Monday 24 December 2007

Break

I am not going to write on here until The New Year because I want to get loads of music done and stop kidding myself that The Internet is a valid place to spend time whilst waiting for creativity to strike. Happy Winterval!

Saturday 22 December 2007

I Am What I Play

Club Creationism, Roz and I's shambolic venture into Playing Records For People, continued on Thursday with our first night at The Cooler. Dean from Off Beat Promotions has said we can do this after all his gigs there, which means every 1st and 3rd Thursday, and this one was special because it was his special Christmas Party special. Roz couldn't do it though because she wasn't feeling good, and so I had to do it by myself because both my other friends were busy.

Dean had warned that people have a habit of not sticking around after the bands (as evidenced by the last time the Lauras played there, when literally no-one stayed for the DJing), so I was getting a bit worried when as Brandon Steep announced their last song, half the crowd began looking for their bags and coats. I did have a couple of friends there though, as well as Big Jeff, so in persuading him to stay, I figured at least people would know what they were supposed to be doing - DANCING!

The clubnight that used to be on after Dean's gigs was called 'Beat Surrender', and was run by someone called John The Mod. So I took a risk and kicked off with The Jam. No-one danced, which perhaps explains why John The Mod now finds himself minus a clubnight, I thought to myself. So I played basically what I wanted to play, new and old, and it actually went quite well. From an empty dancefloor it slowly filled up until the majority of people were involved in some sort of pile-on to "Sound And Vision". The best bit was when someone recognised "I Was Born (A Unicorn)" from the drum intro. The second best bit was when I told someone No, I don't have any JOE LEAN, fucking hell. Bizarrely they were both the same person (I think it was Brandon Steep's keyboardist). Someone took my number and said that he does a lot of parties and he wanted me to DJ or something.

It started to wane about quarter to one and everyone went home. I got paid some money that will go towards Christmas presents. I felt a bit lonely being the last person to leave (except the bar-people, a race of their own), and more lonely again as I walked home with a very heavy CD case. But it was a pretty good night, I didn't fuck up really at all, and Roz and I have the chance to work on making this a Real and Established Clubnight, rather than an afterthought for people who aren't drunk enough to go home yet.

Monday 17 December 2007

Bumblebits

It's a Monday, which means yesterday was Sunday, which means today is the day after the day THE BUMBLEBEES made their live debut. Roz and Bert and Me (and our loyal fans Zoe And Jon And Bert's Dad) crammed in Bert's Dad's Van and headed up to Oxford, or more specifically the Port Mahon pub, where we were going to be the 2nd of 6 bands in an all-day gig put on by our friend Hog.

After being thoroughly confused by Oxford's one-way system, we arrived for soundcheck and managed to squeeze out a couple of songs to a less than enraptured crowd of bored-looking musicians (the eventual crowd of about twenty would not respond much better). The sound system in use at the Port Mahon was temperamental to say the least, and although it sounded alright from Up On The Stage, it was impossible to guess what was coming through the PA. Going by the sound of the other bands we saw (all of whom were ENJOYABLE or better), the mix was probably quite BAD.

I thought the gig, in terms of performance, went pretty well. I felt like I sang with feeling and mainly in-tune, I didn't forget many words, and I remembered pretty much all the chords. We didn't lose track of the drum machine (although there was a horrible bit at the start when it made weird noises and I couldn't figure out why - it turned out to be the power lead), we started and finished all the songs at the same time, and we didn't say anything that offensive to the crowd (apart from "shut up", which I retracted quite soon afterwards).

