Sadly due to being away, it’s taken til today for me to find out that Eric Roche passed away on Tuesday. I didn’t get to speak to him before he went, and neither did he get to hear the tune I’d written for him.
I’ll write more later, but as of now, I’m just thinking about Eric and am thankful for the time I spent with him, and the music he left behind.
Much love and condolences to his family.
thanks to this entry on Wulf’s blog, I found the London Bloggers website, where blogs are listed by nearest tube station, so you can find out who’s blogging in your corner of London!
Here’s the listing for Southgate tube – if you’re in London, head over there and add your listing!
So I’m back in Edinburgh, and it hardly feels like I’ve been away! Back with the lovely Rev G and Jane. Bizarrely, having stayed here for over two weeks in august, tonight was the first time I’ve actually had a meal here with G and J!! the madness of the festival meant that TSP and I were eating out each evening, and though we took the lovely G and J out to Henderson’s, we didn’t get to have a meal in with them at all. How nuts is that?
Anyway, I’m back to buy the Rev G’s car off him – after me slightly facetiously blogging about my car needs, I get an MSN message from everyone’s favourite sweary clergyman saying that they are getting rid of their cars and getting a new one, and did I want the old one? Much haggling ensued, with TSP and I wanting to pay more than G and J wanted to receive for the car (ah, trying to out-nice eachother is such a fun problem to have), but we settled on a figure, and I’m here to pick it up.
i’m also getting to meet up with Duncan and Rise from the Greenbelt gig while i’m here, to catch up and hopefully talk about some gig opportunities – all being well, I’ll have Rise playing in London for John Peel Day on October the 13th (you heard it here first, peoples!) I’ll confirm that on Thursday!
Riding the train through Berwick Upon Tweed, the sun is shining, Rosie Thomas is on the headphones, I’m reading Margaret Attwood.
Why does anyone drive anywhere? Why aren’t trains cheaper? It’s such a civilized way to travel, and if trains were always full, it’d surely take some strain off the roads, and hopefully pull people away from the ozone-munching exploits of the cheap airlines…
anyway, life on-board the GNER east coast mainline train from London to Edinburgh is good, if expensive. Maybe free WiFi on board would make me feel it was better VFM…
soundtrack – Michael Manring, ‘Soliloquy’; Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’; Prefab Sprout, ‘Steve McQueen’; Renaud Garcia Fons, ‘Entremundo’; Seth Lakeman, ‘Kitty Jay’.
I’ve just been reading this interview with Dave Enders – a mad American who went to Baghdad to publish it’s first English-speaking newspaper. The guy sounds like a fruitcake, but it makes the book sound like a fascinating read!
jyoti just blogged about an article referencing the category 5 hurricane (Ivan) that hit Cuba last year, destroying 20,000 homes but killing no-one.
I don’t know anywhere near enough about the situation surrounding hurricane Ivan to comment on it too far, but it makes for pretty amazing reading in the light of the carnage in the US.
The reports from the Southern States keep pouring in – blogs, news, video feeds – painting a picture of almost unimaginable levels of degredation and disaster in what is supposedly the most advanced nation on earth. The heartbreak of it is overwhelming, and almost as overwhelming is the disbelief at how the events of the last week have unfolded; the government response (or lack of), the looting, the way the looting was reported along such seemingly stark racial lines, the tragic delay in security and rescue services arriving. It beggars belief, and the end result whatever the excuses is that thousands of people have been killed, many of them needlessly.
The future for New Orleans as a city looks impossibly bleak – even after the water drains away, it’s going to be many months, maybe years before the rebuilding process can being in earnest.
On a more positive note, my friend Stew has been found, thank God. I don’t know the full story yet, but he’s safe, alive and no doubt has one hell of a story to tell.
Soundtrack – The The, ’45 RPM – the best of’; juliet Turner, ‘Season Of The Hurricane’.
Pop music used to mean something. I don’t just mean ‘music’ – music still does mean something, and still has the power to change the world – but it used to be that proper Pop, chart pop, had a cultural significance.
