Angry man, writing

I had just dropped off my nearest and dearest at Kew Gardens, where they were going to sneer at the Christmas displays and raid the shop.  I was zooming home to wait in for deliveries.  Christmas comes in a van.

It was only when I came to a halt, at the rail crossing off the Sheen Road, that I noticed it.  Checking my rear view mirror, everything was blurred.

I thought; "Well, is this it?  Should I summon assistance, or lie down with my head in a brown paper bag, or what?".

Then I realised that I had the volume on the sound system cranked up to eleven, and it was the car that was shaking, not me.  I was listening to 'Hideaway', from the album 'Never Going Home', by the band Big Skies.

I can't send you a link to that particular song (the album is on Spotify, go rack up a few pence for them, I have put a link on my Facebook today), but believe me when I say that it has the ideal intro .... sounds like a stack of stainless steel bars slowly starting into a landslide.  Jim Cubitt, 'Last of the Axemen'.

And then it led me to ponder and reflect, which is always a bad thing.  About the long, long road a-winding, from Right Turn Left, via Blue Screen Life, to Big Skies, and the kind of music they made, which always appealed to me, and why.  I think because these lads were born twenty or thirty years too late.  At almost any time in the intervening period, their songs would have been up there in what was once called the Hit Parade.  Nowadays, all we get are people who want to be Beyonce, and who generate sub-soul warblings.

What happened to rock and roll?

That's why I'm angry.  I do not want to live off my Led Zeppelin archive, or come across things like Queens of the Stone Age from time to time.  I want .... I want .... what do I want?  Artistic integrity plus killer riffs, maybe.  Is that too much to ask?

Here's a nice video of a Big Skies tune:

Keep music live, again.

I have just spent the evening doing something I thought would be tedious, but it turned out, not.

We went to a pre-Xmas street party, organised by one of the roads round here that is slightly better co-ordinated than ours.  There was mulled wine and raffles and stuff, and there was a band.  They were really very much better than to be expected.  I will try and post some info.  Here they are:

http://bourbonstreetrevival.com/

They were playing as a five piece tonight, and they were really tight.  All members were really good - I liked the guitarist in his pork pie hat, and the trumpet/keyboard player was blowing up a storm.

In the interval, the drummer poked me in the back and said; "So, you're a Doors fan, eh?  I saw your face light up when we played that number."

I am not aware of any other time in the past decade when anybody has noticed my face noticeably lighting up.  I would have bought him a drink, but when I turned around he was gone, and somebody else had spilled their lager all over my new jacket.  Even that didn't faze me.

And I would pay good money to anyone who has video film of their encore.  They played 'Mustang Sally',  and there was this choir of eight year olds who got totally into the moment when the singer presented them with the mike, and belted out 'Ride, Sally, ride!'.  Their little faces!  Some more poor kids lost to rock and roll.  

Ah, me.

Here's a thing I want to write.

I think it will be short, but it's heartfelt.  And there won't be any video links.

I am a great reader, I find solace in reading books, many of which I may have read time and time again.  I even read bad books, knowing that they're bad books, but just because they have something about them that I like.  My favourite books drive me mad, because I have to leave them for at least a year, say, before I can read them again.  Ain't it a bitch.

But music isn't like that.  [Oh god, oh god .... he's going to talk about music again!  Guards!  Guards!]

No, come on, give me a moment.  I was just browsing through some stuff on YouTube.  I know many people decry the comments section on YouTube, and yes, often it is full of moronic observations or abuse or ..... but sometimes you see people lay their lives out.  It's not always easy reading.

By coincidence, this afternoon I have read comments from two different people who have had recent tragedies in their lives, and decided to let it out by talking about music that they thought relevant.  In one case, the song in question was an undoubted work of art, in the other, it was a complete piece of garbage, trust me.

But that's not the point.  The point was that the music gave them a focus, and an emotional release.  A lot cheaper than hours in analysis.

I have never sobbed my heart out at a paragraph of Dickens, Tolstoy, Amis or Sayers, or at a single line of Plath or Housman.  I could give you three or four split second moments from some songs that would reduce me to primeval slime.  I think in one case, simply the studio ambience that precedes any actual sound made by the band would do it.  That's what music does.    

That's all I wanted to say.  

Ah, christ.  Let's all cheer up.

All hail the BBC, and YouTube

I am writing these short pieces while playing around with various blog/Facebook/Twitter settings.  That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

I heard a fascinating package on the radio this morning.  It concerned communication in the modern world.  Now, I listen almost exclusively to Radio Four - the Today programme, The World At One, and PM.  Also Robert Elm's show on Radio London.  These are the best of the BBC and they tell me everything I want to know.  I do not watch television much, and really I don't read newspapers any more.

Several threads to link here ..... must concentrate .....

Ok.  I think I've got it.

I love YouTube, I use it for all kinds of things.  I don't upload any more, but I use links to it to illustrate things I discuss on the Internet.  You can find virtually anything there.  I also try to interact with people who have commented on videos in which I have an interest, but most of the time this is like shouting into a bucket.  However, I have had meaningful conversations with a few people.  

Moving on ..... when I was a freelance copywriter, I wrote a sales leaflet for a mobile phone company, aimed at West Africa.  The company had realised that countries such as Nigeria had been too poor in the past to establish 'copper wires' telephone systems, and that they could easily go straight to cellphones at less investment cost.  The company sold the boxes and masts that would support such a service, and Nigeria has a population of 173 million (did you get that?), most of whom would want to use a phone if they could get hold of one.

