A theremin is a musical instrument¹ that you play without touching. Two antennas pick up the movements of your hands, and translate them into pitch and volume. They rock. They’re also quite expensive. They’re on my Things To Own In An Ideal World list, sandwiched between an armonica and a trichobezoar. None of these are likely to happen any time soon.

Except, I might have a chance at a theremin, as someone has built one from a wiimote. I MUST DO THIS.

Gotta get a Wii first, mind.

1. ’musical instrument’ looks more stupid every time I read it [↩]

Here is a man making a clarinet from a carrot. I repeat: a clarinet, out of a carrot.

A clarinet.

From a carrot.

See also: playing the iPhone like a wind instrument, by pressing touchscreen valves while blowing into the microphone. The next version should use the camera/antenna like a theremin.

The ball was due to start at 20:00. I picked up the keys at 19:00, and I wasn’t anticipating any problems. We had plenty of time to set up the hall, which means plugging in the music system and laying out 8 tables/40 chairs, and I honestly thought we’d be sitting around for half an hour. Oh man, was this naive.

The first hitch came when a group of kids were hanging around outside the doors of the village hall. They weren’t at all threatening, but I had a car full of equipment parked around the corner, and I couldn’t get it all inside without leaving things unattended and out of sight, which made me nervous. Thankfully a very kind friend arrived early and at just the right moment, so we were able to transport it all without a problem. And at this point we entered some kind of time warp.

I initially thought we were doing fine, but things that took two minutes in my head actually took ten. I kept throwing disbelieving glances at the clock. We rushed to lay out the tables, then connected all the equipment. We switched it all on and…it didn’t work, causing utter panic calm analysis until I changed plug socket. Another friend arrived and we worked at full tilt laying out chairs and dressing the tables - candles take far longer than they should - until the first guests started arriving. And even then we weren’t ready for eight o’clock: the first song started at a quarter past.

My teachers do this on a monthly basis. I’m sure they’re into a routine by now, but I’d certainly never realised how much work it involves, in such a short time. There’s no way I’d have been able to do it without help, and I certainly got lucky there. Once everything was plugged in, arranged and working, we turned out the lights and started the music.

I took a bit of a risk with the music setup. My teacher’s setup uses a cd-player with two drives, and he switches CDs many times throughout the evening. But I decided, on Saturday morning, that I’d instead copy everything to a laptop and use an iTunes playlist to control the music. A playlist would be far less work, but also allow pleasing touches like cross-fading between tracks, and allow me to chop-and-change the running order without having to manage dozens of CDs. So, did this work better than the original system? Oh god yes.

It Just Worked. We went from manic work to sitting back and letting the laptop do its thing, occasionally bumping up the volume as more sound-wave-absorbing bodies entered the hall. Much more civilised than switching CDs, and far less stressful - I’d have been a nervous wreck by the end of the evening otherwise. The problems - and there were a few - only came when I took over from iTunes.

I had to take control about halfway through the evening, when we traditionally play a few sequence dances. These range from fun - the Sally-Ann cha-cha - to soporific - the Rumba One. Unfortunately, the cd collection from my teacher was inexplicably missing the sequence dances, so I hadn’t included any on the playlist. But somebody had the whole selection on an MP3 player, and asked if I could play from it. No problem, I said. Its audio connection was the same as the laptop’s, so I only needed to switch the cable.

So in future I’ll turn down the amplifier before ripping a 3.5mm cable out of its socket. Pretty inelegant. But the MP3 player worked fine, and once we were done with the sequence stuff I announced we’d switch back to regular dances, starting with two waltzes. I pressed play in iTunes, at which point my friend Nod noted that the cable was still in the MP3 player. Crap. Not thinking properly, I put the microphone down without turning it off, sending quite the jolt through the speakers, then (again) switched the 3.5mm cable without turning the amp down. This was later memorably described as the DONK URKK moment.

