Anything But Silence

Welcome to my journal, 'Anything But Silence.'

Most of the entries here are my musings on music and the music industry, though some posts are less formal/more personal.  The latter, I tend to leave in the public domain for a few days and then move to "Friends Only."  So, to read the complete journal, you have to befriend me here on Live Journal.  Yes, what a bore. 

Caption Competition : What's Bowie forgotten he wants to tell Garfunkel?

I have to get this off my chest and this is as good a place as anywhere.

As I've mentioned before in this blog, Darren Hayman, above, (probably most "famous" for being the chief singer/songwriter of mostly 90's "indie band," Hefner) was attacked and badly beaten up after playing a concert (as Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern) at Nottingham's The Bodega club on Friday 13th November.
Darren and sometime-drummer, David Sheppard, were driving along Curzon Street in the notoriously violent St Anns suburb of Nottingham when Darren, regrettably, decided he needed to pee. As he returned to the car, he was set upon by a number of youths who proceeded to punch and kick him unconscious. They also violently attacked David as he attempted to stop them from stealing the car.
Darren was admitted to hospital with a fractured skull. David suffered severe bruising and deafness in one ear as a result of a blow to the head.

I'm happy to report that, over a week after the event, Darren is back at home and in a remarkably buoyant, philosophical mood. He remembers almost nothing of the attack and puts it down to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In some ways, David has had it worse. He remembers the attack in detail and though his hearing is starting to show some signs of recovery, he is plagued by violent nightmares and is understandably reluctant to leave the sanctuary of his familiar surroundings. (I hope he doesn't mind me saying this).

This attack has taken a rather personal toll on me. I count David as one of my best friends and both he and Darren have contributed to recordings by my group, Piano Magic. Darren, to our single 'There's No Need To Be Alone' and obscure recording, 'The 17th Time' and David, to our cover of Disco Inferno's 'Waking Up.' David has also made invaluable contributions to my own solo album, 'Details Not Recorded' and my girlfriend's solo album under the name, Klima.
What makes this attack all the more mindless is that Darren and David are two of the nicest people you would ever meet. Neither of them would hurt a fly. Neither of them have a violent bone in their body. If their attackers had simply asked for their money, this incident might've passed without injury. But no....

Darren fatefully premonisced the attack on the day via a message on his Twitter account :

"I'm in Nottingham. Most violent city in UK im told. Come see me play!"

In this context, it sounds almost funny. But Nottingham and particularly St Anns, has a long history of mindless violence. I should know : I was born there. Though my family moved us away to a nearby village when I was three, I found myself gravitating back there in my late teens and spent the next 7 years walking a wide circle around the armies of pissed up "lads," student-mugging yobs and tooled-up drug gangs that have become synonymous with the city.
It's not an awful place. On any afternoon, you'll find the centre awash with happy shoppers and lost tourists. But like anywhere, there are some dark corners you should be wary of - St Anns being the worse. It was, as Darren says, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Still, it makes me wonder what kind of person feels the desire to kick someone unconscious just so they can extract money from their wallet. Do these people just enjoy violence? Or are they simply pre-empting possible resistance? Darren had the night's takings in his pocket but what if he'd had just a pound? Do you kick a man to death for a pound?

What kind of society are we living in?

What kind of monsters are we breeding?

Are we any worse than we ever were?

This incident will be insignificant to anyone outside of those who know Darren and David. I doubt the police will do very little in the way of investigation. The chances of finding these callous, mindless COWARDS are slim. I'm sure even Darren and David know this.
No - time will deal with this, ever so slowly. Darren will be playing concerts again and writing songs about this before you know it. David's hearing will come back, his new subscription glasses (broken by a punch) will arrive and he, too, will nipping down the pub with me again before long (tonight in fact).
But England, Nottingham, be ashamed of your violent sons. Be ashamed of what absolute evil lurks in your backstreets. Don't just let it pass by. Do something about it. Before this mob rule takes over like a virus.

Arguably, it already has.


Please enjoy Darren and David's music. It will help them get better.

Darren on Myspace : http://www.myspace.com/darrenhayman
David on Myspace : http://www.myspace.com/phelansheppard

...I wanted to make music like this....







I failed.

Now Michael Jackson's dead, it's time for Bowie to step back up to the "weirdest fucker on the planet" mantle. Or maybe he's done his bit?