We ran through all our sure-fire hits, from the athiest-funk of "Cool Science, to the animal-rights-funk of "Fluffy Clouds Of Joy", but we didn't seem to go down that well. I don't know whether we were a bit too plain for that crowd, or whether our music is just unlikable, but most songs were greeted with blank stares, or the bowed heads of people texting their friends, presumably to tell them not to hurry to the gig just yet. But..... it was a fun gig all the same. I need to have a bit more confidence, and not just give up because some people don't like us. Obviously I would rather we'd been carried home to ecstatic cheering from newly converted Bumblebees devotees, but it was still a good way to get rid of our performance nerves, and to figure out what worked and what didn't before we get ourselves a local gig. I just hope Bristolians have BETTER TASTE.

Thursday 13 December 2007

Working Sentences

I've just finished a twelve-hour shift sorting post at Royal Mail. My legs quite literally hurt. It is a temporary Christmas job and it pays quite bad money and has really bad hours. I am doing it because I owe a few people various amounts of money (including the bank) and I realised that I couldn't just wait until my talent was recognised to pay them back.

I did four hours overtime today mainly so I could see Roz, who is working opposite shifts to me, so unless I worked afternoons as well, we wouldn't see each other at all during the week. It was definitely worth it, and the time flew by (not literally).

What I have learnt so far is that Royal Mail is a very inefficient company. Lots of time and energy is wasted by doing things at the wrong time in the wrong way. On the way back from work me and Toby saw about a dozen fire engines (plus police and ambulans) heading to the Filton Royal Mail building, so hopefully there won't be any post left for us tomorrow...

Wednesday 12 December 2007

Timbaland vs. A Finnish Person

"Do It" is Nelly Furtado's latest single. It was produced by Timbaland, a largely excellent producer. There have been claims that he based the song around a stolen sample from an obscure Finnish demoscene composer. I'm pretty convinced these claims are true.

There has been a video on YouTube for flippin' ages that exposes Timbaland as a thief, but it only came back into my mind once I started hearing "Do It" twice a day on the radio. I absolutely can't believe that with the internet being quite a big deal nowadays, this hasn't been discussed on a larger platform, that no court case has ensued, and that mainstream radio either has no idea of the scale of fraud being committed here, or knows and does not care.

With this song being a single (albeit a fairly lesser one from Nelly Furtado's album), it's likely that worldwide it'll sell about a million copies, making a couple of million dollars split between Evil Stores, Evil Distributors, Evil Record Companies, Evil Managers, and last of all Timbaland (and Nelly Furtado). At it stands, none of that money will go to Janne Suni, arguably the main composer of the song.

On Timbaland's Wikipedia page, it says this on the subject: Timbaland, while admitting the sampling, has called the issue "ridiculous" but also says he is "in legal discussions" and is therefore unable to comment. It might be libellous to say this, but I think the only "ridiculous" thing is that Timbaland has been caught red-handed, but won't admit to defrauding the public for the sake of his reputation. (Timbaland's full rather... inarticulate reply is just here. Part of his defence is that he just didn't know whether it was public domain. Again, I reiterate, he is a famous producer with a huge company behind him. If it isn't clearly public domain material, don't use it!!)

My opinion is this: Firstly, I am dead against copyright laws, and think that sampling is great fun and should be free. Early rap used samples in fresh and exciting ways, and this potential still exists. BUT..... basically it is down to Record Labels Always Wanting More Money that sampling is now mainly illegal without permission (read payment), with the exception of copyleft material. So when a huge and very famous rich producer steals from a near unknown composer and doesn't even MENTION him, I don't think it can be considered Fair Use in any way, and I think in court he would be found guilty, and I think he (and more importantly Universal, basically the biggest music company around with a twenty-five per cent market share) should suffer the consequences. The song isn't even that good!


Tuesday 11 December 2007

Overheard

Sometimes snippets of a conversation are more than enough. Overheard today, two boys trying to outdo each other in regards to how broken their respective familes were. The winner:

"My parents have been split up eight years, I mainly live at my aunt's... so I get three advent calendars!"

Lucky kid!

