Celebratory Youthmovies Adventure Quest

In Which: Our Hero Travels To The Big Smoke, Encounters The Problems With A Place That Is Bigger Than A Square Mile, Hijacks A Friend’s Evening, Replacing The Last-Train-Home With An Expensive, Relentless Blistering Sleepless Night, And Returns Home, Bemused, One Camera Lighter, But With A Crème Egg In Tow

Those of you who know me well enough to be reminded about it on Facebook will have duly noted that it was my birthday last week. In celebration of this fact, I travelled down to London with Dan and Chris to see one of the last-ever Youthmovies shows. Feeling in rather fine spirits I decided that the most appropriate way to travel was IN STYLE. That’s right; second class carriage, with two bottles of whisky and a large tub of vanilla ice cream. Those of you who know me at all will be well aware of the fact that I very rarely make mistakes, however, my barely finished description of our choice of journey refreshment probably offers some explanation as to the following series of unfortunate lapses in judgement.

By the time we arrived at the gig I was effectively too tight to speak properly (or at all come to think of it), and thus I passed an enjoyable couple of hours swearing, stumbling, forgetting people’s names and hurling abuse at Youthmovies when they were onstage (I should point out here though, that nothing I said came close to Dan’s champion effort of telling Al, the guitarist, that he looked like he was wearing a fat lady’s tee-shirt).

Although we had a place to stay in London with someone who was at the gig with us, we decided at about eleven that it would be a tremendous idea to go and see another gig, having been invited for free by the lovely Cats In Paris. On the way we bumped into Iain making his way to the last train along Bishopsgate, so kidnapped him explaining that there was an excellent music show to attend, and he could certainly stay with our friends in Crouch End, no problems! We arrived, and were met with what I can only assume was the clerical gaffe of a distinct lack of our names on any guest list, but gladly paid money to get in, in such high spirits were we. We danced like massive pricks at the very front of the stage, in the most prominent and distracting position possible, in order to demonstrate to the band how much we were (loudly) enjoying the show. We probably hurled abuse again. I honestly can’t remember. All good things must end though, as I’m sure you are aware, and we eventually turned, tired and well cavorted, to make our way to borrowed beds in Crouch End.

Four hours and seventy-eight buses later, we arrived in the bright morning sunlight at Crouch End, hair be-drizzled, eyelids and limbs a-lolling. An odd thing happened on one of our many autobus journeys. Those of you who know my name will be aware that I’m not one to jump to conclusions, if we’re honest jumping is the kind of physical exertion I rarely stretch to, but I am quietly confident that the two charming [and when I say charming I mean incredibly intimidating] youths that specifically chose to sit either side of me for a period just long enough to offer me a selection of narcotics and accuse me of racism before alighting but 100m down the road from whence they came may have had something to do with the disappearance of one camera from my jacket pocket. Then again it could have fallen out. I’m not making accusations. Well, it was an ancient camera anyway, and full of pictures of my genitalia, so joke’s on them. Ha.


I would like to introduce to you now a concept which I have cleverly denoted by the word ‘blessaster’. The key here is the joining of the words ‘blessing’ and ‘disaster’ [I picked through a long list of words to join together there, for instance ‘plaster’ was a close contender] a neologism which I feel sums up that odd feeling of having been given the best and worst news ever, somehow bundled into one nauseating sentiment. For example, entering a pub to the words “Ben! Just in time, I’ve bought a round of drinks, here’s yours! Carling tops all round!” or perhaps discovering that the Beach Boys have reformed to support Keane on tour.

It is at this point in my evening that I encountered my first example of a blessaster, for as we finally arrived at our destination, with that welcoming door with warm comfortable sofas and beds nestled behind it in sight, we discovered Chris had not in fact been in contact with our supposed host since we left Hoxton, and moreover, he was not in contact with them when we were stood outside their rather grand house in a rather cold place miles away from anywhere I’ve ever been before.

We ambled back to the bus stop, whereupon we received the second dose of blessaster – we managed to stumble upon a bus that took us straight to just round the corner from Liverpool Street in about half an hour. It felt amazing to not have to trek around again for another three hours, but it certainly made the last four hours of brutal wandering seem all the more futile and misery-stricken.

Iain and I got off the train at Stratford, directly onto the platform of the next train departing for Brentwood. The home straight. But no, another blessaster, for you see, we had to wait TWENTY MINUTES for that train. Yes yes yes, it probably doesn’t seem a great deal to you now, but believe me it was very cold, and none of the shops were open so we couldn’t even stand around and browse through porn.

I got home at 8am and promptly slept for as many hours as I could squeeze into my head. Despite how much I am grumbling now, it really didn’t seem that bad.

That is until my phone stopped working, and when I returned home I found my now defunct camera charger. Boo.

Invisible Happenings

In Which: Our Hero Makes A Second Bonzo Reference, Performs Some 'Manual Labour' And As Such Demonstrates A Sympathetic Understanding For What Those Less Fortunate Than Himself Must Regularly Feel, Plays A Gig And Insults A Huge Black Dude From London.

Life's like that, isn't it? as I believe Vivian Stanshall once correctly remarked. One minute you're hauling birdshit covered rotting timber from a roof, the next you're destroying the valuable equipment of an unsuspecting prominent jazz bassist. And all via scoffing chocolates in a disused Prince of Wales kitchen, staring into the blank vessels of an anisotropically loved one's eyes, and reupholstering two sofas. I suppose I can understand when people tell me I have a multifarious or consistently 'interesting' job. Such a motley of novelties has its ups and downs.

