I love rude words. I think part of it goes back to those schooldays where you used to use the dictionary to see how many obscene definitions you can find. My favourite swear has to be cunt. Now I know a lot of people get really upset by that word, but it has old-Englishe roots and is even mentioned in Chaucer. In the Miller’s tale, there’s a line where the randy young cuckold “privily he caught her by the quaint”, which means crotch area. So the word quaint evolved into cunt. Clever, eh? Anyway, it is my favourite swear and I think the world is full of cunts and people (especially ladies) should embrace it. It’s one of those words that just trips off the tongue, as it were (nudge, nudge – wink, wink).
Anyway, that long meandering preamble was just a piss-poor attempt at bringing your attention to the new Jarvis Cocker single. I have been a big fan of his (and Pulp) since the early 1990s, just before His ‘n’ Hers was released and it was great to see he has a new single out, albeit in digital format. It’s called “Running the World” and is a great summation of the current state of our country and people in general. He is a great observer and pop-philosopher. The chorus is the sweet “Cunts are still running the world” and is a sentiment I totally agree with. Now I ask you to head over to iTunes and buy this little ditty for 79p. If enough of us join the bandwagon we might just get Jarv to the top of the charts. It would have been nice to see him sing the song on Top of the Pops, but they axed it. Like he said, cunts are still running the world. Go on, have a listen…
Click here for Jarvis saying a naughty word.
Latest Entries »
I had a bit of a disturbed sleep as Alex the Wonderdog decided he would go on full alert mode and would bark at every noise eminating from our leafy Avenue. With every thunderous bark, I believed my heart was going to stop as I was dragged abruptly from sleep. The upshot of this was that I was able to remember a dream.
The dream started off quite normal. Myself and The Missus were househunting and surveying a four-storey townhouse type dwelling. The place was OK-ish and needed some work. Out in the garden, I was greatly impressed with the large pond and Koi carp. The garden was split on two levels and as you rose up, you could see over the back wall to the sea and a beach behind.
Then all of a sudden things got weird as dreams usually do. There was an audible crack and I feel something change. I was no longer me. I felt smaller and younger. The Missus was replaced by a Chinese girl. It quickly came back to me that this was my girlfriend and we’d not been together that long. Suddenly, there was the sound of car doors slamming and raised voices. The girl quickly told me to go inside and so we retreated away from the voices. Inside, she explained that these were the friends she had told me about previously (????). They weren’t particuarly nice people and they were a gang of somesorts and were coming to take over the house. I was confused about the situation, as you would be.
And so the gang arrived. They were non-descript white youths, a mix of male and female. Modern. Good hairstyles, if you know what I mean. These people herded us upstairs and proceeded to yell a lot about betrayal to my chinese girlfriend and how she had let the team down, while gesturing to me. I guess I was the source of the trouble. So we were held prisoner locked in the attic. Time passed and we talked and other stuff happened which I can’t possibly divulge on this family-orientated blog and we hatched a plan to escape.
It seems that she was very athletic and could climb through the small window, flip herself through a lower window and come back to open the door from the outside. This she promptly did and we were free. We were going to head downstairs and escape via the blue sports car on the drive. As we descended, I could hear noises and the gang appeared to be practising gymnastics on one of the floors. It was very strange. They were even dressed in blue leotard-type uniforms.
We snuck past them, but someone must have spotted us as I heard the shout go up and we made a run for it. We made it into the car, but we weren’t quick enough to pull away and the gang surrounded us. The chinese girl was dragged screaming away, back into the house and I was pulled out and given a good kicking by the largest male of the group. He whispered in my ear that if I was ever to return he would kill us both. He pulled out a large knife and brandished it at me. He then stood me up and kicked me away from the car, telling me to go. It was fifteen miles to the nearest train station, he told me.
So I remember walking in the darkness and miles seem to skip past as I was at the station in no time. There was a sharp incline leading up to the entrance and once inside I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. Being a smaller person in this dream life, the crowds were a lot taller and more intimidating. I wandered around trying to figure out exactly where I was and how I could get home. I spent ages in the bustling station exploring. There were many restaurants, even a casino, and it seemed to have its own thriving communitiy. Every so often, a whistle would sound and the doors would open allowing freshly alighted commuters to rush through the scene.
I asked where if there was a cab office and the man gave me directions. I followed them litigiously, only to find myself back where I started. I explored some more and thought a lot about my life with the mystery chinese girl. Was this really my life? I could feel elements of Darren seeping back into my character and I urgently wanted to get home to Loughton. I managed to find a quiet ticket area – all the others had been bustling with people – and I attempted to buy a ticket. But I had no idea from where I was travelling. I asked another man who kindly showed me a mechanical machine on the wall for plotting the route home. But as no-one was telling me what station this was, I couldn’t enter a starting point. How can you head from home if you don’t know where you are? And so I talked to a station assistant who gave me a map and I told him where I wanted to go. He replied, “That’s going to cost you £140 from here”. Of course, he was clever not to reveal where “here” was. I didn’t have that kind of money.