The great indicator of this in the 60s/70s/80s was Top Of The Pops – like a weekly Queen’s speech, we’d all gather round the tele to find out who was number 1. Playing on TOTP was a sure way of selling a shedload more records, and presenting it was pretty much the pinacle for any radio DJ. Even Peel presented TOTP!
It was reading this article about Andi Peters quitting as Exec Producer that got me thinking about it again. Andi claims he just wants to get back in front of the camera, but the ever increasing irrelavence of the show must have had an influence. I can’t imagine for a second that a producer of TOTP in the 80s would have left to present some lame-assed reality TV show in a hospital. Nope, that would have been seen as a major step backwards.
So what’s happened? Well, partly it’s just that single sales are utterly meaningless these days, so having a ‘number one’ single is less and less important. It’s also partly that the singles charts are so full of novelty crap, because sales are so low anyway – that the kind of thing that gets shown is often dreadful. It’s not like there weren’t dreadful records in the past – Black Lace, Captain Sensible, Spitting Image, Joe Dolce – there were tonnes of piss-poor novelty hits back then too, they were just a better class of piss-poor novelty hit. They were actually funny, rather than infuriating. And they didn’t seem to be part of some huge corporate marketing plan to rip off kids who don’t understand the technology they are getting involved with, in the style of that sodding Frog thing.
Musical markets have diversified hugely – I rarely own anything that gets anywhere near the charts (of the current top 75 UK albums I own one – KT Tunstall‘s marvellous ‘Eye To The Telescope’) – and the internet has thankfully given us access to music that would previously have remained hidden. But I still can’t hlelp mourning the loss of families sitting round to watch Top Of The Pops, even if it was just so the parents could say ‘d’you call that music????’
Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (marvellous, simply marvellous)
There’s an ad campaign running at the moment on the London Underground, for Reebok, the sports clothing manufacturers. The slogan across all of them is ‘I Am What I Am’, and various loser celebs are spouting nonsense about their free spirited approach to life, grabbing life by the nads etc… All rubbish.
What’s particularly odious is the Jamelia ad – TSP came in the other day fuming about it, which piqued my interest – The Small Person is v. intelligent and a fine culture watcher and observer of gross inconsistencies in celeb behaviour – so next time I was on the tube, I looked out for said ad.
Here it is –
and this is the close up of the text –
it reads, “I’ll speak out against violence whenever I can. in interviews, in songs, in my life. If you stay silent you’re part of the problem”
However, surely staying silent is preferable to becoming the poster-puppet of a company with a seriously dubious human rights record, helping them to green-wash their reputation, and gloss over the human rights abuses that the factories where Reebok stuff is made have been guilty of. Hey, Jamelia, I got your violence, RIGHT HERE!
If you are reading this, Jam (don’t mind if I call you Jam, do you?), I’d suggest having a nose around Corporation Watch website before you agree to stick your well intentioned by deeply crass and misplaced anti-violence waffle on the posters of a company like Reebok again.
If you want more info, here’s one article you might like to read – a very enlightening read in light of your stance on ‘violence’.
And if you want to know more, here’s a link to a search of the corpwatch site for mentioned of Reebok. I think you’ll find quite a lot of them, dear girl.
you can click here for some crass greenwash from the Reebok Human Rights Award – which is up there with the News Of The World ‘truth in journalism award’ and the McDonalds ‘animal rights activist of the year award’. the only difference being that these other two laughably crass notions don’t actually exist.
Here’s a quote from the ‘non-acceptance speech’ of one of the people Reebok attempted to award their greenwash award to, Dita Sari, a campaigner for Independent Trade Unions in Indonesia –
“I have taken this award into a very deep consideration. We finally decide not to accept this…. In Indonesia, there are five Reebok companies; 80% of the workers are women. All companies are subcontracted, often by South Korean companies…. Since the workers can only get around $1.50 a day, they then have to live in a slum area, surrounded by poor and unhealthy conditions, especially for their children. At the same time, Reebok collected millions of dollars of profit every year, directly contributed by these workers. The low pay and exploitation of the workers of Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam are the main reasons why we will not accept this award.”
