the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Now, y’all know that my favourite ever surreal news story was the one about Mark Thatcher being arrested for his part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea, but this comes a very close second – “Man gets breakfast tattoo on head” – it’s a few months old, but I hadn’t seen it til today (thanks Steve!)
genius.
Just found a link to piclens on Jonny Baker’s blog – a photo viewing plug-in that does amazing things with Flickr pages, facebook photo pages and google image searches. It’s fab, go get it!
Just read this post about Bugsy Malone on the Guardian music blog. It’s long been one of my favourite films – there’s something fabulously surreal about the kids-as-adults thing – like a school play, without the forgotten lines and corpsing. And, as cited in the article, the soundtrack is stellar. I only own a tiny handful of Soundtrack albums (odd, given that everything I’ve ever recorded sounds like a soundtrack album) – Local Hero, Paris Texas, One From The Heart, Bill Frisell’s albums of Buster Keaton music, and of course Bugsy Malone. It was the first thing I searched for when I discovered you could buy music online, trying in vain to find it on CD. I think I eventually got it in the Virgin Megastore in London.
Anyway, it’s magic, give it a listen.
Home now, back in London (well, Hertfordshire, but it’s near a tube station, so it’s London). Flight was fine, watched two more episodes of Doctor Who on the plane, got a lil’ bit of sleep, then arrived at Heathrow to find that Virgin had lost my bass. Again. Remember, it happened in LA in January? Actually, that wasn’t Virgin was it? Oh well, anyway, they lost it, left it behind in NYC. But it’s on the way to me now, according to mylostbag.com.
Time. To. Sleep.
Just saw this article about the demise of the Record Industry on RollingStone.com – it’s a good read, but here’s the salient bit for this blog –
“In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; last year, they bought 588.2 million (a figure that includes both CDs and downloaded albums), according to Nielsen SoundScan“
Now, I’m sure I’m not typical of ‘the average consumer’ – I know I’m not (I’ve only ever bought one CD from a supermarket…) but I do know that all of my sales, or most of the CDs I buy will never show up on a ‘Nielsen SoundScan’ report… I’d love to know how indie sales impact that figure, and the parallel figure about the number of people now making a living, or part of their living, from their own music. I’d like to see figures on the number of indie labels and artists that are self publishing and selling more than 500 CDs a year (given that if you’re pressing it yourself, you can make between £5-£7 clear profit on each disc – $10 to $14 – so that’s over £2,500 a year in CD sales income, which carries with it the assumption that you’re making probably at least as much again on gig money…
I think the future looks VERY bleak for the majors. They’ve long relinquished their part in the process of pushing the art of popular music forward, settling into a pattern of releasing tried and tested formulae, usually being at least 3-4 years behind the cutting edge of any musical movement (how long had the ‘grunge’ thing been happening before Geffen released Nevermind?). So now they are trying to do marketing tie-ins, computer game promotion, TV show placement – anything to keep their grubby fingers in the many musical pies.
But the major label end of the industry is imploding, the indies are thinking faster, changing, adapting, and in many cases thriving.
It’s a tough time to be a musician and make a living at it, for sure, but the opportunities and potential are there, especially if you lot keep supporting the indie peoples (check out the links page here to get some new musical ideas)
wow, you go away for 7 weeks, come back, and find a new prime minister, a smoking ban, a massive terrorist weirdness thing going on, Wimbledon tennis in full swing… Will i recognise it when I get off the plane? Have all the men grown Amish beards? Have all the laydees grown Amish beards???
I fly to New York tomorrow, and then – hopefully – to London on Tuesday. We’ll see what happens with all the mentalism that’s going on in England at the moment… Does anyone have an email address for the nutters with the non-exploding car bombs? It’d be nice to email them, tell them how much they are potentially disrupting my travel plans, and ask nicely if they wouldn’t mind changing their method of protest… I’m sure they’d listen if they heard my concerns about the airlines reinstating the restrictions on hand-luggage…
So tonight was the last night of our 7 week tour for L and I, and we’re in Wisner Nebraska, about 100 miles north west of Omaha…
The gig was in a beautiful recording studio, with a gorgeous piano, and the most fabulous sound, not to mention a delightful audience. I made a handful of mistakes, just through being hugely tired, but in general, ’twas a fitting end to the tour.
And it was recorded, which made last night’s gig all the more important as a warm-up. That one was in St Louis, at the Delmar Restaurant and Lounge, which was set up at the last minute, but was a nice venue, provided a reasonable break in the journey, and gave us a chance to see Amy and Joe from Clatter – you’d be hard pushed to find two nicer people, they drove 3 hours to see us play, and we then followed them back and stayed in their lovely house, got less than 3 hour’s sleep, and then talked for two hours before we set off for Nebraska.
And tomorrow we drive 900 miles (according to Google Maps, it’s exactly 900 miles from here to Hartville), drop the car off on Sunday, and Monday I fly to NYC, then Tuesday back to London… I think… I’ll check.
OK, so I’d like an iPhone as much as the next Apple iGeek, but this is insane
(as found on the lovely Bananie’s blog.)
Was just looking at L’s igoogle homepage, and saw this news item linked Egypt forbids female circumcision – for those that don’t know, female circumcision, or female genital mutilation is a barbaric assault on the bodies of women across large tracts of Northern Africa and throughout the middle east. It’s hideous and for decades western governments have been tip-toeing round the subject for fear of upsetting fragile relations with the countries that practice it.
So whenever one of those countries decides to drag it’s arse out of the stone-age and ban it, it’s cause for celebration. The full celebration is on ice til the last country bans it, but Egypt is a bit of a trend-setter in terms of Muslim nations moving forward (still got a hell of a long way to go, but they’re generally way more progressive than, say, Saudi Arabia). Aparently they banned it years ago, but never enforced it, but following the death of a young girl undergoing the ‘surgery’, the pressure mounted for a total enforced ban, and they’ve gone for it. Well done Egypt. Now, how about sorting out your security forces and supporting those investigating other human rights abuses…
Altamont – just the name carries so much resonance. The place where the dreams of flower power and the 60s summer of love, woodstock and hippies all went to shit because The Rolling Stones didn’t realise that – unlike in England where ‘Hell’s Angel’ just meant ‘biker with a beard and a personal hygiene problem’ – American Hell’s Angels were largely racist outlaws, who took great delight in stabbing a black dude to death at the gig.
Anyway, that was a completely different Altamont, given that it was in California, and we’re in Illinois. However, there must be some sort of spiritual link between the two, as the shitty motel we’re in definitely feels like the kind of place where a nasty murder could take place…
Still, cheer yourself up by watching this YouTube vid of me playing at the house concert we did in Dallas – Brian who organised the gig owns a Rick Turner Model 1 bass, which I HAD to play… the improv in question is a variation on the ii-V funk guitar thing that I used for the loop demo vid on YouTube, with a bit of the melody from Chameleon by Herbie Hancock in the middle of it, and lots of gratuitous shredding, but it’s a great sounding bass!