Monday 10 December 2007

Brainless Blogging

I know it's pretty laaaaaazy to post videos instead of practising my writing but it's been a laaaaaaazy day and somehow it's made me tired. So this is just a YouTube video of one of my favourite songs ever. There is nothing really special about the construction of the song, or the melody, or the production, or the words, but somehow I find specialness in it.

It's a Beatles song, written and recorded in 1977 by John Lennon, completed by the Rest Of Them in 1995 as part of a big re-issue/Anthology thing. It got to number two I think, which is pretty decent considering it's the sort of mid-tempo soft-rock that is quite easy to forget, even as you're listening to it. It's pretty crap, considering it's THE BEATLES. Anyway I really love it and rather than spending the next four minutes reading whatever I might have had to say, I'd rather you watched this video:




(Just one sentence about today: In the morning I got a BRAND NEW MACBOOK and in the evening I played 5-a-side and the game was abandoned because there was a punch-up involving everyone except for me - I guess I'm just not passionate enough.)

Saturday 8 December 2007

We Are (The) Cooler Than You

Last night was gig night! The Lauras headlined The Cooler, which is a VERY LOUD venue in the middle of Park Street. We hadn't played there before, but everyone was very nice, the soundman was bouncing around like a bunny, and the promoter was much chattier than most. Even the bouncers managed more than a grunt!

Sound-check was at half-five and we weren't on til eleven, so we had plenty of time to get a bit drunk and lark about in the way that a certain type of indie bands do in really crap videos. Jon's friend Steven kept picking me up, I don't know why. I accidentally kissed Jon but we've both forgotten about that now.

We got back to The Cooler about twenty minutes before going on - we didn't watch the first two support bands because we are too big for that shit now. Main support Ulysses were listenable in a dinosaurish sort of way, but I can't really remember anything specific about them. Apparently they are quite famous around Bristol, which sounds plausible, but obviously not that famous else they would have refused to go on before such a ramshackle act as The Lauras.

Doing our songs was much more fun than it usually is - it was probably the smallest crowd we've played to, but I would easily put it in my Top Three Gigs Of All Time (That I Played In), because:
  • There was a nice big stage for dancing
  • I was exactly the right amount drunk
  • The Jelas were there and they danced
And to Top It All Off, the promoter said me and Roz could take over DJing on his nights, after the bands finish. Which basically means we get a great venue for free, every fortnight, from 11 til 2, with an audience already there and waiting for our great tunes!

See you there!

Friday 7 December 2007

Interview Technique

I had an interview today for a job I really wanted. It was working for a well-known vegan and vegetarian charity that I won't name just in case it's against the Data Protection Act or something. This is roughly how it went:

Interviewer: Hiya Ellis, thanks very much for coming.
Me: HULLO
Now tell me, what do you think was the main reason for you turning vegan?
BUH?
Interesting. And what do would you say to someone in order to convince them to turn vegan?
MEH.
Cool! Do you have any experience with in research and organisation?
PHRM?
Great. And what do you think you could bring to the position?

BUH!
Excellent! Thanks very much for your time, Ellis. Bye-bye!
BUH-BUH!

I got an email with a half hour of leaving, telling me I hadn't got the job. More Tact Needed.

Thursday 6 December 2007

And If The Live Show Is Strong

So, on 16th December the Bumblebees make their live debut. The Bumblees are Roz, Bert and Me, and we're playing at the Port Mahon in Oxford as part of an all-dayer organised by our friend Hog. We are sort of hard to describe, but I would say it's sort of post-punk + tweepop. We've practised together a total of two times so far, and we probably won't get many more opportunities, what with me and Roz working completely opposite shifts until Christmas, and Bertie Bass(-ett) busting his ass in a 9-to-5 hellhole for ha'penny per day. I'm sure we will still be brilliant, but I do feel like there's a lot to worry about.

I'm mainly concerned about it being my singing debut (aside from one acoustic gig with Bert), but also concerned about how we'll play as a band, whether the drum machine will work, how many people will be there, what the mix will be like, and whether the other bands will be miles better than us. With so much to worry about, I'll probably render it all irrelevant by forgetting my guitar or something....

