Queen vs 'Queen' Will the real Queen please stand up?

Today's brush with incredulity comes courtesy of an advert on the side of a bus, advertising a forthcoming concert by Queen.  I suppose that it is a measure of my cynicism  that my first thought was not that I had traveled back in time a couple of decades.  This, though was an ad for a concert by Queen, or at least ‘Queen’ less Freddie Mercury.

When a band loses its front man it should do the decent thing and change its name.  Joy Division knew that.  Genesis did not.  Queen, apparently, have decided to stick with their original name, possibly because the remaining members, or is it member now?, of the band consider that they have earned that right just because they have been in the band since 1962 or whenever.

But this wasn't a case of the drummer dying.  Drummers are famously fragile and so bands are quite expected to continue with their original name when they swap drummers.

This wasn't a case of the bassist leaving.  Nobody notices that.

This wasn't even a case of the lead guitarist leaving.  This happens, normally due to 'artistic differences', a marvelous phrase meaning that the egos of the frontman and lead guitarist have clashed in a display not unlike two bull walruses fighting on the beach as a result of the lead guitarist having all the musical talent, the songwriting talent, the work ethic and the original idea for the band, and the frontman getting all the pussy.

This was the frontman's frontman dying.  Queen should have done the tribute gig and retired the name.  They could still play, maybe call themselves 'Princess' or something.

Or possibly they just had too much stationary already printed to bother changing the name?

Christmas Traditions

Christmas is, traditionally, a time of traditions, both old and new.  It is possible, indeed desirable, to have new traditions and although social media can induce ultra short term nostalgia, may I suggest that we all agree that a tradition is based upon a length of time no shorter than an annual cycle.  Going to get your coffee from the same place every Sunday for a couple of months is not a tradition, it’s a habit, you addict.

You can certainly expand upon existing traditions.  My favourite Christmas traditions include switching off the television promptly as soon as the broadcast of ‘Carols from Kings’ begins, and enjoying ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ with a glass of port, just as the schoolboys in the charge of M R James used to do many Christmasses ago when he would invite them up to his rooms, give them alcohol and tell them disquieting stories.  Simpler, kinder, times.

If you are lucky enough to be spending Christmas with your family, you probably have your own traditions.  These can be the traditional ones of traditional games, like ‘Hunt the AAA Batteries’ or ‘Some Assembly Swearing’, they can also be ones that are unique to your nation, region, village, culture or indeed family.  Cherish especially the family traditions that appear so, so normal because everyone does them unthinkingly each year.  The first time you spend a Christmas in the company of another family is also the first time you realise that others might do stuff differently.  Surely it is a test of the manners of any gentleman not to scream ‘barbarians’ at anyone who does not stand for the start of The Queen, and who can forget that moment when you realised that a guest wasn’t joking about being a vegan and you hastily rinsed the duck fat roasted potatoes, beans, sprouts and carrots.

Walking into a room splashed with gore and remarking ‘you mean you don’t batter badgers on Christmas Day, but how do you keep down TB in this area, and what do you serve in butties later?’ might be unusual, but possibly no more so than rousing a guest early on Boxing Day and informing them they are about to hunt down and kill a fox, as is traditional in many villages and hamlets in England.  Fox hunting, on Boxing day or any other time of the year, never really took off in cities, which is a shame really because if there is one pest that needs controlled it’s an urban fox, and the sight of a pack of hounds and several dozen horses going full tilt through a pedestrianised city centre on the first day of the sales would I think we can all agree be unforgettable, no matter how much one subsequently tried.  A Christmas Day hunt is in and of itself a typically English tradition, it has everything the English love, it has posh people and posher ponies, it has dogs, it has a plucky underdog, well, underfox, and it has the voice of dissent in the form of hunt protestors.  All of whom probably meet up at a local country pub before the off, because no bugger is going to go tearing across the countryside and leap hedges when sober, that’s for sure.

The best traditions are, of course, the ones you make yourself.  Like making a Christmas playlist to drive to, ensuring that ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ is on what the radio folk like to call ‘heavy rotation’.

Of course, when creating a new tradition one should have a care, what if, years from now, your child spends their first Christmas with their loved one and their family and embarks on performing an action that has gone unremarked upon and unquestioned at home for years, ever since you first created that tradition.  Will it appear charming, or some weird shit that other folks will think one step away from a ritual?  If the latter, I recommend you go for it, traditions are mannerisms given legitimacy through longevity, no matter how weird.  Kissing under some mistletoe?  Try to invent that today, in the office, and explain it away as a charming festive idea you think will really catch on.

U2 can't even give it away

Ah, Bono. 

Ah, the other lads in the band. 

What have ye done now?

Like many men, I have a relationship with U2.  As a young man, I bought ‘Rattle and Hum’.  You had to, it was the law, like belonging to the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany but slightly less regrettable.  Achtung Baby was an important album.  It must have been, as I don’t think I bothered to remove it from my CD player for about two years.

Then came the later albums and, even though I am partial to Flood as a producer, the band’s move to megalither status was never quite ironic enough to convince me that U2 had not sold out. 

