Complaints over Freeview retune

Hundreds of people with Freeview are complaining after losing some channels when they tried to retune their set-top boxes and TVs.


A statement said: "The majority of people find retuning straightforward but if viewers are experiencing problems after retuning, we would suggest trying again."

It would only be funnir if it was Phrased 'try try try again'

Last weekend was fairly quiet mainly to get some sleep and chill out.  On Friday night I stayed in and watched the first episode of ‘being Human’ as the writer/director is doing a Q&A at the Broadway during Mayhem.  I kind of like it in that it feels like everyone is finding their way on the fly, some of the acting is a bit clunky and the werewolf guy should perhaps rein it in a bit sometimes instead of being 100% intense most of the time (I like him and the character but someone off camera should say shhhhhh) but I like the tone and like how it’s not bucking for US Telly but staying very English plus I love the 1980s werewolf make-ups which can’t have been the cheapest option when dodgy CGI is now so easy.  I hope they stick with that for the second season.

On Saturday I went to see Debi to catch up and give her her Birthday presents from last month.  Jess, her baby hated me.  I used my powers to try to stop this by ignoring her at the beginning as Deb said that she was being wary of strangers until finally she let me play with her on the floor but when I went for the pick-up the WAAAAAlarm went off and I lost at babies.  It was lovely to see Deb and catch up on both sides.  I gave her a mug that I’d got the T-shirt guy to print (I think he’s better at Shirts than mugs but I’ll try again after payday).

I was going to do another stay inner on Saturday night but ended up meeting Martha, Theresa and Martha’s friend Hannah at the Poacher where we crashed Grants Birthday drink and talked about Berlin a lot. 

I’m pretty excited about Berlin, I’ve read the history bit in the rough guide and I might not have wanted to live (or be killed) there in any of the 20^th Century.  It’s certainly a start-again town. I want to see the chariot that Napoleon stole for a bit (how the hell did he get up there), check out the markets for GDR trinkets, walk through the Sonly centre with my S’Only Music T-shirt on until I’ve been there for seven hours being completely ignored and just soak up the town. I did look to see if there were any ridiculous Albert Speer buildings left from the scenes in Triumph of the will but it looks like the ones that are are pretty boring monolithic rather than cartoon monolithic so you’d be better off walking around the games workshop factory car park.  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting burning torches, giant Eagles and stone Swastikas but it would have been interesting to see a bit of that overblown architectural drama that they were going for.  There’s also a comic shop that looks pretty respectable as long as I remember that I’m going to need to follow the pictures only.

On Sunday I watched The Assassination of The Outlaw Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which was cool if edging towards Nouveaux hammy like in There will be blood where characters are allowed to express the largeness of their personalities by frankly embarrassing displays of pantomime hammery.  To be fair it was only Brad Pitt and only for a bit, for the rest he was cool and Cavey as the bad bar singer was hilarious.

In the afternoon I met up with Kris for a drink and bought a kettle (my last one was a disappointment, I think I only got about eight years out of it rather than the fifteen out of the one before. I swung by Cineworld to see what fit in time wise and ended up seeing Sorority Row which wasn’t as bad as you would have every right to expect.  Kind of mid-point between Scream and a 70s slasher where ‘who it is’ makes little logical sense so you might as well point at a random character and say ‘it’s them’ and sit back to see if your guess came true.

Yesterday I went to see Sarah and Caitlin. I won at babies this time as Caitlin did her first reaching out because she wanted me to take her. Caitlin won at adults though because she had a cold and what seemed like extra affection resulted in abig shiny patch on the shoulder of my Hello Thor shirt.

On Tuesday night I went to the Gladstone for Anders’s birthday.  I haven’t been there since Easter before last when me and Sarah tried to find pudding but were denied (That’s the kind of grudge I hold).  I made Anders a card with badges on the front of the letters in his name and it was a really nice night revolving around a game of killer played largely by people who would lose against a balloon army if darts were the only weapon available.  The whole thing, much like the game of pool a few weeks ago was pretty much a game of chance and Theresa heroically stayed ‘in’ by default for ages and it was essentially an exercise in mocking and pretend competitive spirit.  It was a lovely night shooting the shit and great to see everyone.   

On Wednesday I went to see Theresa for the Burly Nagasaki recording session described below.  I had a cool chat with Angie and Theresa about where things are with my dad and as ever the Burly Session ruled.

