You are allowed to enjoy this…

Jah Wobble has been an artist that has slipped in and out of my consciousness for the last fifteen years or so. I remember distinctly helping The Missus with a packaging project for her university degree and going into the local Woolworths to raid their bargain bin for cheap CDs. One of them was “Becoming More Like God” and there were quite a few copies going for 99p so we bought a few in order to bastardise the gatefold digipack sleeves for The Missus’s own designs. That’s how forward-thinking and industrious we were in those good, old days.

Of course, I gave the disc a spin before heartlessly ripping the digipack apart and modifying it to The Missus’s requirements. Of course, since then there have been various TV appearances and his “greatest misses” package came my way about six years ago, which was a very interesting prospect. I was also entranced by his work on Eno’s Spinner project, which was an extension/revision of Eno’s Jarman-based Glitterball non-soundtrack.

Where am I going with this, you is probably asking? Well I pretend to be an uncultured buffoon, I like to play up to my class and pretend that I drag my knuckles on the pavement, beat my wife and have a closed mind, but nothing could be more contrary to the truth. Without sounding like an online dating advert: I actually enjoy museums, art galleries and have even seen a ballet or two in my time. Fuck me, Darren. You sure you ain’t some kind of shirt-lifting jobby-jabber, trapped in a lavender marriage?
No, I pretend that I don’t read and an I’m the archetypal East End yob because I have nothing to prove and it is easier to play up to expectations. But seriously, one of the reasons I don’t read, especially fiction, is because when I come to write my own works, the influence of what I’ve read is often too strong and I find myself inadvertantly writing in the style I’ve been reading, adopting all the semantic ticks and quirks, and diluting my own style. So I steer clear of fiction because it is bad for me as an artist.
However, I do have a penchent for biographies, especially music biographies. It’s obvious really because I love music and I also want to seek our the shared experiences of other artistes. It’s something I really enjoy and I should do more of if I had the time. Sometimes they don’t really get to the nuts and gravy of the person (pick almost any Bowie biog), but I’ve read a book recently that is an essential read – even if you don’t like music.
Now this bit is where my intro collides with the actual theme of this entry. Somehow I stumbled over the fact that Jah Wobble had written his own biography and I was compelled to buy it. Don’t ask me why: I’m not his biggest fan, but I’ve always had an admiration for his work ethic and prodigious output. I can’t stand artists who spend 10 years releasing albums (I’m looking at you Gabriel) because they ain’t really musicians. Musicians are people who think music all the time and find rhythms and inspirations in all moments of waking life.
Anyway, I bought “Memoirs of a Geezer” last week as a birthday treat and read it from cover to cover, despite constant protestations from Verity to “put the daddy book down”. Jah Wobble is a bit of an arsehole during his early years, but even he would admit to that, nearly ruining his life through excess, but always maintaining a way of providing for his family.

In his writing voice, this is someone who spoke to me in my own voice. Someone who was from the East End of London, who saw the ridiculous in everything and could see people for what they were. He is someone who was conflcted as an artist: does he piss his time away making music or get a proper job, he asks? This is someone who doesn’t take bullshit and takes actions often to his own detriment.
This is the first book I’ve read where it answered some of my own internal questions and provided me with a grounding to who I am and why I tick the way I tick. I’m like this because of class and geography. You cannot change who you are, even though you might get the right haircut or change your accent. He also charts the cultural changes in the East End and echoes my own views.
Before reading this book I was seriously thinking of calling it quits on making any more music because I felt I’ve done enough and no-one is really listening and unless I am “out there” I am really wasting my time. But reading this book got me to realise that if you can do, you should do. If you have a talent, you should at least attempt to share it with the world.
Thanks Jah, I owe you one!

