August 2002:October 2002:Sheesh. Talk about overdoing it. This weekend, could we just settle for: I had a perfectly pleasant time, thank you for asking?

Oh, what the hell. Bring it on, London. Do your worst!

And whatever else happens, it's gonna be Blogtastic. Looking forward to seeing all these people (and more besides?)

(Disclaimer: I don't like normally being this slipshod. But it was either this or nothing.)

1. NME Awards Tour = a four band package tour, sponsored by the NME once a year to highlight representative sample of hot new talent.

2. Obvious petty gripe: so why are none of the bands British then? (1 Irish, 2 American, 1 Australian). But I'm not going to make that gripe. Citizen Of The World, me.

3. £12.50 per ticket gave us 36 musicians on stage, i.e. around 35p per musician. Guess this is why we don't get many package tours any more. Don't often say it these days, but God bless the NME. Or whoever it was who bankrolled this caper.

4. The Thrills. Saw them before and didn't rate them at all. Enjoyed them quite a lot more this time. The singer is still the weak link though - the voice just ain't there. Too weedy / strained / quiet, and I fear he might be beyond redemption. He's still nervous & shy on stage, but with all that money and all those expectations riding on them, who wouldn't be? Having said that: still think they could end up massive. It's jingly jangly West Coast country-rock essentially, full of hooks and played with considerably more spirit this time round. Only politely received though - and all my other friends thought they sucked.

5. Interpol. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. They can revive draw influences from early 80s post-punk as much as they like, as far as I'm concerned. During the second number, one friend hissed at me: "Sounds like Terror Couple Kills Colonel." Of course - Bauhaus! I'd missed the resemblence until then. At the end of the same number, another friend hissed at me "Just like The Chameleons, aren't they?" I would add: Gang Of Four, early Psychedelic Furs, Comsat Angels, early U2. A lot of people say Joy Division or The Cure, but I don't think I agree. Several songs use the same kind of stuttering one-note technique; each time, I wanted to sing along with either the Chilli Peppers By The Way ("Standing in line at the show tonight and there's a light on") or U2 I Will Follow ("If you walkaway, walkaway I walkaway, walkaway..."). But that's just me, not them. Besides, they add plenty of their own to their influences - it's not just dumb retro-ism. Wonderfully tight, simple, angular, integrated musicianship - all the instruments democratically blending together into a unified block of sound. Great to see some sharp side partings again after all these years, too!

6. Polyphonic Spree. An out and out phenomenon. A 13 piece band with a 9 piece choir, all in full length white robes (just in case you didn't know). Think: Flaming Lips playing All You Need Is Love, accompanied by an enthusiastic High School band. Quite overwhelmingly joyous - and somehow both ironic and sincere in equal measure. Generated the same "special occasion" party atmosphere as the Flaming Lips a couple of weeks back - they even did the same trick of releasing balloons into the crowd. Except the Lips could afford much bigger balloons. Highlight: Hanging Around merging straight into an ecstatic, exultant Soldier Girl, with everyone leaping up and down and giving it welly. (What's the US equivalent of Giving It Welly? Giving It Galosh?)

7. The Datsuns. A concentrated distillation of all the good bits about AC/DC style Classic Rawk, minus all the pantomimey, self-indulgent, Spinal Tap-ish bad bits. Harmonic Generators / Motherf***ers From Hell indeed. (Can you have a concentrated distillation? I was always crap at Chemistry.) They absolutely tore the roof off the place. I didn't know I loved them till I saw them rock and roll.

8. Scores On The Doors. The Thrills got 6/10, the rest all got 9.5/10, with Interpol just fractionally my favourites. Of the rest of us, one voted Datsuns and the other four all voted Polyphonics, I think. Really do wish we could have more package tours like this: 4 hours of entertainment, with nobody outstaying their welcome on stage. Unlike the last few gigs I've been to, I can honestly say I enjoyed every single minute. Excellent, excellent night.

...being the third and final batch of requests. Next week, we revert to the tried and tested formula of me selecting completely obscure tracks which nobody much is interested in, but which I still think are Good For People.

    

Item 105. Mind Your Own Business - Chicks On Speed (1999)

A terrific cover of the post-punk classic from Delta 5, which retains the spirit of the original while also adding something new to it. If you only have time to download one of these tunes, then I suggest you make it this one.

Item 106. What A Wonderful World - Nick Cave & Shane MacGowan (1992)

Nick Cave's splendid new album Nocturama was released only this week, making this an apposite moment for dredging out this oddly touching liitle duet.

Item 107. Calimero - Stereolab & Brigitte Fontaine (1999)

Brigitte Fontaine (who wrote the lyrics for this) is a "legendary Sixties chanteuse", apparently. Which is enough to excuse her the occasional flat note, I think. Ageing legends are allowed to do that, aren't they?