Then, later, I was asked for an argentine tango. As cool as that dance is, it’s generally a special request, and I didn’t have one on the laptop. So I pulled out an appropriate CD, announced the song, and hit play. Nothing happened, and I spotted an input toggle that needed to be switched. So I did. Here’s the thing: the volume of the laptop signal is very, very different from the CD player itself. The song had been playing for a few seconds before I hit the switch, so I’d missed the quiet start. I blasted the room with an extremely loud half-second of trumpets. Everyone jumped out of their skins, and I hit the volume and quickly apologised. As I said yesterday, I expect this is a rite of passage. Switching between the CD player and the laptop is something I would have practiced given a little more time, but I never quite got to it. Or, in hindsight, I could have just played the CD via the laptop (this has genuinely only just occurred to me). If there’s ever a next time, I’m doing that!

I didn’t have to play any more CDs, but I went back to the MP3 player later and managed to mute the cable-change noise. So at least there was a learning curve.

The microphone was difficult. I expect there are better ways to hold and speak into it, as I struggled to make myself understood. I announced a Rumba One sequence dance to little effect, so announced it again, but still had people shout questions about which dance it was. Having said that, nobody at my end of the room knew quite what to make of this, as they’d heard me perfectly clearly. So I’m not sure what was going on there.

The strangest moment of the evening came when six couples got up to dance the samba. Nobody dances the samba. Ok - people do, but it’s a difficult dance, and the only people willing to dance without hesitation are usually very good - and this puts off everybody else. As such I’d pulled one from the playlist earlier in the evening due to lack of interest; then, inexplicably, popularity! To make things even more surreal, later there were five couples Viennese Waltzing. That’s Just Weird. I put it down to awesome music

I was very nervous about some of my music choices. I wanted to modernise it a little, and I’d put in a few tracks I thought should work, but it’s hard to know for certain, without experience. Sure, I can pick up a three-beat waltz in Journey’s Open Arms, but I’ve been dancing for 3.5 years - how would a beginner cope? Actually, Open Arms was the probably the least successful track of the night. Many couples did ok, but a few were off the beat, and I felt bad. I pulled Faith Hill’s Cry and Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me as a result - no point pushing my luck.

But, cha-chas to The Corrs’ Breathless, Girls Aloud’s I Think We’re Alone Now and Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes all worked very well. And I obviously played the quickstep version of 9 to 5, which transcends awesome. But my favourite track was probably the samba to the Mamma Mia version of Dancing Queen. That’s just fun.

I really wanted to play the Roxanne tango from Moulin Rouge, but sadly it doesn’t work on its own: it has 90 seconds of the most dramatic (and therefore the best) tango I know, but then loses the tango beat, and 90 seconds just isn’t enough. I had the opposite problem with Cell Block Tango from Chicago, which is much too long, although I did play a mediocre three-minute cover.

A couple of songs had weird acoustics: the Sugababes’ Hole in the Head¹ seemed to bounce its bass notes off the far wall, which did very strange things to the beat. This didn’t seem to cause problems, happily.

At 23:00 I played the last waltzes and we packed up. The crowd were very helpful, and the tables and chairs were away in no time. Around 40 people arrived over the evening, which was actually a good number. It’s not the 60-80 that sometimes come, but I was happy with it: the hall had been full enough not to be sparse, without being too crowded. Most people vanished into the night, but everybody from my dancing group said they’d had a good time, which was reassuring. Hopefully everyone else had a reasonable time too - I guess I’ll see whether they say anything to my teacher come next month…

I’m rather relieved it’s all over, as it was a large mountain on my horizon. But I’d be perfectly happy to do it again, should the need arise. I also have much more respect for the amount of effort my teachers put in. But mainly I’m grateful to all the people who helped, when they had no reason to other than general decency. Without them it simply wouldn’t have worked.

—

PS. My clothes shopping trip with my sister worked out well. She didn’t take any of my usual nonsense, and found me some decent stuff to wear for last night. Form-fitting and smart is quite a different look for me - at least one person was quite taken aback. At least I now know what size I am at Next, too.

1. the specially downloaded radio edit, which inelegantly chops out the word ’shit’. I don’t know why this worried me, given that I later played Christina Aguilera’s Candyman uncensored. [↩]

My dance teachers run a monthly ball at the local village hall. But they’re away this month, so we’re running it ourselves. There are usually 60-80 people - it’s open to the general public - and I’m in charge of music. Terrified.