Last night I met up with Holly for the first time in ages and we showed each other ART and spent most of the night in lee Rosy’s chatting about big and little things and drinking tea and smoothies before resolving to have a day-trip somewhere or a hang out day in town.

This weekend looks pretty cool:

Tonight:  Fists at the Maze

Saturday: Theresa’s Birthday

Sunday: Picnic with Alyssa as we cheer Debs on with her run.

Have good ones!

A lot of people outside the music industry are interested in the mysteries of the recording process so I thought that as Burly Nagasaki’s recording process must be fairly typical that I would explain the it based on last nights recording ‘session’ as they are known in the business. 

Firstly the engineer (In this case Theresa because it’s her computer and I have no idea what those lumps on the mac hamburger mouse do) ‘lays down’ a click track, an essential tempo guide for any band who doesn’t have a drummer to keep time.  Establishing the correct tempo is easy, you listen to a couple of real records as a rough guide then keep adding or taking away a few beats per minute to the metronome until all members of the band are saying ‘yeeeeah’ in a semi-committal fashion.

Then you record a guide track or ‘scratch track’ as the professionals call it.  This is for arrangement only so that when you record the real performances you know where everything goes, when you come in for each ‘bit’, where it starts and finishes etc.  This doesn’t have to be perfect as it will be deleted for the ‘final mix’, in fact It should contain a bare minimum of musical cues, a lot of giggling and a bit during the keyboard solo (in this case our cover of the Jimmy ‘ Handyman’ Jones / Del Shannon song ‘Handyman’) where the participants perform the solo with their mouths in such a frivolous way that when it comes to using the guide track later you will spend the lion’s share of the recording experience with your hand jammed over your mouth to stop you giggling into the microphone and then miss your cue to come back in or be half singing/half giggling.   The guide track needs to have the phrase ‘oh shit’ on it a lot and should essentially sound like a couple of 13 year old girls let loose with a cassette player.

From then on it’s a matter of recording each performance; vocals, instruments etc one after the other.  We favour a method where you do the trivial things like main vocals in one take and important things like handclaps in about four where we then tinker with them for about six hours.  We find having control of Stereo funny, so sometimes place singers and instruments in strange places (for our previous track, Theresa sings the main vocal in the middle and for the chorus I’m on the right and Theresa is on the left so that if you want to hear a version of the song without me singing at all you can just turn the balance on your stereo to the left for the choruses).  The Ramones also found this funny as their first album has guitars on one side and bass on the other so you can listen to just Dee Dee or Johnny depending on who is your favourite.  I’m pretty sure that this is what stereo was invented for – larking around.  Phil Spector clearly didn’t like larking around, hence his badge that said ‘back to mono’ and I suspect that he would have pulled his gun about if you larked around during his session.  We haven’t got a gun, just a hammer and some cups of hot tea.

One important vocal trick is that while you are recording vocals, it’s important that you are distracted to the point of not being able to continue by your bandmate doing the TWIST, in the corner of your eye, while she’s holding a hot cup of tea.  You might then have to practice your next bit on your own for a few minutes as they put their scalded fingers under some cold water.  Apparently this happened when Billie Holliday recorded Strange Fruit and when Sinead O Connor was laying down the main vocal for ‘Nothing compares 2 U’ which gives both of those performances their gravity.

If you haven’t quite learned your vocal parts, it’s also a good idea to write the lyrics on both sides of a piece of paper so that the rustle can be heard when you record vocals as you turn the page over. This adds atmosphere to any pop song.

Please don`t copy this information in expensive seminars about recoding.

It’s been a fairly quiet weekend where I’ve spent most of it mucking around with T-Shirt images, so much so that I ran out of time to see the T-Shirt guy on Saturday because I’m working with big hi res images and unless I shut everything down on my computer I spend half of the time telling the hourglass icon what I think about it. And I think negative things about it.

I did watch Martyrs again as a Friday night bed time story which I wouldn’t recommend.  It’s as brutal a second time round but you pick up on bits that you missed when you didn’t know what was happening.  I talked to Leigh about it on Saturday, it’s a masterpiece in terms of building up story and twists but you’re kind of blinded by the brutality.

