I love gadgets. Yeah, I love gadgets and gizmos a lot. I was employed once solely because of my fanaticism to gadgets and gizmos. Oh, the glory days…but I digress. I’ve been enjoyed the Sony PSP since I got mine in the US in May, but one of the shortcomings is battery life. You have to keep recharging the thing. This isn’t a problem in itself, but when I saw this solar charger from Logic 3, I just had to give it a go. The unit itself is made from shiny black plastic and opens up to reveal two solar panels. These are to be exposed to the light and recharge the inbuilt LI-ON battery inside the unit. It should take around 8 hours to charge it in good light and then you can use the charget to either charge up your PSP or use it as an external battery/power source. This is great if you are travelling and aren’t near a power supply. I’ve been using it for a day now and I am impressed. I can keep my PSP topped up or I can run it from the Solar Charger. How cool is that? However it does take an awful long time to charge via the solar panels (but that’s living in England at this time of year) but you can use the PSP’s charger to boost power levels – though this defeats the whole point of the solar charger. So it’s a good idea, but it is let down by the lack of sunshine at the moment! 🙂
The Logic 3 Solar Charger
It cost me a reasonable £23 from Simplygames.com and you can read more about this handy device here.
If I were to give this a rating, I would give it a healthy **** out of ***** (That’s 4 out of 5 stars, purely for effort) 😉
Category: Reviews
Like most fans, I’ve been looking forward to the next Brian Eno “vocal” album for quite a while. “Another Day on Earth” is his first proper vocal album since “Nerve Net” from 1992 and it kicks off with the sublime “This”. Now I love this kind of Eno treatment, a good percussion track, a thoughtful lyric and a guitar solo that comes from the Heavens. The only problem is that “This” could have easily come from “Wrong Way Up” and sounds so much like the co-writes he’s done for U2 and James. I still like the track loads, but it sounds dated and, frankly, old. And that’s the problem with the rest of the album.
Whereas “Nerve Net” had me asked “What was that?” when I first heard it, this CD leaves me asking “Why?”. It is an exercise in familiarity and nostalgia, with dancing percussion, ethereal vocals and those ambient keyboard sounds that are synonymous with Eno. “And Then So Clear” features a throbbing, pulse-like bass drum and Eno burbling along with a distorted vocal. It’s pleasant enough. And that’s the problem…it’s all too pleasant. After this track, “A Long Way Down” sounds like an off-cut from the U2/Eno cross-over record “Passengers” but isn’t as nearly as creative or interesting.
More old ground is visited with “Going Unconcious” which sounds like it could have been lifted directly from the “Drawn from Life” album. It’s suitably ambient and transporting, but it evaporates just before you get to your destination. The rest of the tracks plod along, going at the same pace, it’s like one giant vanilla ice-cream of sound. Thick, comforting, but ultimately unrewarding. Where are the sprinkles? Where’s the flake? Where’s the nuts and juice?
“Just Another Day” manages to lift the pace somewhat and is probably the second best song from the album. It’s got a beat. Yes, it actually has a noticeable drum loop. Hurrah! You could call it the title track of the album because the lyric is “It’s just another day on Earth”. More Eno recycling happens with “Under”, a song that was meant to be on the “My Squelchy Life” album that got transmogrified into “Nerve Net”. This track has been around since 1992 and appears on the Eno Vocal Box Set from that time. I find it’s inclusion here a bit strange. Yes, it is a great song, but surely this is a bonus track, not a fully-fledged album track that every Eno fan is familiar with? Oh well, that’s Eno’s decision, not mine. The last track “Bone Bomb” is probably the most interesting track of the album in terms of texture, but it relies on sampled vocals that instantly remind you of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” – but that makes it sound dated. If you can get over the 1980s sound, it is an intereting little number and owes a lot to the experimental, cut-up vocal sound Eno used on “Nerve Net”.
“Another Day on Earth” is a curate’s egg. Parts of it feel right, but much of it feels wrong for me. In parts, it is too slow, too familiar, too repetitive. Most of the album sounds incredibly dated and this album proves that Eno works best when he has other musicians to spark off from. There’s nothing like that here. There are no moments of jaw-dropping beauty or heart-stopping excitement. It’s almost like Eno tried to make an ambient album with vocals. It’s certainly good listening to it in the bath, but standing it against his other releases it is an empty shell compared to “Nerve Net” which really made me question modern music when it came out or “Another Green World” which is a work of genius.
