Apologies for the lack of posts...been moving. But I have been following the news - sad to see these three go.
Bergman
Antonioni
Hazlewood
Having only seen Fanny and Alexander, can't really comment on Bergman, but Antonioni's Blow-Up must surely go down as the authoritative Swinging London film - even if it's been parodied to death by Austin Powers. It still looks great today, even the groovy swinging cats in the hilarious club scene. It's sad to see most London-based films today lacking any near the style and excitement or cerebral humour, but then I guess Hugh Grant sells.
Some other great London films (James Bond films don't count, and certainly not anything by Guy Ritchie):
- Performance
- Scandal
- Mona Lisa
- The Long Good Friday
- Quadrophenia
Any other suggestions?

Apologies for the lack of posts - been sorting out moving house...will be back soon! In the meantime, check out my review of Isis live.

Check out what I've been getting down to on Last FM here.
Of course, while it's an addictive site it doesn't necessarily capture the fact that not everything you listen to you're gonna like. I have to say that the new Arcade Fire album is just too bombastic and Springsteen-sounding for my liking...surely there's others out there who preferred Funeral?
Some new pictures too up at Flickr.

The World is a surreal place indeed....

Snoop Doggy Dogg applies for Australian citizenship.

Well, Devon rained and rained. For proof of global warming look no further than Britain rather than Greenland, judging from the mental weather this summer. I thought parts of London can look depressing in the drizzle, but places like Tiverton look far worse - desolate town centres struck by the phenomenon of the out-of-town supermarket. Still, across the county border in Cornwall there's always the Eden Project, a surreal experience that makes you feel like you're on a colony on the surface of the Moon. It's straight out of an Isaac Asimov novel, particularly this charming robot assembled from pieces of old abandoned cars. To get poetic, the very detrius of our consumer society laid before our eyes. Or maybe it just reminds me of a few too many car ads:



Anyway, very Terminator-like, even if's nearer to St Ives than Los Angeles.
Wasn't Susan Cooper's fantastic children's fantasy series The Dark Is Rising Sequence set around these parts? I seem to remember in the last book, Silver On The Tree, a huge horse made only of bones. Which is why this in the reception area caught my eye:



Poor old Peter Gabriel's fans got soaked. At least he wasn't playing in Genesis. Then Him up there in the sky could have been really pissed off and made the downpour even worse than it was.

Me doing one of those 'classic album' articles.
Slightly syncophantic, I admit. But the point is, blimey that makes me feel pretty old. When that album came out many guys who are now in bands would have been about two years old. Me? I was around ten years old. Then again, Sonic Youth must be seriously pushing fifty now, so they at least make me feel young. I suppose it's the kind of thing punk rock set out to destroy, but nonetheless I'll be going to the Roundhouse to see them do the album track-by-track. Yes, I know this All Tomorrow's Parties Don't Look Back thing is pure nostalgia - Whitehouse member William Bennett certainly thinks so on this blog comment - but fuck it, I'm gonna go anyway. Maybe Whitehouse will play at Don't Look Back too? Would be interesting to hear charming classics such as "I'm Coming Up Your Ass" and "Just Like a Cunt" at Koko...but seriously, it's amazing to think that they've been going almost as long as SY, which would make them one of the first originators of the 'noise' genre along with The New Blockaders, Merzbow, etc. Incredible as it seems given the inherent uncommercial nature of the genre, noise music has now been going as long as goth (which I reckon started around '82 or so - any objections?). Of course, some smartarse could point out that something like 'Metal Machine Music' preceded noise bands by a couple of years, and before that you can cite modern experimental composers, but Lou Reed obviously wasn't a noise artist as such. Noise music must be one of the few genres where you geniunely don't need to play your instrument (even less so than punk), something that was brought home to me at a Wolf Eyes gig recently where the support act Putrifier ran around the venue with a strange guitar/drill hybrid attached to his chest. To bring this argument full circular,
SY themselves have dabbed in the genre of course - Sonic Death being a sort of neo-noise record of sorts.

K-Punk again on The Apprentice.
I'd go further than this and say that while the program is an interesting for what it reveals about the class system in this country - as K-Punk pointed out - it's also a sort of repository for our catharsis when it comes to office politics: most of us will have met characters similar to this in work, and enjoy watching all of them (except for one, obviously) get their comeuppance. I guess Katie is the long in a line.
The whole program is founded on lies, of course: we must have all heard by now that Alan Sugar doesn't actually own that place, with it's pneumatic secretary, where he fires his wanna-be protégé one by one. The implication when you watch the program - even if it's not actually stated - is undoubtedly that this office is one of many of his 'acquisitions'. Furthermore, "Sir" Alan Sugar's (and what a fuckwittedly lame prefix that is) actual equivalent to Trump Towers - which, funnily enough, Donald Trump doesn't entirely own either - is in Brentwood and looks like this, which is less New York, more Skegness in spirit. As this comment on The Guardian's blog acknowledges, winning that program is double-edged sword - the money may be good, but the actual environment in which you'll be "Sir" Alan Sugar's right-hand man (or woman) is hardly glamorous - and what does Amstrad actually do these days anyway? Sugar's hardly the boss of Tesco. He's simply known as a caricature of himself whose made a few bob from property. Not that he's exactly poor (and he's probably made more money than I ever will), but it's the whole notion that he's some Richard Branson-like genius entrepreneur that's embarrassing. But then I suppose the whole program is essentially charlatan-like anyway.
Perhaps Katie's resignation was a stroke of genius: no-one should really want to actually win the program and work at Amstrad. As that blog points out, what have previous winners of the program gone on to do? In that sense, far from being some kind of gritty reality TV show, The Apprentice is actually as airbrushed as any '15 minutes of fame'-type program, where the exposure granted by getting to the last three contestants is the real goal.

A brilliant K-Punk article on The Apprentice and class psychology.

