Product and Plan B

Update: Is This Music? is out now, with a couple of reviews by moi.

ALt. country a-go-go! You can read my review of an alt.country compilation for Plan right here.
Should be another one up soon - I'll keep you posted.

The new issue of Product, a Scottish arts magazine, is finally out. It's been produced (groan) in collaboration with C4 Ideas Factory and I have a couple of short pieces in the Product Placement section.

It's been a while, huh? Well, I've been running back and forth to gigs the past week or so. Last week saw the inaugural Stirling:Live festival, which I attended in my capacity as Stirling News arts maestro. Had to be nice to all the local bands - it's only fair - but the main acts were quite good. Wreckless Eric was very funny, Martin Stephenson was warm and fuzzy, while Thea Gilmore, a bit earnest on record, was actually quite good live. I interviewed her, which went okay, although I'm hardly Lyn Barber yet. She's a Replacements fan, so plus points.
Also been to see - as a paying customer - Calexico and Blance (molto bene), and the Shins (nice, but shit QMU sound). I'll bash together some reviews for Beard #2, which is starting to come together. We've got some nice illustrations of Kinky Friedman to go with Neil's fantastic interview. Once they're scanned a double page spread can be laid out. That's another two down.
My mission to namecheck as many obscure bands as possible in the Stirling News continues apace. So far I've got in Fugazi, At the Drive In, Sufjan Stevens, Alisdair Roberts - I forget the rest. My favourite preview has been for some shitty Queen tribute act: "With the Darkness straddling the pop world like some hideous four headed gargoyle, you'd think the last thing anyone would want is another Queen tribute band. Think again, because Mercury are here to rock you!" A cheap shot I know, but it brightens up the day.
An exhibition of Alisdair Gray's artwork (bear with me and I'll link this later) is on display at the Smith in Stirling, which meant I could go to town and show off my knowledge of his ouvre. So I've put references to Hobbes' Leviathan and William Blake into a news story in a free paper. And why not?
My Dad, self-styled Zelig figure of the literati, says Alisdair Gray owes him a pair of car keys. He was driving the great man home from a talk my Dad had organised in Irvine. Mr Gray was somewhat worse for wear and threw my Dad's car keys into Irvine harbour. Despite my Dad's best efforts with a fishing rod and magnet the keys were never recovered. Alisdair Gray was forced to stay in Irvine as punishment. (I jest, it's a perfectly decent place)
Alisdair Gray's finest moment is complaining to the staff of a Glasgow chippie about their use of the Daily Telegraph to wrap fish suppers. Were they trying to brainwash the proletariat with right wing propaganda?

Real Shocks

My Real Shocks interview for Ideas Factory. I'm pleased with this one, although the band helped cos they can talk the talk. A shorter, pithier version will appear in the forthcoming issue of Product. They're pretty good actually. And they love Sparks, which can never be a bad thing.

My day off

Being off work on weekday is bliss. I've got a cold, so it justifies my sitting around watching Spaced DVDs and surfing the net. It's not all good, though - I felt too weak last night to go see Jonathan Richman in Glasgow. Boo. Still, he seems to play at least once a year.
Back to my daytime viewing. I hate T4 - it's reduced yoof programming to endless repeats of Friends, sycophantic interviews (June Sarpong and Vernon Kaye in a competition to see who can crawl the furthest up Robbie Williams' fundament) - and the fucking Salon, but the Simple Life is strangely fascinating. It's an MTV "reality" show which places workshy socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on a Midwestern cattle farm. Witnessing two people who are so utterly dim and removed from reality is oddly compelling. You have to feel sorry for the people trailing in the wake of their idiocy. What did decent, hard-working people do to deserve these two fuckwits?