In actuality it will probably not be that bad, and hopefully after we've played in front of strangers, we'll be able to come home and impress our friends with a Rocking Bristol Debut.

Sunday 2 December 2007

Q: Is Morrissey Racist Or Is The NME Shit?

A: BOTH?

Firstly the obvious stuff: the NME is a terrible magazine that exists only to make money, that promotes regressive music made pretty much entirely by bulletheaded stupid men. They create and dismantle "scenes" like Lego with no regard for talent or ability, they write as voice-of-a-generation yet seem to write to a generation of eight year olds, and under IPC give the impression that they would say literally anything to sell more of their shit. They are consuma cultcha embodied and forced into skinny jeans.

In contrast, Morrissey is a well-regarded indie superstar with a long career built on writing brilliant songs (well, once upon a time), who generally seems to talk sense, and more importantly talks with great wit and eloquence. Aside from one previous brush with the NME (and a few questionable lyrics), his record is pretty much clean, unlike the filthy magazine.

So when the uniformly Bad NME puts the consistently Good Morrissey at the centre of a row over racism, I think the intelligent music fan could be forgiven for not immediately setting their Smiths collection alight. However, on actually reading the interview and giving it a while to sink in, it's Morrissey who comes across as out-of-touch, regressive and simplistic. His suggestion that Britain has been destroyed by immigration is not only ridiculous, but offensive to any immigrant of any nationality. If I were an immigrant Morrissey fan, I don't see how I could fail to be disgusted by his fierce nationalist streak, and even as a fairly obsessive Smiths fan myself I can't help but liken him to the grand-dad at the dinner party who doesn't even seem to realise why he is so completely wrong. What's more, his claim is completely absurd: immigration generally has a diverse, positive effect on culture. From what I can tell, Morrissey's vision of Modern Britain would be a stagnating pool of baudy, northern comics and dashing, aesthetic-obsessed playwrights. How boring.

Just quickly skimming the internet on the subject, it's easy to see that Morrissey has not alienated all of his fans with his .....edgy views, quite the opposite in fact. One of the many Facebook groups set up in the aftermath of the controversy has a topic entitled "If Morrissey actually WAS a racist.......................would you care?", with not a pinch of sarcasm evident. The type of brainless Morrissey fans who attack NME scenesters for blindly following the magazine ought to see that brainlessly following an aging singer is just as bad, because when he says something that you really should disagree with, you're more likely to make excuses, or try and understand, or at worst just blindly believe him.

I don't think I'm being overly PC or touchy when I say that almost the majority of Morrissey fans that posted on the groups on Facebook contained something equally offensive to me as Morrissey's comments, whether it was latent racism, homophobia (the irony!) or just the "if you don't agree with me then you're a soft cunt" argument. This is not debate about immigration, in the same way that Moz's Mafia claim the NME did not debate it. This is rats following the Pied Piper in the same way that the Topshop-hoardes follow the NME. Incidentally, the NME and The Smiths share the same musical lineage, namely the endless stream of skinny, male, guitar bands that obsess over the minutae of a British suburbia that no longer exists, obsessed with emulating rather than geniunely creating.
(Just a note on the fickle nature of the whole thing, my favourite group concerning this on Facebook has this fantastic quote: "Make it known to the NME that you won't stand for the slack music journalism approach by not buying the next couple of issues.")

In my opinion (which I suppose is what matters here), the British identity is a manufactured concept, and in Morrissey's case an entirely imagined one. People have been complaining about immigration for literally centuries. But people have been unemployed, victims of crime, and slaves to wage-labour for centuries more. Immigration is not the problem in the lives of the working class. But that is another story for another day. In the meantime, the court will decide whether either side is legally in the right (no, not that sort of 'right') or wrong. But if, as interviewer Tim Jonze has claimed, all the Morrissey quotes printed are 100% accurate, then what exactly is he sueing them for? He has had his say, and both sides have come out looking ignorant, pompous and stubborn.


