NME new noise tour

May 7, 2008

blimey. I was at that courteeners thing a couple of weeks ago and by 8:30 there wasn’t even enough room to flick your lank hair around while postulating about morrissey and pretending to be from manchester like everyone in the waterfront who knew where it was was pretending to be although when he said fallowfield and sung something about students I did have a moment of I was thereism. honestly, if you’ve been feted by morrissey you might as well hang up you guitar now and get down the longsight jobcentre. remember the primitives. if you can listen to that insipid album all the way through without spiking yourself with pointy instruments then you should be ashamed as it is possibly the worst record in your collection and you can’t imagine how you ever liked it. that’s what you’ll think about the courteeners in 10 years time even though you might rather like them now. they do mean it, but its just not worth the effort.

strueth. then I were at the air traffic shenannigans a few days later where I was quite easily the way oldest person in the waterfront by a considerable margin and conspicuously male to go with it. they did rattle out their emoplay pianotastic hits-u-like with some gusto and he is a very nice man but really if you’re going to spend all night sitting at a piano then don’t be surprised if all the 4 foot tall 15 year olds get a bit bored and start trailing out to the cloakroom to avoid the rush. as far as I could tell, it was exactly the same set they played many months before at the arts centre when I was by far the oldest person there but strangely inconspicuously male. they must have been on telly or something since then.

christ on a bike. now its the nme not-as-good-as-the-used-to-be tour which consistently broke bands on the verge of greatness like bloc party kaiser chiefs franz ferdinand arctic monkey etc but now just kind of breaks wind with a flopping rollcall of new music top 5 guardian reader list voted for by you not me ones to watch artists which will never be seen again on a bill which includes less than 4 bands. having deliberately missed the first band because I was washing up or something I arrived at the waterfront to the last few number from team waterpolo and acres of space in which to wander around like it was a pub in the 80s and your mates band were playing in the function room and nobody gave a toss. it was so empty that I was able to ask for a pint of red stripe at a decibel level normally reserved for actor in films in leather bars where the music is apparently quiet enough to hear the person sat next to you talking but loud enough for assorted 90s bad hair losers to go mad ape crazy to like, the sisters of mercy or something. anyway, team waterpolo supported air traffic last week and I didn’t really need to see them again so I read email on my phone like an arse. following an agonizingly pedestrian gap, friendly fires take the stage and I quite like them in a sideways-on sensible shirt proper alternative kind of way even if it was borderline flock of seagulls at some points but just enough this side of gang of four to be respectable and he had a lovely voice. nice man.

sadly, the evening was rounded off by crystal castles, who are, in fact, republica. they tried to pretend they weren’t by lasering out our eyes with permastrobe lighting and ultra magnesium flares, but they were. suffice to say, all I heard after the few of us left filtered out into the street was ‘oh my god, they were so, like, amaaazing’, which proves I’m right.

4000 a minute

May 2, 2008

as david rightly points out you just can’t keep up these days. it used to be the case that cool site of the day was indeed picking from about 100 new sites that had appeared that day. worldwide. and they weren’t cool, except they were there which was cool. the coolest one I remember whcih I can’t find in the archive was someone who had posted pictures from a nuclear bunker and I thought how amazing it was that someone could post pictures of themselves inside a nuclear bunker and then just use an img tag and publish them and I could see them halfway round the world without leaving my seat and there might be something in this internet thing but as far as I could get at the time was to post scans from scooby-doo annuals.

fast forward about 10 years and remember when you first joined flickr and started uploading your photos worried about whether you should be posting candid shots or posed shots or landscape shots or artistic shots and whether you should submit to that rating group of which there was only 1. because when you joined all those years ago, everybody looked at everyone else’s photos. I mean, if you refreshed the explore page after having looked at them all, there might be one or two new ones which might or might not pique your interest. never mind, come back at the end of the day and look at all of them.

