As a user myself, I’ve been interested to see the unveiled new extension to the area in which 'Boris bikes' will be running. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the Olympics coming up, it appears to favour the Docklands and those areas adjacent to the site, with a few extra stations added in ‘North Shoreditch’ (i.e. about as far as the Geffrye Museum). Understandable, of course, with such an enormously significant event coming up, but I still can’t see why the catchment area for the bikes at the moment has to be so saturated while many others areas and boroughs, all of which are broadly ‘inner London’, have been crying out for the scheme and yet have not been serviced by a single docking station. With the current extension I can’t help but feel that while Boris ostensibly is addressing the tournament this summer, in reality the extension is equally there to serve the suits in Canary Wharf.
If he’s serious about the scheme being a meritocratic service for the general public, and not just for a coterie of bankers, there needs to be docking stations in most of Hackney (including Dalston), lots of Islington which currently isn’t serviced (Holloway Road for one), all of Haringey – which, remember, stretches from Muswell Hill to South Tottenham – and preferably some of Waltham Forest. These are vast areas, with an enormous population combined. South of the river, too, areas such as Brixton, Clapham and New Cross haven’t had a look in.
Instead of building dense collections of docking stations streets away from each other in the catchment areas, it strikes me as far better to build outwards with less density of the stations. That way, a larger area is included within the cycle scheme, if one where the stations are dispersed much more sparsely. Stoke Newington, for example, might only get a handful, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Otherwise, I can’t help but shake the feeling that Boris is only aiming for where the bankers live.

Big Brother is Watching You

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."

George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 5

Someone posted the above photo on Facebook. As far as I'm aware, it's 100% genuine rather than a Photoshop job. What Orwell have thought of CCTV cameras is a moot point (or what he would have thought of the TV show Big Brother, come to think of it).
Indeed, it's somewhat ironic that in the country which birthed Orwell and Huxley - those two English masters of the dystopia - "there are reportedly more cameras per person than in any other country in the world". Admittedly I'm being lazy and using Wikipedia to find that fact - but it citates as its source this Guardian article, the contents of which I have no reason to disbelieve. And then there's these jawdropping facts:

A 2008 Report by UK. Police Chiefs concluded that only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV.[22] In London, a Metropolitan Police report showed that in 2008 only one crime was solved per 1000 cameras.

So, leaving aside the use of CCTV cameras for recording traffic infringements, that still means that 999 CCTV cameras out of every 1000 in London achieved absolutely bugger all in 2008 - four years ago, admittedly, but still a shocking statistic. And that, despite the enormous amount of money that's been spent on them, 97% of all crimes in that year weren't solved by CCTV. More depressing still is the fact Germany has far less CCTV cameras and yet still has a lower crime rate than the UK. Now that is something worth thinking about...

Here's two gigs I'm involved with coming up soon (with some nifty looking flyers designed by me if I may say so myself - anyone looking for any paid flyer design work?!). The February 25th gig will have myself playing onstage with Divisionists, as part of an EP launch party. The 24th March gig, meanwhile, is promoted by me, as part of the usual GoodnightLondon/Pennyblackmusic gig nights (though I won't be playing onstage). I'll be hanging out at both!

Here's another article by me, this time for The Clerkenwell Post, on the ubiquitous Banksy. It's worth watching the film I mention - Exit Through The Gift Shop - just to hear Banksy's heavily modulated Bristol twang in all it's glory...click on the jpgs for a closer read of the text.

Here's a review of mine about the current Barbican OMA/Progress exhibition.
After attending it, I've been interested to read this report about the Saudi Arabian government's plans to build a new skyscraper that will dwarf even the world's current tallest. Yes, that'll be the Burj Khalifa (picture above) in Dubai, UAE, which seems to point a finger into the sky, asking the question: what will happen to these Towers of Babel, unthinkably tall in medieval times, when the oil begins to run out and the swirling sands threaten to blot them out? By some estimations, there are some countries in the middle East (Oman, for one), where it's calculated that the oil reserves will dry in as soon as thirty years. It's this unthinkable possibility, combined with global warming, which suggests a deeply bleak future a hundred years hence. Think about everything in your life that runs on oil, and now imagine a life without it...looks like that research into into alternative sources of energy isn't such a bad idea after all.

