Monday 26 January 2009

I Would Love To Be On This List

The 50 people who wrecked Britain

Read it as parody and it is possible to get to the end without wanting to kill the author. Princess Diana being on there is the most hypocritical thing in the history of the world, I would guess.

(I was imagining the author as really, really old, but then I realised that there is picture of him at the top of the page, and he is only 30-something. It is kind of sad that he has so long left to live.)

pt. 2 - Richard Dawkins is on it!

Brrrrrrrrrrrring!

Thursday we got a good review from Organ magazine:

http://www.organart.demon.co.uk/neworgan.htm

Us, 1 - The Jelas, 2

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We have a gig at The Croft soon - there is a listings website that says:

The Bumblebees, Paraffins
The Brixfold-based four-piece.

What they've done there is looked at our myspace and taken 'lennie laptop' to be ....not a laptop, and Brixfold to be an actual place (it is just Bristol and Oxford mashed up together). And their description is not even a real sentence.

Really excited about the gigs. REALLY excited.

Sunday 18 January 2009

Worst Music Writing Ever

Drowned in Sound saves major label ass.

Who do they think they are, Panorama?

The user comments I read on this article are mostly right. The logically fallacies and absurd editorial style aside, the worst thing is that Sean Adams concludes by arguing ISPs should have full access to monitoring and control over how their customers use the internet. Net neutrality? Bah. The most important thing isn't civil liberty, it's making sure that everyone who downloads Viva La Vida pays their share to the record execs. This apparently 'indie' site condoning corporate control to this extent (and making comparisons to internet security in China with the implied message - "this is how it should be done"!) would be so off-the-mark as to be funny if it weren't for the possibility that someone might read the article and be convinced by it.

We have just sent our EP to Drowned in Sound hoping they might want to review it.

Friday 16 January 2009

Sounds Illegal

There is a website called Legalsounds and it sells music downloads. For $0.09 (nine cents) you can get pretty much any track you like. You would think there must be some kind of catch.

They are selling Cool Science! By.....us! For $0.09 (nine cents)!

The most annoying things about this are:
  • It's the DEMO of Cool Science.
  • We gave away the demo for FREE.
Needless to say they didn't contact us for permission and won't reply to us. Don't think I will post a link to it but it is easy enough to find. Maybe your band is on there. I guess we should be kind of flattered but it is just really annoying that sites like this can exist and make money - nine cents seems like nowt but for them it is pretty much all profit, they only need a few hundred customers a day to make it a decent earning.

Anyway I don't think I had a really coherent point to make so that's this post done.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Insomnia

Listening to Einstein On The Beach, watching snooker on mute. And I still can't sleep. This should be some sort of literal impossiblity.

Tuesday 13 January 2009

Iggy Pop Convinces No-one To Get Swiftcovered

Not a new year resolution to get on here again, but just a perfectly natural any-time-of-year resolution to stop wasting free time playing flippin' online games. What a loser. I must remember I have a lot of free time until February, but that does not mean I am not allowed to do anything productive. Quick Fire Pool is not productive, even if I'm on the high score list (I'm not, I just said that to make a joke).

Saw City lose to Portsmouth tonight (undeservedly - counter-attacks that fast should count as a form of cheating), the most interesting thing was the East End singng "we hate Setanta". The game was being broadcast live on Setanta. (For the uninitiated, Setanta is a paid subscription sports channel, I think the resentment comes from the price-to-games-shown ratio, seeing as Sky Sports is pretty similar but is treated with something approaching reverence. Or maybe people just don't want to shell out twice, and Sky got there first.) It is kind of brilliant subversion of what is expected of us as fans. Nick Hornby or Garry Nelson, I can't remember which, touched on the idea that the fans are essentially part of the product that TV is buying, and that consumers buy from TV. What can you do when the product revolts in this way? Fuck all, for now. One day it will be a offence punishable by lifetime ban to insult the sponsor.

I read 'A Confederacy Of Dunces' over Christmas. It is really amazing and brilliant, but I recognise Ignatius in my self now everyday. J.K. Toole must have done so also, which makes it more brilliant I think.