Author: Steve

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The Crepe'd Crusader

certainly brings out mixed emotions in most people. Firstly he’s the loveable cheeky cockney chap, naked chef, bringing new life to TV cooking. Then he became the overexposed Sainsbury’s poster boy, in all the ads, doing voice overs and generally overstaying his welcome. So he reinvents himself as the crowned king of worthwhile reality TV.

What did he get right? He picks things he cares about. Unlike, say, Gordon Ramsay, who just came across as a miserable bag of turd, belittling B-list celebs live on TV (all the ones with any backbone walked out – respect to the late great Tommy Vance for that!), Jamie picked subjects that would change the lives of ordinary people for the better. In , he took a bunch of relative no-hopers from rough backgrounds and gave them the chance to train to be top chefs. They’ve still got jobs. Their lives are on a different path. Magic.

His next project was in a whole different league. Jamie took on Britain’s school dinners in . It took months to film, and started in one school, with Jamie trying to get the kids to eat properly. What they were eating was truly shocking. The worst kind of junk food, the same crap every day, zero nutritional content. Just rubbish, rubbish that will eventually kill them. And Jamie cared. Really, not for a moment did even the most cynical of hacks question his motives. Watching the programme, it’s inconceiveable how parents have let it get to this stage. The kids couldn’t recognise vegetables!

So he goes on a crusade, getting 55 schools in Greenwich to move over to his new menu. He works within the insane food budget that he’s set, he convinces dinner ladies to work unpaid overtime, he wrecks his homelife in order to make this happen.

Suddenly pain-in-the-arse Jamie is transformed into we-need-more-people-like-you-on-TV Jamie. A hero, fighting the beaurocrats who will sell the kids of the nation’s health for 15p a day.

It’s riveting viewing, and I really really hope things change. Things already are changing. The teachers report back a total turn-around in the kids’ concentration levels, attentiveness and behaviour patterns, just through the change of diet.

Come on, Ruth Kelly, get it together!! As Education Secretary, she’s responsible for the decisions, the one with the purse strings. Jamie’s done the work, written the handbook, drawn up the recipes. All you need to do is ban the junk, and pay for the training.

It’ll reap HUGE rewards in the future when these kids aren’t all rotting in hospital from preventable diseases.

So, let’s get behind Jamie, sign petitions, campaign, make a fuss. The future of the kids’ health depends on it. Go to the campaign homepage, and start kicking up a fuss.

Soundtrack – David Sylvian, ‘Secrets Of The Beehive’ (Evil Harv is generally a malicious and sinister presence in the world, but all is forgiven for introducing me to this album a couple of years ago).

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Heatwave!!

Well, OK, not quite, but it is the first proper day of sun this year in London. It’s warm out! Like, proper spring weather. I actually went out into the garden, without having to empty the kitchen compost bin into the huge compost bin outside! Amazing.

Two other residents of this house are enjoying the sun – The Fairly Aged Felines have been allowed out into the garden for over a week now, ever since I expertly fitted a cat-flap to our back-door (well, OK, I fitted it, expertly or not.)

Much fun to be had exploring our garden, and the neighbouring gardens, to be sure!

Soundtrack – still Pat Metheny/Charlie Haden, ‘Beyond The Missouri Sky’ – this is such an outstandingly gorgeous record, once it goes in the player it’s bound to be there for a day or so… I think I’m on my fifth or sixth listen in a row.

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the revelations from Iraq just keep on coming…

So the death toll of Iraqis who’ve died in US custody in Iraq now stands at 108 according to this BBC report – 25% are being investigated as possible abuse cases.

Here’s the breakdown –

“The AP found that of the 108 deaths in US custody:

  • At least 26 have been investigated as criminal homicide involving the abuse of prisoners
  • At least 29 are attributed to suspected natural causes or accidents
  • Twenty-two are blamed on an insurgent mortar attack on Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in April 2004
  • At least 20 are attributed to “justifiable homicide”, where investigations found US troops used deadly force appropriately – primarily against rioting, escaping or threatening prisoners.