Then they went so far up their own arse that it needed a prospecting proctologist to locate them, aided by the light that Bono by now thought shone from there, or so we were led to believe.

The sound became less edgy which, given the moniker of their lead guitarist, was ironic.

Then came this.

In an act of stunning philanthropy (unless that’s the one to do with stamp collecting) or, alternatively, the greatest act of piracy since Cap’n ‘Beardless Nancy’ Coot captured an entire Spanish silver fleet at the mouth of the Amazon single-handedly (literally, the left one had been eaten by a shark, instead of the traditional hook, he sported the much more practical, and piratical, corkscrew), U2 gifted their latest album ‘Songs of innocence’, to the nation, or at least that portion of the nation that has iTunes.

I downloaded and listened and it’s not bad.

Some people, however, are not happy.

Presumably some are unhappy because they take the same view of a free U2 album that I took of getting a free ‘Times’ delivered with my groceries whether I wanted it or not; at free, it’s overpriced.

But more were unhappy because this was an affront to their personal space and an assault on their taste and was clogging up their new iPhone with unwanted music.

Finding an album already installed for free on your new iPhone and thinking ‘meh’ rather than ‘woo-hoo’ is, I would contest, one of those ‘first world problems’ that are supposed to exist.  If there is a problem here, it’s twofold.

The first is that anyone who doesn’t like what is essentially a free gift must have a sense of entitlement so vast it has its own gravitational pull.

The second is, if you have just bought a ‘phone that has something installed on it by the manufacturer that you don’t like…then maybe you made a mistake buying an Apple product.

Really.

Because I don’t know if you did any research before you spunked what I’m pretty sure was more than a fiver on your new ‘phone, but Apple, who make the lovely, desirable and apparently bendy iPhone, do have something of a reputation for installing shit on their devices that you need the cyber equivalent of penicillin to shift.

For years, we had Google maps on our iPhones.  Now we have Apple’s own mapping system.  This is because either:

a)    the data that Apple can collect about our roaming habits has to be worth something to somebody; or

b)    Apple have been paid eighty galizzion dollars by the people who make maps to make paper maps relevant again by making a mapping app so unreliable, you’d be better off packing a sextant and a compass than an iPhone if considering a trip.

All in all, U2 did a good thing in a cruel world.  The album is good (the best for a whole actually, maybe because it was free, maybe not, but what the hell) and the intention was too.

As for those who complained..the Department of Homeland Security thanks you for your feedback on what happens when you overtly install benign compulsory technology on a device that can track your movements and monitor your calls, txt messages and e mails.  And that, Congressmen, is why we install monitoring software, in all ‘phones, covertly.

Oh come on, why else do you think your brand new ‘phone comes out of the box with 0.4GB memory already used?

I look for forward to songs of experience.

Toby Keith - Red, White and blueneck

Vietnam was the first televised war, and the first time many people saw that iconic image from the inside of a Chinook helicopter sweeping low over a combat zone, a lone crewman standing, silhouetted, ready by the open tailgate as the jungle wheels below. 

Successive conflicts have changed the landscape glimpsed out of the tailgate, but not the image, or the message; if you are a bad guy, the very, very best you can hope for is that they’ve rigged up a tail-gun and you are about to be sprayed with bullets, the alternative is that the thing is going to touch down on it’s rear end, rearing up like a begging dog or a prancing stallion depending on how you like your imagery, and a bunch of hard-ass soldiers are going to pour out of that tail gate, determined on making your life interesting for the next few minutes.  That’s a moment that’ll have you revaluating your life choices. (Remember kids, pick-up trucks are for transporting lumber and dogs, not weapons or youths in flip-flops carrying automatic weapons).

General rule, you had better be terrified of whatever comes out of the back end of a Chinook, and yes friends, that includes country singer Toby Keith strumming his guitar in the video for ‘Courtesy of the red, white and blue’.  Because Toby Keith has weaponised folk music.

I first heard of this chap way back, when his video ‘I wanna talk about me’ was featured on Jonathan King’s (a teevee personality judged to be so odious that he was convicted of being a nonce or whatever many years before Yewtree was even set up) show ‘Entertainment USA’.  But it took twenty years and a global act of terrorism before I heard another of his songs, ‘Beer for my horses, whisky for my men’.  Thanks to Youhootube, I was able to see what else the guy had been up to.

Keith is, it would appear, the epitome of a country rock star.  His songs, at least the ones that are popular on Hoooeeeeeetube are either rich with folksy charm (‘I love this bar’ is about, well, take a wild guess, and ‘Trailerhood’ is an affectionate tribute to those sorts of communities that can be regarded as ‘tornado fodder’) or essentially pissed off promises to kick bad-guy ass, of which ‘Courtesy of the red white and blue’ is probably the best example.

Country is an interesting medium.  In terms of sentimentality, only one other music genre comes close – hip-hop.  Who can fail to be moved by the exhortation to put the bonds of friendship before carnal desire or even romantic attachment (or possibly gardening equipment) or, as it’s so neatly encapsulated, bro’s before hoes?