Happy New Year’s all. Apologies for the lack of posts, due alternatively to a busy Christmas period and having to move and assemble furniture around. The anti-capitalist protestors are still camped out near me in Moorgate, somehow encapsulating a tumultuous 12 months of protests and direct action, while we’ve seen crisis after crisis hit the European economy, at the same time as London rents go through the roof and jobs are cut by the thousands. But I’ve been through that already.
Sometimes it makes you want to burrow into a hole and revisit your childhood and adolescence, with for me includes a commodity fast becoming something of a cult collector’s item: the cassette tape. As the format has slowly became obsolete over the last ten years, the medium has contrarily found a resurgence in the noise and black metal scenes, while underground record shops such as Second Layer in London have seen a roaring trade in the format.
There's something still tangibly great about tapes. I’m old enough to remember cherishing the art of the mix-tape, with the creation of unique, warped artwork part of the fun (of course, iTunes pretty much does it for you now with CD playlists). A younger generation growing up now are unlikely to feel such nostalgia for the format, of course. OurPrice and HMV in those days would stock a large section of cassette tape releases (along with blank tapes, naturally), while Rough Trade in Covent Garden had racks and racks of obscure underground releases in the format.
I was reminded of the era of cassette tapes recently when I found this link online to Pussy Galore’s legendary track-for-track postmodern deconstruction of The Rolling Stone’s Exile On Main Street. This bizarre concept was only released on cassette tape in 1986, and has quickly become a collector’s item. This being Pussy Galore, the album isn’t a strict, note-for-note cover. Instead, it feels like what would happen if the Stones had crossed paths with Faust, with weird industrial noises, sped-up tape, distorted interludes, and radio static (not to mention obligatory profanity by band members between songs) among the shambolically-played guitar riffs. It feels kind of exciting to hear something that’s been such a ‘forbidden’ collector’s item for so long (even if some of it veers on the unlistenable), and reminds me of the mystique of that pre-internet era where part of the thrill was tracking down ultra-limited releases.
Which leads to the next impossible-to-get-hold-of release that should be put on the internet: the first album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (or Godspeed You Black Emperor! as they were known then), released in 1994 and entitled All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling – limited to only 33 copies on cassette tape, and damn near impossible to get hold of. Copies nowadays, naturally, must be like gold dust (though not, presumably, as hard to get hold of as the Merzbow album which came in a car, so you had to buy the car to get the album; indeed, the album in question was actually soldered into the car's engine, so that Merzbow's signature ear-splitting power electronics would come on automatically after turning on the ignition. So it's fair to say that there weren't many copies of the car/album hybrid lying around when that was released - though I seem to remember Rough Trade claiming they had the car, album soldered in and all, in stock held somewhere...but I digress). In contrast to the subsequent Godspeed albums (which generally contain three to four tracks, each clocking in at 15-30 minutes), this one has forty-two ‘songs’ (who knows what they sound like), including a charming tribute to Quebec’s finest chanteuse entitled ‘Perfumed Pink Corpses From The Lips of Ms. Celine Dion’. Now this is something I would genuinely love to hear – though, given that so few people have heard it, theoretically anyone could upload music to the Net claiming that it’s the album.

