Right, back on my own laptop, nothing disappeared from the harddrive, all seems to be working. I’m still in the Apple Store using their wireless, so won’t know if the firewire is back working til I get home… watch this space.
Margrave Of The Marshes
I finished the John Peel autobiography, ‘Margrave Of The Marshes’ last night. I say ‘auto..’, he actually wrote just under half of the book, his wife Sheila finishing the rest of it. The changeover between the two, the sudden nature of his part stopping and her picking up the story, is one of the saddest moments in any book I’ve ever read. It’s odd to think of a 65 year old man as having so much unfulfilled potential, especially one who was already arguably the most important figure in the development of pop music in the UK. I’d argue that anyway.
His life story is candid, heartwarming, beautifully written as you expect from the presenter of Home Truths, full of his love for music, his family, tales of his frankly insane youth and young adulthood. I’m not sure I’d have liked him if I’d met him in the late 60s, though even then, the excerpts from his diary that Sheila quotes reveal a man I have an enourmous amount of empathy and respect for, despite his opportunist deceptions involving the Beatles and deflowering numerous american highschoolers…
His marriage to Sheila is an inspiration, his love for his family equally so. His impact on me as a musician and music fan has been written about here before, but it bears repeating – growing up in Berwick on Tweed, pre-internet, music information was pretty hard to come by. There was the mag trinity of NME/Sounds/Melody Maker which, whilst nowhere near the cheap nasty nonsense they are now, were still pretty trend-driven, even if those trends were a little more underground that they are today. No, the only real source of information about music-without-boundaries was Peel, and I devoured his show voraciously, recording it onto Tandy cassettes, making compilations of Pixies sessions before they were released, and collections of tunes by The Wedding Present, Bongwater, Napalm Death, The Stupids, Rob Jackson (not THAT Rob Jackson, sadly), Billy Bragg, The Bhundu Boys, Extreme Noise Terror and hours of obscure Soukous and strange German techno squawks.
The overall effect was that of removing all possible labelling from the process of making music. This allowed me to be simultaneously a fan of BoltThrower, Weather Report, The Cure, Wet Wet Wet, George Benson, John Zorn, The Alarm, Yes, The Housemartins and just about anything else that came along. I was often being accused of having ‘no taste’ – not bad taste, just no discernment about what to listen to at all. Truth was I did, I went through obsessive phases (just as Peel did), and kept the best of it as I moved on. In 1986 I voted the Mission and The Smiths the worst bands in the Smash Hits readers poll. By the 1990, I had every album the Smiths had ever released, along with having cultivated a near-obsession with The Cure and The Pixies that lasts to today. Only this week I’ve been introducing various students of mine to the majestic delights of Kim Deal’s bass playing via ‘Debaser’ and ‘Hey’.
The more poignant, funny, engaging and revealing the book became, the greater the pain at John’s loss. The greater the sense of anguish for the family at having lost him – as much as I miss his broadcasting, and regret never having met him, it quite obviously is nothing compared to the excuciating pain of losing a parent/husband/brother/friend.
The tributes when he died were effusive, though not a surprise. I was one of millions of teens from the laste 60s onwards who saw the world of music though Peel-tinted specs, who dispensed with the style fascism of most teen music-factions and took on the mantle of music-lover. I think it’s safe to say that without that exposure, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. My relationship with music would have been very very different indeed, and that desire to explore as a listener would never have spilled over into that desire to explore as a player that lead to me playing solo.
So go, read the book, remember John, tell your kids about him, make them read the book, and buy them a copy of the new Billy Bragg boxed set, the Hardcore Holocaust’ Peel sessions compilation, The Shed Sessions by The Bhundu Boys and any other weird nonsense you find in the hope that they’ll grow up to view labels like ’emo’ and ‘goth’ and ‘pop fan’ to be as erroneous as they really are.
John, you are missed.
Laptop update
Phone call just now from me to them (they still haven’t called me once). The repair is apparently ‘finished’ but my laptop is in testing… so I might not get it back today. Huh? It’s 10.30am, how long does it take to test to see if it’s working? One of you geeks might be able to fill me in on this, but running some kind of diagnostic test on a laptop to make sure the Logic board is working can’t take 24 hours can it?
Miserable git on the phone – I asked roughly how long after the test was finished would I be called, given that I’ve been promised three phone-calls so far and had none of them. No help at all. A request for a note to be put on it that the repair is already overdue and it’s urgent. No can do.
Useless losers.