Country music allows men to sing with real feeling about the sort of things that men feel passionately about but, as men, are not allowed to express feelings about, and ignore completely those asinine things that men, generally, do get overly worked up about in public.  This is why there are great country songs about family, home and every variation of woman trouble known to man but, thankfully, none about football.

It’s also the music of the cowboy, the tree with a convenient branch, the length of rope and the hemp fandango, in short, frontier justice.  Keith does righteously-pissed-off really, really well.  If you were about to jump out of the back of a Chinook to give the sort of arsehole who thinks kidnapping schoolgirls is a proper occupation for a man, you’d probably not have ‘Courtesy’ on your iPod for the simple reason that you’d want to set your rifle down and settle the thing with your bare hands, but I bet it makes a hell of a tune to get everyone singing on the way back from a successful mission.  He channels the sort of baffled anger many people feel when they watch some atrocity unfolding on the news, and conveys perfectly that guys who love their bar and their trailerhood are the very, very last people to annoy, because when they saddle up and start rolling, God help the unjust.  Shakespeare had something to say about self-depreciating hard-asses in Henry V, but Keith’s take on it isn’t bad.

Of course, if you want a really angry singer, you need to listen to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrecking Ball’.  It sounds like he recorded the entire album after somebody took away his punchbag and his medication, simply astonishing.

Making wristbands at the festival

Music festival time is upon us again and, if they are proliferating then who is to blame, in these times of agricultural diversification, any farmer using his fields for that cash crop that is middle class people listening to music with their faces painted.

There’s the Big Festival, there’s the Folk Festival (formally the Crusty Festival), there’s the Hipster Festival (formally the other Folk Festival), there’s the Other Folk Festival (formally a Great little Folk Festival That The Family Really Enjoyed), there’s the Family Festival (formally Just Another festival until somebody added a comedy tent, a poetry tent and a puppet theatre), there’s the Rock Festival and, of course, there’s the Corporate Festival In The Park, probably sponsored by a credit card company or arms dealer.

There’s lots of festivals.  Want yours to stand out?  Here’s how you do it.

Every ticket holder gets their own toilet.  Which is cleaned every three hours.

Impractical?  Have you seen the price of tickets for festivals recently?  Never mind Madonna playing your festival, for the sort of money you could pay her, the woman would be on with the marigolds and forming a supergroup with Kim and Aggie.

If you had sensational toilet facilities at your festival, then I don’t care if thanks to Time Lord technology you had the original line up of the Beatles headlining, all everyone would talk about when they got home was that after a three day diet of lentil burgers, tofu shakes and whatever the fuck kale is, which is the only sort of thing permitted by law to be sold at a music festival instead of food, nobody had a bad word to day about the cludgies.

Want to enjoy music festivals?  Well, it used to be that wags would suggest you watch on telly, put the telly down the end of your garden to simulate a stage not just in a different post code but in a different time zone, charge yourself ten quid for a warm lager and fifty quid for a bag of something that comes in a baggie that still bears the ‘Barts’ logo on the side.  Then spend three hours trying to find the tent you have pitched in your garden.  That’s all very well except that if you actually attend the festival you don’t have to contend with teevee presenters doing live links.

Jesus.  What is it about deejays and live telly.  Presumably, these people should be quite good at live broadcasting, as most radio shows are live, allowing the deejay to react to news, read out tweets and make emotional farewells, promising their listeners they will be back after their trial where they are confident they will be acquitted.  Maybe it’s the camera, deejays look into the camera like members of the public from 1950s Pathe films who had never seen a camera before, they are hypnotised, or off their faces.

The best way to enjoy a festival is to cover it as a journalist, as this means that no bad the acts or how disappointing it is that a singer you really liked has turned into one of those massive dicks that think it’s acceptable to hold their microphone out to the audience when performing a song (and oh, how we yearn for 10,000 people to chant Wanker! Wanker! The second they do so), you’re still getting paid, and you get to leave mid-afternoon on day one, which is about the time when the toilets turn.

If you can’t photoshop a press pass using the ‘Tattler’ logo and a home laminating kit (trade secret…invest in a convincing lanyard, one that says ‘Chelsea FC’ is unlikely to fool even the dimmest security guard, who is probably a fanb and has one of his own at home) then the best way to enjoy is to up your accommodation budget.  This is available in several packages:

Bronze – a day pack, 200 wet wipes and a carton of pro-plus.  Who needs to sleep, or regular bowel movements for a week afterwards.  Just white-knuckle three days of festival fun.

Silver – a yurt.  If you’re an absolute cunt, this is the festival accommodation for you.  Make sure to bring your own dreamcatcher.  Today’s yurt dweller knows that when it comes to wifi and being able to bang on endlessly about a spiritual experience, nothing beats a yurt.  If, however, you arrive to take possession of your yurt not in a hybrid people-carrier but at the head of a rabble of restless Mongols and a herd of yak ready for slaughter and barbecue, then that is a different proposition entirely.

Gold – (always believe in your soul!) helicopter.  In, bop, out.