Among all the recriminations over the plight of the European Union and Eurozone at the moment, it’s easy to forget that just over fifty years ago, the continent was at war with itself. It’s testament to the power of the European Union since then that there has been relative harmony on the continent as a whole ever since (bar war in the former Yugoslavia and a nasty dictatorship remaining in Belarus). For this writer, it would be an enormous shame if the UK left the EU, and not just because of the inconvenience that could result when visiting the continent. Despite claims to the contrary, the United Kingdom is tied irrevocably to Europe, both geographically and culturally. The European Union exists whether the likes of UKIP like it or not, and comparisons with prosperous Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada ignore the fact that those countries are far away in other continents and have never been linked to the EU in the way that the UK has.
Furthermore, claims that the UK would be better off outside the EU often site the examples of small, wealthy countries within Europe but not in the EU, such as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. Yet, as part of EFTA (along with tiny Liechtenstein), those countries are still, in a sense, linked to the EU, and still have to comply with laws from Brussels when they want to trade with the EU. At the same time, while they also have to pay into the European Social Fund, as non-EU members they have little say on where that money stumped up is spent – a situation that is arguably less democratic than being in the EU and having a say on policy and where funds are spent (no matter how torturous those negotiations might be).
Indeed, comparisons with Norway also forget that the Scandinavian country is extremely oil-rich; in comparison, it’s a moot point how the threat of Scottish separatism could affect the access to oil of a post-Union UK breakup. If the unthinkable happened and Scotland hypothetically did separate, the remaining UK, whatever it would be called (“Kingdoms of England, Wales & Northern Ireland” doesn’t quite flow somehow), might still have access to some oil, but dramatically less than before (though it would probably continue to do trade with a sovereign Scotland). In such a situation, the remaining UK would look isolated if outside the EU – even if an independent Scotland decided not to join the EU and/or Euro currency (which is not an impossibility, given Alex Salmond’s frequent references to joining an “arc of prosperity” that would include Norway and Iceland).
The EU may not be perfect, and there's no doubt that the popular discontent looming throughout the Eurozone has certainly put a strain on the whole idea of a united Europe. The argument that the single currency was always in some senses a flawed project without all EU countries signing up and agreeing to full fiscal union back when the Euro was implemented - which would, of course, consistently have led to questions of national sovereignty - has some merit, though many countries (Austria, Finland, The Netherlands, etc.) within the Eurozone seem to be doing fine at the moment. But that’s a digression to another topic entirely, as is the hypothetical question of where Britain would be if it had elected to join the Euro rather than stay with sterling. The point is, at a time of recession in the West and the looming dominance of China and India, the UK’s best option – whatever its future shape – is still, in my view, to be part of an EU of half a million people rather than alone, especially if Scotland elects to go its own way. Furthermore, it’s easy to forget that while the EU isn’t, admittedly, a country as such, it still remains – just - the biggest economic bloc in the world.

Here's a quick reminder that this is taking place on Saturday 29th October.



Full details in my previous post about the night.

Image taken from Disclose.TV

Really enjoyed this article on Wired magazine's website about the mysterious Russian radio station UVB-76. It almost brings to mind Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in which two men, accompanied by a guide called the ‘Stalker’, visit a strange, haunted place called the Zone, where the visitor’s deepest metaphysical desires are said to be granted. You can imagine the UVB-76, which is based somewhere near the border with Estonia, most likely deep within a pine forest, existing in a forbidden zone, where no-one fears to tread. The reality, of course, is probably a bit more prosaic, and the reality of its military function most likely dissapointly mundane, despite the fact that notions of Soviet/Russian espionage have always exerted a wild hold on the Western imagination. Nonetheless, when you listen to the beeps and static of the ‘Buzzer’, as it’s been nicknamed, via this website, with the lights off and headphones on, you can understand the attraction of this mysterious station, which according to the Wired article has gained up to 41,000 listeners (and if you don’t believe me that people are obsessed, check out this forum. It’s especially spooky when you can hear audible voices in the background. Either the chatter is interference from other stations, or – more excitingly – it is coming from UVB-76 itself and is people talking near the microphone, which seems to be placed near the buzzer. Who knows what they are talking about?

After covering the National Union of Journalists’ Delegate Meeting 2011 earlier this year, I thought it would be interesting to attend the Rebellious Media Conference this weekend, of which the NUJ had a stall. Despite that terrible name – it was originally meant to be called the Radical Media Conference until a media company with the same name stepped in with a lawsuit – the two-day split-venue event turned out to be a good distillation of left-wing media. Organised by an umbrella group containing a number of publications and organisations – New Internationalist magazine, Peace News, visionOntv and others – the conference saw the likes of Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and ZNet’s Michael Albert, as well as speakers from UK Uncut. While the seminar involving Pilger was illuminating with its discussion on how mainstream media reporting is still subject to pressure from Governments, he remained in bullish mood, at one point insisting slightly disingenuously on the subject of Libya that the massacre in Benghazi “never happened” (surely that’s because NATO stopped it from happening?). Albert, meanwhile, had some good points to make on the left-wing movements’ crisis of identity, and how in America the 60s protest movement failed to capitalise on their successes and possibility for change in the following decades – leading, of course, to the nadir of much of the materialist 80s (embodied, to use a striking image, by Jefferson Airplane morphing over twenty years into the turgid Starship:





But, despite his soporific voice, which nearly sent me to sleep at one point, the highlight was Chomsky, with his profound insistence that the UK is following the US in its dismantling of the traditional NHS with the Health and Social Care Bill (Obama's attempted changes to the US Healthcare service notwithstanding). The NHS is one service that the Britain can justly be proud of, an egalitarian, accessible, efficient service which all of society is entitled to use. Yet, to use an example, while British Rail was not perfect, it’s unlikely that it suffered from many of the Byzantium problems which have resulted from contracting out the railways to different companies in the post-privatization age. Could the same fate now befall the NHS?