On Saturday evening I met up briefly with Kris for lassis (I lost a bet where I said that Cat Stevens didn’t write the first cut is the deepest because I thought it was a girl group song that pre-dated him but I was wrong. It also made me look up Cat Stevens who I always thought was a villain for saying that Salman Rushdie had the fatwa coming, based on 10,000 Maniacs’s decision to remove their cover of peace train from subsequent copies of In My Tribe but it turns out he was misquoted at the time and has put in a lot of effort to set the record straight).  I was at a loose end so went to see The Final Destination 3D.  I got there at 9.02 and asked if it was sold out.  The reply was ‘I don’t think so…..no, there are 300 tickets left’.  Terrible! I quite enjoyed the fairground one because they tapped into how scary it is to be riding around on a structure as big as a town-hall that is put up in A DAY.  With a spanner.  Whereas this one was just a load of improbable nonsense that wasn’t very scary.  The 3D was all effort in the first ten minutes (bolted on effort) but then they forgot about it apart from the wink to camera bit where the characters are also watching a 3D film at the movies.

My plan was to head home but Jaynie had come into town so we met Cinema Boy and Amy at the Broadway for a bit then shot the shit in the Social beer garden until late before some Istanbul action.

Sunday was more T-Shirt nonsense, a trip to Asda and checking out a film ironically called ‘Good’ where Vigo plays a professor turned Nazi.  It was based on a play so felt a bit strange in terms of how slightly broad the characters were and wasn’t as good a second world war film as this:



I also started watching the corner which is cool, I tried to watch it before but it was just after I’d tanked all of the Wire.  It’s funny how all the well to do characters in the Wire are played by actors who play junkies in the corner.

The Burly Nagasaki recording that me and Theresa did last Wednesday completely RULES. We must have put in the best part of a day to make just over three minutes of music but I love it.  We’ve got some dub action, we’ve got some spatial stereo tricks, we’ve got some wall of sound and a New order bit!  We just need to do the treasure that goes with the single and the B side and it will be single launch time.  We already have a record label:

We also popped round to see Joe for a bit which was cool and I got to hear what he’s working on musically which was pretty impressive and it was good to catch up with James and Angie.

I’m also putting something together for a show I hope to do in November that I’ve been asked to do as a ‘Sawyer’. This means that firstly I have to actually practice the saw.  I always think I’m a terrible saw player and I’m not great mainly because I don’t practice but to be honest there are other sawyers out there getting by with a similar skill level.  This lady www.sawlady.com is a cut above the others but she’s also a CHEAT in that she’s got over the thumb snapping pain of saw-bending by inventing a gizmo to make it more ergonomic.  To me this is like tapping the bongos in Donkey Konga rather than clapping, it’s a hard thing that’s meant to be a hard thing and once you modify a saw it’s no longer just a saw. I’ve asked Kris to play the stroviol as well as I think the brief is about unusual instruments and I don’t think it’s Chickenskin territory so I’ll need to serious it up to cabaret rather than farce level. This might mean a new project name!

This week:

Tuesday – Anders’s Birthday

Thursday-Meet Holly

Friday-Fists Maze

Mmmmh

It’s been a while but I haven’t really been into writing much lately. I’ve done some cool stuff but my Dad also had what they alarmingly term a massive stroke weekend before last and I went home at the weekend to see how he is and to see my Mum.  I think I missed the worst of it as it sounds like it was very hairy when he first went in and while he was comfortable when I went (too comfortable the first day as we couldn’t wake him up from a nap) the job now is to get my head around the idea that he’s not going to get ‘better’ in a few weeks and to focus on what is still him about him.

The intuition, based on ego and I suppose stories is to interpret the things that he says as the most important things on his mind, take things personally and extrapolate on every detail when my guess is that the damage is entirely random and his preoccupations are mainly the things that he is able to focus on at any given time.  It’s strange that he’s always been a passive guy who had a kind of grumpy bravado about things that irritated him and this bravado seems to be his on-going personality now either because it’s what the stroke has left him with or because he’s not happy with being in hospital or anxious about his own state of being (extrapolation creeping in). For the last year he’s sometimes been  little snappy if he feels condescended to or patronised, if you try and help him put his coat on when given time he could do it himself (he has Alzheimer’s and was , until the stroke, fairly autonomous) and this was also a trait on Sunday where I’d ask him a question and he’d answer ‘of course I know what it is!.’ He spent a lot of time talking about things as though he were in Dublin as a child, mentioned a fight, was trying to give directions and then started talking about Johnny Ray.  I picked up on this and tried to remember the songs that Johnny Ray did only to get a text from my Mum later, who had spoken with my Uncle with the Tom Waits line ‘Johnny Ray didn’t sing anything, he had an ice cream shop on Frances Street’.  He seemed to be looked after well although he’d been pulling his NG tube out so was only getting nutrition from a drip until after the weekend. There’s a lot to think about.