This looks like something that could have been bestowed on the world by Beezlebub himself. If you'll pardon the expression, John Lennon must be turning in his grave. The endless obsession with all thing 60's - along with the those dreadful 'Top 500 Albums Ever', as with this one - reaches its nadir with Oasis, Stereophonics, and the creative zenith that is Razorlight redoing the whole of Sgt Pepper, along with (yawn) Kaiser Chiefs, James Morrison...still awake?
Look, I'm sure they do love the album, and so did my granny, but that doesn't mean that I want to hear Kelly Jones warbling away at the title track. This is the kind of thing that punk was supposed to destroy. But then, I suppose it's part of the whole nostalgia trip bestowed on the 60's as the shining epochal decade where the young rocked out and saved the world...er, except maybe they didn't, which is why this book, of which the image above is taken from, is such a great read - the author is old enough to have actually been there and pours scorn on the 'baby boomer' generation and it's bogus hippy credentials. Remember, these people are now running the world. Or at least they're running the big multinationals, something that's reflected in this article. Of course, you could Blair to that list, but that would be getting personal.
Admittedly, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't appreciate 60's guitar music - from the Stones and Floyd to the more wigged-out likes of Silver Apples, United States of America, Stooges (a mainly 70's band but they started in the 60's), the 13th Floor Elevators, etc. Moreover, a lot of the music I like owes it's debt to the 60's, not to mention the iconography of films like 2001 and stylish thrillers like Blow-Up, etc. So why do I hate smug 60's obsessives and their endless whistful obsession with that decade? Perhaps because the 60's has become an industry, and with it the consensus that we'll never see anything as good as it again - even though Simon Reynolds in the book Rip It Up and Start Again posits that the years 1978-84 were actually just as exciting and creative for music as anything in the 60's. Maybe it's just the way that the sixties have become like a sacred cow that you can't critize, and with it the inference that all subsequent generations are apathetic and apolitical (despite something like a million people - including me - going on that march in central London against the war in Iraq).
Anyway, Revolver was always a better album than Sgt Pepper. I mean, how can you top "Tomorrow Never Knows"??

After the Spitz, another worthwhile cause to sign (though closed by the look of it). Bit harsh, maybe, but I have to say that what annoys me most about the sycophantic fawning over him is the way that he's compared to Baudelaire and Byron, or some other historical poet, as if writing some average indie tunes and being on drugs a lot instantly makes you the genius poet of our generation. Not that I've read Baudelaire or Byron, I might add. Then there's those cynical 'guerrilla gigs' in pubs, which has a strange parallel with Alex Higgins hustling in pool bars for £10 a go. Anyway, they're on Last FM too...speaking of which here's my own page, which is (ahem) rather still-in-progress...

Well, All Tomorrow's Parties was fun once again, and had the added bonus of sunshine rather than a torrential downpour soundtracking Hair Police or 16 Bitch Pile-Up or Ashtray Navigation's (as per the one last December). This time it was The Dirty 3 curating - such a great idea, to have a band curate a festival and choose all the bands. What makes ATP great above the music too is the attention to detail - the ATP TV/whoever's curating TV channel, compiling all their favourite films and general weird music videos. Again I missed the other delights on offer (crazy golf, go- karting, the all-night cinema, the swimming-pool, the rodeo nonsense, etc.) Once again ATP chose to put on a ridiculously OTT film on Sunday night on the TV after the bands, when you're generally in a less than coherent state; the December fest had an excruciating, explicit Catherine Brelliat film (her of Romance and A Ma Seur) documenting a confused French teenager; this time, it was an equally grim film (the title escapes me) about the Nazi's invading Belarus in WWII, with images of concentration camp victims, general death and destruction, and a young Belorussian boy venting his anger and so on. It's fair to say that laughs were thin on the ground. In fact, it made any of Ingmar Bergman's miesterworks come across like a rom-com in comparison. Perhaps they'll show The Passion of the Christ at the one this weekend, which will doubtless get the party in the Crazy Horse stage going.
A Silver Mount Zion's stunning set on Sunday was the highlight of the festival, a magnificent evocation of exactly how 'post-rock' - whatever that means these days - should be done, with it's seamless mix of violin drones, chamber rock and pummeling all-out attack, Efrim Munuck's strangled sigh trying to make sense of a post-9/11 world, framed against the unforgettable outline of birds flying over the tent. ASMZ's deeply profound and moving set, with it's subtle, mournful lyrics and incendiary, climatic music, was the perfect antidote to blandness and corporatization (ironic, given that they were surrounded by Pizza Hut and Burger King, though that's no bad reflection on ATP); shame that they were followed by the dull boogie-woogie of Cat Power.
Other highlights: the hosts The Dirty 3, Grinderman, Low, Spiritualized, Einsturzende Neubauten (on at 1:30 in the morning!), Felix Lajko, Smog, Joanna Newsom, Papa M. Sadly I missed Suicide's Alan Vega but apparently he was a treat - your crazy grandad running around the stage shouting insults at the audience to a half-genius/half-rubbish techno soundtrack.

I've had Ballymore than enough

First Smallfish Records nearby on Old Street, then Hammersmith Palais (no jokes about School Disco, please), now this...perhaps Ballymore Properties have decided that people making interesting, challenging music is just too daring and dangerous a concept - all this new-fangled arty-farty stuff. I mean, Vibacathedral Orchestra onstage doing a 20-minute drone or whatever is obviously seriously dangerous and must be curtailed for the good of society and all that is proper in society. So, come September, the best venue in London (fact!) will be no more, and instead we will have...a bistroteque. Because there's obviously not enough of those around, is there? After all, why not stop there and turn the whole of east London into one big fucking chain of Starbucks? Still, there's always Islington Academy...which reminds me of a certain post on this blog, ahem...

Some new writings of mine up on Pennyblackmusic - a review of All Tomorrow's Parties here, an interview with the mighty Bardo Pond here, live reviews here and here, and an interview with a band called The Early Years here.

My joy at having my PC up and running again was short-tempered on Saturday. There I was, thinking that the song that comes up in a link in an entry posted below about the London Underground was harsh...and then I tried to get the Northern Line, en route to a planned meeting with people at London Bridge, from which I would get to the train to Pinewood and be in the audience for the television programme The I.T. Crowd.
Well, that was the plan, anyway.
Surely anyone who is sane, and who'se used the Northern Line - particularly in rush hour - will tell you that it is the depths of Hades. Perhaps it was what the devil came up when bored. Never mind that it is absolutely roasting; that it is perpetually packed; that is about as fast as a tortoise after a heavy dinner; or that it feels like it was designed in 1582. You also have to put up with the endless closures that seemingly bedevil the track. Exactly what those 1-6am nocturnal hours of the morning, when the Underground is closed, are for if not to repair the tube I don't know, but TFL seems to feel that they have to go the whole hog and close down a whole sector of the Northern Line instead - on a Saturday afternoon. All afternoon. When there are almost as many people as in rush hour. Because, strangely enough, that's what a lot of people do on Saturday: they want to go out and about after working all week.
Arriving at Bank, where I got off the Central Line and attempted to go on to the Northern Line, I found a sign saying the Northern Line wasn't running from this station. Trying vainly to find an alternative route to London Bridge, I opted for Tottenham Court Road, only to find that that whole stretch of the Northern Line was closed. Next to Euston; of course, it's closed for a fire hazard. Silly me for being so optimistic. Next to King's Cross, where I'm informed I have to go back on the only available part of the Northern Line, on the route I've just came, but now all the way to Waterloo too, and thence onto the Jubilee line to London Bridge.
In total I spent nearly an hour on a packed train next to four screaming kids, in the boiling heat, next to someone's armpit. In such circumstances, iPods are mankind's saviour.
So yeah, missed the train to Pinewood. Suddenly the thought of being in that legendary place seemed a long way off. Pissed off and dejected, at London Bridge I had to sheepishly get the bus home, the whole circular trip a pointless waste of time in the end.

apologies for the lack of posts...unfortunately, my PC has been in a state of repair the last two weeks. Back up today and some new posts will follow this week. Watch this space!

