"5-4-3-2-1" - manfred mann

"5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1. 54321 54321 54321 54321 ...."


its 12:11:10 09/08/07

i noticed

i cared

need i say more?

"august 8th" - nofx

"the air is sweet, the summer flowers blooming. nowhere in sight is there anything grey. feelings of joy are filling the street. yeah, august 8th is a beautiful day"



just noticed what the date was, and instantly thought of this song. because i'm so obvious and painfully cliche. maybe i will never have an original thought again.

i wonder what happened to my copy of eating lamb though.

"dedication" - roy castle

"dedication, dedication, dedication - that's what you need"



if you need dedication to succeed in the vaguely impressive but ultimately pointless field of being a record breaker, imagine how much more dedication you need to do anything actually worthwhile.
there are some things i'm pretty dedicated to, but only in a worryingly passive kind of way - and i'm not sure if that counts. i'm certainly not dedicated to doing much, but can fool myself comforted with my dedication to abstract concepts.

"one way or another" - blondie

"lead you to the supermarket checkout. some specials and rat food get lost in the crowd"



it's all emma kennedy's fault. she's been writing in her blog, which i always read, about having to sing this song for an audition, and after reading it i've spent literally hours poring over how i would sing it in such a situation.
and the most annoying thing is i wouldn't.
i can't act and i hate actors so i would never audition for a musical (though if anyone were to offer me a part in a production of return to the forbidden planet i might just die of excitement).
and even if i did i wouldn't sing a blondie song (although i have done so at karaoke more than once - its part of my only doing songs by female singers rule)
and even if i had to it wouldn't be this one (probably in the flesh since you ask)

so all i've done is waste a lot of time and thought on the artistic decision i would make were i to be in a situation i know - for a fact - i am so unlikely to be in that the probability is negligible.

"street spirit" - the darkness

"fade out again"



sitting in a pub in the countryside on a sunny afternoon, eating a moderately generous amount of reasonably pleasant food, and gently despairing at the choices of piped music at barely audible volume - an inoffensive-as-possible mix of 70s "classics" and modern ballads - when jamie cullum's smug little cover of high and dry came on. with my mind wandering away from the conversation in hand i was thinking of the folly of doing a radiohead cover when i remembered this one. it was one of the first darkness tracks i heard and at the time it raised my opinion of them beyond being a one trick novelty act - though i have since returned to the one-trick-novelty-act theory. but this reinvention of the song as a huge screaming rock song was invigourating and my mind kept returning to it throughout the afternoon - until the conversation turned to slagging off my ex which held my attention somewhat more

"ask" - the smiths

"spending warm summer days indoors"


i hate the sun.

obviously i am grateful for its life- and light-giving properties and recognise we'd be pretty stuck without it so i should clarify that i hate the sun as a weather condition rather than as an astronomical entity. in fairness to it, there are many weather conditions i hate more, but on a hot summer day everything i do seems to be tempered by avoiding pain.
firstly, bright lights hurt my eyes, and in the sunshine everything vaguely reflective, or even just very white, becomes a potential bright light, thus leaving me incapable of looking at anything without pain [although mild discomfort might be a more accurate term, i prefer the drama of pain].
secondly, the hot rays hurt my skin. i hate the feeling of sunlight on my bare flesh - the prickly frying sensation that imperceptibly slowly develops into the redrawness of searing flesh. i spend all my time wearing long-sleeved clothes and ridiculous hats and clinging to the patches of shade i can fit myself in. plus i really hate the way tanned skin looks. that's not a racist comment, by the way - there are some stunningly beautiful people of ethnicities different to my own - but porcelain whiteness is much more aesthetic than the blotchy honey-smeared look of the person whose body has just experienced hot sun for the first time in months.



later i put this song on in the car. i told my daughter that she had to be able to sing along to every song on louder than bombs by the time she is 10. my wife didn't seem to think this was a good plan - but i don't think it's much to ask. when i was a kid i knew pretty much all the words to any album of my parents' that i liked - and even many i didn't much - by the end of the third or fourth listen. i wish things came that easily to me now - i cant even remember all the lyrics to most songs i've written at the moment

"sumer of rock n roll" - outl4w

"don't wanna drive a bus or train catch a thief or fly a plane - i only wanna rock n roll"




what is it about the summer that makes people more willing to forgive inanity?
this song is sheer unadulterated drivel. even considering the fact i was written by small children, it is unbearably infantile. its even less clever than their stupid extraneous number in the band name [did someone just call me a hypocrite?].
the original remit for the competition on xfm that this song won was that it had to include the words "summer" and "beergarden". so there i was sitting in a beergarden in the summer and the train of thought left me thoroughly earwormed with this.

now, i want to rock n roll at least as much as the next man, but i don't want to do so soundtracked by a bunch of pre-pubescent punk-wannabes

"flicker" - kathryn williams

"but you sit there for hours watching programmes you don't plan to watch they just come on"



i made a decision this evening that i wasn't going to turn the tv on. this was mostly because i worry about the detrimental effect it has on my daughter's brain development (and mine for that matter) and because i wanted to get on with my plan to play her as wide a range of albums as possible. i started off with the angelou album because of how much it had been in my head earlier and them we moved on to this album.

i bought this record purely on the basis of seeing her perform one track on the mercury awards show and for the most part was not disappointed. it's pretty and witty and thoughtful and immaculately scored (though i'd like to hear the bass do more than plonk) and, even though its a bit too folky for me to listen to often, i enjoy it when i'm in the mood.

so in the middle of spooning yoghurt in the vague direction of a baby's face these lines jumped out at me and knocked me back. maybe it was just a guily conscience on this matter - but it felt like she was levelling this accusation straight at me. oh but its true. there are so many things i want to do, things my wife wants me to do and things i really should do that i just never get around to doing. and theres noone to blame but me. theres not enough time, but theres a lot more than im using - even on nights like this when the tv stays off.

"bitter honey" - angelou

"i am drunk on you"



first up, where did this blog go? i decided to have a couple of weeks off and it just somehow turned into 4 months. i really am pathetic.

secondly, who would have thought the first band i've not been a member of to have two songs mentioned in this blog would be angelou? but all through the last few hours i've had this song all over my mind so much it's made me want to get this blog back out.

and what a track to come back with. haunting, soft, beautiful, full of metaphor, ever so slightly strange, powerful at just the right moment, just enough of a twist of sadness - it is a love song that is so much like being in love. a song that makes you want to be in love. a song that celebrates love. love is the healthiest addiction i can think of.
go, take the one you love in your arms and get drunk on them.

"our velocity" - maximo park

"i've got no-one to call in the middle of the night anymore. i'm just alone with my thoughts"
"love is a lie, which means i've been lied to. love is a lie, which means i've been lying too"


i dont know what it is about the latest wave of indie bands, but the only parts of their songs i seem to like are the bridges. the bridge is supposed to just be a break from verses and choruses so you dont get bored of them. its supposed to make you want to hear the chorus again. there are many songs i love where i struggle to remember how the bridge goes or if i havent listened to it in a while the bridge comes as something as a surprise because id forgotten it entirely.

but this song has two bridges both of which are catchier, hookier and generally better than the chorus. these bridges have been in my head for days now, but i can barely remember how the chorus goes. theres something wrong with the world when things like this happen. its just twisted is what it is.