A grower, this. Give it time. It's worth it.

Item 108. Band Of Gold - Sylvester (1983)

Included for its sheer curiosity value, this is an undeniably spirited performance which would have been much better still without that rather disfiguring sax solo. But then you can't have everything. (It must have thrown poor old Sylvester out a bit as well, as he starts singing a completely different song towards the end of the record...)

Update: Sorry - you weren't quick enough. These MP3s are no longer on my server. I generally make them available for a week or so (sometimes less) before substituting them for new ones. Better luck next time!

Blogjam's changed, hasn't it? It used to be all about esoteric, where-does-he-get-them-from linkage from the outer extremities of the Internet. Nowadays though, there's all this, like, writing and stuff. And it's excellent.

It also seems to be going through a kind of Schadenfreude stage, whereby Fraser has been kind enough to convert his woes into our entertainment. First, the Speed Dating. Next, the Frottage. And now, and best of all...the Most Embarrassing Moment Ever, which has in turn produced some gob-smacking ancedotes in the comments.

All this has almost emboldened me to tell the notorious Paxos Spritzer story. Almost. But not quite.

These Victorian epitaphs suddenly reminded me of the mid-C19th headstone of an ancestor of mine, who died aged less than two weeks. (I remember my grandmother taking me along to see it in the graveyard of Doncaster Parish Church.)Now, how Victorian is that?

I've never yet done the whole inevitable "Ooh, d'you remember Kids' TV; weren't it fantastic?" thing, have I? Well, okay then. An extended nostalgic ramble about Play School, in the comments attached to this posting on My Ace Life. Make sure you follow Steve's TV Cream link, as well. Just about all the presenters are there, pics and all. (Bloody hell, Gordon Rollings!)

Of all our worldly possessions, I don't think there is currently anything more capable of making my spirits soar than this towering monument - this shrine - to orderly alphabetisation. Sod the paintings; I could gaze at this for hours. In fact, K has already caught me standing there a couple of times, with a dopey faraway grin on my face.

Yes: we've just had the decorators in, and we've been to Ikea for some bookshelf dividers. As a result, these shelves are currently standing on their own, in a freshly painted and otherwise empty room. There's a simple purity to it. I could leave it like that forever.

Let's zoom in, shall we?



Looking at the above, I realise that I can actually identify some of the singles just from their spines and their relative positions. I can't decide whether this is impressive or tragic. Let me see now: there's Gus Gus - The Heartists - Madonna - Manic Street Preachers - Morcheeba (oops!) - Pet Shop Boys - Prince - Pulp - and I think that might be the R.E.M. section just starting up on the bottom right.

Hey, it keeps me off the streets.

I've written before about the various recurring categories of dreams that I have. Since then, I seem to have acquired a brand new category: dreams about weblog authors whom I have never met. Thus in the last six months, I have dreamt about (in order): her, him, her, him, her and her.

(Oh, just look at you all, hovering your cursors over the links like that! Look, if I haven't dreamt about you yet, then I'm sorry, OK? These things are rather outside my control, as I'm sure you'll appreciate.)

Curiously, I have never knowingly dreamt about weblog authors whom I have met (apart from the tiny handful of people who I've known for years, of course). My theory on this is that when reading the weblog of a stranger, my imagination is fired up with theoretical images of what they might be like in real life. I will automatically start to ascribe them various characteristics, physical attributes and tones of voice. Part real, part fictional, these people are then free to bounce around my cerebral cortex in a kind of hinterland, thus giving my subconscious plenty to play around with when I'm asleep.

Although I'm not in the habit of remembering most of my dreams, I do retain surprisingly clear memories of all of these people in my mind's eye, along with a few of the events which surrounded them. I am also finding that these dreams are increasing in frequency (with two in the past week). Mind you, I am also going through a phase of dreaming extremely vividly, and at length, and of remembering a lot more of these dreams when I wake up. I have to wonder whether this has been due to being alcohol-free for a few weeks.

I think this also tells me that I am spending far, far too much time reading weblogs.

Fascinating. Morrissey may never actually have written frightening verse to a bucked tooth girl in Luxembourg, but he still had plenty to bitch about with someone called Robert in Glasgow. Who then decided to make the correspondence publicly (and freely) available a few years later.

Ah, the joys of having a penpal in Manchester. I had one myself, for a few months back in 1984; I've still got his letters up in the loft. Earnestly asking each other what we thought of each new Smiths single - sending each other pictures of cut flowers - discussing the plot lines of Coronation Street - and dithering bashfully with the idea of maybe meeting up one day. There was one phone call, but frankly it was a bit of a disaster, so we went back to exchanging letters instead. All very sweet and innocent. Until the inevitable happened, and I started actually dating a real life person in Nottingham. At Christmas, the penpal sent me a greetings card with a picture of a bunch of tulips on the front, bearing the inscription Mike, it was really nothing! on the inside - and then never got in touch again. A class act, you've got to admit.