K-Punk's very own tribute to the recently deceased Jean Baudrillard. Occasionally as inpenetrable as Baudriallard himself could be, but great stuff nonetheless.

Pissed off with the London Underground? Feel that you are being ripped off with a barely functioning service that somehow is simultaneously among the priciest in the world? Angry that it's hotter in the summer than a cattle truck? Well, you're not alone, as this song attests.

Another French philosopher bites the dust

First Jacques Derrida, now Jean Baudrillard, the man who declared that the Gulf War didn't exist (he meant it did, of course, but not in the way that we really thought it presented by the media). He coined the idea that LA is the ultimate post-modern City and that much modern day life is a simulacrum - or simulacra - of itself (does that include dying?.
When I saw that he'd snuffed it today I felt a mild sadness, as I did study the guy a lot at University (but obviously not a huge swell of emotion - steady on there). I seem to remember a website that automatically generated random Baudrillard quotes for any day-to-day situations, which is pretty hilarious if you're au fait with his difficult work. If you're not, erm, I suppose you would fail to see why that's so funny. He's the epitome - or at least was - of the existential French philosopher with a metaphysical comment about everything, delivered with the usual gravitas, even if it's as mundane as mowing the lawn.
Some of his (hilariously titled) books in that Guardian article have a striking resemblance to Michel Hollebecq - perhaps it is he, rather than some French academic, who will be the next globe-trotting Gallic thinker? Given how frequently hilarious his books are, I hope so. In any case, this blog entry, also in the Guardian, is a fitting comment on JB. I didn't know that he wore a silver lamé suit onstage at Las Vegas while reading his poetry. Respect to the man. Can you imagine Richard Dawkins doing the same? I mean, you have to hand it to French philosophers, they had panache.

I’ve been lucky enough to witness some amazing crossroads between art, music and performance recently in London.
The interactive performance of Faust at a warehouse in Wapping has to be one of the most extraordinary experiences that I’ve had recently. This re-enactment of the classic story of man's pact with the devil took place on four floors of a warehouse, wherein you adorned a mask on entering and were took into a lift. The lift operator then chucked out people on different floors one by one, after which you were left to explore the different floors, each themed after the play. 210 different rooms were styled after the play, including one styled as a laboratory with an actor as Faust the alchemist muttering to himself and wondering around with pots, vials of liquid, and papyrus everywhere; another with a 50’s themed American diner; another involving bedrooms and parlours; another one with leaves at your feet and bamboo hut walls; and a plush cinema. Meanwhile, maskless actors flitted about between the rooms acting out the roles, so that at times you would literally be standing right next to them as they recited the lines and acted out the parts of the play. Whoever set up the design and layout of the different rooms did so pretty meticulously, with a million things to explore. A pretty amazing experience all round, which included a floor with fauna and another with dark, winding, endless book cases, where you were literally walking around on your own in darkness.





The other two exhibitions that have came close recently are this one off Brick Lane, in which household appliances, used washing machines and general home appliance detritus took central stage in a huge factory. Walking around it felt like something from Tetsuo: The Iron Body Man, particularly when you could go inside a defunct freezer, which led down to a tunnel.





Finally, the performance of Ray Lee’s Sound Bites at Shunt, the huge, cavernous rail arches next to London Bridge station, in which revolving red lights mounted on plinths circled around at different speed. Walking around these plinths in darkness, all you could see was the lights, set to a swirl of freeform, ambient music, oscilltaing at speed like mini planets orbiting the Sun, with everything else blottled out. It’s now on Kinetica galleries too. Pretty amazing stuff.
Next up is Gilbert & George at the Tate Modern.

Just before their set at All Tomorrow's Parties in December, I caught the Sunburned Hand of the Man play at Cargo in London, performing a live soundtrack to Ira Cohen's 60's psychedelic freakout film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda - a synapse-scorching experience that was like every acid trip combined. The Wire have put up excerpts of it here, which must truly rate as the most tripped-out of that period - check out those dancing hippies! There's also a shorter preview below...enjoy

woah, this program on BBC2 was pretty awesome, covering the labaratory-like environs of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, full of people with white overcoats producing music that at the time must have seemed totally alien-like. The bits about the origins of the Dr Who theme and Delia Derbyshire were obviously gonna feature heavily, but what was equally interesting is how the program linked what was going on in the Workshop to the primitive electronics stuff going on around that time too - The White Noise (featuring Derbyshire), Silver Apples, United States of America, and music concrete. Some hilarious appearances by Sonic Boom (looking stoned, or does he just look like that all the time?) and the Ghost Box people.
Inevitably, one of the remaining members of the Worshop pointed out comparisons in the size of equipment in relation to today. While the huge synthesisers and patch bays took up whole rooms when stacked together, a teenager can produce most of these sounds now in a laptop. I guess this also links to the age of the iPod, in which you can Shuffle songs, taking them totally out of context - something I can never get used to. I still like to listen to albums from start to end - and so do All Tomorrow's Parties, evidently - but with the Shuffle function, an album or collection of disparate songs can be played in any order at all. The other impact of the predominance of mp3s and downloading is that, as David Bowie said recently, music will become as common as running water - whereas just 20 years ago you had to go into a record shop and breathlessly buy your vinyl at the counter (or listen to John Peel on the radio). You can still do that, of course - apart from the bit about Peel, obviously - but I guess the novelty will wear off if you can easily download it for free, and with music in such cheap, plentiful supply...on the other hand, this democratisation of music is pretty DIY in a punk kinda way, if you think about it - it certainly pisses off the major labels. It's never been easier to make your own music.
I suppose labels will have to be more inventive with their packaging to lure customers, which is something Constellation Records have obviously picked up on - their albums are always amazingly designed.

This news about the state of the UK's yoof culture is pretty emphatically depressing. Just how did we get this low? It reminds me of a post K-Punk did here (scroll down to 'Reflexive Impotence' post) about the state of British youth, and especially chimes with this:

It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness.

Exactly why Britain has got so bad is a moot point. It's likely a combination of lots of things: the entrenched class system, the long-hours work culture (I'm thinking of France's 35 working hours a week law - then again, they haven't been hugely successful in the table either), lack of decent public services, and a transport and education system that is still crumbling and inequal (especially the latter, as this testifies). But, as K-Punk taps into in that article, there's also a feeling of impotent helplesness in Britian too, in contrast to France where youth go on protests that inspire the government to change drafted employment laws.
What the list does confirm is that, despite Holland being at the top, Scandinavia is pretty much the best place to live in the world, with all four nations in the top (does Iceland count? Anyway, it's not included at all). The fact that they've hit such a right balance in most forms of life while Britain is lumbering behind is depressing indeed. It's 10 years since Blair got into power - hopefully this report will be the straw that broke the camel's back this year.