"thou shalt always kill" - dan le sac v scroobius pip

"thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants. use it to get into their heads."


this song is going to be huge.

i heard it twice on xfm yesterday and various bits of it have been in and out of my head ever since. a glorious slice of intelligent lo-fi.
that said, by the time it's been played to death this summer - and it will be - i will surely be sick of it, but for now i just want to be excited by it.


i don't think i've ever got into a girl's pants (or head for that matter) using any other method - which is the trouble with this song - it is too busy telling you what not to do without offering advice on replacement activities

"lonely this christmas" - mud

"that's where i'll be since you left me. my tears could melt the snow. what can i do without you? i've got no place, no place to go"



there's not often any real sense of appropriateness about my earworms, but mid march is a pretty inappropriate time to be infected by a christmas classic from that glam band from mitcham.

when i was a kid i was, for a time, obsessed with watching sounds of the seventies on the bbc - though at the time i didn't really appreciate the irony inherent in pretty much all the members of glam bands being really ugly. but then glam isn't about being good looking - its not even about looking good - its just about looking.


it was really cold today, and i was alone, if not strictly speaking lonely - i guess that's why

"shiver" - horny toad

"shiver - brrrrr - shiver - brrrrrr - shiver, shiver, shiver"


the only place i've ever heard this inconsequential ska-punk track is on some free compilation cd. i like it well enough, but it's not a great song in the scheme of things. yet it seem to crop up in my mind every time i shiver.

actually, it only happens when i'm shivering with cold not with any of the more significant forms of shiver - fear, illness, erotic tension, panic, caffeine tweaking, anxiety, resonance or random unknown reasons. i like all of these far better than coldness - not just because they come without this irritating little chorus filling my head, or even just because they are warmer, but because they are deeper. it's almost always good to feel.

"there's no flaws in michaela strachan" - monsters4GODS

"i'd really love to get inside your country file"


the best way i ever celebrated st patricks day was by playing an acoustic gig. it was one of my favourite gigs i played in m4G. partly because we played well, but mostly beacuse the set was relaxed and self indulgent. we were only playing to half a dozen drunks, a soundguy and taming pandora who was playing later, and we treated ourselves by playing stuff we'd never done before - including the later verses of michaela that we didn't usually get round to, some of which got laughs from drunks.

michaela's on some wierd bbc adverts at the moment superimposed on some weak animation and trying to act. i think the fact that she's not very good at it is part of her charm. she's not a stunning beauty but she has always been nice looking and always comes accross as friendly and enthusiastic. her single h-a-p-p-y radio was much better than most people would think too. i don't think we were ever that serious about our devotion to her, despite the lyrics to this song, but she was cute back in her wide awake club days (when there's an incredibly unsubstatiated rumour she had a thing with mike myers who did some sketches for it) and she's still looking pretty good for 40.

"freeze the atlantic" - cable

these lyrics are pretty incoherent - i usually just mumble the right sort of sounds and hope for the best


i've just been out for a walk through the city. i needed to buy a mother's day card, my feelings on which i dealt with on my old blog but which this year was further complicated for the first time by trying to find a card that expresses what i think my baby would want to express to my wife on mother's day. wandering back from an unrewarding chore at the card shop eating a far more rewarding sub (with extra jalapenos) there are loads of people lying around on the ground in patches of sunshine as if it were summer already. for no real reason it reminds me of the dreadful sprite advert that this great song soundtracked which was nothing at all like this really. just summery.

"little miss can't be wrong"/"two princes" - spin doctors

"what you gonna do to get into another one of these rock and roll songs?"
"one has diamonds in his pockets that sounds great, now. this one, said he wants to buy you lockets, ain't in his head, now."



a special kind of double earworm occurs when two songs by the same artist are so similar that bits of them become interchangeable.
everyone loved two princes at the time, even though lmcbr was a much better song.
i don't think either has aged very well, but they are the sort of thing that might come on the radio every now and then and remind you that they were better than you thought.

"nice guy eddie" - sleeper

"and i said hey love i’m making it easy on us. i’ll leave and a few of our dreams turn to dust"



songs always seem to know how to end a relationship - whereas i never have.
i wish i had had the guts to use this line to break up with someone, its honesty and simplicity being surely superior to the self-justifying, circuitous babble that i managed. sure, there's a certain level of cruelty in its detachment, but it's the sort of cruelty you might get at a hospital where they know how to hurt you in a way in which you'll get better. i reckon that if louise wener said this to you in her breathy tones you wouldn't even start crying until a few hours later, and it probably wouldn't take you long to forgive her. i, on the other hand, am not really on speaking terms with any of my exes.

the way i would most like to have broken up with someone would have been to stand outside her window and, in a parody of john cusack's boombox serenade, stand silently with gone for good by morphine playing at streetwaking volume, then turn and walk silently away whilst silent tears run down her face and all dogs and babies nearby bark and cry respectively.

is it wrong to have a fantasy breakup?

"this ain't a scene its an arms race" - fall out boy

"this ain't a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race"


this song is everywhere at the moment
it sounds so much like he's singing "goblin arse-face"
so i laugh inappropriately every time

"the radio still sucks" - ataris

"every now and then i turn it on again but it's plain to see that the radio still sucks"


i remember the death of xfm.

it had been a gloriously uncommercial, eclectic station prepared to take risks, to play stuff noone else was playing, to not be rigidly trapped in a playlist. it had had to make a few compromises to get a permanent licence, and i still didn't like all of the wide range of stuff they played, but it was great because they played bad stuff, sometimes barely listenable stuff, in amongst the fantastic stuff.

it came as a shock to me, though i later found out industry people were well aware of its imminence, when in late august of 1998 it just disappeared - with a short loop of mor repeating endlessly on the frequency.

a couple of weeks later it had turned, through some black magic, into a weak virgin radio clone, and it took many years for it to re-evolve into its current state which is at least listenable, particularly at night. but it can never again, i fear, be the revolutionary force it tried so hard to be.

the world would probably be a slightly better place if it had succeeded

"deeper shade of blue" - steps

"into each life some sun must shine - well someone else must be getting mine. the days are so empty, nights are so long, awaking to find again that you've gone"



i have a grudging sort of respect for steps. they're not good. i wouldn't endorse them, i wouldn't ever choose to listen to them but, the painful (and truly tragic) cover of tragedy aside, always enjoy it at least a little when i do. sure they were throwaway pop, but they had the redeeming value that they knew they were and didn't care. also, i think they had some pretty good people writing for them. lyrically at least, there are some well crafted pop songs, with more emotional lyrics than the bland child-friendly production would imply.

