You are allowed to enjoy this…

Oh well, the incident known as “The Great Chapman Stick Debacle” is over. After much humming and ahhing and gnashing of teeth and impotent frustration, I reluctantly sold the instrument. Today it will be winging its way to a new owner and I managed to make a £100 profit to boot. Oh well, every cloud has a silver lining. As I have been a little preoccupied with said 10-string beast, I’ve not been doing much recording (even with the Stick). A night or so, I started a doodle. It’s another sketch and I doubt I’ll be able to make anything decent out of it.

Direct download: CLICK HERE
Managed to sell nearly the whole crate of CDs on eBay. There’s been an awful lot of envelopes to stuff and stick – almost a cottage industry. Going to do a second sift of the collection and see what else can go. Whooppeee!

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the Chapman Stick. It’s a strange instrument that requires the player to touch the strings onto the fretboard. For about ten years I’ve been trying to get hold of a cheap one. Last week, I was lucky enough to nab one on eBay. It arrived on Friday and I have spent the weekend experimenting with the instrument. It’s a lovely, wonderfully crafted instrument. Here are some pics:




Unfortunately, two factors have caused me to put the item back up on eBay. The first was that despite being able to play rudimentary basslines on it, I just couldn’t find a way of integrating into my existing setup. It sounded too…well, like a Stick. It was obvious that I hadn’t thought this through. I like my bass to sound like a bass and this just made me sound like Tony Levin. Did I really want this? The second factor was Highbury House being put into receivership, which was also announced on Friday. Oh the irony. When the going gets rough, the unnecessarily expensive instruments go on eBay. It’s a shame…I don’t want to sell it but I keep telling myself that it sounds rubbish and doesn’t compliment my music as a way of softening the blow.
So if you want to bid on this item (or know someone who wants to get hold of a cheap Chapman Stick) head over to here. If you mention this website, I’ll knock some cash off as a discount. 😉
Meanwhile, the sale of my record collection continues here.
Now I am off to sulk in the corner…

So Highbury House went into receivership. Well I didn’t see that coming (sarcasm). It was obvious that there was no way the company could survive after such mismanagement and a huge mountain of debt. So where does that leave freelancers like me? Without cash, I guess. Again, this post is a heads-up to those googling Highbury House and receivership. Paragon Publishing, the company I wrote for on a regular basis, was a subsidiary of Highbury and has been bought up by Imagine Publishing, which is owned by Paragon’s ex-owner Damien Butt. Whether or not I get anymore work is debatable (and to be honest, I don’t know if I want to chance my arm again. Once bitten, twice shy, etc). The current issue is the loss of earnings from this collapse. I doubt I’ll get the significant sum owed to me. There’s no protection for the likes of me. The problem is the knock-on effect this missing money has. In the summer (and next January), the taxman will come sniffing around and expect me to pay him. Well I can’t at this juncture. With my salary slashed by this crash and work drying up rapidly like watering hole in the Serengheti mid-day sun, I am well and truly stuffed.
Oh well, you got to laugh, ain’t ya?

I was lucky enough to catch the news that there’s a whale swimming in the River Thames. It’s the first time since records began in 1913 that a whale has been seen. Dolphins have been known to swim in the Thames but not a whale. Of course, marine biologists are worried that the animal might get trapped or beached in the river and are hoping that when the tide turns, the animal will swim back out to sea. Anyway, here’s the clip I managed to nab for the records from Sky News:

In the post yesterday: new guitar strings, some Lil Hum’r Nut Sauce (to stabilise my tuning problems with my Godin XTSA) and a guitar cleaning kit. I changed the strings on my bass for the first time since I bought it. Thinking back, this was probably the first time I had restrung a bass in about 5 years. When it comes to bass strings, I tend to leave them on until they go rusty as I don’t tend to worry about the trebly, bright side of the side, preffering a more muddy sound. The guitar cleaning kit, including some lemon oil for the fretboard, brought a new lustre to the instrument. Usually, I use Mr Sheen and an old rag to clean my guitars, but now I have seen the light.
Got a nice rejection letter from a publisher yesterday regarding “Dead Rock Star” – they said it was an interesting project, but unsuitable for them as they published more literary novels, rather than fantasy-styled fiction. Of course, the cynic in me says that this was probably just a standard letter and some machine spouted it in my direction. But the idea that another human being thought it was interesting gives me a little hope, even it if it is misplaced.