Recluse club night

Been well busy sorting out a new night that I'm putting on with Archslider. We'll be playing at it too. It's on March 2nd....should be awesome, and my brother's playing as well.



Also going to the next ATP, with the Dirty 3 curating. Well, the line-ups allright - first time I'll see Einsturzende Neubauten, Papa M / Pajo (or whatever he's calling himself these days) and Alan Vega (sadly not playing with Suicide, but only on his own). And there's others I've seen already but are happy to see again - Dirty 3 (obviously they're playing), Nick Cave, A Silver Mount Zion, Low, Spiritiualized ('acoustic mainlines'?), Joanna Newsom (that'll bring in the Observer readers). I have to say, though, there does look to be a bit too much acoustic singer-songwritery going on...some of that stuff's allright, but a lot can be just dreaful hackneyed shit - lyrics about shooting stars and people doing histronic sets at the Kashmir club - "can we have a little bit of Kashmir hush, please!" Still, should be great, and ATP is always a blast. Hopefully the crazy golf and go-carting will actually be on this time.

RIP Alice Coltrane - admittely I haven't really heard her stuff, but y'know, hugely influential and pioneering. Respect and alll that.

Great post here by K-Punk about Celebrity Big Brother. I would add that The Sun's campaign during this whole episode stinks of hypocrisy: they'll happily castigate the French ("we wouldn't want that on our worst enemy!" - after an Englishwoman went into a coma, woke up, and believed that she was French) and the Germans, or migrants from Romania, or anything Brussels-related (insert 'bureaucrat' here), in their 'Comment' section, and it's quite allright to do that, with millions of readers chortling along. Yet anyone else in the world and all of a sudden The Sun is the most self-righteous paper in the world. Not that this is an excuse for Goody's stupidity, of course...and has anyone on Big Brother ever had an IQ that goes into double figures anyway??

Bobby Gillespie undercovered as not actually that rock n roll shock.
I was obsessed with Screamadelica when it came out. Even the boogie-woogie of that following album wasn't too bad (and the largely forgotten Dixie Narco EP was amazing). I thought Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR were their last great albums; then came Kate Moss and calling an album 'Riot City Blues'. Now Primal Scream are a ham-fisted pub rock act. Still, rock 'n' roll, eh?

Sovereign donuts, er...?

this has to be one of the best stories I've heard all year. You couldn't make it up. Why can't indie bands be this entertaining....the myspace blog link is hilarious

Some pictures of ATP I took up here (click on the 'All Tomorrow's Parties' set on the right of the screen). We really did feel that hungover when on/near the beach...and following on from my previous posts about noise/industrial music, it's interesting to see that William Bennett from Whitehouse has laid equally into ATP (scroll down to the post entitled 'All Yesterday's Teenage Bedroom Walls') and The Wire ('Propagation of the Faith 2' post) on his blog here, which made me laugh. I thought that Wire article about the noise genre - of which Whitehouse remain a huge influence (they were doing 'Shitfun' back in '81?) - was pretty good, especially when it contrasts how popular a band like Wolf Eyes have become and then compare it with just how underground the scene was in the pre-internet age.

Those posts about All Tomorrow's Parties made me think about just how weird the noise scene can be - a genre that's always had its fair share of freaks and weirdos. As The Wire recently pointed out, the democratisation or recording, and the ease of releasing material, has meant that many bands that orbit the freakout/noise scene are so prolific now that their myriad releases can also be seen as a sort of constant diary or journal, if you like. Not that this endless productivity seems to have affected Wolf Eyes, mind, whose recent Human Animal album was there best yet.
Those kind of scenes have always had a fascination with the unconventional, of course, and this extends to the packaging of records - after all, who can forget the story about one of Japanese noise-meister Merzbow's many albums coming in a car? So it meant that you had to had to actually buy the car to get the album. Strangely enough, the album didn't sell many records. In fact, it sold very little. Probably about two, I would imagine (I think Rough Trade have got one).

Anyway, in tribute to a genre which has its fair share of stupid band names, here is a list of classics. All these bands are genuine (though not all are noise bands, I should add).

Jackie-O Motherfucker

Ashtray Navigations

16 Bitch Pile-Up

The Small Faeces

MV / EE + The Bummer Road

To Live and Shave in LA

Smell & Quim

The Atomic Bitchwax

Ten Minutes With My Dad

Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness

AIDS Wolf

Hair Police

Fuck Buttons

Harry Pussy

Starving Weirdos

Duran Duran Duran

Kylie Minoise

The Fucking Champs

Shit-Spangled Banner (now Sunburned Hand of the Man)

Birds of Delay

Half Man Half Biscuit

Gays In The Military

Anal Beard

My Cat Is An Alien

The Holy Fuck

Those who've gone in 2006...

James Brown
Syd Barratt (Pink Floyd and solo)
Arthur Lee (Love)
Nancy Arlen (Mars)
Mariska Veres (Shocking Blue)
Grant McLennan (The Go-Betweens)
Sapurmurat Niyazov (thankfully)
Slobodan Milosevic
Saddam Hussain
CBGB's
Robert Altman (directed The Player)
Steve 'cripes she's a fiesty little sheila!' Irwin
Smallfish Records (above, or rather what's left of it)

Thinking about Brown, Barratt and Lee makes me realise just how old the 'golden generation' of 60's musicians venerated by Q, Rolling Stone, Mojo etc are now. The rock establishment, in other words, which the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is based around, and which is on Uncut magazine every other issue. I mean, McCartney and Dylan must be, what, mid-60's? Without wishing to sound morbid, they're not gonna keep on going forever. Unless you're name happens to be Keith Richards, of course.
Locally, the closure of Smallfish Records' shop (they're still operating online) was especially depressing. Maybe it wasn't the cheapest in the world (compared to Sister Ray, anyway), but it was a fantastic, one-of-a-kind shop - and, importantly, it had a great cafe in the basement with live electronic sets. What other record shop has got that? Apparently, it closed down because the landlord of that whole block decided to raise the rents extortionately. And what has replaced Smallfish Records since it closed down? Absolutely nothing. What a waste. No doubt there will be something sooner or later - either a Wetherspoons or Starbucks. So one more nail in the coffin for any individuality that Old Street's kept left...no doubt The Foundry in next.
Also music related was the closing down of CBGB's; it's reincarnation in Las Vegas, is proof that rock n roll has truly become postmodern. It had a weird museum attached to it before it closed down anyway, if I remember rightly. What would Baudrillard have made of that?

Well, All Tomorrow's Parties was a blast, if pretty stressful. Three days at Butlin's holiday camp (see original post below) checking out some pretty weird and wonderful acts.