We Benefit Kino

Thursday night was great fun, cause me and Roz did what I like to call "inter-band-DJing" at a Cafe Kino benefit (as previously mentioned) held at Cube Cinema. In truth it was more like inter-band-iPoding and only involved sitting around whilst occasionally adding to our On-The-Go playlist. It wasn't the sort of night that involved lots of dancing, but no-one said anything bad about our choices and some people complimented certain tracks, which was nice.

It felt nice just to be at the Cube doing something rather than viewing or listening. Not that we were an integral part of the night or anything, but it meant that if someone asked who I was I could say "I'm Ellis, we're DJing tonight", rather than "I'm Roz's boyfriend", which is how I usually sort of feel. Anyway all the bands that played between our songs (we paused the playlist) were fun to watch, especially I Know I Have No Collar, who made managed to make a whole show fun based on one gimmick (the pre-recorded "satelite link" to an absent band member).

At the end of the night when the bands had finished and the tidying up had begun, there was a cute moment where four of us danced quite vigourously to Le Tigre, then sort of absent mindedly wandered off to other duties. It was like a really aimless, poorly-attended flash mob (in the best possible way), and if I were the central role in an over-aspiring indie film, I might have thought to myself that our lives are but a series of moments; created by circumstance and destroyed by time. But I'm not and they aren't so I didn't, and we stopped off in the 24-hour supermarket for Bourbons on the way home.

Thursday 29 November 2007

Conglomerative, Sadistic Nature

I hadn't even heard of Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jongs until about five minutes ago, but I don't know if I have ever hated a band quite so fast as this one. It was partly the music (an near EXACT Razorlight rip that I won't bother linking to), but it was mainly this interview in The Guardian, which is a real paper that people buy with money. (Read it and decide for yourselves!)

What I like about it though, is that Mr Jonze seems to actually get fed up with baiting him about halfway through the interview and just resigns himself to having to listen to this shit because it's his job to listen to it. I can almost hear him thinking "I didn't get into journalism for this".

The most ironic thing is that as an actor, Joe Lean had a part in Nathan Barley. Life imitates art etc...

Tuesday 27 November 2007

Cube Kino Benefit

Cafe Kino is a lovely vegan cafe in Stokes Croft which recently had around £1,000 stolen. The cafe is a co-operative, not a money-making venture and this loss doesn't affect shareholders or executives but the cafe itself and the people who put in a huge amount of effort to keep it going.

There is a benefit gig to try and recoup that lost money on Thursday 29th November. Lots of bands are playing and it's just generally going to be great in every way imaginable. Except for that way. Roz and I will be DJing, probably not with amazing technical ability, but we will play tunes that we think are pretty good. I think it's £4 to come but I'm not really sure.

Thursday 22 November 2007

In The Biz

I was sixteen when I first decided I wanted to set up a record label. I didn't know how to start one, how to promote one, or how to run one, and I didn't really know what I would put on it, but I did have a name: Rubber Ring Records. It sounds pretty crap now, and it probably sounded pretty crap then, but it seemed to convey what I wanted to put out, which was music that changed your life.

I didn't really have any friends in bands (or any friends at all), so I scoured all the unsigned music sites I could (MySpace wasn't really on the map at the time) and emailed all the artists I liked the sound of, pretending to be cool and professional and generally appear like I knew what I was doing. And amazingly, some people fell for it. I was almost literally inundated with responses, almost all of them wanting to put something out, or be on a compilation, or something. Quite a few people sent me CDs through the post, and I ended up getting quite a lot of good music for no money simply because I promised something I couldn't deliver.