A week without my laptop
So much for ‘Apple Care’ – it’s been a week since I dropped off my laptop to be repaired. For the last two days I’ve been phoning, getting put on hold, been told three times that I’ll be called back, and have yet to receive any calls at all, or talk to anyone who knows anything about my laptop. Until 5 minutes ago, the support website at apple.com said ‘information not available’ about the status of my repair. As I write, I’m still on hold (38 minutes and counting), but the website has updated to ‘repair in progress’. That’s fine except that it says that the laptop was dropped off at the shop TODAY!!!! That’s clearly total shit, as it was dropped off a week ago today. So it’s been sat there, with no-one knowing where it was, or caring, for a week before some fucking jobsworth realised that it might actually be wise to locate the laptop they’ve had FOR A WEEK and fix the damn thing.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using TSP’s laptop, which is exceedingly kind of her, but it hasn’t got my bookmarks or diary on it, hasn’t got Skype or Adium or any of the other stuff I use daily. Meanwhile Apple don’t give a shit. Bastards.
If you’re getting a computer repaired by Apple, my advice is phone them EVERY DAY. Call them as soon as you get home after dropping it off, check the website hourly and hassle the shit out of them until they fix it and get it back to you. Otherwise, it’ll just end up on a pile of non-urgent jobs, and get done when the pile gets so high they can’t find their way out of the office without fixing a few.
Balls to Apple Care. 42 minutes on hold – great service.
finally – new tunes!
…no MP3s for you, just yet though!
Been recording these last couple of days, the usual bought of improvs aimed at definining a vibe for the album. I don’t think, on the face of it, this one will be a huge departure from what’s gone before. Though, I am thinking about possibly getting some people in to do overdubs on some of the tracks when I’ve recorded my usual solo bass nonsense. And I am allowing myself some editing for brevity’s sake.
The vibe on the tunes so far is pretty downbeat (apologies to the peoples who’ve emailed saying ‘I really like Shizzle/Channel Surfing/MMFSOG*, which don’t you do a whole album of funky stuff?’ (* – delete as applicable) – sorry peoples, it’s not going to happen.) – I have got ideas for a couple of up-tempo things, but as usual they’ll be the exception rather than the rule. For now, I just have to deal with large scale melodic ambient melancholy tinged with a hopeful, redemptive edge being what I’m best at. And that’s no bad thing, methinks. Will get something up onto my MySpace Page as soon as I can. Suffice to say, the Looperlative is making itself very very useful is ways that won’t be immediately apparent – the three biggies are that all the looping is in stereo, there’s virtually no noise generated by the unit at all (less than most soundcards) and I can have multiple asychronous loops that I can mess with in any order… For the listener, it just means everything sounds a little less linear, and even the linear stuff ends in more interesting ways!
Watch this space…
If this isn't civil war, what the hell is???
The former Iraqi ‘president’, Iyad Allawi has said that iraq is in a civil war. Seems like a fairly obvious thing to say, given that scores of people are being killed every day, there are two definable sides to this both with military capabilities, that are daily bombing, shooting, slaughtering one another.
However, those genius revisionists in the White House and Downing Street are claiming that there’s no civil war, with Bush claiming that things are looking up for the Americans to ‘win’ the war, and the UK Defense secretary John Reid saying the terrorists are “failing to drive Iraq into civil war.”
Both Bush and Reid come off like Pike from Dad’s Army – ‘Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring’! The barefaced cheek of the US/UK axis of international bullying are once again making themselves look utterly stupid, ill-informed, in denial and ridiculous by claiming that the truth that anyone with a TV can see is in fact all made up, and denying the reality as voiced by their own jumped up puppet ruler in the area, Allawi – they chose him, he was clearly ‘trustworthy’ back then. Now he aparently knows less about the situation than special-needs-Bush and the wanker that is John Reid.
Having just been watching David Attenborough’s latest spectacular programme Planet Earth, I was marvelling at the wonder of creation, at the mryiad beauties of the natural world, and feeling like somewhere the midst of all that beautiful complexity, we’ll work it out. Then the news comes on, and a handful of powercrazed fools in positions of unmerited influence are driving us headlong into a world war to protect the financial interests of a handful of their fucked-up billionaire friends and financial backers. It’s as wrong as wrong can be. Watching a nile crocodile drag a wildebeast to its death shows nature to be red in tooth and claw, but also shows the balance, the circle, the richly woven tapestry of a self-sustaining natural world. Watching the power-mongers in Drowning Street and The Shite House drag the situation in the middle east further into a downward spiral of murder, torture, imprisonment without trial, terrorism – state sponsored or otherwise, car bombs, cluster bombs, anti-diplomacy and thinly veiled white supremecy, is just about as depressing as life can get.
As my mum said only last weekend, ‘isn’t it about time for a revolution?’ I don’t think she was joking.
Soundtrack, Brian Houston, ‘Sugar Queen’.
Antiwar march on Saturday
Saturday’s anti-war march was a fab event – met up with Jyoti, which was a delight, always nice to put a face to a blog. The march itself seemed rather upbeat, pretty huge (biggest one I’ve been on since the BIG ONE three years ago – organisers estimated 100,000, the police laughably suggested 10-15,000. Using the patented ma lawson method of doubling the police figure, halving the organisers and splitting the difference brings it to 40,000, but I’d say that was on the low side.)