I collected the equipment and 175 cds on Thursday, and I’ve been playing working on it since. I was originally going to use the supplied 2-bay CD player to control the music, as it has some reasonable features. But I’d effectively be changing CDs 60 times, and there’s no way I wouldn’t mess that up at some point. So I’m using the laptop instead, and spent this afternoon importing all the relevant tracks. For all that iTunes annoys me sometimes, it did a stellar job in this regard. It’s very quick at grabbing cddb data, then I only needed to right-click ‘import’ on the appropriate song, and it copied/encoded it all in 10 seconds flat. I was worried this task would take forever, but it really wasn’t a problem.

I had a brief panic after I plugged the laptop into the speaker system and it buzzed like hell. Research indicated the laptop PSU was probably interfering - a common problem with laptops. I was all ready to go out and buy a USB sound card (if I could find one), but plugging the laptop into a separate socket from the amp/cd-player solved it. Phew.

I’ve been trying to put together a decent playlist. My teacher is occasionally accused of being a little old-fashioned in his music choices, but, having listened to many of the cds, I can see he’s filtering out a lot of awful pieces. Once you remove the pleasure-beach organ stuff (urgh) there’s only so much left (of the ballroom, anyway). There wasn’t really time to make informed choices, so I essentially grabbed random CDs and chose the tracks that appealed. 

I’m trying to update it a little. I don’t want to alienate the regulars, so there are plenty of classic tunes in there, but I’ve interspersed some new stuff too. Most of the cha-cha songs are regular pop music, for example (Girls Aloud ftw). Hopefully this will go down ok. There’s also a waltz by Journey. Everyone likes Journey, right? Yeah.

Getting increasingly nervous. In an ideal world I’d hit Play, iTunes would run down its 3hr playlist, pleasingly crossfading all tracks, and everyone would be happy. Hmmmm. We’ll see

I don’t know much about music, and I like listening to those who do. As such, Mark Radcliffe & Stuart Maconie’s Radio 2 evening show is endlessly fascinating to me. They both have a remarkable ability to take a completely innocuous track - Wichita Lineman, say - and spend ten minutes pointing out lyrical touches that would never have occurred to me, telling behind-the-scenes stories (they both have endless brainspace devoted to trivia, it seems) and generating thought-spirals that continue every time I hear the song. Now you come to mention it, that lineman is obviously terribly lonely, but he keeps working anyway. Are the lyrics his thoughts, as he’s driving? Huh - it’s actually surprisingly poignant. And all in, what, 15 lines?

They do this every time I listen. They also play - to my ears - a wide variety of newer bands, and a few weeks ago introduced me to Glasvegas. I’ve been picking up their singles on iTunes since. I adore the lead singer’s voice and accent, as well as the general atmosphere¹ of the tracks. Here’s their latest, ‘Daddy’s Gone’:

Geraldine is also worth a listen, imho.

(incidentally, I’m happily feeling a bit calmer today, having left the house, delivered the RAID computer, comforted a baby and walked a dog.)

1. can’t be any more specific - told you I don’t know much about music [↩]

I’ve liked Katie Melua for years. Something clicked the first time I heard ‘Closest Thing to Crazy’, and it’s never gone away. When my dear friends Lil and Tom invited me to see her at a picnic-style concert at a Devon castle, it was a no-brainer. What could be more pleasant?

The weather reports were iffy all the previous week, and even on Saturday it was 50/50 for rain. But Sunday proved to be glorious, leading into an almost cloudless evening as we arrived at a field near the castle with ~2000 other people. We had a blanket and finger food, but were a minority: most had deckchairs and elaborate picnic baskets of cutlery, cheese and wine. One group even had a stand to hold their wine glasses. Not that we cared - we were happy to indulge in pringles, salad, candy floss and pictures of beaver-sticks (don’t ask).

We were mid-way from the stage, but pretty much in line with the enormous speakers. I resisted the merchandise tent, except I didn’t. Three plectrums for £2 is ridiculous, but I couldn’t help myself. Anyhoo.

We relaxed into the evening as the shadows lengthened, and presently the support act made an understated appearance. He was, um, stoned. There’s no other word. Either that or he didn’t know how to pronounce his own surname. But good nonetheless, with some folksy ballads to start things off.