Platinum – ahhhh, here we go.  Motor home.  Do you know what the difference between living as God intended and living like an animal is?  Six inches.  That’s the distance separating the ground from the bottom of your camper van.  Drive up, park up, plug in, barter some steaks from that nice Mr Khan in the yurt paddock, then turn on your telly and watch the festival with a finger covering over the ‘mute’ button in preparation for the arrival on screen of the lackwits who present the thing.  As for red button coverage, if I press a red button I expect to see a surface to twat missile streaking away from the launcher on top of my camper van and vaporising whatever cultural excrescence has offended me, most likely somebody who wears sunglasses indoors and says ‘like’ too often.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about wristbands.

Different tribes have different markers for honour, success, experience.  In the military, your medals show the world that you have a nodding relationship with heroism.  In the racing world, the form is to suspend your enclosure passes from your field glasses, resulting over time in a rather pleasing multicoloured effect not unlike a paper lei.  If you are a regular festival goer, then your scars are your wristbands.

A wristband is an easy way to ensure that only the people who are supposed to be in a place are in that place.  By the way, if you are anywhere where you have to wear a wristband, you might want to think about what you can do to become the sort of person who doesn’t need a wristband to be at that event.  My advice?  Photoshop.  Home laminator.  A very small loom that can produce a lanyard that reads ‘Reuters’).  They are popular with festival organisers because once they are on, thanks to the wonders of modern synthetic materials, the person wearing them is going to rot faster than the wristband, essential given the need to establish if somebody had paid the £800 entry fee or tunnelled under the fence, and essential given the festival microclimate.

In most circumstances, those allocated a wristband can’t wait to cut that fucker off the moment they leave hospital, which is about the only other place where knowing somebody’s identity is really really important and they are not always drug-free enough to tell you.  Not so the festival wristband.  For some reason, festival goers like to continue to wear their wrist bands, and these are wrist bands that didn’t even give them fast-track access to the executive cludgie, long after the festival has finished.

Harmless, probably.  Decorative, possibly.  Twatty, definitely.

Que the music...and the inevitable pop-up radio station

It used to be that if you wanted to set up your own radio station, far from the corrosive influence of The Man, so that you could play the records that you wanted to play, you needed a ship floating in international waters and a bloody big transmitter mast.  This got you beyond the reach of broadcast licensing (and, some might say, the reach of any law enforcement agencies that might want to take a close look at the activities of the crew of ‘The Singing Nonce’).  Obviously, when the BBC was looking to crew its, appropriately as we now know, youth orientated radio, it took DJs from the pirate stations, a sort of reverse press-ganging.

Radio 1 torpedoed Caroline and others, and the next shift in pirate radio was when even commercial radio refused to play endless twelve inch acid house mixes.  Pirate stations popped up, playing music and telling people what fields they may want to gather in that weekend to either dance in, or make crop circles in, or both.  This still required you to tune in to the crackly end of the dial.

Then came the podcast and the true meaning of pirate radio was revealed.  It certainly wasn’t to allow you to listen to music that nobody else was listening to, that had been happening for years thanks to C30, C60 and C90 (Go!) cassette tapes circulated in schools, you know, the things that were supposed to kill the music industry instead of, as they actually did, generate interest in bands and allow people to share there enthusiams.

This, and the fanzine, was analogue social media.

What the podcast does is allow a radio show to be produced without any of that tedious music to prevent the presenter stoking their ego by talking about their favourite subject for thirty minutes.  Podcasts are now like the magazine shelves of WH Smiths, there is a podcast for every hobby and pastime, no matter how obscure.  There are probably podcasts about how to knit presentational jackets for wine bottles.  If there isn’t there bloody well should be.

And that should have been it for the pirate radio station.  Killed off by being legalised and available everywhere.

However.

Small, temporary stations are starting to become something of a vogue once again.  In the village every Easter, the local Christians run a radio station for a couple of weeks, and jolly good fun it is too.  Who gives a flying frick what the traffic is like over some bridge many miles away, I want an update on what the queue is like a) at the crossroads and b) at the check-out at Threshers, both of which are visible from the front of the café the Christians broadcast from.

But, say the hipsters, how can we make this even cooler?  I know, let’s appropriate the idea, put the word ‘pop-up’ in front of it, and pass off the idea as our own.

Hence, festivals now come with their own pop-up radio stations.  Nothing new there, but the twist is that these ones are being run by national broadcasters.  For instance, Radio 2 and their recent ‘Eurovision’ pop-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think pop-ups are a great idea.  Pop-ups make things more fun, ‘book’ and ‘penis’ are just two of the tings that can be improved by having the words ‘pop-up’ in front of them.  But radio station?

Having said that, there’s a great deal of charm in something that is only in existence for a short time and is dedicated to one particular subject, and if it’s the only way we get to hear what is, essentially, the Eurovision B side, then it’s probably of some cultural significance.  Probably.

But is it as good as being slipped a cassette in the playground, or as thrilling as happening upon a new tune emerging from crackly static at the top of the dial?

