Tag: Blog

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The New Commandments.

Most of the time, I’m glad I don’t watch much TV. However, missing Channel 4s The New Ten Commandments was a bit annoying. I found out about it on Paul’s marvellous blog, and now really wish I’d seen it.

Shifts in what is perceived as ‘moral’ are fascinating, particularly in relation to Britain now having made the shift into being a ‘post-christian’ pluralist culture.

There are a couple of noteable quotes on the website, some really good, some nonsense.

Into the latter category comes this gem from Janet Street Porter –

‘The commandments can’t be very relevant,’ she says. ‘Otherwise people would repeat them every morning as a kind of mantra to live their lives by.’

Riiight – so everything that’s relevant becomes a mantra? OK…

Here’s the full list –

  • Be honest
  • Don’t kill
  • Look after the vulnerable
  • Respect your mother and father
  • Enjoy life
  • Nothing in excess
  • Be true to your own God
  • Treat others as you would like to be treated
  • Be true to yourself
  • Protect your family
  • Try your best at all times
  • Look after your health.
  • Don’t commit adultery
  • Live within your means
  • Appreciate what you have
  • Never be violent
  • Protect the environment
  • Protect and nurture children
  • Take responsibility for your own actions
  • Don’t steal

An interesting list, fairly predictable, and also clearly not a list that most people live by – Live within your means is obviously being ignored big time given the debt levels in the UK, parental respect is pretty low on the priority list, so is taking responsibility for our actions…

The one I’ve bolded up there (my emphasis, not C4’s) is the interesting one, given the ramifications of carrying it out – Treat others as you would like to be treated is such a huge thing to take on. To the point where Jesus reduced the whole of ‘The Law and The Prophets’ to two commandments – love God, love eachother – that’s what the second half of that means. We all want to be treated fairly, to be shown mercy, to be appreciated, protected, have time to enjoy ourselves, to feel safe… How much of our time is spent either trying to bring that about, or avoiding practices that cause the opposite? It’s interesting that most of them are very parochial – lots of things to do with the small stuff of life – family, personal responsibility etc. Very little to do with the big stuff of life – government, global issues, God/spirituality…

Anyway, the campaign is a chance to do just that – to give to other people the kind of fair deal that we expect for ourselves. None of us would wish the situation that much of the continent of Africa finds itself in now on our worst enemies, so why do we support a system which is making the poverty worse…?

Laziness, inertia, ignorance – I’m guilty of all three when it comes to the problems of people ‘over there’. But we need to make some changes. All of us.

Soundtrack – Zakir Hussain, ‘Making Music’; Carl Herring, ‘Azure’.

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Big achievement

OK, so I’m blogging this a week late, but last weekend, I managed to get my email inbox down from over 1200 to 7! The main upshot of this was that I was able to ditch Outlook Express and switch over to , which also allows me to have all my news/blog feeds in the same programme as my email. which is nice. One more step away from Microsoft stuff.

On the subject of groovy free software, I mentioned a few days ago about , the free photo management thingie from Google. Well, I’ve been toying with it, and it’s even better than I first realised. It’ll generate webpages with your photos in, movie files of your photos as a slideshow, and all the edits are non-destructive, so you can do as much editing as you like, and then save a copy later… It’s great. Seriously, I’d have happily paid £100 for a piece of software this logical and useful. I’ve hardly opened photoshop since I started using this.

Soundtrack – and Elvis Costello, ‘Deep Dead Blue’; , ’10 Cent Wings’ and ‘Back In The Circus’; , ‘Entremundo’; , ‘Legs To Make Us Longer’.


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nothing to write on your blog today? take the old-school BBC approach…

I’m in the middle of reading David Attenborough’s marvellous autobiography, ‘Life On Air’ – which is one of the most fascinating and illuminating looks at the birth of TV broadcasting in the world – David joined the BBC very early on in the life of TV, and as controller of BBC 2, introduced a whole host of elements to the channel that still define its output today.

