George Galloway, in an interview with The Metro in london on Tuesday –
“The Metro – Will Gordon Brown make a better Labour leader?
Galloway – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are two cheeks of the same arse.”
:o)
Is it just me…
…or do ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ sound like McFly ripping off the Clash? When is this lame-assed Libertines implosion going to go away? Doherty is a talentless loser, and Babyshambles are indeed childish and shambolic as well as devoid of all musical merit. Go away you drugged-out, imbeciles!!!
grrrrr.
Just in case you know anyone in Barking…
…and suspect they might have been stupid enough to vote BNP, here’s a great list of what the BNP councillors have done thus far in the various bits of England where there are enough people who can’t seem to channel their frustrations with the way the country is run in any direction other than towards these fascists…
Please forward this list to anyone you know in Barking. It might do them some good if the bump into any BNP supporters…
Soundtrack – Rosie Thomas, ‘When We Were Small’ (finally I get to listen to something other than me!)
It's the Final Mixdown (du du duhhh duhh)
I’m in the middle of mixing down the multitrack sessions to normal CD stereo audio files, so they can be sent away to be mastered on a remote Scottish Island.
I was having some trouble with the mixes having some weird noise on them, as though the speakers were damaged slightly. So as an experiment I tried ‘locking’ all the effects on each track – that means the computer pre-computes what each bit of processing does to the file so that when it plays it it’s not trying to play the file and do the processing at the same time. Hey presto, no more weird noises on the mixdowns. yay for me!
And once this is done, if there’s any day left, I think I’m going to head into town (that London town, not Southgate town) for the afternoon to celebrate. :o)
Barking and Dagenham – England's new fascist heartland.
The local elections yesterday were definitely a triumph for the right wing – Conservatives made pretty big gains in most places, and most scarily the BNP picked up a load of seats. In Barking and Dagenham they’ve now got 11, possibly 12 seats. How on earth they’ve managed to convince that many people that their disgusting, pernicious, racist, hate-fuelled filth is worth electing is anybody’s guess. Are there really that many people who are actively violent racists, or are the people there just so fucking stupid that they think that the BNP is an acceptable ‘protest vote’?
The record of the BNP in local elections is risible – their last ‘councillor’ in Barking and Dagenham quit after two months, their councillors in Burnley never turned up for council meetings and contributed nothing to local democracy. A huge number of their candidates last time had convictions for racist attacks and football violence. They are scum, pure and simple, and anyone moronic enough to vote for them should hang their head in shame. The only upside is that their councillors are unlikely to turn up to meetings, won’t get anything done (because the council is still controlled by Labour anyway) and my guess is half of them will quit by Christmas… The Stop The BNP campaign tried hard, but it looks like the BNP will have to be left to shoot itself in the foot.
Overall, it was a disastrous night for the Labour party, who were hemorrhaging seats across the country. There’s a cabinet re-shuffle taking place at the moment… let’s see who goes.
Remembering tunes
Been rehearsing with Julie McKee today, for our gig at the National Theatre on May 31st. It’s the first gig I’ve done in ages where I’ve actually had to remember anything more than about 16 bars of music!
It’s great, in that it’s going to stretch me, and I’m having to think creatively about how to do certain arrangements with the Looperlative, and it’s also good not having to worry about the tunes for most of the song. The results are really cool, and songs we’ve got on the list are pretty broad in scope (no NWA tunes though…)
So I’ve now got a list of tunes that I need to finish off, work out the chords for, and REMEMBER! Whoever heard of actually having to remember anything? Pah!
…and yes, I did go and vote when the rehearsal was over…
May the Fourth be with you
Now go and vote.
NWA unplugged…
…well, OK, not actually NWA, but Nina Gordon doing a cover of ‘Straight Outta Compton’ – click here to download it – be warned, the language on it is pretty much what you’d expect from an NWA tune, so prolly best not to play it if the lil’ kids are around.
Part III – WTF?
Right, The Matrix part III has just finished, and seems to be have been closer to the 2nd one than the 1st – incomprehensible, OTT and full of plot holes. Anyone care to have a stab at explaining this one???
Sad news
Just received a very sad and shocking phone-call from a friend in Edinburgh to let me know that Duncan Senyatso died last week. Duncan, you may remember, was the Botswanan guitarist and singer that I played with at Greenbelt last year – a fantastic musician and a very generous and patient man, putting up with me taking ages to get my head around the rhythms of his songs, laughing and joking, and being very generous with his praise when I finally got the songs right. He also played a vital creative part in what was one of the best gigs I’ve ever done – my ‘global footprint’ improv piece at Greenbelt, along with Jez Carr, Patrick Wood and Andrea Hazell. He sang and played guitar beautifully, miles outside of his musical comfort zone, but he fell into the a-rhythmic improv setting like a natural.
We’d talked at some length last summer about the possibility of getting British Council funding and taking the same project out to Botswana to tour with it, to do workshops in schools on improvising and music technology, and see how the marriage of the two musical worlds would work. Yet more regrets, to go along with the regret that the Global Footprint gig wasn’t recorded.
Simon, who rang me, was the mandolin player in the band last year, and has known Duncan for more than 15 years, and is flying out to the funeral.
if you click the link above, you’ll see just how highly regarded he was in Botswana. A big loss to the music world in that part of Africa, and a musical partner I shall be sad not to see again.
That’s Duncan on the left, with Rise Kagona in the middle.