I don’t think of Ms. Melua as a powerful singer - her songs are delicately jazzy, for the most part - but she walked on stage, sat down at the piano, and blasted out Call Off the Search. She completely filled the speakers, and you couldn’t help but sit up and take notice. It took me by surprise, but made me happy (my average tastes in singers run to the more bombastic end of the spectrum). It also set a precedent for the evening’s songs: the older the track, the more they’d revamped it. Songs from last year’s Pictures were very much like the album versions, but My Aphrodisiac is You, from 2003, was very different. It wasn’t over the top, though - most became more swingy / jazzy than their album counterparts, but still kept the essence of the original song. That’s how my limited musical knowledge interpreted it, anyway.

It was nice to be at a concert with people around whom there’s no need to couch your enthusiasm. Lil & Tom like her as much as I do, so there was none of the silly aloofness that some musical situations engender. Indeed, the whole evening was very relaxed, with one-tier tickets, and Lil & Tom discovered you could easily wander up to the stage. Most groups stayed with their food and wine, so the stage-crowd was only five rows deep and you could get very close (this was quite different from the other concert of hers I went to, where the front row was still the other side of a lake). So we took turns at heading forwards.

I’ve never been that close to a live performance before. In the last couple of years I’ve picked up a lot about music (though I still have a long way to go) and I found it interesting to watch the dynamics of the band. A dude at the back alternated between bass guitars, mandolins and various other instruments I couldn’t identify. Katie mostly played rhythm guitar, with a lead guitarist handling all the tough stuff (and lots of it really is quite tricky - I’ve tried and failed at the regular riff in If You Were a Sailboat). He spent most of the act deep in concentration, but the rest of them interacted a lot. Katie herself rarely stopped smiling, which, as well as being undeniably pretty in itself, regularly infected the rest of the band.

Katie sang tracks from her three albums, leaving the headline hits for the last half hour. I’d have put money on Closest Thing to Crazy closing out the show, but it wasn’t even the final pre-encore track. I headed to the front with my camera for the final two. The first was the only new track of the night, although I honestly can’t remember it now. I suspect it was quite the emotional one, though:

Then the band left the stage, and she sang I Cried for You. I think it’s a particularly lovely song, and I am in awe of anybody who can sing like that while flawlessly playing an acoustic guitar:

I like ballads, and I like her, and I was standing in the Devon twilight on a warm summer evening with two good friends, and it was great.

Earlier this year I was introduced to Guitar Hero, which became the first game in years to get me excited¹. It’s a simple enough idea: you play a 5-button guitar-shaped thingy, pressing down its strum bar and appropriate-coloured button when a particular note hits a particular area of the screen. It’s vaguely like playing a real guitar, and ridiculous amounts of fun. The game is loaded with decent music, and the difficulty levels scale nicely. In April I clubbed together with some friends to buy a second guitar, so one person can play lead and one play bass. This is much better for parties as there’s less time sitting around waiting, but we knew there were better things ahead. Namely: Rock Band.

Rock Band is the same thing, but with 4 people: lead guitar, bass guitar, drums and microphone. It costs a fortune: the game’s £40 and the instrument kit - with just one guitar - another £100. The final guitar is ~£30, although the Guitar Hero varieties are compatible². That’s a serious amount to spend on one game, and we split it up. A friend had already bought the game for use with his GH guitar, and this weekend the rest of us chipped in for the instrument box. All on the promise that it’s great fun.

On Sunday morning we lugged in the enormous amount of kit, plugged everything in, and prepared for the inaugural concert of N00bs in Space. You have to say it like this: N0000000000bs iiiiiiiiinn Sssppppaaaaaaaaace³. Incidentally, it is good to be in control of the controller when choosing a band name, as some people - drummers, say - will opt for The Most Boring Name in the Universe if given half a chance. A veto system is preferable, although I still don’t know what was wrong with The Loquacious Fuckwits.

So is it fun? Oh god yes.

Lead Guitar. Come on. Chronic attention-seekers like, say, me, will naturally gravitate to this position. You play the melody and power chords. Most importantly, you also get the solos. At the higher difficulty settings these are do-or-die moments, and tremendous fun. The supplied guitar has five extra buttons at the opposite end of the neck that are only for soloing, and as such don’t need to be strummed. This results in a brief moment of feeling cool as your hand slides up the neck, followed by a fit of swearing as you fail to get into position quickly enough. It’s very obvious when lead guitarists make mistakes, but wonderful when you don’t.