Last night, my band played a record store and then we DJed across the street at a cafe. We all took turns to spin but this is what I played (not in this order though) :

ARTIST - TRACK

We Fell To Earth - The Double
Silver Apples - Oscillations
LCD Soundsystem - North American Scum
Gary Numan - Cars
Studio - Self Service
PIL - Public Image
Suicide - Ghost Rider
Sharades - Dumbhead
Deux - Game & Performance
TV On The Radio - Golden Age
The XX - Islands
The Ravonettes - Aly, Walk With Me
Chromatics - I Want Your Love
The Human League - Rock N Roll/Nightclubbing
ARE Weapons - Fuck U, Pay Me


It worked out pretty well.

Some of it :

Do your worst.

There's been some amazing music this year.

The young guys next door use their outdoors voice indoors. So you can hear them outdoors. They obviously get this from their grandmother who sees no reason to speak when you can shout at the top of your voice.

I wonder how people end up like this? Are they told to shut up throughout their childhoods and thus, in later life, "release themselves?" Or are they simply starved for attention? Is it a cry for help? "Listen to me!!!! Help me!!!!"

My mother never stops talking. My father hardly says anything. I only raise my voice when I am especially frustrated. Otherwise, pretty calm, I'd say. But the older I get, the more frustrated I get....with people who shout, mainly.

On a similar note, a nice interview with Douglas Coupland in The Guardian today. He can't stand noise either :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/07/decca-aitkenhead-douglas-coupland

A bit obsessed with this at the minute :

Yeah, yeah, I know. This is the band that everyone's talkin' about over here right now. I got the album last week and it's pretty good. Very minimal, no fat, introspective, lush. I love the fact that they don't move onstage - ironically, I hated that about the shoegazers but there's not moving and doing something good and not moving and doing something bad.

The vocals are very, very sexy.

For bands with a non-existent budget, the internet is God. Within 20 minutes, via Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, etc, you've told the whole world that you have a new record coming out, are playing the Dog & Duck on Friday or simply that you exist. Before the social network revolution, the only way you could blow your trumpet loud enough for the masses to hear was to take out expensive ads with national media and/or employ wallet-sucking press officers, radio pluggers and marketing flatulists.
But it has its downsides too. Now *every* backroom/bedroom Casio Dylan is plugging their latest tune. Myspace is full of "New tune on my site! Check it out!" It's like a virus. It *is* a virus. Like a Marrakesh market, you can't move for people thrusting their wares in your face and giving you the hard sell.
But it has to be done. Without visibility, you disappear without trace.

Today, I rushed around the big sites, flogging our impending new album; hammering in the signposts to its release date. I feel a little filthy, it has to be said. I'm surely no better than the opportunists who flood my Myspace comments box with their garish self-publicity? But I've dedicated at least 6 months of my life to this record. It's the least I can do to give it a chance in the big, bad world. I can't just slip it out and hope for the best.
No, the flags are posted all over the Net. I just have to wait for the flies - the consumers. "This way to the mail order store!!!" I'm a spider setting traps.

Quite simply, the best album I've heard in a long time. Can't stop playing it. Play loud.





http://www.myspace.com/wefelltoearth

This house owns one Michael Jackson album - a collection of his greatest hits, bought from a French superstore on holiday around 2004. We needed something to play in the car and my girlfriend, a mere 8 years old when 'Bad' came out is (to put it mildly), partial to 'Beat It.'
Jackson's always been somewhere at the back in my life. I remember watching the Jackson 5 cartoon when I was a kid (though much favoured The 'Tomfoolery Show' in which a fish walked around on stilts with goldfish bowls at the bottom).
The Jacksons didn't so much soundtrack my youth as happen to be on the radio every now and then, particularly when stuck in long traffic jams to the seaside. But I *did* stay up to watch the tv premiere of 'Thriller' (didn't everyone?) and pretended it was "over-rated" the next day at school (didn't everyone?).

Though I can generally recognise Jackson's music (and that of the 5) within a bar or two, I'm particularly enamored by much of his album production throughout the 80's and early 90's. There's an almost Kraftwerkian approach by Quincey Jones to the rhythms on so many MJ tracks; the marriage of the sequencer and drum-machine, consciously or not, owes much to the likes of 'Man Machine' and 'Computer World.' 'Bad' is essentially funk-injected technopop, which was pre-empted, though obviously commercially much less successfully, by Kraftwerk's 'Electric Cafe' a year earlier.
Undoubtedly, MIDI technology was au rigeur in the 80's, as were the plastic, robotic beats of the Linn Drum so some common ground was inevitable but I'd like to think that Jackson (or Jones), on occasion, would sit at home taking notes from 'Pocket Calculator.'