Eurovision 2014

Every year so fresh, every year a new and exciting opportunity to hear ‘bingly-bingly bong’ expressed in a variety of languages.  Every year more opportunity than last year to hear a new language as, things in Europe being what they are, formally happy countries are becoming new, bloody miserable, countries with their own currency, national costume (the flared pantaloon) and language (just like last year’s national language, but with a lot more gargling at the back of the throat).

In a changing world, it’s quite lovely that there are some constants.

Such as the many stock components to Eurovision, without which, it wouldn’t be Eurovision. 

There is the host venue for instance.  It used to be that the competition would be hosted in a prestigious established national musical venue, but that’s before all those Eastern European countries that are intolerant of gays started winning, and so now the venue is likely to be a former industrial site, like a cement factory, abattoir, or prostitute training school, so all the homosexualists the event attracts are already outside the city walls by sunset anyway and nobody has to fret about their goat being fucked by anybody outside the family.  Whatever the venue, some neon and dry ice and it looks exactly like where they film the ‘X Factor’, which I think is a suburb of Hell.

There are the hosts.  Anyone from a foreign country who can speak English reasonably well has either become a banker in London, married a footballer, become an action hero in Hollywood or is working hard on their second Michelin star by doing interesting things with goats.  That’s why the people left hosting the programme sound like their day job is dubbing porn, and look like the only job they could get in porn is dubbing.

There are the acts. 

There are four types. 

The first is, essentially, ethnic Euro.  This is ooompah to a disco beat and it’s only half way through ‘Ein Jolt’ (‘My Goat’) that you realise that this not irony, but a representation of the cultural output of a country that, by the twisted rules of broadcasting, considers itself to be ‘European’. 

The second is the type that has a pleasingly bingly-bongy tune, a bloke singing, and either backing singers or dancers that make the males in the home audience go very quiet. 

The third is the trier.  Typically a ballad, this will normally be a woman in a floaty dress, normally in a lot of dry ice, occasionally with a bloke on a stool in the background strumming a guitar or, if they followed the last act, himself.

Finally there’s the novelty act.  Trampolines can be a feature of this, as can national costume (anywhere East of Paris and national costume is all the same, pantaloons and a hat).  This is the winning act.

There is the definition of ‘European’.  Hello, is that the Kremlin?  Yes, well, according to Eurovision you are part of Europe, and hence part of a larger whole, ruled from Britain (with some help from Germany), so start behaving like a proper European, that is, don’t invade countries, but do by all means buy as much of their goat’s cheese as possible.

There is the Eurovision viewer.  There are two types.  The sort that watch the entire show, possibly making a party of it, either by having an actual party with friends in costume and so on, or by adopting the much more sensible measure of sitting there with a telly, a wine box and a smart ‘phone and txting their thoughts to their friends, all the while occasionally flicking up the channels to that ‘Morse’ they can’t recall if they have seen or not.  Then they get a bit intense and bitter when the voting starts and the camera shows the various camps backstage and the British entry starts the evening bubbly and ends blubbing.

Or the politician.  Miss the acts, sit down in front of the telly for the voting, and probably get a greater understanding European politics than you will from any number of newspaper pundits.

And of course, next year, the possibility of a Scottish entry, with bagpipes.  So, Eurovision 2016 from Leith?

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger has passed.  The BBC features interviews with Billy Bragg, commenting on folk music, protest songs and the importance of popular protest.  Billy remarks that today, the youth have means to express discontentment.  He's right of course, but are a thousand Twitter posts ever going to be as important as 'Where have all the flowers gone?'?

One thing that is very clear from the interviews Mr Bragg gave.  The chap can sing.

And of course, what is quite obvious, he's probably the best singer/songwriter of love songs recording today. Possibly ever.

You disagree?

By al means, hit 'comments',  - but only after you have listened to 'milkman of human kindness'.

And of course...'St Swithins Day'.

Review: New Order at the Brixton Academy

Parents, generally, if encouraging their children to play a musical instrument, ask them if they would like to play the violin or the cello. When a child asks for an instrument that they actually want to play, any parent will feel a surge of relief if it is 'electric guitar' rather than 'D J decks'. The end of the journey for somebody who can play an electric guitar is on stage with the crowd chanting the name of your band. The end of journey for a talented D J is, if last night is anything to judge, playing to a theatre of people who are chanting the name of the band that they want you to fuck off the stage to make room for. A more likely end is printing business cards in a motorway service station with the term 'mobile disco' on them. D J Tintin was supporting New Order at the Brixton Academy and, even though he was trying every trick he had learned in D J school, he would have done better just to have stuck on 'Dancing Queen' or, if he really wanted to please the crowd, 'Blue Monday'.


When New Order did take the stage they were excellent. They did everything that you would want from a pop group whose music you have listened to for years. They were loud, they played the hits, they turned up on time and they finished promptly, allowing you to get home and pay off the babysitter before double rates kicked in. The crowd lived every track but certain tracks, 'Blue Monday' in particular, excited the place beyond reason, as well it might with a guitar so loud it sounded like a cross between construction and a seismic event.


