You are allowed to enjoy this…

Managed to tart up and fix “Don’t Want to Be Found” the other day. It’s new name is “Over It Now” and the vocals have been redone and some bass drum added to the mix. These are never the final mixes I post here – I wouldn’t want you to think that this is how this songs are going to end up on the new CD. No, there are rough mixes and very often I re-record the vocal guides and nail down my wavering voice.
I’m not a particularly big Beatles fan, but I understand their value and contribution to popular music. My favourite ever Beatles track is “Tomorrow Never Knows” – purely because it is the first progressive pop record. I’ve always wanted to do a homage and last night I sat down to record the backing for “Age of Communication” – a direct rip of that track. OK – I hope all you staunch Beatles fans won’t throw bricks at me – this was created out of love. This is a rough mix and the lyrics are below, so you can don your favourite Beatles wig and adopt a Scouse nasal drone…

Productive couple of hours before lunch saw me pen the following little ditty. OK – I am the first to admit that I am not the world’s greatest songwriter and I find it hard to fit lyrics to tunes, but I think this one has some spirit. It’s called “I Don’t Want to Be Found” and the lyrics are below so you can sing along.

As someone who sells items on eBay quite a lot, I use the services of the Post Office and I often sit at home weighing letters and padded envelopes for transit around the UK. Today, a guide arrived to explain how from the end of August, the way we pay for postage is changing. The size as well as weight is going to affect how much we pay. I sat and stared at the brochure over breakfast and fell into a stupor. Maybe I am being thick, but I don’t get it. A small packet is bigger than an envelope and therefore heavier. That is fact. So I don’t understand why the size has much to do with the overall cost because size and weight are exponentially connected. I tried to do the math and worked out that there’s a possibility that the Royal Mail are attempting to screw another 20p out of us for this service. So instead of sensibly increasing prices, they spend god know how much money printing posters and leaflets to be distributed nationwide, telling us of this hidden price hikes. Goodness me, another waste of money where that saving could have been used to keep the cost at normal rates. But this is the UK – a nation preoccupied with wasting money and creating large inneffective structures in the name of customer service. Anyone remember how much cash was wasted on the whole Consignia debacle? The sooner they open up postal delivery to the market forces, the better.
Last night, I recieved a mysterious email from a chap called “G” asking about my music. Nothing weird about that because I often get a couple of emails a year thanking me for the tunes. The odd thing was that the name was a little familiar and so I went back to Friendsreunited and re-affirmed that “G” is also the name of my half-sister’s current squeeze. If he’d been John or David, I might not have noticed. Of course, I might just be a little paranoid (I blame the new neighbours) and this fellow is perfectly innocuous. They are coming to take me away – aha!
On a musical note, the Boss RC-50 is turning out to be quite a useful tool. I was expecting it to be used purely for creating soundscapes and looped ambient music, but I have discovered that it can also be used as a natty, on-the-fly compositional tool. So now I hit the loop button and record some chords, then overlay a slight melody and then use this as a template to solo. Below is another example. Of course, this isn’t a serious tune, but an insight to how I come up with guitar solos. I normally improvise until I find something I like and then refine the idea with a honest dollop of musical spit and elbow polish.