In the end, I was overcome by the place and needed to escape, so I back-tracked the entrance and headed away from the station.On the way down the hill, I found myself walking with another man and I asked him if there was a cab office in the town. He said yes and said he’d direct me to it. When we got to this cab office, there was some kind of misunderstanding and they thought I wanted to apply for a job as a cab driver – which is impossible because I don’t drive. I tried to make it clear what I wanted but I got the feeling I wasn’t being heard.
Then came a voice in the distance and I turned around and saw the large fellow who had given me a pummelling. But before I could find out what happened, Alex the Wonderdog barked loudly again and brought me out of the dream.
What a weird one, eh?
(Again, this dream was written down for my own pleasure and for future reference)
Here’s a gentle ambient piano piece I viddied last night. It’s a live recording of me noodling around on the Boss RC-50 – I basically fed my Triton LE keyboard into it and created three separate loops, one of which is played backwards. This is how the “Mist Suite” was recorded.
Still been feeling a little miserable. The mild depression has only just begun to lift and my day has been lived under the cloud. I thought it would pass quickly as these things usually do, but it was only until later in the day and some vigorous vacuuming that things didn’t seem that bleak.
Managed to record three noodly pieces for my ambient CD. There are called Mist on Stone, Mist on Water and Mist on Mist. They are three piano looped pieces using the RC-50 and are very calming. I have edited them together to create an elongated “Mist Suite”. How fricking pretentious. But when I listened to the reverbed piano, the only image I saw was shapes coming through the mist. So the name stayed. I like them a lot but I am sure others will find them deathly dull. Tough titty.
Yesterday, we spent lunchtime at the pub, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Events of the past week have been weighing on me and I was a bit snappy. I vented. I vented and I vented. Luckily, The Missus has seen this impotent rage before and so just lets me clear my pipes before letting me apologise for my stupid outbursts. I’ve been fairly up recently, so yesterday can be classed as a bit of a downer. Thankfully the booze and the venting helped me feel a bit better – even though it was completely pointless.
After listening to the tracklisting of the vocal songs I have recorded so far, I have decided to stop the CD at 44 minutes. It’s a nice size and doesn’t outlive its welcome and there are six songs from the past and six songs from the present. This gave the CD a name: SIx of One, Half a Dozen of the Other. I like the symmetry.
So now I have three of the four CDs complete and mastered. The fourth CD is about half done with 30+ minutes of ambient noodlings in the can. The fourth CD is my usual “experimental” fare and I hope that each CD gives the listener a different aspect of my musicality. The boxset title has also changed now. It was going to be called “You Are Allowed to Enjoy This”, but that has been dropped for an old expression that my late grandmother used to say: “God Pays Debts Without Money”. It seemed kind of apt with the way life goes.
Now I’ve just got to do some more noodling – hopefully aided and abetted by the new RC-50 and get the artwork together. I nixed any idea of getting this done properly because the costings are beyond me. This is a great shame, but The Missus said that CD packaging is going to be a thing of the past and that everything is being delivered digitally anyway and that I was just being too fussy. She is right, of course. And so, I am going back to the old 4-DVD cases I used before because they give me the maximum space to fit in all the details. No booklet either, but that doesn’t matter because I’ll set up a webpage where the listener can come and read all the details and lyrics.
The funny thing is that I keep listening to CDs one and two and I am really enjoying them. I hate to have any pride in my work (because pride always comes before a fall) but the work and effort in these discs really shows and I feel that I have made more progress that I could ever have imagined. Yes, I honour my mistakes and leave them in for “freshness” and so that I get a sonic smack when I play these songs back. I just hope that I get some good feedback on this stuff. I don’t want money – I just want the odd person to say: “Hey – I really like this, Darren.” That’s not much to ask, is it?
Meanwhile at Chez Lock, I opened the curtains to be greeted by this sight…
Don’t worry, this giant spider was captured by yours truly and released back into the wild.
Yesterday, spent the morning re-recording an old song of mine called “Gone”. Revitalised the original music tracks and remixed it, before adding a new vocal. Also, added a new vocal to “Mr Straight” where I managed to channel the spirits of Mike Reid and Ian Dury. Throat was a little hoarse after that.
Later in the evening, I sat down to re-record the drum loops for “Age of Communication”. The original loop, which you heard the other day, was actually nicked from a commercially available song and was used as a guide rhythm. And so I had to sit down and recreate the rhythm myself, which is a bit tough when you are not a drummer, but I managed to pull something out of my arse which was suitably driving and ramshackle at the same time.
I now have 44 minutes of vocal songs in the can for the third CD. The Missus recommends that I stop after the next tune – afterall, an hour of me warbling is probably torture. Thinking hard about reviving my first ever recorded song “Electric God”, but I am worried that I won’t be able to get the same drum track. Need my old Alesis HR-16B back. This is the problem with recording stuff and then moving on – you end up thinking “I really like that drum machine” and then realising it sold it over a decade ago. I am sure I can come up with something…I still need that pet drummer in a cage. That would make recording a little easier.