I guess the problem is that I expected too much. But saying that, at least it got me listening to “Drawn From Life”, which is a much more fulfilling work in my opinion. Nice try, Brian, but this CD lacks the quirky imagination of your previous works. Must do better…
I’m going through a bit of a Steve Hackett renaissance at the moment. What with the two acoustic gigs I’ve seen and the multitude of recordings I’ve purchased over the last few months, it’s really a Hackett bean-feast at Chez Lock. This particular release I have been waiting for for nearly a decade. When we had satellite TV, I used to tune into all the German TV channels – OK, most of the time I was looking for pornography 🙂 but every weekend, some of the German channels (Bayern, was one of them) used to play old rock concerts from the 1970s. From this show, I managed to tape performances from Marillion, Peter Hammill and Steve Hackett. The only problem with the Steve Hackett concert was that I missed the first fifteen minutes of the show. This galled me because it was such a fine performance and it was never repeated again while I had the old dish.
Anyway, the self-same concert, recorded on 8 November 1978, is now available for the first time on DVD. I got my copy direct from SH’s online shop and so my copy has his signature scribbled on the cover…how dare he deface my DVD sleeve! 🙂 The performance is all here from me this time and we get to see Steve and his band (featuring his brother John) performing numbers from his first three solo albums.
The DVD opens with a pretty incendiary version of “Please Don’t Touch” and I still can’t forgive Genesis for not recording a version of this for their Wind & Wuthering album. The fools! But it doesn’t matter because Steve has done well on his own and this DVD shows just how strong he was so soon after leaving the band. Pete Hicks helps out on vocals for “Racing in A” and “Narnia”, but I’ve never been a particular fan of either song. I prefer the instrumentals. And we do get them…”Ace of Wands”, “A Tower Struck Down” and “Spectral Mornings” all get a strong outing, with Steve using his eBow for the latter track there. You also get to see/hear SH using the infamous Optigan keyboard for one number and it really is a curiosity. I am glad that they included it because it is a funny little number and one thing you always get with Hackett is a lot of dry humour. From the intros to the band (David Bailey on camera – cue applause from the unwitting German audience) to the use of filters on his voice for Carry on Up the Vicarage, you can see why all the fun stuff disappeared from Genesis after his departure.
The concert itself ends with a great medley consisting of the sublime “Shadow of the Heirophant”, complete with Dik Cadbury pulling off amazing vocal gymnastics to perform the vocals that were laid down by Sally Oldfield on the original (all together now: get yer knackers out of the vice, Dik!), which seques into an evil version of “The Angel of Mons” ending with drummer John Shearer going completely apeshit and providing the inspiration for Animal from The Muppets at the end of that track.
But it doesn’t end there… As this is DVD, you get an extra 14 minutes of unreleased stuff that wasn’t deemed fit for human consumption. So “Carry on Up The Vicarage” and “Star of Sirius” are now available to be heard. Neither is particularly strong, but it is good to hear/see them here.
The DVD itself features a 5.1 surround mix, but it didn’t really provided any extra depth to the performance. The really clever thing is that you can programme the DVD to playback the content in any order, so you can seemlessly add the cut footage back into the concert for a complete Hackett experience.
Look, I am a complete Hackett fan, so I say: BUY THIS DVD NOW! You get a great view of SH in the 1970s and it means you can throw away that crappy copy you bought for £25 off eBay, you moron! 🙂
I worked it out that I see Laurie Anderson every two years – what a lucky guy am I. “The End of the Moon” is the second of a trilogy of works by Anderson that began with “Happiness”, which I saw at the Barbican back in 2003. The latest performance piece features many different ideas about science and beauty and art and looking up. The stage is sparse with an old leather chair which is used to tell a couple of stories, a projector and Anderson’s musical rig which is her pulpit for the majority of the show. Around the stage there was about a hundred candles flickering and dancing, creating a very calm effect. Almost a sea of stars on the stage. The narrative thread is provided by Anderson’s employment as NASA’s “Artist in Residence” and she goes on to talk about why the guys at the Hubble Space telescope make the pictures of far-off stars psychedelic rather than try and get a realistic model of the stars (“well we think the people would like them that colour) to how new intelligent space suits that have been developed aren’t being sent into space, but being sent out to be used in desert warfare.
The mood of this piece is much darker than “Happiness” and I was left feeling a little bit down. But that’s not to say it is a miserable piece, there’s much to laugh at and Anderson’s use of language is both hypnotic and, in places, unnecessarily verbose. However, the quality of the stories shine through from tales of duetting with an owl in Italy to walks in the woods with her dog Lollabelle and the canine’s subsequent discovery that danger can come from the air. Yup, looking up is the theme of the piece. Looking at the moon, looking at turkey vultures swooping down on Lollabelle, looking at the Twin Towers falling…looking up. Danger can come from anywhere.
Interspersed between these monologues there’s Anderson musical pieces played out on the violin. Very often these are solo, sometimes accompanied by a backing track. This time around she used a harmonizer and delay effect on a couple of the performances to create a twin violin duet with herself. The music was very strong and it certainly broke up the stories and kept you interested in what was going on.