Sadly, I missed those aforementioned greats Ashtray Navigations, 16 Bitch Pile-Up, and MV/EE + The Bummer Road. Perhaps I was busy playing crazy golf or go-carting. Jackie-O Motherfucker cancelled too, dissapointingly. Perhaps they got lost trying to find the place.

Highlights: David Tibet with Nurse With Wound (first act on of the weekend!) screeching "I'LL SEE YOU ON THE DEAD SIDE OF THE MOON!" (and seriously freaking out the bar staff); Islaja; Charalambides; watching My Cat Is An Alien with my eyes closed, feeling dazed. Iggy & The Stooges (well, obviously). J Mascis' monstrously loud distortion pedal in Dinosaur Jr.'s set. The look on the bouncers' faces during the heavy weirdo double-bill of No-Neck Blues Band and Sunburned Hand of the Man (no, this isn't Freddie Starr onstage), in which members of said bands blue bubbles at the audience while wearing pink wigs, and ran around with an empty crate of Stella Artois bottles on their head. The same during the Dead C's hour-plus maelstrom of howling feedback and pummeling bass. The looks at the hot-dog stall outside the Reds stage as Prurient played punishing screeching power electronics. Double Leopards. Watching an hour-long live concert of John Fahey on ATP TV. Watching a gig by Hair Police, also on ATP TV, in which they trashed a venue and attacked the audience. The first half of Magic Markers' set. Gang of Four's singer and guitarist tripping over each other by accident onstage. Being involved in a surreal discussion about 9/11 with Blood Stereo's creepy gutteral noises as a soundtrack.

Lowlights: Wooden Wand. Missing most of Richard Young's set (would have been interesting). Not being able to get into the MC5 at all due to bad organisation. The excruciating Catherine Brelliat film on ATP TV on Sunday night. The queue to get in for Sonic Youth (even though they played twice). The toilets, quite a bit of the time. Food, and the price thereof. Drunken idiots in the queues to get into the gigs (not that I was sober, I guess). The idiot who came up to me at the 'jazz skronk' stage (as the Reds stage was nicknamed) during an excruciating (but kinda cool at the same time) set by Corsano/Flaherty/Spencer Yeh and leered into my face drunkenly -with extremely bad breath- and sneered unplesantly. Said person then went on to the next bloke. It turns out that this was part of a 'trangressive', 'daring' art project filmed by some nobs with a camera, to see the reaction of people. And they decided to do it at a safe, mainly left-thinking, mainly white festival like ATP rather than on the streets of Peckham, obviously, because they're just so, like, transgressing the boundaries of what's acceptable. Sitting in the coach on the way back tearing through winding country roads while suffering from a hangover.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the event by those folks at Ecstatic Peace.

Bring on the next couple of ATP's!

Ah, the joys of YouTube

this really did my head in...

Some great pieces in the last few months by K-Punk and Simon Reynolds – the latter in November’s issue of The Wire - that talks about the Ghost Box label as part of his Haunted Audio article, revisiting the future from a perspective of the past (K-Punk's got stuff about it here [scroll down a bit] and Blissblog / Simon Reynolds here and here). The ghosts of ‘haunted sounds’ are a legacy of people like the BBC Radiophonic workshop, who soundtracked Doctor Who and other futuristic sonic detritus on British TV, and whose aesthetic has been revisited recently from the space-age pop of Broadcast and Stereolab. Other early precursors can be found in the early electronic stuff like the Silver Apples and The White Noise (Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonics stuff, plus others), the 2001 film, and countless other haunted sounds where there’s a vision of the future rooted very much in the period stretching from 63-83 or so. I missed this similar-minded night at the Purcell Room on the South Bank because of doing a gig but it looked pretty wild:

Concurrently to Reynold’s article is a hilarious but brilliant post here by K-Punk (this man really should have a column in The Guardian) about the fetishism of autoeroticism in Ballard’s Crash. It reminds me of that interesting period in the late 70’s and early 80’s when you had dark cyber-punk classics such as The Normal’s Warm Leatherette, Throbbing Gristle’s sardonic ‘United’ single, and A Clockwork Orange. Ballard’s book chronicled a group of dejected 30-somethings who find themselves aroused and liberated by having sex while crashing cars. The human scars end up being attempted replicas of what happens to their automobiles – the subject matter of Warm Leatherette, with the automobile couples bleeding into one with the car (there’s many metaphors like this in the book, in which man and machine become one).





Vaughan’s messianic, deranged personality kind of reflected some of the titillating themes of post-punk at that time, such as the obsession with dominance – just check out this amusing footage of Genesis P-Orridge live with TG onstage.

It’s funny that Gang of Four seems to have become seen as the archetypal post-punk band now, as I’ve always thought that Joy Division and something like ‘Warm Leatherette’ captured post-punk more. This era is kind of summed up in this fantastic bit in Simon Reynold’s book:

“And yet, as colour-depleted and crumbling as these now post-industrial cities were, it was possible – perhaps essential – to aestheticize their panoramas of decay. The post-punk groups found two writers especially inspiring in this regard. Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, set in a near-future Britain, features roving gangs of marauding youths midway between skinheads and punks, vicious dandies who live for gratuitous ultraviolence. Both the book and the 1970 Stanley Kubrick film version capture the desolate psychogeography of the new Britain created by the ‘visionary’ town planners and fashionably Brutalist architects of the 1960s – all high-rise blocks, shadowy underpasses, concrete pedestrian bridges and walkways. This same traumatized landscape served as the backdrop – but also, in a sense, the main character – in J.G. Ballard’s classic seventies triology of Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise. Likewise, Ballard’s earlier short stories and cataclysm novels obsessively conjure an eerie, inhuman beauty from vistas of dereliction – abandoned airfields, disused weapons ranges, drained reservoirs, abandoned cities.”

The above might sound a bit pretentious, but I can kind of see where he’s coming from. The ‘60’s utopian experiment gone wrong’ of places like Elephant & Castle (and Southgate’s futuristic tube station, above, which looks like something from Doctor Who) is kind of an example of this, with E&C’s endless underpasses and concrete walkways surrounding the strange clearing that the roads surround, with its bleak, expressionless building (is it some kind of miniature power station?). It can be a really eerie place sometimes. Soon it will be gone, of course, with the new million-dollar plans for the area…it’s this kind of dystopian feel that Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire, and PIL kind of captured a bit more than Gang of Four, and in the way that they used primitive synths or tape machines alongside conventional instruments. In a lot of ways, Throbbing Gristle were just as much a post-punk band – even though the guitar was barely recognisable – as GOF. I finally got to see GOF live up in Glasgow at the Indian Summer festival this summer, and I thought they had more in common with heavy punk stuff than post-punk in a way, but others would obviously disagree. It seemed kind of weird watching them doing these anti-capitalist critiques while at the same time well aware that they’ve all got comfortable media jobs, well entrenched in corporate life (there’s a link somewhere on Simon Reynold’s to some blog post where it exposes all the jobs they’ve got – apart from the guitarist that is, who’se apparently a total alcoholic). In any case, Shellac and the Liars are more post-punk than Bloc Party will ever be.