RIP Bert Jansch

So yet another installment in the GoodnightLondon/Pennyblackmusic series of concerts is on the cards at the end of this month, taking place at the usual manor south of the river...

Live:
Morton Valence
Madam
The Doomed Bird of Providence
Rome Pays Off

Saturday 29th October 2011
The Half Moon, Herne Hill, South London (directions here)
8pm
£5 in advance from here
£6 on door
A description of the acts can be found on the Last FM page

www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk
www.halfmoonpub.co.uk

Spot the difference...











The first three pictures are of the Montreal Biosphère in Canada; the latter two are of The Eden Project in Cornwall, south-west England. Both are geodesic domes. The first was designed by the great Buckminster Fuller while the latter was inspired by him.
Walking around the Biosphere while in Montreal this summer was a true highlight of this year, with the dome's Utopian feel balanced by the alarming exhibitions on global warming and rises in sea temperatures. It's fascinating to think of the contrast between Fuller exploring the geodesics structural synthesis with nature and Le Corbusier's concrete urbanism, both of which were occurring at roughly the same time-span. In John Brunner's dystopian novel Stand on Zanzibar, Manhattan is imagined - like in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We - as surrounded by an enormous geodesic dome. In hundreds of years time, when global warming accelerates and the seas rise, such domes may be the only method of survival for the world's cities.

Walking around Paris’ rue Oberkampf (“one of the city’s premier after-dark hangouts”, apparently*) while on a trip to the City of Lights recently, my first impressions were just how ostensibly quiet things were. A few people milled outside bars, but for the most part the area seemed muted and languid rather than the boisterousness of the Bastille area. Then it hit me: people don’t go out drinking until midnight here, as with many other parts of Continental Europe. I was there at 10:15pm - too early.
I’ve touched on the contrast between opening hours in Britain and Continental Europe once before, but it still seemed to apply more than ever in my mind after this trip across the Channel. The ritual culture of drinking heavily before the 11 o’clock curfew and then all converging on the street at the same time (leading to the inevitable punch-up or some such activity) has become so embedded in the British psych that many people find it nigh on impossible to imagine an alternative. The Government’s slight attempt to relax opening hours hasn’t been adopted by many drinking establishments (there have been exceptions), and the result is an infantile drinking culture that sees no prospect of changing. It doesn’t have to be this way.
This is not an encouragement for people to get even more legless than before (and consequently put a strain on hospitals). While there would certainly be an increased amount of idiots in the short-run being admitted to Casualty wards, hypothetically if drinking culture were introduced there is no reason why British drinking culture wouldn’t adapt to Continental hours in the long-run, leading to a more relaxed drinking culture.
Exmouth Market, a busy pedestrian area near Farringdon full of independent shops and a great atmosphere by evening, is an example: it could be the equivalent of some of the side streets I saw in the Bastille area; yet by 12:30am everything remained shut and the area was completely deserted, with only one pub nearby open until 2am. Much of the area around Jaguar Shoes, Catch, The Spread Eagle et al, where Kingsland Road meets Old Street, is the same, leading to puzzled looks from many tourists after midnight. Late night clubs – the vast majority of which you have to pay to get in, of course – which genuinely do open late are not included here, of course, but rather simple opportunities for drinking after 12:30 or so.
We can hardly lay claim to London being a ’24 hour city’ in comparison to rivals such as Paris or New York when an irrelevant law left over from World War I continues to stymie the city’s nightlife.

* According to the Rough Guide Pocket Guide to Paris 2011. And when are the Rough Guides ever wrong?

(Image taken from MailOnline.co.uk)