The performance itself is about 90 minutes long and it is a totally solo performance with Anderson operating the backing music, cameras and some of the lighting herself. That’s without all the dialogue. It’s a very involving show and if you get the chance to catch it, please do. It’ll send you out of the theatre thinking and looking up.
I was never going to see Elvis play Las Vegas, so I settled for the next best thing in the shape of Tom Jones. Yes, Tom is a guilty pleasure. He’s been around for ages and still manages to produce the odd fluke hit every decade. Even if you don’t like him, you have to admire his tenacity and longevity.
This was my first Las Vegas show and I was very excited. Me and the Missus got to the venue with minutes to spare (thanks to the terrible traffic along the strip) and were ushered to our seats. Drinks were being served at our table so we got a couple of beers and some pretzels. Then the introductory music began and the curtains opened and there was Tom.
The gig was incredibly loud for a small venue such as the MGM Grand (it was much louder than the recent Musical Box show we saw) and it certainly rattled the bones. But we were there and were behind the music. We got what we wanted…all the old hits “Delilah”, “Green Green Grass of Home”, “It’s Not Unusual”. “What’s New Pussycat?” and newer tunes like “Kiss” and my personal fave “If I Only Knew”.
The performance was superb and for a sixty-four year old, Tom is in fine form. He still has “THE VOICE” and I feel lucky to have heard two fantastic vocalists in the space of a week, even though there are from completely different genres and generations.
We got very excited by the show and made lots of noise and cheered at the appropriate moments. Highlight for us was the point where a lady in the front row fanned Tom’s crotch with her drinks menu, much to the consternation of her husband.
As Tom said, “We don’t plan any of this, you know!”
Afterwards, an American fellow asked if I had enjoyed the gig, knowing full well that it was me and The Missus making all the hullabaloo in the row. I grabbed him by the hand, shook it fiercely and told him I was British and that I had been born to enjoy the show.
Oh well, another lifetime ambition achieved…what next, eh? 🙂
Track-list (though songs might be missing and in the wrong order because I am still giddy like a schoolgirl whose first crush has just invited her to the prom).
Undercover Man
Scorched Earth
Refugees
Every Bloody Emperor
Lemmings
Nutter Alert
Darkness (11/11)
(In The) Black Room
Masks
Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End
The Sleepwalkers
Man-erg
Encore:
Killer
Wondering
I arrived fashionably late to the concert. Don’t get me wrong, I started on my journey two hours before the gig started and it should have took me around an hour door to door, but the Jubilee line decided to stop working and I had to back-track fast, using my knowledge of the rat-run tunnels at Bank station to get to the Waterloo & City. Suffice to say, I broke some kind of landspeed record by getting from Stratford to Waterloo in around 24 minutes.
Anyway, the Missus met me inside the venue and the bells were sounding ushering people into the concert hall. I was already excited, but now I had the added rush of adrenaline from hurtling across town. I could have murdered a drink, but with no time before the start, I settled for a boiled sweet of indeterminable flavour provided by The Missus. Like a dromedary, I used my own moisture content to overcome the “thirst”.
The band came on stage at about 7.45pm to a standing ovation. Hey, even I stood up and they took their places and launched into “The Undercover Man”. Wow…I’d never seen VDGG perform live before and was instantly stuck by the power. The second song up was “Scorched Earth” and by now the hairs on the back of my neck stood up on end. It was an intense experience, it was like a force of nature smacking you in the chest. At one point, I thought I was going to die…that’s how fucking powerful the music was.
The band shifted gear with “Refugees” before pulling out a track from the new album in the shape of “Every Bloody Emperor” which stood up quite well amongst the old stuff. Hey, I even got to sing a long. Then there was a surprise, pH introduced the next song and by the introduction, I knew what it was…it was “In the Black Room”. Sweet. I love that song from his solo album and it was amazing to hear the band tear it up and inject it with that patented VDGG energy.
Now, my memory is getting hazy because I was very carried away with the music. I was just in the middle of it completely, so I might forget songs or pull them up in the wrong order. I remember a particularly intense version of Lemmings, which just tore my head off and vomited in the stump. The band played another track from “Present” and this time it was “Nutter Alert” getting an airing. Again, it worked better than the album version and pH injected more fire into it. I was completely knocked back by the two tracks from Pawn Hearts, which were absolutely vicious in their delivery.
The selection of songs were great and I was surprised just how many of them I was familiar with – I didn’t think I was THAT much of a VDGG fan. Wrong. I am a really big fan…an even bigger fan now. OK – the band were a little sloppy in places missing cues and that, but who cares. The energy was there. Hammill is just THE VOICE. That guy could shred phonebooks with that set of lungs and David Jackson is something else. Never seen him play before and it was a real treat. A flute, two saxes at once? No problem. Though after one particularly aggressive solo he stood too near to a microphone and I heard him gasping for breath. I thought the poor old sod was going to snuff it. Then there is Guy Evans…what a powerhouse. If he’d have played the drums with the Schizoid Band, he’d have blown them away. His bass drum alone was causing palpitations in my chest! And then there was steady, reliable Hugh Banton, delivering the goods and then pulling out a blistering solo. My god, it was one of the most amazing gig experiences I’ve had.