Bass Guitar. Yeah, it’s ok. If you’re into that kind of thing. It’s the Jim Corr position.

Singing. Oh man, was I terrified of the singing. I don’t do singing. It’s not that I can’t hit the notes so much as I can’t tell even when I do - it’s probably diagnosable as Imperfect Pitch. I haven’t sung in front of anyone since the school play when I was 16⁴ and only now try when in splendid isolation on the M5. And here’s the thing: the game has pitch detection. An on-screen indicator shows whether you’re too high or low, along with the lyrics. You’re scored on both pitch and whether you hit the vocal on time. Oh, crap.

I had a go. It was horribly embarrassing and secretly thrilling. I had to be Thom Yorke (’Creep‘), Courtney Love (’Celebrity Skin‘) and…Jon Bon Jovi (’Wanted - Dead or Alive‘⁵ ). I sucked. It’s inevitable that your voice will waver as you try to hit the note, but mine just did anyway. It was shameful. But in the very back of my mind I was a little bit happy. 15 minutes of this and my voice died - on Easy, which is pretty forgiving - and I was croaky for another 24h.

Drums. Woohoo. This is the stand-out impressive bit of kit. Four drums and a pedal. Were it four drums, I’d have had a chance. But I struggled with the pedal. Even at Easy level, you have to hit the pedal at the same time as a particular drum, then it’ll switch to alternating, and…I sucked. Again. I’d never played a drum kit before, and I’d wondered whether I might discover a new ability. No. Not a picobit of natural talent. Lead guitar is where I live. The others were all much better than me, and I have new respect for drummers. In fact, they don’t have to sit with the bass guitarists any more.

Here’s a terribly facile observation: the secret is to make sure you’re finding it difficult. It’s still fun if you’re hitting most notes, but you need to be out of your comfort zone for the real adrenalin. When you hit the solo, or nail a particularly tricksy section, or just finish the song without failing, it’s really quite the feeling of success. It’s actually possible to do so badly you get kicked out of the song, but other players can save you if they’ve hit particular targets. But only up to three times. This is clever - each player can set their own difficulty level, so you can try something tricky and have it be dangerous but not so much that it’ll spoil everything. And it’s perfectly possible to substantially improve between the start and end of a song. Particularly one by Rush.

I had a great time. The songs are good and mostly original versions, and the Xbox 360 can download new tracks to keep it fresh. This costs more, but isn’t surprising - nothing about this game is cheap. They recently released a load of Oasis tracks, and we got through Don’t Look Back in Anger in expert guitar (those of us who are Oasis fans did, anyway), then realised Liam Gallagher can do that, so we probably shouldn’t be too proud.

There were a couple of problems. The game itself involves playing gigs, and gaining fans and cash to progress up to the harder songs. Some gigs have surprise setlists which select random songs, but fail to take into account those you’ve already completed. So you can end up playing the same routine three times in quick succession. But not often. Plus there are apparently concerns that the drum pedal quickly wears out. But these are, currently, pretty minor.

Rock Band is basically Guitar Hero with extra instruments, but has a few neat touches. The most impressive, I think, is the freak-out section at the end of the rockier numbers. After the main melody ends there’s sometimes a go-nuts-hit-as-many-notes-as-you-can section, which turns into utter white-noise crescendo as everyone tries to rack up as many points as possible. But at the end of this section come a few isolated chords / notes, and everybody has to hit them to get the points. This was designed in a moment of brilliance, and makes for some dramatic endings, followed by cheers or, usually, abuse toward the offending player.

My favourite moment was the final song of the night: The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again. Particularly the last two minutes: Wonderful pre-storm calm, followed by Very Important drum solo, then BLOOD-CURDLING SCREAM and power chords. It’s got everything. Well, apart from bass guitar. But who really cares.