Yes, it was a night of live music! At a venue! And an interesting venue at that.

If a tinpot dictator should ever need guards for his brutal, repressive regime, then the thing to do is to kit out people with high viz orange jackets (a sure sign of petty authority if worn by anyone not shovelling Tarmac) and apprentice them at the Brixton Academy as security. There is nothing that builds expectations of a great gig quite like being shouted at to keep in line by a runt dressed like a traffic cone with delusions of having 'steward' as a job description.

Once through the door of the theatre they split the crowd up into men and women, just like they do in an internment camp or in a temple of one of the rougher sorts of religion, then do a bag and body search. I am talking about two entity different things thankfully, although the pat down was pretty intimate. I had not known there would be a bag check and so had not thought to pack any of my bag check conversation pieces; garden gnome, double headed dildo, spring loaded bear trap, that sort of thing. As it was all he found to object to was my water bottle, which was binned because presumably I might have filled it with vodka in order to avoid the bar prices. This was a grossly unfair assumption, it was in fact filled with an indifferent Chardonnay which, to be truthful, I was quite glad to see the back of.

Obviously tango boy could smell I was a rum 'un and indeed prior to the gig I had tried to offload a spare ticket to a tout, only to be turned down because it was an e ticket, meaning I could have printed two, flogged him one and so stuck him with a worthless ticket. It comes to something when your character is being questioned by a bloody petty criminal. Still I suppose it only takes one disgruntled burly customer to be turned away from the gig and come back and beat the living shit out of the tout in order to put him off e tickets, if not a life of crime.

Brixton Academy is a mixture of faded grandure and rough as hell venue. The stage is surrounded by a sort of Italian village fresco, with little towers and trees. Like most actual Italian villages it's in a right old state, but I suppose that a steady stream of rock bands, rock fans, spilled beer and loud music will have an effect on a place.The shouty security extended inside, although I thought it was a little bit over the top when there was a bloke shouting at the line into the gents to move faster, it was an excellent cure for anyone with problems about urinating in front of others.

Grim though the Brixton Academy may be, its a great, intimate, pop venue, allowing you to actually see the band and rather more fun than standing in a field in the rain watching a figure on a screen because your view of the stage is obscured by the sound mixing marquee and the twelve thousand people in front of you.The demographic was interesting. There were young people there, easily identified because like young people everywhere they were wearing Superdry tee shirts. The older people frankly looked happy that this was a gig with seating. I had imagined that the majority of those attending would be the sort of people who had sweated through their tee shirts dancing to Blue Monday every weekend when it was first released, but of course the music of previous generations is enjoyed by the younger generation, usually to the annoyance of the older generation, although in truth if music was not enjoyed from generation to generation, Mozart would be fucked.

Romance ahoy

One of the best things about renting films on iTunes and streaming them is that there are no tedious adverts to sit through. In particular there are no 'piracy' adverts (not, you might imagine a timely public service announcement about giving the coast of Somalia a wide berth if in anything less than an battleship, but about movie piracy, and not the ones starring Johnny Depp either). If the authorities are serious about catching the movie pirates then I suggest they do a round of pubs and arrest the people selling dodgy DVDs out of a basket (why the hell is it always a basket?), or go to a car booter, rather than litter the front end of DVDs with crap adverts

Those adverts were hellish annoying, and, for those of us who have seen it all before, doubly irritating.

Because back in the day when they had proper record shops (independent, small, dusty, run by staff who cared deeply...about being smug), proper records (vinyl), and proper pop stars (blokes wore more make up than the women, hair like a startled seagull, shoulder pads you could land a 747 on), records used to come with a little sign in the corner of the sleeve declaring that home taping would kill the music industry.

No, Simon Cowell did. What home taping did was allow the cation of the mix tape which, before the invention of STDs, was the best way to show somebody that you loved them.

Back in the 80s, nobody could be arsed with the analogue version of file sharing, that is, copying an LP onto a cassette for your mates and then handing them round in the playground. Instead, everyone used to go round each others' houses and listen to the music together. Home taping was more or less reserved for taping the top 40 on a Sunday, a practice that nobody ever indulged in more than a couple of times because of the nerve-shredding skill required to record a song without the DJ talking over the intro and then speaking again over the last few seconds. I am sure that attics and sheds the country over are full of recordings of the middle of pop songs and the first syllable of 'that was...'.

As a romantic gift though, the mix tape was ideal. It was personal, it sent a message and it was cheap, leaving a young man (men make mix tapes, women receive mix tapes) plenty in the budget for Lynx should things go well. They also make the ideal anonymous gift, being easily posted, deposited, or gaffa-taped to the front door of the object of your affection.

The small card inlay is an ideal canvas for not just the track listing, but exquisite biro art, with plenty of hearts and flowers. The tracks can be jaunty pop songs interspersed with the occasional gushy ballad. It's all about hitting the right note, conveying how you feel about a person. Having the same song played over and over and over again rarely results in a successful seduction but if it does, hold onto the tape because when the inevitable break-up occurs, you'll be able to listen to it repeatedly while sobbing and thinking this was 'our song'.

