Tag: tv

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A sad goodbye to a once-proud institution

Pop music used to mean something. I don’t just mean ‘music’ – music still does mean something, and still has the power to change the world – but it used to be that proper Pop, chart pop, had a cultural significance.

The great indicator of this in the 60s/70s/80s was Top Of The Pops – like a weekly Queen’s speech, we’d all gather round the tele to find out who was number 1. Playing on TOTP was a sure way of selling a shedload more records, and presenting it was pretty much the pinacle for any radio DJ. Even Peel presented TOTP!

It was reading this article about Andi Peters quitting as Exec Producer that got me thinking about it again. Andi claims he just wants to get back in front of the camera, but the ever increasing irrelavence of the show must have had an influence. I can’t imagine for a second that a producer of TOTP in the 80s would have left to present some lame-assed reality TV show in a hospital. Nope, that would have been seen as a major step backwards.

So what’s happened? Well, partly it’s just that single sales are utterly meaningless these days, so having a ‘number one’ single is less and less important. It’s also partly that the singles charts are so full of novelty crap, because sales are so low anyway – that the kind of thing that gets shown is often dreadful. It’s not like there weren’t dreadful records in the past – Black Lace, Captain Sensible, Spitting Image, Joe Dolce – there were tonnes of piss-poor novelty hits back then too, they were just a better class of piss-poor novelty hit. They were actually funny, rather than infuriating. And they didn’t seem to be part of some huge corporate marketing plan to rip off kids who don’t understand the technology they are getting involved with, in the style of that sodding Frog thing.

Musical markets have diversified hugely – I rarely own anything that gets anywhere near the charts (of the current top 75 UK albums I own one – KT Tunstall‘s marvellous ‘Eye To The Telescope’) – and the internet has thankfully given us access to music that would previously have remained hidden. But I still can’t hlelp mourning the loss of families sitting round to watch Top Of The Pops, even if it was just so the parents could say ‘d’you call that music????’

Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (marvellous, simply marvellous)

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The horror of Katrina

So much for ‘walking on sunshine’… The true horror of Hurricane Katrina may not be fully realised by the rest of us for a few weeks to come, when the body count starts to rack up, but in New Orleans and Biloxi at the moment, it’s all too real.

I’ve got at least one friend who is missing in NOLA – bass player friend who decided to stick it out there. Seems like a lot of people without good transport or community around them thought they’d ride it out, before they realised how bad it was, and by that time it was too late. I just hope Stew is OK.

Here’s one horrific report from a local New Orleans station, WWLTV.

My thoughts and prayers go out to anyone who has friends or relatives caught in this mess…

Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (nu-jazz project from noted CCM singer/producer, featuring amazing all-star cast (including Victor Wooten and James Genus on bass) – really lovely stuff, full review to come soon…)

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Inconsistency?

So, London Underground have banned an ad featuring Jerry Hall holding 12 men on leashes.

LU said it “breaches our advertising code relating to the depiction of men, women and children as sexual objects.”

Which is quite clearly bollocks. Ads all over the underground depict women as sexual objects. At certain times of the year, depending on what kind of products are being advertised at the time, most women in ads are depicted as sex objects. There’s a huge double standard at work here. I have no desire to defend crass reality TV shows that have Jerry Hall ‘training’ men – it’ll be unwatchable shit anyway – but I do get really annoyed when advertising standards people pretend that women being sexually objectified hasn’t become the norm in advertising. Ads where it doesn’t happen are pretty rare. Yes, the occasional bloke gets in there too, but for the most part, men are portrayed as aspirational symbols to other men (equally destructive in its own way, given that their airbrushed adonis bodies are utterly unobtainable to 99% of blokes, in the same way that the huge-boobs-tiny-waist look is impossible for all but a handful of women, and for celebs is pretty much always airbrush enhanced).

Advertising is an almost entirely morally bankrupt area, and it’d be great to see LU – who own an enourmous amount of ad space – take a sensible stand on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. This time, they’ve missed the mark by miles.

Soundtrack – Andy Thornton, ‘The Healing Darkness’ (a great bunch of songs, that I first heard in their infancy months and months ago (maybe years ago, even!) – I’m not on this one, more’s the pity, but it’s still fantastic, and well worth getting)

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Which part of 'thou shalt not kill' is so unclear?

So in his usual ‘ignore everything jesus ever said and 2000 years of church tradition’ kind of way, American TV-evangelist and uber-wanker Pat Robertson has called for the US Government to Assassinate Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela.