(And if he ever stumbles across this and decides to go public with the correspondence, I'm f***ed.)

BEFORE...


Sorry and all that, but my love affair with Vanilla Ninja's potential Estonian Eurovision entry is starting to border on the obsessive. Apparently, Club "Kung-Fu" has now been voted the clear favourite in a big online poll over there, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the gals.

I wasted a fair amount of time yesterday attempting to transcribe the frankly genius lyrics as best as I could. I just couldn't quite grasp the chorus. Were they really singing about feeling weird while pole fighting, hanging at the club "Kung Fu"? Is pole fighting a common occurrence in Estonian nightclubs, I wondered (thereby setting something of a trap for myself, but we needn't dwell on that here).

Anyway, now that the lyrics have appeared on the web, I have discovered that feeling weird while pole fighting should actually read dealing with hardcore fighting. Well, of course!

Anyway, why not grab the MP3, back-comb your hair, stick on your skintight stonewashed denim, and sing along with the Ninjas? I know I will be. In fact, I suspect that I shall still be singing the first verse to myself as I emerge from Great Portland Street tube on Friday evening, mere minutes away from meeting "hottest people ever seen in whole downtown"...

Update: Dear sweet bountiful Lord above, there's a video! Which is actually a slight disappointment, as it reveals that Vanilla Ninja have now been sleekly groomed to within an inch of their lives. And yes: just like Girls Aloud, Atomic Kitten and the rest of them, they all been given that inevitable golden slick of ironed hair, memorably described by Popbitch as "the labrador look". Such a shame. Could someone have a word with their stylists, please?

AFTER...

From Mister Diamond Geezer himself, this is an amusing counterpoint to that cute little collection of read-it-on-the-toilet titbits which everybody (except me) got for Christmas last year.

(Translation courtesy of the AOLer Translator, via Grayblog and Dutchbint.)

So, are any bloggers reading this attending the Official UKBloggers Blogmeet thingy in London this coming Friday? Because I will be, and it would be good to know who I might be meeting there.

It would also help me to stave off this nagging nightmare vision I have, whereby everyone in the pub will be eagerly swapping Movable Type plugins, or...I dunno, parsing each other's PERL scripts, or optimising their Pingbacks, or whatever it is that Proper Web Designers do. Which is all well and good, except that my last technological breakthrough was learning the keyboard shortcuts for Blogger's "edit your blog" screen (CTRL-SHIFT-A changed my life!), and I don't imagine that very many people will want to hear about that. Message, not medium - that's me, I'm afraid.

Failing that, I'll be making another pilgrimage to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern on Sunday, in honour of his birthday (and his, two days later). Wonder whether he'll be there as well?

Anyway, I trust it will be as much fun as last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. Hey, it could scarcely be more eventful. And which of the week's major stories will Edna choose to talk about, I wonder? Gosh, I simply cannot imagine. (And that's as close a reference to last night's marathon televisual gobsmacker as you will find on this site.)

Although I trust that the twentieth anniversary of the death of Karen Carpenter will not go unmarked in some way. In fact, it was twenty years ago...today.

It hasn't even won its national finals yet, but I am firmly with Chig, Elisabeth and Kyle on this one: Club "Kung-fu", by the four-piece Estonian girl band Vanilla Ninja, has the potential to wreck the Estonian economy bring Eurovision triumphantly back to Tallinn in 2004.

Certain people reading this (you know who you are) might be a little surprised when I concur that the song in question has distinct Roxette-ish overtones (my views on Roxette being well known for their forthrightness in some quarters). But you just can't argue with top-notch Baltic pop-rock like this.

(Well, you might be able to argue with it, I dare say.
I, on the other hand, can only quiver before its towering majesty in abject awe.)

You can download a rather poor quality MP3 of the entire song here, or a high quality MP3 of the first 1 minute 21 seconds here (which thankfully waits until the killer line about Def Leppard before fading out completely).

You read it here first! (Well OK, you probably read it here first. Talk about bandwagon-jacking, eh? I have no shame.)

(Please note that I am writing this under the mental fog of yet another incipient flu bug heavy cold type thingy. Oh, the aches! Oh, the pains! Misery me!)

(In which case, perhaps I need a "poorly" font to match last week's "hangover" font. Let's see: Courier = Hangover, so how about Times New Roman = Poorly? I'm hoping that, like Courier, it will carry the same sort of reduced-power, default-options-only, emergency-service connotations. Yes, I am actually converting font selection into an exercise in maudlin self pity.)