not so now. flickr users are now uploading more than 4000 photos/videos/things a minute. that’s (hang on, let me open the calctool), um, more than 60 a second. by the time I’ve refreshed the explore page, even if I just repeatedly do that and not look at anything, about 300 objects have passed me by. so I hope people are putting them in that rating group so I can pass some value judgement on them. what do you mean there’s about a million ratings groups? how can that be? what do you mean its an interestingness hype methodology? oh. and while I’m banging on about it, why do I never get any of those “Your photo has been selected for the SWORD OF DAMOCLES AWARD! (insert huge gif). Please tag your photo with SWORDOFDAMOCLES and bother 10 other strangers by blarting this message all over their photo pages! thx!” awards? everyone has those. I want one. not enough cat/sunset photos I expect.

sacrilege

April 24, 2008

having invested as much effort as I possibly could in actually liking foals and deciding I don’t it’s that time in the afternoon where I’m hankering after something dependable to get me through to teatime which today happens to be joy division but wait there’s something not right with that its not like I’m just listening to closer which I ripped from the cd I bought to backup the album I got back in 1980 oh no its something much worse. I’m listening to ‘the best of’ on napster. now, if I were for a moment to put aside any latent musical fascist tendencies and step down from the pedestal marked ‘I was was there the first time you can’t really understand joy division like I do’ which is populated with middle-class art school envy types who now work in IT or online media and write miserable little blogs about IT and online media or worse still, listening to joy division on napster, then I might think that actually listening to ‘the best of joy division’ released in the wake of control was a perfectly acceptable way to spend an hour in your home office. but no sooner have I written that last dribblesome sentence than I’m slapping myself with the wet fish of procrastination and I’m telling myself that, really, I should know better than to defile the mighty division by not listening to the albums as they were originally released and instead getting drawn into the out-of-sequence vaguely cashing-in less-than-tactile experience of online recycled nostalgia.

but I have, so never mind. I think actually that’s what I’ve really wanted to do for ages, but being a middle-aged joy division stalwart is a bit like being a member of some insane catholic sect where you’re expecting some laconic thunderbolt to strike you down at the merest suggestion that you might be taking the piss with the back catalogue. I mean, I’ll dig out my 12″ of ideal for living later and listen to the whole miserable thing on a proper record player by way of self-flagellation, so hopefully I’ll feel better about myself tomorrow and continue stroking my chins about the relative merits of interpol or editors and whether actually its alright for the wombats to be quite so blasphemously ironic about it all when they weren’t even born, dammit (always good to finish with that chestnut).

caught by the fuzz

April 22, 2008

its easy to get overexcited about things in norwich because when they actually happen nobody seems that bothered. such was the anticipation/apathy contradiction at the Lightly Crowded Room at the uea last night as the mighty supergrass found themselves in east anglia when they probably expected to be in the astoria where everyone would go mental and clap their hands and things like that. the last time I saw supergrass was in 1994 when they were supporting shed seven at the boardwalk in manchester which was a spectacularly upside-down night as clearly supergrass should have played after shed seven who were already the also-rans of 90s british alternative music that hailed from york and miserably underachieved except for dolphin or that one about rainbows which chris moyles probably likes because they’re from yorkshire and what else you might need to know about them I’m not sure. the boardwalk was also was also a canny little venue which crammed students and townies in all week and had, well, a boardwalk kind of thing in it from where you could pour red stripe onto teenagers on club nights but was the right size for the amount of people who actually went to gigs like that in those days before everything was sponsored by o2 or top man and you have to barter on ebay to pay double just to see the congolese nose-flute orchestra playing hex enduction hour backwards at the art centre.