K-Punk’s blog gets even more weirder, with a strange four-way blog discussion about pornography, involving Infinite Thought, The Measures Taken (another blogger interested in dystopian landscapes), Bacterialgrl, and Different Maps And Poetix, whoever these people are (doesn't anyone go under their own name anymore?). What that Ballard book brilliantly picks up on is the way that porn is overlapping with consumerism and the mainstream; you only have to look at many r ‘n’ b videos to see what he means. Or the works of NYC ‘cinema of trangression’ director Richard Kern.

Finally got some pictures up on Flicker here.

After one of my previous posts about the unique band Mars, a 'No Wave' band based in NYC's lower-east side, it was sad to see that another member of the band has recently passed away - drummer Nancy Arlen. RIP.

Great Independent front covers of our time (II)

Just in case there was any confusion as to why the Democrats have been so popular in the U.S. mid-term elections...well, thank you for clearing that up, The Independent

Getting well excited at attending All Tomorrow's Parties for the first time. In just over a months time, I will be watching Iggy & The Stooges, Sonic Youth, Gang of Four, Jackie O-Motherfucker, Bardo Pond, Melvins, Deerhoof, Wolf Eyes, Sunburned Hand of the Man, and 50 other bands or so (it must be literally that much - just look how many bands have been confirmed in the line-up). Given that it's Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore curating the festival - ie choosing all the bands - you can expect that most of these bands aren't exactly going to sound like Hard-Fi (or Razorshite). Good, if you're inclined to sometimes like difficult music (which I do - most of the time, anyway). Obviously it'll be a little difficult to see every one of those 50 bands on the bill. In fact, it will actually be impossible, as my understanding is bands will be performing in different rooms simultaneously. Well, obviously the same band won't be performing simulatenously in two rooms, as that would require teleportation. Anyway, Moore sadly won't be playing with To Live And Shave In L.A. (you haven't heard of them? Shame on you), of which he is a sometime member. Still, it should be an experience - especially as it's at Butlins. Yes, Butlins - a veritable British institution on the English coast, the holiday camp that bored families take their whining kids. Watching Ashtray Navigations (whoever the fuck they may be) performing their "psychedelic noise project" and 16 Bitch Pile Up - who probably don't sound like a fey, jangly C86 band judging from their name - or MV/EE + The Bummer Road together with their dog Zuma doing some serious drone action in Butlins is going to be a truly surreal experience...

I'll be performing on Thursday 30th November 2006 at The Wilmington near Angel tube station, on around 8 to 8:30pm, with Archslider. Click here for details on address, etc. The night has four other bands and a flyer can be found here, at the bottom of the page. Apparently it's £6 without a flyer, £5 with.

North Korea's statement in response to unilateral UN sanctions after their nuclear tests is pretty downright scary, particularly this bit:

We will fulfil our duty to denuclearize the Korean peninsula as we have already declared, but if anyone tries to infringe on our sovereignty and our right to existence, even a bit, under the signboard of the UN Security Council resolution, we will unsparingly launch a merciless strike. We will watch out for any move by the United States, and will take appropriate measures accordingly.

What constitutes infringing on their sovereignty just "even a bit"? Taunting Kim Jong-il from across the river in full view of the guards on the border between China and N.Korea? Actually, it'd be difficult for the guards to see you as they'll be in darkness, judging from this article.

Indeed, while Kim Jong-il parties away with his cognac, and bottles of wine that cost more than what a North Korean worker makes in a year, his country only has a couple of hours of electricity a day. The contrasts from space with South Korea and Japan are pretty telling when you look at this composite picture of the Earth at night from space, as well as the close-up image above.

More on the practice of 'Wyatting'...

From K-Punk's blog in the July archives - this is a heavy one, and involves some serious class analysis!

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I think we can gain another insight the big Other from ‘Wyatting’. I remain deeply ambivalent about the phenomenon, but I’m more sympathetic to the motives of some of those involved after reading Carl Neville’s account of participating in it. Carl’s attack on ‘that horribly sentimentalized middle class viewpoint that its horrendous to sneer at "normal" people and disrupt their "normal" perfectly harmless Friday nights out etc,’ gets to the heart of what is wrong with Popism and its academic twin, Cult Studs. There’s an awful poignancy to Carl’s description of he and his fellow Wyatters’

love/hate relationship with the class that we were always estranged from but for which none the less we continue to nurture a kind of angry hope..we are appallingly conflicted ourselves.. there is for us a particular heightened poignancy in, for example, putting on card-carrying-Commie Robert Wyatt's exquisite version of "Red Flag" in a pub full of pissed-up Proles and watching them pull faces and shout to have it turned off... a particularly bitter amusement, compounded of many emotions...

The question Carl poses at the end - ‘how do you Wyatt a bar full of Resonance FM listeners.... a bar full of super eclectic, super ironic Fashionistas (I'm guessing M-People's " Elegant Slumming", is pretty much the key.)’ – makes it clear that what constitutes Noise is structural position rather than any inherent features of the sound itself. Wyatting can be seen as one response to the impasse that Simon described in his piece on Noise in Blissed Out: without a big Other who can be annoyed and scandalized, Noise loses it cache.

The fact that the site for Wyatting is pubs is also revelatory, especially in a week in which Top of the Pops is finally limping to its inglorious end. Part of the thrill we got from performances by the likes of Japan and the Associates on Top of the Pops came from the fact that they we knew they were being broadcast into so-called ‘normal’ living rooms. The ‘normal’ context of the show itself - the hopelessly out-of-touch pre-Yoof Radio 1 presenters and the mediocrity of the surrounding bands - added to the intensity. But those bizarre incongruities were features of Old Media broadcasting, elminated by the proliferation of niche marketed narrowcast digital channels. The only site you will be able to reach anything like a general audience now is, indeed, pubs, so it is here that digitial hyper-choice can come into tension with ‘normality’. It is difficult, though, to see that tension generating anything but pointless rancour and/ or bemused incomprehension. British people will defend, sometimes literally to the death, their absolute right to reality-confirming convalescent oblivion. The game was up when breweries managed to successfully market pubs as anything other than places in which the defeated and the dejected - old men and (pre-Cool) Coronation Street characters - shuffled off into the sidings of life. The Rover's Return: Britain's popcultural answer to Waiting for Godot: a confirmation that 'no-one moves', that any attempt to escape ends up in the same drab familiarity. Pubs, like universities, are unredeemable; nothing can ever happen in them. That is what they are for: to suck everything into a black hole of vegetative inertia…

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I guess there's an underlying theme of nostalgia here for the days of Top of the Pops at 7pm, and when there was no internet radio or cable to offer dazzling choice. In other words, it was a kind of 'special' moment when your favourite indie band appeared on TOTP/The Tube/The Old Grey Whistle Test, or when John Peel played Half Man Half Biscuit, etc because it was like a rare gateway into a more exciting universe of left-field music before the program just put on some bland tosh again (which would have been dreadful power-pop in the mid 80's - Deacon Blue, Wet Wet Wet, Level 42, that sort of thing). Whereas now, you can just go on YouTube and get footage of the band you want straight away, or buy a DVD of the band's performances. Music has become decentralised.