2011 has been a year where I’ve vowed to take up that which I’ve put off for ages. And one of those things is cycling around London.
First, though, a gripe. I’ve only been using the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme for a few months, but already the limitations of the scheme are obvious. Go into Hackney and Stoke Newington and there’s not a single docking station, given that the scheme only stretches as far as the south tip of Kingsland Road. Likewise no coverage in Mile End and the whole Docklands area in east London; Brixton and East Dulwich in South London; and none in Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith in west London. The scheme, by and large, seems designed for those who work in the Square Mile, King’s Cross/Islington, and the West End, with some docking stations thrown in the important parts of South London for good measure (for those from outside London unacquainted with the service, and/or who haven't perused TfL's Barclays Cycle Hire mini-site, each of the 'pin marks' in the image above represents a docking station, where you pick up or 'dock' - i.e. leave behind - a bike).
There’s certainly a high density of docking stations in those areas which are included in the cycle hire scheme, but surely it would be wiser for them to be less concentrated and instead spread out over the city. All the areas mentioned above are relatively near to central or inner-city London, but also have a huge number of residents who would benefit from the scheme.
It’s true that there is a huge demand within central London, to the extent that I’ve passed docking stations entirely empty (though I may have simply passed at the moment when all the bikes have been took away in those Cycle Hire vans to be repaired). But in general the scheme still seems biased to a relatively small area.
Despite that, cycling through the back streets of London opens you up to a whole new vista of the city, with areas that you never thought existed. London has a capacity to surprise just when you thought you knew it well, and the endless stream of previously unseen squares, winding canals and obscure back street areas has opened up in a new, dynamic way compared to taking public transport. I’m beginning to realise now what I’ve been missing all this time. Taking up cycling has opened up a new dramatic perspective on the city. And you’re not forced to listen to people’s tedious conversations on their mobile.

Walking around London today was a weird experience, with a subdued, intangibly jittery and apprehensive atmosphere. On the surface, everything felt normal, but underneath, you felt that tension could rear its head at any moment. It brought to mind the days straight after the 7/7 bombings. It seems incredible that Hackney, the borough I grew up in, and the other areas of East London in which I’ve lived (including Tottenham), are in the news around the world.
Two articles in particular on the rioting have been especially illuminating. This one in Time highlights just how different the London 2011 riots are to those which took place in Paris in 2005. The riots in Paris took place in the banlieues, away from the mostly affluent inner city residents. The areas hit in London, by contrast, are not only ethnically heterogeneous but also contain poor and wealthy living virtually cheek-by-jowl, which has meant that the riots have, in the words of the article, been “surging right up to the doors of the comfortable, middle and upper-middle class homes” (such as happened in Notting Hill). This is contrasted to Paris, where many of the banlieues where the riots took place are geographically remote from the rest of the city, both physically (exacerbated by the Boulevard Périphérique motorway) and mentally, with many residents complaining of their disenfranchised alienation from wider French society.
What’s also disturbing too in that article is the mention of how the new Sarkozy government brought in money, social programs and better transport links to the blighted areas in Paris subsequently. In recession-hit Britain in 2011, by contrast, the focus on the Government has been on cuts to benefits and services. While many of the rioters have undoubtedly been mindless idiots keen to join in with the carnage, there is nonetheless an acknowledgement here in this revealing article in The Guardian that cuts in services may also have played a part, particularly in this interview with a local on the Pembury estate in Hackney:

"They just want to be heard," said a young black woman. "This is the only way some people have to communicate. "Were cuts in services a factor? "Course they are. They cut our youth project by 75%. We used to work with gangs, run a workshop that brought police and young people together. Gone.”

Of course, that still doesn’t excuse the mindless nature of the rioters, particularly when they have targeted local businesses, people, cars and buildings. These are the same kind of people who make taking buses in London such a misery much of the time. I never felt the urge to join in looting when I was the age of many of the rioters, and neither do many ordinary working people. It’s quite obvious that many of the opportunists who have joined in with the riots have brazenly took their chance to loot and arson local stores full of DVDs/TVs/trainers rather than display any interest in serious objection to Government policy or human rights (hence the absence of the anarchist/anti-globalisation brigade in these riots, many of whom are in any case from an educated, white, middle-class milieu rather than working-class teenagers from the estates). It’s true, too, that there are many different factors in play – background, culture - that have led to the mindset of those that have took part as opposed to those who haven’t, and which would lead to another article entirely.