so there was a little squeak of anticipation as I left the house after putting the bins out and filling the dishwasher and sorting out the recycling. 14 years later, supergrass and shed seven are still shuffling around the country peddling their indiewear but supergrass never went away and have popped out some super sparkly albums in the meantime and so are now touring to support their new album which I haven’t heard and don’t know what is called whereas the aforementioned shite seven have recently ‘done an abc’ and reformed because they apparently had nothing better to do and are hawking some kind of greatest hits tour which must be a pretty short affair and is undoubtedly rubbish. on arrival at the uea I parked the zafira under a street lamp in the hope that the wing mirrors would still be there on the way out and tritted down the hill to the concrete bastion of acoustic deconstruction which was by the time I got there a little bit kind of full but with gaps in the way that says its not sold out but the middle-class middle-aged have bagged all the steps round the edge and so you’ll have to push through them to mix with the teenage fanclubs and stoners who will undoubtedly lob their plastic pint over you at some point which they do. expecting the support to come on at any time I took my nasty-but-cold pint of 1664 and sorried and thankyoud my way through 5-deep of people even older than I and after nearly failing to negotiate the last step down to the pit arranged myself neatly in front of someone who was far too short to go to gigs at the uea anyway. I checked a couple of emails on my phone, like a w*nker, and then suddenly it went that kind of half-dark and on trolloped the other band from oxford (I’m not counting ride), and proceeded to rock out with a track from the new album. and another. and another, I think.

even though they had a rather splendid lcd backdrop (although not, unfortunately, an lcd soundsystem), by the time they’d rattled off some tracks from the new album and gaz had informed us that we’d probably be regailed with pretty much the whole of the new album, people were getting a bit twitchy and shuffling around and rather than taking pictures with their phones they were talking calls with their phones. but wait, salvation. deep enough to submerge dubai is the back catalogue and so we will be treated to a smattering of hits-u-like which will keep us amused enough not to leave and amuse they do. they obviously save caught by the fuzz right until the end, but in between the borderline prog-foo fighteriness of some of the new stuff they clasped our hands and walked us right into the 90s when the sun was always shining and I had hair. it was at its best when members 4 & 5 of the live band disappeared off stage or picked up a tamborine and gaz poked us with the whimsy stick with sublime renditions of late in the day and a soaring moving and you remembered why you came. they can rock out just fine but you don’t want to be doing that at the uea because it just sounds like a jet taking off without any wheels when it gets mashed unceremoniously through that arcane speaker stack although brecon beacons sounded nice until my eyes started bleeding with the sonic james bond laser attackness of the sound system even though some people were actually jumping up and down a bit which must have meant something.

I make it sound half-hearted but it wasn’t but it was. they did what they do very well which is crack open a song box and let it pop all over the stage like a looney tune. we did what we do very well in norwich which is gawp like goons and start a mock fight while one hand claps and a stoner bounces of everyone shouting oi! oi! I think I may have enjoyed the whole experience much more if I hadn’t had to know in quite so much detail who I was surrounded by. there is an unfortunate trend currently to arrange a large number of lights on the rig so that they shine directly into the audience and mostly directly into your retina. at far-too-frequent moments in any given set, those lights will cascade over those assembled, presumably so that we can somehow join in with the signing bit where we’re supposed to join in but really, for about half the night we were bathed in an effervescent glow which only served to highlight the fact that you’re surround by people you don’t want to be surrounded by. I am quite happy for all the lights to point at the bloody band like what it always used to so that I can remain comfortably numb of my immediate surroundings and focus on the action. they do it down the waterfront too, but I don’t mind it so much there because in general what you see is akin to what you would see if david lynch made teenage pop horror, which is often better than what’s on stage, but at the uea, well, its just unpleasant. its not as if we need help in norwich to kill the atmosphere, but turning all the lights on like its the end of the school disco doesn’t really help.

you am demographic

April 11, 2008

dammit. not even partially recovered from the oi!, baldy! ads that have appeared to be targetting me successfully, I’m finding myself in the box marked “fatso” and now I’m reminded that being a middle-aged englishman (for tis surely the trigger) means that I’m obviously failing miserably to combat to the encroaching sidewaysness of myself and I need to find out how to look like the middle part of someone from gladiators. I’m guessing that the 5 mistakes I’m making might include eating, sitting still all day, eating some more, not going out, etc., but, you never know, there might be something I’d never thought of.