Merzbow photograph courtesy of Under City Lights

Wolf Eyes interview up here.

Writing that article made me think about the whole 'noise' scene and how Simon Reynolds exposes in the book Rip It Up and Start Again just how dodgy the politics of some of those bands were - Whitehouse, in particular, were practically a parody of fascism. In The Wire, free-jazz drummer Chris Corsano makes the point that Whitehouse live were so OTT that it's 'supercamp', as he puts it, with two blokes in their 40s onstage shouting lyrics about various sadists and mass murderers throughout history. Nonetheless, as a spectacle, the sheer sonic assault of Whitehouse live when I saw them took some beating.

Goying beyond the confrontational approach of some of its acts, noise remains a fascinating genre, with's its incredibly prolific releases (Merzbow (above) has released something like 350 albums, including the legendary one that came soldered into a car's ignition) and uncompromising stance. Stubbornly avant-garade, noise remains the genre most untainted by commercial success, and has a kind of purity about it as a result (though some would translate it as elitism), both in aesthetics and in the visceral drone of the music. No-one becomes a noise artist with even the slightest hope that they might actually make some money.

Following on from this, Reynolds has also mentioned in his blog about the practice of hip music fans christened 'Wyatting', which basically involves going into a pub with a fiver and putting on deliberately the most unlistenable music on the jukebox all night, thereby rendering the chav's attempts at chatting up members of the opposite sex nullified by the fact that it will be to a soundtrack of punishing industrial power electronics white noise.

Amazingly, it's been picked up by The Guardian, who've provided a succint explanation of the act here. But Reynolds' blog below is far more entertaining.


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From Simon Reynolds blog 2006-01-06

There’s A Wyatt Going On

Further to the Thursday Afternoon prankster story, two correspondents write to tell me how this is becoming a burgeoning cruel sport among hipsters--square-baiting-- or perhaps, in a more charitable reading, a desperate intifada-like resistance to the tyranny of Pop and/or Indie Middlebrow...

A Guy Called Danny says he did “this exact same thing (right down to using Thursday Afternoon as the polite nuisance) in a bar in Brighton mostly frequented by metalheads about a year ago. Those "infinite jukebox" thingies are an unlimited source of fun: Another favourite trick was to go to a fashionable indie pose-pub and cue up all four sides of Metal Machine Music, then watch as the customers' carefully cultivated cool slowly crumbled. How we smirked! Looking back, it probably wasn't worth the four quid I had to put in the jukebox, though.”

while Carl Neville says “this particular use/abuse of pub Jukeboxes is something of a ritual now, at least it is for me and a couple of mates.. . there's a bar in Ramsgate... with one of these massive database jukeboxes installed, and once a month when i visit family and friends we go " Wyatting" (the cowardly white muso boys anonymous attempt at provocation and civil disobedience, term coined after our inital experiment with playing the whole of Dondestan one Friday evening, to general be/amusement). Now we like to get down there nice and early with twenty quid each, get a good four or five hours worth of Dark Magus and On the Corner or the complete works of The Mahavishnu Orchestra on, nicely topped off with a bit of Neubauten or Coil, maybe a smattering of "Frankie Teardrop", a soupcon of Merzbow and a pinch of No Pussyfooting as the locals try to go through the ritual Friday night lad/laddette motions to a soundtrack of nails down blackboard feedback and thirty two minute Evan Parker clarinet solos. Naturally you have to try to look like as if your not enjoying it much either, even complain vociferously if required....though thus far no one has ever demanded its turned off.. which maybe an interesting brit/yank diifference.. they just tend to complain to each other and get on with the business of suffering through ( ahhh, the stoical, masochistic, stiff upper lip Brit!) any number of auditory abominations.....naturally the more inappropriate the pub the greater the delight in "Wyatting".. we've enjoyed it so much down on the coast i'm thinking of exporting the practice to London ( no doubt I'm well behind the times and there are already embattled enclaves of "Urban(e) Wyatters" doing the rounds here, i've just yet to hook up with them) perhaps blissblog could help to promote this childish, futile, but finally hilarious practice (death of the political and all that, eh?) by forming a "Wyatt Squad" in New York and generally helping to boost its profile on an international scale...

“It’s already becoming a competitive sport!."I Wyatted the Wifebeater's Arms in Castleford with three solid hours of Diamanda Galas last Friday, mate what you been up to.. oh yeah, Pauline Oliviros???.....Cambridge....??? is that the best you can manage?"I guess the music biz and the pubs that have installed them have no idea what a demographic busting, commercially suicidal innovation this one is... it only takes twenty or so commited, strategically deployed Whitehouse fans to bring entire national chains crumbling to the ground... endless loops of "shitfun" and " I'm coming up your ass" of a sunday morning as the punters tuck into the pub lunch..... and so Kapital sows the seeds of its own destruction through hammy Eighties PowerElectronics... fancy twenty five minutes of Sutcliffe Jugend with that Full English love?... two pints of Stella, a pickled egg and could you turn the Smell and Quim track down a bit mate, its given one of the kids a nosebleed....just wait till the video version o f this jukebox becomes available, no doubt in conjuction with youtube.. come that glorious day comrade it's gonna be wall to wall live G.G. Allin footage down Laurence Llewelyn Bowen's poxy Inc bar, i'll tell you that much... !"

Pockets of resistance inside the City of Music, using the technology against itself--a design flaw in the machines unspotted by the manufacturers? Or just the Wire-reader/ Resonance FM-listener as audio-bully?

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Now that you have 'internet jukeboxes' theoretically you could have any track that's ever been released at your fingertips, but surely it's only a smattering of pubs that have these new-fangled things set up? I mean, the majority of pubs patently have 'traditional' jukeboxes which most certainly don't have Whitehouse or Merzbow or Dimanda Gallas (never mind if it's in Margate), surely? You'd have to be a pretty clued-up (or loony) pub owner. The closest I can think of is The Strongrooms in Shoreditch, which has My Bloody Valentine's Loveless or Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space - the latter of which had the 17-minute free-jazz freakout of Cop Shoot Cop, which I was sorely tempted to put on. But come on, 32 minute Evan Parker clarinet solos or Swans' Public Castration is a Good Idea, or Foetus' Scraping a Foetus Off a Wheel? No pub with a traditional jukebox is going to have that.
Reynolds has also managed to find other stuff about Wyatting here.