Recently I have realised that I have become a snob and a far from ideal socialist. The reason for this is that we have new neighbours. Our previous neighbour was an old lady who had lived at the address for a very long time, but her declining years and the pressure from her sons forced her to move to sheltered accommodation somewhere else in the district. She didn’t want to go. We didn’t want her to go – but change comes whether you like it or not.
The house next door is a big, nicely kept two-bedroomed semi-detached (like ours) and I was expecting a young family or similar to be rehoused there by the council. In fact, I was kind of looking forward to it. What we got was a middle-aged gentlemen with a bad leg and his 21-year-old semi-retarded son (a young man so dense that when his father had a spasm in his leg, he went indoor and let his father descend the concrete stairs on his behind – a guy so lethargic that even his father has said to the Missus that he needs a good kick up the arse). I spoke to the father soon after they moved in and he seemed friendly enough, but like all people, I quickly became irritated by their imperfections.
Their first sin was the fact that they brought three cars with them. And these aren’t nice shiny cars, but right old bangers, meaning that our spacious little street now looks like a breakers yard…and one of these cars is of very dubious origins. It has been left outside our other property to basically rust – having not been moved – but the tyres have been allowed to deflate and oil to leak over the road. OK – they like cars and you don’t – so get over it, you whinging creep. But I hate car owners in general. I even moan at The Missus for having a car that we don’t use much, so no-one is safe from my anti-car bias. (Of course, I happily allow myself to be driven to the aquarium shop and to music concerts – the hypocrite).
The next thing I had an issue with was the fact that these fellows didn’t seem to have any concept of putting the rubbish out for the weekly refuse collection on a Thursday. Recently, temperatures have been in the 30s and there’s nothing better to spoil lunch in my garden than the pungent stench of rotten rubbish to come wafting down our shared alleyway where they’ve left there rubbish (we leave our bin bags there too, but I put them out every week to be taken away). The smell got so bad that I took matters into my own hands and put their rubbish out for them last week….all four bags of it. No, no, no…don’t thank me. I was doing it for myself and my own nostrils. Me and Mr Bluebottle have become firm enemies and I even had to chase one out of our bedroom at midnight last week – such was the pong eminating from the alley. Or maybe he was attracted by the hum from my socks…?
Of course, while this goes on the front and back gardens have been left to overgrow. Now the previous occupant loved her garden and used to employ a gardener to keep it spick and span, despite being a pensioner of limited income. But now the grass is high like the Serengheti plains and I half expect a tigress to come bounding out after a startled wildebeeste. It kind of depresses me that things always seem to change for the worst and never the better.
So why does this bother me? Well the way people treat their homes whether they are council rented or private owned/rented is a good indication of what those people are like. Our example don’t seem to care much for the garden, which is a shame and I can see a future when old car engines will litter the front lawn and a broken down Jeep is worked on out the back garden. You might think this a joke, but I’ve seen this in other council properties in the area. It is the creeping cancer of the underclass – those without any commonsense or pride in their environment.
So there you have it. I am officially a snob and I don’t like my unemployed neighbours. I resent them for not keeping their council property clean and tidy while I am asked to fork out £100 a month on council tax to keep them in it. Of course, I just wrote a cheque to the tax man the other day and this has left me feeling a little sensitive too. But I’ve said to the Missus that this is a drip-drip-drip kind of decline and things will soon get a lot worse. She isn’t a big fan of them either as they look at her in a funny way that only women can detect and they officially give her the creeps. (This is unusual as it usually takes a lot to phase out The Missus).
But the line in the sand was drawn tonight when I was talking to Alex the Wonderdog through our kitchen window. I was cooking the dinner and Alex was in the garden being cheeky and I said: “Whooseagoodboy?” or something and he barked back and kicked up some grass and I said “Whooseagoodboy?” and he did it again in canine joy and a little doggy smile on his face. That’s the kind of owner-pet relationship we have. From a window next door a loud, uncouth “Shuddduppp!” echoed in our general direction. This was from the son, who ruined a perfectly peaceful Sunday afternoon yesterday by revving a petrol driven engine for a remote control car for 30 minutes until he got bored. No, you shut-up, fuckwit.
No-one bad mouths Alex the Wonderdog and gets away with it…