someone i know mentioned recently that he had had a thing for claire. i think i over-expressed my surprise and it came across as a criticism. i would never criticise anyone for finding another person attractive, however little i understood the reason for it. i was however surprised since i'd never met a claire-person before. i know of several faye-people, and i know i'm not alone in the lisa-people, and i've even met some h-people (though that's a very different thing), but no claire-people.

chaqu-un a son gout, je suppose

my wife asserts that steps were rubbish, and to an extent she has a point, but then she tries to claim that s-club were the far superior pop band. this is clearly an error of judgement since i have rarely heard an s-club song without wanting to hurt someone (this would preferably take the form of hannah-homicide, but has a range of options right down to scooping out my own inner ear with a screwdriver). the only faintly acceptable member of s-club was jo o, and she has now proven herself, through the medium of "celebrity" "reality" tv, to be a dull, slightly racist chav.


oh dear, how sad am i to even have an opinion about any of this rubbish?
(please note that this is rhetorical)

"cement" - feeder

"i'm in quicksand sinking in again. i've got concrete shoes and i can't swim"


i love this song. it reminds me of why i used to be a fan of feeder. a combination of melody and power. a summery sort of pain. when he sings "how can i stop this?" it meant something to me. buck rogers leaves me cold.
but they've been disappointing me for a long time. when i saw them live, just before the rerelease of polythene, they were quite good but what i remember most of their set was the disappointment of the songs everyone wanted them to play but they didn't - how could they not play tangerine for example.
actually what i remember most from that gig is just how fantastic tampasm were in support. they looked great, they wore plastic devil horns, they played hard fast and tight, i moshed like a mentalist, some guy jumped on my head when i went down, i got back up and they were still rocking, they played glorified vibrator - they deserved to be much much bigger than they were.
oh and it was this gig where i spilled the beer of a music journalist, and he made me buy him another and then when he realised that meant i had no money to buy my own he said i could have as much of it as i could down in one - i was terrified i was about to hurl on his feet.

it was also on the way home from that gig that i experienced the man on the tube with the pizza hut balloon who killed rock, the saddest molko-wannabe i've ever seen and the drunk guys who thought it was hilarious to say "what rhymes with bank" over and over again.

"reginasaurus" - regina spektor

"if i was a philosophy i'd be registentionalism, and if people spoke using quotes of me they'd say reginaisms. if i was a religion, then my church would surely have a schism"


some time ago now, i got an instant message from pat. "you have to go and see regina spektor when she plays in london," she said, "my friend messaged me and told me to go and see her and i did and it was great so now i'm telling you" [i'm paraphrasing a lot here]

so based pretty much solely on that recommendation and only having heard "baby jesus" before i duly went up to islington to see her. after enduring a competent but incredibly self-involved support band and an interminable wait a slightly ditsy-looking girl with just a hint of kooky-cuteness walks out onto the stage, sits at a piano and captures the full rapt attention of the entire crowd for her full set. she makes jokes, she plays requests (and has to give up on "baby jesus" quite early cos she hasn't played it all tour), she is genuinely concerned for all the young girls fainting in the sweltering heat of a poorly ventilated box, she is genuinely likable.

i was singing this song for days afterwards and it has regularly been an earworm since. it's so not her best song but it is sweet and funny and pretty in a throwaway kind of way

"king of the kerb" - echobelly

'"sugar smile savvy"

nothing was quite as era-encapsulating of the whole britpop thing as the shine compilations. anyone with a full set has an amazing assortment of huge hits, indie gems and forgotten classics. whoever it was at polygram picking the tracks did a fine job. anyone planning an indie-disco could get by with just a few of them - as long as they were discrete and prepared not to do many requests.

i'm pretty certain this song was on shine 3 which is probably one of the best ones. i must have heard it dozens of times before i worked out what the lyrics were she was singing and i think i liked the song less once i knew what it was about, but you've gotta admit it's catchy

"dancing in the moonlight" - thin lizzy

"i always get chocolate stains on my pants"


i first got into this song on a smashing pumpkins acoustic bootleg where it is haunting and great, and then got into the original which is more powerful in its own way.

the main trouble with cover versions is that - even if you totally understand the lyric and empathise with the emotion behind it and can use it to express your own emotions - noone can ever convey the message of the words with as much emotional power as the person who wrote them.

hearing this song so much on that stupid cider advert is starting to make me sick of it - i really hope that doesn't continue.

"monday night pet shop madness" - sid shuttle and the space cadets

"if you want to have fun on a monday night, come down to the petshop with me."


when i was, i think, 9 my friend chris and i started writing poetry together in the playground. the compass grew to include jack, and the other chris and some other people, but it was our project. i remember the battered spiral-bound notebook chris would pull out at break and lunch times - chock full of the scrawlings of our collective art. in fairness, most of it was derivative or just plain ripped off, and a lot of it was ruined by trying, in our own small-child, pun-obsessed way, to be funny.

one day we realised that a lot of the better material we had written wasn't poetry so much as song lyrics and we formed a band. it mattered not a scrap that none of us could play anything (though i think i was already a very poor clarinetist by this point) - hey, many bands have formed and then worried about learning to play things.
heavily inspired by "morris minor's marvellous motors" - a popular children's tv comedy at the time - we settled on the name sid shuttle and the space cadets. i wish i could remember the ridiculous themed pseudonyms of other band members but i can't even remember which out of chris and i lost the battle and ended up being sid shuttle.

why we chose to write a song about a pet shop also escapes me, and with the cynical eyes of hindsight it all seems rather pathetic, but for a few moments we believed in something - and made some (albeit faintly ridiculous) assertions about our collective future.

i'd settle for a childish clarity now

"beheaded" - the offspring

"the way his body is severed in two his vocal cords are gonna be hard to use"



i'm not quite sure when the offspring turned into a parody of themselves. maybe it was the shift to the major label placing different expectations upon them. although ixnay was on epitaph and there are a few novelty-ish songs that kinda point to the direction they ended up going in for columbia.
but right back in the dying moments of the eighties there were tracks like this that blended so-cal punk with a twist of the cartoon horror of the misfits. this song is as much about finding ways to silence those try to control you as it is about collecting heads in a sack under your bed.