Following on from my earlier post about the probe to Pluto, it now emerges that Pluto may not actually be a planet anymore. The debate is getting serious, with exciting - well, sort of exciting, anyway - news emerging of punch-ups among experts at the International Astronomical Union's conference in Prague. This bit made me laugh:

Stern said like-minded astronomers had begun a petition to get Pluto reinstated. Car bumper stickers compelling motorists to "Honk if Pluto is still a planet" have gone on sale over the internet

Strange to think that a lump of rock millions of miles away in space is causing consternation among grown professionals. In the next hundred years, there will no doubt be endless discoveries of planets such as 2003UB313 in our solar system, which are actually bigger than Pluto. What are the school text books going to look like then?

This New Scientist front cover from a couple of months back takes some beating. Cripes, as Steve Irwin once said when he was still alive. Puts things into perspective when watching X-Factor, anyway.

I have been joined in the world of blogging by none other than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose set up his own website-cum-blog. In a country that has serious restrictions and censorship when it comes to cyberspace, Ahmadinejad has shown that he's keeping up with the modern times.

His site is in four languages - English, French, Farsi and Arabic, with English denoted by a rather bizarre hybrid flag that combines the stars of stripes with the cross of England (whither the Union Jack these days? Perhaps he has inexplicable greivances against Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - not that the Wales flag is in the Union Jack of course, but I digress). There's also a frankly scary poll in which we are asked to vote on: "Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word war?" It's nice to know that Ahmadinejad wants to ponder these questions with us. Maybe there will be one next where we can vote as to whether North Korea really wanted to bomb Alaska.
While not busy threatening Israel with scary remarks about Zionism, the President has decided to share this thought with us:

I had to start working in a shop- that made certain parts for cooling system of buildings- to make some money to cover a portion of my family’s expenses and also my educational costs. Even though I was very playful those days, but was aware of my school & education. I was a distinguished student.

Apart from the bad grammar, you have to wonder what he means by "I was very playful". Woah, was Mahmoud a bit of a hell-raiser? Things get more surreal with this:

Although these terrorist groups are still under the protection and shameful support of Great Satan USA, however, the slap that these groups have received from the brave nation of Iran will never be forgotten by them.

Yeah, they got a slap on the bottom. Great Satan USA sounds like an awesome title for a psychedelic rock song, by the way. A bit like Rocket USA by Suicide but, erm, not. Maybe Ahmadinejad is a fan of Suicide's classic first, self-titled album. Then again, maybe not.

I will continue this topic later on as it took long in the beginning. From now onwards, I will try to make it shorter and simpler. With hope in God, I intend to wholeheartedly complete my talk in future with allotted fifteen minutes.

Why fifteen minutes, exactly? Anyway, we've been promised some future gems while he's off. His blog will no doubt get 5 billion more hits than mine, and is in four languages. But in every other way, mine is better. I wonder if I should post my blog address at the bottom of his webpage? It can only be a matter of time now before his mate, dear old Kim Jong-il of North Korea, does a blog about his favourite films in his vast DVD collection (he has reportedly the biggest hi-fi/stereo system in the world). There must be a lot of porn in there, I reckon. After that, keep your eyes peeled for Robert Mugabe's imminent appearance on Myspace.

Went to the above, rather strange warehouse party, in which Shoreditch in excelsis promoter Sean McLusky has attempted a rather bizzare 'new craze' at the moment (or maybe it's just syle magazines talking bollocks) of revisiting early 90's rave and rave-rock with bands like the Klaxons...this was nothing like those cheesy 'Ibiza 89 classic hardcore revisited' type nights full of Essex boys with ponytails though, as the audience was your typical Brick Lane trendy fashionista people. The world is truly becoming a surreal place when the 'indie' scene - or at least the trendy, Trash-visiting indie/electroclash/post-punk etc. crowd - starts venerating something that it was traditionally always diametrically opposed to fifteen years ago. I used to go to raves in the 90's, in both squat parties and in warehouses, and a weird sense of deja vu from the first time around pervaded. Yet at the same time it felt like a weird simulacrum, for while it felt like a proper early 90's squat rave - replete with endless graffiti, some goon with glo-sticks, glow-in-the-dark clothes, and pilled up people in the chill out areas away from the music - the fact that it's more than ten years on from all that led to a surreal atmosphere. I seem to remember them playing classic tracks by Phuture ('Acid Trax', maybe?) and others.
It's another example of how music seems to go in cycles and repeats itself, just as post-punk rehashed the late 70's/early 80's and electroclash the mid 80's - but also of our endless diet for nostalgia, that's ever-present in people's obsessions with Star Wars, The A-Team, and all those sodding remakes being made in Hollywood at the moment.
So is the next step to rehash the early 90's rave scene, even within the 'indie' circles (whatever 'indie' is these days)? I've heard that the Klaxons latest single has been a regular at indie clubs lately (you know you're getting old when you only hear about the new de rigeur tracks being played at indie clubs rather than actually being there).
That means that chronologically the next movement could eventually gravitate towards a dreadful version of Britpop, ten years on....God, what a horrible thought, and that's when I'll feel really old...in mitigation, maybe they'll rediscover that period around '93 that had a whole load of interesting bands (Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Bark Psychosis, Flying Saucer Attack, Seefel, and the tail end of shogazing).

Great Independent front covers of our time (I)

It struck me on the 10^th August walking to work that all was not it seemed - the traffic and pedestrians walking down the street were there as usual, but there was an eerie, distinct silence too. Then I realised - the constant noise emanating from planes flying past every hour of the day wasn't there for once. I've become so used to the sound that it seems almost like an anomaly not to hear the familar roar of those jets.... Perhaps the front cover of the Independent captured the despondent, neurotic mood of the nation best after the suspected plot to blow up passenger planes, which led to mass cancellations at UK airports.

If this continual threat of terrorism continues, it's not long off before those ID cards discussed by the Government are made compulsory - a depressing thought indeed, and one that would stoke an Orwellian, paranoid state. In a sense, even though the plot was foiled, the terrorists will have won if it gets to that point...how did it get to this?

I've just had a horrible moment of clarity.
There I was following this exciting - well, exciting to geeky space-following nerds, anyway - probe mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, in which it will orbit the far corners of our solar system for the first ever time. It will encircle mysterious Pluto and it's moon Charon. and then on to negotiate huge rocks orbiting the Sun from way out in a 'belt' which marks the edge of our solar system (well, sort of anyway). But then I realised with a horrible dawning that I will be 37 when it 'arrives' there....Christ, what a thought...I feel like I was only about 23 yesterday. Well, obviously I wasn't, and objectively I'm talking crap, but you know what I mean, etc. Reading about space exploration always has a way of making you feel really old...
Edit: apparently, Pluto and Charon and in fact a double planet set rather than one planet and it's moon...