The Beasties are finally releasing new album. Hello Nasty came out the summer between school and uni, which makes me feel real old. While the Beasties have never been the greatest lyricists, they do have moments of genius, such as Ad-Rock's adaptation of Run DMC's King of Rock to "I'm the king of Boggle, there is none higher, score eleven points from the word 'quagmire'". So it was with a heavy heart last year that I downloaded their anti-war song. "Say ooh-ah, what's the White House doing?" was one of the better lines. I've managed to purge my memory of the rest. It was painful. Unfortunately, their new album apparently continues the political theme. Public Enemy it ain't.
Here are some of the rhymes, according to Pitchfork:

"Since 911 we're still livin'/ And lovin' life we've been given/ Ain't nothing gonna take that away from us/ We're lookin' pretty and gritty 'cause in the city we trust." ["Sonic Reducer"]

"We've got a president we didn't elect/ The Kyoto treaty he decided to neglect/ And still the U.S. just wants to flex." ["Time to Build"]

Eeee.

Good news! I'm getting tried out for some reviews in Plan B, the sequel to Careless Talk Costs Lives, and I've been given a place on a reviewing masterclass, which should hopefully lead to reviewing comedy, theatre and music at the Edinburgh Fringe for Fest mag. Yay! And Beard #2 is gradually taking shape. Very gradually.

David Stubbs [Mr Agreeable]

Ah ha! David Stubbs [Mr Agreeable] has a website. Great blog entry on getting into Private Eye's pseud's corner for his florid descriptions of Hendrix.

It's also well worth checking the Sacred Cow columns he wrote as "The Reaper". These were a breath of fresh air in a dad rock mag like Uncut. It's the antithesis of their 20 page features on the time Eric Clapton and Duane Allman changed the gauge of their guitar strings from a 10 to 9-44 hybrid. I pastiche, but you get the point.

Good reading...

Cajun music

Sufjan Stevens

Christiania, as featured in Beard #1.Seems like the Man is trying to shut Denmark's commune down.

Another Ideas Factory feature added to Stuff Wot I Wrote. This one is about jazz singer and entrepreneur Alison Burns.

Plagiarising bastards pt.2

What's this? Top football beards in the Daily Record? Sounds familiar...didn't Beard #1 have the top ten literary beards, with such masterpieces such as Hemingway's nautical number and Allen Ginsberg's bristling, priapic and bracingly counter-cultural facial fuzz? (Yes it did, it's a rhetorical question)
But if we have "inspired" the Record I'm more flattered than offended. The writer Andrew McInnes has truly entered into the spirit of beard admiration with his humorous asides. Respect to you, sir.

a c u n t c o m p e n d i u m

Wonderful stuff. The adventures of TV Go Home's London meeja wankstain Nathan Barley brought together as a c u n t c o m p e n d i u m

Plagiarising bastards

It's been a few days. I've been churning out articles for Ideas Factory and the next issue of Product magazine (yay!) and being lifted and renewed by Brian Wilson's gorgeous Smile gig in Glasgow last week.
Got my first front page on the Alloa Advertiser - not bad going for 9 weeks in the job - and it's been picked up by a few nationals. Yes, I'm talking about a Clackmannanshire councillors's invitation to Elton John to marry his partner David Furnish right here. The P & J picked it up alright. They barely even bothered to change my copy. They even nicked a collaborative joke piece about possible venues that took the piss out of celebs. Now that's dirty. The P & J are notorious for this sort of thing. Bastards. The Herald actually bothered to get their reporter to do his own version from scratch. Don't mind that, but to lift the lot and not credit it - that's just rude. Suppose I should get used to it. Oy vey.

The Observer go wild forThe Fiery Furnaces. And why not?

Splendid stuff from The Onion this week:
If Al-Qaeda Had A Hockey Team, We'd Kick Its Ass!

And everyone's favourite stoner, Jim Anchower aka The Cruise, is back...fuckin' a.

holy fucking shit!

Bloody hell, rockcritics daily have picked up on my rockism post. We're famous! Shame some of my other posts are a bit iffy (my Parisian ramble springs to mind). That said, if there are any influential people reading, don't hesitate to check out "stuff wot I wrote". Have I no shame?

email us: beardmag@yahoo.co.uk

Getting more and more excited about Brian Wilson's Smile

Interesting to note that the "Beach Boys" are touring later in the year, visiting many of the same venues as Brian Wilson. As Mike "Fucking asshole" Love bought the band name a few years back he can bill his tribute act as the real thing, when it's simply him, Bruce Johnson (I've no beef with him: he wrote Disney Girls and has provided many hours of amusement thanks to his uncanny resemblence to Melvynn Bragg) and some hired hands. But it's kinda like Ringo going on tour with his mates and calling it the Beatles. And at least Ringo is a nice guy and a talented musician...