Anyway, it soon fell through because I decided it was too much like hard work, and I mention it only because that was the last time I recieved a promo of any kind through the mail, until this week. This week I got in the post the new Kotki Dwa single (plus press release), the same as probably every radio station and music mag in the country did. Only I'm not a radio station or music mag, I'm just me. And again I promised something I couldn't deliver: I'm on the mailing list cause of me and Roz's clubnight, but in fact the night in question is no longer a going concern (aside from one...thing which I will type about soon).

So because I'm not really in the strongest position to Make Kotki Dwa Their Surely Deserved Millions, I thought I would do a Single Review. It's fifty words in the style of a young critic's first piece for a middle-brow Sunday supplement reviewing a quirky indie band:

Buckinghamshire 3-piece Kotki Dwa may sound like a foreign proposition, but there's nothing alien about their effervescent debut single "Robin's Clogs", which plays like Alice dreamily abling into a bizarre toytown of casiocore mathrock. A "Honey I Shrunk The Arcade Fire" take on anthemic pop, this miniature gem is worth purchasing for the artwork alone. EJ.

Hope that helps. "Robin's Clogs" by Kotki Dwa hits a couple of record stores on December 10th. (They don't really sound like Arcade Fire.)

Monday 19 November 2007

Chart Without A Heart / Trucking X Factor

It's a Sunday, so I was doing my usual post-band-practise bored-internet-trawl, when I ended up on the Radio One website. More specifically, the page containing this week's UK Single Charts. It is a really terrible list. I guess there is always a pre-Christmas lull in terms of Big Hit Songs, but I feel more concerned about the staleness of the music than anything else. It's not that the songs are rubbish (.....they are) but that they all seem so worn out.

I don't know if now is really the time for a single-by-single rundown, but it seems like the top 40 is mainly split between ropey 'comeback' singles (Kylie, Britney, Spice Girls, Craig David[!]), album-milking third or fourth singles from the summer's big sellers (Rihanna, Mika, Take That, Mark Cunting Ronson) or dad-friendly rock that presumably has been advertised heavily on iTunes (Phil Collins, Led Zeppelin, Elvis....yes, Elvis Presley). Not one song (of those I've heard, which is the majority) has any merest hint of edge, be it originality, controversy or style. I know Elvis is The King and everything and even though I think he is shit, old people still love him, it's just hard to accept that there are that many people who need to buy it now, this week, that it would manage to beat hundreds off new releases from new bands with new young fans. (Soon the world will be full of old people and nothing new will ever happen.) I don't know if I should even be mentioning this, because it's easier to pretend it isn't true, but NICKLEBACK have a single in the top 20 this week. Nickleback.

Whilst on the subject of atrocious popular music, I thought it was worth noting that every single song on yesterday's X Factor featured the horrendous trucker's gear change. I wouldn't really mind if it was actually in the songs they were covering, but as far as I know the originals are gear-change-free. I wonder what they would do if someone did Man In The Mirror (which features the most wonderful gear change in the history of everything) - perhaps they would just do the change twice or something. Anyway it's a sickly horrible thing that should be reserved for pop songs which need it (or even deserve it), not ruined by using it as the quickest route to making the audience think you're really going for it.

Not that I watch X Factor of course, far too busy....

Saturday 17 November 2007

When Is A Pig Not A Gig?

The Lauras had a gig last night, and because I'm one of The Lauras, I was there. It was a last-minute gig, not literally, but it was literally a last-48hour gig. So there wasn't very much time to badger and bribe our cash cows fans into seeing basically the same set as we played last Monday.

Being a replacement for the surely-marvellous-but-cancelled "Adam Hussein Show (from GLC)" is never going to be an easy one, so an audience of about twenty was a pretty fantastic result, although they were never all watching the bands at the same time, and at least a car-full left after the first band, which is a shame, because the first band were rubbish.

