Today, it is story time and Verity gives her unique interpretation of the children’s classic “The Gingerbread Man”. Despite only being two-and-a-half, she does a cracking job, complete with voices of the characters, which causes the videographer to lose his composure at a couple of points, such is the delighful nature of her delivery.
Category: Diary
The accidental collisions and seemingly random mouse clicks lead me to an amazing piece of music today. For a moment, I was transported back in time, to a younger place, a place when I was seventeen again, where the world held no obstacle and I was a superman, before the cynicism and brutality of life crushed my youthful, optimistic spirit.
There was a link thrown up on my other music site’s newsfeed about a piece of music written for eighteen electric guitars and I clicked on through to the composer’s MySpace page where I found a remarkable piece of music called “The Fourth Door” by a band called Regular Music, which was helmed and written by this chap called Jeremy Peyton Jones. Unfortunately, this album is out-of-print but luckily for me I found a copy on eBay and purchased it immediately. The music is from the minimalist movement and sounds very much in a similar vein to the experiments made by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra crossed with a healthy dollop of Michael Nyman.
Thankfully, by chance or fate or whatever, there was one copy on eBay which I bought up immediately. On perusal of the recording credits, I noticed that the percussionist on that album was a fellow called Charles Hayward who worked with a band called Quiet Sun, an experimental rock-jazz band led by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera. Of course, I am very familiar with this chap and that album but I am always bowled over by the interconnectedness of things, especially in the world of music.
This explains a lot…
As someone who has always had the urge to create, whether it be writing or music, I always wonder what makes me different to other people. Take for instance fellow musicians. In the past, through work assignments, you often come into contact with others who say: “Yes, I also play the guitar” and then you ask them if they’ve written or recorded any songs and they shake their head in the negative way. Being someone who likes to encourage people to push themselves forward, I’ve been in such guitarist’s company and explained to them how easy it is to record and offered them my services or knowledge only for them to do nothing. Then you realise that for these people playing the guitar is more of a social pursuit. It’s about getting together with friends, murdering a cover version and then having a beer. More power to them, I say, but it’s not my modus operandi.
For me it is about pushing myself forward. As I’ve bleated on before, I am not a natural musician and it has taken me years of slog to get this bad. I’ve known other folk who are naturals. Music just flows through them and I am both in awe and a little envious of their talents. I remember back at college, I got shafted into writing the play for the school musical (and then the guys that wrote the music tried to take credit for the words as well and said so in the local paper – much to my chagrin). During this time, I came into contact with a couple of the lads who were playing behind the curtain: a drummer and the bass player and they were both naturals. The drummer was the most down-to-earth, natural human being I’d come across at that age and had a natural self-assurance that people of older years tend to have. He gave me a lot of advice about people and myself and it’s those brief encounters that leave an impression. I’d forgotten his name for a while and then the other week it came back to me in a flash. Somehow my memory had dredged it up from the depths (without me even thinking about it) and I found the guy was now a top-class jazz drummer on YouTube and everything. That made me feel very good indeed. I was right – this guy really was a pro, but then you can just tell.
But I digress…the creative impulse is hard to control – or at least I find it hard to control. For me it used to be writing, but there was no challenge in it because I got to the point where I could write a novel in six weeks and what’s the fun in that? Of course, these novels were probably a load of old rot, but I wrote them purely for the excercise and not to get them published. But then I found another creative outlet and it was the music and then I discovered that this really did take effort and every victory was often marred by crashing depressions – moments where you question yourself and wonder why you waste your time producing this stuff? And then there’s the times when you want to give it all up and sell your instruments and the times when you feel that you have a direct line to the muse and the ideas just fall into your lap.
I always say to The Missus that if fate had played a different game, I might have been a cartoonist. For when I was about 10 or 11, I was fanatical about writing and drawing little cartoon strips. Loads of them, mainly sci-fi, I think it was. But then one day, my dear mother told me that she’d found my sketchbook and commended me on my sketching. The book was hidden, in private, because those cartoons where for me. So I tore up the sketchbook and never doodled again, because I felt my private world had been violated. The ability to create also comes with the need to destroy too. It’s two sides of the same coin.
I always wondered what this process was about and now I know. It is all part of the plan, I guess. Oh well, at least the music making keeps the multitude of voices in my head quiet! <---- THAT WAS A JOKE!
Oh dear, Gary Coleman of Diff’rent Strokes fame has passed away. 🙁
In ye olde days, in ye olde unenlightened days, it was quite common to open up a guitar magazine and see an advert for a guitar brand that featured a half-naked model draped around the instrument. Those days have gone, but you do often see pretty models with instruments as I guess it is much more pleasing to the eye to see them with said instrument than to see a corpulant, gut-bucket like me standing there with pizza stains on his T-shirt and three-days stubble growth on his chin. Mind you, at least I got to use a blog title that nicked from a Sparks LP (although subtly altered for my purposes).
But I digress…
My attention was driven towards an article on the Daily Mail website that features the daughter-in-law of playwright Tom Stoppard appearing in the all-together in a feeble attempt to advertise a £1 million violin that she’s involved with that’s encrusted with Swarovski crystals. To be honest, the violins look nicer on their own, but at least it gives me a chance to post pictures of half-naked women on my blog…the shame!
Nice violin, shame about the…err…
You can hear more from Linzi Stoppard at her own official website here.
Image via Wikipedia
What’s the collective noun for a pair of wankers?
It’s a good read, I promise.