You are allowed to enjoy this…

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:

As another CD of tunes has been recorded, I tend to look back at all the various stuff I’ve put down over the last decade I’ve been recording and reflecting on the nature of all of this. I often ask myself why I bother and why should I continue to bother?
Music is my hobby. I am not a professional musician because if I was, I would starve to death. So there’s no impetus to continue recording as there are no mouths to feed, no butlers to pay, and no mistresses to keep in Ferraris. I do it purely for my own entertainment. But why?
Well back at the beginning, the learning of an instrument was part of a phase all my peers were into. I guess I was drawn to the arty crowd at school, but due to coming from a single-parent family and not having two brass farthings to rub together, the chances of me getting a guitar for Christmas or my birthday was slim. In those days, guitars were expensive things of beauty and you just didn’t see the cheap starter instruments that you get today. To spend £130 on a guitar back in the mid-80s would be the equivalent of spending five times that today, so it was never going to happen.
By the time I did finally convince my grandmother to “loan” me the money for a bass guitar, everyone else had either moved on or dropped out of college. So I was on my own with my bass. This is a story I’ve told before, so sorry if I am repeating myself. But I was determined to play the instrument and get something from it as I had waited five of my teenage years to get one.
So I played. Then when I got my first grant cheque, I bought a tape recorder. Then I recorded. The important thing about recording is it let me do two things. Firstly, it let me hear just how frigging bad I was (though at the time youthful exhuberence tells you otherwise) and it put in me in a “live” situation, as I would often set the drum machine going and jam onto the tape. This enabled me to forget the fear of the red recording light and to concentrate on hiding my lack of musical ability.
I am not a natural musician. I am not someone who can pick up an instrument and play by ear. I have never had any interest in playing other people’s songs or licks, and have only ever been interested in creating what I consider “new” things. Why?
Well before the music was the writing. From the age of about ten years old, I was convinced that I was a writer and that I should have a career in writing. I loved telling stories and stringing lies together in order to entertain and involve the reader. Writing for me is a little bit like breathing or any other natural bodily function. I can just do it. It sounds arrogant, but I’ve learnt that with any creative act comes a certain degree of conceit. Call it confidence, arrogance, blind faith, or whatever, but if you don’t have it, you won’t create. Any wavering feeling of self-realisation or doubt will kill a creative project. So you have to have the power to believe.
So I grew bored with the writing. I could write a novel in six weeks if I wanted to. But who would read it? If I was any good an agent would take me on and get me a publishing deal, but that would take effort and I’m not very good at stuffing manuscripts into envelopes. I tried when I was younger, but got frustrated at waiting and waiting and waiting for the rejection letters to pile up. Then I grew to know the nature of the publishing industry and the old adage: “It’s not what you know, but who you know” never seemed more a truism. Some might say: “Oh, you are cynical because of your lack of talent”. I say: “This is probably half the story”.
The need to create or be creative is a strong one. The popularisation of the Internet, and more importantly, the development of the MP3 encoding format fell at exactly the same time the technology was made available to allow home PCs to record and mix multi-channel audio. All these factors converged at roughly the same point and I, being one for technology, bought into the idea of the home computer as a multi-track audio recorder. So after about four years of playing very little, I engaged with my instruments again.
For me, the process of making music is a lot harder than writing a novel, and so I decided to pursue a musical hobby rather than continually writing material no-one was ever going to read. At least with music, I could self-publish. And the internet has allowed me to do this. And if it was good, people would like it. And if it was bad…well, people soon let you know if something is bad.
I had recorded a couple of tapes in the early 90s, about four-and-a-half hours of dubious material. Most of it was rank, but a couple of tracks signposted what pathway I would take. While I enjoy writing lyrics and songs, I am not a vocalist and prefer “tunes”. So the impetus would be to explore the guitar and try and make songs that I could whistle.
So over the last ten years I have recorded twenty-five albums of material: from “Fade In – Fade Out” in 1998 to this year’s “EchoNET”. And out of that, I have made enough money to buy a single electric guitar in the medium budget range. So why do it?
I don’t know. Am I showing off? Am I setting myself challenges? Am I hoping that something will come out of all of this? I don’t know. What I do know is this is a thankless business…like all work, really. True, I get the odd positive comment on YouTube and the rare email once a year, but feedback is limited and it is getting harder to sell product, so that is why I give it away.
Take for example, the surround sound DVDs I released last month. I did that project purely to take my mind off dealing with insurance companies and the worry generated by my personal situation. But at the end I had three DVDs that I couldn’t sell – so give them away – I had the bandwidth there, so let’s see who wants them. Since their release last month, I’ve shifted over 400Gb of data. In real terms, that equates to over 400 individual DVDs – though the actual figure is hard to quantify. 400 DVDs? That’s without all the files that are shared on P2P networks. Well call it 500, shall we? In that time, I’ve not had one email to thank me or to ask how I did it or to tell me what a big fat fucking idiot I am. There’s just a void. An empty space between me pressing the mousebutton that FTP’d the files onto the website and the mouse click of the downloader as they burn the ISO files to DVD, ready for playback on their 5.1 surround sound system.
I’m feeling frail, I guess. A little worn. Like the dregs of the butter dish, yellowed and on the turn, I am spread thinly across the bread of life, with such effort that the knife has worked on the fundament of the dough and created holes and broken the surface tension of the whitened slice. The past seven months have been an ordeal and I don’t know how I am sitting here typing this…or even why I am publishing it.
I think this is the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new start. Although I am feeling isolated and emotional (I burst into tears while having a piss yesterday for no apparent reason), I do sense that everything is getting better. The Missus sees it in more simpler terms. When I ask her why should I bother recording she says to me:
“It’s what you do.”
So maybe I am a musican then? I don’t know. I just think I am messing about to be honest. The way I feel in my limited capacity as a musician

Before…

After…