Now, Jamelia, do the decent thing, recant, and do some ads for No Sweat trainers or Ethical Threads clothing.
TAGS – Jamelia, Reebok, Sweat Shops, Corporate Watch, London Underground, Dita Sari.
Had a fun day today, working on a track with Baba Brinkman – the rapper/poet behind The Rap Canterbury Tales, one of my favourite shows from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Having met at the show, and heard a fantastic rap he’d written for his brother, Erik. After they came to see my show, we decided it’d be cool to try a track together, and as the one for Erik had no track yet, I was offered the chance to take it on.
So Baba came round today to record the vocal – we took a few passes at it, with just a drum loop from the Kaoss pad as a click track. First challenge was finding a working XLR cable – did that eventually – then got the mic wired into the computer. It’s amazing how fast you can forget the shortcuts for a particular programme – I’ve not used Audition for a couple of months, so was a little rusty navigating it, but we got three takes, the last one of which is going to make up most of the track.
And now I’ve got to construct a track around it. challenge number one was when I came to sync up the drums from FL Studio, I’d looped the Kaoss drums slightly out tune. 5 minutes of calculator crunching and some good ole fashioned trial and error, and I’ve found the proper tempo for the track (89.68bpm, if you’re taking notes), and we’re all set, with FL Studio running as a Rewire plugin in Audition so I can do all the audio recording in Audition, and all the sequencing in FLS.
So at the moment, I’ve knocked up a basic drum track to work to, and have been getting an inspiring vocal sound (which, though I say it myself, I’m doing rather a good job of).
This is going to be a really fun project – I do so little beat-related stuff, and I really ought to do more, so we’ll see how we get on. I might even try and MIDI up the Echoplex to the computer so that I can record a load of looping stuff along with it and see how we get on…
Soundtrack – Bruce Cockburn, ‘You’ve Never Seen Everything’ (was reading a review of this from an old copy of Third Way Magazine, written by Martyn Joseph, and had forgotten just how good it is.)
The law of diminishing returns suggests that the closer you get to the very top end of the pricing for any item, the less extra quality you get for your money. It’s something I often remind people of when they are looking for new basses and ask me ‘which is better brand A or brand B’. As a general rule, there are very very few basses beyond the 2 grand mark that aren’t any good. The companies wouldn’t stay in business for long if there were. There are some who charge a lot more for their name, and each of them have differences, for sure, but in terms of measurable quality, the differences are pretty minute.
And alongside this story of a violin worth 3.5 million pounds, 8 grand for a top end bass seems pretty reasonable. I mean, you can pay more for a bass – I’ve seen them for up to about 25,000 dollars, but normally that’s cos they are covered in hideous mother-of-pearl inlays, or made with some really rare wood that shouldn’t have been harvested in the first place, not because they actually sound any good.
I wonder what the most expensive bass guitar of all time is? Probably one of the ones said to have been owned by Jaco… I think his classic beaten up Jazz fretless went on sale at some point, but I can’t remember what it fetched at auction… tens rather than hundreds of thousands, I think… Some of the very early Fenders are of similar value…
So we’ve a long way to go to catch up with orchestral musicians, where even rank ‘n’ file section players will take out a mortgage on a new fiddle. I’ve heard a couple of great violins up close, and the difference is marked from a run of the mill 5K one, but we’re back to the diminishing returns. How much better would it have to sound for 3.5 million?
I guess the other big difference is that with any electric bass, you’re factoring in the electronics side of things – if your electronics are running on one or more 9V batteries, there’s a glass ceiling on the kind of quality you’re going to get… Maybe we can convince SSL or Neve to start making phantom powered onboard preamps for basses…
I’ve yet to hear a bass with a sound I like more than my 6 string Moduli, or one that plays as well, in any price range. I feel very fortunate to have such delicious instruments to make noises with.