So, the war on terror, eh, George? Now one of your ‘boys’, your ‘bottom line’ is calling for extra-judicial killings of national leaders. Time to have Pat thrown into camp X-Ray? How about a few weeks in Abu Graib? I mean, it’s not like it’s just suspicion that he’s inciting millions of his highly guillible viewers to support murder in the name of God and country. My, what startling respect he has for the rule of law, for due process…

Robertson’s a dick, we all know that – he’s been spouting rubbish for 20 years. After the Sept 11th attacks, he and his fellow moron, Jerry Falwell blamed it on pagans, abortionists, feminists & gays and lesbians, so it’s pretty clear where he’s coming from – but this seems to be on a whole other level, in that it’s clear incitement to murder.

The crazy thing is that the US has a history of doing this kind of shit in central and southern America – they supported the military coup in Chile in ’73, and from then on, backed any bunch of right-wing murdering psychos operating in the Americas, if only they were against a ‘leftist’ government, including the Contras in Nicaragua (for more on this, read ‘Like Water on Stone – the story of Amnesty International’).

So when Rumsfeld told reporters “Certainly it’s against the law. Our department doesn’t do that type of thing,” he should, as Cary pointed out on TimeBeing (email discussion list thingie – if you’re not on it, you don’t need to know) ‘Even giving Donald the benefit of the doubt, shouldn’t there have been an, “anymore” tacked on the end of that quote?’

It’s all just another example of the stunning duplicity of the US government when it comes to what constitutes terrorism, or war-crimes, or justification for invasion. One rule for all, my arse. What’s most shocking is that the rest of the world’s national leaders will fail once again to stand up to the US, to put pressure on them to condemn in any sensible terms the words of one of dubya’s closest allies. A former presidential candidate, FFS!

The latest development is that Robertson has claimed his comments were misconstrued – OK, which bit of “You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war … and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.” is unclear?

He’s calling for state terrorism to be enacted on the leader of a nation, and should be tried under America’s new draconian anti-terrorism laws. You can bet your arse that if Louis Farakhan has said something similar, they’d be onto him in a second.

Robertson, you’re scum, do the decent thing and hand yourself over to be tried for incitement to terrorism. Go on, just for lil’ ole me. You loser.

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What is this, how you say, 'Kassett'??

So, I’ve got four days to get my head round Duncan Senyatso‘s tunes for Greenbelt, so time to have a listen to them… hang on, that’s not a CD. What is it? It this some new technology I’ve not seen before? A small plastic box, with a long ribbon inside wound round two spools.

Ooh, I remember – cassette tape! Blimey.

It took me about half an hour to find a cassette deck in the house (actually, there’s one in the kitchen but I didn’t want to bring that into the office). Eventually I found the cassette player at the bottom of a dusty box under a pile of records (records!!) behind the TV. It hasn’t been used for many years, but it seems to be doing OK thus far..

The sound quality is dreadful – how did we put up with this for so long? What a rubbish way to listen to anything. It makes low res MP3s sound positively high-tech. Maybe we should blame the inventor of the walkman – there’s no way cassette would have survived without it…

Thank the good Lord for CD, CDR, MP3 and Minidisc!

though sadly I don’t think even those lovely new technologies would make Duncan’s marvellous music any easier to play!

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First gig!

Soi that’s gig number one out of the way, and it seemed to go pretty well. Not a big crowd by anyone’s reckoning (17), but above the Edinburgh average (11), and more than I had on my first day last year! It’s very odd becoming one of over a thousand acts vying for people’s attention and money, when usually I’m the only thing on on an evening in that venue, and just have to be better the TV and worth the drive to the venue. When you’re up against the cream of British comedy and some fine music as well, it’s all a bit more daunting.

Still, the gig itself went well – as it was a fairly small and intimate crowd, I was able to experiment with a new addition to the show, a bit of audience participation. Here, I got various members of the audience to come and make percussion sounds into a mic, which were recorded into a blank loop of about 6 seconds long, with the output turned down. So neither the audience or I could tell what was happening as the sounds were being recorded (they had no idea what was going to happen at all). I then picked up a bass, turned up the volume and started to play along with the rhythm that came out of their sampled noises – 6 sounds in all, forming a particularly weird and stilted funk rhythm, which I was fairly easily able to shape into a groove and start layering. A hugely successful addition to the show, and one I’m going to have fun with each night – it’s nice to have something completely new to add to the set.

