"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.

"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