1. not a comment about the state of modern games, more about me [↩]
2. this is not true in reverse [↩]
3. in my head this is a reference to a shortlived CBBC show that I can’t remember the name of, but I know it had General Dogsbody in it. It’s nothing to do with INXS [↩]
4. inexplicably as part of a 4-person gang in Bugsy Malone. That poor, poor audience. Bloody great play though. [↩]
5. I actually quite like the band, but the level to which I am not Jon Bon Jovi is ridiculous [↩]

Some days you can’t beat a bit of Elton + Bernie. This is Porch Swing in Tupelo, one of my favourites from his 2004 Peachtree Road album:

As ever, Bernie Taupin’s lyrics are worth reading over. I’m continually impressed by his ability to cram such atmosphere into so few words. He’s a proper songwriting poet.

A couple of weeks ago I pre-ordered Coldplay’s Viva La Vida on iTunes. I’d really liked the two singles, so used a birthday gift voucher to pick up the full DRM-free album. The pre-order promises a couple of exclusive acoustic tracks, but I did it mainly to use the voucher for something substantial. It turned out you don’t get charged until release date, but I left the pre-order in the system so I wouldn’t squander the gift on something pointless.

Viva La Vida came out today, and I can’t download it: I apparently need to wait for an email with a download link. I can understand them staggering it to help their servers cope with demand, but it’s now 24h later and the email hasn’t arrived yet. Which is annoying. The album is the same price as the pre-order, so I could just cancel it and go for the immediate download. But - and I admit this makes no sense - having waited 24h I am damn well going to get my free acoustic tracks that I wasn’t bothered about in the first place. Grumpy.

Update: email arrived at 0200. Have forgotten all about the grumpiness now.

When I’m working at home I usually have Radio 2 on in the background. I like the music - contrary to its old-fashioned image, they seem to play a good range of modern stuff, but without the genres that aren’t particularly to my taste - and the presenters. It’s certainly light years ahead of any local station. But I’m increasingly irritated by the public interaction, particularly in the mornings.

Terry Wogan’s show is heavily based on listener comments, but what’s meant to be pithy and/or insightful is increasingly just ignorant. I don’t know whether it’s always been like this, or if they’re filtering differently, but it seems far more cynical and authoritative than before, and certainly isn’t intended to be funny. Global warming features prominently, and is genuinely spoken about as just another lie; this is backed up by definitive statements based on the movements of birds in gardens, the everpresent fallacy that scientists are always changing their mind, or - my particular favourite - opinions apparently based entirely on the meaning of the words ‘global’ and ‘warming’. Health advice and the general awfulness of any public service / American take up the rest of the conversation. It’s no longer wry, it’s just a sad and unnecessary affirmation of the worst old-person stereotypes.

I get bored of the barstool cynicism, but a moment this morning particularly bothered me. The hourly news had relayed the awful story of Mark Speight, reporting how he’d been found dead at a London railway station. Having listened to this news of a guy whose life was so dreadful he felt the only way out was to kill himself, somebody wrote in to point out that Britain doesn’t have railway stations, it has train stations¹².

I guess that’s a way of avoiding dealing with the real world, and I’m not particularly surprised somebody felt strongly enough to write in with such a thing. But why read it out? What does that add to anything?

Still not defecting to Radio 4, though. I can at least feel happy singing along to the inter-snark songs on Radio 2 - I don’t think I could cope with the depression of Radio 4 at that time of the morning.

1. incidentally - WTF? I’ve never heard this before [↩]
2. edit: ok, so I realised what this was all about as I was falling asleep last night. Got sidetracked by the nationalistic bit, but I guess it’s pedantry over ‘train’ and ‘railway’. Still stupid [↩]

Sometimes the universe gives you no choice. A mild example occurred in February, when I heard of somebody claiming it was the Chinese Year of the Salmon, and I was compelled to remark that this must be due to the leap year. There was no option: these circumstances were never going to arise again, and it’s a moral duty to take advantage of such existential confluences, regardless of company or surroundings. Professional ballroom champion Darren Bennett, on the news that Strictly Come Dancing partner Emma Bunton had become pregnant a month into their training, said “I thought she was getting heavier.”. He knows what I’m talking about. This kind of thing can get you in big trouble. I call it the OTOCE - the one-time-only-comedic-event.