Fiery Furnaces were terrific at King Tut's on Saturday. Eleanor Friedberger is a real cool frontwoman - poised and charismatic without having to resort to rock chick cliche (hello Brody!). She spins out surreal yarns about the King of Spain and the Millenium Dome while brother Matt grooves behind his organ or fires off hot scrappy guitar licks. Plenty of Moog too. There was a glut of strong new material, while the songs we know and love were given a new vitality.
On Sunday I attended Brian Irvine's Filmworks at the Tolbooth in Stirling where the fruits of a week long project where six budding composers worked with the big man to produce soundtracks for short films were unveiled. Impressive results - review for the day job and Brian Irvine feature for IFS coming up...

And another thing...Just over a week until Brian Wilson performs Smile in Glasgow. I'll be there, can't wait. Won-won-wonderful news: the completed Smile album is now slated for an autumn release.
Do you like worms?

It's the biggest thing in music blog land. So big the word has been registered on Google. Yes, yes y'all, we're talking about ROCKISM Thanks to the efforts of rockcriticsdaily.com, a whole bunch of articles with references to rockism can be read here.
This whole rockism thing is more than an internet in-joke. In fact, it's sparking off a classic and much needed debate on the nature of popular music criticism. The ever-astute Simon Reynolds makes some particularly good points on his superb blissblog. He discusses how popists such as Paul Morley use a great, colourful and sexy pop moment such as Kylie's Can't get you out of my head as a club to bash dour rockists. All good fun, but do we really need to take sides, Reynolds asks. Damn straight.
Rock crit daily also lists an article on how Common and the Roots are not at all innovative, but rockist. I.E. they compromise hip-hop by approaching it like 70s rockers did, making "serious", conceptual albums. Humourless and preachy, lacking fire and funk. I got over the indie backbacker thing when I realised how dull most of it is - the same old jazz breaks, the same old rhetoric about the "elements" and respecting hip-hop tradition. But as with any musical genre, trying to preserve styles in aspic only stifles creativity. There was a split in backpacker circles when El-P et al arrived. Those offended by Company Flow's still startling 'End to End Burners' (undoubtedly one of the greatest hip-hop 12"s ever - the relentless abstract churn of that distorted sample, the disturbing lyrics and vicious scratching...oh man!) were like the hip-hop equivalent of old hippies dismayed at punk, or to be more apt, rockist Pistols fans gaping in horror at the dubbed out grooves and angularity of PIL.
And when the mainstream can produce greatness in the form of Outkast and Timbaland et al, the validity of the whole indie rap purism thang crumbled for me. All these stoned guys nodding along to the latest DJ Premier (although, to be fair, on form Premier is great cf. Nas's Illmatic) seemed to forget how funky and colourful all the old-skool guys they claimed to be keeping the flame for were.
Anyway, I'm going on a bit, and I've got articles which I'll actually get paid for to write. Oh, and I have used the word "rockist" in a review before, long before it became a blog buzzword. Attempting to reappraise Neil Young's electro-folly Trans, I queried whether its infamy was simply a knee-jerk reaction by Ol' Shakey's more rockist fans. I wrote this for the first Beard but held it back. A revised version shall appear in issue two, however. Whenever that comes out...

Got to get it in your bowl...

I was listening to Mingus's Ah-Um yesterday. Absolutely incredible. Here are the great man's tips on how to toilet train your cat. This is for real, I shit you not.

Is This Music? #9

...is out now. There are some reviews by my bad self, but don't let that put you off, cos there are features on Franz Ferdinand, the Magnificents and Future Pilot AKA. Excellent free CD too. Click the ITM? link to the left to find out more.