Didn’t get round to playing the John Martyn cover – really need to have a bash at that tonight, if I remember. Did the tune for Eric, which went well, and ‘What A Wonderful World’ which has become a staple of the set over the last couple of months, but wasn’t in the set last year. So I’m happy with the amount of new material.

The links all seemed to go OK – the Snoop Dogg story went down v. well as usual, and I even explained (for the first time ever onstage) the story behind MMFSOG – just seemed to fit with the general comedic thread.

All in all not a bad first night – a few things to tighten up, and certainly room to move things around a bit, but I’m definitely happy with how things went.

the one thing I forgot to mention was the text-review thing, where you can text a star rating for a show, by sending them the show code and a rating – there are little cards explaining this in every venue, so please pick one up and vote for the show if you were there (the show code is BASS)

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Tshirt details –

Here’s a webcam pic of me in one of the t-shirts –

nice, eh?

And they can be yours for a measly £12 if you live in the UK, or £13 round the world, in advance of the festival!

The sizes available are

Small
Medium
Large
X-Large
XX-Large
and a ladies’ skinny t

All lovely top quality ethical threads marvellousness.



– Click here for UK delivery (£12)


– and click here for the rest of the world (£13)

So make sure you put what size you want in with the paypal order!

[EDIT] – OK, so there’s nowhere on the paypal page to do that (doh!) – instead, just email me, or I’ll email you back when I get the order and find out what size you want! Sorry ’bout that.

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Mercury Music prize…

This year’s nominees –

· Antony and the Johnsons – I Am A Bird Now
· Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
· Coldplay – X&Y
· The Go! Team – Thunder, Lightning, Strike
· Hard-Fi – Stars of CCTV
· KT Tunstall – Eye to the Telescope
· Kaiser Chiefs – Employment
· The Magic Numbers – The Magic Numbers
· Maximo Park – A Certain Trigger
· M.I.A. – Arular
· Polar Bear – Held on the Tips of Fingers
· Seth Lakeman – Kitty Jay

according to The Guardian, the Kaiser Chiefs are the bookie’s favourite, but it’d be fantastic to see either Polar Bear or Seth Lakeman win. Seth’s album is fantastic – I bought it when he played at The Bedford about a year ago – a lovely acoustic folk record, in the same tradition as Eliza Carthy, Cara Dillon etc. Polar Bear are one of the crazy jazz outfits featuring drummer extraordinaire, Seb Rochford, an amazing drummer that I did a gig in Brighton with once – he’s the only drummer I’ve ever met who could follow my glitchy everso-slightly-out-of-time loopage without any kind of sync or click – a great player, with fantastic hair, and a couple of marvellous bands (the other being Acoustic Ladyland).

I have to confess to having no idea who most of the bands are on the list – I’ve never heard Maximo Park or The Go Team or MIA or Hard Fi, or Bloc Party, or Anthony and ‘The Johnsons’ (that’s really the band name??) – I’ve got the KT Tunstall album, which is cool, and I like what I’ve heard of The Magic Numbers, though was totally underwhelmed by what I heard of The Kaiser Chiefs. So I think Seth would get my vote, if I were on the panel (though, if I was on the panel, I think I’d probably have heard all the other albums by now too…)

Soundtrack – Janis Joplin, ‘I Got Dem Ole Kosmic Blues Again, Mama’ (you, you can keep Joss Stone, I’ll stick with Janis.)

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Another great post about the bombing

I’m an avid reader of Jyoti Mishra’s blog – he’s eloquent, and full of righteous anger at the shit that’s going on in the world.

His latest blog entry is fantastic – he highlights the false dichotomy drawn by those who suggest that to draw parallels between the daily killings in Iraq and the London bombings is to be on the side of terrorists. He points out that it makes perfect sense to hate all such killing, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the US/UK military in Iraq.

I remember just after the Sept 11th terrorist attack on New York, there was a TV discussion programme on which a young, eloquent Muslim woman commented that hers and many others primary grievance against the behaviour of western governments, media agents and public opinion was the ongoing view that Asian and Arab lives were fundementally less important than western lives. That Arab ‘collateral damage’ is unfortunate, whereas Londoners blown up on tube trains warrants days of mourning and blanket media coverage.

The same could be said of just about any area of foreign policy from any European country or the US – that self-interest has been elevated to the point where pressure is applied to countries to destroy their very infrastructure just to make conditions favourable for western investors.

Her point could not be more striking than it is at the moment, and Jyoti’s blog highlights and explores it fabulously.

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