I’m just waiting for the oi! speccy! ads to come back into rotation and then I’ll consider myself to have the full demographic ad set and I’ll go and do something right mad like make a 3d version of myself because it’s fun! and free!

facebook: you spammer you is

April 8, 2008

oops. I appear to have triggered the magic number of posted items on facebook. I am now officially a spammer. I had the temerity to post 100 items I had created myself to my own profile, thereby inflicting misery and pain upon all those 73 people who I paid large sums of money to to agree to be my bestest friends ever on the internet. most of them haven’t logged in since 2007, but I apologise unreservedly for ruining their lives forever.

I was, in fact, only warned that I was probably a spammer, not categorically accused of it as such, but, I was warned with a big red popup screen which said something like “OI! SPAMMER! HOW DARE YOU!”, notwithstading the fact that I politely decline about a zillion requests a day to add applications to my profile that allows anyone in the known world to look at my particulars and send videos of dogs wearing underwear to my email and then tricks me into sending it to the united nations when I thought I was just moving along.

I wonder what the threshold is for actually being blocked from posting my own stuff to my own profile, for that was the threatened next action therein contained in the insidious red box. “DO THAT ANYMORE AND WE’LL CUT YER BALLS OFF”, or something like that. they don’t actually tell you what the threshold is in the faq section specially prepared for spammers, that you’re forwarded to, like a ‘private interview room’ at the airport reserved for ‘people with beards’ who ‘talk funny’. they just let you know that if you carry on, you deserve it. which I suppose I do. how dare I.

holy fuck

April 7, 2008

there’s really no polite way of telling your children who you’re going to see at the arts centre without a calamatous verbal outage while saying night night following a group questioning regarding who exactly I was going to see at the arts centre which meant I wouldn’t be around to say night night at bedtime when it happens to be holy f**k, so I resorted to the eric morecambe school of coughing into a fist and saying something like ‘<cough>hollyfunk’ which seemed to do the trick as they lost interest immediately and headed upstairs.

but it was indeed holy f**k (nsfw kids) I’d crawled out of the hoovering to see and having only sampled the _radiohead nude remix and the myspace tracks I was curious orange too see how they would go down on a cold norwich sunday in a converted church, which sounds ironic but isn’t really. the 37 or so of us who decided to give the support act a one-hand clap were treated to a delightful brother/sister husband/wife partner/partner act apparently known as free blood (‘from new york, usa, new york, usa’), who ambled unto the stage and pressed a button, whereupon a dr rhythm backing track from 1981 exploded through a stack and rattled the inside of my chest like spanners in an empty bronchial metal mickey and they gooned about together like the reincarnation of blancmange as a brother/sister husband/wife partner/partner act from new york usa, frotting their mikes like gibbons and after about 5 minutes clasping strangers from the assemblage and manhandling them stageward. we all kind of liked them in the end and even after a few false crescendos involving bass drum 1 and some screams we offered them the dubious courtesy of clapping for a bit and then being quite quiet as they walked off stage amongst us and straight to the bar.

being the arts centre, the warm-up act between acts is actually the headline act putting their kit together and soundchecking while we all (more than 37 of us now) talk amongst ourselves or if you’re like me, pretend to be doing something important on your mobile phone which is actually something more like updating your facebook status with ‘…is at holy f**k with the people who actually have friends’. while the sound desk isn’t looking, they suddenly decide they’re ready and quietly stumble into the set as the lights dim around us and a couple of stoners (for there are always a couple of stoners at a norwich gig) amble into your field of vision where they will mildly annoy you all night by having a good time but not paying attention.

it’s easy to make comparisons for reference, but imagine you’d collected every piece of musical hardware that had passed through your hands in the 80s (after imagining you’re that old), which would be in varying amounts, casio keyboard/samplers (lots), boss effects pedals (lots), analogues mixers and switchy things (lots), the occasional 1/4 inch tape loop, cables (lots and lots), effects racks, random electronic devices that make noises like sawtooths or the clangers, and then meet some friends with real instruments (drum & bass) that can actually play them, and then daisy chain 17 4-way adaptors and then start playing everything at the same time and record the sound of you house exploding and play it backwards through a baked bean tin with a piece of string as the drugs start working.