Anyway, I’ll write more about the book at another time, but one of the things it reminded me of was that time back in the 70s and 80s when TV channels were honest about having nothing to put on, so instead of showing endless reruns or commissioning shite like Kilroy or Trisha, they just played some music and showed the test card… maybe it’s something we bloggers should adopt when we’ve nothing of interest to say… :o)

Soundtrack – Kristen Korb, ‘Where You’ll Find Me’ (a fantastic CD); Armen Chakmakian, ‘Caravans’ (another album featuring Doug Lunn on bass).

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Blogs to make you think

There are a whole host of blogs that I read on a weekly basis – many of them are linked to at the bottom of the right hand column on this page.

The great thing about blogs is that you find bits of news, information and thoughts that you would almost certainly never have come across any other way.

Today, I was browsing a load of friends’ blogs, trying to catch up on their lives of the last couple of weeks while I’ve been away, and Jonny Baker’s blog was flagging up a load of stuff on the adbusters website – a site I used to visit regularly, but haven’t been to in a while.

In amongst the great stuff he was writing about, was a link to a fabulous article headed DIVINITY FOR THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY – an article exploring the unique spiritual role that artists can play in the modern world. I would quote a chunk of it, but the whole thing is so good, I don’t think I’ll bother.

Soundtrack – Mark Isham, ‘Blue Sun’ (featuring the masterful Doug Lunn on bass); The Works, ‘Beware Of The Dog’ (soon-to-be-released album by Patrick Wood’s quartet, formerly known as Woodworks. Fantastic stuff.)

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RE-Brand your blog!

you’ll hopefully have noticed that on this site (and on my homepage and the forum on my site) there’s now a ‘make poverty history’ white band link in the top right hand corner – you can add one to your blog too, by adding the little bit of code you can get from the make poverty history website. Thanks to Sarda for alerting me to this one.

Soundtrack – Stephen Dawson, ‘Demos For Dolly’ – Stephen’s in a rather wonderful band called Dolly Varden, and these are his original demos for a lot of their songs. Great stuff.

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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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Happy Christmas, blog-readers!

Right, I’m just off to do my christmas shopping, and just have time to wish y’all and very happy and blessed christmas. Please don’t spend too much, eat too much or drink too much – there’s something deeply perverse about celebrating God coming into the world as a homeless refugee by overindulging in everything. Instead, be thankful for your family, tell them you love them, and spare a thought for those who are alone. If you can, invite someone over who’ll be on their own.

Thanks for reading this year – I must congratulate you on your superb taste in trivial reading matter. :o)


Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Steady Pull’; Theo Travis, ‘Earth To Ether’; Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’; The Pixies, ‘Doolittle’; The Works, ‘Beware Of The Dog’.

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More big changes at the BBC

regular readers of this ‘ere blog will know that I’m a huge fan of the BBC – I think any Brit that has travelled abroad comes to appreciate the unique resource we have in the BBC, and as the media in general seems to get more and more commercialised, the Beeb is a bastion of publicly funded journalistic marvellousness in the middle of it all. Their track record on commissioning great drama and comedy is fantastic, and their kids programs are the best there is.

So I’m always a little uneasy when I hear talk of big changes at the BBC, such as those announced yesterday in a talk by the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson.

Thousands of jobs are to go, and loads of BBC stuff is going to move to Manchester… I’ll watch this one unfold with a cautious eye.

This spawned a discussion on BBC London about whether a licence fee funded BBC was still valid, and true to form, much of the genetic detritus that makes up the listenership to John Gaunt’s show in the morning seemed to think that they got better value and programming with their Satellite and Cable channels. Sometimes I despair for the future of the country. Most of that despair comes from listening to John Gaunt’s show. Maybe he just attracts obnoxious morons?

Anyway, if there are any referenda on the future of the BBC, do us all a favour and vote for it keeping it’s funding base just the way it is, please. The licence fee would be great value if it just covered radio, or just covered the BBC website, let alone the TV as well… Gawd bless the BBC.