The sunset was a spectacular one again. Despite the day being murky, I suddenly noticed a very red glow spreading across the sky as the remains of the day disappeared into the west. I grabbed my camera, ran into the garden and snapped this:

The sky is on fire…
Meanwhile, Google Video are offering some cool content for download and purchase. But the really interesting thing is that some record companies are allowing their videos out into the public domain. They give you the option to post links on your website of a handful of music videos. And so I present Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” without fear of getting buggered by the RIAA:

This video was one of my earliest memories as a child and because of this Queen were the first rock band I got into. I only really like their first four albums these days, but they were certainly unique. I don’t agree with what’s happened post-Mercury and believe that very often you should let sleeping dogs lie, but I guess it gives some of the younger fans to experience a quasi-Queen concert experience. And now you can witness exactly what Queen + Paul Rodgers is like courtesy of Google Video:

Recently, I have completed the complex purchase of an equally complex musical instrument. More news when the item arrives here in good old Blighty. 😉

Over the weekend, I completed the first 60 sales from my record collection on eBay. These were a few box sets and other items I no longer wanted to gather dust in the dark. The who lot netted me around £500 so I am pretty pleased so far. Now I have an entire blue crate of excess stuff to put up on the auction site. Again, the feeling for me is one of almost euphoria as I let go of this stuff. It is liberating and I have vowed that once the first crate of gear is shifted, I will sift through my collection again and dump even more. It is my ambition to have only two crates of CDs in the house at any one time.
Meanwhile, I was going doing a bit of spring cleaning in my music archive and found a few unfinished ideas that I had recorded last year. These are all acoustic pieces and were recorded on my old Fender 12 and 6 string guitar. Both of these instruments have since been sold. I was just getting to grips with the 12 string again, so please forgive many of the fluffed lines and squeaky fingers. 🙁

Direct download: http://www.darrenlock.com/media/a1(demo).mp3

Direct download: http://www.darrenlock.com/media/pingpong(demo).mp3

Direct download: http://www.darrenlock.com/media/awful acoustic(demo).mp3
Enjoy!

Well in the past few days I’ve been going through the five large blue crates that contains my CD collection and I’ve managed to sort out an entire crate’s worth of music that can go. The first lot of these items have been loaded onto eBay for sale. The weird thing is that I don’t feel any upset with this anymore. Before I would have felt a little miserable, but this feels quite liberating actually and I am considering shifting the rest of it too. I feel so disconnected with my music collection that I might as well profit out of it while I can. But I realise that it is nice to have a purge and that you can’t live in a sub-branch of HMV. The only downside to all of this is that it could take me a couple of months to actually shift all of this stuff.
Celebrity Big Brother is turning into car-crash TV and real guilty pleasure…no, actually pleasure isn’t the word because I am finding some of it genuinely unsettling. It’s obvious that some of the freaks in there need psychiatric attention and shouldn’t even be on the programme. Meanwhile, the sight of Pete Burn’s skinny white ass in tights is almost as unpleasant as his fucked up face. In Victorian times, the upper classes used to roam the asylums for their fun…now we have it pumped live and direct into our homes.
While CBB is a toilet, it’s good to see the BBC investing in original drama and so I did enjoy Life on Mars a couple of nights back. It uses a central conceit often used in novels (Irvine Welsh’s Carabou Stork Nightmares, Alex Garland’s The Coma) or TV (Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective) where the central character is trapped in a coma nightmare and his surroundings are just a construct of his symptoms. While the writing is a little wobbly and some of the authenticism just a little too brown for my liking, you have to watch this with your tongue in your cheek and the voices of The Sweeney’s Regan and Carter ringing in your ears. Of course, it’s going to end with John Simm discovering one of the major baddies is himself and he’ll wake up from the coma. (Or he might not, if the Beeb wants a second series). But I just keep marking the days off the calendar for the return of Dr Who.
If you have been coming here via Google about the Highbury House/Paragon crash, then I would like to take this opportunity to provide an update for that. My contact at Paragon informed me that although he doesn’t know what the future holds, the company does intend to pay its freelancers. The downside to this is that because magazines have been closed and he has had to absorb extra staff from those magazines, there’s going to be little or no freelance work for us loyal writers. So it looks as if another door closes…ho hum…
Anyone going to volunteer to give me that kick in the ass?
Meanwhile, someone yesterday told me I was in The Guardian. There I was thinking that they were maybe talking me up about my writing or my music and it seems that they had quoted my Golden Wonder lament. Oh well…in a weird way, I feel honoured.