Shitty ol' Brits

I suppose I shouldn't have expected much, but this year's Brits were dull as Milton Keynes ditchwater.
The overall tone of blandness was established from the start, with Cat Deeley trying to be all Kylie-sexy stradling a giant champagne bottle, but coming across like a holiday rep with highly paid stylists. "The booze is back!" she grinned, but the following two hours remained more subdued than a Christian Union disco. What's happened to Cat Deeley? Has she had a lobotomy? Back in the days of Chums and SMTV she was a sweet and funny foil to idiot man-boys Ant and Dec. Hardly Lucille Ball, but more likeable than her dead-eyed, cooing self.
Andre 3000 stole the show effortlessly, jigging about in his skeleton costume to Hey Ya. Shame it was curtailed for a perfunctory Beyonce performance featuring an entirely lame attempt at cheeky Benny Hill goes to Brixton humour, whereby a buff young man in a dirty mac flashes Beyonce to reveal Union Jack boxers. As he shook his thang, his manhood quite clearly rose and fell beneath the cloth. Beyonce actually looked a little shocked. Fair enough. It was awfully badly judged - a blatantly staged attempt to raise a Janet nipplegate style brouhaha in the tabloids.
Alleged "jazz" musicians Jamie Cullum and Katie Melua teamed up for a duet. As is wont to happen in these awards show pairings, the individual artists fight for attention, rather than do a real duet. The utter lack of chemistry wasn't helped by the fact they could barely see each other - JC was at his piano and KM right up front. Her weedy voice was no match for Cullum's graceless mugging or the parping horn section. This had more in common with weak tea than jazz.
Talking of weak tea...Dido! Need I say more?
Wack version of Kiss, with none of the sass and slinkiness of Prince's original, starring Alicia Keys, Gwen Stefani and Missy. Much as I love Missy, I can't pretend she was any good. Fluffing inane lyrics, making yet another tiresome reference to her buddy Michael Jackson...c'mon girl, work it.
As for Duran cunting Duran...I can't believe some people are trying to pretend their ridiculous, preening, coke sprinkled ouvre represents great British pop music. It's clear the Brits are running out of potential lifetime achievement candidates. It's almost got to the stage where - heaven forbid - they might give it to someone on merit rather than record sales. Someone like John Cale, Robert Wyatt, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush...
What the fuck???!!! moment of the night was Lemar winning best UK urban. What, over Dizee Rascall or even Amy Winehouse? You could see the daggers launching from Ms Winehouse's eyes when the camera briefly cut to her. And who could blame her? I'm not a great fan, but at least she seems to have a personality. As Lemar made the most dull of the evenings many dull thankyou-to-my-manager-producer-mum-god-biggie-Jordan speeches, presenters N.E.R.D, particularly a toothpick-chewing Chad Hugo, looked bored to tears and not a little peeved. They know Dizzee is the boy. I mean, he's old school like Happy Shopper.
Another year, another boring Brits. Oy vey.

Chicken, chicken, marry my mouth

Excellent weekend in Aberdeen where I caught up with Uni pals and was persuaded to spend cash money on records by the staff of the Cavern, Belmont Street's superb vinyl basement. Damned good records, though - Townes Van Zandt's first, which includes the absolutely stunning For the Sake of the Song and Waitin' Around to Die, not to mention Be There To love me, as covered by Norah Jones, who surely couldn't do it justice. Also got Gene Clark's Roadmaster. Lovely stuff.
Also saw Explosions in the Sky hanging around the morning after their gig, which, unfortunately, I only realised was on too late (Instead I went to horrible rock club Moshula and got royally drunk with my good friend Hugh before eating foul curry and chips and waking up with my mouth stained yellow - a good night then).
But highlight of the trip was catching the Granite City's finest garage-punkers, King Liar & the Brutes at the Lemon Tree. Headlining over much fancied, but quite painful classically influenced indie bods Cayto (or is that [cayto] or [wank]?), King Liar were highly entertaining. With his gold cape, massive crucifix and gravity defying quiff, Project S.A.M. is a great showman, who rides on the neanderthal power of his band. Ferocious guitars and rinky dink organ make ditties like 'Ghost Cop in my House' and the inspired 'Chicken chicken, marry my mouth' the best silly punk songs you've heard in a long time.