From the hour or so tv coverage I saw last night, Blur's Glastonbury headline performance left little room for any doubt : they are/were one of Britain's best contemporary bands. The setlist was a conveyor belt of hits - most of which (with perhaps the exception of 'There's No Other Way' and 'Country House') have stood the test of time plainly because they're just very good songs.
There's no questioning Damon Albarn's songwriting ability or his boundless enthusiasm. Arguably, he, less than the others, needed a Blur reunion. He's made a fortune and cemented his reputation as one of our best songwriters with the likes of Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad & The Queen, not to mention the odd Chinese opera. But at Glastonbury, along with the rest of the band, he gave his all, regardless. The contestable "mockney" accent has long since vanished, though given the size of the auditorium and the often breakneck speed of much of their set, Albarn spent a large proportion of Blur's set shouting.
It won't go unnoticed either that Graham Coxon is one of the finest guitarists of our time. His playing throughout was sublime, tirelessly joining the dots between punk and Pavement.
My only gripe for the whole performance is a trivial one : the whole band appears not to have bought any new clothes since 1994.

The first time I saw Blur, sometime around their patchy first album, 'Leisure,' with Happy Mondays in support, I hated them. They smacked not only of "student favourite" but bandwagon jumpers. Their sound aspired little more than to the "baggy" indie-psychedelia of The Stone Roses but it lacked the swagger. By their second album, 'Modern Life Is Rubbish,' they'd found not only their own sound but their own image - I rather liked both.
But I became a "proper" Blur fan when they started their 'Parklife' tour at Nottingham Rock City in 1994. Rock City was my local haunt. I'd dance there every Saturday night. Though it had a rough reputation, it was the essential place to start your tour. The crowds were rowdy and a good review from there bode well for the rest of your tour. Blur, almost literally, brought the house down.
The following day, in my guise as a fanzine writer, I followed them up to Manchester but Nottingham had evidently tired them out. It was a sharp contrast - a lumpy, sludgy show. But I was still on board. In fact, I stayed on board until the more experimental '13' album in 1999 - the record which, for me, should've been their swansong.

A new Blur album sits uncomfortably with me. Given their hit rate at Glastonbury yesterday, they really don't need to even attempt to add to it. Is there unfinished business? I don't know. If it absolutely has to be done, personally I'd go the Radiohead route and draft in Nigel Godrich as producer. Coxon's ever ingenious guitar experimentation would find a natural bedfellow in Godrich's restless sonic innovation. Old Blur is all well and good but if they want to compete in 2009, they need a wider palette.

Re-reading his biopic of life on the road with his old band, Black Flag, has gotten me into digging deeper about Henry Rollins these past couple of days. Hands up, I've never been much of a fan of his music. Black Flag's sludge of punk and meat'n'potatoes metal was never going to hit the right note with me. The Rollins Band, equally, are far too lumpen; a bad, tired 90's Iggy Pop.

But 'Get In The Van,' Rollins' frankly unputdownable account of life on tour with Black Flag in the early 80's, is essential reading for anyone in a touring band. It just doesn't get any worse than what these guys had to put up with. Going without food just so they could fill the petrol tank to get to the next show, sleeping (and fucking) in the back of the windowless truck surrounded by the tools of their trade, promoters who don't pay, audiences who throw bottles and punches at them, in-band fighting, crashes, police harassment, maudlin backstages, broken limbs, black eyes, all night drives, skanky groupies, blood, sweat and tears.

In recent times, Rollins has mellowed considerably and aged gracefully. He's an amiable, if not side-splitting, stand-up raconteur who commands decent audiences all over the English-speaking world. He's a tv-friendly presenter for any US "youth" show that wants a bit of danger/edge and Rollins cleverly plays up to this caricature. He's also something of a bit actor (see the straight-to-video Keanu Reeves-fronted 'Johnny Mnemonic').



He's plainly not a stupid man, though anyone on the street would most likely give him a wide berth. He cuts a larger-than-life shadow; handsome, thick neck, GI haircut, punk tattoos, huge chest, biceps. You wouldn't want to fuck with him. But whilst, by his own admission, he gets angry with the "wrongs" of the world, he's well aware that violence solves nothing - though he's used it as a release many times in the past (see below).
I'm most fascinated by these Black Flag years when he's essentially a pot always on the brink of boiling over. How he didn't end up dead or in prison is something of a miracle. He always managed to keep the lid on somehow. Even when, in 1991, his best friend, Joe Cole, was shot dead in front of him.