The tricky thing was gauging the reaction and judging whether to risk public humiliation and private heartache. Best result, you hear her saying how great she thought the tape was, casually reveal you were glad she liked it and you arrange to do something interesting involving chips. Bad result, you hear her saying how great she thought the tape was, some other scrote expresses an interest in the same bands and she either lends him the tape or they arrange to go off and do something interesting, involving chips. Apocalyptic result, you get the tape back the next day, it has been recorded over, with the sounds of her brother and his friends doing very bad impressions of you declaring your love for his little sister. It ends not as you are now hoping with a death threat, but instead a message from the object of your affection kindly explaining that you appreciate the thought, but don't ever speak to her again, posting stuff anonymously is creepy, being spotted in the bushes doing so is worse, and your taste in music is atrocious.

The mix tape was a rite of passage and recording one, even if you never sent it, was an important formative cultural event in the life of a young man. Today it's easier than ever to make a mix CD or playlist, and I wonder if there are lovelorn bedroom DJs out there patiently assembling a twelve track message of affection, or if it's a thing of the past. File sharing may well be piracy, but using music to send a romantic message is surely what the damn stuff was invented for in the first place. Send somebody a mix tape, you're not a music pirate, you're a love buccaneer.

Goldsmiths

And from nothing, it starts. One moment the audience are fidgeting, the orchestra are making last minute adjustments to instrument, frock or trouser and then music, soaring and swirling around the auditorium and I am instantly reminded why classical music buffs spend a fortune on stereo equipment, it's because compared to a live orchestra, recorded music sounds like it's being played into a tin can with the listener on the other end of another can and a length of hairy string.

This was what I believe is termed an unfamiliar programme, in that none of the music would be familiar to those of us who get the classical music elements of our culture through the medium of television adverts or film scores. It does though mean that we had to apply our own images to the music, the film score of our imaginations.

Maybe the unexpected music is because the lights in the auditorium do not dim in advance of the performance. Neither there a warm up or an announcement. The conductor does not come out and scream 'hello you fuckers, are you ready to rock?' but merely strolls to his podium, faces away from the audience and motions with his baton, no doubt muttering 'expelaramous' under his breath. The only hint that choral music is imminent is a very serious voice telling us that recording and photography is forbidden. This is a shame because some of the livelier sections would have made a hell of a ring tone. The voice sounds suspiciously like that of Patrick Stewart, leading me to wonder if it's a recording they play or if this is what resting actors do. But if it was him surely he would have advised 'no recording, no photography, make it so'.

The London Symphony Orchestra and Goldsmith's Choral Union are at the Royal Festival Hall to perform their Autumn show. The programme is Brahms and Strauss and it's the real deal, with Swedish sopranos and a selection of German requiems that promises to be good, if short on laughs.

And the performance is good. However, some sort of classical music etiquette dictates that nobody applauds between movements. If throat clearing was a sign of approval though, then the singers and musicians can assure themselves that they are either doing a great job, or that there is a coach party in from the local chest clinic.

The first half of the programme, known in live performance circles as the countdown to a gin and tonic, features the orchestra and the soprano. The choir sit in their balcony and I'm not sure if they are disciplined, or sulking. The architecture and design of the Royal Festival Hall is such that the choir balcony, sat above the main sage, looks for all the world like a giant's version of the set up on 'University Challenge'. Among the soaring strings and blatting brass, one almost expects to hear a buzzer and a voice intoning 'Goldmith's, Jones' at the conclusion of the longest music round in the world.

Consultation of the programme and scrutiny of the soprano on stage lead one to believe that either her publicity shot was taken some years ago, or the soprano on stage has eaten the one pictured in the programme, along with a lot of cake. Possibly this explains why the singer has gone with a close up headshot for the portrait, as a photograph revealing dress may also reveal vintage. Nothing like a photograph of somebody in a rah rah skirt and a 'choose life' tee shirt to prompt the uncharitable conclusion that the years have not been kind.

Large as the soprano was, the orchestra was larger. But even with the stage full of folk in evening dress, there was still room for members of the orchestra to stash spare instruments by the sides of their seats. Like the chap sitting next to his spare bassoon. No denying it, he had an emergency bassoon, what sort of event was he anticipating where he's going to have to switch to a back up bassoon? At least the presence of two harps was explained by the presence of two harpists, although the effect was somewhat spoiled by their playing the same notes at the same time. Maybe that was what was in the score but how often do you get two harpists and two harps together? Sod the score, we want duelling' harps! On seeing the harps I did wonder what we were in for? One harp is intimidating enough, two were disquieting. The things are as tall as a person and carved out of solid wood, with a wee harpist standing next to them they looked like medieval siege engines.

Another intimidating instrument was a tuba with what appeared to be a huge cork in it. I am assuming it's some sort of muffler intended to turn the normal fog horn effect of everyone's favourite collection of brass and valves into a sigh, but it rather looked as if the tuba player had taken himself down the musical equivalent of Halfords for a mod kit for the thing. Pimp my horn.