The interview in the package this morning which particularly interested me was with a young lady in Nigeria who was asked how she got her 'news of the world'.  She said straight away that she got her view of the world from YouTube.  Not a newspaper, not a radio or a television channel, or a text  newsfeed to her mobile phone, but from YouTube videos.  

Analyse this!

I really haven't decided what I think about that fact.  It's a bit of a showstopper, isn't it?

The world is changing ..... many things that were ..... yeah, I know, shut up with the mock-LOTR quotes.

No, really, I'm dumbstruck.

My war against poop.

I have nothing against dogs, per se.

We are cat people, but I will fight to the death for your right to own a dog, exercise a dog in public places, even let your dog defecate where we walk and, in extremis, leave the detritus because you have no way of bagging it up and taking it away, it can happen.  Just plan better next time.  (OK, we're lucky - cats make their own arrangements and do their best to bury the evidence;  dogs and foxes think a pile of crap is something to boast about, apparently.)

But when you bag it up, and then throw the bag over our fence so that it lodges in our ivy and we wonder what that strange thing is for several days while it matures, and when we come to trim our ivy hedge discover what you've done ..... well, you're dead meat.  There's a social covenant, and you've broken it.  I'm not blaming your dog, I'm blaming you.

The man at the crease aims to hook it to square leg, but he finds his off stump has been sent tumbling

Not to put too fine a point on it (another partially cricketing term) it is p*ssing it down with rain here in leafy Kingston, and I have greeted the day with a glad scream of anguish.

See, I have this ancient cricketing injury, which I am convinced stems from the days when I was a deceptively languid mid-pace off-seam bowler for Derbyshire Colts.  From only a six and half stride run-up, I would launch tricky deliveries by stamping down my left leg (the guy above is on the follow-through, the right leg is just the brake) and using it as a pivot to hurl my thunderbolts.  As a result, forty years later the knee cartiledge is knackered.

If I sleep on it wrongly (and I always sleep on it wrongly these days), it slackens overnight and so the first movement I make is agony.  If I remember (and I usually forget) I can sleep with a spare pillow arranged just so to prevent it flexing in the wrong direction.  But after I walk around for a short while, it sorts itself out.  It is sorted now.

I didn't have a long cricketing career.  I tried to take it up again, for the Ham team that played out of the 'Hand and Flower' pub on Ham Common, but it wasn't a success - maybe one day I'll tell you about the shower I took with a visiting West Indian team ... strangely, none of my own team-mates were keen to share the experience.  I also scored eight runs that day (not a bad total for the occasion), and I was very proud of one late cut for two in particular .... the West Indians appreciated it, I remember the slip fielder saying something like; "Shit, mon, I didn't see THAT coming outta this guy!"

I was also an opening bat for Derby County, but I didn't enjoy that so much - batsman just have to make one mistake, but bowlers have a chance to redeem themselves within an over.  Once, just once, I experienced batsman nirvana.  It lasted about ten minutes.  I could see the ball coming at me in slow motion, it looked huge, and it seemed I had half an hour to decide where I would hit it on the field, to avoid fielders.  I hit boundaries all over the place, and then the power disappeared as quickly as it came.  Next ball, I played a textbook forward defensive, but unfortunately on completely the wrong line.  I missed the ball, it went by me and the stumps clattered.  Hated that noise.

Had a few occasions of bowler nirvana, they were good.  I swear, I once decided in the middle of a purple patch of seam bowling, when I was visualising and potentially hitting not just the wicket, but a precise area on my chosen stump (this is not fantasy, other bowlers report it) to change from seam to spin bowling.  I reduced my run-up, lobbed the red orb down the wicket with a vicious amount of tweak, and .... I again swear ..... it bit into the sward, turned almost ninety degrees, and laid waste to his bails.  I can still picture the batsman staring at me, wondering what the hell had just happened.  Walk, boyo!

For completeness, I will relate the other two episodes of this nirvana in my life.  I am not making this stuff up.

1)  As a teenager, I was on holiday with my family in Chesapeake Bay, USA.  The hotel had some much-abused games facilities in the basement, and I was playing table tennis with this guy .... and I suddenly realised that I could direct the ball not just to the optimum areas of the table to make it difficult for him to return, but actually hit the EDGE OF THE TABLE so that the ball would squirt off at a totally unpredictable angle.  I did not make a friend that day.

2)  I'm a deeds clerk, I have an attic full of some four thousand individually numbered client files.  If I don't think about it too hard, I can go up there with the four digit number of the file that is required in my head, and sometimes I will just look straight at it.  Ok, obviously I know roughly which series of files are in which section of the attic.   And it doesn't always work.  But when it does, it scares the bejeesus out of me.

I'm a science grad, I do not believe these things are supernatural.  I just think that our brains are incredibly complex, and sometimes they are capable of doing things at an unconscious level which our conscious thoughts can't comprehend.  Fascinating.

And before I leave this topic ... are you a motorist or cyclist?  I bet you are.  So, you're approaching a junction at which you want to turn right, and there's traffic or pedestrians also approaching the junction, and you need to avoid them.  Do you have any idea how complex the maths you are doing in your head, all unconscious?  You need a time sense, a distance sense, a velocity sense and a predictive behaviour sense, overlaid with the ability to do what on paper would be called integral calculus.  Just to turn right.  A non-verbal, purely physical transaction.  So no wonder it's the single most common cause of road traffic accidents.  

This is by way of an experiment, talk amongst yourselves.

<a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/9933643/?claim=rhqs4v8gy73">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>