So tonight was the last night of Top of the Pops. Now while many will be cheering from the sidelines about its demise, it was very sad to see the Sir Jimmy Saville (jangle, jangle) switch off the lights of Studio 3. For me, TOTP was a consistent part of my life and a good barometer of popular culture throughout the decades. I get misty-eyed remembering crashing out in front of the Xmas round-up-of-the-year, stuffed with turky and pudding, and waiting for my favourite artistes to appear.
A lot of people have said that the advent of the multi-channel TV and mobile phones and the Internet have been responsible for the lack of interest in the show, but I think it has more to do with the empty-heads who were left holding the baby. They had a format which they didn’t know how to drag forward into the 21st century and it was silly because TOTP was always event television. It was about getting the biggest bands of the day on the screen and having some fun and that spirit was in decline throughout the 90s when pop music decided it wanted to be taken seriously.
Who can remember seeing their first glimpse of a pop video (Bohemian Rhapsody) or Bowie in space alien mode or the very first appearance of gender-bender Boy George (is it a boy or a girl?). Mods, rockers, hippies, punks, new romantics, goths, grunge, baggies, Brit-pop, rap, dance, even folk have had their moment on the TOTP stage and was the platform for getting the teenagers of Britiain growing/cutting/dyeing their hair, adopting a new fashion trend or inspiring them to pick up a musical instrument.
Unfortunately, popular culture in Britain today is no longer based around music. Where are the great musical trends gone? The last one was possibly Brit-pop and now it seems that our youth are more moved by reality TV, mobile phones and MySpace. This means that popular culture is now on the decline. Where are the great individuals that coloured our youth? Where have the Bowies, the Boy Georges, the Pistols and the Dylans gone? The great teen spokespeople have been replaced by the Crazy Frog and Coldplay – what a sick fucked up world we live in. And so it seems that music is no longer the potent force it used to be and the world is a duller place for it. I still remember seeing my first punk in Oxford Street when I was about eight years old. It was my birthday treat to be taken into London by my grandparents and I still remember him with his black spiky mohican. Once there was individualism, now it is follow the flock with our kids wanting to be anonymous and don the hoodie of invisibility.
What does this have to do with TOTP, you say? Well I would say that the programme was a barometer of the time and because there is no youth culture to speak of now – just a series of consumer trends – when the youth culture dries up, so must the programming. With the TOTP brand being so strong and the archive being so far-reaching, it wouldn’t surprise me if ITV or Sky bought the licence to the franchise and kick-started the show again on one of their digital channels, especially as last-night’s finale got a projected 4 million viewers – not bad for a Sunday night on BBC2, eh?
It is a real shame that they axed the show because it could have still had an audience. But heck, the BBC can spend our money on yet another dull reality TV show and shovel “I Am A Consumer Slut” and “Look At My Fat and Unruly Kids” down our throats for five-nights-a-week. Cheap TV = dull TV. Top of the Pops took effort to make and so it had to die. R.I.P – you will not be forgotten. And I will bet my left testicle that it will rise phoenix-like from the flames before you can say “Doctor Who’s Third Series”.

Daniel Hoffmann-Gill comments yesterday: “Sorry for not posting what you want me to post, I shall stick to making videos of myself playing guitar…”
Now I feel the need to explain why I make videos of myself playing guitar. It is because music is all I’ve got. Yes, I really am that shallow. My guitar and my music brings me joy. And I hope that maybe some people who visit this site might see the videos or listen to the tunes and say: “Hey, I kinda like that”. I might be pissing in the wind, but at least I know I am pissing in the wind. Commenting on world politics over which I have no control is a an exercise in futility. I’d rather keep an eye on local politics, on the events that actually shape and affect my world – that’s why I rail against the BNP becoming local councillors and HG doesn’t. Call me selfish, but I know that even after I am worm food that the Arabs and the Jews will still be killing each other, Mr HG. Life is just too damn short for me to worry or care about it. Also, I recently wrote a guide about putting video onto the web for a consumer computing magazine to which I regularly contribute and so I guess I got a little bit inspired by my own advice. Here’s the article here – you can see my Ashbory Bass clip in the bottom panel.
On a seperate and more joyful note, I am pleased to announce a second batch of baby mollies in the fishtank. This time they are gold and black mottled mollies. They are still small, but I managed to capture some video footage of them swimming around. They are the orange specks moving in the background.

At the beginning of the year I made a promise to myself and The Missus that I would somehow pay-off our combined credit card debt. Now I wouldn’t say that we are heavy abusers of the plastic, but we had a certain amount shuffled around on those zero-percent interest cards for a while. We are good zero-interest whores and moved our debt around when the going got tough. We realised that this amount had been with us since our wedding way back in 1998 and was just there, hanging over us. It was an average amount of credit card debt, but I knew something had to be done. And so I sold off various nick-nacks and CDs and whatever and after much effort and belt-tightening the final cheque for £1200 heads off to Capital One. We are now debt free (with the exception of the mortgage, naturally).
Of course, things never go to plan and this week I noticed that Soundslive (a rather excellent online music shop) had a number of Boss RC-50 Loop Stations in stock. Now these doo-hickeys are as rare as rocking horse shit in the UK and so I purchased one. Don’t worry, most of my music gear I pay for by selling off other instruments. It’s survival of the fittest here for the gear at Studio Lock and I am selling my old RC-20XL and some other stuff to cover the amount. The pedalboard arrived on Wednesday, but it was too hot in Studio Lock to have a fiddle, instead I waited until we had a thunderstorm and the cooler weather to arrive.
The RC-50 is a great bit of kit – it allows me to loop in stereo (at last) and its sound playback is superb. You can also record three different loops and let them organically run alongside each other. Anyway, I made my first attempt at a recording today and it isn’t like my usual looped material. Enjoy!