"mambo number five" - bob the builder

"a little bit of tiling on the roof, a little bit of making waterproof, a little bit of concrete mixed with sand, a little bit of bob, the builder man"




oh no. oh please no. a million times no.
inane drivel with gratingly poor scansion.
for several hours.
my poor poor brain

"the most beautiful girl in the world" - the artist formerly known as prince

"when the day turns into the last day of all time i can say i hope you are in these arms of mine"



everyone knows that the most important question in understanding a person's musical taste is "elvis or the beatles?"
in my opinion, though, the second most important question is "michael jackson or prince?"
the third question i usually add in is "ramones or sex pistols?"

i think its the second question that people don't seem to expect and is really more telling than you would think.

i don't like michael jackson. almost nothing he has done since his earliest stuff has really done anything for me. i have respect for him as an artist, he has written popular and influential songs, though i'm not keen on them. i have less respect for him as a person - i'm never sure if i believe the rumours and allegations but i do know i can't relate to him on any level. i don't think i let that influence my opinion of his music much, though its possible i do.
prince is notoriously weird. i very much doubt there's much about his life i could relate to either. but i do know he writes incredible songs, seems to play every instrument ever invented with amazing passion and somehow manages to touch me.

but i think the question - like the elvis or the beatles issue - goes deeper than your specific preference between these two artists. to me, although their styles could be considered similar they diverge enough to make the comparison significant. jackson to me represents all forms of dance and soul music, while prince represents all forms of rock music . jackson represents commercialism, prince experimentalism. jackson mawkish sentimentality, prince genuine expressions or powerful emotions.

maybe thats just the way i see it.

someone once tried to argue with me that i was just asking people to choose between black music and white music - but it's not about that, it's really not.

"don't let me get me" - pink

"every day i fight a war against the mirror"


i know it's not a universally held opinion, but i think pink is gorgeous. she's had so many looks but they are pretty much all good. once upon a time one of the music tv channels (the hits i think) was having a pink weekend where all her videos were available for selection so she was on about every 4th or 5th video. i foolishly decided i wasn't going to go to bed until i had seen them all - which at the time was eight videos i think. at about a quarter to five on sunday morning they finally played the most girls video and i could finally get some sleep. by this time i think i had seen the lady marmalade video 5 times. the biggest problem was that most of the videos in between were the drossiest pop which was quite soporific.

on world aids day diva's bar had a porn star themed charity fancy dress night. like most fancy dress occasions this was generally an excuse for girls to look slutty whilst guys generally made as little effort as possible. i'm pretty sure i saw several people whose costume consisted of sticking a name label to their chest of a punny porn-star name. anyway, i had decided at that time that the sexiest moving image i had seen was pink's video for like a pill and that, although there was no actual sex or nudity in it i had drooled over it more than enough times for it to count. so i decided i was going as pink. the biggest obstacle i faced was that i am outrageously cheap and i had to go as pink on a budget of a couple of quid. so i went on a charity shop crawl. so that gorgeous flowing gaping black jacket was substituted by a "silk" robe (made by killing genuine acrylics) , that tiny tight skirt was replaced by the smallest skirt i could find and legally wear without being arrested for exposure, i already had some stockings so that wasn't a problem, the shoes i gave up as a dead loss on my budget and hoped people would be too distracted by the rest to notice, i copied her eyeliner style as well as i could, put loads of product in my hair so it came across my face "just so" and then came my big mistake. a feature of this outfit in the video is the crosses of black tape across her nipples. i'm pretty sure pink is wearing insulating tape, but the only tape i had was gaffer tape. now, as you are probably aware, insulating tape is much less sticky than gaffer tape. suffice it to say that removing the gaffer tape from my nipples was more than a little painful (pixie chris did it for me).
i had clearly made more effort than most of the males there put together.
a good night though.

"watch this" - the slackers

" i cry but i can't complain. i supply my own ball and chain"



this song is about fear of commitment. strangely i've never had that fear of commitment in relationships that's so stereotypical of men - i found an awesome woman and i married her - but i have a real fear of committing to a job, to a task, to a role or to a routine.

maybe i'm just scared of some pathetic idea of selling out

"pavlov's bell" - aimee mann

"nobody knows thats how i nearly fell. trading clothes and ringing pavlov's bell"



despite the fact that several of the ones i used to go to have closed down, there is still some choice of cinemas in croydon. admittedly your choice is mostly the big vue in the centre of town or the big vue next to ikea, but there is also the david lean cinema. its a strange little place, 3 or 4 rows of chairs in a surprisingly small room tucked away in a fairly obscure part of the clocktower complex - past the museum of croydon, past the bar - and they usually get things at least a few weeks after the bigger cinemas.

because its so small you can really get a feeling for what the other people around you think of the film. when i went there to see magnolia i got a real sense at about 2 hours in that the room was split into two approximately equal groups. the first group - including the girlfriend i went to see it with - were clearly of the opinion that it was confusing, boring and crap while the second group - including me - found it complex, subtle and fantastic. strangely, about 45 minutes later as things were tying together and making more sense some of the people who had been enjoying it were beginning to flag under the sheer length of the thing whilst some people who had been hating it realised that it had all made some sense all along and realised they enjoyed it.

my advice to you is that you don't buy the soundtrack album though. get aimee mann's ultimate collection instead - a much better album. and then buy lost in space that this great tune is on - even if just for the comic in the inlay.

"tell him" - the exciters

"i know something about love"



i have had a sad evening. not earth shatteringly tragic in the scheme of things, but enough to put me in a real downer.
my wonderful wife bought me a saxophone from e-bay. not just a saxophone, a 1954 conn 12m baritone - the sax of my dreams (though in my best and pickiest dreams its a mid 40s model with mint gold plate finish - and for free rather than the many thousands market forces would expect for such an item). i was so excited that it was arriving, but then so shocked when i opened the case. it instantly didn't look right, though the true horror was hidden until i lifted it up. the loop of the crook had taken a serious blow in transit and was bent right up against the body. this crushed the octave key meachanism, bent the top f key and snapped the top e key right off. coupled with the sadness of disappointment was the greater sadness of seeing something so beautiful that had been abused so badly. and it really was beautiful. and it really was brutally damaged. in its own way it was kinda heartbreaking.

stupid parcelforce clumsy delivery drivers. what have you done? what have you done?

"losing ctrl" - whale

"it's not as easy losing control"


this song leaps aggressively at you out of the middle of all disco dance must end in broken bones and always, but always, makes me want to scream along. it is, in and of itself, an opportunity to lose control, which i guess is its strength. and points out that often what we are uptight about is our own uptightness.

"sos" - rihanna

"you on my mind has got me losing it"



kurt cobain would have been 40 today. i really wanted a suitable nirvana earworm to celebrate it and give me an excuse to write about him, but i've been getting tiny bits or fleeting visits from about 50 different nirvana songs and thus none of them count.

instead i got this. i couldn't even remember where this line was from for ages until it clicked with this song. somewhere in the murky grey area between sample, mashup and cover - a pretty enough girl with a mediocre voice and a riff everyone's sick of by now even though it comes from a classic song.

maybe there's a connection

probably not

"down in a hole" - alice in chains

"don't understand who they thought i was supposed to be. look at me now a man who won't let himself be"



it's a common misconception that there's no such thing as the truth. the trouble is that everyone has a different truth and they can be incompatible. like extreme said - the three sides to every story are yours, mine and the truth. in reality its more like that fable of the blind men and the elephant. there is an absolute truth but for the most part we don't have the ability to perceive enough of it at once to understand it. concentrating too hard on the bit of the truth you can see will stop you understanding that the bit someone else can see can still be the truth.

i think this is even more true about roles. nobody else's idea of who and what you should be is right, but in all honestly yours probably isn't either.