Last night we played a gig with The Invisible. There wasn't a huge turn out, which was a shame (well only slightly; I was quite concerned before that a BIG TIME Not-Mercury-Music-Award-Winning-Band would entice a full house = me defecating masonry), especially since Norwich was the first gig of their tour, and opening to a room of silence is always slightly unnerving. I used to think the people of Norwich must appear tremendously respectful to artists playing at NAC, but having actually done it now myself, the fact that nobody makes a sound throughout performance is incredibly eerie and off-putting. Us being the kind of people we are, in the absence of heckling we find ourselves babbling senselessly about puffins or moustaches.

Anyway, we had a merrily fraught sound check in which neither my guitar, Chris's bass rig or The Invisible's bass rig worked, and lasted a rather hasty ten minutes (The Invisible of course arrived an hour before doors opened - you don't have to be on time when you reach the echelons of having your album chosen as the best of 2009 by the iTunes office).

Look at me, I sound spiteful. I really don't mean to. I have an enormous amount of respect for them, their live show was faultless, and an incredible show of mastery without the baggage of inaccessible jazz-wankery that so often surrounds such music. I have seen the bassist Tom several times before playing for Polar Bear (surely the best British jazz band at the moment) and have never failed to be impressed - what is most astounding is the ability of three jazz players to transfer that language into a tightly regimented pop format without losing any of the rhythmic diversity, melodic interest or groove. Their music is sparse in the sense of its indie-disco simplicity and tightly controlled structures, and thus almost vulnerably accessible (an approach completely different to ours, and frankly most jazz players, in which one throws as much as one can at a song so that in the likely event of things going wrong, nobody notices, owing to there being so much else happening, and you having played it so fast that by the time things go wrong you've already moved on to something completely different). Surprisingly though, they managed to improvise within this framework - their set ended with a huge ten minute post-rock mountain, building up and up in a weird frenetic disco.

But now who's wanking on? I'm almost finished, I promise. I spoke to the band when they'd finished, and told them how much I enjoyed their set, and how I'd found it surprising the extent to which they managed to create drawn out improvised sections and epic climaxes. I was returned strained smiles and polite 'thank you's.

Of course I now realise the reason for this is that I basically went up to them and said, "Hey guys I really enjoyed your set tonight, which was totally surprising."

Oh well.

On a lighter note, I'm going to Finland on Friday. How rad is that?!

Actually, no need to answer that question. I know how rad it is. Very.

The Future

I just watched a fairly interesting episode of 'Bottom Line' the Radio 4 discussion program. One of the guests this week was Stevie Spring, chief executive of magazine publisher Future Plc, and the basis of a lot of the discussion was the move of magazine publishing into the digital world. Evan Davis, presenter, made, I have to say, a bit of a shit effort trying to place her position in relation to the other guests, an outsourcing firm executive (obviously relevant) and the chief exec. of O2 mobile phones (completely unrelated). For some reason he was making a string of facile comments and questions about mobiles being able to provide magazine services, and the potential for magazines to be a completely online phenomenon in the next decade.

Stevie made a rather stoic effort to answer the questions, I thought, but really the idea that magazines will go out of print is absurd. The whole beauty of online media is not the ability to buy whole publications every week or month and read them cover to cover. Everyone hates reading things on a screen. If publishers aimed for that, sales would plummet. What Davis didn't seem to grasp was that the beauty of the internet is that it's an easily navigable research library. Magazines are moving online because it's easy to search for specific articles that you want to read.

The other important thing is that you need not charge for viewing on the internet, as direct marketing is so much easier. Being a business affairs program he seemed intent on pressing on the revenue from online sales - I think really the only effective way to make money from online publishing is specific and appropriate advertising. This is obviously something that free publications embrace fully, but with online media it is hugely easier. As Spotify has worked out, the internet being the internet, the effectiveness of any marketing campaign can be completely and accurately be understood, as viewing, search optimisation, and follow through can all be exactly measured. Of course the other very important factor is that almost all of the outsourcing related to publishing vanishes when you take printing and distribution out of the equation. Costs plummet. Why this did not come up I cannot think.

Online publishing is growing, and I'm very thankful for it, and as much as I hate to so mercilessly be a part of such a disposable capitalist society (that's a lie, I love it, I'm not a hippy), viewing adverts is, I think, a small price to pay for having a world of opinion and dubious fact at your fingertips.

By the way, Stevie is actually a woman with a huge mouth. Surprisingly.

That is all.

I WANT TO DRINK ALL THE WATER IN CHESTER

You can't have what you want
Because it's too far away and you've
No way to travel there.

And why would you be allowed it, so
Refined and keenly-thought?
It is for funny men
Che parlano altre lingue,
Remember people's names,
And know about clothes and marketing.

And It all belongs to somebody
Else so even if
You tried to attain a drop they would
Remove your hands and feet.
And maybe they would have used it a
More worthy way than you.

But there's a space upstairs
That can't be filled (with rain),
Til one day you'll buy a vehicle
With space and need no more
To sit and guard the house,
So you can fetch It all
And be at one at last.

CRYSTAL CLEAR YUM YUM YUM.