The harpists and tuba player were, however, innocents compared to the timpanist. According to the programme notes duding the premier of the piece the choir was drowned out by an over enthusiastic timpanist and the look this guy gave the audience indicated he knew we knew and who knew? tonight might just be the night for history repeating. While he didn't drown out the choir he was bloody loud and played like a man who seethed that this and 'bolero' were the only times he got to strut his stuff.

All this though, was as nothing compared to the palpable sense of apprehension that seized me when the organist took his seat. I was sitting twenty rows back and even I could see the huge 'vox die' stop that he was eyeing with relish. Any instrument that comes with rear view mirrors, and is traditionally played by mad scientists, has to be taken seriously.

It was, of course, stunning. A professional orchestra, a full choir and a programme that went from pieces that described perfectly in music the fall of an autumn leaf to a choral celebration of life. The fact remains though that however you look at it, it's two hours of being shouted at in German.

Radio daze

There’s a very good chance that this entry will contain even more eccentricities of spelling, grammar and reason than is normally the case. This is because I have been decorating, painting the kitchen to be precise and this has involved gloss paint. Not the new, environmentally friendly gloss paint that is water based and is, essentially, skimmed milk, no; I’m using oil based gloss that I’m pretty sure is the thing they paint on tanks to make them bomb proof. Painting with this stuff is the closest you can get to solvent abuse without getting a bag of glue stuck to your nose.

But while the fumes are strong enough to make you hallucinate vapour-trails being left by your finger when you wave it in front of your own face, it’s not enough to offset the horror of listening to the radio.

Listening to the radio is essential while decorating, and a good tune can really up the tempo of the swish of the roller and gloop of the brush being dipped in the paint pot. However, there’s only so much commercial radio one can listen to – the problem being the commercials. I’m not sure what the demographic of commercial radio is, but whoever listens appears to need a lot of adverts about debt consolidation services.

In an attempt to find some fresh toons, I tuned into Radio 1. Luckily, using gloss paint means that I had plenty of white spirit to hand to clean the brushes with. Highly flammable, it was most useful for dousing the radio with before setting it on fire and hurling it out of the window. Over reaction? Then you haven’t heard Jo Wiley’s show. Now I know that DJs are hardly likely to land weekend jobs at CERN, but are they not supposed to make up for the lack of smarts with personality? And if all fails, can they at least not pick some good tunes? It would appear that air play at the moment is granted to a song that starts normally, then has an angry man shouting over the top of the lyrics. Unfortunately, he’s not shouting ‘turn that down’.

Did you know that somebody has sampled the guitar lick from ‘need you tonight’ by INXS? They then shout over the top of it. I suspect it is somebody from an energy starved part of the world intent on using Michael Hutchins spinning in his grave at 8,000 rps as some sort of grotesque turbine.

Postcard from Edinburgh - Oompahbrass

So you’ve taken your show to Edinburgh.

But with thousands of shows on, you need publicity.

You could try adding your flyer to one of the leaflet totems dotted around the city, and hope that somebody notices it.

Or you could try and hand out your flyer to a disinterested public.

Or you could turn up at the Grassmarket, on a Sunday lunchtime, when everyone is settling down to a beer and some chips, make sure you are dressed in offensively pink shirts, and start unpacking brass instruments. Just when everyone’s terrified that this is going to be terrible, you launch into your act, which is great.


Ooompahbrass are a five piece band that play rock and pop classics on their brass instruments. They got good reviews but still did this impromtue gig to draw attention to their show, flog their CDs and busk for beer money.

The golden rules of getting noticed are:

Be relaxed


Be good enough to get, and hold, a crowd’s attention.


Don’t mind if people film you, they’ll spread the word


And always have a trumpet duel in the act.

Oh-drink-ah-deary-deary-deary-me-oh!

Drink and folk songs are, I have been discovering, a dangerous combination – and the blue touch paper to this danger is being left on your own in the afternoon when there is alcohol in the house.

The night before, feeling a bit ‘tired’, I went on iTunes and made a few purchases. Chief among these was the song ‘skin too thin’ by Jez Low. Ahhhh, folk. Folk songs appear to break down into two types; there’s the type used in chocolate adverts and are concerned with maidens, meadows and simple goat-boys. Then there are the folk songs of the industrial north, which mainly consist of killing the mill owner using clogs. ‘Skin too thin’ is definitely in the latter vein.

Listened to it once. Yes, it was as good as when I first heard it many years ago on a radio show (odd how certain songs stay with one…I suspect that some memory neurons, swamped by wine, expanded to the point where they fired into the area of the brain that governs acquisition). Listened again. Oooh, better. But would be better still with wine. Got wine, listened again. And again. Finished wine, got more wine, listened again and started singing along.

Half three on a Sunday and come to realisation I’m slightly potted and have listened to the same song 20 times. This is bad. Worse would be stopping drinking – it was imperative I got past the stage of inebriation when you feel like wrecking looms.

To be honest, the rest of the afternoon is something of a blur but I can’t of drunk that much – I didn’t buy the rest of the album.