"ten shades of grey" - terrorvision

"it's night again all the time - shadows are lurking but i can't find mine"



one of the times i came closest to losing respect for a friend was when fred claimed that in his opinion regular urban survivor was a better album than how to make friends and influence people. its not just because he was clearly wrong, but because that album holds a special place for me. even though i have heard it and played it many times in many situations it will always be the summer of 1995 to me. on holiday without my family i was finally - at not quite 15 - able to step away from the roles i had been cast in in my normal situations and start to become myself. making friends, flirting outrageously with girls (by my standards) and generally not being dismissed by people out of hand gave me a boost of self-worth that was severely lacking in my life around that time. this album was everywhere that summer, and its bouncier songs like oblivion and time of the signs set the soundtrack for a slight tempo shift in my life.

"the sound of silence" - simon and garfunkel

"people writing songs that voices never share and no one dared disturb the sound of silence"



i don't get the graduate. there's nothing sexy about it. hoffman is too old looking at 30 to convincingly be young. bancroft at only 6 years older is too similar an age for the age gap thing to be believable. i know the jumpyness is part of the mood but it just irritates me - as does the whole formality of pretty much noone having a first name. far be it from me to disregard what is widely regarded as a classic - but i honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about.

and then there's the soundtrack. maybe my modern ear expects too much from a soundtrack but it mostly seems to consist of variations on mrs robinson and sound of silence over and over again - doing nothing to enhance for me the viewing experience.

but here's the kicker. i don't get simon and garfunkel. i don't understand why anyone would choose to listen to them - let alone get excited about them. i'll give you that paul simon is a talented songwriter with a pretty good voice - but i'm not really sure what garfunkel is for. the pretty much live versions of the same songs on "the paul simon songbook" are much more listenable. but i still don't really like that material. his eponymous album, or even graceland, are so much better and have videos where he takes pride in beating children at baseball or pretending to be chevy chase.

and if i never hear bridge over troubled waters again it will be much too soon.

"hedonism (just because you feel good)" - skunk anansie

"how do you remember me, the one that made you laugh until you cried. i hope you're feeling happy now"



stuck in a traffic jam on the south circular and this came on xfm. i had no choice but to crank it up and sing along (though i have to drop out the really high bits). hours later i was still singing it. it probably only just scrapes into my top 10 tracks of theirs but its great. the band is great. the songs are great. if you don't own either of their first two albums then shame on you.

i used to be really bothered about how people remembered me. surprisingly much more so than what people thought of me in the moment - which i never really cared about. i remember writing long quasi-deep meanderings in the school leaving books of people i had barely given a second thought to most of the years we had coexisted. it always meant more to me if someone mentioned a long time later that they enjoyed one of my gigs, rather than straight after which meant quite little. being memorable was its own way of ensuring i was being significant. being memorable is a far greater aspiration than being popular, or even than being liked.

go out there and be memorable, readers, go.

"all your way" - morphine

"i was raised with the strong of heart but if you touch me wrong i fall apart. i found a woman who's soft but she's also hard, while i slept she nailed down my heart"



there's something deeply attractive about a strong woman. i don't mean by that that i get off on images of female bodybuilders or have an obsession with world's strongest woman contests. the strength i'm referring to is something less physical. she and her strength may take many forms but the beauty is still there. it may be some form of emotional strength, mental strength, sexual strength, strength of character, strength of will, strength of determination, or some combination of the above. its the spark of controlled power. she knows how to destroy you but chooses not to.

that's probably what sea bass is about.

there's probably something attractive about a strong man as well but i've never met one.

"sea bass" - monsters4GODS

"my makeup will etch my sorrow on your face. you're smiling, telling me they're just laughter lines"



i never really knew what this song was about, even the bits that i wrote, yet at some level it always meant something to me. it definitely wasn't about seabass though. he came from uruguay, and there are rumours of his immortality.

"monstarr" - bis

"can i not be normal cos i'm not a size ten. play music, be in films or even show my face. should i be embarrassed if it's such a crime. funny how yr life depends upon yr waistline."



i must be getting old. it's a sure sign when my 31" jeans now fit me less well than my 34" jeans. when, like me, you are scrawny and unfit putting on weight is a weird experience. it just seems to arrive in bits that don't fit with the rest of your body - making me feel even less proprtionate than i ever did. a man this scrawny should not have a face this fat. don't expect me to do anything about it thou, i'm just too lazy.

partly because of my grunge casualty status, i often used to wear 2 or 3 pairs of jeans. this has the added effect of making your waist look really narrow in comparison to your hips and thus your reflection seems a bit slimmer. but then i usually used to wear 3 t-shirts and 2 shirts as well. this is mostly because this is a good look. just you wait, one day the fashion cycle will complete and looking this 1992 will make me cutting edge again. but i did always feel a lot better knowing that my body was a long way inside what you could see. hiding in plain sight.

"white chocolate space egg" - liz phair

"i'll see you around. every hollow has its favourite sound and my heart is holding on"



something of a shortage or earworms lately. lots of those self-soundtracking scraps of song that fly into your mind with powerful urgency and then flit off forgotten, and several ghost earworms (where something that was an earworm recently comes back for a bit even though you thought you were rid of it - which doesn't count as a new earworm), but no genuine unshakable, barely-able-to-think-of-anything-else earworms.

until this hit me and i had to fight from singing it aloud

i can't stand white chocolate. don't get me wrong - i am a fan of most things that fall under the category of confectionery and if offered some white chocolate would not be churlish enough not to accept it and obtain some enjoyment from its consumption - i just can't bear its intrinsic untruth. how can anything containing no cocoa solids or cocoa mass have the gall to call itself chocolate? (i have a similar gripe against red liquorice - but don't want to get distracted mid-rant) if i wanted the taste of milk i would drink some milk - good grief, if i wanted a confectionery taste that was reminiscent of milk i would eat milk duds - but when i eat chocolate i want it to taste of chocolate. i want it to be dark brown and laden with cocoa solids. i want it to scream "CHOCOLATE" at my tongue. i want it rich, dark and aromatic. i want to savour the subtle interplay between sweetness and bitterness. if i'm going to destroy my vocal chords i want it to be worth it.

and don't get me started on the milky-bar kid.

"london's brilliant parade" - elvis costello

"the lions and the tigers in regents park couldn't pay their way and now they're not the only ones"
"the lovely diorama is really part of the drama"
"i'm having the time of my life or something quite like it when i'm walking out and about in london's brilliant parade"



arriving too early for a jazz band rehearsal i decided to have a wander. in and out of brick lane past the boasts and come-ons of the curry house pimps, up and down the side roads with their road signs i can't understand, onto the outskirts of the mildly intimidating estate with its small clusters of bored youth, into the ethnic grocers where the smells instantly bring back memories of amman foods. i'm a south london boy and i wouldn't want it any other way, but i'm glad the east end is there.


my dad is a big elvis costello fan and i grew up with his albums on in the background and his songs part of my understanding of music - not this track so much, obviously since it wasn't released til the mid 90s. i still struggle not to rip him off too much as a songwriter as i find myself always wanting to slip a nice pun, triple rhyme or clever piece of wordplay into the middle of the second verse. and importantly he was one of the main bonds i had with glyn that i didnt really have with anyone else - part of the sharedness of where we were trying to come from and where we were trying to go.