Soundtrack – Zakir Hussain, ‘Making Music’; Pierce Pettis, ‘Great Big World’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’; Jonatha Brooke, ‘Plumb’; Indigo Girls, ‘4.5 – the best of’.

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New residents in the house…

So Tuesday was the day our new owners moved in. Oh, we would love to think of ourselves as their owners, but it’s more than apparent who runs the show, even at this early stage.

Gizmo and Spender are two Fairly Aged Felines, from whom many lessons will be learned over the next while. They are both cuddly, gorgeous and full of personality. We picked them up from a cat-fosterer, courtesy of HAWS – Hounslow Animal Welfare Society – very lovely people who take good care of lots of lovely animals.

I’m sure I’ll blog lots over the next wee while about their antics, but at the moment, here’s a few pix to give you some idea of who we’re talking about…

this is gizmo –

and this is spender –

they’re currently investigating the house, getting into everything, and pausing occasionally for food or cuddles.

Soundtrack – Kim Taylor, ‘So Black, So Bright’; Chic, ‘C’est Chic’; Julie Lee, ‘Stillhouse Road’; John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’; Paula Cole, ‘This Fire’.

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Still can't believe he's gone

I know I’ve blogged about the death of John Peel before, but this evening I finally got to watch the back to back documentaries about him that were on a week or so ago (thanks Neil!!).

The first was various celebs who knew him talking about him post-death. The second one was a doc that was made for his 60th birthday – 5 years ago, and what really struck home was that then, when he was alive, he was getting more effusive accolades than most people get when they die. His influence on the UK music scene really is immeasurable. I have numerous records in my collection that would never have been there if it wasn’t for Peel – both those that I bought as I direct result of hearing the bands on his show (The Fall, The New FADS, The Pixies, etc.) and those who probably wouldn’t have reached the attention of the listening public if it wasn’t for his championing (The Smiths, Billy Bragg, Pulp, etc.)

Listening to Peel’s show in the late 80s told me that it was OK to have no boundaries on your listening. Thanks to Peel, I knew metal-heads who bought Ivor Cutler records, and I ended up owning a compilation album called ‘Hardcore Holocaust’, featuring bands like Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, The Electro Hippies and Dr And The Crippins!! The feeling that stylistic boundaries meant absolutely nothing permeated my record buying and my own music experimenting – I bought ACDC records and John Zorn records, Yes albums and Sade albums, Nick Heywards and Charles Mingus, The Fall and Mendelson… I had no boundaries to my listening at that time, and it did me no-end of good when it came to finding my own musical voice. I avoided the musical myopia that people learning instruments often get caught up in, playing along to The Cure and Stu Hamm, The Pixies and Olivier Messiaen.

A huge amount of that can be traced back to Peel and, as was noted in the documentary by Benjamin Zephaniah, the completely matter-of-fact way that he would introduce the most extraordinary music on the planet, juxtaposing hardcore punk with techno, reggae with folk, records from the 30s with electronica from Belgium, Japanese Pop with English protest songs.

I just can’t believe he’s gone. The hole it leaves in the middle of British music broadcasting landscape is crater-sized, with no chance of ever being filled. Johnny Marr commented in the doc that he was a total one off, and wasn’t even training up a protege. There really is no one that can fill that space, and the British radio airwaves will feel the lack of it for ever.

We were exceedingly lucky to have grown up with John on the airwaves – he championed just about everything that’s been intersting in music in the last 40 years. Rock ‘n’ Roll, hippie folk, prog, jambands, punk, hip-hop, electronica, rap, folk, hardcore, techno, indie, protest, african and utterly unclassifiable music. Radio formatting was shown to be the shallow market driven bollocks that it is.

And once again, the second documentary brought it all back to the pain of his wife and kids. Regardless of his legacy, they’ve lost a dad and a husband. I just hope and pray they find some comfort in the way he changed british music for ever.

Soundtrack – Nick Harper, ‘Double Life’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’; Mary Chapin Carpenter, ‘Between Here And Gone’; Ani Difranco; ‘Little Plastic Castles’.

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