Here’s a clever video that is doing the viral rounds at the moment. It’s the band OK Go with “Here it Goes Again”, which is reminscent of those smart videos we used to get in the 1980s when the medium was still young and full of creative vigour:
Here’s something different. I thought I’d start doing some retrospective reviews and today I just happened to decide on putting these two records on my MP3 player while I walked Alex the Wonderdog.
The first rock band I ever got into was Queen. I think it might have had something to do with my raising in the 1970s and listening to Radio One over breakfast and hearing the hits of the band played with frightening regularity. Neither of these albums were my first proper Queen purchase – that honour goes to “Greatest Hits” and then “The Works”.
Queen – Queen
I listened to this album today and it was the first time I had given it a spin in a couple of years. I managed to bag a cheap version of “The Crown Jewels” boxset a few years back which contains a remastered version of this album. Instantly, the opening chords of “Keep Yourself Alive” took me back to being a withdrawn 13-year-old and the many times I had spun this album in my bedroom. In those days, I never bought LPs, preferring tapes. The reason for this was that our old house in Alber Road was so damp that in a matter of weeks, any LP was reduced to a crackly mess. So cassette tape was my weapon of choice and I can still remember buying Queen on cassette.
I was on a family holiday to Jersey in the Channel Islands with my grandparents. They always took me away during the majority of my teenage years and I purchased the cassette in Boots The Chemist in King Street for £3.05. This was at the beginning of a two-week holiday and I didn’t have a Walkman and the longing to hear the tape was burning a hole in my ears. My nan suggested that I should ask the Portuguese family who ran the hotel we were staying to play the tape over their PA system, so that I could listen to it. But I was too shy to ask and I waited until we got home.
Good job I did as the tape itself had been loomed into the casing the wrong way, meaning that on playback you heard the whole thing backwards. Subliminal messages ahoy! But this meant I had no album and there were no other large Boots The Chemists in the locality that sold music. So I had a further wait until we had a family day-out at Southend where my mum exchanged the tape for a fresh, working copy. Aahhhh, the good old days – I waited about five weeks to hear that album. Now we can download music at the click of a mouse – but you try and tell the younger generation and they won’t believe you!
So back to the review. The first Queen album is the sound of a young band trying to find themselves – it is incredibly rough in places, but I think that adds to the charm. Some of the ideas are just “out there” – “My Fairy King” for example, though I’ve always loved “Great King Rat” as it reminded me of my own errant father and shared the same birthday and sentiment. What always captured my imagination is the playout of the proto-demo version of “Seven Seas of Rhye”. I was already familiar with the proper version, but how amazing was this band that they put a preview of a future song at the end of an album. That was just brilliant in my book.
There’s a lot to like about “Queen” and what it lacks in production, it makes up for in charm and sheer energy. Some of the songs on this are better served on the “Live at the Beeb” album that was released in the early 1990s, but it is an important record, especially if you listen to it back to back with its successor.
Queen II
This is a completely different prospect. Here is a record by a band that now has confidence and a vision of what it wants to achieve in the studio. But is this a progressive rock record? I think it is because there is some kind of concept behind it, from the Black/White sides to the song cycle on the second side that starts with an “Ogre Battle” and ends with “Funny How Love Is”. I can’t get over just how good this record is. You can even hear the conception of the Queen sound shaping before your ears – with “The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke” and “The March of the Black Queen” showing that the band were interested in creating walls of operatic sound and not afraid to screw about with the stereo field. Get your hands off than pan control, Deacon! And it finishes with a fully realised “Seven Seas of Rhye” – its almost as if the first album was a dry-run for this, the real deal.
What’s great when you listen to these two classic albums together is that you can actually hear the band growing and that’s quite unusual in rock. Usually bands break onto the scene fully fledged and its not until you listen to their fourth or fifth subsequently released platter than you detect any development. But with these two records its a steady progression which continues onto “Sheer Heart Attack” and culminates in their magnum opus “A Night at the Opera”. It’s really tough, but with the benefit of retrospect, I am beginning to think that Queen II might just be my favourite record of theirs purely because of the embyonic ideas within.
Again, there are bits of this album that are truly brilliant, like the opening instrumental “Procession” where Brian May manages to coax a tone from his guitar the likes of which have never been heard of before. It is earthy and kind of alien, but provides a suitable introduction to the crashing “Father to Son” – a song that always has an effect on me (or any song dealing with fathers and sons, for that matter). I like the way that the first side is more of a classic rock album before every wigs out with the backwards experimental nightmare that starts side two and “Ogre Battle”, a song that delights with every listen – can you hear the ogre ripping the man’s arms off. Great!
The final song cycle on the record is just inspired and the level of detail and the amount of ideas bouncing around truly are a portent of things to come. The next thing you know the record is over and you are wanting more. And then there’s the iconic cover from Mick Rock where Freddie and the band do a Dietrich. A bona fide classic.