I haven’t been paying attention to my website stats of late and I just checked the download figures for last month and during October 2011 my website shifted a ball-breaking 295Gb (yes, gigabytes) of data – mainly the audio and video files that I have created. This is a personal best. I am flabbergasted…and slightly scared…
Tag Archive: 2011
I just heard that composer David Bedford has passed away. I came to him via his association with Mike Oldfield and remember at the height of my record collecting days (late 80s-early 90s) being completely entranced by his “The Odyssey” album. I was due to see him in November when he was due to appear with Roy Harper, but alas that moment has passed. I was really looking forward to it too.
This is a track that he and Oldfield did in 1977.
And here’s a link to his website.
I don’t ever send music off for review or to record companies or to whatever. My music is mine and belongs to me and no-one else. I decided to send a copy of “The Luckiest Man in the World” to Sound on Sound – a magazine I have read since the early 1990s and is key to my musical education – in order to see if I could get some feedback on the quality of my music production. Unfortunately, the review didn’t really go that way and evolved into a more traditional music review. The criticism is valid, but I was hoping for more on my mixing and overall sound of my album. Oh well, maybe I should make some sweeping soundtracks instead?
Look at my manic, smiling face - hee hee hee...
And to mark this epic review, I might as well point you in the direction of where you can get it:
I’ve kept schtum about the moronic hoards that have destroyed hard-working people’s businesses, properties and communities during the past few days. In the past, the disenfranchised rioted because they had nothing or were rallying against a political idea or even massed against injustice. But over the last few days, there’s been none of this. It has been opportunist chaos, a chance to raise hell and not face the consequences. It’s sad because the only people they are hurting are themselves because it is their own communities that have been damaged. Money will drift out of the area and those businesses won’t return – the infrastructure weakened, you turn your community into a ghetto. Well done, have a banana! Pat yourself on the back with the self-satifised glow of idiot glee.
The fallout (and I mean literal fallout) has been huge chunks of ashes from the local riots drifting out to us. In the garden and around our property are large chunks of burnt wood – the remnants of the riots.
Should I put them on eBay and give others the opportunity to own a genuine piece of the action?
Own your own piece of the action...contact me for details!
My favourite picture of the kids on a mug...
This is a model plane Verity and myself made this afternoon.
Madness, yes they call it madness...
Last night I slummed it, dear reader. Yes, instead of stroking my chin to 20-minute progressive rock epics about starship troopers or killer fish, I was bopping to some two-tone style classics.
It’s hard to review a band with Madness’s pedigree. They are a multi-limbed juggernaut of hits. They cannot be stopped. They will just roll over you like a steam roller, so it is best just to wallow in the nostalgia, enjoy the new stuff and do your best to sing along.
It was my first visit to the RFH since the refurbishment thanks to my self-imposed exile and I was duly impressed with the changes and the comfort of the new seating. Of course, there’s never enough legroom, but what can you do about it? Hire a wheelchair and do a “Lou and Andy” in order to get to the best seats. That has crossed my mind on numerous occasions…
The striking thing about the night was not the band or the music, it was the audience and their complete lack of co-ordination. For I have never witnessed such a shambolic attempt at “dancing” in my life. It was as if five bus loads of lobotomised, highly-sedated, old age pensioners had been shoved into the hall and instructed to “do their stuff”.
Then there was the hooray henry behind me who had been to grammar school, owned all the albums and proceeded to bore his female associate/girlfriend with his knowledge of Ray Davis, Madness, the Meltdown festival and any other subject that might come his way. His mouth was lubricated by a large pinot grigio “I saw the small, and the medium and realised that the large was the only way to go,” he said as his voice seemed to get louder and louder. Throughout the concert he would shout, holler and whistle and generally be the twat of the gig, and I had him behind me. I’d had a couple of gigs like this before, and this is why I prefer to be sober at concerts because if I’d had a few sherberts inside me I think I would have told the toe-rag to shut his pie-hole and enjoy the music. Unfortunately, this would have been accompanied with a threat of violence.
But yes, the audience was predominantly OLD and I kept hearing Pete “It was for research” Townshend’s words “I hope I die before I get old” echoing in my head, which is a bit trite from someone who has just entered middle-age. Fuck me, I’m middle-aged! No-one sent me the manual…
The band were impeccable, thundering through all the hits and were what you expected. I paid for an evening of Madness doing their thing and that’s what I got, and cannot be disappointed with that. Ray Davies actually introduced the band, but it was hard to follow what he was saying because Mr Pinot Grigio behind me was too busy flapping his mouth about the Kinks and Jerry Dammers and whatever.
While many of the audience decided to rise to their feet and jigger about at the very beginning of the concert – much to the consternation of the row of disabled punters whose view was blocked and the families with children who were too small to see and busied themselves trying to move themselves to a better vantage point – I decided to keep my powder dry and only shake my money maker towards the final stage of the concert, when the big hits were out – Our House, Baggy Trousers and It Must Be Love, etc. That way, while the oldsters were all flagging and searching for their cod liver oil tablets, me and the Missus were fresh and bopping like youngsters. Ha, epic win!
The gig was a good evening out and nothing else. For me, there was a distance between the music and myself probably because at the beginning the sound mix was very muddy and it took the sound people three or four songs to get the balance right. Plus, it didn’t help having the hooray behind me playing at being the poshest Madness fan in the hall.
But I heard all the hits, saw the band and even had a dance – so I guess it was a successful evening. As their guitarist said before his attempt at murdering Ray Davies’s “Where Did All the Good Times Go?” – “It’s not like there’s anything good on the telly tonight, is there?”
‘Nuff said!
Verity celebrates the Royal Wedding
Verity got behind the Royal Wedding and so did I. We made our own flag for Verity to wave, using a drum stick and a piece of A4 paper.
Don’t it make yer feel proud to be a Brit? Huzzah!
(And of course we wish the happy couple a happy and prosperous future)