In the wider context, though, at the same time as the cuts, we are seeing footballers and bankers in the UK paid obscene amounts of wealth, while corporations such as Barclays have been singled out by UK Uncut – quite rightly - for their tax avoidance. Meanwhile, rents have gone up at the same time as wages have stagnated, jobs have been lost and benefits have been cut, leading to serious financial difficulty and desperation for many. So while the rioters are mindless thugs, the events haven’t taken place in a sociological vacuum, even if another article in The Guardian points out that the rioters are from a diverse range of ethnicities.
If Cameron and Osbourne are serious about tackling the stagnating economy and putting some money back into the community, there is no choice but to raise taxes on the wealthy and on companies, while imposing financial regulation on the Square Mile and imposing limits on ridiculous bonus culture in the City by law. On top of that, rent controls - coupled with a genuine desire to protect individual businesses (as Paris has done to some extent) in the face of greedy landlords and the onslaught of homogenous chain stores which seem to blight many UK high streets so much - would actually endear me to the current Government. But I would be surprised if it ever happens. These changes might not fully avert another riot in the future, and whatever happens the Government’s future policy certainly doesn’t justify the looting, arson and terrorising of local communities, now or in the future. But the changes could lead to a more egalitarian society, in which people feel less disenfranchised and less prone to mindlessly smash up everything in their sight.

My recent trip to Canada feels almost like a dream now. Montreal and Toronto were hazy and hot, with the Biosphere pavilion, in Parc Jean-Drapeau, a strange utopian vision in the distance. But what interested me particularly was trying out the Underground – or Metros, as they call them - in the two cities, and comparing the result with London. Both had large, wide tunnels with trains running both ways, leading to air being able to flow. The London network was nicknamed ‘The Tube’ for a reason – namely that the narrow tunnels are literally like a tube, with heat unable to escape anywhere. Consequently, even if the grills on a London Underground train are opened in the summer in order to let in air, they are essentially just blowing hot air into the train. On top of this, the ancient, creaking, Byzantine nature of the LU infrastructure of signals exacerbates many of the problems which any frequent user will attest to.
Having viewed underground metros in other cities, it seems to me that the only way that the LU’s conundrums can be really solved is by building entirely new tunnels, this time suitably large in length, right near the existing ones. This would mean that an entirely new track and infrastructure could be built. These new tunnels could then eventually link up with the existing stations. There could then also be exits in the stations to the old tunnels, which could be used as underground cycling tunnels. In the cycling tunnels you could have bright lighting and places to drink water.
Admittedly the idea sounds far-fetched – try convincing any member of TfL, as I have - but it would certainly iron out the Underground’s endless cycle of problems. It would also cost billions upon billions of pounds, of course – but then, in all likelihood, so is Crossrail.

Fantastic evening last Thursday going to a hearing of Eliane Radigue's work at a church near Bank - an 84-minute piece of deep minimalism in which everyone sat in a circle, eyes closed, concentrating on the music.
Going to the ‘concert’ (in reality a public broadcasting of her work) made me realise that many live gigs are actually the worst places imaginable to concentrate on music: there’s the mobile phones aloft, the toilet queues, the uninterested half-drunk audience at the back drinking Carling beer (the only on offer if it’s the ‘Carling Academy’), the unavoidable sound of someone’s mundane conversation near you…Thursday’s experience offered completely a different experience, where all you could do is concentrate on the oscillation vibrations of the music. Sometimes I think The Luminaire (RIP) were right with those signs telling people who liked to talk in the middle of gigs to go downstairs, as puritanical as it sounded. Thursday achieved a kind of beauty and purity with its hypnotic hour and a half, leaving everyone spellbound and drowsy at the same time by the end. ‘Somnambulant’ I think is the word I’m looking for – but in the right way rather than in the pejorative sense. Now I know what they mean by the phrase 'Deep Listening'.

Me interviewing current indie-pop heavyweights The Pains of Being Pure At Heart on Pennyblackmusic's updated edition this week...fascinating to find that they've played two venues in London that yours truly has also played at (The Betsy Trotwood - officially London's smallest venue - and the Brixton Windmill). When I was (very) young I thought in my naivete that playing these venues meant that you were a guaranteed rock star. How things pan out as you get older...

It may have escaped your notice, but World Oceans Day happened recently, which celebrated...well, I think you can guess what it celebrated, given the title. You only have to go on the Events page to see just how extensive the festivities celebrating awareness of this day were. The oceans of the world are in as much trouble as some of the problems plaguing land, with overfishing and climate warming leading to alarming conclusions from scientists. So I thought I’d play my part by including a song (which you can stream below) on a local compilation which was released celebrating WOD. It’s a cover of The Dirty Three’s Sirena, which featured on their Ocean Songs album (you can hear the original version here). Sirena was a mermaid-like creature in mythology who lured men to the bottom of the sea, never to return. Perhaps less glamorously, the above pictures were taken by me at Brighton Sea Life Centre, in which you can go into a tunnel underwater while various sea creatures float around you.

Sirena by DominicSimpson