The issues were a bit simpler than for the last few – people get very tetchy about protesting about military situations where there are British soldiers committed, as though it’s somehow treason to complain once they are there. Not much thought given to how little they want to be there, and the legality of them being there in the first place… This one was easier because of the dual themes – troops out of Iraq, and don’t attack Iran. The threat of a military strike on Iran is just nuts. Sure, the Iranian president is a crack-pot, but if anything is likely to bring together the myriad disparate factions in Iranian politics, it’s an attack by the US/UK Team America-stylee crack commando team. A damn fool thing to do, for sure.
So, I got to protest the lunacy of our jumped up nobhead of a prime minister, and hang out with lovely peoples all day.
And now I’m breaking my own rule and am using TSP’s laptop to access the net, as my desktop has bizarrely decided not to connect to the web. It’ll access email, chat, ftp, just nothing with an http in front of it. There are no proxies set up, and I can’t find any changes to the firewall settings (and switching it off doesn’t seem to change anything either) – any suggestions, lovely blogling geeks?
Here’s me on the march, from Jyoti’s photos –
RC IV – another great gig
Another stunning Recycle Collective gig last night – me, BJ Cole and Thomas Leeb, with special RC-stylee special guest, Rowland Sutherland.
As usual, I kicked things off with a solo set – the first improv piece was one of those ‘doh!’ moments where I forgot to switch on the minidisc, and it was gorgeous. Really happy with it, will have to try and remember what I did. Followed by a variation on the bubbly drum ‘n’ bass theme that I’ve been working on of late, then did Eric’s tune, after which Rowland joined me for a duo improv thingie. He’s amazing, you really have to hear him. He’ll be back. I finished up with ‘Despite My Worst Intentions’, which I completely forgot the title of, and thought it might have been ‘there but for the grace of God’. duh. Anyway, a nice set, which went down well.
Next up was BJ – I love BJ’s playing, and his approach to harmony. His opening piece was a variation on one of the ‘Transparent Music’ tunes, and sounded beautiful. His second track suffered from all kind of Echoplex gremlins – at least it’s not just me who has EDP nightmares! – but still went through some really interesting twists and turns. He was then joined by Rowland for a lovely duet, and finally by me for another duet. Much fun.
Thomas’ set was spectacular. The thing I think I love most about the RC gigs is presenting musicians to people who they might not have heard before. Tonight there were quite a lot of people there to see Thomas, so for them the joy was that of fulfulling the anticipation. For the others, it was amazement at what was possible with an acoustic guitar. His between song banter was funny, the performance was great, and the setting ideal.
We finished up with a quartet improv, with me looping and processing Thomas as well as myself, to great effect.
This really is the most fun gig for me – great musicians, lovely ever expanding audiences (in number, but for those who partake of the delicious food at Darbucka, in girth as well, no doubt), in a stunning, supportive venue. Don’t miss the next one on April 19th – I’ll announce who it’s with ASAP.
No laptop for a week :o(
Dropped off the laptop at the Apple store this morning for its repair. No laptop for up to a week! What on earth am I going to do? Probably get some work done, to be honest… we’ll see, I shall report back on whether productivity is up or down. I think the only thing that’s likely to go down is my number of new people added to myspace. And I might even get a proper start on the new album… watch this space.
Don’t forget, Recycle Collective gig tonight – more marvellous music in London’s coolest venue, with me, Bj Cole and Thomas Leeb. you’d be nutz to miss it. :o)
Theatrical debut
Had a v. fun gig last night.
If you remember back as far as last year’s Edinburgh Festival, you may remember that on before me in the venue I was in was a fab theatre company called Subverse – a lovely collection of leftie eco-monkey anti-war political actors and playwrights doing a collection of short sketches that were alternately moving, hilarious and downright confusing.
Three of the pieces they performed – the three that most strongly resonated with me at the time – were three monologues in verse by a writer called Adrian Page, and it was these that I was called in to soundtrack last night.
The gig was at Theatre 503, at the Latchmere pub in Battersea, and our bit was the second half of the show. I missed the first half due to a lovely trip to eastborne for my nan’s 87th birthday party.
The three pieces each had a very distinct flavour – the first, ‘Peace Police’ we did as a beatnik/tom waits kind of vibe, with the genius that is Andy Williamson on sax, the second was ‘There Is No Left Left’ – dark despondent piece that I took in a twisted abstract direction, manipulating and processing Lara’s voice to further the sense of dislocation. And the last of the three, ‘the Clever People’, was a bubbling drum ‘n’ bass track, which the performer, Penny, hadn’t rehearsed but performed to a T – I started up building a basic track of percussive stuff, bassline and chords, then played over it and used the pause, restart, double speed/half speed and reverse functions to try and follow the contour of the text.
All in all a huge success – I interspersed the monologues with solo tunes, and finished up with a version of my Erich Roche-tribute tune, which I again got Andy Williamson to come and play on, which he did beautifully.
I’ll hopefully be back there before long, and will get the SubVersives along to do the three monologues at Recycle Collective soon as well…