I don't know if I should really say this, but it's too late because I'm just about to: Lionhearts were really depressingly bad and my favourite part of their gig was when the singer defiantly ripped his mic off the stand to further emphasise the ....emphasisness of their performance, only for it to disconnect from the cable and improve the overall sound quality by approximately twenty-five per cent. (Actually my real favourite part was when one of the bullet-headed fans they had taxied over from Cardiff barged past me on the way back from the bar and spilt most of his pint across the floor. Hopefully he learnt that sometimes it pays to have manners, but I expect he will just shove harder next time.)

My third favourite part was when they said they had a song called "Dirty Rotten Scoundrel". It would have been a brilliant joke, but it didn't make a brilliant song.

The Jelas, though, do make brilliant songs! In abundance! Not only that but they are the nicest, funnest, funniest band we have ever played with. They seem like the sort of band who have ideas thick and fast, and just put them all together until they run out of room, making a skronky collage out of musical pipe-cleaners. We got on too, as bands, which is not a completely freak occurance, but it is definitely the first time that a band has been so sociable with us, and it was great!

We went on last and played alright. It was quite hard to be excited about it but I didn't play as many wrong notes as usual and Bert said something funny about Children In Need. He also wore his SPECIAL t-shirt, which might have been good but for me it was an anti-climax because I couldn't really see it. But despite playing Every Song We Have, it seemed to go by just as quickly as usual and if we'd had any more songs I would quite like to have played them (although no-one was exactly screaming for an encore). Bert's cousin who was once in a good band called The Danans said that I was a good guitarist, and that I used my little finger a lot, which I hadn't thought about before and won't ever again.

I got back to see the end of Children In Need (they were struggling to reach last year's total) and no-one had said anything nice about my new song.

Friday 16 November 2007

Sandcastle Advice Bureau

I'm blogging on a laptop! I feel like Carrie Bradshaw, only without the stupid rhetorical questions. Anyway it's not even my laptop.

I have done a new song! I started it yesterday and finished it today, which is probably the best order to do it in. It's on the myspace now, I took all of my old songs off because I wanted a fresh start with new songs that I absolutely loved instead of ones that I thought were.....alright. Truth is I don't really love this new song but I can imagine liking it for a while. It's called "Being Me and You" and it's about how Roz and I spend a lot of time together but don't really do very much of note.

The myspace is and has always been at http://www.myspace.com/rescueaidsociety, I'm working up to a Facebook page but I'm not sure I'm quite ready for that level of scrutiny just yet.

Wednesday 14 November 2007

An Introduction

Hullo, I'm Ellis, and if you're reading this you probably know me already. This is a blog I'm going to be writing in. It's hard not to be self-conscious and so I make no apologies for being a little bit awkward for this paragraph at least, and probably the next few days.

The main reason for committing myself to write regularly is for practise. I tend to go about day-to-day life thinking in the back of my head that I am a "Writer". I suppose lots of people do. But I haven't written anything of worth ever, and the last time I wrote anything at all within any sort of structure was probably something I was forced to do through promises of a shiny certificate at the end of it. So maybe through here I can sharpen up my literary wits a little, and hopefully make something worth reading (though I'm not promising anything just yet).

Another reason is that things keep happening to me that I'd like to write about. Not to claim that my life is a calvalcade of whirlygig adventures - it really, really isn't - more that a few things have happened recently that have been quite suprising, and if more things happen like that in the future then I'd like to record them here for posterity. I tend to forget the details of things with an alarming quickness, so hopefully by writing here bleary-eyed when the memory is fresh, I can read it back the next week and remember "yes, last Tuesday I really did trip over three curbs in a row!", or whatever.

This blog will probably be mainly about music, because music is mainly what I'm about. It's what I think about when I'm walking the dog, or catching a bus, or watching Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, so it will probably be what I'm thinking about what I'm writing here as well. Playing and writing and gigging and recording and probably mainly planning. Planning is what I do best. Following up the plans I am pretty crap at.

So I'll probably forget to write here ever again. But I hope not.