"police officer" - smiley culture

"me and my colleagues have got a few questions to ask ya. you'll be on your way as soon as we get an answer"


walking home from the pub. outside selhurst park a pair of cops are hassling some drunk, scratty woman. all i can think about is this song. if only that woman had recorded the song cockney translator she could have gotten away with anything.

this song has a special place in the hearts of everyone who lived at byron acres. it was the highlight of vh1's worst videos countdown and we all loved it. many's the time we drunkenly acted out the comversation from the middle eight, though i think we usually got the words wrong.

"sleep to dream" - fiona apple

"i tell you how i feel but you don't care. i say tell me the truth but you don't dare. you say love is a hell you cannot bear so i say give me mine back and then go there for all i care"


i got into fiona apple simply on the recommendation of some guy on the old nirvanaweb board known as apple. his opinions on everything else were pretty much spot on, and he loved her, so she had to be worth checking out.
when i finally got my hands on a copy of tidal i was blown away. the whole thing is good, but there are 4 or 5 tracks with real emotional power i could happily listen to round and round.

i don't seem to dream much any more. i guess i mostly just go to sleep to sleep.

"mr blue sky" - elo

"running down the avenue see how the sun shines brightly in the city on the streets where once was pity mr blue sky is living here today"



i hate getting this song as an earworm. it never never goes away.

and the weather is a dreadful thing to have a conversation about, so how much worse should it be considered as a subject to write a song about.

it's probably a euphemism though, right

"white wedding" - billy idol

"it's a nice day to start again"



i think this was my unconscious mind's idea of a pun as, barely awake, i trudged through the virgin snow trying to keep each crunching footfall on the snare drum beat.

i am cold

the only thing that might make snow less than perfect for a white wedding would be that the desire to remain sufficiently warm not to die would necessitate the bride wearing something other than the traditional styles of wedding dress. i'm sure there would be a sartorial way around this. a bit like when you see cheerleaders at snowy american football games in costumes that still try to look slutty without the unpleasantly unattractive possibility of losing an extremity to frostbite.

im sure there are people out there who would quite like to see slutty cheerleaders with missing fingers and toes, but im pretty certain its a small enough minority for it not to be worth catering to.

"today" - the smashing pumpkins

"today is the greatest day i've ever known"


today is one of the best songs about suicide ever written. it is also right up there on the list of songs that people misunderstand and like for the wrong reasons. these are mostly about suicide or drugs. i think the way that song about heroin by the las keeps getting used on adverts probably puts it at the top of that list though.

almost every day i read emma kennedy's great blog which today featured the recounting of a dream she had. the line of dialogue "i will never be as happy as i am today, i am going to die" was one of those step-back-and-say-whoah moments of random beauty that spark off strange thought processes and cause earworms.

as well as this song i also have the opening to this poem punctuating it in my head. i wrote it when i was 17, so please forgive the mawkish angsty romance

when i die i want to be
happy. when you're with me
i feel happier than i ever have before
so let me walk down to the shore
of your cheeks and drown my-
self in the ocean of your eyes
my love
let me drown in the ocean of your eyes




the really sad thing is that there were originally several stanzas of this drivel i can no longer remember

"when i argue i see shapes" - idlewild

"i'm not really sure of all this pressure. i'm never going to lose any of my old letters"


i think this is the best idlewild song. by a long way. every other song of theirs ive heard just makes me wish they could do something this good again.

my favourite solid shape is the rhombicosidodecahedron. i think its great. by which i dont mean i think its a "great rhombicosidodecahedron" which is what some people call a truncated icosidodecahedron because although they both have 62 faces theres something about the decagons i really dont like. although strangely the truncated cuboctahedron is much better than the rhombicuboctahedron.
anyway, im getting distracted. the point is that the best archimidean solid is definitely the rhombicosidodecahedron, though i can see why someone might try to argue for the more familar truncated icosahedron.
search the interweb, find yourself a rhombicosidodecahedron net and make yourself one. it might start off looking like a fairly random assortment of hexagons, squares and triangles, but theres beauty in the end product. and, i suspect, a sense of achievement also. its many years since i made one



here, look, ive even done the searching for you

"bastardo" - charlotte hatherley

"and in the morning when i woke there was no antonio, just some money that he’d left for the memory of me. and oh my beautiful guitar, that’s what really broke my heart, had been stolen by the two-faced lothario"


when i saw charlotte hatherley in the carling tent at reading festival a couple of years ago it was at least partly just to kill time before something i really wanted to see. i had never heard her solo stuff and my expectations werent high, but i was pleasantly surprised with how good her bouncy indie set was. i did leave early to see whatever it was i had been waiting for though.

"saints and sailors" - dashboard confessional

"this is about as social as i get now"



i like the first two dashboard albums. theres an undercurrent of something smug about the band i dont really like, and the over-reliance on open tunings feels weird on my ears after a while, and the songwriting is occasionally mawkish or linguistically awkward, but there are just some lines that leap out at you from the middle of songs. lines you feel a real empathy for. lines that sum up a moment so well that all similar moments from then on seem to be soundtracked by it.


i cant remember when i last did something properly social with a real friend


i do want to kick in the head all of the muppets singing along on the dashboard confessional mtv unplugged album. but something of the band's sound has coloured or informed my acoustic playing since i heard them.

"war pigs" - hand of doom

"generals gathered in their masses just like witches at black masses"


i dont really know much about the hand of doom album, but its great. it seems there isnt a sabbath song that melissa auf der maur cant sing really well. i love her voice - its a real, powerful rocker's voice. especially over the sparse arrangement of the beginning of this song.

and she is probably the most beautiful lesbian i have ever seen.

"cure" - metallica

"everyone's got to have the sickness cos everyone seems to need the cure"


one of my internal battles - what's the best metallica album? without question the answer is master of puppets. which metallica album would i most want to listen to? load. not that ive listened to metallica much for quite some time. or ever really cared that much when i did.

i waited in the doctor's waiting room with a grumpy baby with a cold for over an hour. it was one of the most soul-destroyingly boring things i have ever done.

alphonso bonzo theme tune

in the kids tv show of my childhood, alphonso bonzo was an italian "exchange student" who would exchange some boy's everyday item for a similar item with magic properties. i have a vague memory that at the end he wanted to swap his life and it was all a bit twisted. the most memorable thing though was the annoying tune he whistled all the time.

