You are allowed to enjoy this…

The following review has come in courtesy of music website Jamendo:
Music to My Ears wrote:
Very Laid Back, Chilled, Calm Album
8 out of 10
15/05/09
A very laid back, chilled, calm album. Filled with lovely,beautiful filled, rock, instrumental, guitar, progressive, musical tracks. That are produced, composed and performed to a high standard. Excellent album, to relax, sit back and simply enjoy, as a great background music, or even to meditate along to.
Excuse the punctuation there as many of the listeners at Jamendo are from the European continent with English not as their mother language. If you want to go over to Jamendo and leave a review and rating, head over to:
http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45201

The parliamentary expenses crisis rumbles onwards. After watching the mealy-mouthed Margaret Beckett patronise the British public last night: “You wouldn’t understand why we need to claim so much money because you are so stupid…it’s because we want to sit on stinking great piles of cash paid for by you.” OK, she didn’t say that, but she might as well have said. And then you had Ming The Merciless Campbell justifying his £10,000 refurbishment bill. Heck, if he needed his love pad tarted up, he should have done the decent thing and met the expenses halfway and gone 50/50. But no, we foot the bill…we always will do.
The worrying thing about this is that I am increasingly agreeing with the fucking Conservatives. I find myself nodding along to Tebbit (spit) who says don’t vote Tory at the Euro elections to punish them. And agreeing with Widdiecombe and last night Theresa May. I think that the world has gone mad or at least I have passed into some sort of alternative Bizarro-world multiverse where everything I believe has become perverted and the opposite of what I know.
Some say that it is only money and we shouldn’t complain. But these are supposedly honourable members of parliament who we have trusted with our electoral power. But if we can’t trust them to do their expenses, then how can we trust them to make decisions on our behalf. Massage chairs and home cinema systems come first in this political world.
These people aren’t fit for purpose and are criminals. I will repeat myself again: they are criminals. They have committed fraud and have stolen our money. The rules are clear if you read them. Expenses are for items that will aid their work in parliament and should not be viewed as extravagent or unnecessary by the public. “But we were only following the rules,” they bleat. No, no you were not. Claiming for mortgages you’ve paid, rent that doesn’t exist and generally using the public’s money as your personal investment account is not sticking to the rules.
So we have a political system that is broken. OK, there are many members of parliament who don’t fiddle their expenses and who are blame free, but one rotten apple spoils the barrel. And if they are blameless, they should be judged by their electorate.
I was thinking about this and realised that the Queen should dissolve parliament and we should start again. Clear out the rubbish naturally, by our own hand and try to regain our political trust.
Thankfully, one guy has already started an online vote. I suggest you add your voice to this. Of course, nothing will actually happen but at least you can expend your impotant rage with a mouse click. It is either that or we join together and reclaim parliament by force.
Who’s got the AK47s????

I remember the Manic Street Preachers. They used to be good once, when I was young, when they had melody lines that burnt into your brain like “Motorcycle Emptiness” and “A Design For Life”. Now it seems the band has inadvertantly caused controversy with its new album sleeve.

Journal for Plague Lovers (Art by Jenny Saville)
Apparently, the powers-that-be at Sainsburys will be selling this CD in a plain sleeve just in case the artwork might cause offence. I balk at this, I really do. Obviously, some sensitive soul sees blood and gore instead of having any appreciaton for artistic technique or the education to understand the art in front of them. They obviously have no experience of art and I wonder what they’d make of some of Lucien Freud’s darker pieces. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy continues as they will probably be selling copies of Nuts and Zoo with boobs, bums and wobbly bits on show, and copies of women’s weekly shlock mags that have headlines like “Boyfriend raped my baby” and appear to the rubbernecker instinct in us.
It is plain to me that we live in a childish, stupid society with no common sense or ability to process visual information at a higher level. Arsehats!

It’s nice when people compliment you. I’ve had two compliments in just as many days for my music, so I am feeling flushed and giddy as a lovesick schoolgirl. I give enough of this stuff away, so it is very heartening when someone takes the time to thank you. It’s is a rare thing and I know it takes a lot of effort to pen nice words, so it always is a good thing when you get a little virtual slap on the back.
Dom Langham of France wrote:
“Thanks for your music.You’re a great dreamer, composer and musician. I like this.
If you have a moment, take a look at my website : http://www.myspace.com/yin_yang_music
I’m a musician like you… but i don’t have your talent.
Thanks a lot,
Dom”
And thank you Dom for taking the time to write.