1. No alcohol.
I'm with Richard Herring on this: after a couple of weeks without booze, I started to go through a peculiarly evangelical phase, loudly proclaiming the joys of sobriety to anyone who would listen.

Ultimately, it's all about maximising pleasurable impulses, I would explain, face aglow. And being alcohol-free is such a buzz...like really top grade coke, I would josh (as if I would know anything about such things, hem hem). Sod the virtues of self denial: I'm recommending it for hedonistic reasons, I would smirk.

This phase didn't last. By the end of the month, sobriety had started to lose its novelty. I first wobbled off the wagon on the 24th, after seeing Sophie Ellis Bextor. I could withstand most things without a drink in my hand - but not a crowded Lord Roberts on a Friday night. Impossible, quite impossible.

Depressingly, after even just a couple of drinks the night before, I would then find myself relatively lacking in energy and focus for most of the following day. I strongly resented this.

Conclusion (1): I'm not getting back into my old habits in a hurry. If I'm going to be drinking on a School Night, then there had better be a bloody good reason for it. The days of cracking open a shared bottle of wine in front of the telly, night after night after night, are gone.

Conclusion (2): I have also discovered that, when genuinely thirsty, a good soft drink is actually more refreshing than an alcoholic drink. As a result, the fridge is now permanently stocked with a tasty array of Fentimans, Duchy Originals...and (cue hideously corny Graham Norton moment) this stuff:



Altogether then, this has been a useful and illuminating exercise.

2. Out of bed by 7:30 weekdays, 8:30 weekends.
Started well, then lapsed. Especially at weekends. However, average getting-up times have definitely improved overall.

3. Sit-ups every day.
I probably missed five or six days, usually due to simple forgetfulness. This was partly because I never quite established a set time of day to do these. However, the number of sit-ups/stomach crunches I was able to manage did steadily increase over the month, in a most gratifying fashion.

The stomach bump is just as big as it ever was, though. I ask you, what's the point?

(Mind you, I did eat rather more than usual during the month - probably compensating for the lack of booze, or else rewarding myself for my abstinence. Because you've got to have some treats in life, right?)

4. Read a bloody novel for once in your life. All the way through to the end. By the end of the month, please.
Technically, a failure - but in terms of actual pages read, a success. Because I spent the month reading two books simultaneously, and finished the month roughly halfway through both of them.

5. Finish the various serialisations on the blog, by the end of the month.

• Nottingham, My Nottingham - check.
  
• Vietnam Diary - check.
  
• Stations Of The Diva - well, at least I conquered the block and made a start.

As someone with virtually no capacity for self-discipline whatsoever, I'm actually rather pleased with the way things turned out. Could have been better, but could very easily have been a whole lot worse. Time for a congratulatory glass of nourishing Lemsip, I think.

...on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion gig last week.

1. I remember reading in an old punk fanzine (Ripped And Torn, early 1977) that the test of a good gig was simply this: for how many minutes did you think you were watching the best band in the world? The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion got two, maybe three. They started off incredibly strongly, with musicianship, dynamics and attitude being everything I could have wished for in a live band. My friends and I kept looking at each other and grinning and nodding. Yes! This is it! We're in The Zone!

2. The initial feeling didn't altogether last, though. It was nothing you could put your finger on - but, as exceptional as the band were in so many ways, there was still something missing for me. Maybe this was simply due to unfamilarity with their material - but I think it was more to do with a certain lack of direct emotional communication. The styling and execution was spot on, the synergy between the band members was there...and yet, and yet...I don't exactly know what they were trying to convey. For all the energy, it was all just fractionally too studied, too knowing, too oblique. They couldn't quite cut loose and give full expression to the base elements: joy, pain, rage, passion, whatever. This was all the more frustrating as they were providing such a close facsimile to all of these things.

3. Or maybe I just wasn't used to being back on the booze again. Maybe the beer was fogging me over, slowing me down, dulling the acuity of my responses.

4. My conclusion at the time: this was a RealPlayer band, not an MP3 band. An MP3 band would have indelibly burnt itself onto my mental hard drive. But the Blues Explosion were merely streaming through my temporary buffers, in three or four second chunks, leaving no trace behind.

5. I was surprised at the number of fortysomething and fiftysomething Blues Geezers in the audience. I hadn't expected that the Blues Explosion would actually attract proper Blues fans. Was it just the name, then? Had they come expecting John Mayall's Bluesbreakers instead? Clearly not. The Blues Geezers were all standing around on their own on the fringes of the crowd, smiling and nodding sagaciously, giving the band that all-important Blues Geezer Seal Of Approval. Who would have thought it? The following night's Jon Spencer/Solomon Burke double bill at London's Royal Festival Hall started seeming less wilfully incongruous, and started making much more sense.