Apropos of nothing, I remember realising in my teens that the much advertised “Now” compilation CDs would one day reach number 69. And that would be a funny day. As a 24 year old I can look back on my teenage self and observe the unsophisticated nature of this humour. Adolescent and immature, the slightest hint of sexual innuendo seemed incredibly amusing. I’m now older, and wiser. Here’s the thing, though: the Now 69 adverts are on tv at the moment and they’re really funny.

I’m not proud of this. But what can do you. Here are the rumoured hidden tracks:

• Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Right Round
• Men At Work - Down Under
• The Hollies - The Air That I Breathe

Sorry.

I picked up The Feeling’s new album ‘Join with Us’ a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been looping pretty much ever since. I adored their first album¹, and its final track “Blue Piccadilly” is my 2nd all-time-most-played song, according to iTunes. I’m happy to say I like their second just as much - it’s happy, fun and eminently sing-along-able. iTunes says my most played track is “Don’t Make Me Sad“, although the endearingly bonkers “Turn It Up” is close behind. Highly recommended by me.

There’s one caveat: I have heard complaints over the compressed nature of the sound. I’m not particularly sensitive to that kind of thing, but can pick up on it at times. My computer and car speakers aren’t all that great to begin with, so it’s not too annoying, but it could be a problem on a better system - just thought I’d mention it.

1. currently £5.49 on iTunes [↩]

They: Who fancies a boogie after this?
Others: [murmur]
They: Andrew, do you boogie?
Me: Yes sir. Well, I can boogie, but I need a certain song.
They: Which one?

There is no dignified way out of this conversation.

A scandal is rocking the music industry:

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has admitted he was among the thousands of people who paid nothing to download the band’s latest album.

Despicable. Just because he wrote and recorded the thing doesn’t mean he shouldn’t pay for it like everyone else. Who does he think he is? I predict there’ll be a wave of revelations. I bet J.K. Rowling didn’t pay for her own copy of Harry Potter 7.

I’ve had a request - a request - to review the video for “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)” - the new Spice Girls single. I don’t know why either, but I’m always happy to oblige friends…I should mention that Anna Pickard has done a good job of this already.

I should also confess that I don’t mind the Spice Girls at all. They had some catchy songs: I still think ‘two become one’ is pretty good. Please don’t stop talking to me. I should probably move on. Here is why I think the Spice Girls video is like Hamlet.

Video begins with the Girls walking into Enormous Room of Abandoned Stuff. Dark, musty and littered with photogenic bric-a-brac, it’s a place that only exists in music videos. The entrance is, in my view, important. In Hamlet he gets banished for a) killing old men a) being a brat, but when he secretly returns to Denmark he has the advantage of surprise. He can spy on his enemies, track their movements, plan his revenge. And then he blows it by throwing a hissy fit and jumping into a grave in front of everyone. It is the very definition of anti-climactic¹. ‘Headlines’ is the same.

So the Girls enter Ikea Batman’s warehouse. In slow-motion, natch. They’re in beautiful dresses. They look elegant, mature. They used to be a massive pop force, and are now together again. Ok so the song isn’t all that hot, but the video can redeem it. Some class is needed. What’s the story?

This is the entire story of the video: the Girls stand in a room; some of them undress.

Well, Ginger does. Takes her about fifteen seconds. There she is looking good in sparkly red dress, and moments later she’s in a bra and up against a wall.

Lesser bloggers would need to take a moment out after that sentence. I shall push on.

They soon split off into little areas. Ginger has clearly been banished to a corner, so is all look: I has breasts and occasionally look: I has thighs. Posh stands around looking sultry for a while, then, suddenly, we cut to mid-lap-dance: she’s on a chair in her underwear, feeling herself up while gazing sidelong into the camera. Scary appears to have been replaced with Animatronic Girl devoid of personality. Sporty and Baby are clearly embarrassed by all this so wander off and, by virtue of actually being able to sing, retain their dignity.

And that’s it, really. Well-lit attractive women hovering about chez-lounges. Measuring it on the Take That Scale of Comebacks, it gets a Winehouse with Merit, slightly below an All Saints First Single. I hope they get their act together - I still think they’ve a certain kitsch charm.

1. people have tried to tell me it’s very clever and moving. Having none of it. I like the play, but this bit is Just Rubbish [↩]