To say that I am tired and emotional would be an understatement. I knew I would enjoy the concert, but I didn’t realise that VDGG would grab me by the scruff of the neck, rattle me around, hold me over a precipice and leave me dangling there screaming for my life. Amazing. Hammill is great solo, but he is amazing with those three guys behind him. What a team.
Amazing…my heart is still thumping in my chest with excitement.
What can I say? When I was about ten years old, I was first exposed to the works of Douglas Adams. First it was via the TV shows, then the books and eventually the radio plays – so I kind of did it arse about face. During a run of the TV shows, I contracted chicken-pox and suffered for a fortnight, but that programme got me through and I loved how so knowingly clever it all was. Hitch-Hikers, like Dr Who, was a thing that I loved in my childhood, but both are having a resurrection, so at the moment, I am feeling a little bit like and eleven year old again. It’s bloody brilliant!
Back to the movie. There’s been a lot written by the “fans” about this film and most of it has been bad. This is a shame, because I thoroughly enjoyed this new version of the classic. Firstly, I wasn’t expecting a complete conversion of the book, I wanted something NEW and FRESH and that’s what I got. Not a crusty adaptation of a 30 year old book where the everyman Englishman was ever-so middle-class and had a tea fetish. I could never identify with the old Arthur Dent because he was so far removed from my experience, but I like the new Arthur Dent played by Martin Freeman who sums up his modernity towards the end of the film when he says: “I could murder a cuppa”. Too right, Arthur. 🙂
Anyway, the film radically departs from the book, leaving a lot of the oh-so clever, self-reverential words behind and instead taking a more filmatic journey through the HH universe. I think the fans that complained about this film wanted large chunks of the text projected onto the screen so they could read and giggle along – alas, movies do not work like that. They are a visual medium (no shit, Einstein). The story cracks on at a frightening pace and it is not long before we are into the action. It certainly was the fastest 109 minutes I’ve spent in a cinema. The special FX are absolutely excellent and I absolutely adore the new Marvin robot, voiced by Alan Rickman. All the cast work well with Sam Rockwell nailing it as the shallow, vain and frankly stupid Zaphod Beeblebrox. Some of the new ideas, like the point-of-view gun are inspired and I liked it how the white mice are more malevolent in this version of the story.
When the opening banjo plucks of “Journey of the Magi” began to play, all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was fantastic. Granted, some of my favourite passages weren’t included, but it doesn’t matter. This is a new film aimed at an audience who hasn’t read the books. My only major gripe was that there wasn’t enough from the Guide itself, voiced by the superb Stephen Fry. I thought Mos Def did a great job as a spaced-out Ford and Zooey Deschanel made a very attractive Trillian. A lot as been made of the “romantic” thread in the film, but I thought it was OK. If you are the last two humans left alive after the destruction of Earth, it’s only natural that you might want to “get it on”. Am I right or am I right? 😉 Bill Nighy makes a great Slartibartfast and the journey through the planet workshop on Magreathea is the film’s money shot. I really liked that bit and the bit when they activated Earth Mk II. Fantastic!
This film was made for the next generation of fans-to-be and luckily, we had some ten year olds sitting in the row in front of us. It was cool because I was that age when I first got introduced to this work. The kids laughed at the jokes, loved the whale and let our a roar when the mice shouted “Bollocks!” and got squished. As the curtain came down, they looked like they enjoyed the film and I was left hopeful that they would investigate the source. The only people complaining were the fat, flabby-arsed, unattractive anoraks we heard outside moaning about the fact that not enough money was spent on Zaphod’s second head. For fuck’s sake, get a life. It’s a movie. It either entertained you or it didn’t.
I was entertained. For my money, I got 109 minutes of entertainment. OK – it’s not wet-your-pants funny, but then HH wasn’t like that for me. It’s more a wry smile “that’s very clever” kind-of-funny. When it finished, there was a final, very quick, shot of Douglas Adams’ face zooming off the screen and my eyes went a little moist. It was my love of Douglas Adams and Harry Harrison that made me start writing sci-fi stories when I was a nipper and caused me to vow that I wanted to be a writer. I liked this film a lot and it saddens me to think that a lot of fans who’s minds are stuck in 1977 or 1981 won’t realise that this movie wasn’t actually made for them.
I loved it and can’t wait to own it on DVD. Please, I hope that enough people see this film so that the DisneyCorpTM decides to make “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”.