Those are pretty horrific statistics. 29/108 dying of ‘natural causes or accidents’ – what kind of set up are they running??? Accidents doing what? Natural causes? are they imprisoning sever asthmatics without access to medication? that’s a huge percentage to attribute to those two factors.

And the ‘justifiable homicide’ – justifiable in the way that the shooting of an Italian intellegence agent was ‘justifiable’??

It just goes on and on, the list of crimes being committed, the collapse of the rationale in the first place, the further information about the illegality of the British government’s case for war.

The biggest tragedy is that the next election won’t be a proper referendum on the war – Blair has taken us into this mess, but the alternative if we vote him out is so grim.

I just hope that between now and the election the Lib Dems come up with enough good stuff and media profile to dent both parties. They were the only ones that were anti-war all along, and do seem to have the most coherent policy set for this election. I just fear they don’t have the internal infrastructure for government.

Soundtrack – Pat Metheny/Charlie Haden, ‘Beyond The Missouri Sky’ (one of the most beautiful albums ever made); Alison Moyet, ‘Greatest Hits’.

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A little bit of indie marketing…

used to be the singer in the Dum Dums, a very fine pop/punk band who were basically the template for Busted, only their songs were better and the album was better produced. Anyway, they split a couple of years ago, and Josh is now a solo artist, and has a new single, free for download from here – it’s rather good, go and have a listen. If you like it, you can go to Josh’s site and buy the rest of his stuff!

Simple as that.

Soundtrack – , ‘Contemplating The Engine Room’.

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Yet more reasons not to vote Tory

As if we needed them!

Taking a leaf out of George Bush’s book, today the Conservative party leader Michael Howard announced that he’d back a change in the law on abortion.

Now, Michael Howard having an opinion on abortion is no bad thing – I’m rather glad that he’s concerned. What is a HUGE problem is him turning it into an election issue. This is clearly in response to observing how single-issue voting helped the right in the US – by turning the election into a conflict about abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research, the republicans mobilised millions of conservative religious people in the US, who considered those issues more important than protecting the poor and the enviroment…

The lunacy of Howard’s pronouncement here is that Abortion has always been a free vote in UK parliment!!! – it’s never been a partisan issue. The various lobby groups involved are cross party, and no party has ever applied the whip to try and get a particular result.

So his motivation is clearly to divide opinion and paint Labour as child-hating murderers… What a loser, what a party full of losers.

I really really wish we had a stronger opposition in UK politics. Labour have got very complacent and started doing some really stupid things (the war being the most obvious example) – a strong opposition is good for the democratic process. But Michael Howard is such a waste of time. I’d hate to see the Tories get back in in the UK, but I’d like to see them push Labour harder than they are.

this is so lame – the US election was a farce because ‘people of faith’ were blackmailed into supporting a party that embodied virtually no ‘christian values’ but talked the talk of ‘personal morality’ – they give tax breaks to the super rich and make life ever harder for the poor, pollute the enviroment, crap on the rest of the planet, wage unjust wars and are fronted by a moron, but they were elected by scaring right-wing so-called-christians into voting against abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.

Those are all really important issues, but not deciding calls in an election, especially not a UK one.

Email your local MP and tell them just how crap this is.

Soundtrack – /, ‘Get Happy’; Tom Waits, ‘Foreign Affairs’.

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Manic Compression

I’ve just been listening to ‘Absolution’ by – the songs are great, the playing’s great, the sounds are great… but the mastering is SOOOO harsh!! The whole album is flatlining at close to 0dB all the way through – so little light and shade, distorted vocals, squished drums… MAKE IT STOP!!

Why do bands do this? At least one track on the new album by The Killers is like this too – Glorious Indie Rock ‘n’ Roll is so over compressed I get major ear-fatigue after about two minutes. It’s a shame, cos it’s a great song.

This kind of mastering job used to be reserved for single edits of songs – it makes tracks sound great on small cheap radios (think ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Bartender And The Thief’ by Stereophonics). But to mix a whole album like that is just painful – stop doing it!!

