You are allowed to enjoy this…

Just discovered that someone had very kindly written a short, positive review of my “Sows’ Ears & Silk Purses” 4-CD boxet.

GREAT BUY – BETTER OWN
Reviewer: staticmerry
AMAZING package! Well presented. Value for money. 4 disk set means your to find the musical ark of DARREN LOCK, from start to today, smoothly polished.
How cool is that? And I didn’t even have to sleep with anyone for that to happen! 🙂

I like the Simpsons…

I also like Little Britain…

So the story in the newspapers today is how some of the characters from Little Britain might be heading to Springfield. Here are two images of characters from LB that have been given a Simpsons makeover, courtesy of The Sun & The Evening Standard.

I love the TV series “Spaced”. I also loved “Shaun of the Dead”. Both of these were directed by beardy clever-git Edgar Wright. Anyway, he’s just finished a pop video and here is it for you to see. How many stars of UK comedy can you spot in this? It’s called “Bastardo” and it is by Charlotte Hatherley (obviously the talented one from universally crap Oirish grunge-pop band Ash).

Hey, I quite liked it!

Whoo-hoo! Pay day today. I received a cheque for some work I did in October (yes, the only problem with being a freelancer is the long waits between finishing the work and receiving the money. Normally, I have to whinge like a bitch just to get a sniff of any cash, but this time around they paid up on time, which was nice of them).

More money came courtesy of CDBABY. It was $4.95 – OK, that’s not much, but that is pure profit from sales from Apple iTunes (US & Europe), Napster & Real Rhapsody. Now if you factor in that I get paid 65 cents for every download and a penny for every streamed play, you can understand my excitement. I must be selling something like seven songs a month. 🙂 All this and I don’t even promote my own music properly. So I can feel my big fat head get a little bigger with big fat pride. Uh-oh…

But if I can do this, can you imagine the kind of turnover proper recording artists are making from the digital download boom? And if you are an independent artist, own your own copyright and basically DIY without the big record companies, even if you don’t earn the big bucks, you can be happy in the knowledge that you get a bigger royalty cut than your musical peers with a record contract! 🙂

I guess the next thing would be to do a national tour. If only, eh? But I am still practising for possible live action. It’s still a bit of a dream, but I have worked out a number of stripped-down backing tracks for me to play lead guitar along to. My problem is whether or not punters will like to hear my music and whether or not they will accept instrumental guitar music without a proper band backing me up? I can’t see it myself, but I really would like to give it a crack. Here I am, 33 years old (turning 34) and I finally feel the confidence of my performance and music growing.

Crazy, ain’t it?

I am wearing my black armband today because I am in mourning. Why? Don’t worry, no-one has died. For five years, between 1995 and 2000, I worked for a company called Intelfax who specialised in teletext. For those of you outside the UK, teletext is a means of transmitting data via a TV set – you could almost call it a non-linear, non-interactive version of the Internet (but not as pretty).

Anyway, I used to look after the regional teletext services for a couple of regional TV stations and this was a daily, thankless job of making sure TV listings were correct and writing synopses of TV programmes. When it was busy, it was hard work because teletext is meant to be instantaneous and when a TV host says “And for more details, check out teletext page 6xx” the information had to be there for people to access.

Anyway, I digress. Last night, for the first time in about 9 months, I checked the regional teletext service to see what films were on TV and it wasn’t there. There was just a message to say it had been discontinued. 🙁
So that’s why I am in mourning.

For an irreverent peek at what I used to do, check out this website.

I used to look after the Carlton, LWT and GMTV services…and the mistakes lampooned were all done when I was on holiday, honest! 🙂 It’s good because even though the services are gone, my work and page designs (yes, I did the little graphics and logos on those pages) still live on in cyberspace. Hurrah!

More cheap CDs from the local Sainsburys bought by The Missus:
Suede: The Singles
I should have gotten into Suede at the time, but I prefered the off-centre stylings of Pulp over the sub-Bowie gloss of Brett Anderson and Suede. Suede are OK – but they never really pushed themselves. They got stuck in an incredibly boring verse, chorus, verse song structure Hell.
The Kings of Leon: Youth and Young Manhood
I like simple three chord, balls out, hairy rock and roll like this. 😀 I would like to be in a band like this but my hair fell out and my balls aren’t that pretty.
Peter Gabriel: Hit
OK – I’ve heard all this before, but The Missus picked this up so she could listen to it in the car on the way to work. My record collection is your record collection. This means Adam Ant and the Pet Shop Boys sit next to Van der Graaf Generator and King Crimson.

The first review of the new Lemon Jelly album ’64-’95 has appeared here. I am really looking forward to this record and the review is comforting and hasn’t dampened my ardour.