"this is not a love song" - angelou

"we can sit and talk all night, spectate and philosophise but there's no rehearsal this is the real thing. so lets just say that you got it wrong and this is not a love song"



the monkey bar was one of those places that just had to exist. by day a scratty cafe, by night host to an eclectic range of gigs and club nights. i have a strange range of happy memories of it - the gig i played there was enhanced by the singing of drunken dutch sailors, the dub night had an open african drumming circle in the upstairs room and there was psycho's.

every third thursday a weak comedian would compere an acoustic night. i saw a lot of these gigs, but the only one that is specifically memorable was seeing angelou.

now, as you may have noticed, if you give a girl a guitar i am weak around her, and if you give a pretty and talented girl a guitar i am literally putty. they sung a complete set of soul-shatteringly lovely songs, threw in the best cover of buckley's hallelujah i have ever heard and were funny and endearing between songs. holly even seemed really sorry for having to take money from me in return for a copy of their cd afterwards.
it was an evening of beauty and i walked home in a daze that night with autumn thinking about turning into winter around me.

"richard" - billy bragg

"how can he go on when noone answers the adverts in his mind?"



nadine baggott knows all about pentapeptides.
barry scott shouts about making pennies shiny.
carol vorderman knows all about loan sharks.

but none of them can compete with that "editor" from the advert in the late 90s whose conversational opening gambit "i get hundreds of letters about thrush" throws up far more questions than it can ever hope to answer.

"dhc" - the dance hall crashers

"the world's a mess some people always say. well you know they're right, but who am i to say? we keep on living and we take it all in stride 'cause if we worry too much we'll never stay alive. "


there are some bands who call themselves ska-punk because they have a horn player and a fondness for the offbeat. but one of the reasons i like the dance hall crashers is that they actually seem to know about ska. i hear vocal harmonies and techniques that i hear in the selector and the bodysnatchers, and im sure if i was more knowledgeable about the "real" ska of the sixties i could think of examples of those techniques being used then.

i generally hate songs that imply things will be ok if you just dance, hence my predominantly negative attitude towards disco. but this one is just so catchy.

"tide is high" - blondie

"it's not the things you do that tease and wound me bad, but it's the way you do the things you do to me"



whenever i listen to the best of blondie (the proper 1981 one, not any of the crummy later pretenders) i am always disappointed when this song comes on. im not even sure that i dont like it, i just know im impatient for "in the flesh" to kick in.

"j'aime pas l'amour" - olivia ruiz

"si tu crois me séduire ah ce que tu te goures. je suis sourde au désir et le désir rend sourd "



back when i had cable, and if noone else was around, i occasionally used to flick over to french-speaking channel tv5. far too often it was some news , or halfway through a tv movie or that thing about sailing, but if i was lucky the show acoustic would be on. the format was beautifully simple - set in a recording studio and artists would play a song, do a bit of an interview then do another song. then they would repeat the process for another artist, then it would all be over. i saw an eclectic variety of performances on this show, but my favourite one was seeing some cute alternative-folk girl with a heavily distorted guitar and some form of tuba in her band singing cute and funny sung "la tango de qui?" i know almost nothing about olivia ruiz except the songs on this album, but most of them are great.

"jungle music" - rico

"you must be cra-a-a-azy"


there was a time in the mid 90s when the world (at least the world i inhabited) was split between junglists and metallers. people like me who werent "cool" enough to really be into either pounding shouty dance music or pounding shouty rock music were irrelevant, but most everyone at least came down on one side or other of the divide.

it always amused me though how much of their terminology the junglists borrowed from the old ska scene. as they called each other rudeboys and roughnecks thinking they had made these terms up and only the most with-it people would know what they meant.

they must have been crazy

"tony's theme" - the pixies

"this is a song about a superhero named tony. it's called tony's theme"


fat tony runs a mediocre bar, but he runs a kickass quiz night. he knows his audience, and the questions are always easy enough that most people get a good score and feel good about themselves, but hard enough that there is a clear winner. he also plays indie disco classics whilst marking your papers. he never played this song though, despite my constant wishing that he would - the cheeky monkey

"my name is jonas" - weezer

"tell me what to do now this tank is dry, now this wheel is flat"


i literally cant remember the last time i listened to weezer, i dont mean caught their video on tv or heard them on the radio, which i'm sure has happened a few times, but actually sat down and listened to an album. its gotta be 10 years since pinkerton came out, so i reckon in the last 8 or 9 years it can only have happened a few times.


i remember when my school first got the internet. it would have been autumn of 1995. we had a teacher with some contacts and we were testing some kind of line that was pretty new at the time but i suspect is madly out of date by modern standards. everyone got an e-mail address and internet access, and like a typical internet newbie i threw myself into things. i signed up for pointless email lists (i got sent the weather in california 5 times a day, for example, and it took me forever to get off the thing that sent you sermons about star trek) and found many many ways to waste time online. i down loaded enough guitar tab to teach myself to play, i added my 2p to many discussion boards (including the early snon) and got hooked on the centre for the easily amused. im pretty certain it doesnt exist any more but at the time it was full of pointless things and links to more pointless things (oh to be able to find the enormous buttons of mild amusement again. it also had a board where you could sign up for an e-mail penpal.

i feel really guilty that i cant even remember the name of someone i corresponded with regularly for over a year, she deserves better than that for putting up with my angsty adolescent moaning for so long. if anyone reading this blog thinks im on some kind of self-absorbed downer they may find it hard to comprehend that im now a well-rounded individual having cast aside a lot of the stuff that made me such a twat in high school. in fairness, with hindsight at least 95% of everyone i knew in high school was a twat in some way or another, its an integral part of being that age isn't it.
a typical email from me at that time probably read
"hi ... blahblah ... no friends ... blahblah ... life is crap, maybe ill die ... blahblah ... some comment about music and/or pop culture designed to make me look quasi-cool in an isolated subcultural way ... blahblah ... me me memememe ... blahblah ... oh and how are you?"
and yet she still managed to be my friend (/pillar/pillow/therapist) for months. she even downloaded the complete tab to 2 weezer albums for me when they turned up the internet filter on the system to "re-he-he-ally safe" where any site that had a link to a site they had already blocked was blocked, even if that site was only blocked for linking to another site that was blocked for linking to a blocked site. maybe she saw something in me that was of worth, or maybe she was just scared to let me go in case i made a mess when i landed. either way, i owe her so much.
and i cant even remember her name

"the sidewinder sleeps tonight" - r.e.m.

"call me when you try to wake her"


at various times i have been convinced this fairly unintelligible lyric has been many things. ive known people convinced it was much stupider things ("i need a caterer" for example), but strangely for a song so prone to mondegreens it doesnt have an entry on kiss this guy . i'm not really that keen on this song - or anything on automatic for the people really since monster is a far superior album.


i was walking round the park on a chilly winters morning with my baby strapped to my chest, looking at the woodpeckers and squirrels (shouldnt they be hibernating?) humming this song for no real reason. we also saw one of those grey dogs that freak me out because they look like theyre made out of felt. there was one in the video for blue monday. dont pretend you dont know what im talking about.
[later addition - apparently its a weimaraner]

"where the wild roses grow" - chicks on speed

"on the second day i brought her a flower. she was more beautiful than any woman i'd seen"


there was something sensual about the cave and kylie version of this song. but the chicks on speed version is hauntingly terrifying. i'd never heard of chicks on speed until i saw we dont play guitars on mtv2 late one night and thought it was awesome. most of their other material that ive heard is kinda ok but the other standout track is this one. the gently nightmarish whisper of the vocal tone, the unplaceable wrongness of the production - its scary stuff.


it was dydd santes dwynwen yesterday and for various personal reasons that would only seem like excuse if i expounded on them i didnt buy my wife a flower. i must rectify that today.