Well firstly it seems that Twitter was invented just for his self-important parrumphing. I forgave him for that because he is “Britain Favourite Upper Class IntellectualTM”. However, his true colours were revealed yesterday when he was interviewd by the BBC News regarding the current furore over politicians’ expenses claims.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8045869.stm
Now I’ve been described as a journalist once, but I was one of those types who never really took advantage of the expense culture. I’ve known other who would claim for a cup of coffee (though they came unstuck with the taxman who successfully argued with them that they would have drunk the coffee regardless of their job assignment and so wasn’t eligible for reclaimation). In this interview, Fry claims that the general upset about the Parliamentary expenses is nothing and that journalists are just as bad/greedy/dishonest.
Well that might be true, but the difference between a hack bumping up his expenses and a member of parliament elected to represent his constituency claiming for toilet seats, moat cleaning and the other trappings of the upper-middle classes is that it is directly paid for my Johnny Taxpayer, you and me. Now I don’t mind paying for their travel expenses or their staff or those things that will help them execute their position in the best way possible, but I do resent the signals sent out by Parliament.
On one hand, we have Brown and Cameron bleating on about austerity and tightening our belts. We have politicians running down single mothers, benefit cheats, and telling us how to spend our money or who should be given social aid. But all along they are no better than the tax dodgers and benefit cheats that they rail against.
In the old days, politics was a game for those later in life, for those who had seen everything and actually wanted to change things for their fellow man. They didn’t need expense accounts or their moats cleaned at the public’s cost – they had earned their money and made their connections before they hit parliament. It was never about MONEY – but about politics.
Nowadays, politicians enter the arena as a career choice, not a socio-political choice. You have people there who have trained specifically to end up being elected, with no experience of us common folk. So you end up with this detached, money-grabbing, political cabal that act in absolute collusion to maintain their own expensive lifestyles.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can go to the wall, lose our jobs, homes and savings thanks to years of mismanagement by the Labour Goverment and failed opposition by the Tories. I am a Labour support, I am a left-winger, but it is the current government that got us into this position and encouraged a decade of living on credit.
Yes, I do have a credit card and a mortgage, but my total debts to the bank is less than a third of the value of my home/business, which is pretty fucking fantastic compared to the national average debt without mortgages (I think it is supposed to be £21,000 on credit cards or something).
But I digress. These people who we have elected, who we have trusted, have stolen from us. They have stolen money, and are no better than the dole cheat, or the guy who avoids his tax or doesn’t buy his road tax or MOT. They are the criminal underclass and are no longer fit for purpose.
We all have a right to feel anger at the current situation and arseholes like Stephen Fry prove that this really is a class war. You work, you pay for these people, while they employ the best accountants, solicitors and advisors who will show them how to avoid paying tax and dodging the cost of life the rest of us have to bear.
If I could, I would start my own political party and encourage others to join to stand against these criminals, but you need cold, hard cash to make such a campaign a reality. So in the meantime, I would encourage everyone to write a letter of disgust to Gordon Brown, David Cameron or whoever represents the broken political party you support.
Stephen Fry – you are still an absolute arsehat…

Over at the Cakewalk Forum (which is all about audio recording software SONAR), someone heard my music and said that “you got skills”. I think that in modern parlance that this is a good thing. I think the young folk was complimenting me. I am honoured. I Got Skills…
(I think I might use this as the name of my next compilation album! Though I think it sounds more like something from the movie Napoleon Dynamite. Still it makes me smile at the thought of having some sort of skills – this is almost as good as the time when I was in Los Angeles and buying a guitar at Sam Ash near the Virgin Megastore in Hollywood and the goth girl behind the counter was really getting off on the fact that I was a bona fide genuine Brit who played guitar. I could have gotten off with her. Even the Missus said so!).

For those of you who can’t wait, here’s the album to listen to in full: