The world isn't listening

2011 in 12 words; 2012 in 12 bands

2012-01-10T00:16:00.022Z

This is one of those new year's blogs. One of my loose resolutions is to start writing for pleasure (clearly I'm going to have to do it more often if I'm going to get away with phrases like 'loose resolutions'), and while there's barely 150 words here, it's a start at least.

2011 in 12 words
January: Job
February: Flat
March: Elbow
April: Carpet
May: BBQs
June: Tour
July: Turkey
August: Bournemouth/(Cornwall)
September: Run
October: Twenty-six
November: Campervan
December: Parties

2012 in 12 bands:
The band everyone should love by now - Los Campesinos!
The band you always remember you love - The Shins
The band who said they'd never reform - At The Drive-in
The band you tell people at parties you're into - Django Django
The band you've never heard of - Pengillys
The band who are actually really good at folk music - The Civil Wars
The band whose song drops and you go crazy - Niki and the Dove
The band who are the newest (and best) 'we're a proper band' band - Dry the River
The band where you have to believe the hype (ok, solo artist) - Lana del Rey
The band you JUST WANT to be utterly brilliant again - Bloc Party
The band whose 'good song' really is - Friends
The band who I will properly discover this year - Real Estate

The Spotify playlist

LIVE: Bombay Bicycle Club, Brixton Academy, 19 October 2011

2011-12-01T10:05:00.001Z

There are points on Bombay Bicycle Club’s second album, ‘Flaws‘, where the band could quite easily be mistaken for a singer-songrwiter project. Less than a year on from their distorted guitar led debut, the acoustic melancholy of album number two was as far removed as it was possible to get from the first LP without doing a full on ‘Kid A‘, and the only thing more surprising than the new sound was the speed at which it had arrived.

But when Bombay Bicycle Club approach the end of their euphoric Brixton show, the 16th and final date of their largest ever UK tour and a homecoming of sorts for the four young north Londoners, they have 11 people on stage: the band themselves, who tonight are grown to a six-piece by vocalist (and burgeoning solo artist in her own right) Lucy Rose and multi-instrumentalist Louis Bhose – starring particularly on banjo during ‘Ivy & Gold’ – two brass players and three backing vocalists, courtesy of members of earlier support act Dry The River.

Read more...

Ten for '10, pt. 1

2011-01-07T10:13:00.022Z

Though it was officially the first year of a new decade, 2010 somehow felt more a by-product of the previous 10 years than the dawning of some fresh new age. For while there were a series of original and exciting début albums that flirted with wider acclaim, the majority of plaudits in 2010 went to artists returning with second, third or fourth efforts (Vampire Weekend, The National, Arcade Fire, Laura Marling, Kanye West, LCD Soundsystem...).

In some ways this is no bad thing; given the lifespan of a new band at the moment is akin to that of a mayfly, that any of the last decade's popular acts are earning considerable recognition now they're further on in their careers offers at least some suggestion that music in the digital era isn't entirely fucked.

After contributing my nominations to GodisintheTV's end of year poll, my much belated annual review of the year's albums goes into a little more depth on the best music 2010 had to offer.

1. Villagers - Becoming A Jackal
12 months ago, Conor O'Brien was the lead singer of the little known, and defunct, Irish indie outfit The Immediate. One breathtaking appearance on Later... Live With Jools Holland last April changed all that overnight. Outshining Paul Weller, Hot Chip and Gogol Bordello was no mean feat, but he did it with just his trusty guitar, his earnest voice and the heartbreaking lyrics to 'The Meaning of the Ritual'. It was that rare thing: a truly spellbinding piece of television.

The experience listening to Becoming A Jackal upon its release a month later was much the same; 11 songs of heartfelt intensity, built on delicate guitar arrangements and often augmented by sumptuous string parts and atmospheric percussion. Always at the fore, however, was O'Brien's keening vocal, flitting between a menacing mutter on 'I Saw the Dead' to the rueful lament on 'The Meaning of the Ritual' and rousing cries of 'That Day'. His distinctive voice dispatched a series of arresting lyrics, tales vivid with imagery and shimmering with poignancy.

In the end, though, there's little that can be written to do absolute justice to the uniquely affecting album Conor O'Brien released this year as his Villagers début. Now having spent six months touring the LP to awestruck reviews, his is a star that is resolutely rising, and 2010 was the year that all who discovered Villagers set sail on his ship of promises.

2. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Had it not been for Villagers' unique effort, in fact, ordinarily Arcade Fire's third album could well have been been my number one. With both 2005's Funeral and its magnificent follow up Neon Bible heralded as defining albums of the last decade, their track record was only made more immaculate with the 16 songs of The Suburbs; a quality of music that moved the BBC reviewer to cause something of a stir when he proclaimed it was 'better than OK Computer'.

Whatever it might be better than (or not), it was certainly another paradigm shift from the Canadian crew into territory that, at first, had listeners confounded. Here was a band who, having spent much of their grandiose second album railing against the ills of the modern world, were reverting to the simpler loss of childhood pleasures.

After repeated plays though, it made sense - of course - as each of the songs gave up their individual treasures. The pounding 'Ready to Start' and 'Month of May' were joyously instant single material; 'City With No Children In' and 'Empty Room' were The Suburbs's anthemic calls to arms; while the trio of 'Suburban War', 'Deep Blue' and 'We Used to Wait' towards the album's end saw Arcade Fire at their intense, majestic best. Even the title track's unexpected piano jaunt soon gave way to a haunting, unforgettable chorus.

But it was the group's two-part crescendo 'Sprawl I & II' - half morose waltz, half quite brilliant Abba-ish Europop - that finished The Suburbs in the style it deserved. Worlds apart sonically, 'Sprawl I & II' was nevertheless representative of the album as a whole: where Arcade Fire's outstanding first two records may seem more cohesive units, it's the individual songs, melodies and more immediate arrangements of The Suburbs's wistful, 65 minutes of childhood longing that ultimately made it their strongest, and most necessary, long player yet.

3. Rolo Tomassi - Cosmology
Two years ago, this Sheffield five-piece were barely on my radar when, as teenagers, they released the mind-melting hardcore début album Hysterics. After seeing them tour the album in 2009, however, their difficult screamcore/math-rock/jazz-metal hybrid began to make sense, even though it continued to be an assault on the ears at loud volumes. Another year on, and their sophomore release has racked up more plays on my MP3 player than any other album I own.

Back then, the prodigiously talented band demonstrated a dizzying ability and creative scope that surpassed their years - and peers - to ignite one of the most exciting releases of 2008. Its only real fault was in the way the juxtaposing elements were crammed together over the album's course, suggesting youthful exuberance at the expense of musical direction.

Now, all concerns have been washed away. Rolo Tomassi have retained the unrepentant ferocity that blew Hysterics apart, but in 2010, the quintet have produced an album that utilises this force most effectively: in short, sharp barrages of abrasive noise. Indeed, the first six songs of this 10-song LP clock in at less than 15 minutes; the visceral 'House House Casanova' and 'Unromance' are almost as lightning quick in length as the pummelling guitar riff brilliance of Joe Nicholson - who I can only laud highly enough by quoting the NME review: "...as a young musician his ability as both a player and songwriter is unbelievable".

But it was during Cosmology's second half, when Rolo Tomassi revisit the slower and more readily melodic soundscapes they flirted with on Hysterics (especially 'Fantasia'), that the album turns from a fascinating work into an unforgettable one. The contrapuntal duo of 'Kasia' and 'Sakia', brimming with spiralling guitar work, mixes Eva Spence's angelic singing voice with her brutish screaming to mesmerizing effect - I defy anyone to listen to the latter song and not recall her line "Mirror mirror on the wall/I'm a liability if there ever was one" days later. 'Tongue in Chic' presents the band's most complete five minutes to date, with a frenzied intro not unlike The Mars Volta's Take The Veil, Cerpin Taxt balanced against an almost overwhelming wash of guitars and hypnotic vocal cycle.

When the title track's combination of displaced vocals, off-kilter time signatures, a guitar solo and a crashing instrumental outro of intergalactic proportions brings Cosmology to a close, the full effect of Rolo Tomassi's second album takes a moment to sink in. When it does, the crux of the issue is this: for such a young band, their transition from hardcore aggressors to masterly and innovatively ferocious songwriters in 2010 was little short of astounding. Cosmology was an achievement that wrestled hardcore from its moorings and crossed spectacular new frontiers for the genre.

4. Everything Everything - Man Alive
It was only after a chance meeting - I happened to be visiting HMV in Oxford Street one lunchtime when the band were doing a 1pm in-store live session - that I even gave Everything Everything a second glance this year. It was on the strength of the two and a half songs I heard then that I bought Man Alive - and discovered it to be perhaps the most enjoyable listen of any album this year.

Vocalist Jonathan Higgs's staccato/falsetto may take some patience at first, but it soon mattered little with each song so brilliantly forged. Opener and previous single 'MY KZ, YR BF' (My keys, your boyfriend) is all spangly R'n'B-stealing bombast, ingenuously soundtracking the awkward moment of one relationship ending for another's beginning. Newly re-released single 'Photoshop Handsome' pitched synth stabs, pattering drums and ringing guitars under a video-game eulogy, while 'Schoolin'' warps expectations by being another R'n'B throwback brushed with funked-up art-rock.

The latter song's difficulty to define is indicative of Man Alive as a whole, not least when 'Final Form', the album's glittering, slow-burning mull over life and death happened to contain the best chorus of the record.

Album reviews often talk about 'single material', and Man Alive was one of those rare, and in this age almost unnecessary, albums where the majority of songs were strong enough to be potential singles. But unusually, this made Everything Everything's first album so much more a sum of its parts; a collection of irresistibly exciting and creative songs that simply outshone pretty much every other 'indie' début in 2010.

5. Foals - Total Life Forever
Foals had the unusual success of actually delivering copiously on early hype back in 2008 when their first album Antidotes collected the spiky electro promise of 'Hummer' and 'Balloons' into an album of angular, pulsing tunes that dominated end of year lists.

Expectation this year, then, was high, but musically, Total Life Forever was a very different beast, more out of necessity than anything: Foals' 2010 would have been very disappointing if they had simply made Antidotes pt. 2. True, they employed a similar use of minimal clean guitar lines in sound, but in scope, their follow up was a deeper, more fervent affair, with tracks building over their not inconsiderable lengths into overwhelming waves of sound.

Lead single 'Spanish Sahara' spent seven minutes drawing blood from its whispered beginning, culminating in one of the defining choruses of this year, Yannis intoning, I'm the fury in your head/I'm the fury in your bed', but across the album other highlights gleamed: 'Miami' was Foals' most straightforward indie rock song to date, 'Black Gold' and 'Alabaster' revelled in their rumbling, moody atmospheres, and second single 'This Orient' bounced with a lightness of energy that stood out among the eloquent sonic weight around it.

Total Life Forever was the sound of an artist deliberately turning their back on earlier success and setting about creating an ambitious record that would change people's opinions of the band. That it received so much critical acclaim and further raised Foals' stock in British music in 2010 was merely verification of that ambition being scaled.

Underestimating Social Media; a recipe for disaster

2010-11-13T18:27:00.004Z

Ten days ago, a phenomenal wave of anger surged through the internet thanks to social networks and media sites, vilifying the unknown Western New England-based Cooks Source Magazine for its blatant and unapologetic copyright infringement - which had been uncovered by a blogger whose work had been stolen to go into October's issue.

I wrote about this for Birddog here. Not only was the journalistic crime obvious and pretty unforgivable yet flippantly denied, but it showed the power of social media and the internet in bringing brands to justice - if that justice now seems in hindsight a little severe.

In the interests of fairness, too, the editor responsible finally broke her silence here. But it's a rather biased woe-is-me tale; which perhaps isn't surprising given how badly the magazine's "apology" that sits on their website does its job.

Villagers, live at Scala - 5 October 2010

2010-10-14T09:39:00.003Z

London’s Scala boasts a colourful history as both a cinema and live venue. Now one of the capital’s most coveted locations, its vaguely steeping stalls and balconies and close standing area seem to bear down on the stage almost as intently as the spotlights above.

They fall first on Welsh songstress Cate Le Bon and her three compadres, who flit around the cramped stage, swapping locations and instruments like good friends exchanging playing cards. Cate Le Bon initially caught the eye as vocalist on Neon Neon’s debut single, ‘I Lust You’, resulting in her year-long tour with the band. Now forging her solo path, Scala sees her deliver a quaint performance, in which Cate’s syrupy but dextrous tones float and soar over her mix of rough-edged guitars and woozy organs, just about winning over a rather cooler-than-thou audience with her bursts of heady folk: warm applause sends the Welsh songwriter on her way.

The real spotlight tonight, though, is all on one man, Conor O’Brien. The face behind the misleading Villagers moniker... more

Blogger's block

2010-09-27T12:22:00.004Z

It's been a day short of three months since I last blogged depressingly about England's world cup exit. Happily, I have managed to put some words into comprehensible sentences in my spangly new job as Content Editor for Birddog B2B.

I've managed three blogs for Birddog in six weeks or so, which is not a terrible ratio, but it's allowed me to try my hand(s) at pretending to do marketing/brand type posts. Anyway, here they are:

What's in a name?
Location, Location, Location
Birdjob!

That last one looks faintly lewd but I can assure you, disappointingly, it's not.

Have a read and if you're of the media, marketing, B2B or blogging disposition, comment.

K THX BAI

The morning after the 44 years before

2010-06-28T21:16:00.019Z

It was probably with relief, more than anything, that England fans reacted to the final whistle - and final nail in England's sorry World Cup 2010 coffin - as the gut-wrenching score was crystallised in memory and in history at 4:45pm on Sunday. Not quite payback for '66, though any bragging rights leftover from Munich in 2001 are well and truly handed back to the German supporters; expect the sea of scarves to bear this scoreline for now: Germany 4 - 1 England.

The result was as if finally and thankfully waking from a growing nightmare, rather than descending into one. The dream familiar to so many English fans (you know, that one where England win the World Cup?), preceded by weeks of feverish, optimistic expectation, faded almost instantly. If the insipid 1-1 draw against the US, where England, looking tired and short on ideas, battled gamely and little else, soured the first steps on what was supposed to have been a glorious path, the excruciatingly dire stalemate against an inferior-in-every-way Algeria demolished the path, and tore up the map.

This, incidentally, was the game where Gareth Barry, injured for the previous two months, was supposed to slot into the England puzzle and make the picture clear. Instead, Barry was ineffective in all three subsequent games, offering no protection to the back four against Germany (indeed, Barry was directly at fault during both of Germany's second half goals, giving away possession for 3-1 and failing to deal with a long punt to Mesut Ozil for 4-1), and in the games against Algeria and Slovenia, lacked any guile or passing flair - an asset Barry has always been short of.

The 'dream', now on the verge of dying, was burnished by the slightly more convincing first half display against Slovenia, Capello's two line up changes combining for the only goal. Yet as it turned into a fully fledged nightmare after all, like a Shakespearean tragedy there was a final, drawn out despondent end to the play, the inevitable descent into the sombre, damning ending.

Though Lampard's clear goal was academic by the end, there is something to be said that maybe, just maybe, an England side, pumped up and level 2-2 against the old enemy at half time at the World Cup, just might have had one last effort up their sleeves.

There is also something to be said that an England side, pumped up and harshly behind 2-1 to the old enemy at half-time at the World Cup, should have had even more of an effort up their sleeves than did emerge on Sunday.

Because apart from 15 frenzied minutes before half-time, England offered nothing against Germany to suggest that there was any more to this side than the three limp group games had shown. The failings of an England team, at the last opportunity for the heralded Golden Generation, were exposed against a young, exciting, clinical and organised German side.

Exposed, in every department. In goal, England's traditional problems since David Seaman retired continued: Green's woeful error was punished, but James, though competent when called upon in the must-win game against Slovenia, might have done better for the second and fourth German goals, and arguably should have reacted quicker to prevent their first, too. In defence, though their display against lowly Slovenia was also admirable, John Terry and Matthew Upson had no answer for Germany's attacking talent, whose prowess also left Glen Johnson and Ashley Cole hopelessly out of position on what seemed like countless occasions.

In midfield, Aaron Lennon struggled but was inexplicably replaced twice by unimpressive substitutes - Shaun Wright-Phillips has no doubt earned the last of his England caps, although Theo Walcott must be sunning himself somewhere, positively beaming - while Gareth Barry's lack of match practice showed alarmingly. Gerrard and Lampard, AGAIN, looked shadows of their club selves, and brought very little star quality into a midfield that consistently lacked energy, creativity and threat. James Milner showed glimpses of what may be a fruitful long-term England career, but Joe Cole's fleeting appearances were disappointingly ineffectual cameos.

Jermain Defoe looked lively against Slovenia and Germany and may just have done enough to earn a few more starting XI spots. Ignoring Emile Heskey, as Capello should have done from the start, that leaves Wayne Rooney.

Rooney looked like he played the tournament in a pair of bricks. His touch was barely there, his passing wayward and lacklustre, his goal threat non-existent. Something was wrong, whether it was the ball, an old injury, the long 50-game season spent single-handedly winning games for Manchester United or the pressure of similar expectations for his country. It would be hard to believe the pressure did get to him, given his consistency for club and country prior to the tournament, but one way or another, the magnificent and gifted footballer everyone knows just didn't show up.

Rooney will have another two, maybe three World Cups but by the end of 2010, the key quartet of Steven Gerrard, John Terry, Rio Ferdinand and Frank Lampard will all be the wrong side of 30. The England stars of tomorrow are few, far between and, where they do exist in players like Adam Johnson, Jack Wilshere, Jack Rodwell and Joe Hart, inexperienced. It's time for a shake up, and it may be some time before the dust settles on an England side capable of challenging at major tournaments.

For all the clear changes and difficult decisions needed, however, Capello cannot go just yet. He is, after all, responsible for galvanising this same squad who failed to even reach the Euro 2008 tournament, under Steve McLaren, to win nine out of ten World Cup qualifiers, and, with the right selections here on in, deserves the opportunity to lead England's Euro 2012 campaign. He has learned quicker than Sven, and will deal with better than McLaren, the massive media pressure that comes with heading the England national team, and with his undoubted pedigree and results delivered prior to this World Cup, should be given the chance to help English football turn this corner.

But right now, for those remaining talismen of England's Golden Generation, the greatest prize in world football will forever remain as tangible as the everyman's dream. It's a recurring dream that football players and football fans alike have had for 44 years, but on Sunday it was starkly and inescapably shown up for what it is. Now, a long-overdue wake up call is needed immediately to restore any faith in the future of English football.

Operator Please - Gloves

2010-06-24T23:11:00.001Z

I’m not sure that everyone has been looking forward to Gloves, the follow up long-player from Australian racket Operator Please, as much as I have. Their brilliant and infectious debut was only mildly received on this site two years ago, but without doubt, the still gratingly young five-piece are an Aussie storm to be reckoned with – certainly live – proving themselves to be accomplished songwriters, with a catalogue of songs capable in the same breath of turns of genius and unrestrained fun.

It's interesting, then, that... more >>

Short changed

2010-05-05T22:24:00.010Z

Whatever happens for the rest of tonight, and over Friday, the frenzied final weeks of the election campaign have largely flattered to deceive. For all the bright yellow sunshine of the Liberal Democrats' false dawn, very little change has been seen - and is likely to be seen - to challenge the usual political suspects.

It's not really Nick Clegg's fault. Given a podium on national television three weeks in a row, the country warmed to the impassioned, reasoned and (frankly) MOR performance from the calm, clean cut new face of British politics. Three months ago, he wasn't even the foremost political party leader called Nick, and suddenly he was the second coming, the real alternative, the answer to years of Conservative and Labour gridlock.

For about 15 minutes. After Clegg's surprise popularity spike following the ITV debate - a bit like winning over undecided Sun readers - Cameron and Brown spent the next week drawing level with Clegg, offering him a seat at the top table, and then promptly dropped him from their gang the week after, when the two main party leaders locked horns in front of the biggest television audience yet.

And despite the continued public favour for Clegg and the Lib Dems, into the last week of campaigning the press followed Cameron and Brown instead, relentlessly. Unfortunate pictures of the Tory leader, unfortunate recordings of the Labour leader, it remained that Cameron and Brown drove the headlines, and spent the last days of the campaign prior to election day obliterating Nick Clegg's slowing hype-train.

What had given Clegg his spotlight was, it appeared, the sort of smooth-talking, persona-based party leadership that earned Cameron such derision not so many months before. All very well talking the talk, but where were the policies? It was on policy where Clegg lost his way in the third televised debate. His defence policy was attacked on all sides, his European stance washy. The immigration views, when pressed, was eyebrow-raising. A case of not enough, and much too late.

But the response at large to the familiar TV format - like a mix between The Weakest Link and Question Time - caused the overreaction. The glamour of the television screen, so instilled in American political history, yet so conflicting with the very different British system, widely misrepresented the strength of serious backing behind the Liberal Democrats that the impressed viewers seemed to be gushing forth. Anyone wholeheartedly convinced by the debates' influence over voter attitudes is going to be mightily let down come Friday morning.

As the night's gone on, the failure of the Lib Dems to obtain any ground on the major two parties augments the disappointingly small shift in the playing field at this election. While the hype surrounding 'Cleggmania' among the online column inches grew, none of it, it seems, has transferred into hard political evidence. And though the television debates may have engaged with a wider band of the electorate, increasing voter turnout and, it could be argued, furthering democracy, the only picture that remains now is one of slight confusion. The fresh start seemed a great idea in theory, but very little of it has been put into practice.

What change there is suggests a clear turn away from 13 years' hard Labour. It looks unlikely that there will be a majority victory for any party, but in the serious business of politics, the only shift worth checking will be just how wide a margin the Conservatives have gained over Labour. Their 'vote for change' campaign might be tainted by naysayers who affect to be unable to differentiate between the parties' policies, but by promoting future change, instead of warning of past problems, the Conservative party just might get their opportunity to start implementing it.

The Rebs launch debut album 'In A Heartbeat'

2010-05-05T13:56:00.002Z

For a band whose star is in the ascendancy, The Brook in Southampton gives independently signed acts like The Rebs something of a natural pedestal on which to stand and survey their audience. The place is full to the rafters, literally, as the first floor balcony is jam-packed: eager locals ready to consume the Southampton band's invigorating indie/electro-pop songs. But the stage, you see, is raised a good five feet from the floor, forcing the crowd to gaze up at its occupants - whether they like it or not.

This is, you suspect, how The Rebs prefer it. They're no strangers to limelight, having come good in 2008's Road To V competition and opening the festival for Kaiser Chiefs, The Zutons and The Courteeners, and winning two Exposure Music Awards for Best Pop Song and Best Overall Song in the last 18 months. On first glance though, they're a curious bunch: guitar-wielding frontman Russell Edmonds is almost transatlantic in his good looks, as though forged at the height of Strokes and New York garage rock fever. The beaming bassist, Nader Rezaie, seems much more laid back with his elongated basslines and falling black locks, while Vicki Averre-Beeson hops about behind her Korgs, lost in the atmosphere and stabbing out synth melodies. Sticksman Sim Cracknell provides big bouncing rhythms, also wearing a large grin throughout the night.

The night's main event is to see The Rebs entertain, and they come out in buoyant mood, visibly excited to impress the crowd on this, their début album launch. Taking the unusual step of playing through the tracklisting in order, the crowd are treated to the full Rebs repertoire; the best of their blossoming catalogue causing some of the avid audience to break in to chants of 'Reb Army!'. The army deal, primarily, in thumping pop rock, the attitude of Edmonds's driving guitars balanced out by a series of knock-out choruses. Début single 'Don't Fool Yourself' is exemplary, a punchy mid-tempo affair that throws in the night's main foot-stamping, sing-a-long moment.

The Rebs appear to have taken their cues from that golden early to mid-00s period, their widescreen indie reminding of Hot Fuss-era Killers - see 'Superman' - and early Franz Ferdinand. Despite any misgivings that sentence may have just stirred in you, live, it still works, thanks to the full throttle treatment it gets from the confident foursome. Standout moment is the fast-paced 'Would I Remember', forceful but irresistibly catchy - perfect summer festival stuff - while sort of title track 'Always in a Heartbeat' spears numerous synth lines across a crashing rock backdrop to memorable effect. Even if it does draw comparisons with The Automatic.

What quickly becomes obvious is just how saturated the tracklist is with strong single potential. With a commendable motto on their MySpace - "Influences: artists with great songwriters - we like singles" - each song tries to pack in that classic sounding chorus, and most are successful. It's no mean feat building 11 songs to a fervent indie template, yet managing to produce almost as many pop choruses from the top shelf among them, and credit is due to The Rebs for this. A breather tonight, however, comes in the form of three acoustic tracks in succession, the band leaving Edmonds alone under the lights to amuse himself for 10 minutes. Not all of the acoustic numbers feature in the tracklisting, thankfully, but it's a disappointingly typical (or perhaps naive) début album tactic, including an obligatory 'quiet one', the supposedly introspective, deep track, and it doesn't quite sit with a band who for the main have canon of excellent songs that don't necessarily conform to the typical début album.

Nevertheless, tonight it's all about The Rebs collectively - an affirmation of their award-winning songwriting, the headrushing performance of their songs in the live arena; the strut of a band who've got something and believe they're ready to take it to the world. And if people start catching on, The Rebs just might come out on top.

Also avilable on God is in the TV

The Noisettes + support, Bournemouth 02 Academy, 24/2/2010

2010-03-12T13:26:00.002Z

The Noisettes live are a very different prospect these days. Their incredibly well-received second album Wild Young Hearts was shorn of the rattling blues-punk that captured their enthusiastic spirit on (poorly-titled) first album What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?, but it gave rise to a slew of hit singles driven by the Mazda-sponsored success of ‘Don’t Upset the Rhythm (Go Baby Go)’ – a single so good, they squeezed both hooks into the title for good measure.

Before a quarter of tonight’s expectant crowd have drifted in though, more...

NME Awards Tour review

2010-03-03T17:38:00.001Z

Nearly five years ago, my best friend from school sent me an almost indecipherable text message to say he was backstage at the NME Awards Tour and had just drunkenly introduced himself to Brandon Flowers. Back then, NME magazine were championing the best in what everyone still loosely accepted as rock, with perhaps indie leanings, and they were getting it pretty much right: on the line-up that evening were The Killers, Bloc Party, The Futureheads and Kaiser Chiefs. Three now globe-bestriding acts all starting to crack the path to success, and one bright star that would quickly burn itself up.

It is difficult to see many similarities five years on. More...

Thrown to the Lions

2010-01-27T20:35:00.027Z

Morris's return will reignite the debate about humour and taboo

Last week Billy Connelly, in his twilight years as a leading British comedian, stoked the flames of the old debate about the remit comedians have to push the boundaries of comedy, flirt around (or not) taboo subjects and advance ever further into the heart of dark humour.

Connelly was talking specifically about the outrage performers can invoke through swearing, which is rather self-serving given that the man can barely deliver a joke without punctuating every pause for breath with an obscenity, but personal taste aside, it was a timely, if moot, stirring up of the debate. One of the most divisive comedians and satirists of the last two decades Chris Morris returned to the public eye at Sundance, finally unveiling his latest work: a comedy about British jihadists. What else?

Morris, made infamous by his Brass Eye special (some nine years ago now, which itself was four years after the original series), still retains the mysterious, unflinching and publicity-shunning satirical edge that enveloped him during the fallout from the 'Paedophilia special', and has given his customary lack of media time to promote this début feature, his first major work since Channel 4 series Jam. Critics have already begun to advise who it will offend, though since showing at Sundance it has been largely well-received.

Many will look at Morris's film as just the latest in a line of controversial treatments of difficult subjects, given his history, but that is to discount Morris's acute contextual awareness. Terrorism, at home and abroad, has been a heated political, cultural, religious and social issue post 9/11*, but it has yet to be properly and overtly approached by humour, though it provides a decent source for stand up material. Britain's broad position on terror, from abhorring wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to harbouring concerns over Muslim schools, and the conflicting policy on religious preaching, has since the London attacks in July 2005 descended into increased confusion. Out of that, though, there is much humour to be found, reckons Chris Morris, and he's approached it from a particularly thorny and - following the failed plane bombing on Christmas Day 2009 by a London University-educated man - pertinent angle.

*(That said, there is a painfully funny 'Easter Egg' on The Day Today DVD whereby Morris conducts a telephone interview with Peter O'Hanarahanarahan, who should be covering a business conference taking place in the Twin Towers later that day (September 11th 2001) but quite clearly, it emerges, isn't there).

Does the subject's high profile in the media and penetration of cultural and political zones sanction, or indeed call for, a film being made specifically to raise a laugh? If a certain topic is capable of stirring up emotions such as anger, confusion, compassion, then why not humour also? If art imitates life - and Morris reveals that he was in part inspired by a report of a real failed terrorist attack - it is not to suggest that the imitation can only serve as a mirror and end there.

One of Morris's greatest skills to date has been holding that mirror up to an audience, warts and all, letting the eyes see and the brain disbelieve. It might forever be his albatross, but the hysterical fallout from Morris's Brass Eye 'Paedophile Special', a 'mockumentary' about hysterical fallouts to taboo like paedophilia, transcended the boundaries of satire, humour and social commentary with a peerless brilliance, exactly because it probed at something that was at the time the most controversial of subjects.

The difficulty, or genius, of this type of work is the way in which it is received. Politcial and media outlets dispense and encourage an accepted stance on contentious issues like terrorism, which becomes a stock and recognised view. The reaction to acts of terrorism, quite clearly, is one of shock and disgust. Sometimes outrage and war. But what happens when the issue is displaced, in two ways: by treatment from a different source, namely a film, book or even song lyric, and secondly, in a manner which deliberately contradicts what might be a 'generally-accepted' view?

Imagine this scenerio: a family and guests mourn the passing of a grandmother at a funeral service. As they go to leave they realise her husband, the grandfather, has died during the service. Aside from the morose real life reaction to this, consider the ironic comic possibilities were this a scene in a sketch show: discount for repeat customers, 2-for-1 coffin offer, loyalty card etc etc. This is the detached treatment that art's (un)limitation allows, for any subject matter going.

For a film, as a piece of art, is not limited by an audience or a market, nor by an overarching agenda - unlike the media or political arenas - it will find or make its own. (Whether or not it is then successful is a different matter). It is perhaps fair to say that a film is not and cannot be barred from touching certain subjects simply by its being.

It's more a question of the boundaries writers and performers like Chris Morris and Billy Connelly should or shouldn't impose, in the search to find new angles from which to approach topics, and even to find new topics themselves. Because the less interested in your work the audience is, the quicker it will fade and be forgotten about. And the key point is, for a film like Four Lions, 'interested' doesn't have to mean amused or impressed; it could just as well mean shocked, furious and upset.

But Morris hasn't simply made this film by sticking a number of touchy subjects to a dartboard and taking aim, in order to goad a reaction out from the typical Daily Mail reader. Firstly, while the issue is contentious, it is still 'on-topic' and as a piece of work slots into the current cultural context. Secondly, as a film, the treatment of British terrorists as a source of humour presents the interesting spectacle of whether it will even succeed in its intentions to make people laugh. Often, the closer to the bone, the bigger the risk - and the laugh. Morris is of course well of this, but even so, for a début commercial feature and his first major work in some time, it's a bold opening salvo.

But the third and most important point is that humour does not undermine or belittle that which it uses to raise laughs. Because as Morris himself says, terrorism matters. A film like Four Lions might treat it in a way which might be different, but that is not necessarily 'offensive'. If it makes people think about terrorism in a different way, exposes subtleties to the subject because of the unusual angle, then it serves a purpose of simply adding a voice, a side to the story, on a very broad, current, feared and often misunderstood topic. If Four Lions makes people roar with laughter, and it makes some of them think as well, then, really that's all there is to it.

Nine for '09

2010-01-17T03:23:00.008Z

It wasn’t the most vintage year of the Noughties, 2009 – it didn’t throw up heavyweight classics (despite releases from bands like U2, Muse and Green Day), its debutants were often too lightweight (La Roux, Empire of the Sun, Dan Black) and it failed to really settle on what was supposed to be the sound of the year.

(Except for the number one here, and everywhere: pretty much anybody who has ever acted on an urge to translate their feelings about a record into the written word agreed on this year’s best album.)

What 2009 seemed to suggest was the increasing closeness of the oft-perceived class war between mainstream and underground, popular appeal and critical acclaim. Nobody who had an ‘album of the year’ in 2009 made music that wasn’t too far out for Radio One or Jools Holland. Solo female electro artists like La Roux jostled for airplay with chillingly sparse guitar-soulers The XX, while French neo-pop artists Phoenix adorned television adverts and instrumental mind-melters Fuck Buttons got played on Top Gear.

All in all, 2009 seemed to say, when music got good, it was very good. Some of it is outlined in more detail below.

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1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
When Noah Lennox’s solo album Person Pitch – released under his moniker Panda Bear –romped home as an album of the year in 2007 (and more recently cropped up in many lists as an album of the decade), it served to turn a few more heads toward Lennox’s band ‘proper’, Animal Collective. Their late 2007 album Strawberry Jam was equally well received, but even then, despite that step up in visibility, few would have wagered on their next studio album being by some stretch the best thing to come out of anywhere this year.

But it was, and everyone from bloggers to newspapers to zines to David Letterman joined forces to proclaim, all but unreservedly, that the album of 2009 had been won just two weeks after the year had dawned. Perhaps the most pertinent note to support this is that when 2009 came to a close, no one had changed their mind. The reason? Its irresistible collage of synth loops, primal rhythms and ecstatic joy-infused vocal melodies was mind-expanding, life-affirming and simply the best music released in 2009.

2. Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
By contrast, Wild Beasts’ second album was the year’s laudable slow-burner. Released to decent critical acclaim in August, Two Dancers’ appeal grew stronger and brighter with each listen, as its elegance revealed more glistening musical nuances and turned up gloriously eloquent lyrics – not least when Hayden Thorpe proclaims delicately and menacingly, “Trousers and blouses make excellent sheets / down dimly lit streets”. Like a blood stain smattered across deep pure snow, Two Dancers was a case of beauty struggling to envelop a dark underbelly: a perfect – and timely – counterbalance to Animal Collective’s winning effort.

3. Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
The boundless sense of ambition shared by the Fuck Buttons duo Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power manifested itself in wild, sprawling and at times plain awkward instrumentals on their debut, often exerting a sustained pressure of head-spinning soundscapes. With the follow up Tarot Sport, Hung and Power decided to uncork their ambitions further still, and yet somehow created frameworks in which their ideas and verve could work as ‘songs’. The insistent battering rhythm of ‘Surf Solar’, the climax of ‘Olympians’ and the hissing euphoria of album closer ‘Flight of the Feathered Serpent’ were just highlights from an extraordinary and unique sophomore album.

4. Florence and the Machine – Lungs
It was this time last year that everybody was getting very, very excited about a young Florence Welch. The flame-haired songstress was riding the crest of the hype wave, with storming live performances that hinted at greatness and singles that were, simply, ‘it’: that new sound that 2009 was going to be all about.

So it was to Florence’s great credit that Lungs turned out to be anything but that new sound. Explosive single “Kiss with a Fist” was lost among the embarrassment of gems on Lungs that wielded an unwavering power, presence and talent to the 22-year old. 12 fierce and passionate songs burned with Florence Welch’s voice, spilling reams of harp strings, not guitars, over everything, a cacophony of drums making and shaking Lungs’ foundations. Somehow, what came out the other side was a sound that was uniquely Florence’s (inspiring an infamous dressing-down from DiS), a different new sound that no one had really seen coming. Flo might have started the year as one of the BBC’s top sound for 2009 tips, and ended it with countless airplay time on Radio 1, but it was a success that her otherworldly debut record thoroughly merited.

5. The Mars Volta – Octahedron
Whatever it sounded like, The Mars Volta’s fifth LP in seven years was always going to land somewhere in this list for 2009. Having spent four albums expanding his band’s sonic palette to ever greater heights, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez came over all ‘acoustic’ on number five. The term was never expected to be more than tongue in cheek, but Octahedron’s eight tracks – bar, perhaps, the explosive ‘Cotapaxi’, whose climbing riff and intense wailing vocal wouldn’t have sounded out of place on previous album The Bedlam in Goliath – certainly took people by considerable surprise.

‘Since We’ve Been Wrong’, one of the band’s more inherent nods to Led Zeppelin, and ‘With Twilight as My Guide’ both flowed with barely a patter of drums, instead relying on layers of subtle guitar and a more natural use of Cedric Zavala-Bixler’s voice to focus the attention. Elsewhere, the restraint only increased quietly ferocious tracks ‘Teflon’ and ‘Desperate Graves’, the latter seeming to hint at a reference to Eriatarka, all the way back from their debut 2003. For purists, especially those who’ve still not forgiven Cedric and Omar for At The Drive-In ‘what ifs’, Octahedron was noticeably short on urgency and The Mars Volta’s usual psychedelic challenges, but its power and finesse came from a far more majestic, if softer, sound. New formula: same result for album number five.

6. Grammatics – Grammatics
The original foursome who released this gleaming debut back in February have, unfortunately, since jettisoned two members, including cellist Emilia, whose sweet string melodies and vocal harmonies combine to produce some of the album’s finest moments.

A grower, the self-titled LP was anything but guitar-driven, despite the band being fronted by ex-Colour of Fire man Owen Brinley His clever riffs and chords interplay with the cello lines, letting song structures ebb and flow, sometimes packed with intensity – especially Brinley's vocal histrionics – and sometimes allowed to simmer. Full of constantly surprising nuances and musical turns of phrase, on top of some striking rhythm work, Grammatics’ first record made for very affecting indie, grand with unbridled ambition but tempered by hints of pop. It’s a shame that half of the people who made this debut are no longer around to create the follow up. But in some ways, that just makes it an even more intriguing prospect.

7. Bombay Bicycle Club – I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose
When these youngsters burst onto my radar a couple of years ago, (ahem), their melodic, youthful output glimmered with promise, with one EP crafted and another equally exciting one soon to follow. 2009’s album delivered their great tunes, but with two years’ growing up, their sound had developed a broodier edge.

No longer were the vocals fragile and wide-eyed; instead Jack Steadman’s voice, while still quivering in places, seems to have been hardened by the tales of the love and loss told in the lyrics. Stronger, too, were the guitars – clever parallel melodies between two leading guitars, heavier chords and the occasional standout riff. With the tracks all in a similar vein genre-wise, yet each with its own individual flourishes and hooks, IHTBBISTL was something of a coming of age accomplishment. It was by no means an eyebrow-raiser, with several years’ hype weighing down in expectation, but it was perhaps the freshest sounding indie debut in the last year of the Noughties.

8. Arctic Monkeys – Humbug
Those Beatles comparisons refuse to die. Alex Turner, often half-hidden by his unruly, Lennon-esque mane and now, like Lennon, a resident of New York, may have toned down the bullish aggro that seemed a by-product of the Monkeys’ astronomical fame a couple of years back, but the music keeps on getting better.

Unlike their instant classic Whatever People Say... and its equally brilliant follow up Favourite Worst Nightmare, Humbug – introspective, moody, darker and, well, just slower – took a long time to truly give up its treasures. But when it did, Humbug evidenced some of Turner and Co’s’ greatest songs yet: ‘Crying Lightning’ built into their most well-rounded single to date and included Alex Turner’s fabulous storytelling at full strength (“You never looked like yourself from the side/but your profile could not hide/the fact you knew I was approaching your throne”), ‘Cornerstone’ was a simple slice of guitar pop, miles from the sharp punky singles from their first album. But it was elsewhere – the mysterious album closer ‘The Jeweller’s Hands’, the classic indie chorus of ‘Secret Door’, and ‘Fire and the Thud’, the shuffling, elegant George Harrison-like love song – that, over a few listens, posited the theory that after all the hype, the singles, the million-sellers, the awards, Arctic Monkeys’ third album Humbug was somehow their most impressive.

9. Passion Pit – Manners
When all the cool kids discovered Black Kids following their Wizard of Ahhhs EP at the end of 2007, and everyone else caught up six months later, they were supposed to be the brightest young things going, about to release a landmark debut. Instead, they released the Bernard Butler-produced, fun but musically pretty stagnant Partie Traumatic.

Manners, from Passion Pit, is the album Black Kids could (perhaps should) have made, full of joyous, bounding vocal melodies and eclectic electro sounds and visions. Its quirky synth lines fizzed with energy, sparking huge life into the sort of danceable indie that in other hands can so easily sound flat and false. Passion Pit instead were fresh, reinvigorating belief into a sound that was just starting to become a bit of a chore. With glorious choruses pouring in from all sides, songs like ‘Moth’s Wings’, ‘Sleepyhead’, ‘To Kingdom Come’, ‘The Reeling’, ‘Make Light’ and more soundtracked the year with uplifting dance anthems, making Manners a polite reminder of how well this genre can be done.

...and Nine more for 2009:

The XX – XX
Chillingly stripped back, quietly heart-stopping soulful dub-indie. Possibly a one-off.

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Jumpy, buoyant and brilliant French indie-pop oozing with class.

Wavves – Wavvves
Scruffy surfer pop to soundtrack unshaven, hungover and slightly-angry-for-no-reason Sundays.

Sky Larkin – The Golden Spike
Scratchy awkward riffs and shouty female vocals from the Leeds three-piece.

Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
Heartfelt folk with huge crossover appeal and uplifting soundscapes.

The Bird and The Bee – Ray Guns are Not the Future
Twee jazz-pop with added electronics, one of the most underrated albums this year.

Telegraphs – I Don’t Navigate By You
Outstanding British melodic rock with better choruses than Paramore and acute musical awareness.

Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
Powerful and epic, mystical and sometimes psychedelic, really it’s just good female pop and balladry.

Dent May and his Magnificent Ukulele – The Good Feeling Of...
Chirpy ‘50s throwbacks by a Costello-aping crooner and his “like a guitar but not a guitar” instrument. Worked.

Cheers.

Strauss's men pass sternest test

2010-01-07T20:34:00.009Z

From 4pm yesterday 'til 8.30am this morning, not many people would have given Andrew Strauss's men much hope of withstanding an entire day against a strong South African side, with their tails up, and with only seven wickets to last them. With less than an outside chance of England chasing down 466 - some 130 runs more than England's highest ever winning fourth innings chase - it was simply a case of how long England would last until the inevitable collapse.

And lesser sides - particularly some of England's, over the last 15 years or so - would have crumbled. At times, it had appeared that the collapse was just around the corner. When Trott and Anderson both went within 40 minutes of each in the morning session; when Paul Collingwood, after all his hard work had given England hope, was out quickly followed by Prior; and when Ian Bell, after 213 balls of intense pressure, left Graeme Swann and Graham Onions three overs to face against South Africa's pace attack, each time England looked doomed.

But Strauss's men have proven for the second time in South Africa what they are made of. Every man who batted for England on the final day of the test was heroic, from Anderson who faced 52 priceless balls to steady the ship at the start of the final day, to number 11 Graham Onions who might never be more proud to see his name next to a '0 Not Out'. Kudos go to Andrew Strauss and Alistair Cook too, for their 100 opening partnership on day four, without which the draw-clinching effort would not have stood a chance.

To Paul Collingwood and Ian Bell, though, go the biggest plaudits. Both spent over four hours at the crease each, guarding their wickets with their lives, not for personal glory - Collingwood made just 38 off 188 deliveries - but for the good of the team. Ian Bell, who despite having played over 50 test matches and scoring a stunning 142 in the previous match still gets the fiercest criticism, proved all his detractors wrong with a responsible and resilient 78 from 213 agonising deliveries, which alongside Collingwood's robust innings, proved to be a match-saving partnership.

Not that long ago, England's test cricketers would have been odds on to wilt in the intense heat of the South African sun, facing the intense pressure of saving a test match against a world class cricketing nation on their home patch. But this current England side is beginning to look nicely balanced, with world class players in every department and developing talents starting to flourish, and under the guidance of Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, the winning mentality is beginning to grow brighter. England cannot lose the Test series in South Africa now, and a win in the final test next week for a 2-0 series victory would confirm England's as a re-emerging power in world Test cricket once again.

Simon Cowell's back track highlights fear factor

2009-11-10T21:24:00.010Z

It was Halloween, in a grim twist of irony, when X-Factor tykes John and Edward's double act passed from the ridiculous to the ghoulish. Highly entertaining though their Ghostbusters... ’rendition’ was, it served on Halloween as a scary indication of the way the latest series of X-Factor is going. Losing sight of its apparent talent-finding objective, pandering to a public looking for some twist on Big Brother’s gormless reality TV format – which will finally die an ignoble death next year – Simon Cowell’s money-spinning programme has now jettisoned two genuine talents within its grasp in favour of far less talented, but more widely commercially appealing acts.

Admittedly, Rachel Adedeji's exit the weekend before last had less to do with John and Edward than Lucie Jones’s. Young Lloyd Daniels, who each week seems increasingly out of his depth, was suffering from a virus and virtually unable to sing in tune, yet despite Simon Cowell’s repeat assertions that he and the other judges base their decisions on the merit of the performance ‘on the night’ – something Cowell reiterated last week – it was clear that this is no longer the case. Rachel’s singing performance wiped the floor with Lloyd, only to be met with Cowell back tracking and putting her at the public’s mercy.

If viewers thought this was a one-off (and given their capacity shown so far to put up with childish nonsense on primetime television, they probably did), they were horribly mistaken. For the first time, last week John and Edward found themselves in the ‘bottom two’. It seemed a no-brainer. Louis Walsh would obviously stick by his boys. Cheryl Cole and Dannii Minougue would correctly support the talented singer Lucie Jones. And Simon Cowell would be only too delighted to oust the twins himself, ridding Louis Walsh of his only act, and ridding the competition of two boys who he himself had consistently maintained “can’t sing, can’t dance”. Cowell has always relished the role of X-Factor’s pantomime villain; here was his moment to kill off two main characters. Oh no he didn’t! Oh yes he did!

Except: oh no. He didn’t.

The X-Factor's twin publicity propellers have divided opinion like no other act in the six (yes, unbelievably, six) series of the show so far: even brother and sister combo Same Difference, for all their gut-wrenching, incestuous faux-romance shtick, were undeniably decent singers and capable performers. John and Edward (smartly shortened to Jedward by chortling Brangelina fans) have the capacity for neither. They’re High School Musical – without the music. The trouble is, that is the sort of snide putdown Cowell is renowned for. Yet this week he clambered clumsily all over his previous statements and intentions and, knowing full well that Jedward were never likely to be the public’s least favourite, gave his backing to the boys. On television, as Lucie Jones broke down in tears, the crowd weren’t even split 50/50: the boos far, far outweighed the cheers.

Simon Cowell is not stupid, however. He said himself that the twins won’t win the competition, and he’s right. There isn’t a Facebook campaign big enough to garner the twins that amount of support. So at a purely tactical level, Cowell is now holding the cards for three of the six remaining acts that could win this year’s competition. He has furthered his stronghold with the decisions that cost Rachel Adedeji and Lucie Jones, genuinely talented vocalists and rivals to his acts, their finalist places.

His wisdom runs deeper than beating the other judges, of course. Cowell knows that John and Edward attract a wider audience than a simple ‘talent versus talent’ shoot out would. He knows that the twins’ plight has given the programme itself an X-Factor. The twins certainly don’t have any, but they’re the twist the programme needs to stay fresh each week; their survival enthrals both the audience cheering them on, and the audience baying for their blood. No other act can command such attention in equal measures, and Cowell, fearful of losing such a massive audience segment, has acted. For once, the show has a bigger villain than Simon Cowell himself – and all the best stories need a villain.

But in replacing himself as the necessary evil, Cowell briefly lowered his guard. As The Guardian wrote on Monday, in prolonging the absurd theatre of this year’s X-Factor Cowell has cheapened its core values; the search for singing talent, and the dreams of those who enter. He has given in to public demand, dethroning himself as the pervading pop idol of X-Factor and put popularity measured in television ratings ahead of everything else: the programme’s integrity, the album and single sales, the record deals, the tours. And once the Jedward novelty wears off – about January 2nd 2010, I’d wager – it will be very difficult to claw that elevated status back.

No longer can he claim, as he did last weekend, that the programme is made for the dreams of people like Leona Lewis: this year’s strongest female singer is already out of the competition thanks to Cowell. Maybe the lifecycle of X-Factor is drawing to a close, and Cowell’s short-term gain at the programme's long term expense is already in full flow. Perhaps Cowell’s mind is turning toward the infinitely more empathetic stories that drive Britain’s Got Talent. But whatever might happen, X-Factor has suddenly been reduced to pure spectacle. Cowell has tarnished the programme’s mission statement, and possibly its reputation; for good.

The Resistance: is futile? A track-by-track reaction

2009-09-21T12:32:00.002Z

GIITTV deputy editor Tim Miller goes through Muse's new album 'The Resistance' track-by-track. But is the Resistance futile? Or not?

Uprising –

Hang on, this can’t be right, the CD’s playing Kasabian’s ‘Shoot the Ru –’ oh no, this is actually it. Now it sounds a bit Dr. Who theme-ish; spacey and wishy-washy. Matt Bellamy’s wailing about being ‘victorious’ again. For the third album in the row. Sigh. Bellamy’s chord progression expertise is here, that’s evident, and it’s a passable romp, but where are the guitars?

More...

Da Silva lining

2009-09-14T20:20:00.006Z

UEFA's lightning U-turn on their own decision to ban Arsenal's forward Eduardo for diving would raise many an eyebrow and derisive snort, were it not for the fact that that had been the majority reaction to the initial decision in the first place. With, as usual, impeccably ham-fisted timing, UEFA waded into a minor, irrelevant subplot from the one-sided Arsenal versus Celtic Champions League qualifier, and blew it out of all proportion.

Matters weren't helped when Scottish FA chief Gordon Smith needlessly and publicly criticised Eduardo for his 'dive' that won Arsenal a penalty, resulting in one of the five goals they scored against Celtic. Deception or not, Celtic's own players and manager admitted it was immaterial to the tie, but such was the furore drummed up by Smith and the media - probably due to the lack of other talking points from a match that thoroughly highlighted the gulf between the English and Scottish top leagues - that the incident took centre stage.

As dives go - if it was a dive, that is - it was hardly blatant, hardly the sniper bullet-suffering theatrics that are seen across Europe and occasionally creep into England's top flight. Sure, Eduardo is guilty of leaving his body there to allow for contact with the goalkeeper, as Wayne Rooney did against Arsenal a couple of weeks ago too. But how severe the level of gamesmanship is no longer the issue.

Referees have the power to - and do - punish players they deem to have dived, handing an on the spot yellow card. When UEFA got clumsily involved, this should have been the extent of their remit, to give Eduardo a retrospective yellow card. After all, if an off-the-ball sending off offence occurs in a match, which the referee does not see, the Football Association can go back and decide to ban the offending player for three games, the equivalent of a straight red card - as is likely to happen in yet another event involving Arsenal, Emmanuel Adebayor's stud on Robin Van Persie's face from the weekend. But in the case of Eduardo, UEFA took it further and rightly garnered furious criticism from Arsenal, and many points across football.

The reaction was justified, largely because while UEFA and FIFA condemns diving, this was the first occasion a retrospective and severe punishment had been handed out for the offence. Television cameras have been catching players diving every week for years and years, and yet UEFA chose to 'set a precedent' by punishing an inconsequental dive that paled in comparison to the out and out cheating that has gone before it, and that ultimately made no difference to the game it came in.

If their choice in timing was ill-judged, then their involvement at all was bizzare. UEFA would have had no reason to revisit the incident had Gordon Smith not voiced his futile annoyance. So in their effort to affect the game for the greater good, UEFA's precedent essentially became this: 'moan enough about an alleged dive in a football match, and we'll go back and ban each player for two matches if it can be reasonably proven'. Of course they've now overturned it; the very idea is a non-starter. That UEFA could have even begun to uphold the standard they would have set had they allowed Eduardo's ban to stand is clearly impossible.

And that isn't even to say what the precedent would have set for challenging ANY refereeing decision. Take one of the most common problems in football - an offside goal. These errors can be proven within 10 seconds, never mind post-match. So for example, a team loses 2-1 with the winner being an offside goal: given that the losing team can prove they've suffered at the hands of a poor decision, do UEFA now go and cancel out that goal? Change the outcome of the match and award both teams a point? Where do you draw the line, UEFA? Rather than try and answer the question, sensibly the governing body for European football have overturned their ridiculous Eduardo Da Silva decision that got them into the predicament in the first place.

Every cloud...

Following in Freddie's footsteps? As long as it is Broad...

2009-08-26T22:47:00.009Z

There was never any doubt, of course, that Andrew 'Freddie' Flintoff could possibly allow the fifth and final Ashes Test match of 2009 - and his last for England - to pass him by. Though he offered two indifferent innings with the bat, and huge, gargantuan heart and effort with the ball for no reward, the pivotal moment of the deciding Test nevertheless fell to Flintoff - in the field.

Australia, chasing an improbable (and would-be record-breaking) 546 to win, were making a decent effort of it. Mike Hussey and Ricky Ponting had shared a third wicket stand of 127 runs when Hussey chanced a quick single to Flintoff at mid-off, presumably thinking he would be the one in danger as they ran. But Flintoff, so often in his career the big man for England in big moments, had his eyes on the big prize: the potentially match-winning wicket of Aussie captain Ricky Ponting. And, in one 30-yard throw, as though of pure lightning, Flintoff had done it. The single second on which the Test, and ultimately the 2009 Ashes series, hinged, was a moment of magic from Flintoff. As he has done more recently (as he's got older), Flintoff stood basking in the adulation of the crowd, awaiting his teammates to envelop him hugs and high fives. The key moment of the Ashes 2009 series had fallen to the key man, and he had, as ever delivered.

Following the ecstasy of the series win, the talk swiftly fixed upon where England are going to find Flintoff's replacement. He had always been considered the 'Botham' of his generation - who would be the next one, or more pertinently, the next Flintoff? Up until his announcement that he was retiring from Test cricket, it hadn't really been a problem. Suddenly, it was a panic. It was fitting, then, that the fifth test's Man of the Match, Stuart Broad, should properly step up to the plate in Andrew Flintoff's final Test match for England.

Broad, supported by Graham Swann, stole the show over the first two days. An entertaining quickfire 37 ensured England nudged a first innings total of 325+, but then came his starring moment. A majestic, unanswerable 12 overs of quick, accurate and clever fast bowling blew apart the Australian batting order, and gave England an advantage from which it would soon become impossible to lose. This, to many watching, was where Stuart Broad finally delivered on the potential he's been showing for the last two or three years, and proved he is capable of individual match-winning performances.

Without doubt, Broad has always had the talent to be a top performer for England. But critics have pointed to his temperament - think back to his dreadful over just in June in the T20 World Cup against Netherlands, where he literally threw the match away - and his bowling has often been expensive, a sign of inexperience and lacking concentration. With the bat, Broad has regularly shown his natural talent - elegant strokeplaying, attacking mindset, able to score quick runs - but his bowling seemed to let him down in the 'all-rounder' takes.

Not anymore. As well as scoring two fifties, contributing important runs in the final match and averaging better than recognised batsmen Alistair Cook, Paul Collingwood, Ian Bell and Ravi Bopara, Broad also became England's most potent bowler. Broad took the most wickets, including two 'five-fors', at the best average. And contrary to his previous problems with expense, Broad's economy rate was a smidge over 3.5 an over: compare that with Jimmy Anderson who was at 3.4, and generally recognised as England's best bowler before the series, and it seems more than decent.

The Ashes 2009 was the biggest series of Broad's life and across the five tests he has performed. After an inauspicious start too; following the first two tests Broad was in the firing line to be dropped. But Andrew Strauss, Andy Flower and the England selectors stuck with their precocious pin-up - and it paid dividends. England have now got to be patient with the star Englishman of the Ashes 2009. Broad is far from the finished product: consistency is what separates the greats like Brian Lara from erratic genius like Kevin Pietersen, and Broad is only just learning now how to use his talents tactically: when he does, he has proven he can be a match-winner. For sure, Stuart Broad can be nurtured into one of the best English all-rounders of recent generations - he is after all still young and, touch wood, not injury prone. But to be the next Andrew Flintoff, he will need careful handling, support and persistence; enough time to bloom, enough matches to become a regular England performer, enough opportunities to win matches for his nation. Because when England expected, Flintoff would deliver. If Broad is given the same treatment as Freddie, he will deliver too.

Fabulous FIB - Benicassim 2009 in review

2009-08-03T18:06:00.002Z

Hey to everyone who does read this: sorry it took, and is, so long! Great memories...

There are better ways to spend a Friday night than hiding from gale-force winds huddled in an empty paddling pool at 2am while horizontal torrents of sand and dust whip the skin from your face and loose tents fly overhead. Preferably, you’d be getting pissed round a campfire having cheered on Kings of Leon earlier, given that’s why you’re out in the Spanish seaside town of Benicàssim in the first place. But, as has been well documented, the Friday night of Benicàssim Festival was something of a disaster.

Luckily, it was a minor blip in an otherwise stellar journey...

More...

For Iran, citizen journalism is the only journalism

2009-06-25T14:17:00.002Z

Twitter has courted its fair share of news headlines since the turn of the year – many for its novelty factor, in truth – but this time it was different. When online news sources began reporting that Twitter had rescheduled technical maintenance to its service in order to allow a crucial daytime period for Iranian users to go uninterrupted, it highlighted not only that Government restrictions are clearly oppressing communication from within the state, but also the very real power that sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook now possess.

It is without doubt the most telling example of the increased significance of ‘citizen journalism’ to date. With official channels stifled and doctored, and censorship clamping down on internet usage in Iran, sites like Twitter and YouTube don’t just offer an outlet for the Iranian people but a view in for the world outside. The importance of these two-way flows of information cannot be underestimated, as proven by Twitter’s decision to delay its technical work last week, but more potently in one of the most landmark internet videos in the web’s history.

The death of Neda Agha-Soltan, shot in the street of a Tehran suburb, was captured by a civilian with a mobile phone camera, chillingly recording the last moments of the young girl’s life. It was uploaded to YouTube and Facebook within minutes. Its amateurish but unmistakable footage is disturbing, but the content itself is hardly shocking by the net’s standards. What sets it apart is that this video is being shared by everyday people worldwide, and broadcast by international news sources too: YouTube is allowing multiple versions of the footage to sit on its site attracting millions of views; CNN replayed the whole film in its news broadcasts; in the UK, the video made the front page of the Guardian. An unknown citizen journalist has created the single most iconic image of the 2009 Iranian Election: the girl lying prostrate in the street, blood streaming from her mouth, her eyes rolling back into her head.

More than a mile from the main demonstrations, this moment would have been missed by the world’s media, and would have been smothered by the Iran regime if they’d caught hold of it first. But instead the power of citizen journalism is fully realised; clearly it no longer reflects upon the news (unlike this blog does), but now creates and shapes it.

At the same time, the fallout from the Iran election is being given a platform that can no longer be ignored. The words and images emanating from the protests in Iran have a global stage on which they are communicated, and importantly, a global audience too. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have given the Iranian people a voice, an escape for an otherwise hidden version of events to rival the official controlled reporting, and that this is resonating with people around the world is overwhelmingly evident.

The events in Iran have further blurred the rapidly decreasing boundary between traditional and new media, and called into question the truth and validity of ‘official’ reporting. The reaction across social media sites has mobilised worldwide outrage and sympathy, and the issue is now unavoidable. The tools of the web have shed light on what the Iranian people see as the real truth, and for Iran, citizen journalism has been the only outlet to do it.

Relegation, relegation, relegation

2009-05-26T20:23:00.004Z

As Newcastle's 'best fans in the country' will be counting to their cost, the high profile calamitous collapse through the trap door that was the Magpie's relegation brought the curtain down on one of the best English Premier League seasons in recent years. The title chase was a genuinely exciting two/three horse race for much of the season, extended perhaps by United's timely dip in form after being trounced 4-1 by Liverpool, while the bottom half of the table resembled chaotic turmoil until the very end, as gradually one by one teams hauled themselves away from the yawning chasm into the Championship.

While the gulf remains between the top four and the rest - painfully so for Villa, who saw a seven-point lead over Arsenal crumble to a ten-point deficit in just 13 games - the relegation of Newcastle and Middlesborough, plus close shaves for Blackburn and Sunderland, only goes to highlight the narrowing gap between the lower regions of Premiership football and the Championship. Middlesborough have flirted with relegation and promotion for over 10 years, while West Brom have also been classic bouncers between the divisions recently, and Birmingham sealed automatic promotion just a year after losing their Premiership status.

But a deeper look into the Championship explains why the two divisions are drawing nearer in quality. The top four teams have all been in the Premiership within the last three years. Between positions 6 and 20 there are eight clubs who enjoyed decent Premiership spells since the league's inception: QPR, Crystal Palace, Sheffield Wednesday, Ipswich and Coventry to name a few, not to mention Nottingham Forest. But most intriguingly, the three relegated teams from the Championship this season were all in the Premiership four years ago, and in Southampton and Charlton's cases, well established, if unspectacular, top level sides.

In all, 16 of last season's 24 Championship teams have graced the Premier League in its 18 years. Scattered around leagues One and Two are more examples of others - Swindon, Oldham, Leeds. Rarely are the Premiership's relegated teams all obvious candidates - consider examples of Leeds and West Ham, and Newcastle, being considered 'too good to go down'. With the competition as fierce as it is, that old adage just doesn't wash.

But if the likes of Hull City, Stoke and Burnley seem odd in the Premier League, it only reinforces the strength of the second tier of English football. Ex-Premiership sides don't get promoted by right anymore, as a short on form Reading discovered, despite missing out on automatic promotion on the last day. And, as Norwich, Southampton and Charlton can testify, it is quickly possible to struggle in the Championship even with years of Premiership experience. Ultimately, if you can't adapt quickly to the Championship, aspirations of a promotion chase can easily turn to fearful glances over your shoulder (something Derby can also sympathise with, after their indifferent Championship season).

And so it will be for Newcastle, Boro' and West Brom that relegation isn't just relocation, a change of scenery for a year (the Baggies are probably well aware of this anyway). Unless they take seriously the burgeoning strength of English football's most competitive league, and prepare in the right way for a long and difficult season, fighting for the right to harbour Premier League hopes rather than assuming they deserve them, the harsh reality of life in the Championship may just have a couple more major scalps to make.

Bournemouth in decent gig lineup shocker

2009-05-03T21:08:00.001Z

Four and a half years I’ve lived in Bournemouth, and tonight’s gig is the biggest live music coup I can recall; certainly in terms of eye-catching and wave-making new bands. The Gander – a grotty, carpeted room that looks inside like a local football team’s decrepit clubhouse, sitting above a much trendier bar – welcomes four acts, and three are what you call in the indie scene ‘names’. More...

Spotfiy's the difference

2009-04-20T15:43:00.015Z

While undoubtedly the most high profile filesharing courtcase to date, Pirate Baygate has this weekend also become one of the leading global news stories. Sir Paul McCartney has brought the debate closer to the UK with his comments to the BBC, judging the verdict 'fair'; the Guardian has poured scorn on the ruling that will see four Swedes spend a year each in jail and pay (or not pay) in excess of $3m to the undernourished record conglomerates; while forums, Twitterati and online communities the world over have vowed to continue with their illegal downloading efforts. You only have to read the reaction of BBC website users to realise just how marginalised the support for the record companies is.

For one thing, Pirate Bay has been heralded in many places in the last few days for its innovation; it is a central location for links to torrents from which its users - which numbered 22 million in February - can download free music, film and television files. It represents the height of the digital revolution in accessing and distributing music. It stands as a beacon against the record companies who still want to charge £10 or more for physical CDs, and who have monetised the digital musical publishing industry for not much less of that cost.

Trouble is, its primary function is to facilitate an illegal practice.

While it plays the Robin Hood of the online music scene, there's a reason why the word 'Pirate' is in its name. Pirate Bay didn't host the free files, but allowed and assisted mass access to them. In the same way you can be charged separately for the possession and supplying of drugs, the Pirate Bay verdict has shown that music giants are capable of not just successfully prosecuting the people who own illegal files, but the ones supplying them too.

Where the real issue lies, though, and why the case has been derided in many circles, is that the ruling poses an insignificant threat to the activity itself. Pirate Bay does very little more than Google, a point that is being increasingly made in the fallout, in 'making available' copyrighted material. A Google search for BitTorrents will get you the links required to start your illegal downloading career. And indeed, if Pirate Bay had 22 million users in February, surely twice that many more have now been made aware of the service. The founders of the site will be behind bars, but the website will not be shut down. Its users will not stop, and it won't prevent other services from continuing. Napster, all those years ago, was ahead of its time and suffered for its art, but set a precedent that, given the ubiquity of the internet, is simply unstoppable in this day.

The answer is great value, legitimate online services, and many new start up sites are learning quickly how to make techniques pioneered by martyrs like Napster and Pirate Bay legal. Which is why the divisive verdict has been particularly timely for Spotify.

Something akin to the Twitter of online music applications, essentially Spotify combines the access of Last.fm with the recognised layout of iTunes. It's free, legal, and they're adding albums in their thousands by the day (literally: check out their blog as they continue to bolster the Spotify library). What's great is that currently, the music labels are buying into it too: Spotify obtains licences for every single minute of music they put up. Their revenue consists of advertisers, whose 45-second ads crop up once every five songs or so if you're a non-paying user, and the fees from premium users, who pay £9.99 a month to forgo the adverts. Like much of what's good about the internet at the moment, it's innovative but simple, easy and accessible. And also, possibly, revolutionary.

It allows free, constant and instant access to pretty much all the music you could want on your computer - and if you can't find something, you can be sure it won't be long in coming. The one difference is you don't have the bytes stored on your hard drive. Is that so difficult to grapple with? Real music fans will not have a problem in paying money towards owning someone else's art, be it an official download or a new CD, if owning a particular song is so much of a burning issue. And in any case, to counter the overpricing problem, artists are increasingly finding innovative ways of packaging, complementing or adding value to physical copies of music: exclusive downloads, gig tickets and competitions, t-shirts, badges, books, DVDs, teabags.

The rise of online has caused a shift in importance from ownership to access, according to one of Spotify's founders. The method of free legal access to copyrighted material and free illegal ownership of it is indistinguishable, but Spotify is the most recent winner of the battle by being the safest bridge between the gap. It is, of course, in its infancy and no doubt will face a challenge in sustaining its business model against ongoing illegal filesharing and the newly-buoyed record companies. But it is growing, and conveniently doing so at a time where embracing some sort of digital model is the only way forward, regardless of who you are or where you stand on the internet's regulatory and ownership flaws. The Pirate Bay case has served to highlight how much there is a need for the gap to be bridged further still, but, for the moment at least, those who still respect the rights of an artist to their intellectual property will be able to Spot the difference.

The Sun won't shine on Hillsborough

2009-04-10T23:31:00.007Z

20 years ago today, 96 Liverpool fans were killed at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough ground in an FA Cup semi final against Nottingham Forest. It was a disaster, the worst footballing tragedy the English game has known, one that resonates still today, and particularly on its 20th anniversary. Everyone knows what happened, and everyone is united in sadness and respect - Liverpool, Manchester United and Everton supporters alike, players, managers, fans and families.

Everyone except Kelvin MacKenzie.

The editor of the Sun newspaper at the time, MacKenzie's editorial on the Wednesday (19th April 1989) after the disaster was so badly misjudged as to be unheard of. The Sun's front page alleged that the Liverpool fans stole from and abused their own supporters, urinated and attacked the emergency services. It was simply unbelievable that a leading newspaper could support such claims. What was simply catastrophic is that it could parade the allegations - on the front page, remember - as 'The Truth'.

According to a book on the history of the Sun, MacKenzie was alone in his conviction behind the newspaper's stance on the tragedy, and as editor, no-one stood in his way. No one else at the paper, it seemed, thought that that day's edition of the paper was a mistake, or misjudgement, or confusion. To everyone but MacKenzie, that Wednesday's paper was little more than outright, and deliberately accusing, lies.

MacKenzie originally apologised for the error personally in 1993, excusing his actions on the grounds of believing what a Conservative MP had said, which had been supported - apparently - by the Chief Superintendent, who later admitted to lying in statements immediately following the disaster.

The Sun, in 2004, the 15th anniversary of the disaster, took the opportunity to apologise unreservedly for that terrible error, and labelled it - quite rightly - the worst mistake in the paper's history. It goes without saying that you would be hard-pressed to find another, by any paper, on that sort of level. But the fact remains that MacKenzie's editorial was a lone choice, based on statements by unnamed sources and hearsay, with literally hundreds of counter statements from supporters who were at the game, on the pitch, in the stands, at the time.

Despite not having a leg to stand on, MacKenzie then shot himself in both feet. In 2007 he stated he was forced to apologise by Rupert Murdoch in 1993, against his will. An infamous quote attributed to MacKenzie is, "I was not sorry then and I'm not sorry now." His only concession to this day, by all accounts, is that he does now 'not know' if everything that he stood behind in that paper's shocking coverage was true. In other words, still MacKenzie has no reason not to believe in what he printed.

MacKenzie, however, does not deserve to be forever tied to the disaster as it lives on in the memory of football fans. Nor does the Sun newspaper. Despite their hollow apology of 2004, obviously the paper has gone through many changes in 20 years and even being the rag that it is, is not capable of making the same mistake again. MacKenzie has said that the distinction between the tragedy and the newspaper story is blurred, and he is right. The blame for the events of the day that caused the 96 deaths should not lie at MacKenzie's feet - he was not responsible, or in a position of authority on the day that could have saved those lives. The Justice For 96 campaign needs to remember the facts, and they are firmly pointed toward the authorities at the ground on the fateful day.

MacKenzie, however, refused to deal in, and still fails to acknowledge, facts. His terribly misguided bullish stance has earned him notoriety in Liverpool, and indeed across most football fans who were alive at the time, and he is hated. However, such an arrogant, callous man does not deserve a place in history alongside one of the most genuine sporting tragedies, and neither does the diabolical decision he made to publish a newspaper story belittling it. Boycotted for the last 20 years by thousands and thousands of people across Merseyside, and indeed the nation, The Lies by the Sun and its editor will never be forgiven, of course, and there will never come a day where the paper can make amends for its shocking conduct over Hillsborough.

What is most important, though, is that what happened on the day is remembered beyond all. Only in the hearts of those who were at Hillsborough on 15th April 1989 are the full facts, and for the peace and mind of families and friends of the 96 victims, justice might never find its way out. But The Truth is that the dead need to be remembered, the mistakes need to be learned from (and have been), the grieving needs to respected and wounds need time, and support, to heal. The humanity of Hillsborough - the loss of life, the outpouring of emotion, the uniting of people in sadness and respect - is its greatest lasting memory, and one man and one issue of a tabloid are just tomorrow's fish and chips paper.

Mach ado about nothing

2009-04-08T13:07:00.007Z

What was unthinkable just three weeks ago has become an exciting and tense footballing reality. Manchester United were swanning down the home straight to the Premiership title, had drawn the - on paper - weakest opposition in the Champions League, had two cups in the cabinet and were in the semi finals of a third. The question wasn't whether United would win more trophies, but whether they could win ALL five of them.

That has now changed, quickly and drastically. United met Liverpool in a make-or-break match - for the Anfield side anyway - that, had United won, would have all but settled the Premiership title race. But they crumbled at the hands of Rafa Benitez, whose well-organised, energetic side led by Torres and Gerrard carried out a clinical and thrilling 4-1 dismantling of Alex Ferguson's men. Since that result, United have put in three lacklustre performances since: a 2-0 humbling at Fulham, an undeserved victory against Aston Villa thanks to a 17-year old debutant's moment of magic, and a barely deserved draw at home in the Champions League (quarter finals, no less) against Porto.

The last four games have exposed severe frailties in defence and a worrying lack of creativity going forward. United have conceded more goals in the last three Premier League games than in their previous 15, and have proven that without the formidable Ferdinand/Vidic partnership, others - notably Gary Neville and John O'Shea, not to mention Edwin Van Der Sar - are nowhere near the level required to keep clean sheets against top teams when the pair are missing.

Similarly, United's attacking options have run out of steam at just the wrong time. Ronaldo seems to be sulking, though two excellent goals against Villa managed to stave off excessive criticism and he could yet prove to be the single deciding factor in United's success this season. Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs both now look short on fitness when required to dominate the midfield in big games, with the latter virtually restricted to substitute appearances to affect matches. Michael Carrick, so essential for much of the season, seems to have run himself into the ground trying to provide defensive cover at the expense of the consistently injured Owen Hargreaves, and both vision and passing at the expense of Fletcher, who has neither. Whisper it, but a key figure for United currently missing is the Brazilian youngster Anderson, who can provide the perfect foil to Carrick's deeper creativity. United's bit-part midfielders, Ji-Sung Park and Nani, have suddenly become big game necessities.

Berbatov's disappointing season looks set to end in patches as he returns from injury, and United's predicament was summed up neatly by last night's performance,where only the industry and loyalty of Wayne Rooney and Carlos Tevez saved United's blushes - and the latter isn't even a full United player, still. The fans have made up their minds firmly on where Tevez's future should lie, though, and Ferguson should have the nous to realise how important he is to keep. If not, Barcelona or Real Madrid will surely come calling.

Against Porto, United were out-passed, outmanoeuvred, devoid of flair and that winning mentality that Ferguson instills in all of his teams, gifted their opening goal and lucky not to concede twice as many. Of course, that they had to work extremely hard against Villa barely 48 hours earlier showed. Again there, United were second all over the pitch for the third league game in a row, but the heroic Federico Macheda's last-gasp winner to steal three points was supposed to reignite the United march for five trophies.

The ecstasy and jubilation at that goal subsided last night, however, when United turned in another poor performance against a thrilling Porto team, and dealt their Champions League defence a hammer blow. It would be stupid to write United off in any of their competitions yet though - Ferguson's various United generations have made snatching victories from defeat's open jaws a habit over the last decade. An unprecedented quintuple would be Ferguson's greatest feat, possibly unrepeatable in future seasons, and United still have the time and the players to chase that dream.

Very quickly, however, Manchester United need to rediscover their form and self-belief of a few weeks ago, or the wonderkid's goal that supposedly set their title ambitions back on course will turn out to be much ado about nothing.

Jade Goody's 'legacy' should not be as a cash cow

2009-03-29T21:25:00.010Z

The late Jade Goody has always been a favourite target of mine for this blog and throughout its archives are probably a generous spread of more-than-derisory remarks on the unfortunate icon who became the figurehead of a reality TV-obsessed - but not always friendly - media. I hadn't wanted to make any comment on her death - heaven knows it's everywhere else right now - but the fallout from Jade's demise peaked at fever pitch some weeks ago, and has failed to drop off since. It had been acceptable, although naturally over the top, but the personal tipping point came for me over the weekend, as headlines screamed of globally-renowned actresses being lined up to portray Goody in a film about her life.

Now let's get one thing straight. Jade Goody was an ordinary woman, with no outstanding talent, who contributed nothing of worth to society at large for about 26 of the 27 years of her life. In fact, her lack of intellect, Essex roots and loud mouth were remarkably common, middle of the road. Aside from (the small matter of) her early death, the more recent of Goody's years have been graced by extraordinary good luck.

Catapulted from a lower-class abyss to nationwide stardom in just a summer - with not one identifiable reason why, apart from a ravenous desire on the public's part for her documented humiliation - Goody was the first, and ultimate, reality TV star. Goody was ridiculed, admonished, shamed and caught out for months - yet refused to go away. It came full circle when, two years ago, she went on Big Brother again, this time as a celebrity in her own right. Books, videos, relationships, photoshoots, columns, interviews, TV shows - Jade Goody was the cat that got all the reality TV cream. She was rich, she was a success, beyond the dreams of many who share similar backgrounds to the Bermondsey babe, and for nothing more than exploiting the happy chance fate decreed her. She was the first to benefit from the insatiable cycle of reality TV feeding tabloids feeding public feeding reality TV, and because she was, she was also the last one standing. She is the irritating testament to just how far you can go in this country - despite having no remarkable talent whatsoever.

But it was not for her life in the media spotlight that Jade has a 'legacy'. In fact following the 'racism row' (more stupidity than malicious, and it's made Shilpa Shetty a household name), Goody was starting to tumble down the side of the peak she had been atop for so long. It was the onset of an untimely and unstoppable death that swung things back again.

To me, it says something that it took being diagnosed with cancer, that most terrible of illnesses, for the public to forgive and accept Jade Goody (I mean a certain public here, not necessarily everyone, and certainly not myself). It doesn't say a lot for her regard, and it doesn't say a lot for the press either, who were quite happily lambasting the woman one day and quite suddenly mourning for her the next.

The months leading up to the inevitable were quite astonishing. She did what any normal mother would, and that was to safeguard her children's future as best she possibly could, and, in the privileged position of being able to command hundreds of thousands of pounds for her fast-diminishing time, must have accounted for a lot of money, and is still probably making heaps as I write. Handled correctly, the money Jade will have secured will be immense, but the act alone does not make the woman remarkable.

Jade Goody also campaigned, with incredible success in such a short period of time, to raise the awareness of cervical cancer. Again, aided by the constant spotlight of a media falling over itself to portray her as an understudy to Princess Diana, great work has been achieved to this end. But there are many charities, and countless women who are faceless and nameless behind the scenes, who are doing exactly the same sort of work, for far, far less success. Goody's heroic success in reaching out to generations of women with an urgent and potentially life-saving message is remarkable only in its highlighting of how collective support can be mobilised by something as trivial as a twentysomething single mum dying. As if that doesn't happen every day of the week. Many of my friends have raised money in their own way for charities to support other family members and loved ones to the full extent they can. Jade did nothing differently to you or I; she merely had the help of the nation's daily media on her side.

It is the mark of a nation who can raise £57 million in one evening for a televised charity appeal, but who look the other way when offered a £1.80 Big Issue.

'Cash' and 'cow' are two words that have followed the late Ms Goody around from the moment she filled our television screens ten years ago. But she died a near-national treasure, a term that no matter how I look at her story, her 'achievements', her 'troubled past', her 'success', I cannot bring myself to accept. Her life story is made all the more remarkable by just how ordinary a woman she was, and how easily she was able to forge a career via an ever-present spotlight, and a huge market lapping up every tit-bit, good, bad or - as was often the Jade Goody case - ugly.

Hers is a story barely worth re-telling, lest the extreme spectrum of reality lived out by Goody be over- or under-played. She is worth remembering, of course, but a reinterpretation of Jade Goody's life will no doubt lend itself to a heart-warming, feelgood outcome. To preserve the memory of Jade Goody the person does not require Jade Goody: The Film (a.k.a one final money-spinning opportunity). No doubt her estate - no longer a two up, two down in Romford - will want the legacy of Jade Goody to be decent and dignified, qualities that the woman herself sometimes embarrassingly lacked. But a blockbuster movie would be indicative only of the society that made her the celebrity, and not of the down to earth, bubbly and honest qualities that made Jade Goody the person.

If it does happen, a film to mark Goody's death would be in danger of distorting reality one time too many. Because however much it may try to have us believe, the life and times of Jade Goody did not have a happy ending after all.

Seeing wood for the trees

2009-03-02T22:35:00.004Z

This economic climate, then. I've avoided getting on to it until now, because it's been everywhere for too long already and it's getting worse through constant coverage, doom-mongering, and so on like this blog. But it's taken some very real effects to people close at hand to bring home just how quickly this climate needs to bounce back.

I won't say much about it because I had genuine faith in people, the power of uniting in the face of adversity and challenging a crisis head on, to believe that come end of 2009, we'd have turned this ship around and been heading for a brighter horizon, albeit it sailing with much more care and attention to the course.

I don't believe that anymore. I don't believe in people now. This is all someone else's fault. Everyone is out for themselves, no one trusts anyone else to do something about the crisis, and individually everyone is contributing to a worsening situation that affects everyone collectively more badly than the day before anyway. There is no public trust in the banks or the Government to pull the economy around, there is only finger pointing between institutions to blame the crisis on a cause instead of unity and responsibility in getting through this, the media tells us the worst is yet to come, then behind us, then the worst ever, and no one is looking further than their own nose.

But it is going to take trust, more than anything, to turn this situation around. Only by putting faith in the people paid/elected to do their jobs right will this issue be addressed. If people actually thought, for one moment, 'hang on, what if I do something about it?' and changed the negative attitudes, put some belief (and some money) back into the banks and the economy, rather than cursing that damned 'someone' whose fault this all is, then things would be brighter based on a collective unity and effort to right the wrongs.

Yes mistakes have been made by few in high places, and everyone now has to suffer the consequences. But the consequences have now become so vast that everyone will have to pick up the pieces, not just for themselves but for others, to reverse the sliding global economy. It's going to require trust in each other to pull together for a greater good, instead of individual short-term safety (which has thus far done nothing but bad - for anyone). The bigger picture needs repairing through the changed views of millions of little pictures. But when the public can't seem to see the wood for the trees, I don't trust anyone else to think the same way.

It's Calypso cricket, Andrew, but not as we know it

2009-02-20T16:45:00.006Z

Fortune favours the brave. He who dares wins. Just a couple of cliches that could be, and have been, applied to England's 3rd Test in Antigua. If you're feeling particularly vitriolic, you could apply them more specifically to Andrew Strauss's captaincy. In these days of instant success or failure, a lot of questions, if not criticism, will be placed at the spikes of Andrew Strauss.

But this was only Strauss's second Test match as captain proper. It was also one in exceptionally unusual circumstances, although given the Mumbai bombing-affected Tests last December, abandoning one due to the pitch being more like a beach and rearranging the next for two days later must seem like pretty standard fare by comparison. Regardless, several key decisions had to be made, and as it was England drew a Test they should have won.

The first decision was whether to make the West Indies follow on, after dismissing them for a first innings total of 285. Strauss instead chose to bat again. Was he right? England's bowlers were on a roll, there was enough time in the day to take another couple of West Indies wickets, and possibly pile on the pressure for day three. They could have knocked the West Indies all out for an innings defeat, or leaving a meagre total to chase in England's second innings.

But: Flintoff had picked up an injury. Harmison had been unwell all day. In fact the whole team had toiled admirably in the hot sun all day, and would have to do so again indefinitely the next day. Batting again, the West Indies could have posted a total some 200/250 ahead of England, leaving Strauss's men a difficult run chase and the danger of losing. And bearing in mind the last match's 51...

So for my money, it seems in hindsight that not enforcing the follow on was the right choice. By leading England out to bat again, Strauss ensured that England eventually put themselves in an unassailable position - 500 runs ahead. But one or two points stick with how he got there.

The second decision in sending James Anderson out as a nightwatchman at the end of day three was too defensive. We weren't protecting a lead because every run gained was an extra piece of the target for West Indies to have to chase, so a lower order nightwatchman was a hindrance as Anderson slowed things down - especially on the morning of day four - in Strauss's quest to reach a 500+ lead. Thirdly, there are question marks over the need to have that high a lead anyway. By giving the West Indies 450 or so to think about, a carrot dangling so to speak, they may have been inclined to go for their shots, take risks, and be more likely to go out. Did Strauss effectively price Windies out of the game to England's cost? Was he too worried about losing?

Well, really the answer is no. The Windies reached 380 - not all out, either - when trying not to take risks and score lots of runs. The ground, small and uneven, is notorious for having big run-scoring records broken on it. A lead of anything less than 500 would have been less of a carrot dangling, and more on a plate: England bowled 128 overs defending 503, and even then the West Indies only needed to score 4 an over to win against that lead. If they'd have been actually trying to score runs to win rather than avoid defeat, and especially if that target had been sub-500, who would have bet against the Windies getting there?

So we've established that Strauss's decision not to enforce the follow on was correct, the decision to declare with a 500+ lead was sensible, even if putting out Anderson slowed up the scoring. Why, then, did England not win?

There's a case to be made for the weather. England lost 75 minutes bowling time to rain, and bearing in mind England spent about 35 minutes trying to get the last wicket, it would be safe to say that with an extra 75 minutes that task would have been achieved. Of course, that is too simplistic because in the morning both Chanderpaul and Sarwan were at the crease, so it was they who would have taken up the minutes. but who's to say we'd not have rattled through them before tea, if it hadn't been for the rain?

Ifs, buts, maybes. The real truth of the matter, and the central point to this roundabout defence of Andrew Strauss, is that he is captain of a side that is not as good as it was two, three, four years ago - bowling especially. Anderson and Harmison shared just four of the 19 West Indies wickets to fall - Harmison in particular looked sluggish, bowling short and erratically for the most part. Swann is a virtual beginner in Test cricket, bowling in just his third ever Test - and he was England's keynote spinner. Broad, so useful in the second innings, remains expensive, and is only just beginning to show signs of maturing into a consistent world class bowler. Flintoff was the man to make things happen with the ball, but is short of full fitness and hasn't made a noteworthy score with the bat since returning from injury.

On the subject of batting, Pietersen's oddly subdued innings, Cook's two unconverted 50s, Owais Shah's uneventful debut and Collingwood's place-saving (career-saving?) century all went unnoticed in the excitement. No real complaints but overall, England were taught a lesson in Antigua on how to bat in the face of adversity, how to apply oneself to the task in hand and contribute to a match-saving team effort.

Cometh the hour, it was cometh the West Indies performers. England have got positives to build upon - I remain convinced that this match would have been an England victory but for the rain delay - but Strauss has got to ensure his troops are rallied, confident and prepared to win in the 4th Test.

Tweet, to who? It doesn't matter

2009-02-11T13:33:00.002Z

Though Facebook was celebrating its fifth birthday this month with its 150m users, the party has been overshadowed by the spiralling stock of a rival social media platform. ‘Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter’, goes one of the social networking site’s snippet-like reviews. That might have been considered a premature verdict to... Read more

Transfer window of opportunity disappoints

2009-02-04T22:55:00.016Z

No takeovers, no £100m Kaka, no Robinho-style steal, no big names: 2008/2009's January transfer window was a shadow of the start of season sales. The obvious pick out of this lacklustre window is the farcical 'Robbie Keane returns to Spurs' story, the Irish whinger making a south-bound trip down the road he'd taken North only six months before to follow his 'boyhood dream' move to Liverpool. Farcical because it went against Rafa Benitez's continued assertions that Keane would continue to be a Liverpool player - though I doubt he was really as sincere as his words suggested - and farcical because the player's desire to fight for a place at Liverpool was clearly inhibited by his ego, and his desire not to sit on the bench at a top three club. Keane scored seven goals in around 28 appearances, which, given his proven pedigree in the Premiership, wasn't really good enough.

It obviously takes a player a while to settle at a new club, but Keane is nearly 30, a well-travelled and expensive forward (some £71m has been spent on the man in his career), a potent goalscorer with international experience, who did have plenty of starts for Liverpool. 28 appearances does not equate to limited chances - as Andy Gray would say, it only takes a second to score a goal. Liverpool find themselves second in the league, and in the Champions League knockout stages. It's not as if they haven't been winning games, and ergo scoring goals. He might not have played 90 minutes every time, but with Keane's experience, you could forgive Benitez for having expected a better return.

The third farcical point is Liverpool's title challenge. In Torres they have perhaps the most deadly forward in the league, but he hasn't been properly fit all season, and now has to carry the weight of the team's attack on his shoulders for the remainder. Support can come from Babel, N'Gog and El Zhar, but that's all they will be, support. Benitez maybe would have wanted to prove a point by allowing Keane to go, but he hasn't done himself any long-term favours by letting him do so with half an hour to find a replacement.

The only other major transfer of the window - Andrei Arshavin's incredibly protracted, probably dodgy, we'll turn a blind eye anyway switch to Arsenal - was verging on farce too. For 31 days, Arshavin wasn't, to paraphrase most football pundits, 'the sort of player Arsenal needed'. Then panic sets in hours before the window was shutting, and suddenly Arshavin is the player Arsenal cannot afford to miss out on, lest they fail to qualify for the Champions League. More pressing for Arsenal had surely been a holding midfielder in the Flamini role, which would allow Nasri and the returning Rosicky more freedom, and the inconsistent Diaby, Denilson and Song chance to improve. Arshavin is not going to score 15 goals coming from midfield, even though he will likely be given a totally free role behind one of Van Persie or Adebayor. Obviously the lad is top class, but his is a signing that needed to be made in August, not now, and one world class signing with four short months to make an impact might not be enough to give an inconsistent Arsenal side the necessary boost they need.

Returning to Spurs (like a certain Irishman), Tottenham continued this month's 'variations on a theme' transfer policy: the theme being ex-players, the variations being Keane, Pascal Chimbonda and Jermaine Defoe. Rumours that Ossie Ardiles and Jurgen Klinsmann were returning to White Hart Lane proved to be unfounded. Harry Redknapp, for all his transfer guile and experience, has never been in a position where resources are plentiful and the club is genuinely attractive, and Spurs were the busiest signing club in the window. After also capturing Wilson Palacios from Wigan, they had only spent a million or two less than billionnaires Man City, but Redknapp has got to do more with his usual wheeling and dealing than simply save Spurs from relegation. A top half finish is imperative now, given how close the table has been this season, but Redknapp will not have any excuses come the end of the season should they fail to head significantly upwards.

For most of the other clubs in the UK engaging in transfer activity, the credit crunch had a major impact on their plans. Outside of the Premier League, most clubs could only loan players to each other, with the occasional five or six-figure fee being splashed by a Championship team. Even Chelsea, so often the funds behind a merry-go-round of transfers, were restricted to a loan signing of the quality but inconsistent Ricardo Quaresma.

It seemed a case of two approaches in the Premier League. Spurs, Man City, Wigan and Arsenal, and to a lesser extent Hull, Pompey and Stoke, took the 'spending money to make money' path i.e. the monetary reward of staying in or succeeding in the Premiership. But for many other clubs including Blackburn, Sunderland and Middlesborough, it was more a case of keeping hold of assets already at the club - Roque Santa Cruz, Kenwyne Jones and Stewart Downing respectively - to aid their bid for survival or glory. Even in the multi-billion pound football industry, caution seemed the watchword.

But despite the economic climate and most clubs' lack of funds or willingness to break the bank, it was nevertheless a record January spend for the British transfer window: some £160m went on new players. However, for the incredible combined price paid, it will be interesting to see whether the rest of the Premier League season delivers its money's worth.

Kaka deal falls through, sun shines but hay is not made

2009-01-20T17:52:00.007Z

The most expensive and lucrative job switch in the history of football (if not history of anything, ever) collapsed yesterday as Brazilian star Kaka decided against a move from AC Milan to Manchester City, turning down the chance to be come the sport's first three-figure million pound player and a wage of around half a million pounds a week.

That anyone can turn down that amount of money, for whatever reasons, is in itself a commendably brave rejection. Just a month's wages could set his family up for life, two months' pay would virtually save the UK economy in a single shopping spree. True, Kaka already commands a wage of around £100,000 a week at AC Milan, but while cynics would suggest anyone earning that much doesn't need a pay rise, not many people would ignore an opportunity to increase their wage by 500%. Imagine someone who happily earns £50k a year, and is offered the same job for a new company at £250k. Why turn it down purely because the current situation is comfortable? Make hay while the sun shines, and all that.

But the truth lies deeper than money. Kaka is the shining light of an imbalanced, ageing AC Milan team past their dominant glory years, and, though they're rebuilding slowly (and with Yohan Gourcruff still on their books, ominously so), a rejuvenated, new look Milan is far from ready to challenge seriously in their domestic league, never mind Europe. While the sale of Kaka made business sense, it would have been almost sporting suicide: not least because the backlash from the Italian media and the Rossoneri would have almost certainly lead to the notoriously violent and sometimes fatal scenes Italy's football supporters are well-versed in.

Depending on where you read, Kaka may or may not have been open to the idea of a move to Manchester City. Stories emerging today point to the steady influence of his father, who City's representatives talked with, and the stumbling block posed by AC Milan's apparently slow conduct in the transfer negotiations, as the reasons behind the failed move. It is also likely that a media furore about the sheer scale of the transfer got in the way of the hard facts over the last few days. But whatever the reasons for the deal's ultimate collapse, a quiet sigh of relief at the sport just about extracting itself from madness has probably been breathed all over the world (bar the City of Manchester stadium). I don't think the world of football is quite ready for the first £100m pound player.

Not yet.

My Year in Lists: Tim's absolutely definitive Albums of 2008

2008-12-22T18:19:00.042Z

All right, this isn't the most defining list of 2008 music-wise, it is in fact a shortlist of albums I've acquired this year. But then, I wouldn't have got them without liking them, or if they were free, certainly not put them into an end-of-year list, so I've narrowed down this year's CDs into my top 25. Any similarities between my lists and others such as polls on God is in the TV Zine, The Guardian's website or even The Sun's (I wouldn't link...oh ok) are purely coincidental and only highlight how universal, eclectic and frankly spot on my music taste is. (My tongue is planted in my cheek as I write).

In January I predicted a few names of which most have made it into my albums list. Debuts as well, so they were hunches. Just pointing it out, y'know.

Haha. Anyway, the list (blog title comes from a Los Campesinos! song, they're at number 12). Without further ado, here it is:

1. Cats in Paris - Courtcase 2000
Frankly, this came out of nowhere. Back in August someone recommended them and linked to their MySpace and it was love at first listen. A Manchester four-piece, but one with the ideas, enthusiasm, quirks and guts to shame every band that ever stepped out of that city since The Smiths. An abundance of youthful creativity, Courtcase 2000 is a masterclass of micro-prog, songs squeezing a kaleidoscope of sounds and melodies, rhythms and instruments into four or five minute mini-operas, rich in vocals that whisper and shout, time signatures that take on a mind of their own, gorgeous string arrangements framing a tragic story of 'broken kittens', random instrumentals with French monologues over the top, bombastic chords that open 'lovelovelovelove', merry-go-round synths chortling to 'loose tooth tactile', perhaps the song of the year. It's almost twee, but it's so gloriously unhinged in its experimental, free flowing river of musical creativity that it deserves to remain undefined. Every British debut for the next five years should be measured against the sheer brilliance of Courtcase 2000, my album of 2008.
Listen to: Loose Tooth Tactile

2. MGMT – Oracular Spectacular
You can gauge much about this stunning debut from the cover. Its proprietors stand on a sunset beach awash with psychedelia in their get up of spangly scarves, bright trousers, make-up and wild hair. Indie-by-numbers this ain’t. Summer anthem ‘Time to Pretend’ kicks off proceedings, but as a benchmark is outdone by many of the album’s tracks – particularly the unbelievably gorgeous 'Of Moons Birds and Monsters' – which hurl together an American ‘60s guitar sound with modern woozy synths, snippets of playground chatter with haunting vocals, discofloor beats and progressive song structures with hazy choruses: above all astonishingly melodic and sparkling with ingenuity. A close listen reveals grimmer lyrical matter ('We’ll choke on our vomit, and that will be the end' anyone?) but such a mood is painted over by the cinematic colour of MGMT’s music, and supplants everything with a virtually unmatched-in-2008 sense of eclectic beauty.
Listen to: The Youth

3. The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath
Well documented are former ATD-I members Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's dabbling in 'creative substances', but though such antics are now assumed to be fewer and far-between, there must be something unusual keeping the latter, in particular, going, because the driving force of this band keeps surpassing each ground-breaking LP with another. Not quite a year and a half since third album 'Amputechture', 'The Bedlam in Goliath' was a tour de force of blistering drums - thanks to incredible new sticksman Thomas Pridgen - polyphonic rhythms, free jazz style solos as well as maze-like layers of guitars, more extreme bludgeoning than before, all doused in Omar's trademark effects and topped with the ever-impressive vocal range of Cedric. After suffering (lazy) criticism for their meandering jams passed off as songs on previous works, 'The Bedlam in Goliath' tied up some of those loose ends and pooled the myriad ideas, sounds and influences into tight, progressive behemoths that heralded The Mars Volta's most exciting album since their landmark debut.
Listen to: Wax Simulacra

4. Foals - Antidotes
Although they were bordering on the precipice last year, the Dave Sitek-produced Antidotes blew this Oxford fivesome out of the water and into the arms of the waiting press to critical acclaim, indie club hits and storming live shows. A collection of icy, minimalist indie with endless delayed guitar lines that gently melted into the subconscious, packing enough of an electro edge to get the body moving and the energy levels kicking into gear. Singles such as 'Cassius' (this year's 'Helicopter'), 'Vessels' and 'Balloons' were all shining examples of the meticulously angular melodies and rhythms abounding on the album, softened with the occasional brass moment and impassioned cry. A wonderfully crisp and refreshing reinvention of an increasingly derivative genre.
Listen to: Cassius

5. We are the Physics - Are OK at Music
The fourth debut (of 13) in my list, and without doubt the most underground. And also, one of the most exciting. The Scottish group of Michael, Michael, Michael and a Chris created one of the best 'rock' albums of the year. 11 tracks of breakneck speed drums, off-kilter guitar hooks and stuttering vocal yelps, crashing and bouncing around with a schizophrenic energy that is all but out of control. Brilliantly deranged but measured with recognisable riffs and shouted choruses - if your benchmark for rock is Oasis, and things are getting edgy when you put on The Enemy, then you won't know what the fuck has hit you here.
Listen to: You Can Do Athletics btw

6. Operator Please - Yes Yes Vindictive
This one's a bit biased since they absolutely blew me away supporting The Go! Team in Bournemouth last October (2007). Not one of them were out of their teens at the time, and when Yes Yes Vindictive was released in March, they were still very, very young. In fact I went and got drunk with three of them in July when they played at sixtymillionpostcards in Bournemouth, and two of them weren't even old enough to be in clubs. Jeez. Anyway, the album is a gloriously youthful collection of perfect pop rock songs, no false pretences about emotion, scenes, sounds or styles. From the hammering indiepop of 'Leave It Alone' and 'Zero Zero' to the mature waltzing of '6/8', this was a jaw-droppingly accomplished debut from five Aussie kids. More hooks than a fishing equipment store, this 'baroque pop' album (the violin probably exaggerates this categorisation) was near-perfection in genre-crossing anthemic pop songs.
Listen to: Zero Zero

7. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
Originally this didn't make my list, a) because it was just so obvious and b) because I came to it late. But when Mojo and Uncut magazines are making it their album of the year, and it simultaneously features in The Sun's top five, it's also obvious that omitting the sheer beauty of Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut would be a travesty. A cut of haunting close harmonies throwing back to a retro Americana, glinting over jangly guitar backdrops and bittersweet folk atmospherics, with the occasional sunburst in 'Ragged Wood' and 'Your Protector', Fleet Foxes might turn out to be a landmark album in contemporary American music. That it encapsulates a past American age, turning those influences into a gorgeous modern pop album promising much for the future goes to show how deserved these Foxes' acclaim has been.
Listen to: White Winter Hymnal

8. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
A lot has been possible in pop music recently, but almost everyone was taken aback by this quartet’s direct fusion of modern African influences (rhythm, percussion) with sparse guitars that consequently stormed the music industry. Switched-on nightspots have been plying an ever-increasing spectrum of listeners with singles ‘Oxford Comma’, ‘A Punk’ and ‘Mansard Roof’ for months now, and the universal appeal of this charming if erratic-sounding debut, as well as its knack for upbeat chorus hooks, means it has been strolling into best of lists everywhere.
Listen to: Oxford Comma

9. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
Three albums in, and it's no less of a struggle for Dave Sitek's main musical outlet - the brilliantly eclectic five-piece that is TV On The Radio. That Dear Science topped Guardian and GIITTV polls, featured in music publication lists everywhere and featured on TV spots does not mean that you can now stop an average Joe in the street and say "Do you think Dear Science is better than Return to Cookie Mountain?" However, TV On The Radio are anything but average Joes - they stir in the pop funk of, say, Gnarls Barkley with black soul, big beats with balladry and hazy electro, making for a thoroughly modern eclecticism that also contained their best choruses yet. It might have been a weird chemistry for some, but Dear Science had more than enough about it to hit that niche spot in everyone's music taste. Probably a nailed-on certainty for next year's Mercury Music Prize.
Listen to: Halfway Home

10=. Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel
With the exception of We Are The Physics, perhaps, Late Of The Pier deserve plaudits for the freshest sound this year, a young band going about the matter of dismantling recognised genres by making a boisterous racket of synth, guitar and big beat madness that somehow fits the bill of quirky glam rock, bluesy grunge and electro punk. This is the debut that Klaxons should have made, but failed. It figures that Late Of The Pier should win next year's Mercury... but won't. Shame. Approaching the making music process with a similarly eccentric enthusiasm as Cats in Paris, Fantasy Black Channel was an utterly beguiling album, challenging but emphatically rewarding.
Listen to: Focker

10=. Black Kids - Partie Traumatic
Infectious party spirit, kooky lyrics and all-singing, all-dancing impishness. Partie Traumatic was in fact a bit of a disappointment, as the majority of tracks didn't stand up to the ghostly awesomeness of their Wizard of Aahs EP. However, Black Kids make it in my top 10 purely because said EP was about the best thing anyone anywhere in the world had heard as 2008 was born, and the fact that all four originals from it make the hairs on my neck stand up without fail. Had they not rushed the album and given their sound an unnecessary sheen (thanks Bernard Butler) it might have just been sitting nine places higher.
Listen to: Hit The Heartbreaks

12. Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster
The internet's success story of 2007, this debut managed to deliver their early potential with a squeaky guitar-topped mesh of exuberant indiepop with wonderfully quaint lyrics, bouncy feelgood rhythms and a glockenspiel.

13. Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid
You won't find another album this year as grandiose, heartfelt and shatteringly intimate in equal measures. A deserved Mercury winner, its rich textures and orchestral arrangements underpinning Guy Garvey's rasping soul is a stunner.

14. Bloc Party - Intimacy
Snuck out on the quiet, Intimacy hit the download stores almost before anyone knew, nevermind pirated a leak. A fusion of samples, drum 'n' bass and heavily-affected guitars, the tangled complexity of Intimacy eventually unravelled into some typically pioneering Bloc Party songs and the odd indie monster. That elusive 'Helicopter 2' still hangs over their head, though. And 'Talons' is not it.

15. The Long Blondes - Couples
Sadly this band are no more, although they might be on a mere hiatus. It's a shame, because Couples was the intimate loneliness of the post-one night stand bed to the dolled-up glam of the pull on 'Someone To Drive You Home'. It was as if that debut's insecurities had manifested into bitterness, with Couples being an LP of starkly cold indie guitars and an icy Kate Jackson on vocals. Hoping for a reunion in 2009.

16. R.E.M - Accelerate
A stonking return to form for one of the seminal artists of the last 20 years, Accelerate saw the three 'boys' thrash out a series of hard-rocking songs peppered with that stinging trademark R.E.M balladry - with renewed political vigour and some hot riffs, R.E.M showed they can still cut it in music today.

17. iForward, Russia! - Life Processes
Their debut was my album of the year 2006, and Life Processes saw much of the same intoxicating mix - playing with time-signatures, wailing vocals and spikey, growling guitars with snatches of searing melodies interspersed with the odd choir and synth. Unfortunately this group are also on a hiatus (damn it!) but their influence in the Midlands music scene will continue to be keenly felt into 2009.

18. Coldplay - Viva La Vida (or Death and All His Friends)
All credit to Chris Martin's troupe, who could have banked on shifting 50bn units with another album of lighters-aloft ballads a la Fix You and coffee table rock like In My Place that would be great for six tracks and then go flat. But they didn't, they returned with an album full of dark edges, perplexing mini-songs, fanfare-march singles and in short a brave new set of songs.

19. Young Knives - Superabundance
After the angular and brilliant debut, the trio of Knives returned with a much more accessible but equally infectious bunch of awkward hooks and brash harmonies, stomping rock songs with more meat than previous efforts. Lyrics were slightly repetitve but gave up anthemic indie choruses in, ahem, abundance.

20. Glasvegas - Glasvegas
The paradox of this band's name, alluding to the glamour and glitz of Vegas, is tapered by the gloom of every single song on this eponymous debut, the perma-sad Scots dishing up a sumptious helping of wall-of-sound meloncholy, lucious guitar layers of fierce emotion that had all who came across it wiping tears from their eyes and reminding loved ones that they are loved.

21. Guillemots - Red
It was always going to be difficult to match the patchwork-quilted genius of their near-miraculous debut, but Fyfe Dangerfield and co. gave it a good go. Just lacking in that multi-coloured spark that made Through the Windowpane such a joy, Red instead saw Guillemots dabble in straightforward pop songs, creating a wealth of gems that seemed to reference a catalogue of pop supremacy in 11 tracks of shimmering melodies and 21st century instrumentation.

22. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
From performances at Reading Festival to appearing on Skins, Crystal Castles came to usher in during 2008 the glitchy electronica that was ok for those outside of the dance market to embrace to its bosom, paving the way for a truckload of soundalikes (or soundabitlikes at least) to follow in their footsteps. Alice Glass's disturbed vocals over sometimes hypnotic, sometimes explosive dancefloor ravers soundtracked a year in off-kilter dance music that threw off the shackles of genre wars and made glo-sticks cool again. Again.

23. The Spinto Band - Moonwink
Following up their twee gem of 2006, the Spintos returned with an album rich in squeaky-clean indie musicality; that is harmonies, chord progressions, retro references: little nuances that are missing from many of today's bands' songwriting. It all makes for very pleasant, if sickly sweet, listening.

24. Fucked Up - Chemistry of Common Life
A hardcore punk band with a pointlessly vile name? That's almost as far removed as you can get from my usual listening tastes, but Fucked Up's wall-of-noise guitars, snarling spirit and pounding drums took punk to credible new planes in 2008, channeling aggression into huge riffs and chords, vitriolic smites at religion, and the occasional stadium-rock anthem thrown in. A superb, if abrasive, album of wholly renewed punk ethics.

25. Santogold - Santogold
I already know that this album is better than six or seven of the above. The trouble is I bought it yesterday and as such it's only fair that less than 24 hours of judgement does not cloud a list that spans consideration of the prior 364 days as well. A sparkling fusion of tribal, pop and world influences, Santogold's eponymous first album of eclectic pop gems throws a huge guantlet down for all solo females in 2009 (especially you Little Boots) to step up to.

If you've made it down here, well done. I love you. Thank you for reading, and if you buy one album this week, make it Cats in Paris - Courtcase 2000 please! Thank you again.

Louis Theroux's Law and Order in...London

2008-12-12T11:31:00.003Z

The last two Sundays have seen Louis Theroux, another of the BBC's more outstanding figures, doing his documentary thing on Law and Order in two vastly different areas: a notoriously volatile district in Philadelphia, US, and Johannesburg, South Africa, the focus of last week's programme. The latter, particularly, delved into the almost lawless areas outside JBurg, the shanty-town sites Diepsloot, where the terms 'community' and 'mob' became blurred. With little to no law enforcement from the police in place in Diepsloot, self-styled protection firms - privately-run security forces - set themselves up to distribute justice around the area, for an agreed price, by whoever has the money to buy the service.

In the Johannesburg documentary, Theroux repeatedly highlighted the problems Diepsloot experienced without a police presence: where crimes were committed, the private security firms had their own methods with dealing with criminals. Increasingly, however, Theroux saw how villagers would take matters into their own hands, hearing how the 'community' caught and burned a man who had been stealing. 'Community' seemed to be a vague term during the programme - at times it brought a sense of togetherness for the residents, united in their plight on the outskirts of J'burg, ignored by police and riddled with problems. Yet 'Community' also became a term that was used to justify the violent nature of the residents' treatment of criminals. The people Louis Theroux spoke to about the capturing and burning of criminals (which happened more than once while he was out there) simply shrugged it off as part and parcel of the place, a consequence of the lawlessness pervading Diepsloot. They called it "A South African solution to a South African problem".

Theroux's point might have been to highlight the huge difference between gun crime on the homicide-ridden Phily streets to, say, London or Birmingham, and the sheer violence of the out-of-control Diepsloot to our policed towns in Britain, but today saw a damning case of a 'mob mindset' (eloquence as ever from The Sun) within this country that is little short than the South African examples.

BBC's take is slightly calmer, but both sources make reference to the evidence that Mr Cunningham was killed by a group of people, stabbed and mutilated by the 'vigilantes' in return for his history of sexual offences, possibly some more recent. Mr Cunningham had recently been removed from the register, however, seven years since the offence that he had been place on it for, and had not been arrested for any related offences since 2003. But The Sun in particular highlights that Mr Cunningham's death was most likely to be a result of something that had happened recently.

The point in this instance isn't whether the paedophile deserved to die or not for what he did, and may have done. It's the manner in which more than one person appears to have murdered Mr Cunningham in a case of citizen justice that equates to mob behaviour. The UK prides itself on being one of the most forward-thinking and advanced democracies in the West, nevermind in the world, but the tribal mindset of those responsible for killing Andrew Cunningham have branded elements of our society as savage as the poverty-striken, crime-filled shanty-town communities in South Africa that Louis Theroux last week claimed were a million miles from our own.

Eurovision in danger of becoming Eurotrash

2008-12-08T23:26:00.005Z

In another high-profile shuffle at the BBC, this time decided by the figure in question, rather than on their behalf, Terry Wogan has called time on 35 years of Eurovision and stepped aside for a new face - voice - to fill the void.

And it will be a void; Terry Wogan's fantastic commentary on the increasingly-farcical event has become as synonymous with Eurovision for the British public as the obligatory woeful entry we put out. Wogan's subtle but devastating put-downs, tongue-in-cheek xenophobia and stereotyping coupled with his good-natured charm - aided in no small part by the odd glass of wine, you'd imagine - made the competition bearable. Several hours of MOR pop song crap, usually woodenly presented in broken English, peppered with the odd flourish of ingenuity such as Lordi's ludicrous Hard Rock Hallelujah, and the occasional shock of a decent song turning up, somehow became mesmerising as Wogan and the watching audience become more and more amused (and possibly drunk) as international politics come into play, the attention begins to wane and the songs get worse. This is when Wogan is at his best, when respect for the spectacle is lost; becoming more scathing and witty, unrestrained and cheeky in a single-handed bid to keep people watching.

Graham Norton, then, has some big boots to fill. A cheeky chappy himself, his name is nevertheless more synonymous with innuendo, playing to his camp styling and deriving laughter from often crass subject matter. His bouncy enthusiasm and direct interviewing does make him a different prospect on the BBC - granted he's no Parkinson, but then who is - but his show is cut to half an hour, and some of his guests (Dame Edna, Paul O'Grady, Eddie Izzard, Jackie Collins, Joan Rivers, Alan Carr to pick a biased few) seem obvious by any stretch of the imagination.

Norton's switch to the BBC, at an incredibly lucrative price as well, will have done something for his image, as will the BBC's decision to entrust him with his own talkshow, especially one self-styled on the website as "the aspects of celebrity culture that interest him [Norton] most, featuring trademark Norton comedy monologues (????) and celebrity chat". Not quite in line with the BBC's mandate for creative and challenging programming, perhaps. But their decision now to import him into Wogan's vacated seat as the British public's Eurovision Song Contest compere for the evening gives Norton a chance to prove himself.

It's likely to go one of two ways. Either Norton will take the time to write (or get staff writers to produce) a wealth of material, one liners, ironic jibes, comments that showcase his talent for direct critique but with capacity for good-humour, non-serious but funny all the same: a chance for him to really prove his worth. Or it will wind up as trashtalking, Norton getting evermore bemused and high-pitched, spitting out bitter criticism without humour or balance and finally losing the will to try, proving that he lacks the temeperament and skill to really mix it with the top BBC names. One would hope obviously for the former, but such is the lowly level to which the event has descended, a live Graham Norton car crash to soundtrack the madness would almost be fitting for the Contest - the mediocre but watchable Eurovision morphing into throwaway Eurotrash.

Everything's Peachy: Geldof culture title launches

2008-12-05T17:14:00.000Z

She’s been the marmite celebrity of 2008, ousting Lily Allen as queen of the online buzz. Whether it’s via her blogs, columns or media spots, or the increasing newspaper inches her lifestyle generates, Peaches Geldof is a name that’s rarely been out of the spotlight this year. But, in an effort to focus her media career – or perhaps give it some credibility – Peaches has embarked on the latest high profile venture in her short and privileged life so far: the launch of her own magazine, Disappear Here.

Peaches has already come in for enormous scrutiny for her column/blog for Nylon, the fashionable New York magazine, particularly recently when, while listing her views on forthcoming fashion trends, she proclaimed, “I don’t follow fashion.” Right. Admittedly, her Nylon contributions to date have done little to affirm Peaches’s free reign on this kind of indulgence. Back, then, to her own magazine.

Disappear Here has been funded, and is owned, by Peaches, her manager Andy Varley and men’s magazine guru James Brown, though the cost of this has not been revealed. Captaining the ship herself, with guidance from Brown, 19-year old Peaches declared in an interview with the Guardian: “This is basically my job. I want it to be a blank canvas for young talent – writers, photographers, graphic designers, artists and bands.”

Admirable sentiments, of course, but hold on: Peaches herself isn’t even out of her teens. That she and her new publication could single-handedly be this great springboard for undiscovered talent works on her own assumption that Disappear Here, merrily launched by the starlet while the country’s flagship newspapers are either cutting staff or shacking up together, stands a chance in the diminishing glossy publications market.

For it to do that, it needs more than the divisive Peaches image to drive success. The Guardian interview reveals that following the advertisement-free launch issue out last week, paid-for advertising will subsidise quarterly issues from March ’09. With MTV colleague Dan Jude the only other significant staff writer named so far – Brown’s contacts, including a friend’s school-aged daughter, make up the bulk of the remaining writers – Issue Zero, as it’s called, needs to do an awful lot to generate that advertiser interest. Granted, Peaches knows her onions on pop culture and what will appeal to the London clientele she moves with. Whether the combination can succeed enough to ride out the credit crunch, nevermind make a long-term assault on established culture mags, will be a test of the teenager’s will and patience.

For Peaches, this is a chance to change her reputation, convince the increasingly-disillusioned British public that she’s more than a rich ‘daddy’s girl’; that her new “job” as magazine editor is merited rather than simply a privileged whim. But whether Disappear Here dazzles or dives, the sad truth is that either result won’t really make much difference to Peaches Geldof at all.

Home comforts

2008-11-30T00:19:00.007Z

A short mulling of a blog update. Last night I had a pretty awful dream, in that it was totally non-enjoyable in a bleak, depressing way rather than being a straight-forward, put-it-behind-you nightmare. One that had life-affirming threats in it and threw up hard-hitting facts of life in the aftermath that stayed with me for the rest of the day. It isn't important, the detail to it. But it was more than a little reassuring to wake from it, in a different bed to usual, but a bed that is one I gratefully still call my own. This weekend sees me back at home for a weekend with the family, and a timely reminder of things that are important to me that don't revolve around what I do in Bournemouth.

For instance, who else is going to make me an ad-hoc fisherman's pie for dinner on a saturday? Who else would drive me to Brighton on a miserably grey afternoon for the sole purpose (as it turned out) of pissing about on guitar effects for a while, and then returning home again? Who else would I allow to sip - copious sips, bro - my paid for pint without so much as an eyebrow raise?

Despite it being that I do not see my family as often as I should, they still have without doubt the overuling bearing on my life, and like to admit it or not, I on theirs. Even if it is not day-to-day, it is part and parcel, inescapable. And it was nice to come home to surroundings that reminded me strongly of this, and clearly had a big impact sub-consciously with that goddamn dream. It's easy to say, but comforting in the extreme to feel, that outside of the self-centred bubble of my personal daily life is the continued, sometimes invisible, sometimes overlooked but never forgotten, love and support of family.

It seems a moot point to make, esepcially as Christmas time approaches, but I often curse myself for not showing enough gratitude for it. This isn't going to make up for that but might hopefully cause a similar reaction for anyone else who sometimes takes a few things in life a bit for granted.

(In Charlie Brooker style) This week, Tim Miller: joined Twitter about 50 years too late, and came within £7 of maxing his overdraft (not just the interest-free bit, but the extra on top of that).

Here Juande, gone the next: Levy and Spurs left with Hamburg-er all over their faces

2008-10-26T17:05:00.009Z

If you thought that the now low-burning Newcastle crisis two months ago bordered on farce, the black comedy of Tottenham Hotspurs' season continues apace this weekend (which is lightened only slightly by my atrocious puns in the headline). In an astonishing move made all the more ruthless by the instantaneous appointment of Harry Redknapp, the Spurs board took the decision to remove Juande Ramos after one year in charge following the club's worst ever start to a Premier League season.

Daniel Levy is clearly, then, a man who doesn't agonise over delicate decisions. Subtlety may even be an alien concept to the Spurs chairman. Just 12 months ago, the protracted but very public seduction of Juande Ramos from Sevilla to replace Martin Jol dominated the headlines, causing outrage and disgust in many circles at the embarrassing treatment of Martin Jol's at the hands of his employers. On a side note, the irony of Levy complaining about Manchester United's courting of Dimitar Berbatov this summer, when much the same had occurred in Spurs' capture of Ramos, appeared to be lost on him. Anyway, Jol's crime was to oversee a poor start to a season after two consecutive fifth place finishes - the best any team outside of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool can realistically expect. While Jol's Spurs' bad form was not to be denied, that Levy judged succeeding the Dutchman with a new face as an instant solution now looks to be an obvious mistake.

Spurs had had two very successful domestic seasons in a row, playing exciting football, albeit resulting in often dramatic scenes at both ends of the pitch. Jol was well-liked by his squad and the fans, and while their form then might have been poor, it is positively flying by comparison to this season's start. Many questioned quite rightly the legitimacy of Levy's ousting of Martin Jol, in favour of giving him time to turn around the successful team he had managed for the previous two seasons.

And this weekend, many of those ugly elements have again darkened White Hart Lane's doors. Following two points from a possible 24, Juande Ramos, his two coaches and sporting director Damien Commoli were all shown the door, and another replacement instantly lined up in the (unmistakable) shape of Harry Redknapp. Less than a quarter of the way through the season, Levy's cherry-picked manager was removed, again without being given any time to rectify the situation, again without remorse, and again without Levy displaying any sort of awareness as to the hypocrisy of his decisions. You can't help but feel sorry for Ramos: as the object of Levy's affections just over a year ago, he can hardly be blamed for feeling stabbed in the back somewhat by the amount of faith shown in him by his former suitor.

What rankles particularly, though, is Levy's subsequent statements. While he explained away the sacking of Commoli as being a move back to a traditional footballing structure (fair enough - though many Premiership clubs currently work very well with sporting directors or directors of football) his quote that, "We are delighted to have secured the services of someone we have long since admired" is pretty outrageous. Levy was purported to have wanted the services of Redknapp at the time of Jol's dismissal: how long, then, has Redknapp been in his thoughts? Was Ramos doomed from day one? This is little short of an admittance that Ramos was the wrong man to replace Jol a year ago.

Levy goes on to say about Redknapp, "With his great knowledge of the game and his excellent motivational skills, Harry has inspired his teams to consistently over-perform". Levy clearly recognises these qualities; why, then does he not admit to Ramos's appointment being a mistake of his own in this respect? Redknapp gets results in English football, there's no denying, but Ramos was brought in to do the same but playing a certain way; see below.

The final dagger, in my opinion, is this highly hypocritical comment: "His [Redknapp's] preferred attacking style of playing the game sits comfortably with our club's history, heritage and the type of entertaining football our fans want and expect to see." That Redknapp's preferred style of football is attacking is certainly debatable. But either way, there can be no denying that 'entertaining football' is what Spurs were playing under Martin Jol. 'Entertaining football' is what attracted Levy, and many clubs in Europe, to Juande Ramos in the summer of 2007, following Sevilla's flamboyance and flair in winning back to back UEFA Cups with the likes of Freddie Kanoute, Luis Fabiano and Daniel Alves. While Spurs have won for the first time this season today, the substance to Levy's 'official statement' is left badly wanting, and so, perhaps, is the credibility behind Levy's position at the helm of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

The Hamburger, incidentally, comes from Martin Jol's new position. Currently employed by Hamburg, the team were last week top of the German Bundesliga, a long way ahead of teams like Bayern Munich, Werder Bremen and Leverkusen. There it looks like Jol had the last laugh, and one can only hope for Juande Ramos to do much the same in his next role as well.

The Lisbon Blog. The Lisblog.

2008-10-16T20:33:00.017Z

As my Facebook status might suggest, my first proper holiday in four years is at an end and the inevitable return to England, from very warm climes to temperatures in single digits, is pretty hard to swallow. Lisbon was a fantastic city to experience and made a great destination for a late 'summer holiday'. Allow me, then, to recount the best bits of Lisbon and wallow in a bit of pining for Portugal.

The Lisbon Lounge Hostel was our home for six nights, a modern, comfortable and lively hostel aimed at the young, exploring traveller. Having landed, taxied to the hostel, dumped suitcases, showered, changed and headed out into Lisbon, we endeared ourselves to the overnight reception staff by returning at 4:30am, making a drunken racket and knocking over a locker, setting off an anti-theft alarm. The quote from the girl who came up to see what the hell was going on was, 'Are you going to be like this every night?' No, we assured her, and passed out in the bunk beds.

Friday, with the temperature at around 25, and having done a quick fix on the locker door, we hit Caiscas, known for its golden coves and vibrant centre. (We actually spent most of Friday at this very beach). However in the morning, I was ridiculously excited about riding one of these, which I did for 15 minutes around the local square. At seven euros, it was surely the bargain of the holiday. The traditional piri piri chicken sufficed for dinner that night, and we headed back into central Lisbon for more alcohol and late night hedonism.

A word here about the drug sellers. Clearly, according to the local dealers, a group of eight lads are going to want drugs when on holiday, as we were offered them every 100 yards, every day, as soon as we stepped out of the hostel until we went back to bed. Adopting a Portuguese accent, 'Hashiche? Marajuana? Coke?' was the quote of the holiday. Every fucking two minutes a moustachioed, tanned bloke often about 50-years old would approach us and, in faux-hushed tones, offer us the goods straight out of their pockets. Their relentless and indefatigable attempts to sell us drugs were amazing, then laughable, then boring, then finally irritating. Most of us were pretty close to 'chinning' the bastards by the end of the holiday.

Anyway, the Saturday dawned clear, blue and hot, and we spent the day here. With incredible panoramic views across the entire city of Lisbon, dizzyingly high - and unsafe - walls, it was a fabulous icon of Lisbon which brought great tans as well as photos.

That night, however, was the only real down point of the holiday. Suited and booted, sort of, we went off to visit Lux in two taxis, a famous Lisbon club part-owned by John Malkovich and known for its glamorous clientele and generally being the centrepoint of Lisbon's nightlife. Despite the entrance - a pair of female legs with the doors being right in between - the club was a total let down. In short, the first taxi party got in for 12 euros each. Those of us in the second taxi had a slightly outcome. We were told that the entry was 240 euros to get in. Each. The main reason was because we were tourists, and as it was Saturday, they had enough of them inside. 'Fuck off' doesn't even begin...

That low point aside, the rest of the holiday carried on in much the same glorious, sunny way. Sunday morning was spent talking football with a Sporting Lisbon youth coach in the nearby square, before a torrential downpour - and I mean monsoon proportions; the splashes were rebounding about a foot in the air off the concrete - dampened the day, but not spirits. The previous three nights having taken their toll, we dried off and took a nap before staying in for a meal put on for by the hostel for its residents. They actually did this each night, and at eight euros each, a home-cooked fresh three course meal with red wine was a total bargain. The trouble was, being in a group of eight, we basically filled the roster: the chef was only really catering for 14, and with anything up to 48 or so people in the hostel over the weekend, we counted ourselves lucky to get even one meal in during our stay.

The Sunday was spent relaxing, chatting, drinking and playing an ill-fated few games of cards in the company of some of the other people staying, including a charming Canadian couple called Audrey (competitive) and Rob (easy-going), two American girls Beth and Claire, and an Ozzie journalist called Amanda. In my wisdom, I'd bought myself a bottle of Port to drink when staying in, which the Portuguese drink like wine and I attempted to follow suit. At 19.5% abv, I of course failed miserably, and, barely able to see, put myself to bed at about 3:30am with some mumbled garbage of goodbyes at the American girls. Smooth.

It turned out that my travelling buddies had ended up in bed around two hours after me, and therefore Monday morning was largely a total write off. In fact, I didn't make a single breakfast (9:00am - 10:30am daily) during the holiday, and only a couple of our group made one or two at most. Two of the group managed to get up to entertain the American girls during the morning, and with the temperatures at 25 degrees or so again, we all regrouped to enjoy lunch in Alacantara, overlooking a faux-Monaco marina under clear blue skies again. Although it had now reached about 4pm, we ferried across the port to go and visit the Cristo Rei. You could pay to go up and stand on the platform below Christ's feet, which we duly did, and got awe-inspiring views across the main part of Lisbon, and over the 25th of April Bridge. Considering the day's start, Monday turned out to be a successful bout of proper sightseeing.

Tuesday, being the last full day in Lisbon (already!) was spent on the beach at Estoril (this casino featured in the original 'Casino Royale' James Bond novel), thanks to the late 20s temperatures and alluring sandy beach and clear waters. Another night on the tiles followed a meal in a restaurant specialising in live and expensive lobster and seafood, and suddenly, depressingly, Lisbon was almost over.

The Wednesday, despite great weather again, meant packing and leaving. Being men though, some of us managed to squeeze in a trip to the Benfica stadium, a spectacular sight the like of which English teams rarely get to play in. After I carelessly spent 80 euros on a Benfica shirt, we headed back to hostel to pick up our bags and hit the 'aeroporto'. With heavy hearts, amid a pretty irritable crowd of English people (why is our conduct abroad always so embarrassing, so...colonial?), we boarded the EasyJet flight home. Landing at 10:30pm, it was dark, about 9 degrees, and promised nothing.

So there it is. How I miss it so, already. In all seriousness, though, I would thoroughly recommend going to Lisbon at any point between April and October, eating the fish there, going to the beach, seeing the sights, and above all riding a segway, to anyone thinking of having a holiday or travelling around Europe. It's a must-visit.

Thank you, Lisbon.

The differing joys of six

2008-09-23T20:31:00.009Z

Two identical scorelines over the last four days in football - 6-0 - showed that two markedly different schools of thought in attaining success as a football club are still relevant, even if they're taking those ideas to the very extreme.

Manchester City's incomprehensibly rich new investors have raised the bar in foreign ownership. It wasn't too long ago that Roman Abrahmovich's relentlessly deep pockets, as they seemed, were scathingly criticised for 'buying' Chelsea's first league title for 50 years. Yet in the short years since that trophy landed at Stamford Bridge, foreign investment in top football clubs has become a common sight, and most recently reached an unprecedented era of bankrolling when the Abu Dhabi United Group agreed to formally buy Manchester City.

Middle Eastern money is a very real force in the modern world, least of all football, but the billions upon billions backing Manchester City now make previous target for money cynics Abrahmovich look a pauper. The club were able to simply wade into the protracted 'Robinho to Chelsea' saga, flex their new-found financial muscle and within 24 hours, Robinho was a Manchester City player. Chelsea were simply not prepared to be bullied over the £32m price-tag: for City it was merely a matter of making a higher offer. In the previous weeks, the club had without blinking forked out £19m for Brazilian Jo - a dubious decision at the time but the player does look genuinely to have the stuff to make it in the Premiership - and enough cash to buy back Shaun Wright-Phillips with minimum fuss. It capped a remarkable final day in the transfer window - and an expensive one for City.

It was short-lived owner Thaksin Shinawatra whose original funds cemented the signings of the then manager Sven Goran Eriksson - another Brazilian Elano, Martin Petrov and the exciting (but injury prone) Valerie Bojinov - and which saw City make a real attempt at challenging the established order in the Premier League. It faltered before any significant inroads could be made, but this season, with results like the 6-0 demolition of Portsmouth, the signs are there to suggest that the almost infinite bank balance at the disposal of City's owners, coupled with sensible long-term planning, low-key involvement from on high and the integration of existing players and youth players, could give City a very real possibility of disturbing the peace at the top of the table.

By contrast, Tuesday night saw another 6-0 demolition, Sheffield United taken apart by an Arsenal side superior in every single way. While the scoreline is surprising on its own, it's the fact that Arsenal's first XI consisted of mainly teenagers; the team's average age was 19. Arsene Wenger had put this team together from gifted - and mostly inexpensive - youngsters sourced from all over the world, with 17-year old Aaron Ramsey the notable exception following his £5m transfer from Cardiff City. Mexican Carlos Vela (19) stole the show with a breath-taking hat trick, while 16-year old Jack Wilshere scored his first goal for the club. Wenger is notorious for unearthing talent from outside of the UK: names like Song Billong, Merida, Vela and Denilson do not exactly suggest players learned in Joey Barton's football philosophy, while the steal of Cesc Fabregas from Barcelona at 16 might be the best transfer ever done. However, Wenger's side also consisted of equally adept teenagers from these isles; Wilshere, Ramsey, Gibbs, Randall and Lansbury all playing some part in the fixture.

The sheer brilliance in technique and ability, not to mention the physicality, of these young players, was testament to Wenger's own brilliance, and the legacy he is building at Arsenal. Though he's already been there 10 years, it might be that the Frenchman has only now started to put on show his plans for the club. He's been quoted as saying the current crop is the best group of players he's ever had to choose from, and it's remarkable to consider that he may have spent his time at Arsenal thus far plotting this, a wunderteam, never mind wunderkids. There is no other club in world football doing quite the same thing, and for fans everywhere as well as Gunners the possibilities are just mouthwatering.

That a team of teenagers can rip apart another fully professional club who, only one season ago, were in the same league as Arsenal, is a powerful commendation to the cause of developing a youth setup capable of schooling and producing young players that can, as a team in their mid to late teens, play football in a manner so glorious and so undeniably brilliant as to stylishly thrash opposition with ease.

The two schools of thought, then: 1) buying the top of the range finished product to give instant results, or 2) developing your own top of the range product steadily to give long-term return on investment, are completely different in terms of time and money investment, planning and thinking. But, for the moment at least, two clubs in the English Premier League have provided evidence to suggest that both remain viable methods to bring results in every football club's endless search for success.

A cappella Walcott is a Capello masterstroke

2008-09-11T22:34:00.003Z

When Alan Hansen ill-advisedly uttered the infamous line "You don't win anything with kids" over a decade ago, I doubt that he, let alone the many critics and commentators who jumped on that quote, would have imagined the longevity it would still have today. In terms of relevance, that soundbyte surpasses his glittering playing achievements for most, except maybe Liverpool fans. Yet last night's 1-4 win in Zagreb, the first defeat for the Croation national side on home soil, put Hansen's blithe write-off to the sword, and more seriously, presented the possibility that in Fabio Capello, England may just have found the first coach able to meet English expectations since that Gareth Southgate penalty in 1996.

Let's not for one minute start up the England uber alles brigade - despite resonating around Europe, the defeat of Croatia counts for nothing at the moment aside from a pretty looking table. The fickle nature of England fans, who booed the team's victory away in Andorra but jubilantly cheered the team's victory away in Croatia, should be firmly ignored in judging the chances of a current England team. (Incidentally, we shouldn't even have to play pointless matches against countries like Andorra, but that's another matter entirely). It is easy to see why Capello prefers playing away from home, away the Wembley spotlight and the hysterical media circus that so dominates around England internationals. 'England Expects' all right, but 'England Accepts' is not something supporters are well versed in. From the fans' verdict, the team is either world-beaters or no-hopers, when in fact the actual, far less extreme truth is somewhere in between, edging towards the former.

Last night's victory was more than just three points: it firstly exorcised the demons of England's last competitive match prior to the current campaign, the truly despondent 2-3 defeat by the very same Croatian team at Wembley. It sent out a message to the European nations: yes, England can still mix it with the big boys - Croatia, strange though it seems, have somehow become a 'big boy'. But the performance was the biggest result: the team, and the coaching staff, got it totally right.

After a wobbly opening 20 minutes, England played with determination, courage and wit. To a man, they were forceful in their tackling and closing down, inventive with their passing and movement, and confident with the ball. The first goal naturally helped, particularly with David James once again looking shaky, but once they were ahead the English players never looked back. In the hostile surroundings of Maksimir Stadium, the internationals earned their shirts, earned back the fans' respect, and earned their manager the credit he deserved for his part.

Leaving out Michael Owen was not a good choice, and his presence on the bench may have been a more welcoming sight than Defore or Jenas, but in his first-eleven selections, Capello can congratulate himself for a flawless line-up. Heskey, so often the butt of jokes (including many of mine), was a colossal threat all night, starring in the lone striker role with his strength, aerial prowess and his glorious contribution to Walcott's second goal. Such a figurehead allowed Rooney, Joe Cole and Walcott to roam in the space between midfield and attack, a ploy which is undoubtedly Joe Cole's best position and also brings out the best in Rooney. It did last night, with Rooney banishing critics with a fantastic performance full of technique, vision and crucially, the elusive international goal. Joe Cole, too, was having an enjoyable game until he was cynically elbowed and the resulting blood-spurt injury saw him substituted. Lampard, with Barry as anchor and with less pressure on him to join in with the front four, had his best game in an England shirt for some time, and looked something like his Chelsea self.

But it was, of course, Theo Walcott who rightly stole the show and the headlines with a wonderful hat-trick that oozed with confidence and international class quality. Wenger knew all along, when snapping up the 16-year old Walcott from Southampton in 2006, that a future star was waiting to emerge from the exciting raw talent, but perhaps this potential was delayed in Walcott's early career. Sven, despite the fond memories looking back now, will never live down that ponderous World Cup selection, and it is only this season with Arsenal that Walcott has begun to show that his ability is up to scratch at the highest level. Being a Southampton fan, I'm over the moon for the boy.

As much as it's Walcott's man of the match though, those reading between the lines must applaud Fabio Capello for sticking with the 19-year old. He was hot and cold against Andorra, but Capello is clearly one to put his faith in individuals with the ability to affect matches. As one of the three attacking players behind Heskey, it was Walcott who was the most disciplined, holding a wide right position, running at players and finding space at key moments, as well as showing a deft knack for top class finishing. Walcott is a player who makes things happen, and as tempting as it must have been for Capello to go for the steady, safe bet in David Beckham, he is a coach who will trust his judgement to bring about results. And what an emphatic endorsement of his judgement the result was.

It was fitting when Walcott, wearing number 7, embraced David Beckham as the latter replaced the hat-trick hero for a cameo few minutes. It was almost as if something was passed between them, the torch from the old guard to the leading light of a new era of English football. Capello might not be the young upcoming coach that many would prefer to see in charge of this generation, but there can be no doubt now that, given time, he can be the coach to finally do justice to the nation's expectations.

Heart of blankness?

2008-09-08T22:29:00.006Z

Last Monday (1 Sept.) Charlie Brooker wrote, somewhat dejectedly, of his 'crippling' internal blankness of soul - that is, a kind of indifference to life: hobbies, culture, his [enviable] job, essentially failing to take an interest in the day-to-day running of his own existence. Or rather, not so much 'failing to', but not being motivated enough to bother. While this sounds a totally depressing outlook, this was not a suicidal confession, nor a cry for attention, because as he quite rightly pointed out, that would require the presence of extreme emotion, and it is a lack of emotion, on any level or at either end of the scale, that seemed the fundamental basis of his terrible 'personal blankness'. A failure to engage with anything, and the lack of will to do something about it.

It is not, looking around, an uncommon predicament. Certainly I have felt sheer listlessness towards day-to-day life: turning up to work on time, mustering the right attitude to going out when it's cold, wet and you've not really got the money, putting the best effort into University work, that sort of thing. In the early years of the 9-5 grind, the transition from carefree party-attending socialite and part-time student to responsible, council-tax paying young adult tends to manifest itself into disillusioned yuppie living for the weekend. Even counting yourself as a yuppie - young, upcoming - requires a certain aptitude that, when faced with the hard work needed to achieve the status, often seems overly difficult. And what we are fed into our daily diet of living tends to appear disinteresting as well. Take television: the latest series of Strictly Come Brother Factor on Ice offers nothing: people perform to the cameras, audience pays money to vote, people pretend to care, someone wins, brief elation, no one cares. It passes the time, I guess.

Music, my deepest love, isn't quite the same, but it requires the strength to locate and enjoy good music to counter the ease of being fed the same commercial, MOR fodder through TV, radio, internet that somehow pleases people enough to pass the time for them. I'm one of the few people I know who will shell out £8-£12 on an artist's album rather than download it, even in full. I've bought 17 CD albums that have been released this year, and two further albums that haven't.

I digress, though; which is something that Brooker himself was wont to do during his downbeat ramblings. Apart from his trademark laconic self-deprecation, he pondered serial killing, mused at length on the 'glass of water' conundrum - half full, half empty? - and practically reviewed a (to me) totally unknown film for the opening third of the article in order to get underway. For a relatively short piece, which surely cannot be too taxing given his licence to meander so freely, and might point to why he feels no sense of achievement in his professional career, it certainly didn't pack much of a punch. Maybe he couldn't be bothered to try.

It amounted to a collection of thinly tied together jabs at himself, a biting cynicism at his own life. Having taken passing interest in Charlie Brooker's media bits and pieces from time to time, it seems that this makes up a large amount of his output: inward-looking criticism with a touch of humour that the reader can relate to. But that's easy, anyone can do that, and many people can do it a lot more succinctly, and with more wit. The article, in the end, read like the bored musings of a faux-depressive, lacking in direction. Of course, this was exactly the type of person Brooker claimed he was - it's just that since most people probably feel like that at more than one stage in their lives, and since it was written with about as much emotion and illumination as the black and white text it appeared in, Brooker's non-cry-for-help proved a pretty dull read.

It's obvious to me that Brooker's direction-less article was a little-needed insight into a no-doubt common anxiety many people will come across, since I seem to have been affected by the same condition - I read the article last Monday, but despite wanting to write a riposte, it's taken me more than a week to actually get round to doing it. I just couldn't be bothered.

Magpie Madness; Media mayhem

2008-09-02T19:07:00.010Z

'What on earth is going on at St. James's Park?'

The closing line of a Sky Sports News presenter as they went to a break just before 7:30pm tonight. It's the question anyone with half an eye on football will be asking as well. Forget Manchester City hijacking Chelsea's bid and subsequent pinching (for the meagre price of £32m) of Brazilian 'galactico' forward Robinho from Real Madrid less than 24 hours ago. Ignore Manchester United's bully boy acquisition of Dimitar Berbatov for a fee of similar weight.

It emerged, around 2pm today, that something very strange was developing on in the North East. After Saturday's result - a humbling 3-0 defeat at Arsenal, in which convicted criminal Joey Barton was roundly supported by Kevin Keegan against condemnation by pretty much everyone in football (for being a prick, mainly) - and confusion over who has actually been signing and selling players for Newcastle, 'King' Kevin Keegan and Mike Ashley have been in discussions most of today and yesterday. About what these discussion were was not clear, hence the BBC report earlier today touting that the pair were in talks over transfer policy. However, as interest grew and speculation mounted, BBC's point of view - and Sky Sports News's, according to forums online today - moved to suggest that Keegan's future as Newcastle manager was in doubt. It seemed suddenly that issues arising from the past two days' meetings were more than problematic; enough for a manager to walk out less than a year into a job at a club he loves and at which he is beloved and held in the highest of esteem by fans.

Suddenly, the media frenzy peaked, and 'sources confirming' stories saw BBC, Sky and numerous other news outlets reporting, as fact, that Kevin Keegan had left Newcastle. Eyebrows, if they had been raised, positively receded beyond hairlines. What could possibly force Keegan into such a position that he had no choice but to leave? Could Mike Ashley - laddish chairman of Newcastle pictured downing a pint during Newcastle's defeat at the Emirates - really be stupid and strong-minded enough to force his will onto a man whose dismissal would turn Geordie fans against him to a man?

Indeed, the long-suffering Geordies - who have put up with nine managers in just over a decade, and declare themselves a top four club every time they're asked, despite not having finished anywhere near for at least three seasons - gathered immediately outside the ground to protest at this news. Ashley, if he was aware of this, would surely have realised through the haze that it wouldn't only be Keegan gone if the fans turned against him. The football world scratched their heads in bemusement: why had Kevin Keegan been sacked?

Yet the obituaries had barely been inked - although BBC ran (and still are running) 'Keegan's coaching career in photos' - and the fans' pitchforks raised in anger than Newcastle finally produced a statement: Keegan had not, in actual fact, been sacked. That was around two hours ago; little has changed, except BBC rewriting its story to say Keegan's future was unclear.

And it still is; KK might not have been sacked, but that does that mean he hasn't walked? Who is making decisions at Newcastle? Why was Milner sold? Who sanctioned the signings of Ignacio Gonzalez and Xisco? Has Dennis Wise's position got anything to do with it? Questions that need answering for Kevin Keegan, never mind the fans and media.

But what concerns [me] most at this point in time, though, is the media's handling of it. Keegan was purported to have told those around him he was leaving, or had been sacked. That is information, from unofficial sources. It is not a press conference or statement. Phrases like 'sources close to' and 'we understand' are not enough to base factual journalism on.

However, it is the nature of today's media, where news is instant and global, reaction is real-time, and fans are angry mobs, that neccesitates this need for knowledge - although not neccessarily facts, which seem of secondary importance. Audiences don't just consume, they participate in the news, indeed constitute a substantial amount of detail in internet reporting with citizen journalism, blogging, eye-witness texts and videos. They expect in return a news supply which conforms to a similar time-frame. But facts aren't quite like that: just look at the Foster story where, it has now transpired a week after taking place, father and husband Christopher Foster murdered his family, before setting fire to his million-pound mansion and committing suicide.

It's true that the sporting arena is one of extraordinary passion, under a constant spotlight, with football dominating all year round. It requires an equal in its reporting. But it seems that following yesterday evening's incredible events, a one-off day of madness in football news, in a race to confirm and 'break' a sensational story today in that same sport, the truth may have got left behind.

Back online!

2008-08-07T22:14:00.004Z

Months, MONTHS have passed since I was able to even view this page, let alone use it. BT's dismal customer service cut us off from mid-February til the very end of July, although of course they're lightning quick setting us up again as new customers. Not so happy that they're simply the foundation on which we use Sky for everything, but twats can't be choosers as the saying goes.

So it's another year in Bournemouth, the second in a row post-Uni and into a new job, new flat to mark the occasion. The job: Marketing Assistant at Emap Glenigan, the first rung of the ladder, step in the right direction and so on. The flat: four lads, Sky TV, a beer fridge, a back garden with a goal already lined up against the flowers, first name terms with the curry house round the corner. It's the centre of everything that's happening in Winton. Big deals, yeah?

Olympic fever will grip the country for three weeks from tomorrow, Britain's drugged-up athletes (heroes) expected to win around 40 medals. Typically last-minute British fuss, though a strange lack of mass promotion as global companies try not to appear supportive of China owing to the regime's human rights and Tibet issues. At least we can all get behind Andy Murray as one of our own, and ignore the fact he is actually Scottish. Elsewhere, since there's no football (yet! We'll be there in 2012) there's a few other high points, notably proper British idols such as 'attractive woman in epic contest' (Kelly Sotherton), 'talented youngster and underdog' a la Britain's Got Talent (Tom Daley) , 'heroic, nearly-woman' (Paula Radcliffe) and Christine 'innocent after all' Ohoruogu, who, should she win a medal, will bravely fight back tears as the justice becomes all too much.

It's the fleeting frenzy of it all that disappoints, the bandwagon jumping on names who enter into the daily language simply through hype. These people devote their normal working days and weekends into getting good at something, just for the odd event that peaks in the public eye, then disappears again. They're supported not for the hard work, sheer determination and natural talent that goes into their competing, but for being British. But it is their Britishness that is craved: I doubt many people watching the Olympics actually feel proud to be British when they do so; for one thing, it's just sports. It's (usually) thousands of miles away and there's no personal involvement. And many of the events are rubbish to watch: a lot of waiting, something happens, there's perhaps an exciting flourish, the end. It's not (of course) like football or tennis, which no doubt will be the most attractive Olympic medal contests.
I also tend to feel physically inferior, jealous of someone else's obvious talent and muscle, and generally less of a man. So anyone analysing this rambling is immediately diagnosing 'inferiority complex' and putting it all down to me being jealous of muscly men (and women). But it's more an irritation with the over-the-top interest, the hysterical highs and gut-wrenching lows that 'everyone feels' when really, apart from the athlete's, and their coaches and families, come September no one will really be bothered again.

Explosion chaos in Bournemouth town centre

2008-01-23T22:10:00.000Z

The pensioner and student-attracting seaside resort Bournemouth was rocked by an enormous explosion at around 15:45pm this afternoon, inflaming fears of a terror attack on the iconic Bournemouth Tourist Office on Westover Road. Eyewitnesses in the Portman House building report a total loss of power for at least 1.8 seconds, before all eyes were drawn irresistibly across the 6th floor and out to sea - where, in between the eyes and the sea, a charcoal black plume of smoke had risen quite suddenly around 100 feet into the air, towering above the rest of the town centre skyline.

The cloud of black smoke dissolved as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by wispy white funnel that was soon barely discernible in the fading grey afternoon light. Further attacks - sorry, burnt out fuse boxes - were not reported, though the town and indeed the entire nation will sleep uneasily tonight while fierce rumours abound that Al-Queda, Muslims, Iran, the US and the Irish are behind this reign of fear.

The centre of Bournemouth was brought to a standstill as the thick smoke engulfed the surrounding area and turned a Wednesday afternoon into night, lit up only by the raging force of an 11,000 volt fireball that terrorised helpess shoppers and countless pigeons for over 4 hours.

What really happened is this: an 11,000 volt electricity sub-station did actually explode, in one burst of flame and puff of smoke, and a tree caught fire to render itself the only casualty of the drama. In typically hackneyed fashion, the Daily Echo website commented unhelpfully on the 'knockout' blow which has left parts of Bournemouth, including surrounding shops and the stream running through the nearby gardens, without power. Rumour has it the tree was unwisely lighting up a cigarette while leaning over the electricity station, though official sources have refused to confirm whether this was an attempt at suicide.

The point here, of course, is not the irony of my blog but the disappointing conclusion and reality to what seemed from where we were, for a few minutes at least, a genuinely frightening proposition: the lights going out, black smoke appearing just across town, concern on people's faces. Maybe I've been watching too many trailers for Cloverfield. But as the entire power running to a building housing some 1,000 people failed utterly, and in the immediate confusion what looked like the aftermath of a bomb appeared starkly out of the window, there was a slight air of unease and mystery that was founded on unknowing, guesses and confusion. A desire for excitement, the thrill of potential horror, the possibilities far more interesting than the probable explanation would be.

So, investigative journo that I am, I walked down to the gardens in search of the facts, to be greeted by one policeman, some Do Not Cross tape flapping lamely in the wind and two men in fluorescent jackets with 'Electricity' on them looking down a hole. Wet leaves and fast-disappearing foam dampened the pavement. A few shoppers were still milling around - in fact the only thing that seemed to be closed was the Tourist Office itself. "Show's over" was never more appropriate. And, if you've read this all the way through, you're probably wondering if it even began. But if I'd stated that at the blog's opening, it wouldn't have made such a good story. And maybe that's the point.

Music for 2008

2008-01-11T00:16:00.000Z

My internet's just about to be cut off, as we've "forgotten" to pay the bill, so I thought I'd get some blogging in before it dies for 4 days or so. I posted about New Year's Resolutions last year, and I've decided to try and be more active in my blogging as a resolution for this year, so I won't bother with the boring details of my new aims of keeping fit and healthy.

Instead, I thought I'd whack out some details on music for this year. First I'll get a few recommendations out of the way: Foals, We Are The Physics, Los Campesinos!, Operator Please, Bombay Bicycle Club, Duffy, Black Kids, Crystal Castles. All of these are making great, exciting new music and are for the large part stupidly young. Which is a good thing. Forget Coldplay, Hard-Fi, The Twang, Kasabian, Snow Patrol, Razorlight, MOR stuff like that, and search out some of these for a refreshing taste of new music.

2008 is likely to see yet more innovations and irrevocable changes to the music industry than last year. We saw the incorporation of downloads into official charts and sales figures, saw how the opportunity seemed to glisten for every struggling unsigned band going, saw how this new avenue could be exploited through careful campaigns - Chris Moyles made Billie Piper's Honey to the B get to number 17 in January '07 even though it had originally been released in 1998, while Koopa became the first unsigned band to have a top 40 hit through their relentless download campaign - and then saw how smoothly record companies and online music stores were able to capture the market with considerable and unquestioned ease. In light of how, just 3 or 4 years ago, the big record labels were bemoaning the rise of music downloading and file sharing, the shoe certainly seems to be on the other foot now.

But music, in my opinion, is getting ever more fragmented. When MySpace first emerged, bands that had 25,000 friends were heroes, the power of the underground, the shining examples of good, unsigned new music. But already, MySpace has lost its voice: there are probably a hundred thousand bands on MySpace now - and a lot of these will have 25,000 fans. Yet they'll still be unsigned, and unnoticed. Conversely, multi-million selling acts with big record label backing will have quickly cottoned on to the online phenomenon, and will gain double as many fans as the best unsigned band around in no time, through their backing and support from label channels. The smaller bands have had what should rightfully be 'their' medium descend into a free-for-all, with scope for capitalist-like gains and losses.

The competition for real-time music listening for free on sites like MySpace, as opposed to the non-real-time transaction of actually paying for a CD/download, and listening to it once it's purchased, is also too large. The internet has become congested with a thousand great new bands vying for the same fans, the ones that want that new music buzz, the excitement of finding a new fresh band that no one else really knows. But in the ever-quickening pace of modern technological life, staying loyal, or at least staying in one place, is too lazy and worryingly easy to appear out of touch. Bands are constantly having to produce, to innovate, without the financial resources to do so successfully and competitively, to appeal to the internet consumer, without any tangible reward. It's all very well the Guardian Art pages recommending 10 unsigned acts for 2008 - people aren't going to wait patiently for them to take their time to produce a quality debut LP. They want results straight away, and if not offered, there are 100 unsigned bands good enough, and just waiting, to be recommended elsewhere.

The other area in which the signed and established artists hold a major advantage is in the purchasing of mp3s. Admittedly an unsigned act might have a great track record so far, but why take a risk buying their latest EP when it might be a let down? Why not listen to it for free on their MySpace? Meanwhile, you know what you're likely to get with an established band, so forking out just £0.79p for their new song is bound to be great value. This leads to a situation whereby, for example, Iron and Wine's latest album is available to listen to in full, for free, on his MySpace page, while Red Hot Chili Peppers can suffice with 4 one-minute long song excerpts on theirs. The lengths that up and coming artists have to go to to make strides on the internet is now almost as tough as getting signed through someone liking your demo. The internet might well be the world's most democratic medium, but democracy still needs its leaders and rulers.

So it seems to me that music careers are short-term in the modern world. Who released a debut album last year that you could genuinely tout to being the next Radiohead, REM or even Oasis? By that, I mean a band who will have a decade or more of success, a success that contains several acclaimed albums in a number of years greater than the number of albums, and who will even be given the time to earn the chance to do so? The only example that springs to my mind for a modern band achieving this is Coldplay. Seriously. You might not like them, but the fact is they've had 3 huge albums, and a 4th is guaranteed to be in the pipeline and will only be released when they're happy with it. With new bands, record labels are so caught up in snaffling each Next Big Thing that the Current Big Thing is left in the cold to fend for itself in coming up with the notorious difficult second album. Success is fleeting, and nowadays, seems more subjective than ever. Are The Ting Tings going to be successful because they're being widely regarded now as one of the bright stars for 2008? If they get dropped from their label after one album and are unsigned by the summer of 2009, will they think of themselves as a success? I highly doubt it.

If anything, the rise of the online music industry has segmented the audience further and may in fact lead to a recession in opportunity for new bands like Los Campesinos!. Art is held by all its lovers in their hearts for personal aesthetic reasons and reaches real emotion for those who let it. And a personal sense of this can be gained online: there is something inherently romantic and self-rewarding in being part of a clandestine fan base of a certain band, an appeal which is all too easily propagated through websites and online communities, feeling that connection through the egalitarianism of the internet that our personal interaction and support makes a difference. (It doesn't, much). But this creates a group mentality, a need to compare and contrast with other artists of similar stature, a reason to find faults with other people who are on the same level as your favourite band. Online consuming of music has become a matter of taste insofar as who you like, and when you like it, is more important than what you like, and why. As I've said, it is hard to stay loyal when so much more is going on, and trend followers jumping from one thing to the next leave less behind to remember the bands who once 'were', and divide an audience who should be embracing all of this exciting equal opportunity phenomenon into micro groups of support that hold no power to speak of to offer the bands they love.

I've not even touched on the qualities in possessing a CD as opposed to iTunes telling you you now own the YouthMovie Soundtrack Strategies album, but it's 9 minutes past 2am and I have to be up in 5 hours for work. I'll leave that for another time.

Christmas Eve

2007-12-24T00:49:00.000Z

My blogging continues to be as sporadic as ever this year; generally finding time to write that which is not going to earn me money or readers of music reviews is difficult these days, what with a counter-productive job 9-5. Anyway, it's Christmas, and in light of the ever increasing dumbing down of Christmas, thought I would lay down one of the very few qualms I have with a modern Christmas.

Call me traditionalist, or something, but in my view Christmas Eve, and this really only applies if you've made the effort to spend Christmas with the family anyway, is the one evening in an entire calendar year you could bother to make the time to spend in and around your family. It is still a time of coming together and surrounding yourselves with the ones you love, even if it's all about online shopping and credit card debt. Similarly, even today, for me Christmas Eve still holds a sense of magic and anticipation I enjoyed when much younger, though the thrill and excitement of the day itself has long dimmed to a low flame, more of pleasant contentment than high-octane enjoyment. I enjoy spending Eve with my immediate family and remember Christmases from my childhood and recollect those feelings, which probably explains a little of it still retaining the sense of magic.

I also think that Christmas Day is the one day a year where it's unnecessary to be hungover. There is so much to enjoy to be stuck feeling ill, tired, sick, or disinterested. What a waste of time; clearly, Christmas lunch is the best meal of the year, while opening and exchanging gifts requires polite appreciation and is of course, an integral part to a great happy Christmas. Going clubbing, for example, on Christmas Eve, therefore, presents itself to me as a ridiculous notion. I would only look around and think "What the hell have all these people got to do with my Christmas?" I will probably go to the pub tomorrow afternoon with friends, or early evening, as I also enjoy spending time with them at this time of the year, but not as though I'm going to be rolling home at 1am. (Jinxed it now, blatantly going to be smashed).

This has no religious basing, as I don't bother with any services or anything over the Christmas period. This country's Christian stronghold had been dwindling long before I was born, and has never been a way of life for me at any point - more people will be shopping online on Christmas Day than going to a church in the UK, according to an article I read today. However, I just believe in family, I guess, and spending time with them at a time for celebration is something that everyone one can afford to do just once a year. It surely isn't too much to ask.

Sweet FA to do next summer

2007-11-21T23:58:00.000Z

The dour, pessimistic English attitude is rife throughout the sports world, but even deeper down, far more real than we are prepared to admit, is the ever-present conviction that England will do well. Football, cricket, tennis, athletics, Formula 1: constant expectation constantly crushed, and yet every week/year/2 years/4 years, we are eager again in anticipation fronted by feigned indifference or cynicism.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that England's footballers, schooled in the art of doing things the hard way, couldnt grasp a chance gifted to them from a most unlikely situation that could only be described as a lifeline. Throughout their qualifying group England had been inconsistent enough to leave qualification out of their hands, and yet when their fate was placed, by small miracle, back into their hands again, still the performance wasn't there. (I say 'inconsistent' rather than poor, as England had their moments, notably the vital back to back 3-0 wins over Israel and Russia.)

It's difficult to know where to lay the blame for England's failure to qualify for next year's European Championships. How far back do you go? Carson's howler in the 8th monute? Throwing away victory in Russia last month? The 0-0 at home to Macedonia? Was McClaren the wrong appointment 18 months ago? Or did he simply inherit a team managed by a coach who was tactically astute enough to take England to two quarter-finals but at the expense of the passion and heart that is supposed to embody English sportsmen, and which more than anything else inspires the English fans?

Of course, Enlgish fans return their passion and heart through alcohol-fuelled destruction of foreign cities, so tonight's result will be a welcome relief for the Austro-Swiss officials and organisers.

Returning to tonight's game, it never once, naturally, looked remotely like going to according plan. McClaren chose a must-not-lose game to throw Scott Carson his first competititve cap. Of course, less than 10 minutes in and that choice was made to look laughable. At least no one would have been surprised if it had been Robinson making the same error. McClaren then chose to play a defensively minded 4-5-1 formation, neglecting the fact that England couldn't really risk playing for a draw as one Croat goal would scupper the plans completely. Two Croat goals therefore tore the entire plan to shreds. McClaren didn't help his formation by going with Crouch's height as the lone striker, with two wide players whose main asset is speed. Leaving out David Beckham, still one of the best crossers of the ball in the world, when our main threat in a 4-5-1 formation would come from crosses and set pieces, was little short of madness.

The only surprise came when McClaren made exactly the right subsitutions at half time. A quick striker to replace Barry - who had been ineffectually rubbish and, since we had gone 2-0 down with his role supposedly protecting against conceding, was even more surplus to requirements when we need goals - and getting David Beckham on to supply the passes. Almost amazingly, Defoe's presence won the penalty, and Beckham's pristine ball created the equaliser. If it hadn't been McClaren's errors initially, those subs would have been tactical masterstrokes.

Yet just when England looked to be in a position to go on and win the game, the team did what they did under Sven - which was, admittedly, about his only problem during his tenure as manager - consolidate the position and try to hold out. Being England of course, this didn't work. A better team than Croatia could have scored six past England tonight, so when Croatia's third went in, it was time once again for the desperation and anxious panic. Unlike against Greece four years ago when Beckham's 90th minute free kick sent England through, there was no smile from lady luck, no individual piece of genius, no (second) life line for England. The simple truth was we hadn't the belief or the performers to carry out what was required.

In searching for excuses; yes we were affected pretty dreadfully from injuries. Hargeaves fully fit would surely have seen Barry dropped, while Owen and Rooney's injuries saw a striker without a Premiership goal to his name start alone up front, with underachieving Spurs' second string striker pairing as back up. And the least said about the back four - to a man an understudy to England first choice of Cole, A., Ferdinand, Terry, Neville - the better. The pitch was poor, too.

Once McClaren has been sacked, and it will happen because the pithy FA would never risk the complete backlash that will come from every single England fan if a manager who couldn't take us from the group we had to the European Championships was kept on, what's needed is a fresh start. Though the debate about the quality of English players will surface, England do have the players to compete on an international level. The U21s, so nearly finalists at the Euros this year, are all bright prospects. The likes of Walcott, Taylor, Carson, Bentley, Richards, are all waiting to step up. Terry, Ferdinand, Lampard, Gerrard, Rooney and Owen can be the back bone of a world class team for 4 more years at least. It's finding a coach who can convince them, and the rest of the players available, that we ARE a world class team that will bring England's national side out of the slump that is surely at its lowest point tonight.

Kyle slammed for shit TV show

2007-09-25T21:29:00.000Z

Yes! A bit of flagrant one-upmanship here for me over Jeremy Kyle's car crash of a show, put out daily by - who else - ITV, the News of the World of television. I'll intersperse snippets of the glorious BBC story into my blog just to rub it in as much as possible.

A judge has branded The Jeremy Kyle Show "a form of human bear-baiting" at a court case in Manchester. District Judge Alan Berg said the ITV1 daytime programme was "trash" and existed to "titillate bored members of the public with nothing better to do".

Don't you love it when judges actually do what their title entails, and pass judgment on something? And this guy couldn't be clearer, or more right. Jeremy Kyle's self-indulgent and moronic 'chat show' has come in for a complete battering, but in my view fairly. The show does exist to titillate members of the public - indeed, perhaps all programmes do - but the emphasis on pitting hapless idiots whose intentions are guaranteed to be anything but honourable is only going to end in one thing. For some reason, ITV producers think we'd actually care to see it.

Judge Berg added that it was "human bear-baiting which goes under the guise of entertainment. It should not surprise anyone that these people, some of whom have limited intellects, become aggressive with each other."

That quote is particularly important; 'under the guise of entertainment'. Certainly, the only possible entertainment to be gained from tripe like Kyle's programme is derogatory laughter at other people whose lives are ridiculously fucked up. Not that there's anything wrong with laughing either; it seems that ITV has a strict policy in place to make sure that only people with low self-esteem, "limited intellects", and a lack of education get on this programme, to ensure the maximum brainless outcome possible.

"It seems to me that the purpose of this show is to effect a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people whose lives are in turmoil."

For the purpose of ratings and audiences. I mean literally, the above is all the Jeremy Kyle show does. Is that what we need, a damning reminder of how bad some people's lives are? A reminder, however, that is so pointedly exposing and mocking that the only reaction is simply not to care? Kyle himself doesn't help, of course, but before I get onto ripping him apart, here's some abuse for the producers:

"This type of incident is exactly what the producers want. These self-righteous individuals should be in the dock with you. They pretend there is some kind of virtue in putting out a show like this," said Judge Berg...

which is exactly true, and the same can probably be said for the show's regular watching audience, pretending there's some worthwhile element to it. The show's a pile of crap: it's not social commentary, problem-solving or educational. It's simply encouraging apathy to other humans' plight, and glamorising the failings of society for 'amusement'.

The only amusing thing is what a cunt Jeremy Kyle is. Taking his cues from the US, Kyle simply sits his contestants, sorry, victims, in their chairs and proceeds to abuse them, talk over them when they try to speak, criticise them, make wild claims about them as though fact and then ignore any response he gets, all the while swanning about looking like a plumber dressed in a cheap suit and getting his braindead audience to cheer him on.

My next guest is a story about the sponsor of Jeremy Kyle pulling the plug on their £500,000 advertising deal. Let's bring him out! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7019266.stm

The work ethic

2007-08-23T22:40:00.000Z

It's been a sickeningly long time since I blogged; my digital silence crushed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. I have always advocated blogging and believed it to be a worthwhile online hobby, a 21st century communication tool and more, yet I haven't posted a blog in 7 weeks.

The main reason for this lack, at least in the last month, has been the daily grind of 9-5, the working life. In fact what made me think about blogging seriously again was a work e-mail and meeting regarding 'social networking sites' and Portman, who I currently work with. (I don't say 'work for' as I'm technically employed by a recruitment agency, who take about 15% of my wages, and because I could quit Portman with no notice at all as it is 'the nature of temping'). This e-mail said that it is important, working as we do with sensitive and highly confidential financial information, that all internet activity that in any way mentions Portman must be clearly safe and not in breach of the Data Protection Act, and secondly, and more oddly, must be accompanied by a disclaimer stating that any views expressed are those of the individual and are not held by Portman Building Society.* So:

*Any views expressed within this blog are those of the author, Tim Miller, and are not in any way opinions belonging to, or endorsed by, Portman Building Society. That Portman Building Society disappears into financial history and is literally no more from 28th August 2007 onwards, when it gets taken over by Nationwide, is not the point. My views, I guess, are not endorsed by Nationwide, either.

Anyway, the work ethic. Choosing Portman was forced upon me by my penniless situation and £290 p/m rent after 2 months of relaxing since finishing Uni, and not being able to afford living while the wait searching for and getting a job I wanted went on, as it was simply taking too long and everyone needs money. So having turned them down initially, I was humble enough to throw myself upon their £7 an hour offer a second time and was luckily not turned away. Also lucky is that I've landed in a Correspondence Team, so, as tenuous as it is, my writing and communication skills are actually in use! There's a moral in there somewhere, probably about not biting the hand that feeds.

Regardless of where it was, though, I needed a job, as my days without structure had begun to turn into weeks where the weekends bore no difference from the weekdays, and getting up before 11am was 'early'. I've spent three years in that mindset, now more than ever before, I guess, it's time to grow up. And it has been enjoyable, having a new place to go to, new people to meet, something, however menial or dull might seem, to work for. After the communal University atmosphere and the comradery forged through being students, a place where the majority of staff are under 30, bright and beautiful and on your level is not a lot different. It is, in fact, more of an extension of those relationships and links, except now I'm paid for turning up.

There's something faintly Hitler-esque about it, but earning your own wage is very comforting, knowing that you've earned money to call your own and do what you will with. You start somewhere, and this is only the beginning, but a real sense of self-satisfaction comes from working at something so that you might live a certain way, achieve a certain goal, create new possibilities. There's also a sense of independence, of freedom, and maybe Adolf was right: Arbeit Macht Frei.

Because it also makes you appreciate the free time you get, the friends you have, the hobbies you take part in, the music you listen to, and so on. For the first time since I was a 16 year old about to do my GCSEs, the weekends actually mean something to me. And of course, the great difference between working and Uni is that you leave your work at the door. No coming home straight into a 2,000 word essay anymore, or reading a hundred pages on Marxist criticism. At least until I do a Masters....!

Working is inescapably something that has to be done, for the bulk of your lifetime, and you spend more time with your colleagues than your family, friends and partners. That's why enjoying and embracing the work ethic is so important, and by association, finding a job you love is too. There is no sense in belittling a 'job', ignoring work until it's an aside between doing things in free time. It needs to be swiftly integrated and harmonised to suit the lifestyle you want. Until we find out what the human race is for, and the meaning of life, 'work' will be how your life is built and managed, and subsequently, something which has to be taken head on.

(This was certainly not presented as part of a speech at any recent Neo-Nazi conference, and again, is not in any way the views or opinions held by Portman Building Society or Nationwide. The rich fat-cat wankers).

The Blair Switch Project

2007-07-02T00:17:00.000Z

A humorous title to begin my blog always helps, though I have to nod my head to Channel 5, who created a news piece on what Tony Blair might do next called Blair: Which Project?, which is a lot better than mine. The transition between Prime Ministers has not been an easy one this week, and Gordon Brown, dour-faced and rubbery, looks set to inherit a multitude of problems that in the run up to Blair's leaving do, were widely forgotten about.

After much umming and ahhing, Blair has finally left 10 Downing Street, months after originally signalling his intent to do so, and after several delays in specifying when exactly he would be moving house. I was perhaps too young to commit to memory much of the passover between John Major and Tony Blair in 1997 - a much more significant event, in that the change of Prime Minister then actually meant a change of Government too - but I do not remember such a spectacle made of the event then compared to this year. It will take months for Brown to affect any radical or even noticeable overhaul of the Labour Party's governing of this country, yet this passing over power turned into something of an all day television event.

The BBC's Huw Edwards spent hours commentating on bird's eye views of London where indistinguishable cars bearing Blair and then Brown visited Buckingham Palace to take part in what Edwards called a "great British tradition": the former PM resigning before the Queen, the new PM being appointed by her. Somehow, it seemed to go on for ever, and flicking to and fro from BBC One, I wondered at times whether they were actually re-running old footage and scenic shots of the London Marathon.

Cherie said it: "I don't think we'll miss you very much", and no doubt she was right. How the (admittedly convoluted) process of power passing from one man to another, that had been on the cards all year, deserved live coverage for hours on end is beyond me. It went on almost as long as Concert for Diana today (and THAT had Ricky Gervais, Lily Allen, Nelly Furtado, James Morrison, Elton John and Rod Stewart). The power switch didn't make for electrifying viewing: what was going to happen, Blair suddenly run out of the Palace yelling "I won't resign!!"? Brown's car go up on the kerb and into the railings outside number 10? As I said, it's significance in the moment was largely superficial, only time will tell what difference it will make. However, the country has certainly been a more...interesting place in the last few days since Brown took over.

Two foiled car bombs in central London (the police are lambasted when they shoot an innocent man, but prevent two potentially horrific nail bomb explosions and there's not a word of praise), a flaming car driven into Glasgow airport, half of Yorkshire under water; Brown's going to have his work cut out. Britain remains on the highest security alert after the two incidents in London and Glasgow seem almost certainly linked to a terrorist group, although that does lead me to ask what security alert we go to if something like 7/7 were to happen again in the next day or two. Still, the police and Scotland Yard do seem to be making strides in their investigations with several arrests and successful leads being followed. But the message, if indeed it was a message - the timing is all too punctual to be coincidence in my opinion - is clear.

Welcome to the hardest job in Britain, Mr Brown. Signed the media, the public, Osama, Iran, me, the Conservative and Lib Dem Parties, and France.

Na-na, why don't you get a job?

2007-06-14T23:48:00.000Z

So this is it. The three years of University education, being a tax-dodging student, spunking money on nothing but beer and booze (...oh), are over, and it's time to move into the world, grow up, get a job and join the ranks of people counting down the days til retirement.

I'm not that cynical about this, actually; in fact I'm quite looking forward to procuring a nice job where I can settle into the initial groove of my career path and look upwards at the various rungs I wish to climb, as they - hopefully - come nearer. The trouble is, we came to Uni to get a degree...to get a good job. And since I finished my University work and stepped up the employment push, I've discovered something. Getting the degree, it seems, was the easy part.

For everybody has a degree nowadays. That's the first blow: of course, how did I not see at the beginning? Everybody who'll be applying to the jobs I want will need, and therefore have, a degree too! It must come down to grade, perhaps. But apparently, a lot of places don't place much emphasis on the difference between an upper second (2:1) or lower second (2:2). Why, then, did I bother working hard enough to aim to achieve a 2:1? (Or, why didn't I work harder to achieve a first?! Damnit Damnit Damnit.)

A desire to work in the type of industries where the cliche 'it's not what you know but who you know' is a general rule of thumb, which happens to be shared by thousands of people in exactly the same boat as me, is obviously an uphill struggle. In my view it's worth attempting and worth trying to succeed. However in just a few weeks I have learnt that your supposed aides, the recruitment agencies, are not your friend beyond the first contact. They'll happily cart you off into any role, vaguely linked to some element of your chosen profession often simply by being opposite a building where the job you actually want goes on. The way in, it appears all to clearly, is indeed to know someone, or hit that jackpot with a chance meeting, an opportunist, impulsive journey, or simply being in the right place at the right time. In other words, a degree might give you the knowledge, but that's it: it's up to you to find out how to use it.

I'm not convinced that this is what Playstation 3 meant when they said; 'This.Is.Living.'

Summer of celebrity

2007-06-01T23:08:00.000Z

Probably at a similar time last year (check the archives), I embarked on my customary 'Big Brother is shit' rant. Naturally I watched this year's launch show, because to criticise something you don't know anything about is a double standard, and also because if I am to hold a conversation over the next few months, I will no doubt need some inside knowledge on it. So my brief thoughts: twins, I would, Posh Spice wannabe, I would, Emily, I would. The rest don't deserve even the little consideration I've given to those four there.

Anyway, Big Brother 8 (eight, for fuck's sake, wasn't 1, maybe 2 enough?) will no doubt be at the forefront of the tabloid newspapers until September/Madeleine is found alive/dead, and the inevitability of it just depresses me. Alright, they've filled the house with women for the first few days. And yes, in with the weird looking (possible man Tracey) and the plain weird (embalming-obsessed Laura), they've thrown in a couple of normal girls and plain, older women who probably just want a bit of fame. Where my problem lies is that they're going to get it, in shedloads, all summer, and for the rest of 2007, for doing absolutely nothing at all, and being absolute non-entities (Emily apart, she should be the next queen).

This country's saddening obsession with creating celebrities, putting people up on pedestals is just verging on the ridiculous now. Take those twins. If I want to see rather empty headed, slightly vain but attractive 18 year old blondes giggle and dress alluringly, I'd sit in Bournemouth town centre for an hour, cut eye holes in a newspaper and voyeur. That sort of girl exists in every town in every corner of Britain; I don't need a television screen and 24 hour coverage to see, understand, and have confirmed for me, their behaviour. Yet when they're evicted (or worse, WIN), they'll have lads mags shoots, television interviews, radio interviews, fashion lines I expect...for what? They're nothing but day to day girls, cherry picked (I wonder if they've had their cherries picked) from a million other girls exactly the same to appear on television, and be lauded over by a mass audience somehow TOO STUPID to realise that these people are outside on their doorsteps anyway.

The poorest part of this creating celebrity - note, the point is that we don't just worship them now, we make our own idols from anywhere and anyone - is that, in a typically British fashion, we set them up with huge, great expectations, perfect suckers for a fall when the realisation dawns that oh yes, they're normal people, and then take utter and intense delight in that fall from grace anyway. What does it say, that this country's press and Big Brother watching masses can create a self-sufficient circus of news, gossip and celebrity, that lasts for an entire year, with the only proviso that Endemol gets round to picking 14-odd people and building a house for them once every 12 months? Perhaps this famous quote, from hundreds of years ago, speaks for itself.

"The People, who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions; everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses" Juvenal, Roman satirist.
***************************************************

The other story, of course, from which we have not heard the last but may well fade over the summer, is of Britain's newest celebrity couple: Kate and Gerry McCann. Having flown into Rome for a chat with the Pope, as all devout Catholics are able to do of course, no matter where they're from or their status, the McCann clan are now off to Amsterdam and Berlin, taking in some of Europe's greatest cities and enjoying an extended summer holiday, having already stayed in Portugal and Spain over the last month.

I'm not sure who's paying for their European tour; but, despite having played already to sell out crowds in Wembley, Athens and Hampden Park, their fans are still urged to donate their money to a fund (confusingly entitled findmadeleine.com) and to contribute more to the total, which stands at nearly £590,000.

In all seriousness: These people have lost a child. They are NOT Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. And £590,000 donated to a fund that does nothing, and serves no one. Next Big Brother will be donating their entire text message voting revenue to the website, and the world will implode in a tidal wave of tears from false compassion.

End of days

2007-05-30T00:07:00.001Z

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." I can't remember who it was that said that, but it seems fitting now. A torrid few days of past-midnight finished in Uni, then one final up-til-5am before getting up at 8.30am to hand it all in the same morning. Not a degree that has ever really been keen to go quietly, naturally the CD-writing didn't work first time round, and it was stress stress stress (stupidly tired, hungry and armed with a pair of scissors while shakily cutting out my final piece of work) til about 11:30am before a 12pm deadline.

That was, however, it. A week that had seen me watch ITV quizcall til the early hours, order a Domino's pizza to Weymouth House and go without a much needed food shop was over (the two rather obviously linked), and with it, three years of University, an entire degree, the end of life marshalled by education. It really was, in a way, the first day of the rest of our lives.

The relief at getting that final work in was replaced almost instantly with a feeling of not knowing how to feel, apart from tired, still. The warm realisation that there went the final piece of coursework I'm ever likely to do was balanced by the shock that the place that had been the centre of my life for three whole years was going to simply send me out into the world without so much as a tender goodbye, barely even a mention. Meanwhile, the prospect of a glorious summer of freedom ahead filled with fun times, fantastic friendships and experiences that only a cycle of time spent at University can create was tempered by the nagging reminder that, in the long term, things were certainly going to change when the sun goes down. Yes, no more Uni work; instead, the five day-a-week 9-5. The pauper's life of living off the student loan is replaced by having to pay off the student loan. Would you rather be meeting deadlines or targets? Can I risk going out tonight, or just start living for the weekend?

There is no way in words or pictures to sum up the last three years of my life sufficiently. Picutres: I'd need thousands from digital cameras that have probably been broken numerous times and photo albums that existed only on someone's old laptop. Words: I could write a dissertation-length narrative describing everything about University. Every single night out, ever. Getting tea in the break in Research Methods. The open top buses to Uni in summer. Friday afternoon lectures. When Elements used to be good. Literally, something worth talking about happens every week while you're at Uni, and the habits that you grow into don't become boring, they become lovingly kept up, looked forward to. The same old places hold new experiences. The great times are prolonged until the dark times can no longer be avoided, but are instead managed and got through by the promise of further great times on the other side. To the Uni, I'm just a name or a number, either 99109116 or bournemouth/d1163660, class of '04, but to me, the Uni and the three years I've spent here has and have been literally life-changing.

They say at the beginning of your degree that starting University is the biggest shift in your life. What they forget to add is "...until you finish". Throughout Uni, there's always been the 'next' thing; the next essay, that presentation, minor exams, second year, longer essays, the placement to sort, final year, the dissertation, more essays, revision. It's only now that the conveyor belt of University deadlines and landmarks has given way to a gaping chasm, called What Now? As one door closes, another opens, but it will be a few long weeks yet before I'm ready to step into the light.

Missing Madeline

2007-05-11T22:51:00.000Z

Or 'Maddie' as the empathetic press have dubbed her.

I was moved to make some form of comment on this now international news story after watching BBC News 24 try badly to get a rise from a Portuguese spokeswoman about the competence of the Portuguese police and, because I have a lot of time for the BBC, it made me angry.

BBC's line of questioning went in the direction of asking this spokeswoman how the Portuguese were reacting to the British press' accusations of substandard police work and poor organisation and so on. The Portuguese spokeswoman started out by saying how shocked and concerned the country is with news, and then, quite rightly, said how surprised they've been that the fantastic institution that is this country's press has decided to focus on the work of the police and criticise that.

This is, of course, typical of British journalism. Not content with having a three year old Briton girl missing in a foreign country - and, according to latest police theories, kidnapped for a paedophilia ring - our national papers decide to attack the work of the Portuguese police, in a move that will surely inspire confidence in the family, and will raise up in their readers the usual British nationalism stuff. You can almost feel the tabloids, itching to say 'Well, if she'd gone missing in our country, she'd have been found by now'.

But that's not even the point. The BBC, usually able to detach itself from such a mess, instead goes and gets in even deeper, by focusing on those papers being critical of the police, as if THAT is the story!! I mean, come on BBC! It's the British tabloids! What do you expect of them? They're not going to report on the missing girl story objectively when it presents such a clear opportunity to invoke emotions in their readership that they don't really feel.

The Portuguese spokeswoman also managed a dig of her own against the British press, and had clearly been doing her research. There are, she said, 20 missing children in the UK under a certain age - I forget which - including several under 2 years old. Where are the front page stories about these children? What makes Madeline so different? Being blonde, photogenic and missing in a foreign country? What sort of criteria are they, except for making a better news story?

Cynical me again, of course. I'm just disappointed that in the 8 days this young girl has been missing, already the press have put scapegoats in place while they wait idly with nothing better to write, until the juicy finale in which she turns up dead or, miracuously is returned. Of course, everyone hopes for the latter...but we all know which outcome would run and run in the papers longest.

No smoking, please, we're English

2007-04-23T00:44:00.000Z

Just a note, first, on returning to writing my blog for the first time in almost a month. It actually seems longer - I guess I've been busy, which I have, spending most days either writing, rewriting or rereading my dissertation. But that can finally be put to bed this week. I've almost forgotten what it's like to be able to write in first person again!

But a news story today caught my eye and reminded be that I hadn't bothered to blog about the smoking ban coming in on July the 1st yet. (yes yes yes yes yes). Today's story, anyway, was that the British Medical Association is calling for 10-packs of cigarettes to be abolished, saying that the amount encourages younger people to buy as they appear to be buying less and it doesn't cost as much as a pack of 20 (obviously. OBVIOUSLY!). The cynical idea that Labour ministers might have thought "once the smoking ban comes in cigarette sales could slow so we better hike the minimum price up" hasn't even crossed my mind. Apparently they make a lot of tax on cigarettes - I don't really know or care - so by all means, hike the price up to £10 a packet of 20.

Anyway, looking forward to the smoking ban. Wales and Scotland have already led the way, now finally it's our turn. One for the obvious health related issues: I'm fairly confident I haven't suffered too much at the hands of cigarette smoke so far, and now I won't again! Result. Two for the now-cliched going out fresh/coming home stinking reason. Next year my entire wardrobe will no longer smell faintly of smoke. Result, again. But the best thing about the smoking ban is the smug satisfaction in not having to even argue the good/bad about it. It doesn't matter if someone thinks the ban is a good thing or a bad thing, the fact is from the 1st of July it will be a thing; a law, in fact, so you avid die-hard smokers can moan til you're out of breath (which won't take as long as someone like, for example), but it won't make a bit of difference. There won't be such a thing as "social smoking" anymore, for all smoking will be anti-social. That, if anything can, will make some people hopefully question themselves a bit.

I expect in 2008 we'll find out that cigarette smoke actually balances the Ozone layer and the ban causes a critical imbalance in our atmosphere and the world will burn up in 2009, but nevermind. Two smoke free years!

Just fed up with England supporters to be honest

2007-03-30T00:55:00.000Z

It's been a while since I've blogged, and it is down to a lot of Uni work: just for example, this week I had to write a 2,000 word dissertation chapter and create a 2' 30" long radio package from scratch. Did both in 4 days, I actually smashed it this week.

But anyway, despite to being smothered with Uni work and not keeping up with the news much, I haven't failed to notice how much criticism Steve McLaren has come in for this week. Ok, 0-0 against Israel is not the result of a team supposedly 6th in the world. But then, when 'England expects' as the saying goes, sometimes 'England forgets' the reality of the situation. Did the England fans watching the game (not least the ones actually there) somehow miss that for about 75 minutes, we were in total control and Israel just threw every single player behind the ball? How can you expect to win a football match like that when you're the only team trying to play football? Gareth Southgate has a point when he says that England shouldn't even have to play certain teams.

Returning to the England coach, Rome wasn't built in a day, and McLaren has been in this job about 8 months, playing only 6 competitive games. Sven Goran Eriksson, who spent most of his tenure as England manager under constant fire from the "anti-foreign managers of England" brigade, was given 5 years, and I suspect it's those same fans calling for McLaren's head. The pictures on Sky Sports showing those fans in Andorra berating McLaren with abuse and gestures just make me think: 'I'm English, I support England and want them to do well and would consider myself a fan, yet these so called 'real fans' that apparently represent my feelings just look like a bunch of wankers to me'.

What is also ironic, and saddening, is that only in England would a 0-3 away win in a competitive European qualifying match be classed as a failure. Like Israel 4 days earlier, Andorra just turned up to try not to lose by too many goals. For 45 minutes it worked, then England proved themselves. But the fans and the media were not happy. McLaren must feel hard done by: you manage a team that wins 3-0 and all the press want to ask you about is why we played so badly? No wonder he walked out of the press conference.

With that conference cut short, Sky Sports News turned to talk about themselves and the press, turning a news piece about England and football, incredulously, into a self-pitying parade of bollocks, acting as if it's not their fault - of course it is: we beat a team 3-0, and you're not satisfied with the good, so you talk about speculation and rifts and poor performances, while ignoring the basic facts. Is this representative of the way sports news, and indeed all news, is going? That 'good news is bad news', or perhaps that bad news is the only news. It just seems to me that the media needs to perpetuate something negative for the public to engage in, which is a really sorry, sorry state of affairs.

And the worst thing is that those witless fans that appeared in their droves in Andorra will lap up every word.

Upon meeting your heroes

2007-03-08T00:28:00.000Z

It's that once in a lifetime chance. Make something of it, or let the opportunity slip. On Tuesday the 6th of March, 2007, (the day a key figure in my dissertation, Jean Baudrillard, died), I met one of my heroes, and the ACTUAL central figure to my dissertation. Christopher Morris.

I hadn't realised, until I was standing in a circle of likewise starstruck students listening to Chris Morris offer his sandwiches to a girl before the open interview he gave, how high a regard I hold the man in.

The thing is, he isn't your 'celebrity you'd love to meet', he isn't handsome, he isn't fashionable, he isn't even famous. His work is infamous. He himself is infamous, notorious but mysterious, a genius to some, a cunt to others.

He certainly is a genius to me. Taking it upon myself to pore over his most well known television material - The Day Today, Brass Eye, Jam - for my dissertation, instead of becoming sick and tired of going over the same ground constantly, as was the danger with writing a dissertation on a book, I was warned, I have instead become embroiled in the world of Chris Morris. The multitude of disguises, the phenomenal attention to detail, the brutally scathing but oh-so accurate parody and pastiche, the finest satirical material in contemporary television work, the man is regarded - in the right circles - to be perhaps the best comic satirist of our time. He was number 11 in Channel 4's 50 greatest comedians ever - a show voted for by other comedians and writers. That's some feat (if you ask me) when you consider his work isn't funny because it is comic, it's funny because it's true.

But to last Tuesday. Basically, if you don't know much about Morris: his last proper interview in a newspaper was in the Guardian in 2003. He thrives on not appearing in public to defend, explain or occasionally take credit for his work. He used to refuse to appear in public unless he was under the guise of a character from his television shows. All this I knew.

So for THE Chris Morris, the man who I am writing my dissertation on, the man who never appears in public, the man who has built his reputation on refusing to confirm or deny anything about himself, to be appearing, in public, at my University, IN MY MEDIA SCHOOL, FOR FREE, was about the biggest and most exciting coincidence of my life so far. In fact, so amazing to me was this coincidence, that until he appeared in Weymouth House at 6:05pm or so, bushy haired and with a spangly scarf, I was quietly prepared for him not to turn up at all.

When he appeared, he chatted leisurely with a few students about stuff, ate some sandwiches put on by the Media School and posed for one photo. I managed at this point to stand somewhat near to him, but my nerve failed me to step forward and ask him to sign my copy of Jam, as I was, actually, shaking. We all then trooped to the Barnes Lecture theatre for the main event. The interview itself, which we were specifically asked not to record audio or visual, was a fairly informal affair, conducted by Paul Lashmar, a freelancer who seemed to me to be fairly unsure what to make of Chris Morris. Things got a lot better when he opened up 'the floor' to the audience a chance to ask questions, which went on for about 45 minutes.

It is hard to describe how surreal, how "once-in-a-lifetime" that moment truly was. Chris Morris, a man who cloaks his every move and covers his every track, sitting, stripped of any mask or disguise, in a grubby lecture theatre in front of perhaps 200 or so students (mainly) , the very people who want to surround the him with the attention and hype he so deliberately avoids, though of course we all knew that and tried not to act so breathless and in awe. When the opportunity arose to ask a question, engage in conversation their media hero, everyone tried to outdo each other with interesting questions. I thought of three myself, but by the time I had the guts to put my hand in the air, I was overlooked for what turned out to be the last question and for the second time that night, I missed my opportunity.

After that, there was a generous 15 minutes before he had to be escorted to a train, in which some IDIOT animation students took up almost all his time trying to sell Chris Morris their ideas and productions. At this point, I could see the flicker of annoyance begin to appear in his face, a face which seemed to gently say 'Ah yes, this is why I don't do public appearances'. With that 15 minutes up, and still no one on one conversation held with him, I had no option but to join a couple of others in apologetically thrusting something into his hand to sign.

On taking my Jam DVD cover, which is purple, and my blue Biro, he said "this will just be some sort of colourless indentation", and looked at me slightly quizically, before writing "colourless indentation" above his signature. He briefly considered the futility of it, it seemed to me, and probably considered what sort of person I am not to care that you can only read what he's written in a good light. Maybe, just maybe, it appealed to him, this satisfying a fan with a colourless indentation.

It was over in 2 hours. I had two chances, but I DIDN'T MENTION THAT I AM WRITING MY DISSERTATION ON HIS WORK. Fuck fuck fuck fuck, why why why? I can at least count myself very, very lucky that this once in a lifetime opportunity occurred, and I think I almost managed to make the most of it. It isn't every day you get a chance to meet your heroes, and with Chris Morris, it's unlikely I will have such a clear opportunity to do so again. But I did, I met one of my heroes, and that, as I still seem to be unable to quite comprehend that it happened, was enough for me.

Postmodernismist

2007-03-06T01:19:00.000Z

Something I still remember from either a Bournemouth Open Day, a very first lecture or perhaps something another student said when I started at Bournemouth, was that 'you will find that postmodernism is everywhere'. Back then, postmodernism was just another one of those words to put aside til the time came, like SPSS, Feminism, decontexualised and chlamydia. But now, whoever it was, I see, was right.

This year, postmodernism has been looking over my shoulder in almost everything I do: it's fuelling my dissertation argument, it's been at the heart of some of my essays, and generally, whether I've realised at the time or not, it's underpinning just about every text book I read on all my University projects at the moment.

The problem is, whoever warned me about postmodernism nearly three years ago got one thing wrong. They hadn't bargained on me actually liking it.

Perhaps Universities, if they do nothing else, really open your eyes to your place in society, and finally show you glimpses of the real world before you enter into it. They act as the central site for generations of young people to take on board and evaluate the great thinkers and ideas that have shaped our society up til now - right before we go on to try and shape it ourselves. And since postmodernism is defining the aesthetic of the society we find ourselves in (it IS everywhere), it seems not the worst thing to actually spend some time thinking about.

For I quite fancy myself as a bit of an intellectual in the making - again, going to University at all has probably brought this egotism on - in that I want to entertain and try to understand the ideas of the great 20th century names, Saussere, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and so on; those names that, on the first day of Uni, simply washed over you into the part of your brain marked 'probably won't need this name again', so that I can better understand, exist in and, who knows, affect my lifetime. University has perhaps dampened my belief in politics, despite it being the breeding ground for various movements and causes and petitions and campaigns and so on, all of us young people despairing at the inability for anyone but ourselves to see the way things really are. That sense of involvement, a genuine conviction in being able to make a difference, has lost some of its charm for me now.

Instead, I can see great enjoyment in the pretentious life of sitting about, writing about social and cultural issues in a detached, superior manner, casually obliterating entire periods of history, social movements and cultural trends of the past and the misguided present, telling people what was definitely wrong about 'Then' and what 'Now' definitely is and is not. Yes, that's the life for me.

And the reason postmodernism appeals so much in my modest quest for reputation and intellect is because, as University has shown, it is in everything I'm interested in, it is the period of my life, it is inescapable, for now. As someone once said, very wisely as it turns out, "You'll find that postmodernism is everywhere."

P.S
Update, 8/3/2007. I had no idea at all at the time I posted this blog, that on the same day, the 6th of March 2007, Jean Baudrillard died. He was 77.

Was Baudrillard, as I wrote about aspiring to critique and emulate the great philosophers of the last century like himself, uttering his very last words? Could his death have coincided with my declaration, setting in digital stone, as it were, that I would love to be considered a writer or even a philosopher of MY time? As Baudrillard died...have I begun? We shall soon see.

Jean Baudrillard, 1929 - 2007. In death we find out that he did live in reality, after all.

Our beautiful game...

2007-02-09T01:20:00.000Z

Not so pretty anymore. Tonight's main football headlines on Sky Sports News at 8pm were: a mass brawl between QPR and the Chinese Olympic team in a 'friendly', tied to QPR's charges on a brawl involving them and Luton last month, Luis Aragones (Spain Manager) having his appeal against making BLATANT racist comments upheld, Sheffield United player Keith Gillespie getting an extra match ban for punching an opposition player, and more on the story in Italy where a policeman was killed, maybe murdered, by rioting football fans.

Great. There's no news in football to do with football anymore, the only thing papers and media want to talk about is bad relations, bad behaviour, problems off the pitch, and so on. Whereas these sort of stories rumble on for days, the brilliant goals and sublime football gets rounded up in a highlights package shown once or twice.

Has football become, like all its detractors claim, simply two teams of 11 to running around an agreed space at an agreed time and trying to incite kicking the shit out of each other while thousands/millions of people look on? Is that all that men want to do on a Saturday afternoon nowadays? Last Saturday I went along with the first team (the first team - the team that is meant to be our club's best) and watched as three of our players got sent off for nothing to do with the football, but for either swearing or punching someone. After our centre-mid floored a lippy 16 year old kiddie with one blow (to be fair, how did the kid think he was going to react to being stamped on? Twat) an out and out brawl ensued. There wasn't a football kicked in earnest for around 10 minutes while just about everyone on the pitch piled into one corner and started fighting. Where have we seen that before? Oh, right, a top flight match between two Premiership sides in supposedly the 'best league in the world'.

My main anxiety is that football, after all is said and done, allows whoever plays to release some pent up energy and gives exercise and all that, but that this spills over into neanderthal savagery anyway. Why bother with Football Factory style hooliganism and risk getting arrested when you can join a team and have a legitimate circumstance to do it? It isn't enough to take part in competitive sport. It isn't enough to win at it. You have to fight for it, and win that war.

In the words of Henry Newbolt's World War One poem likening that great war to sport, "play up! Play up and play the game!" ("for fuck's sake", he might have added).

BB will bite the hand that feeds...its own

2007-02-02T00:49:00.000Z

After another classic series of the defining television programme of our time, the fallout rages on, the 'burning' issue in the pages of the tabloid rags. What have we learnt? Jade Goody IS a twat, after all, and even the most ardent of BB followers managed to jump on the bandwagon damning those racist remarks that were broadcast to an audience of...well, twats and racists in denial probably.

We were reminded in a timely manner just what drew our attention to Ms Goody in the first place - her extreme levels of genuine stupidity and general defamation of the term human being - when she appeared on her original Big Brother run; the show where real people do real things apparently. She should, at the time, have been mocked, ridiculed, made a spectacle of and made to feel ashamed. She was certainly a spectacle all right: and people with an ounce of intelligence looked on in disbelief as this society's celebrity obsessed culture made an idol out of this woman who could not set a poorer example to young girls if she tried.
And so it became the pattern; give someone an inch of limelight and they'll take a yard. Suddenly, all you had to do was appear on TV, and let the masses and their mass media (tabloids, Channel 4) begin the cycle. The "stars" of Big Brother became the stars of the tabloid masses, so the tabloids gave more and more info to those masses, who in return made greater "stars" out of those contestants, creating the need for even more tabloid coverage, and so on. As long as the show's running, the bewildering excitement and entertainment gained by some from Big Brother will grow uninhibited. Channel 4 knows this. Start a new series, sit back and let the BB circus run its course.

I've said this before on this blog, but I'll say it again. Are people's lives (or is it reality?) so dull that they find expression and enjoyment through a slim and fake involvement other people's lives? And what's most pathetic is that involvement is so non-existent: coverage of Big Brother contestent's lives is edited from 24 hours into one: what 'happens' in Big Brother is the choice of the programme producer. Viewers watch what they are told to watch, and think they're making individual choices and conclusions by doing so. Meanwhile, viewers cannot exert any influence over the lives they have a sudden interest in. There's always that human nature of curiosity, to be the unseen fly on the wall, an omniscient narrator if you will, but with Big Brother that's all there is. What point is there in 'knowing' everything that's going on and being unable to do anything about it? What use is that knowledge? Idle chit chat over an 11am cup of coffee, that's all.

The CBB just past has at last raised genuine doubts about Big Brother's hitherto untouchable status. It's uncomfortable suddenly seeing "one of our own" (I would usually detach myself completely from BB fans but for the sake of this argument I'll play along) make such a tit out of themselves and then remember that all the media interest, the condemnation, the embarrasment, the shame it brings on our nation, is down to the fact that, yes, it was us, we put her there in the first place. The people who put Goody on a pedastal suddenly don't want to know. The proud English are very quick to denounce the fallen, and even quicker to forget that we set them up for a fall at all (see football/cricket, our 'boys in Iraq', Tony Blair, Pete Doherty, etc etc). Even Big Brother's most die-hard fans joined in with the concern about the events in this Celebrity version, and it might mark, at long long last, the point where those fans realise that the 'reality' they hunger to observe is simply selected elements of our own culture, and it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Suddenly, the realisation: if they want to feel better about their own lives and our society, making a spectacle (on television for crying out loud) out of the worst parts of it for all the world to see might not be a good idea after all.

It's only taken 8 years. But I hope with all my heart that the implosion of Big Brother has begun.

New Year's Resolutions

2007-01-03T22:03:00.000Z

It's difficult to know what to do with NYRs (what you make after NYE ). Nowadays it's barely worth even thinking about doing something positive in your life which will most likely have negative side-effects at first. Society is so very unbothered about making resolutions for itself.

However! (there had to be an 'however' didn't there). I always say to myself that I will make a new year's resolution or two, and I always take the step of writing them down. Nothing life-changing, like "discover cure for AIDS", although I really should be getting on with that. Just personal, minor things; more realistic you might say, more achievable.

The reason that I continue to make them is down to a conviction that it is actually good for myself. It shows a strength in character, to deliberately set yourself targets or goals to achieve. That they are minor or realistic isn't the case in point: simply the act of setting things I want to and believe I can achieve shows a nature who desires challenges, which I think is important for self-confidence and self-belief. Sticking to difficult NYRs is difficult, so why set difficult ones?! I'm not going to set resolutions that I think I ought to be targeting, like cutting out foods or taking up jogging for example. I've set things that matter to me: resolutions that Iwant to meet and that I feel I can look back upon and have completed. Things like: get a part-time job to ease the money problems, and make sure I work hard enough to get a 2:1 this year. Those are well within my abilities - any fool can get a part-time job, in fact - but it would mean something to me if I could start balancing my money a bit more, so it's well worth me doing personally.

So I guess that's it: people should be setting resolutions, not because it is a thing everybody else does, or pretends to ("I meant to........, this year"), but because there are things we all want to achieve which, looked at seriously, are far less daunting than they actually are. New Year's Resolutions shouldn't be mocked for making people do things they don't want to do, they should be embraced for offering the perfect excuse to start doing something which really could begin any other time of the year anyway.

The one time people take a sober look at their lives, and it gets ridiculed. I say: NYRs ftw!

Music vs the music industry

2006-12-20T01:34:00.000Z

With X-Factor winner Leona bound to be Christmas number one this year (not that she's not good enough. She's supremely, incredibly talented. She will be an international star), it just highlighted the fact that you can take someone and plonk them to the top of the music tree. It points so obviously to that falseness of the music industry nowadays, and was just about enough for me regarding music for 2006.

This year has seen record companies, record stores, markets and customers embrace music downloading, rather than oppose it, to the point where it now makes up most of the sales in deciding the music charts. How quickly those record companies stopped moaning about illegal downloading once they bothered to venture into the almost limitless audience. Online music has now moved away from the self-promotion, underground fan based, word of mouth phenomenon that gave rise to the likes of Arctic Monkeys and sites such as myspace, and has become big business. Hugely big business, in no time at all. So that side to the music industry, a DIY ethic only getting to its feet in 2005, has already gone the way of the mainstream and commercial.

Is it all about money? Were illegal downloading sites really cutting physical sales so much so that they had to get the money available from downloading? It's clearly been worth it, as CD prices have barely moved. It still costs £10-12 to buy an album in the record stores. It doesn't cost much less to order CDs online. It does to download albums. But then, I still can't see the fascination of paying £7 to only 'virtually' own the songs of an album by a band. You don't own their album, you have digital copies of songs.

For me, why I refuse point blank to download unofficial leaks and will continue to buy new CDs of my favoured artists, paying to hold a CD in your hands, even though it probably costs less than 50p to make that CD, is a hell of a lot more valuable than paying simply to legally download music. 79p on iTunes, to do no more than connect to their server and get a certain song. If it costs almost nothing to make a CD, it costs nothing at all to let people download some data.
The posterity, too, of owning an album is valuable to me too, though I grew up with tapes, then CDs and mini-discs, and this generation will grow up needing nothing but an mp3 player to hear every song they can ever want. That sort of listening, though, devalues the music. Like re-reading your favourite book, putting on your favourite CD and listening to it is an experience. You're not going to think "I'll sit down and have a read of Catch-22" (for example) and go and read it at your computer.

So, the big businesses have done very well out of online this year. And the trouble is, all the sources who try desperately to provide a genuine alternative to commercialism in music now have to constantly come up with something new. These days, regardless of where you stand as an artist, you get chewed up and spat out. MySpace profiles a new band every day on its homepage. NME's "2006 cool list" feature 3 people in the top 10 (including no's 1 and 2) whose bands haven't even released albums yet. It reads simply like a "what's hot this month". New acts get a week's worth of fame and are gone again. And this is in the places where they're supposed to be supported.

The thing is, I don't have a problem with commercial music. Girls Aloud, yes, are vastly image conscious, but they release perfect pop songs, as do Sugababes. Getting into the charts should not be snubbed by underground bands, or bands of certain genres. If you want to be successful, the charts, especially albums, are the only thing that matters. Artists like the above are successful because they do well in them. For some reason, being popular as a band is a bad thing now? But if you want you music to be heard, and you want to be loved for your music, then the popular music album charts (the clue is in the name) are the place to be. Do you think the Fratellis, Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen or The Kooks care that their CDs sit alongside Take That, George Michael and Scissor Sisters? Of course they fucking don't. And it doesn't make these bands instantly void from being credible. Well, it shouldn't but the "real" bands who play to 57 people in their home town once a month and sell albums through MySpace to friends in other "real" bands while having a day job to fund being in a "real" band think so. I sure hope that superiority complex keeps you warm at night.

So like I say, music isn't suddenly bad because it becomes commercial. (Everyone loved the Arctic Monkeys before their album found its way into 93% of the homes in Britain - now it's trendy to hate them. Turner is a prat though, but still). It's the perception and actuality of the commercial music industry, which uses artists to make money, devalues the one thing that matters - the music - as a commodity, that turns people against it. It makes bands who really need to and deserve to be a part of that industry, think 'I don't want to get into that'. There are hundreds of great bands who should be part of it. But the music industry is cutting itself from the music, relying on the unit shifting, image based acts instead of taking risks and breaking down the barriers between the audience who buys it because it's in the charts, and the audience who buys it because they like it.

By definition, the popular music chart should reflect popular music. But the industry keeps shooting itself in the foot. It caught on to the online bandwagon in the nick of time - and now downloading no longer favours the underground/new music scene. It's alienated the very people it should be trying to reign in by promoting the mainstream above the underground. It's made the charts a (musically) unfashionable place to be - yet if you want to be a truly successful music artist, it's the only place you can be. In today's society, The Beatles really would be ridiculed by one half of the music press, because they'd sell millions of records and be as mainstream as possible. Yet they're the best band in history.

Who took the music out of music industry?

Suffering from P.T.D

2006-12-06T01:24:00.000Z

Or Public Transport Depression.

Is it just me - (an aside; I hate people starting articles and comment with 'Is it just me', because it's either A) blatantly not and an easy way to persuade people to side with you, or B) blatantly IS becuase you're trying to say something oh so individual and outrageous and pretending to be funny: I fear I'm doing the latter) - but does public transport depress people?

It's more when you travel on your own: the whole being surrounded by people you don't know, and never will, people you don't care about and vice versa. In fact, public transport encourages this sort of thing, that sort of introspective space to go into your own little world. You think things about people you're trapped with for a journey, and probably judge them. I know I do: one of the reasons I don't like using buses is because of the people you're likely to find on them. Idiot kids, who can't drive, in huge groups, called Dave B and Dave H, Darren, Chezza, Nikkeh, Danielle, Luce, etc. Who shout and scream and act like twats. I swear I was never like that, ever. Then you get women with massive prams and Argos bags on the back of them that roll into your shin while you're standing and give you looks as if you KICKED the pram. Then there's the old dears,...And there's always one really weird, deranged looking guy that spots you as you get on and won't stop looking at you til you get off - often, conveniently, at the same stop as deranged guy.

The worst thing about buses is how they look, too. Messy inside, steamed up windows with hearts and text speak written on them, and they just seem like boxes of artificial light. It's a strange qualm, but that sight just depresses me: at night, a box of people bathed in artificial light. It makes me think that there is no meaning to life.

Trains - slightly different. Still that sense of your own little world (yet it's 'public' transport - ). Bit more classy (richer people?), nicer setting and easier journeys and so on, but their main problem is alcohol. Alcohol on trains is, in my opinion, stupidly dangerous, and it's advertised and encouraged! It's almost as bad as Air Rage where people drunk on planes get violent and aggressive. Like being on a plane, when you're on a train and there's some idiot who's drunk and starting to eye you up for an argument, where the hell can you go except another part of the train? Trains basically trap you in an awkward space for a suitable enough length of time for anything to happen. A guy got stabbed on the underground recently, and they stop somewhere every minute.

And taxis, what the hell are they about. You can't even throw up in one nowadays!

I realise this is a weird thing to opine (again, is it just me?), and as I am wont to do I've taken it to some extremes to make my point clear. But basically, public transport's paradox of being a lonely experience, often a sorry excuse for a method of 'transport', usually late, never clean or pleasant, and in a country supposedly the most advanced in the world (of course, the actual infrastructure is usually at meltdown), I'm suffering from a case of PTD.

"When you're sad and feeling blue, with nothing better to do, don't just sit there feeling stressed, take a trip on the National Express!"
The Divine Comedy

Too much time.

2006-11-29T01:19:00.000Z

This week I will spend 9 hours in University, as required by my timetable. Next week I will spend 7. How, then, can I not find the time to comfortably do all my work? Somehow, I think that having so much free time during the week (Monday and Wednesdays off, for example) lulls me into the sense that I will always have time to do everything, because I really do. I have enough time to do it all. The trouble is I'm not distinguishing my time beforehand to do things, and the last minute. Still. And I've been doing this Uni lark for almost three years. Fuck.

Similarly, how can so much free time go so fast? (When you're spending too much money, I suspect). What have I filled it with? It's now the eighth week of term, I can barely remember two weeks worth of it that actually stand out. Weekends blur into the week, nights out seem like one ungodly 24 hour mess, I've lost count of the amount of games I've had on Pro Evo. By the end of the year it will match my dissertation's 10,000. Do people ever learn? I'm worried I haven't, still. I've learnt a lot at Uni, and I've changed for the better because of it. But now I'm concerned that I've got a final lesson to learn, one last big hurdle to jump, which I've not seen coming and really should have.

Nevermind. I know that I have the aptitude to do this, and do it well eventually. I think I need something to stun me into action now, rather than thinking this time next year "Shit, I wish I hadn't slacked my way to a 2:2 after all." This week I've had some really disappointing feedback on some of my work, and I know I'm better than that. I think I needed it, though. Not everything is going to fall into place for me at this stage. These last two and a half weeks of term one, year three, I'm really going to throw myself into it all and get back on my highway to success.

That said, I'm still going out friday and having a house party saturday. Ole!

"You're much too young girl...

2006-11-03T00:31:00.000Z

...or why society encourages paedophilia."

Ok, so it might be a bit of an extreme title. But then, who ever gets anywhere by being MOR? Except fucking Snow Patrol.

I got to thinking the other day, disillusioned at walking around Bournemouth town centre having armies of younger girls trying (and in many cases succeeding) to look like they're...well, legal, instead of knowing what's good for themselves, flaunting their sexuality to all manner of society. I mean, instead of me thinking "Christ she's far much younger than I thought" and quickly looking away, who knows who might be thinking "Mmmm, 15, just how I like 'em"? It reminds me of a joke I heard recently (although it could well be based on truth from how the girls in Bournemouth dress up):

It's not that there's more paedophiles around today. It's just that children have got sexier.

But anyway, I digress. The point is, why are girls as young as - actually I dread to speculate - tarting themselves up in a manner which is for no other reason than to attract male attention, making themselves appear older and more mature than their years, if society then turns around and labels the attracted males paedophiles? There is of course a difference between the girls that look good, and the ones that looks like slags and deserve it. You can always tell. But still, why? Why risk the danger? Where's the motivation coming from?

Let's see, this week on TV. Taking some of this country's best loved soaps, you have Sky in Neighbours, who's meant to be of college age, about to have a baby while her boyfriend, whose baby it isn't, looks on. In Hollyoaks, you've got a student/teacher relationship, another relationship between school girl and weird looking older guy, and a girl who looks about 14 (and I think is meant to be around that age) pregnant from some 'lad'. Hopefully she'll lose the baby in the car crash and at least it won't put a happy slant on teenage parenting. In any case, TV: the popular programmes are glamorising this younger age group in real life crises. The shows which fail to draw attention to their constructedness simply reflect what is happening in real life to minority sections of society; and without judgement pass it on to the majority. Art imitates life imitates art imitates life (though I'm extrememly generous to have to call soaps 'art'), but these programmes, who have such cultural resonance among young people, do nothing to dissuade their audience from any of the things that happen in their melodramatic plots. They simply put them among the audience.

Though the film itself is quite well created and eye-opening, the same criticisms of TV could be levelled at films like 'Thirteen'. Granted, the film's underlying themes transcend the messages on screen, but to do so through the medium of film and DVD, the implicit meanings will be hopelessly lost on much of the audience that is reached. Critics know what they're looking at; young girls have no idea. They take things at face value. What is worse, is when a similar sort of message is toned down, but thus lacking in any sort of critical value, and aimed at a younger audience still, such as films like 'Mean Girls'. The cliquey, fashion and looks driven society is simplay paraded in all its 'importance' to people who are too inexperienced to do anything but absorb what is put in front of them.

You could, again, make a similar case for music videos, from artists like Beyonce, Pussycat Dolls, Christina, Rhianna, Akon, Girls Alound, 50 Cent, Ne-yo, Chris Brown. Their music is marketed at an audience probably from 10 years old upwards. Yet the videos to go with the songs, almost universally accessible now on TV, online and on mobiles, are marketed at a completely different audience all together. Indeed, many videos of the ilk of those artists mentioend here are so unashamedly sex-driven that they could, perhaps should, be rated/censored. Certainly they appeal directly to much a later teenage audience. Do you want 11 year old girls that don't give a beep while you keep looking at thier beep? Of course not. Or is anyone going to let a 13 year old lick their lollipop? No, it's absurd, it's crazy, that sort of thing could never happen. But why the hell not when things are like they are?

But finally, this brings it round to the male point of view. If TV programmes, films and music marketing glamorises the wrong images for a younger female audience, who then go out and re-enact it and reflect it in society, what does that send out towards the male population? If the girls are reflecting what they see on TV and in music videos, what's to stop the boys? If underage girls are getting knocked up on TV by guys that shouldn't, why not try and find some girls in real life like the ones on Hollyoaks? Isn't it, after all, a reflection on society? So it must be happening somewhere in the real world, or TV wouldn't be telling us about it.

Of course, this is a simplified thought process, and I use it to highlight my point. It seems to be summed up in a very simple cliche, but one which people like hysterical Sun columnists, holier than thou organisations and those quick to judge ought to think about. When it comes to girls dressing up beyond their years and basically attracting the wrong kind of attention, then there's clearly no one thinking about the consequences. And the cliche, then, is this: you cannot have your cake, and eat it too.

So shoot me.

2006-10-16T16:07:00.000Z

I saw this and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Comic has been removed because it is Breast Cancer Awareness day today (27/10/2006)!

Because as they once said in Blackadder; "if you can't laugh, what can you do?"

And the answer was; "Take up politics perhaps."

And I'm not about to embark on that career just to cut short my tendency to see the funny side of just about anything. I realise that this joke is distasteful, in fact tasteless, but the BEP reference in the 3rd picture literally had me in stitches. I guess I'll remove it if I get enough "My aunt this" type responses, but for now, since you can't shoot the messenger, it stays. I had planned to put it on my MySpace, now THAT'S risque. But I haven't, I'm too scared.

To be honest, jokes with realistic endings are the in thing for Uni students. When you're this intelligent, when you're the cultural hub of society, when the future is ours and we are the future, what we say goes and at the moment, not funny is funny. Check out, also, www.somethingawful.com for more brilliant observational jokes.

Back to Uni! Yay.

2006-10-12T00:01:00.001Z

It's a new dawn, it's a new day it's a new life, for me -

and I'm feeling good. Yep, it's back in Bournemouth for me, for my third (and final! Christ!) year at the University, and I cannot wait. The lucky but now a lot poorer fresher's Fortnight's been and gone, my birthday was dreadfully drunken, and I get Mondays and Wednesdays off til Christmas. Result!

Unfortunately, this continues my frankly shocking summer post ratio of about one a month, but with less time to party this year and more days off, I hope to be back blogging regularly. After all, it's good to talk.

Already slipping quickly back into the Bournemouth routine (checks clock - 1:06am - yep), this year promises to be a work hard/play hard split. It's really, now more than ever, time to knuckle down. But I think the year's work also promises to be interesting and stimulating, if a little frustrating from time to time. The new iMacs are awesome though.

Anyway I'm bored of talking about Bournemouth Uni. I want to talk about the Bournemouth-based insurance brokers Alan and Thomas Ltd, who have BANNED the signing of birthday cards by people in the office as comments made in the cards could be offensive under the new Employment Equality laws. New measures hot on age discrimination means that somehow, jokes made in birthday cards about a person's age could be considered harrasment. The brokers' solution is to send every member of staff a generic birthday card on their special day, signed by the directors.

Great. Typical old people in Bournemouth kicking up a fuss about being old. How cliched. Now we can't even sign birthday cards without offending people. And I had such plans for my black, gay, neo-nazi, patriotic uncle's 90th card. And what's even more pathetic is that a generic birthday card is about the worst solution possible! Who wants that? No imagination, nothing personal about it, no meaning behind it: it certianly won't be the thought that counts when you get "from the board at Alan and Thomas Ltd Ma PhD BSC" in your one office card with a picture of a greenhouse in autumn on it.

It's PC gone mad. Except you can't say mad. It's PC gone mentally unstable.

Pravda

2006-09-13T21:11:00.000Z

Far be it from me, as a mere Media student, just starting out on the ladder to media and literary wisdom, to attempt to genuinely critique a successful stage play; a piece 20 years old, rejuvanated this year for its slant on the fickle industry of newspaper journalism. But, since I have no such qualms about doing it towards music, I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

'Pravda', by David Hare and Howard Brenton, takes the shape of a South African entrepanuer, who basically is protrayed throughout as a tyrant, coming into the English media with a view to making money at the expense of the trade. His arrogant Australian accountant might be just more than a subtle nod toward contemporary media mogul Rupert Murdoch, though the play's actual press baron character Lambert Le Roux is far, far more outlandishly written than any real life media owner, despite apprently being based on a 1980s Murdoch. Le Roux aquires a regional paper, and a scene or two later acquires a national, respected paper through his money-based persuasion of a Government member, and his smooth-talking manner. Setting about creating a media monopoly, he assures everyone he won't interfere with editorial freedom - before in the next scene firing about 6 people without reason, and declaring that he wants news; at the expense of truth (Pravda).

The rest of it plays out in a rather predictabe modern tragedy manner; Andrew, the hero (ish), as Editor of the Victory, tries to publish a big story about Government cover ups, in the interest of a free press. Le Roux disagrees and fires Andrew, who vows revenge. Conveniently, the editors, journalists and MP that Le Roux has made enemies of during the play meet, and conspire to out bid Le Roux for the The Daily Usurper, yet another paper he is supposed to be buying out - on secret information from his apparently disillusioned accountant.

The information is false, however, and was a ploy to get Andrew, now Editor of the Usurper, to make the claims Le Roux's accountant gave him, in order to be in a legal position to sue him. This takes place in a frankly bizarre scene set on the Yorkshire Moors, where Le Roux has engineered 'bumping into' Andrew, alone, and immediately crushes his spirit of revenge, issuing him with a legal writ and making him beg for forgiveness. Andrew does, and the final scene sees him editor of some dross nationalistic tabloid, trying to find the best pair of tits for that paper's competition. Andrew has become everything he was against at the beginning of the play, a tabloid editor, and another pawn of Le Roux's.

So that's the play. Is it really relevant to today? For a start, that strange scene on the Moors might well imply Le Roux's overpowering, irrepressable influence over a man's life, but to watch it it seemed absurd, outlandishly written to make a less outlandish point. Then there's the way in which Le Roux acquires 4 papers on stage, and we're led to believe more during the play's span. The fact is, it just doesn't happen like that anymore. There's more taking over football clubs than there is taking over papers nowadays. The satire behind the play aimed at a fickle industry where money rules all is still applicable, but now, 'Pravda' is outdated in the way it conveys it. Yes, stockholders and shareowners can have a large amount of influence in their media projects, but modern day media is influenced as much by advertiser pressure and audiences as it is their owners. And, since it was written 20 years ago, that isn't catered for in Pravda.
In fact, Pravda simply presents us with the usual suspects. It was Murdoch then, and it's Murdoch again now. Tabloids are portrayed in a shabby, sordid light, but then, tabloids are still, so no change there then. Pravda hits the right note with its portrayal of the shady minister, corrupted by fame and small fortunes. Indeed, politics and the media are more intrinsically linked these days - both rely on each other for success, and the 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' relationship seemed the most approriate part of Pravda. Sadly, it was not the point of the play, proclaiming as it does to be a satire on the media industry.

Rather ironic, really, as it is the media industry which has heralded the return of this play.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do (and not what the terrorists want)

2006-08-16T23:25:00.000Z

Never one to miss out on the thick of the action, last week I coincided flying out on my one holiday of the year with the day terrorist cells attempted to blow up 10 transatlantic flights. Somewhat remarkably, in my opinion, none of the planes went down, as the entire plan was foiled before it could at all get underway. Somehow, the press and public seem to have mistaken the operation preventing the biggest united terrorist action in history for a deliberate attempt to ruin holidays and bring airports into disorder. Usually the first to lay into the Labour running of the country, even I can recognise how 10 plane loads of living people and chaos at airports is better than 10 plane loads of people in pieces and hysteria at airports.

But I suppose, I was one of the luckier ones. (Not as lucky as those who would have been on the targetted planes, but close). My flight to Rome being at 6:40am, and with the news only flitering through at the time I and my friend Jon were checking in (4:45am), we were one of the very few planes, as it turned out, that were even allowed to consider leaving. Gatwick, as I later heard, grounded most flights for the rest of the day, while Easyjet valiantly tried (and I hope succeeded) in getting all the flights they had scheduled to leave before 8:15am away. Eventually, 4 and a half hours later, EZY5253 was up up and away, with its passengers carrying nothing but wallets and keys.

Again, my annoyance at losing most of my Thursday in Rome should be considered in the context of actually getting out of the country on the right day at least. Rome, in any case, was fantastic. The whole reason I went out was to meet three friends who are travelling Europe, as a surprise: unfortunately the plane situation meant having to give it away in order to meet them. Still. The city was constantly buzzing, a lively air about the place, yet most of the Italians were completely relaxed about life. I managed to see most of the sights: the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, Vatican City - St Pietro. While we were there, the Pope (the actual POPE) gave his Sunday speech thing, just around the corner from the live feed I watched in St Peter's Square. He spoke 7 languages as well. Impressive, Pope.

Much beer was had, though only at regular intervals and only once mass consumed for getting very, very drunk. Ice cream, pizza and pasta was basically our diet, with a bit of apple tobacco for good measure. Numerous in-jokes and you-had-to-be-there stories arose from the 4 days I was out there, which I won't bore you with. It also took a lot more out of my bank account than I'd hoped to, but you can't put a price on good times. Except when you have an overdraft and no regular income, like me, in which case you need a Good Times Budget and quite possibly a Good Times Accountant.

It was nice to get out of the country for a while, desperately needed as well. I've not enjoyed living at home as much as I used to, I really want to get back to my Bournemouth way of life. Also, the summer's been shit in general due to the work experience, it has actually, in this many words, ruined my summer. The only brighter points have been the World Cup, the Rome holiday, cricket on hot July sundays, and next week, when sixteenpointeight go into the studio to record our fantabulous EP! Watch this space for more narcissistic plugging.

My lovely band

God is in the TV

2006-07-26T15:29:00.000Z

Also, a quick plug.

The online zine I write for has had a spectacular revamp and now, as well as looking pretty, offers high quality and comprehensive reviews on the best of new unsigned music and current commercial arists. Register on the site, comment and get involved in the hottest re-newed music review site around.

http://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk

Now you can search by my name, and see all the lovely stuff I've written, and avoid all the bands I've slated.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon...

2006-07-26T14:49:00.000Z

Quite so, Ray Davies of The Kinks. That's all I seem to be doing. And why?

Because of stupid, goddamn pointless work experience. This is going to be one major, unedited, non-sensival (likely) rant. One of the things the Uni prides itself on is its employement rate after the course. Therefore, you'd think it would take some responsibility for its students' work experience. But has it? I can't help thinking, from a personal point of view, what a waste of time this whole placement idea is.

1. We received CV writing and interview advice in late January, during the busiest term of the year. Which meant:
2. Most people didn't start thinking about placements until the Easter break. Which was when people simultaneously started thinking about exams.
3. The Uni FORCES - that is, you must have it in order to pass onto year 3 - the 6 week minimum placement. A lot of places see that as a questionable length of time: what can you bring to a company, a major company where your experience will be worthwhile, in just 6 weeks? There aren't many places that see 6 weeks as a good time period: most offer 1-2 weeks, or several months to a year.
4. Because of THAT, nearly all companies are reluctant to pay for just 6 weeks, though most cover travel expenses. Which is still, not a wage.
5. And that means you have to spend 6 or more weeks of your summer not earning much needed money to cover the debt we've accumulated over the last year.
6. That's also assuming you have your placement sorted, 6 weeks, no more no less, no gaps, in one place: if you don't, you can't get paid work over the summer until you guarantee your work experience because that must come first otherwise you won't pass the year. Personally, I now won't have had ANY paid work over this summer, due to the 'neccessity' of organising a placement. Brilliant.
7. All the good places go very quickly. Most decent magazines, for example, fill their placement spots about a year in advance. Why weren't we warned that? Why is our placement guidance held back til January, when in retrospect you realise that it should have been the time for finalising a placement, not starting to think about it.

Of course, this doesn't apply if you signed up to a STEP placement, where although the placements aren't always quite suitable, everything else is sorted for you. The Uni, for some reason, didn't see fit to advertise how useful that scheme is however, instead presenting it as an unglamorous alternative.

To sum up those interweaving, mish mashed points: Your often non-paid, not-particularly suitable placement is enforced otherwise you fail your course. It's a key part of the degree, and one students are interested to have, yet the Uni is inclined to sit back and let it add to students' pressing problems. If it's such a valuable element of the course for your students, why isn't it addressed so? It seems, at the moment, and I have no doubt come October it will seem the same: a complete waste of time.

I'm sorry Cromitor

2006-07-17T10:55:00.000Z

Crime Monitor! Find me some crime to fight!

Alas, I don't have a crime monitor (Cromitor). So there's another excuse for it being a month since I last blogged gone. The last two weeks, I've been completing work experience at a PR company in Havant called HarvestPR. It's been very valuable, but ultimately quite time consuming work and for no wage. I might get a nominal sum for my work (which was, I hasten to add, valuable to the company as well as me) but not actually paid. I did get my own e-mail address though!

So this week, in light of hopefully starting a 3-week placement in London either next monday or the following, I've generously allowed myself some well-earned time off this week in order to see people, play football and guitar, and get up late. Especially since I passed year 2 of Uni last week, 62 overall for the year, which I'm obviously pleased about.

Anyway, in my last post I realised I mentioned getting addicted to Big Brother which is of course, a lie. In the same way as people can't help but stare at a horrendous car crash, in wonder at other humans' mortality and death, Big Brother is the same on tv. Train wreck TV (I think it's an actual term - I'll ask Bronwen). There's something, not addictive, maybe it's human nature, to look at other people so more unfortunate than yourself. It was only good, as in interesting, to watch while Grace was in there manipulating everyone to her own ends, which is the point as it's a game show, and generally being ace. Now, in desperation to save a dying programme, the producers chuck in 5 or 6 new people (most even more train wreck tv victims than the original lot) in a SECOND HOUSE, OMG LIEK NEIGHBOURS, in the hope that something interesting might happen. Which hasn't. Just more outrageous stupidity, people crying, playground level relationships. Thank god Nikki, with her 5 year old face and 4 year old intellect, has gone now, and that utter mess of a woman (she's a mother!!) Lea has gone back to her beloved children who she supports by making porn and leaves for 2 months to go on tv.

That's all for now. It's 30 degrees outside, I should be out sunning myself like a lizard on a Majorcan rock.

So long since blogging :(

2006-06-16T00:22:00.000Z

It's getting on for 3 weeks since my last blog, and a lot has happened in those three weeks. I convinced myself I'd posted about exams, but I obviously haven't. Mainly, I guess, I've just been too busy to blog! But shall quickly wind up the events in the time since my last post.

Exams: The most recent post was probably the last ounce of time I had before I had to do nothing but revise, eat and sleep a bit before the Media exam 27/5/06. About 9:20am that day, the nerves hit me like a lorry. But I took my time at the beginning of the exam, and I thought it was a pretty kind paper all in all. Questions were specific but allowed for a lot of discussion. (If you didn't bother doing enough revision, then this won't apply to you. Unlucky.) Getting Media done was the biggie. Hard to revise for, hard to understand, hard to write about. So glad it was the first exam.

Then that left plenty of time to revise for Literature, and I managed to revise three texts, and thankfully none of the questions were dire. In fact, after doing the fairly gentle Heart of Darkness question first, I spent 10 minutes planning both Slaughterhouse-5 and Waiting for Godot answers. Eventually went for Godot as it was more specific and easier to make an argument from.

After Lit, though, there was no time to slack with Narrative just 48 hours away. But I slacked anyway, and went for a meal in the evening. The thursdsy was manic, dreadful. I'd already revised some about 2 weeks earlier before media, but that didn't really help when it came to going over them. Ended up spending the thursday revising Feminism, and glancing at Sitcoms, and went to bed not looking forward to the exam at all. The main reason was that I'd felt the first 2 exams to have been decent papers, and there was bound to be one bitch. And it was Bronwen.

Not exactly. Well, not exactly her. The paper wasn't "stick two pens up your nose and slam your head on the exam desk and puncture your brain" terrible. The questions were just worded in Bronwen's telling 'You better know what you're talking about' way, which meant the Feminist Q was out of bounds. The sitcom question was OK, but when did we ever do any work on Reality TV? It didn't matter though, as it simply gave me an excuse to tear into Big Brother for half an hour before I remembered the question. Oops.

But it was all forgotten 15 minutes later as everyone piled into Dylan's, then we went home and drunk, went out and drunk, and so on. Since then it's been a hazy mix of sunshine, sun burn, beer and football. Fantastic. If only I didn't have this stupid stupid work placement to waste half my summer (sorry, gain invaluable experience). I'd love to just spend my entire summer living how it is now, waking up mid morning, hitting the beach all afternoon, then seeing friends or going out in the evening. Alas, 'those were the best days of my life'.

Summer Ball: How awesome was THAT? Just the perfect day altogether. Watching England win in the World Cup at Bar Fruit which we had to ourselves, basically. Indeed, we were even stopped from going in originally because of a 'private function'.That private function was us!
Then getting ready and drinking and photos in the glorious sunshine was brilliant, and the Summer Ball really was the party to end the year. If you were there it doesn't need explaining. If you weren't, you don't deserve it explained. :)

That's it for now, posts on my Big Brother addiction and England's brilliant start to the world cup (2 games, 2 wins, no goals conceded, through into round 2 already?) to come.

Knives away

2006-05-29T23:02:00.000Z

It's now a week since the knife amnesty began across the UK, and over 2 months since the West Midlands began their initial amnesty. In the last 3 weeks, there have been SEVEN high profile stabbings.

A police officer was killed in Wembley just over two weeks ago. In the next few days, a pupil was stabbed to death outside his school one afternoon, in front of pupils and parents alike. The DAY after, a health worker was stabbed to death by a patient. In the last week, two students were stabbed on a University campus, a man was stabbed and died on a train, another student was stabbed outside a school in Birmingham and yesterday, a man died after being stabbed, also in Birmingham. And this is in a period where knives are meant to be thrown anonymously into bins at police stations, this knife amnesty.

I may be wrong, but never can I remember so many highly covered stabbings in such a short space of time. Has the knife attention suddenly glamourised the crime? Are young people with knives vying for their 'slice' of the media limelight? (Sorry about the pun).

If things get any worse, people will be carrying knives around for protection, out of the sheer fear of being stabbed. The irony. And, some groups are even advocating girls carry knives for their protection at night. While in the opposite corner, groups are pressing for up to 5-year jail sentences for those caught in posession. Can't be both I'm afraid. And people using knives in 'self-defence' are always going to be in big, big trouble....

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Exams: one down, hardest one out the way. Went fairly well, I hope, and I mistakenly felt like the pressure was off when the reality is I have 2 in three days this week. Literature is a pain to revise, re-reading texts I'm not hugely fond of. But it being such a subjective exam makes for much less stress.

The stress isn't helped though by having one and a half days (and that's assuming you get up at a reasonable time - which I won't) to revise for Narrative. Even if you've already revised the topics, going back over them is going to feel stressful knowing the exam's the next day. But maybe it's the presure I've needed. I just couldn't get motivated to revise much before a week prior to my first exam. I had to revise backwards, in a way, what with no time to revise Narrative directly before it, and the pressure just wasn't there.

And the weather's getting better! Revision is going to be so hard with everyone else at the beach. But come friday, and it is so going to be worth it. The word celebration will be forever illustrated by the photos that come from friday night's messy, messy affairs.

Interestingly, and quite worryingly, I can distinctly rememeber blogging about exams this time last year. Where have the last 365 days gone?

Hard rock? Hallelujah...

2006-05-22T18:13:00.000Z

Monsters. Five sisters from Denmark in skimpy outfits. An abundance of cheesey ballads. Short skirts. Politics. Being anti-france. It could only be one globally televised event: The Eurovision Song Contest 2006.

As usual the standard of song was atrocious. Weak lyrical efforts about the heart, disco beats bashed out in minutes, songs based on football terrace anthems: it seems that there is an entire style of song that is only suited to the Eurovision. The UK's entry, jesus christ. 'Teenage Life', it was called, and it was about as out of touch with British teenagers as you could get. The 'rapper' Daz Sampson, looked a) about 35 and b) as if he'd just left the kebab shop where he worked. So PAINFUL. Surprisingly, it picked up a few points and we didn't do as badly as 2 years ago when we finished 2nd last (though that might have had something to do with the Iraq war). Finland's entry, Lordi, bucked the love balled/cheesy disco trend with an all out mock heavy metal song, dressing up like extras from the Lord Of The Rings. And won. Oh.

But the Eurovision isn't, and probably never has been, about music. The tactical voting was out again in ever-so-obvious force: particularly the Scandinavian and Eastern European countries, who clustered around each other all night, exchanging maximum points with each other. The countries with enough clout to go it alone globally (in the real world, you might say, outside of Finnish Orcs and Danish meat) such as France and UK suffered. France in fact came perilously close to not getting a point at all. That would have been the creme de la creme of a night of purely comical entertainment.

It's lucky that the Eurovision is so out of touch with music, because the British votes were diabolical. Surprisingly, in my view, voting in the Irish song (a below average Westlife affair) as third best, we still saved our ludicrous votes for the top 2 spots. Voting in Lithuania's entry as second was a joke. The entry itself was a joke: 6 men all about 40, singing "We are the winners of Eurovision! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote!" almost endlessly, in the style of football hooligans. Yet we deemed that to be the second best song. Naturally though, the British and their eye for the ironic followed suit with most other countries and awarded the Finnish monsters maximum points for their Iron Maiden pastiche. Full marks for the dressing up. The British appreciate effort.

Sadly though, it only seemed to further confirmed the trend seen in the other programme where public voting features so much, Big Brother: that the British tv-watching voting public will always vote for the circus freaks, the spectacle and the ridiculous.

Christ, Big Brother 7 starts today.

2006-05-18T23:08:00.000Z

I am aware of the irony that blogging about a show I hate and think should be taken off air gives it more exposure and means I'm getting involved with it. But at least this involvement is me airing a damning opinion on the bastard programme.

Another three (maybe four?) months of watching nobodies become somebodies because they're a bunch of twats who, if you put them in a house together for several months, are fairly obviously going to have flings, or have fights. Brilliant.

"I know! Let's put a good looking girl in there, and some guys!"
"Yeah, yeah, and we can have a gay guy too!"
"What about someone who isn't English? You know, just to mix it up?"
"Yeah! Lads, we've got a programme and a half on our hands!!!"

The tv feeds the tabloids who feed the tabloid reading masses who care about this sort of bile who feed the programme again. It's a vicious, pointless cycle. I don't know which is sadder: people getting incredibly involved in other normal everyday people's lives, or people watching life play out on the TV, as if it's somehow different to what goes on in real life because it's on TV. It's fucking sad.

Putting a guy in who has Tourettes? Well, that will make funny TV viewing for about 7 seconds, seeing someone who can't help but swear randomly every so often. In the end, he'll probably be one of the cleaner-mouthed people on there, seeing as the housemates this series seem the likely bunch of tarts and idiots that always get on, with the token lesbian, Muslim, vegan or whatever thrown in just so everyone can't get along. Poor old George Orwell. He must be turning in his grave to think that his revolutionary novel is never going to be the first thing to spring to people's minds when someone says Big Brother, and worse, what an entirely circus spectacle it has shockingly become.

I might still watch a bit of this, because sadly otherwise I'll be out of the loop for most conversation that'll take place over the summer. Until June 9th, that is, when the World Cup starts. Ha ha! Have that girls, Channel 4 and Big Brother! Men will be talking about football on BBC and ITV for months, and you'll be stuck with your pointless little people being twats for the cameras. Yeah.

FUCK off, BB7.

Tim 1, Blogger 0

2006-05-10T01:12:00.000Z

A quick post: and I thought I wasn't learning much at Uni...

So I was deleting a comment from my last post because it was an ugly spam comment of no use at all, when I suddenly realised that my links to other websites and other blogs were missing from my sidebar. Upon checking my template, I found that they'd just disappeared. For no apparent reason; Blogger had taken away the carefully organised section of my blog that I'd put in for networking the small group of us that carry on blogging.

However, Blogger, you hadn't reckoned on me being something of an amatuer in Dreamweaver, had you? No longer is the 'edit template' section of Blogger an overwhelming abundance of meaningless numbers, words, and phrases. Thanks to dreamboat Dreamweaver Will, I know a thing or two about code now, and in 15 minutes they were all restored back to normal. It even gave me the confidence to try a fancy link in a comment on Kate R's site. Which worked!

So Blogger, until next time. And to everyone else out there, code isn't insurmountable. Together, we can beat it! And THEN, we can join it.

TV comes good...at the worst possible time

2006-05-07T23:52:00.000Z

With exams looming and yet more pieces of work still due in, I can't remember a time for ages, certainly not since I began Uni, where TV has been so watchable. Just taking today (Sunday) for example, I got up, watched the Grand Prix, watched Sky Sports News for the last day of football of the season, then had a break til Top Gear at 8, England World Cup Heroes at 9, The Office at 10, and Match of the Day at 10:45- 12:15am! I spent around 4 consecutive hours watching this evening, and around 3 hours during the day. Not how I should be spending my time.

But, more generally, there are more programmes on that I watch regularly now than in a long long time. The fantastic awesomeness of improbability that is Lost series 2 has finally begun, while the brilliant unique laugh out loud comedy of Green Wing is carrying on on fridays (repeated saturday nights). Added to that is the new series of Top Gear, every sunday. And, new student favourite replacing Countdown, Deal or No Deal, is every weekday! Now I won't admit to watching DOND every day, but it certainly hasn't lost its charm. I think the charm relies on the ease of relation to the contestants, in that there is absolutely no skill involved, you just spend 45 minutes seeing how lucky you are on national television. Anyone could be a winner.

That isn't to mention the feast of football that has been on in the evenings recently, and still two more finals to come between now and exams. Thank god the exams are out the way before the world cup starts, or I'd have actually failed them.

I've never been a big fan of TV, especially when it's so hard, among the thousands of programmes on hundreds of channels, to find something good on. For example, ITV is basically The Sun in tv channel format, while Channel 4 is being very hit and miss, not least with the sensationalist style of its news programmes recently. The BBC continues to fuck me off by commissioning some real crap, including Titty Titty Bang Bang, countless bargain hunting/auctioning/holiday home programmes, and the drivel that is Two Pints of Lager and A Packet of Crisps. It has done even better by giving us a new show by the same writers. Brilliant oversight. So, it has come as some surprise to me to find that at the moment, I'm actually spending quite some time in front of the idiot box.

Idiot!

Vote BNP (well, don't, but lots of people are)

2006-05-03T00:12:00.001Z

Ngngngngngngng.

Like tempers in the middle of a riot, there has been a sudden flare up of interest in the far-right/fascist policies that the BNP offers as an 'alternative' to the politics of other parties. Coinciding with the upcoming local elections, the pressure seems to be on the favourites to address issues of immigration more seriously in order to avoid embarrassment by losing local seats to parties such as the BNP, Respect and UkIP.

Quite why this has escalated so quickly recently I'm not sure. Maybe it has something to do with a similar US situation just now, where Bush is pushing for tougher laws on immigration. This has, incidentally, resulted in mass protests this week advocating the value of the 'immigrant workforce' and citizenship.

It also ironically coincides with the three linked firebombings recently in London, all Asian-owned business. There's nothing like a racist attack to put things into perspective. Yes, the BNP proposes stronger actions on the immigration issue than other parties. Perfectly aceptable. The trouble is, that's all some people need to be convinced. Dig a little deeper (indeed, just LOOK at the surface, nevermind scratch it) and the racist undertones to the BNP are clear to see. Log on to their homepage, and the first sentence you're hit with is this: Can you just sit there and watch as our country is being ripped apart by the forces of multiculturalism?

For a country supposedly one of the most economically, technologically and socially developed in the world, there's a lot of backwards thinking still rife in certain areas. We can do without more and more people subscribing to such views.

When the going gets tough/yay English football!

2006-04-27T22:28:00.000Z

the tough watch a video of a cat falling asleep. Nevermind dreamweaver8, exams, revision, not being motivated to do any of them, just imagine you own this cat. If only we all had one.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3573852431733156394&pl=true

*****************************************************
Kudos tonight to Middlesborough, who for the second time in 3 weeks, had to score 4 goals in a European match to win, and did. English teams to make a clean sweep of the footballing trophies?

Arsenal to win the Champions League? Hmmm. Unlikely since they're playing Barca, by far and away the best team in Europe this last year, though it's just the sort of arrogant thing the bastards would do:
Lehman: "Oh look we won the Champions League, how the hell did we do that?" Henry: "Nevermind, we're clearly amazing, but I'm off to Barca anyway".

'Boro to win the UEFA Cup? Well it's an easier task than Arsenal's. Sevilla are no mugs though, and are easily the best side Boro will have had to play since Roma. Can't see them pulling three unlikely wins off in a row.

England to win the World Cup? The 'best chance since 1966' brigade are so right. England have a world class squad through the whole team. On our day, we could beat Brazil, Argentina, Germany. On an off day, we could lose to Paraguay. If we avoid Germany in the first knock-out round, I think we could overcome anyone else at any stage until the final, and who knows then.

And post-world cup, a new foreign coach era! Luiz Felipe Scolari is all but appointed into the role of England Manager fron August 1st. It seems to have divided opinion however, but it's a clueless divide to me. Scolari is clearly qualified for an international job - he's been in the final of the most recent World Cups and European Championships - and compared to the English candidates (today I even heard bloody Steve Bruce as an option) he's a different class. Out of the three main English contenders, only one (Sam Allardyce) is managing a club in the top half of the English premier league. (If you include Pearce, that's 1/4). None of the English contenders have had overwhelming club success: Curbishley has enjoyed another below average season with Charlton for about the 8th season running, McLaren's Middlesborough have been slumming it in the lower mid table, and have reached a clup competition final for just the second time in 9 years, and this season, Bolton's wheels are drastically falling off at the crucial time. There isn't an English manager with the track record to say 'I can win England trophies'. So to Scolari, welcome.

Overall though, it's been a superb season for English football. Chelsea have won the league, Man U have won the (mickey mouse) Carling Cup, Liverpool or West Ham are going to win the FA Cup, and some new faces will be in Europe next year (from Tottenham, Blackburn, Bolton, Newcastle, West Ham). If both our teams could take the European cups to have 5 different English teams with trophies, I'd take that.

Too long...

2006-04-24T22:41:00.000Z

Ridiculously, this is my first post for three weeks. Now, obviously, back at Uni, internet access is constant, I have finally got round to setting aside an hour or so to post a blog, as usual by running into the early hours of the morning with a 9am start to get up for.

The main reason I haven't blogged for a while is two words which, incidentally, have been the reason I haven't done a lot of things: "Bloody Marketing". Literally spent the last 2 weeks fof Easter holidays doing it during the day time, and was still finishing it a day before. As a result, professional writing suffered. Badly.

Anyway, blogging as citizen journalism, or a hobby, or a nerdy thing, whatever, has come up within Uni a couple of times, especially about the content and use of blogs. Are they democratic? Is everyone writing and no one reading? What should they be for?

The reason why I attempt not to fill my blog up with drivel is because I would feel hard done by if I made the effort to read someone's blog and was faced with such a sorry excuse for writing. It isn't personal content I'm against, it's irrelevant personal content. Posts like "he looked my way today. we had a moment. yes i cant believe it seth noticed me today at last!" that are just, I don't know, ngngngngngng. There's no other way to describe it. I suppose if I could summarise it into one sentence, it would be 'blogs shouldn't be a platform for glorifying idle chit chat". Anything I put in about myself, I at least try to make it relevant to the people who I think are reading this. Failing that, at least humorous. At least, if you're going to talk only about yourself, make it INTERESTING for other people, that's all I ask! If you write blogs for yourself, why make it public? Expecting people to care what you've got to say is self-indulgent enough without expecting them to care about your pointless 'dirty laundry'.

However, I do think that blogging is very important because the internet is going to be at the forefront or a central mode of technological communication for the forseeable future. Why wouldn't it be? The internet provides the link between people to absolutely anything and everything. So in my opinion, blogging, the local journalism of the internet public sphere, shouldn't be remarkable for its collective lack of interest to anyone outside of the author, nor for a complete lack of grammar and spelling. Ha ha ha!

Easter break...

2006-04-05T21:36:00.000Z

It speaks volumes that in this Easter break so far, this is only the second time I've had time to update the blog. A nice three week break from University, after a demanding term has been almost as busy so far.

First week I spent writing and re-writing my CV and numerous covering letters, getting addresses and posting them off. Am now thinking that failing to gain 6 weeks work experience equals failing the course is a little harsh. And then this week, I've spent about 4 hours a day so far doing reading for Marketing. 4 hours....a day....reading. There's no way I'm even going to be able to start writing it this week! Partly because I'm going to Norwich this weekend for a wedding. I might just use a few of Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson's tips though while I'm there....

Also, while I'm having a moan, I have no money, no paid work, and I want to go out approximately three times next week. People to see, people to...see.

But I got a new phone yesterday, a lovely Sony Ericsson W800i. It's so pretty! And does loads of things apparently, but the important thing is I got it free. Getting new stuff to play with is GREAT, no matter how old you are.

EU police to shoot Brits

2006-03-28T00:04:00.000Z

Well, kind of. Here's one for the nationalists, and the 'life means life' brigade.

Under discussion in *this* country by *this* Goverment (not Brussels) are possible new agreements on EU laws: the relaxing of certain rules under which continental polices forces must operate when in this country. It is in the hope that this will allow British police to work under similarly relaxed conditions when they go onto the Continent in pursuit of criminals.

At the moment, the agreement clause as it stands says that foreign police in this country are allowed to carry weapons (even though they should only be used in self-defence, according to the treaty) - which is why, until now, the British Government have not agreed to it. Britsh rules mean foreign officers must leave their arms at their 'port of entry', and can only spend 5 hours hunting their suspects independently before they have to notify british police forces.

So here we have a juxtaposition of issues for all those who frown upon the EU. We don't want goddamn Frenchies catching our crooks do we? Why, it undermines our boys! They're taking the Mickey out of our Bobbies, our own police force...on our own soil!
That's all very well until a criminal being persued by EU police kills someone or commits a crime in this country, and the EU police in question were held back by red tape preventing them from apprehending the criminal.

At the other extreme, passing this legislation could instantly mean many more armed officers in Britain, which is a good thing for those concerned with how well criminals in Britain are treated these days - but the last time the country was caught up in catching international criminal hysteria, an innocent Brazilian was shot dead and the Met. Police spun a cover story out in the media about it.

So there we go. On one hand, tougher times for criminals are in the offing. On the other, yet another of our country's institutions is now adhering to EU laws. Whichever way the Government goes, you can bet the Mail, Express, Sun and Mirror will be screaming about it.

Thought for tonight, adapted from Slaughterhouse 5.

- "Boy, they sure picked the wrong guy to pick on!"
That idea has a brother. If there are wrong people to pick on, then there must be right people to pick on. -

Doesn't that seem to apply to the world at the moment.

Blogs, essay ownership and copyright

2006-03-24T00:43:00.000Z

I think it is safe to say that, for me, the feature article due in earlier today was the most enjoyable deadline I've had to meet all year, with the possible exception of the radio script. It led me to wonder, though, what issues arise were I to post the feature on my blog tonight?

For starters, it's all my own work. I've not referenced any other authors, used any other work from anywhere else. Now, however, that I've handed it in to be assessed by the University, who does the copyright belong to?

Are there issues with making work available on the internet before it is assessed? Does the University own the copyright while it's in their hands for the moment? How can they, when I have proof on my laptop that it is my own work? I mean, if I was to post an essay of mine up, complete with references, what's wrong with that? Nothing as far as I can see. And, as long as I put 'Copyright Tim Miller 2005/2006' at the end of the post, then hopefully the person reading it would reference me as well, instead of stealing it the dirty cheating bastards.

It's mainly that question of whether a piece of work that carries marks towards a degree can be published before it's marked. If I'd put it up online on monday (except I hadn't finished it by then) then I could have gained feedback from people and adjusted my work. I could have got top journalists to give it a glance if I was really organised. So what happens if I put a piece of work in my blog, and, say, it gets published for a website, before I get the mark back? Does anyone bother? Or is it no problem at all? It's not that I'm bothered about how good the piece is, it's whether I can use te piece for my own reasons even though it's been written specifically for my degree, before it's been assessed.

I wouldn't have any qualms about putting my work I've had back online, except that I'd much rather set up a site which you have to pay a small sum a month to access, and stick all my work on there. There's no such thing as a free degree, after all, first years.

(p.s: any new students: My media essay in Year 1 got an 80. I'll sell the rights to it for £25 o.n.o)

Excuses

2006-03-21T23:34:00.000Z

Being hungover isn't really a passable excuse for missing 4 hours worth of University today. I mean it IS an excuse, in that it's the truth, but it's not an acceptable one. Especially when Wednesday and Thursday are off, and there's only 3 hours on Friday.

But, having seen 10 out of the 11 deadlines met this term, in what has been the hardest 2 and a half months of my life, this final week has become strictly business: get the last deadline met, and party hard. This week will be the first time since January that I've had 2 nights out in one week. And boy was last night heavy. But cheap! I went to the Firestation with a tenner, woke up this morning with a fiver...and that included gate-crashing the night shift at ASDA for a sandwich.

What's bad is that once I realised I was in control of my spinning head (at 1pm or so), I started looking forward to going through the exact same routine on friday. That IS bad: usually when you wake up with a hangover, you promise yourself never to touch an alcholic drink again. You don't think, 'hmmm I can't wait til the next time I get to drink as many whiskey/cokes as I can see to hold". Or you shouldn't. But I did! Uh oh. Surely people don't become immune to alcohol...

Anyway, my gift to you all for reading this self-musing drivel today is http://www.burntfaceman.com. Take 20 minutes to wacth the episodes one by one and laugh until you cry. And then watch the awesome movie trailer.

"I'm Paperwork Dan, the paperwork man! (Extends arm). Rah ha ha ha."
"And in what way are you an evil supervillain?"
"I do EVIL paperwork! Rah ha ha ha."

Winding down for the term...or not

2006-03-18T02:11:00.000Z

It's friday: my dissertation proposal is in, the two deadlines due this week are in, there's only one out of 11 set this term left, it's Easter break in a week, I haven't gone out tonight so I could have a week off. So why did I have dinner at 1am and am still up at 2:13am tonight?

I went to see Southampton vs Liverpool Youth FA Cup semi final second leg (in Southampton) instead of hitting the town, as a less eventful way to end the week, a week which concludes the hardest period of time at University I've had yet. As it happened, by going to see the football I've not saved any more money than by going out, I've come home angry and freezing cold, and the time I post this will actually be about the time I would be getting in from theoldfirestation anyway, only it will be harder to get to sleep because I'm not semi-passing out with alcohol.

And, although work pressures this term are more or less off, superhero Jill Quest (POW!) has put the fear of God into everyone by detailing just how hard our assignment due in after Easter is going to be. On top of that, exams are looming and I need to work close to full time over the break if I'm to escape into credit with HSBC (and only when the loan comes in!).

Naturally, the final week of a long hard term promises to be a release. They don't call the last friday night at TOFS 'Bedlam' for nothing. It is going to be, needs to be, must be, will be, manic.

When I think of something more interesting to write, I will. In the meantime, if you're reading this, please please read some of my more opinionated posts and disagree, or agree with them, and COMMENT on them. Thanks.

Who rests on a Sunday anymore?

2006-03-15T01:20:00.000Z

"On the seventh day, God rested".

Surely if God himself can rest, then why doesn't anyone else? This struck me as I struggled into Uni at 2:30pm on a Sunday afternoon, bleary eyed (from getting up, not hungover). University students doing work on Sundays. Lecturers presumably preparing for the week ahead.
Kids play football matches all day long on Sundays. I should know, it used to be me. Professional footballers play as well. The sunday games are some of the biggest games on offer over a season.
And as for commercialism, well. It never sleeps. Shops open at least 10-4 on a sunday now, and customers bemoan the legal ties preventing them from purchasing anything after 4:30pm.

This either shows a general move further into a secular society, which is pretty obviously going on anyway. Or, does it mean that demands on people in a contemporary world force people to be on the go 7 days a week, every week? There is nothing anymore that can be put off until the day after, it's all about now, today.

Students are right after all. All this getting up at 2pm in the afternoon is simply making the most of it before the rest of our lives are lived around 7am weekeday alarms and lie ins at weekend allowing us until 8:30 (or 8 if the kids have football at 9).

"People that are weaker than you and I..."

2006-03-12T00:40:00.000Z

"...they take what they want from life."

Here is my very simple philosophy on life. It's narcissistic, individualistic and quite possibly, hideously arrogant.

You only have one life. Regardless of whether you believe in reincarnation, even if you do come back, you don't know you've come back do you? You DO know that at any moment you could die. You don't want to die unhappy. You want to die poor, but only after living richly. (What's the point in having money when you're dead?) You want to die knowing you've lived a full, or fulfilling life.

So, there's no other way of looking at it as far as I can see. Basically, in life: always look out for number one.

Be nice to people, be polite, have friends, have amazing friends, love. Be a good person, as good as you can. But don't do anything, ever, that means you suffer at your own personal expense. Because it's your life alone, and it's not for ANYONE to make it bad for you. If they do, get ahead, get away, get out. Don't let people who are weaker than you push you around. Lend a hend, but don't get taken for a ride. Have compassion, but there's no need to feel too bad: if there's suffering in the world, it's not your fault. Don't feel guilty. Be thankful it's not you, and be determined to take your chance.

Whatever religion you are, or not, you are living your life for you alone. You have to think that you're better than everyone else. Why? Because if you don't value YOURSELF about anyone else, then you're undermining the value of your life. And your life is all you have. That's a pretty terrible state to be in. Why else? Because otherwise, anyone can walk all over you and tread you into the ground, along with all the other of Life's "also-rans".

Again; be a great person. Be the best person people who know you know. Be loyal, loving, caring, friendly. Make others happy (as long as they deserve it).

But always, always, always, look out for number one.

Rape, in the current climate

2006-03-10T00:47:00.000Z

Though I am well aware of this pun, I'm going to put it in anyway. Rape is a very touchy subject. An article in my University's magazine has discussed the modern view of rape, although 'discussed' is being generous since it seems to scream hysterically from a rather narrow-minded point of view. I intend to pick it apart somewhat from a male point of view.

Dealing with the article then, first of all, there is an 'old myth' that women who are raped were 'asking for it'. This isn't old, and it isn't a myth. I mean, literally it is; women don't stand in the streets and say "Rape me, Rape me!" to passing men. But that view in the past certainly hasn't diminished in today's climate. I don't think myth is the right word, either. Prostitutes dress up in short skirts and revealing tops, and they ARE asking for it. How does 'not being a prostitute' change the stereotypical connotations of an outfit? More importantly, why should it? This is, in essence, what the article argues: that short skirts are to blame for the undermining of rape as a serious crime.

Anyway, the article takes the view that because a girl dresses up 'sexily' on a night out, she becomes a target for men because it looks like she is up for it, or as the writer suggests, asking for it. This is apparently the current excuse that is given these days - that a girl is 'up for it' because she's dressed in alluring clothes. It should go without saying that this does not give a guy the right to approach her and touch her up, expect to go home with her that night etc. This is, surely, blindingly obvious? I don't think anyone in their right mind could argue otherwise, and in any case, in Western judiciary systems, 'provocation' is not accepted as a legal argument to excuse rape.

What can be argued, is this as a general assumption. The article seems to claim that all cases of rape in modern society are contended, that in every case, the blame goes to the victim. We are, apparently, going back to an era before women's rights, yet nowadays being proven guilty of rape basically ruins your life forever; the average sentence is 7 years in jail and the media will NEVER, ever, let you or the public forget it. Those that argue that 7 years isn't long enough consistently assume a 'once a rapist, always a rapist' point of view. Anyway, it certainly isn't the case that with every rape, the victim gets blamed.

The point, though, is that the claim that the victims of rape are to blame isn't perpetuated in the media. It is, as far as I can see, in the mind only. Studies that cite this point of view gain their evidence from talking to people. The results say "yes, a lot of people (1/3 according to the article) believe a woman is responsible for her own rape". But the results don't say, or ask, why. Where does this belief come from? If a girl is walking down an unlit alley by herself and a rapist is hiding there, then it is a natural reaction for most people to say; 'why is she going down there on here own?' However, it is not the reasons behind actual rape, but the reasons why rape victims are apparently more to blame than ever nowadays, as the magazine article claims, that I am contending. It is almost, in a post-feminist world (and here I realise I am offering an extreme argument) as if this has become a bandwagon; women so angry that rape happens portray themselves as double victims, victims of being raped and then victims of a society who blame the women themselves for it happening.

At the moment there is a climate of false claims of rape by young women against high profile figures - there seem to be several cases in the last 2 years of utterly false claims against footballers: Ashley Cole, Kieron Dyer, Cristiano Ronaldo, Robin Van Persie and others. It may be that the belief that society views rape victims as to blame for their own rape stems from the meida making a mockery of such aforementioned women, who cry rape TO the media. Real rape victims don't go and shout it from the rooftops and sell their story to a newspaper.

From a male perspective, just to be labelled a rapist (sod any PROOF) is about the worst name you could be given in public, apart from, maybe, a paedophile. Once the label is there, it's with you whether you prove your innocence or not. False claims don't help gain general male support on the issue.

Going back to the article, it states that "men are allowed to go out get drunk, dress to impress, sleep with as many people as possible" and women can't. I would ask, who actually says this? I don't think anyone does, but it's articles like this that help propagate a belief that people do. Again, this is all just word of mouth - "Did you read that article in the Uni magazine, said guys can go out get drunk and fuck, but girls can't?" "Yeah I know, sickening isn't it". Lo and behold, opinions are informed based on an article which is only based on opinion in the current climate, yet appears fact because it's written in a magazine. One girl claims in the article that "If I dress sexily, it's only for me, and certainly not to get attention from guys". Erm ok, love. If so, why go out dressed like it? If you honestly dress for yourself, keep it to yourself then, and don't get all angry that a girl dressed in revealing clothes when in a club or out in public gets male attention. What the hell do you expect?! Stop the presses: Men in looking at sexy women SHOCKER.

This has been a long fragmented post, so I will try and tie it up in one paragraph here. There is, and has been for sometime, an opinion that rape victims are to blame for their own rape. Yes, fine. Whatever the suggested reasons behind the rape are, though, the reasons behind this opinion are unclear. Certainly, it is not one which is proficient in the media, nor is it one in my opinion which is proficient among people in general. Yet it appears that this opinion only exists on one level, that of people determined to perpetuate the belief anyway. Why bother though: you cannot blame a woman for her rape because she was wearing sexy clothes. She isn't asking for it. And, in a legal sense, regardless of social perception, this is all that matters.