There is an upside to my not being a drop-dead gorgeous superstar: whenever I’m working with a bunch of stubbly musicians and my singing’s not up to scratch, they tell me, bluntly. I got my first paid residency after helping a pianist move a piano to a restaurant. He asked me to take over from […]
While I’m tinkering with multimedia, I’m simply going to steal this from wongaBlog. Cinco De Mayo Carnival from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.
I’m so tired with work I’m starting to have hallucinations. I’d swear Richard Dawkins starts rapping 1 minute and 6 seconds into this YouTube video. (Christopher Hitchens throws shapes from 1:49 or thereabouts.) Go here for the torrent. [via]
It’s not a good idea to take a whole slice of brie out of the fridge, allow it to reach room temperature, eat some, and then re-chill it. If you do this enough times, then, by the time you reach the end, you may well have cultured yourself a nice little dose of food poisoning. […]
I’m busy. Amuse yourself with this. It’s amazing. Type in a song title and an artist name and listen. [via Lifehacker]
Another storm, another surrealist beach installation: Ferry sheds thousands of biscuits Thousands of packets of chocolate biscuits have washed up on the Lancashire shore from a stricken ferry. The McVitie’s biscuits were being carried on lorries aboard the Riverdance, which ran aground off north shore near Blackpool on Thursday night.
A couple of days ago, I was driving along the front at Worthing and saw for the first time the amazing spectacle of the drifts of wooden planks washed up in the recent shipwreck. This was days into the operation to clear the spill and long after sunset, yet the timber loomed unignorably two storeys […]
I was so uncool at university that I only made it to the periphery of a gang of sad scientists. One full member of the group could play immaculate air drums. I think he might have owned a small drum kit at some point, but he wasn’t a drummer. He’d sit on a chair in […]
Alan Tracy off Thunderbirds Rhydian Roberts off X-Factor
The beardy-weirdy teacher in this Metacafe video is probably a cinder now, having expired when his garage exploded during his attempt to stage a one-fiftieth-scale re-enactment of the Hindenburg disaster, but I do recommend that you visit the film on the end of that link. It has to have been one of his finest moments, […]
I’ve taken my time getting around to this because the original email I was sent read like “benign spam” (which, in a way, it was) so it went to the bottom of my in-tray. [Sorry, Paul.] The legendary Paul Wixon is promoting a Japanese band called “Sollers” with a view to getting them some gigs […]
It’s one in the morning. About fifteen minutes ago, I got back from working hard at a delightful wedding. Thanks to Jason Hare, I’ve just read this piece by Stephen King about the joys of junk culture and listened to Petra Haden’s uplifting and progressively sillier cover of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. I’m grinning like […]
Sorry to link to my Anastacia post again, but further to its attack on the current oppressive fashion of using limiters and compressors to increase the loudness of pop and rock recordings and my sideswipe here, Slashdot links to an(other) article about the “loudness war”. [If you are a newcomer to Slashdot you should take advantage […]
Last week I discovered JasonHare.com, a blog full of trivia about the sort of music that only kids in high street electrical shops will admit to liking. Hare is obsessed with 80s cheese and soft rock. There are eleven mulleted musos visible on the current front page alone. It’s brilliant.
For a long time now the Philippines have been net exporters of strangeness. If you can’t watch YouTube videos on your computer then you’ll just have to imagine 1 500 orange-jumpsuited prison inmates recreating Michael Jackson’s Thriller. [Thank you, Dee.]
A couple of weeks back I attended one of the two “reasonably smart” evening occasions that PooterGeekers kindly invited me to in response to my appeal so that I could test out some wacky lighting techniques. This was photographing various Latin American performers at a Cambridge college ball. I’m sure you’ll agree such a setting […]
The Israel Ministry of Tourism would have you believe that the tiny Mediterranean state is a hip young place full of sunkissed, lean ‘n’ lovely twenty- and thirtysomethings, alternately running high-tech start-ups and hanging out on the beach playing frisbee with their gay friends. But the country has a dark underbelly. If you want to see it in […]
Also at that party the other day, one of the Young People told me that Passenger, featuring Richard Brincklow on keyboards, are high up on BBC Radio 2’s playlist. The next day, one of my spies inside the Passenger camp also passed on to me a delicious factoid. Whenever Richard and I write or perform any music together […]
I listened to Gordon Brown’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as actual Prime Minister yesterday. If you put the substance of the “debate” aside (as the laws of contemporary British journalism require all commentators to do) then David Cameron made Gordon Brown sound a bit rickety. The good thing for our democracy is that, before most […]
Did anyone else hear that BBC news soundbite from a representative of the emergency services reviewing the effects of the sub-tropical storms that hit parts of the UK this week? Amongst other things, he described them as “very, very frightening”. If so, did you manage to resist singing, “Thunderbolt and lightning / Galileo! / Galileo!”? (And why […]
Last week, Steve Wright interviewed Paul McCartney on BBC Radio 2. At one point, Wright asked him about his latest single. The track is exactly what you would expect of Lord Macca of Loch Kodak: completely insubstantial and terminally catchy. It’s called Dance Tonight. It’s about how everybody is going to dance tonight—and have a good time, […]
Go here [requires Flash video]. Skip the intro by clicking on “SKIP” in the bottom right-hand corner. Then click on “Video” and choose the first example: “Don Lewis demonstrates…”
Thanks a commenter at Maximum Bob, I discovered that yesterday was Talk Like Bob Dylan Day and, thanks to a video on the Talk Like Bob Dylan Day site, I discovered that Bob Dylan wrote every single popular song of the last forty years.
Just to prove I didn’t make it up, here’s a screencap courtesy of a Newcastle Utd discussion board: [click to enlarge] And there’s softcore panda porn over on the BBC News Website: The look on Bai Yun’s face—“female panda in heat finally gets seen to by toy boy bear”—is hilarious.
Somewhere in a box I have a copy of Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold on cassette. I bought it when I was a kid and listened to it on the Sony boombox that I won when I was thirteen in a competition to come up with a new advertising slogan for Pot Noodle™. Dire Straits’ fourth, […]
Controversially challenging the wisdom of the BBC, Andrew Skudder claims that Chris Squire is a better bass player than Sheryl Crow.
This is the first time anything related to Pink Floyd has actually blown my mind: Cambridge-educated economist-turned-music-manager (Pink Floyd, The Clash, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Billy Bragg) Peter Jenner … [has] put a figure on how much each music fan who buys music would have to pay in order for access to every song ever […]
Jogging from the bank yesterday evening to catch Richard Brincklow’s in-store performance at Passenger’s launch of their new single [buy it now!*], I stopped to photograph this: Regulars will know that I am not an admirer of Banksy’s work, but circumstances and the shrewd planning of the staff at artrepublic temporarily turned the 2006 effort of […]
Over the past few years, both here and elsewhere, I have from time to time suggested that Robbie Williams is an individual of limited talent whose output has consisted mainly of hamfisted pastiche, northern English karaoke of the sort that belongs alongside the deliberately lighthearted performances of stand-up comedian Peter Kay rather than next to […]
Richard Brincklow leads a jazz trio called Sesame Forum. They have a Sunday afternoon residency at The Brunswick in Brighton. The weekend after next, The Brunswick is hosting a jazz festival, featuring people who you might have heard of, like Liane Carroll, who won Best Vocalist Award at the 2006 British Jazz Awards and is […]