The auditions at StudioLock fall a little flat as Verity shows me her chops on the Korg Wavedrum…

On 17th February 2007, at approximately 1pm, my wife and I viewed our current property with regards to purchasing it. Today, 17th February 2010, at approximately 1pm, a man and his wife visited our property with regards to purchasing it.
It’s those kind of coincidences (and there’s been a lot in my life) that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I seem to be in a real negative fug at the moment. The downward spiral continues to go downwards and there’s no way to steer towards the sky. Everything I see or do is cloudied by the negative and it is really getting to me. The only thing that lifts me is playing with the kids.
I’m fed up with being this complete and utter twat for the rest of my life. Why am I continually hemmed in by my own limitations? I bore me, so I must be boring you right now.

I bought myself a pair of surround sound headphones so I can do mixes in silences without disturbing sleeping children. They are Zalman ZM-RS6F headphones and while they are supremely shit for music mixing, they are quite effective for watching movies in surround sound. The problem with these headphones is the separation is pretty poor for music and there appears to be no subwoofer/LFE speaker channel, so everything feels a little hollow.
But despite the limitations, I did a reference mix of “START” in surround sound and it wasn’t too bad. Obviously, some of the levels are way out but it is a useful and quick way of at least positioning audio for mixes. I can then connect the laptop to my proper surround sound speakers when I have ten minutes and fix the mixes properly.
Mind you, the surround sound version of START is woeful. You can almost hear the gaps in the music, such was my poor playing and scant ideas back in those days. It’s not really suited for surround, but I did it anyway.
So there…who cares really? Anyone? No…people only come here to read about “In the Night Garden”, my gay hands or to find out what the Korg Wavedrum/Digitech Timebender/Epiphone Les Paul with MIDI pickup is all about.
Moan, whinge, spit…

Looking through the files for 2000s “Touched by the King”, I remember that I had a couple of CD-Rs fail on me back in the good old days and there are only half the original master tracks still in existence. This is a bummer, because a couple of those that are gone and lost forever are really nice songs that needed polishing up. On the plus side, I’ve found a couple of undiscovered gems on the disc that were never previously “released” into the listening world. Granted, they are only ambient audio splodges but they really show off what the Roland GR-1 can do. I’ll post them when I begin the archiving properly.

When I started recording digitally on my home computer, things were very different to now. Today, we take for granted the GIgabytes of storage data that’s luxuriously provided by external hard drives, memory sticks and the like. Back in 1999, hard drives were tiny in comparison to now and if I wanted to buy an external backup drive, it would have probably been tape-based and cost me the same price as a small bungelow in Diss.
So in those dim-dark-days, you put your faith into recordable CD, which was still a relatively new medium. I remember my first CD-writer. It was a Hewlett Packard and I took great joy in spending over £250 on it and installing it into my home PC. In those days, I was paid with buckets of pound coins on an almost hourly basis, so money really was no object.
The only problem was this drive was a piece of shit. It wouldn’t write to the media, the discs were either wasted, or worked for a while before becoming corrupt and even the recommended Hewlett Packard branded discs wouldn’t work. Eventually, and after piles of shiny coasters produced by yours truly, I found some discs that would work with it.
The downside is that these discs seemed to have a self-destruct function and over time became unreadable. It is a fucking miracle that I’ve got any of my old music masters available, but sadly some tracks have been lost forever. I’ve gone over this old ground recently with my archiving project and it is sad when a particular song or mix exists no more in its fundamental parts. There’s no chance to revisit, reassess and sprinkle magic audio dust over the tracks. Those songs become fixed points in time and space, never to be changed again.
In one way this is a good thing because it preserves them, like prehistoric insects trapped in amber, and means that I can’t make a dog’s breakfast of the remix. But it is sad to think that I can’t make these songs sound a little bit better.
It also makes me grateful for this day and age when digital storage is abundant and relatively cheap compared to a decade ago. Now all my work exists on my hard drive, as well as being backed up on my network hard drive which has a backup. So effectively, there are three copies of my creative efforts at any one time.
How things have changed…for the better!