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2004 – a year in statistics

Well, here’s the year-end stats for the website (not including this blog – which is hosted on a different server, thanks to Sarda)

so that’s over 40,000 individual visitors, making a total of more than 80,000 visits to the site, viewing over 400,000 pages, and racking up over 1.3 MILLION hits! I’d say that’s pretty good show! For a musician doing what I’m doing, the web is the hub of it all, so having a busy site is pretty much vital to keeping things moving. I’ve had more CD sales via the website this year than ever before as well, and the forum has been a great place to hang out and chat about all manner of weirdness. A big thankyou to all those of you who contribute over there (it’s about time for a live chat again, but since I updated the phpBB software, I haven’t had a chance to reinstall the chat program…)

Soundtrack – Sarah McLachlan, ‘Afterglow’ (if you haven’t seen it yet, you HAVE to check out the video to World On Fire from this album – best video of 2004, by miles!)

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Start as you mean to go on…

…so I’m meant to be sorting out my tax stuff for last year (really need to get it finished this weekend), but before that, I found everyhit.com mentioned on another site – great place for music trivia enthusiasts. Find out what the number one single and album were in the UK on the day you were born by Clicking here.

Soundtrack – Julie Lee, ‘Stillhouse Road’ – starting 2005 with my favourite album of 2004!

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Happy New Year – welcome to 2005

Another year over… a new one just begun…

It’s 1.23am here, Jan 1st, 2005 – out with the old, in with the new.

Happy New Year, lovely people.

I hope I get to meet lots more of you in the year to come…

Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Hits’; 3 Prime, ‘3 Prime’; Duran Duran, ‘Greatest’; Terje Rypdal, ‘Skywards’.

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As one year ends…

This is a great time of year for me – Christmas, then my Birthday (28th – you missed it) and then New Year – lots of time for reflecting on a year gone by, and looking forward to the year ahead. Time to compile daft lists of favourite things from the last year, and make resolutions about things to do in the coming year. To count my (many) blessings, and resolve to see the good things as they happen in the year ahead.

A couple of books that I find useful for this kind of thinking – Proverbs, attributed to King Solomon in The Bible, here translated by Eugene Peterson – some marvellous advice for living. The link starts you off at Chapter one.

And the Tao Te Ching. taoteching.org is an online version, though not a particularly inspiring translation. (my favourite translation that I’ve looked at so far is This one, by Ralph Alan Dale – definitely worth reading.)

So, anyway, I’m 32 now – not that it really means much; you see all those lists in magazines about ’50 things you should have done before you’re 30′, and I’m usually very relieved not to have done three quarters of them – most seem to involve a high risk of either death (yours or someone else’s), disease or at least a serious loss of dignity… No thanks, my life’s quite exciting enough. You never see ‘do a solo bass gig at the Royal Albert Hall’ on those lists…

One of my ongoing resolutions every year is to practice more, and for 2005, I’ve started early. Been practicing quite a lot in the last few days, hoping to keep it up into the new year. Not writing any new music at the moment, strangely, but I am working on a couple of new technical things that I’m happy with…

Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Plumb’; Brian Eno, ‘Music For Films’; Terje Rypdal, ‘Skywards’.

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Christmas TV gets it right for once…

Usually, Christmas TV is all about blockbuster films, climactic soap storylines and the Queen’s Speech.

This year, Channel Four presented what is arguably the best ever bit of Christmas Day TV – a documentary entitled Who Wrote The Bible?, presented by Robert Beckford. A fascinating look at the origins of the Bible, it’s writers, the earliest manuscripts, the relationship between written word and oral history and the various agendas at work in what was kept in and what was left out. Fabulous viewing. Robert Beckford is a speaker I’ve heard a few times before at Greenbelt – engaging, interesting and massively well researched.

Well done Channel Four! For a self-confessed BBC fanatic like myself, it was interesting to see them being totally outclassed in the quality programming for christmas day this year.

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A Christmas pressie for my bass!

Well, it’s been two years since I last changed them, so I thought as a christmas pressie I’d give my 6 string fretless a new set of strings… Woah! It feels like a completely different instrument (that might also be down to me ill-advisedly tinkering with the truss rod at the same time…) – it suddenly sounds all bright and twangy! They’ll break in in a week or two, I’m sure, but it’s a huge difference from two year old flats to brand new ones… Now, do I do the 6 string fretted at the same time? Those have only been on for just over a year… :o)

Also discovered in changing the strings that thanks to not really playing much bass over the festive period thus far, my intonation has gone to shit… time to put in some practice, methinks!

In other news, The Small Person and I were due to meet up with Andrew AKA Calamateur today, but got so snarled up in traffic on the way, that we had to abort the visit and head home – the worst traffic I’ve been in in London for many a year… :o(

On a more upbeat note, I’ve just had an email from Michael Manring inviting me to do a couple of gigs with him at the end of January in CA, which will be a lot of fun!

BTW, a couple of people have emailed/AIM’d in defense of Lost In Translation, but nothing even vaguely convincing has been said of yet…

Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Plumb’ (one of the greatest albums ever made – she’s coming to do some gigs in the UK soon, finally!!)

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Lost on me… Lost in Translation

OK, The Small Person and I just watched Lost In Translation… am I missing something? Did anything happen? Was there some really subtle deep character development and plot magic going on that I’m just too much of a philistine to see?

It was all fairly pleasant visually, nicely lit, etc. but ultimately seemed to be a film in which nothing much happened. There was no sense of a special friendship developing between the two main characters, beyond neither of them really wanting to be there. Bill Murray’s character didn’t seem to go through any epiphanous moment in his clubbing/partying scenes, but neither was he rescued from feeling hideously out of place by Scarlett whatsherface… One of the least developed plot lines I’ve ever seen. And for a film that appears to make so much of the fact that they didn’t end up jumping into bed together, very very little was made of Bill’s character shagging the lounge singer – once again, the female half in a cinematic sexual-encounter is reduced to a footnote in a story serving the rest of a lame non-plot.

He’s still a sack of shit for screwing the singer, so don’t pretend he’s all heroic for not doing the same with Scarlett… What a load of bollocks. Sophia Coppola’s got a lot of work to do to uphold the family name… Still, she did match her dad in the great soundtrack/shoddy film stakes – his deeply forgettable film ‘One From The Heart’ has one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, courtesy of Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle.

Soundtrack – Weather Report, ‘The Is Jazz’ (a best of, covering all of it, not just the Jaco years).

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Festive Fives Pt 2

Films (again, in no particular order)

School Of Rock
Harry Potter III
Dodgeball
Meangirls
Shrek II

Soundtrack – right now, some me-loops. Before that, Duran Duran, ‘Greatest’ (a pressie from me to the small person for Christmas); Kerry Getz, ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’; Top Banana radio’s non-stop christmas hits.

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Festive Fives Pt 1

OK, here’s the first of a few top 5s of this year –

Albums of 2004 (in no particular order)

Julie Lee – Stillhouse Road
Tom Waits – Real Gone
Sarah Slean – Day One
Matthew Garrison – Shapeshifter
Theo Travis – Earth To Ether

…

oh sod it, I can’t just pick 5!!

The Low Country – The Dark Road
Calamateur – The Old Fox Of ’45
Todd Johnson/Kristen Korb – Get Happy
The Cure – The Cure
A Marble Calm – Surfacing

Feel free to post your own festive fives over in the Forum.

Soundtrack – Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’.

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