You are allowed to enjoy this…

Ortho Stice commented on my post about Vampire Weekend:

Oh come on, Darren. Vampire Weekend are yet another group of privileged white kids stealing sweet beats from Africa. We all have heard this before on our Afro-Fusion compilation CDs.

One could also foolishly argue that all rock and roll comes from Africa, but does that mean Elvis shouldn’t have curled his lip and wiggled his hip? Influence and inspiration are good things. When you mix two or three or four different genres together you make something new. I’m not saying Vampire Weekend are particularly new, but at least they are trying to move outside the current trend of spiky guitar pop. The use of a mellotron also scores extra points.

Quirky video – check!
Spiky guitars – check!
Retro geek chic – check!
Superb use of a melltron – double check!
Welcome to my new favourite band: Vampire Weekend. In an effort to stay hip with the kids, I always keep my ear out for new tunes that touch me in some way. This band’s album came up on eMusic and I gave it a try. It mixes 1979 pop sensibilities with the rhythms of Soweto and a dash of prog-rock mellotron. The album is good fun, if a little samey in parts, but the hooks are good and that’s what makes good pop music.

Surround sound mixing is not something I’ve been particularly impressed with when experiencing other musician’s work presented in that format. It always seems to me to be a bit of a gimmick and an excuse for guitars to go flying all over the sound stage.
However, I’ve known that Sonar Producer Edition can handle surround sound mixing for a while and seeing as I have a home cinema speaker setup at home, I thought it would be a jolly wheeze to present some of my material in this format too. Of course, I needed to make a budget for such an ambitious remixing project, so I set aside £10 to buy a new soundcard that could handle 5.1 sound for my laptop and got to work.
It was obvious that Textures is the only piece in my repertoire that deserves such a remix because there’s enough space and depth of instrumentation in the mix to do a satisfactory job. And so here it is.
There are two ways that you can get Textures [Surround Sound Mix]. The first is to download something called an ISO file which will allow you to burn your own DVD of the track for playback in a DVD player connected to a surround sound system. The downside to this is that the file is over 1Gb in size and you’ll have to burn your own DVD. The second option is to download a multi-channel Windows Media Audio file. It’s not as good as the DVD option in terms of audio quality but you can play it back on a PC or XBox 360 connected to a surround sound speaker setup. So what do you want to do?
Download Textures DVD ISO File
Enjoy!

Here are some comments cut from the WWW about my tunes:
Via Jamendo:
“musictomyears” wrote about Without Words:
Fantastic. 10 out of 10
This man has ability with his music, each piece of much is so different and so catchy and more you listen more you want to listen to his music. love this album.
“codearray” wrote about “A Pocketful of Stars”:
Great 10 out of 10
I love the album, but torrent files aren’t seeded. I think this the best album you have done so far. Keep up the good work.
Via YouTube:
NeronDomitius has made the comment on Seville:
Middle eastern touch of perfection. Your work is always fantastic, keep ’em coming mate.

Today was a disaster movie made flesh. We had a flash-flood that lasted an hour. A torrential downpour that actually scared me, but at least I discovered that I can cope under pressure. The shop suddenly flooded and I found myself armed with mop and bucket, trying my best to bail out. That failed, so I soaked up excess rain water with cardboard boxes and use the hard brush to force the water out of the shop. Thankfully, we held it back and won that battle.
As the rain seemed to subside, there was a small lightning flash in the distance. As I looked out of the shop doorway to see where the lightning was heading, there was an almightly flash of light and the crack of thunder almost instaneously after it. I leapt back, my vision a mess of colours and my teeth rattling in my head – my fillings felt like they were vibrating.
We had a massive electrical storm over the village, the resulting snaking bolt of lightning came in through the window upstairs, blew up my modem and AV amp that powers my surround sound system. In the shop, our PayPoint and credit card processing machine got fried. The funny thing is both the amp and the PayPoint machine were disconnected from the mains. The Missus and Baby V were in the living room at the time and saw the electrical charge come in through the room. The sound upset the baby. Normally, I would turn off electrical equipment and unplug it from the wall at the first sign of a lightning storm, but I didn’t even get the chance.
Truly terrifying.
This place is cursed.
I hate it so much.

A topical joke:
The Beijing 2008 Olympics started today in China, but the only problem with having a Chinese Olympics is that 20 minutes later you want another one…
I than’ you!

For me, the single defining cop show of the 1980s was Bergerac. You can forget your Dempsey & Makepeace and your Cat’s Eyes, Bergerac was the cop for me. He was a man who was troubled by his demons who overcame alcoholism to take on the criminal tidal wave was ashore on Jersey’s picturesque beaches. OK, so some of the stories got ridiculous, but I still enjoy watching the first few series when they air on UK Really Old. It is my guilty pleasure and I am a Bergerac anorak, I admit it. I have no shame.

A few weeks ago, the current run of repeats came to an end on UK TV Old and it got me thinking if, like Doctor Who, the show could be revived for a modern audience. After catching ten pitiful minutes of John Nettles wasting his time in Midsomer Murders, I decided that I would write a script for fun. I’ve never written a TV script before, so I settled in front of the laptop for a couple of afternoons, bashing out a story that would thrill and scare in equal quantities.

This was to be a modern Bergerac. The early episodes were pretty gritty and quite violent, so I got to work putting that stuff back in. I am also a fan of two great crime movies “Get Carter” starring Sir Michael Caine and “The Squeeze” starring Stacey Keach (it is a totally overlooked cult movie that features some tough moments as well as using a track from Olias of Sunhillow by Jon Anderson as part of the soundtrack – weird!), so I wanted this new script to be gritty like them.
OK – I know this will never get made and I wrote it for the pure pleasure of it. If you are a fan of Bergerac, download it, print out a copy and go to bed with it. I am sure you will be entertained – or at least horrified by it.

Here is “The Return of Bergerac”
And for the Googlebots: Bergerac, Jersey, John Nettles, Terence Alexander, St Helier, BBC TV, detective series 1980s