to hold me responsible (hint: it's never my fault but I always blame myself) for the loss of their data, it's always a confrontational situation. It can be paralysing. And then I look down and realise that I could walk out of here any time I want to. The passageway is right over there and at the end of the passageway there is a door and then there is a 'foyer' apparently and then the top of the staircase where there is a closet door that I have a key for that will even take you up to the roof. Alternatively you can go down the stairs to the car park. Leave. Go. It's over.

Tomorrow I am flying to America. I will be there for two weeks. I may post photographs.

this is my idea of what might happen if you could take out a 25-year lease on martin amis and make him do whatever you wanted...

2008-11-20T22:58:00.003Z

...for instance, writing for The Amazing Spider-Man:

A still, gravid silence descended upon the chamber. Peter shifted on the fullness of his gluteal cul, watching as J. Jonah Jameson sat back heavily in the high-backed leather office chair - this, Peter suddenly recalled, had been imported at great expense from Darlings of Chelsea - and sipped at his coffee, the staunch asperity of which curled his upper lip into a baroque arch of disdain. The monochrome eight-by-ten glossy sheets of Peter's latest commission had spilled into his lap with the quiet, deadly whisper of the silks of a chorister's cassock, and now it was merely a question of business. Peter felt his eyebrow threaten to twitch, and braced himself. His earlier hearty snoot had proved inefficacious at driving the bugs from the walls, and if he intended to put a better front up here with JJJ than he had with Mary-Jane in bed last night, his balls had to stay between his thighs where they belonged.

2008-11-05T09:15:00.004Z

Well, this is going to be exciting.

My dreams are getting stranger

2008-10-30T15:37:00.008Z

I woke up on Saturday having dreamed that I was hanging out with Rage Against The Machine and being directly exposed to Tom Morello's gigantic balls, by which I mean they were of sufficient magnitude to inspire bewilderment at the prospect of everyday perambulation, which is an unnecessarily stupid way of saying they were really fucking big, but whatever. I felt I had no alternative but to attempt to write a song about this and was busking my way through a preliminary chord sequence with the guys, all getting really enthusiastic and "wow new direction awesome but i could still totally toggle my pickup switch over this to help ease the true believers into it"-type comments were thick and fast, but then I hit a diminished 7th chord and suddenly everyone went really quiet and they were all looking at their shoes and I put the guitar down quietly as Bob Hoskins entered in a suit and put a hand on my shoulder and said "I think you'd better leave, son,". He said it kindly, but I could tell I had made a major transgression. Like one of those fuck-ups you make which is so severe that for minutes afterwards all you can bring yourself to do is breathe.

Last night was relatively straightforward. I dreamt The Royal Tenenbaums, which I have not actually seen, and I'm inclined to say that my version was better. Highlights included:

Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum waking up to find the front end of a greyhound growing from his abdomen.

Supporting role for Richard Hell as an alcoholic contract killer (assigned to snipe Chas' creepy kids) who just can't get it together and winds up on a tramp steamer headed for Lisbon with a stolen suitcase full of cash.

A long sequence with Margot crying, cooking stir-fry to cheer herself up and crying into her wok, spooning out a lavish bowlful of gorgeous-looking food which she then proceeds to throw out after taking one bite, destroying her telephone by hitting a wall with it, taking a bath and then a shower, then towelling herself off and finally dressing in a leisure suit and playing Super Smash Bros. by herself, all tracked to "The Long Medley" from side two of Abbey Road.

With SSB match-victory animation sequences over the guitar solos, a cut to the following day as she exits her townhouse in a jogging suit over "and in the end...", and finally a crane shot pulling back over the rich-and-liberal part of the city on an immaculate fall morning over the final orchestral crescendo.

End credits roll over "We're Alright Til Then" by Jonathan Kelly.

Synchronicity

2008-10-24T22:17:00.004+01:00

See here. Also here and here.

Eminent domain

2008-10-20T07:42:00.002+01:00

Open letter to all the state departments and cryptofascist secret polices:

Here I am, ready for use. Come and get me. I don't care. Tired of the confidence tricks, tired of blogs, tired of half-arsed simulacra of communication. Medical research. Information retrieval. Parking warden. Give me some small and complex set of requirements, goals and rules that I can quietly apply myself to with the dedication of a fucking termite so that I'm not forced to think about principles and loneliness and careworn excuses invented for the benefit of other people whose lives doubtless run over with purpose, commonwealth and satisfaction.

Seriously, I stand 5'10" in good boots, I have never married, I've got a savage temper with no self-preservation instincts whatsoever, and my chest measurement is 52 inches. Get your tailor to run me up a few uniforms and let's do this shit.

Quote Classic Legends of Rock Unquote

2008-10-19T11:02:00.004+01:00

On some sort of package dealie at the moment where you get to see all three. Went last night: good seats, down at the front, left ear still mildly concussed.

T.S. McPhee and his uniquely paranoid take on the blues have been objects of veneration 'round these parts for a long time. If, for instance, there is a more thrallingly fucked record than 1971's Split, I don't know what it might be. When they're on - and tonight they certainly were, although parties with us disagreed - the Groundhogs come off like a barbaric splicing of the Stooges and Can. And his various bands aside, T.S. has one of the best voices of anyone involved in the British blues thing. It's like fucking an oak tree. Shit yeah.

Anyway, the Groundhogs played it loose and fast with T.S. up front, raking and flailing at his guitar in terrified, shrieking arcs of noise and quick, rushed phrases of the words. We got most of "Split" and a couple of new songs, all of which dangled over that line that divides "totally going for it" from "sounding a bit pissed". I was fair lit up with the chance to see T.S., let alone Magnificent.

Quote Martin Turner's Wishbone Ash Unquote appeared after a short intermission over, I shit you not, a synth intro tape. Irresistible memories of "...Stone 'Enge." drifted into my head. Eminently professional in all the ways the Groundhogs hadn't been and presented with evident pleasure and pride, the Ash sound is basically a series of variations on a sort of hard rock hornpipe, much given over to lots of twin guitar leads and inspirational lyrics. This went down with the assembled very well, but my own motor stayed resolutely uncranked.

Last on were Focus, who with various lineups over the last forty years or so have cornered the market in yodelling jazzy prog-rock. A little apprehensive since I know precisely two songs by this lot - "know", that is, in the sense of "cherish and adore" - actually, fuck it, here they are doing "Sylvia" and "Hocus Pocus" on the Whistle Test:

That gives you a fairly decent taste of what they're like, albeit with this year's model of guitarist and bass player (both very acceptable) and these days Thijs the organist is a bit larger and wears a really sweet hat. I could say more about what those two songs have done for me over the years (let's just say that for effectively bulldozing a depressive condition they're probably up there with An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer and Autechre's "Mcr Quarter" and leave it at that) but I shan't. Anyway, the Focus vibe is effectively communicated by the fact that Thijs has the band name marked out in strips of black gaffa tape on the front of his Hammond, and between the four of them they made about an hour of remorselessly upbeat prog-rock with flute and yodelling seem like a totally rocking way to spend a Saturday night.

How do they get away with it, though? I'm not sure. Firstly, though, they don't louse up the proceedings with miserable attempts at song-writing: most of the catalogue is instrumental (and very LOUD) and there's no Greg Lake type squatting over the jams intoning direly portentous 'lyrics'. Secondly, I think it's that alone among most prog they put themselves forward as entertainers first. Thijs, for instance, manages to look like there's nothing he'd rather be doing at the age of sixty than beating the hell out of a B3 with one hand while playing flute with the other, and this good vibe is utterly infectious. Thirdly, it's that their set seems to eschew dark paranoid ramblings and "Watcher Of The Skies"-type pablum for stuff that has all the gonzo bug-eyed fucking zing of Otis doing "Try A Little Tenderness". It's an interesting state for a band to work themselves into.

Incidentally, though, I've got to start wearing earplugs to gigs. Ow.

2008-10-14T11:28:00.004+01:00

A little too late for D.C.'s Self-Portrait Day, which received a submission from one of my failed prototypes in lieu of something more representative, this, by the estimable Creeping Bobbism during our recent jaunt in Liverpool.

It may be my favourite picture of me ever, and evidently this is very important.

Six weeks from now...

2008-10-13T10:12:00.006+01:00

...I will be in the United States. I will be sleepy, jet-lagged, vaguely menaced by a cat, waking up to the smell of coffee. I will be in the company of people who wear bathrobes and who take their shoes off at the front door. I will go for walks by myself under skies the colour of aluminium siding. It won't be snowing, which is too bad. I like snow. I like the way it feels like a beautiful end of the world. (Then again, I've never had to spend the night in it.)

...I will be stranger still than I am now, alive in every nerve and fingerbone, once again a confident party in the construction of display cases, drawers and wardrobes. I will understand how to synchronise timeclocks to Logic Studio. I will have more than three clean shirts at all times. I will not fuss. I will not feel weird about communicating with people. I will be enjoying myself and others.

...I will resist the temptation to join a travelling circus and disappear into the not-there places of my imagination where people sleepwalk in broad daylight down the furrowed brows of malignant clouded hills. I am not Werner Herzog.

The six million dollar sandwich

2008-10-13T08:40:00.005+01:00

Waking up in the dark at 6:30am in October with a hot cup of tea in bed in an empty room. The orange/red colour fields do exactly what they were supposed to at night with the lights out. (I haven't fitted any curtains yet, and the moon was low on Saturday night, so it came right through the window.)

I find it strangely difficult to go to sleep in this room. My brain won't stop talking about anything and everything. It might be something to do with self-abuse, or the present cessation thereof. It's ok. That's what Ovaltine is for.

Sorting socks with the lights on at seven am on a Monday morning, playing The Dead Texan on my stereo. I've missed my stereo. The way the (average) speakers make the (average) sound circulate through an entire room. The wooden floor helps with this. The wooden floor is amazing. I want to take it with me everywhere I go.

I want to live in places with wooden floors.

This is "Glen's Goo" by The Dead Texan. The memory of what it sounded like this morning as I sorted my socks is presently suffusing my workday with a pervasive sense of unreality.

2008-10-11T21:50:00.003+01:00

"Did I send you that link about Marky Mark & The Fall?"
"Er ... oh. Yeah. Wait, what did you say? Mark & Lard?"
"Marky Mark and the Fall."
"Mark E. Smith, Mum. Not Marky Mark."
"Oh? Oh, if you say so."

Mixtape as autobiography

2008-10-07T17:42:00.006+01:00

I made this tape about a year ago, posted it to a couple of people, forgot about it, and found it on my hard drive while I was backing up. As an amusing exercise, I will now post the tracklisting with a one-sentence justification of each song. The selections follow my memories of summers 1998 to 2007, and was restricted to music I was listening to at the time.

1. Dear Dr Doom - the 13th Floor Elevators
"But you can make certain the ghost is always there."
2. Psil-Cosyin - The Black Dog

3. Paris 1919 - John Cale
"She makes me so unsure of myself..."
4. Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit - Sonic Youth
"Come on, if you could, you would surely die."
5. New Family - Plaid
Does your life seem rather vague & unreal to you?.
6. Tewe - Autechre

7. People on the Highway - Pentangle
"But I LEAVE my troubles and my worries behind me..."
8. Memory Lame - Jim O'Rourke
"Listening to me you reminds me of a motor's endless drone."
9. Perfume - Pere Ubu
"Is there someone here who knows me?"
10. The Recess Bells of School - Charles Bukowski
"It's all the same."

2008-10-05T18:18:00.001+01:00

Collaborations & excuses

Shopping list

2008-10-02T16:58:00.005+01:00

— semi-skimmed milk
— muesli
— booze
— more crates
— a CF card to load with google image search results for "horses being shot" to leave on the bus
— fake tupperware
— fake turkey
— crusty white rolls
— tartare sauce
— red peppers
— pastries
— therapy

I didn't make this.

2008-10-01T14:05:00.000+01:00

Innovations in the workplace

2008-09-30T14:03:00.003+01:00

1. Limiting your working week to a healthy thirty-seven hours or so by devoting several hours a week to installing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and using System Restore to uninstall it again a couple of days later, ready for next week.

_{Seriously fixing it in there just takes a longer time than polio, famine, or milking a cat that does not know you.}

Which we are now doing very successfully

2008-09-29T11:21:00.008+01:00

This thing I'm thinking of with regard to American hate-metal is actually something that I think ties into the metaphysics, if you will, of how Americans do things. There's something oddly traditional about the "now we're going to double-track those crunchy guitars for the third time with a different micing technique" attitude of recording metal albums that's redolent of how Cadillac and GM and Buick especially manufactured automobiles that were basically bloody great big iron sledges with ridiculous amounts of horsepower and fuel consumption by necessity of the design document's coy suggestion that having just purchased the item, the buyer would have to be able to get the fucking thing off the lot ... I'm not sure it's a question of overcompensation, strictly, as something else ... and it might help to explain why something like Swell Maps' "Let's Build A Car" sounds far more aggressive than Korn's "Freak On A Leash" merely because Swell Maps perform a much more genuine evocation of simply not giving a fuck whether you like them or not. Korn are clearly punching for impact and drama and meaning in their meaningless world, whereas Swell Maps have a drum kit you can barely hear, aggravatedly toneless vocals, the world's most revolting guitar sound, and the nearest concession that the song as a whole makes to any kind of development is an interlude where it sounds as though they emptied a basket of discarded tape from other people's recording sessions into the tape recorder ... but the sum is breathtakingly insolent, with a fuck-you-fuck-your-mother swagger to it that gets the job done with the absolute minimum of effort, all this and more alive besides because of less health ... no weight-lifting, no protein shakes, just fags and gin and boil-in-the-blister Vesta curries ...

Wobble: "We are now trying to finish the album with as little effort as possible, which we are doing very successfully..."

Perhaps it is about an experience of violence - an experience that I am beginning to suspect certain kinds of people just need in their lives, like a kind of fix ... that can be denuded of hate and even pain until it's just that physical, enervating shock ... there is that moment of white burning light that fades away behind the eyes but which can be sustained under unnatural circumstances for minutes at a time, the blood flowering, and perhaps this is why people are still listening to Metal Box, to this music that is after all older than I am ... because there is an experience there that could not be replaced ...