"waiting" - the rentals

"i'm waiting with nothing to do. i'm waiting, just waiting on you"


a loser named greg sold me return of the rentals on cassette one lunchtime for 50p and a packet of nerds. fond as i am of nerds, with their ability to seem cool despite just being small oddly-shaped lumps of sugar, he clearly got the poor end of that deal because, whilst i would have had a total of maybe 15 minutes of pleasure from that pack of sweets and whatever i would have blown the 50p on, i have whiled away many many happy hours listening to this lo-fi newwave classic. i almost always sing along, usually with petra for some reason.


like most british people, there are some things about the way americans misuse the english language that annoy me more than others. one thats right up there on my list is using the verb-phrase "waiting on" to mean "waiting for". all right-thinking people know that waiting on someone means serving them food in a restaurant whilst waiting for someone means being in a place until they are also in that same place.

sometimes you wait for something in vain - but if it was truly worth waiting for it was worth the risk that in might never happen.
you have to know whether to give up and go home though

"not my idea" - garbage

"this is not my idea of a good time"



im a big fan of the novel the wrong boy by willy russell. sure some of the plot twists are just a little too far fetched - though many things in life just arent coincidences - but the characters are vivid and at times it has a feel of the philosphical novel about it - trying to find subtle artistic ways to expound ideas.
the idea that most stuck with me from the novel is the grandmother's insistance that she didnt want to have fun. fun is little but meaningless distraction from problems and never more than short term. what she wanted in her life was joy. a powerful, deep, meaningful undercurrent of joy in which problems can been seen in context and moved past, rather than trying to extend islands of joy out into a sea of despair - reclaiming them through hard work like holland.

i like to think that my idea of a good time is not rooted in fun but in joy

"pearl's cafe" - the specials

"its all a load of bollocks"


the first couple of times i heard this song i enjoyed it without really getting it, catching the chorus and kind of accepting that as the core of the song. it wasnt until several listens later that i realised what a sad tale jerry dammers had spun. firstly the sadness of compassion for someone whose life has been tough, then secondly the sadness of realising his girlfriend is a heartless bitch. and theres a bouncy keyboard solo. the release date of this song makes it almost exactly as old as me. things really dont change.


in finnic mythology a goddess called (i think) ilmatar is sleeping lonely in the middle of a vast ocean when a giant duck with shining eyes builds its nest upon her knees, laying two eggs. when ilmatar wakes up she knocks this nest over and the eggs spill and break, forming the earth and the rest of the universe from the pieces by doing so.
its all a load of bollocks.

"the jeep song" - the dresden dolls

"i try to see it in reverse. it makes the situation hundreds of times worse when i wonder if it makes you want to cry every time you see a light blue volvo driving by"


it still shocks me that the dresden dolls arent huge. maybe not pop huge, but certainly indie huge. theyre both scarily talented musicians, their songs are intense and beautiful, amanda is a good looking lady with an original look - surely thats the right set of ingredients and then some.

i woke up this morning with this song in my head and its still there 6 hours later. its a catchy beast - particularly the sweary bits.

there are some cars that i instantly associate with people - beat up old red fiat pandas with jack, for example - some with events - small blue fords with trying in vain to get a whole band and all their gear through carmarthenshire in one - and some with times in my life - any of the increasingly few occasions i see a morris marina will always remind me of my childhood when it was our family car.

i'm pretty certain noone associates me with a car - since i've never owned one and since my wife's estate is useful but unremarkable - but i wonder what people do associate me with. might there be things that people see and are always reminded of me or a situation involving me? i'd like to think it was something cool and musical - cheap, heavily-customised guitars and gear for example - or something quirky - like silver body paint or stripy purple tights - or maybe even something meaningful, but i suspect if anyone does associate me with anything its something rubbish. thats the thing about other peoples memories - theyre so hard to alter.

Fedde Le Grande - "Put your hands up for detroit"

"a lovely city"

This song always makes me think of my favourite blog pinkisthenewblog.com
Its writer, Trent, is from Detroit (although he lives in LA) and often talks about it. As much as I like reading about his personal life though, I prefer Trent's rants on Celeb World. He was the first one to know about Britney and Fed-ex!! Well, if he wasn't the first one to know, at least I read about the divorce on PITNB waaaaay before everyone (at least the night before). He likes Britney, Jake Gyllenhaal and Madonna and lets it be known! There are other celebs whom (which?) he slags off in a gentle but hilarious way. I don't agree with him on certain things (I'm in Team Jennifer!!) but I like the way he writes, it makes me smile and sometimes laugh. I also follow quite closely his relationship with his boyfriend David, I think they're really cute together. My dream is to have one day my name and pic on the blog (as a fan, not a celeb!), but I don't have any friends who know of PITNB with whom to take themed pictures!

If you're a fan and you read this, get in touch.

That's it. I'm out.

"in the navy" - the village people

Following some joke from my French family after my boyfriend explained his grand-parents had met in the navy, the chorus stuck in my head for a while. I only know the words from the title - no idea what the rest says.

It made me think of this picture:

"st thomas" - sonny rollins

my baby girl loves st thomas. ive known it turn her from a screaming ball of grumpiness into a giggling tiny dancer. it might not be specific for this tune - it could just be a good example of an upbeat, accessable tune with interesting rhythms - but i like to think shes developing good taste at her very young age. im probably fooling myself - but to those of you who are doubting (not unlike st thomas himself) i would ask you to give her the benefit of your doubt until she is proved to just be responding to my enthusiasm or some other theory

"saltwater towns" - monsters4GODS / sultry lemon

"we fade in and out of our saltwater towns with gardens of dreams and temples of sound"


the earworm is specifically the sultry lemon recording of this song about 70% of the time, but occasionally lapses into a more familiar m4G arrangement.


i think i'd hate to live at the seaside. i cant see what attraction all the retired people see in it. i can see how it would make more sense in a climate where there is a higher proliferation of scantily clad lovelies, but i can see those on the interweb any time i like and i dont think even that would outweigh the negatives. now i realise the cynic would argue that i lived at the coast, but swansea is more a city that happens to be next to a beach, and to me doesnt really count as the seaside. it doesnt exist to pander to holidaymakers and daytrippers. its not a depressing economic wasteland the coldest 8 months of the year. it could never be described as a resort. these are the thingsthat i associate with the seaside. swansea does share some of the other drawbacks though - such as seagulls, constant wind and the sand that gunks up the bearings on your skateboard.