actually, they’re unmistakably the reincarnation of the who. I mean, they’ve got all the best bits of add (n) to x, they do the triptastic glasto endofshow chemical brothers trance pieces, but are clever enough to start at the point where everyone goes ‘yeeeeah’ and then gets mental, rather than including the boring 10 minutes of intro, they stumble over the remains of numerous analogue forebears from the 70s to the 90s, check in with the fall, and even, worryingly, sound like lemonjelly at one point, but, when it comes to it, they are the new electro-mod. or something.

they did achieve the formally unachievable by way of me dancing on one leg and nodding my head without even caring what anybody else thought and mostly I was transfixed on the drummer, who was, albeit canadian, the living embodiment of keith moon’s bastard child with john cazale, but eminently intensely watchable. connecting him, the bass player, who did a grand job of playing one note over and over and over and over until your brain bled, and the crumpled shirts of satan, on fiddling duties, there was some kind of invisible lasso threaded through their ears which was held, at the other end, by a 30-foot argonaut that was constantly jerking their heads around like a stop-frame animation as waves of electropopocalypse washed over us from the effects box of the devil himself.

a good night then.

smiley animals

April 4, 2008

all I did was look at karl’s blog on myspace and an intensely annoying flash banner stared meiowing at me by way of reminding me if I needed reminded that in reference to a previous post I went out to that theatre royal last night and sat through a good few hours of orchestrated light poperatic feline musings wrenched from dubious catterisms as scribed throught a haze of pipe smoke by the earnest T S Jellicat. With due regard to my misgivings on the evening’s performance I can duly report that it was a triumph and when that bette davis cat sang memories in act 2 we all blubbed into our souvenir programmes even if it all got a bit close encounters at the end when she ascends to little catty heaven. hurrah!

if I need bringing back down to homo sapien earth, then it comes in the delightful form of canadian thrash electro pop perverts holy f**k at the arts centre on sunday. a second hurrah! for the all-seeing eclectic I!

andy loves anthropomorphism

April 3, 2008

is there anything more cringeworthy that watching otherwise sane members of the human race tripping around in fur and stroking their whiskers with their little paw-like hands in lycra and fluff. maybe not. especially if they’re also singing. having witnessed some inexplicably awful things masquerading as entertainment for which I paid good money for over the years, I’m not quite ready to make a final decision on feline embodiment as the last resort of theatrical production but by tomorrow I’ll be in the most unenviable position of being able to refer to a full blown west-end production of its making me twitch just thinking about it cats. that’s cats, as in, lloyd webber cats.

by all accounts it is a wonderfully fabulous rendition of said macavityness but the last time I was pleased with anything to do with macavity it was at madentist getting plaque scraped off with a sharp hook. I’m hoping this evening will prove to be at best slightly less painful although I suspect I might still need some horrible pink mouthwash to take the taste away afterwards. but you never know. I used to not like african music. and I saw that jesus christ superstar up theatre street a few years ago, which was alright.

facebook stealth ads

March 13, 2008

dammit. I thought they’d turned off that facebook feature that knows everything about you. I mean, its not even as if I’ve frequented any dodgy online salons recently enquiring about their superior lines of treatment products. I’ve not even googled ‘alopecia’ recently (although I just did to see how you spell it). so how does facebook know that those two magic words might mean something to me?

‘hair loss’. there it is, in the left nav. complete with a baldy slaphead photo, just in case you don’t get it. I might even have been tempted if the tagline didn’t sound like the hair loss cream in question came from the same reputable source who provides me with multiple emails about getting pills ‘for you satisfy lady!’.

as they probably say on university avenue, all your demographic are belong to us. and I opted in. slap! slap! slap! I’m waiting for the full rotation of ads to determine just how well they’ve identified my needs. I’m expecting some kind of weight loss pills and at least a couple of instant debt clearance offers to pass by.

Things what I writ