Mastering is such a sensitive part of the recording process – it’s what happens after the tracks are recorded and mixed – you send a Cd of the mixes to a dedicated mastering person who then compresses and EQs the tracks to make sure that the level is consistent between the tracks, and that there are no rogue peaks in the audio that means the rest of the track has to be really quiet to accomodate them. In more extreme circumstances, the whole track can be really obviously compressed to bring the average level right up. That’s what’s happened here, and it really hurts your ears listening to it on good speakers.

the mastering on was done by – a hugely experienced and skilled mastering engineer who got the job on my stuff because he’d mastered albums, and also ‘Spirit Of Eden’ by Talk Talk – one of my favourite albums, and one of my favourite sounding albums.

He did a great job of taking my pre-mastered mixes and doing the compression and EQ magic required to bring the overall level up a bit without losing the dynamics on the tracks. There’s some serious audio-voodoo involved in mastering, and Denis has clearly got the mojo. I’d recommend him highly if you’re wanting to get a record mastered.

Soundtrack – Muse, ‘Absolution’; Tommy Simms, ‘Peace And Love’.

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Calling all Brit musicians

OK, so it could just be another phoney exercise in pretending to talk to the people concerned before ploughing ahead with whatever crap policy they came up with in the first place, but the government are at least pretending to want to hear from people in the music industry about how to improve things for live musicians in Britain.

Here’s the page about it on the culture secretary’s page – all looks good. The email address to contact them is LiveMusicForum@culture.gsi.gov.uk – so let them know your thoughts.

For my part, I’ll be emailing about classifications of music and venue – the licencing laws for venues that require them to have thousands of pounds worth of restructuring work for safety reasons seem ludicrous when the act is a solo acoustic guitarist, or bassist, or a piano/sax duo or whatever – in fact, the audience is likely to be far more static and orderly for that kind of event than they would in an ordinary pub! Lumping together all music as a job lot for licencing is nuts – I think there’s still some sort of ‘two in a bar’ ruling that means you can have solo acts and duos, but I think the ruling changed… need to look that one up. Anyone with any insight, feel free to post over in the forum.

Soundtrack – Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton, ‘Live’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.

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For anyone having a bad week

if you’re having a bad week, console yourself that you’re not famous for riding a fake ostrich…

What was Bernie Clifton all about? Did anyone ever find him funny?

Soundtrack – Green Day, ‘International Superhits’.

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Composition famine…

I’ve not written any new music for quite a while. It’s not a problem – most areas of music tend to happen in terms of flurries of activity followed by plateaus, whether it be technique, concepts, composition or whatever. And right now, I’m working on arrangements of other people’s tunes – something I’ve done very little of as a solo player. I used to do a short version of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ to finish gigs, and these days do ‘People Get Ready’, and now have just worked out a lovely solo arrangement of ‘What A Wonderful World’. I’ve also been working on a version of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), the Talking Heads track, which sounds great, but is really hard to play!! I need to make sure it’s well hammered into my skull before I attmept it live. It involves some pretty tricky looping (well, tricky for me…)

So I’m having fun with other people’s tunes (and maybe I’ll finally get round to having a go at ‘The Fish’ – something I’ve had a number of people nagging me to do for a while (yes, you, Catherine Street Team and California Bob!)

And as an off-shoot, I’ve got the beginnings of a new tune. It might end up as a solo piece, or maybe in one of the collaborations. This Monday and I met up with a fantastic drummer called Andrew Booker. Andrew has his own duo/trio (recorded thus far as a duo, now have a guitarist as well) called , whose CD is really cool (bass and drums duo, with Andrew singing like a less-heliumed John Anderson).

Anyway, he plays a tiny electronic kit, and adjusts really well to the slight imperfections of my loops, so we’ll hopefully be launching said trio on the listening public before too long – playing the tracks from Open Spaces with a drummer certainly took them into a very different space…

So, despite the famine, much creative noodling is taking place, and many new avenues are opening up…

Soundtrack – , ‘Ghost Town’; , ‘Slow Life’; , ‘Live’; , ‘Stones’; , ‘Polarised’.

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