The rest of the weekend was cool hanging out with my mum.  I won some Ben and Jerrys Cherry Garcia frozen yoghurt when I bet her that Tesco wouldn’t have Lincoln biscuits and won. I did some research afterwards and no one makes them in the UK anymore but you can buy them in Irish supermarkets and Kraft make them in ARGENTINA.  Some guy in Ireland was hawking a packet on ebay if you thought that over a fiver wasn’t an illogical amount of money for knobbly shortbread biscuits.

On the way back from EA I went to see Fists playing at a little festival in Loughborough which ruled. It was nice being somewhere else with our friends and Katie had come back from south America so it was a cool, slightly drizzly hang out.  Fists played a blinding set! Everyone was great, it sounded far too good for a marquee in a pub garden set up, James tried to tell swear-jokes to sports students who were actually chanting incomprehensible shit from the back between songs, Angie was an indiestar, Nick looked like the enigmatic guy looking away from the audience but a lot more relaxed and having fun, Dave is Rock and Roll and Theresa had a Joan of Arc thing going on with her new haircut and made it look easy as usual. It was shorter than usual, which is usually pretty short but all the fun of all the fairs.

On Monday I chilled out, watched Coraline which looks cool but is a bit messy story wise (it was Coraline or Antichrist – I should have done a double bill), went to the park with Sarah and Caitlin and met up with Kris before falling asleep to Antichrist before the gross-out bits kicked in.

Last night I got to the laundrette at closing time but stuck my clothes in and faked ignorance which meant I had to hear about every single aspect of the laundrette from the guy but that was fair, I was keeping him behind.  I then went to Aldi and scored some MARLIN STEAKS for £1.99.  When I got home I caught up with my Mum and my brother and cooked them before throwing them away when I ate a bit and remembered my previous decision that Tuna was probably the meatiest fish you could get before it seemed like meat and not fish. There wasn’t much flavour and it was very tough like I remember meat being with a similar texture which put me off enough to not want to carry on. I’m sorry Mr Marlin. 

I then watched the end of Antichrist a film that makes you say ‘Oh Lars!’.  I like Lars Von Trier mainly because he’s a guy who you expect certain things from but he’ll often give you some of them but flip your expectations in other ways.  Antichrist is pretty much Lars Larsing around for a couple of hours.  It’s almost a cliché to write a film where a man does the shopping list of grim things and has grim things done to him and gets his arse out a lot and then offer that part to the green goblin and for him to say yes when he could make ten times as much doing the voice over in a cartoon.   Apart from generally wincing as nudie bits get a hard time, it’s hard to be shocked by someone with a reputation for putting those things into films. Do the audiences at Cannes really fall for that or does the media pretend that they are outraged to whip up publicity?  It was a little film from someone who can do bigger and not little in an intimate way but little in a pretending to be stretching budget when you are actually stumping up a wedge, faking your first film way. There were loads of annoying camera angles where the gag was a cheap jerky tripod that you jeked right and had to compensate back a bit but who’s point of view is that?  Unless the ‘evil’ has a little joint on it’s neck that you tighten with a plastic screw it just pulls you out of the story to picture Lars stroking his chin with a cheeky grin on his face.  I wasn’t going to not watch it and Charlotte’s in it but it was a bit of a task to get through it.

Today is part two of the Burly Nagasaki recording session.  Me and Burly met up last week and half recorded Burly Nagasaki putting down the keyboard, mandolin and some vocal tracks.  Today’s mission is to finish our ‘single’ and record the b-side (handyman) to hopefully have the single out in time for our TWO upcoming shows.  We’ve already got a record label ‘S’only’ with the tag line ‘S’only a record label’ (maybe we’ll be even cheekier and have ‘S’only music’.  There is a corporate logo that we could pastiche but knowing our luck we’ll make a joke about being signed to ‘S’only’ and end up in court where the only benefit to us would be the publicity which would enable us to sell all THIRTY of our CDRs (£60 net – legal fees £750,000) which would then be worth upwards of Three pounds.

Thursday night was amazing! I went to see Theresa for a run through of the Burly Nagasaki ‘set (there were two different possible setlists: 1) Handyman 2)Burly Nagasaki or 1)Bur….).  When we went through the songs it was TERRIBLE!  We had to do Handyman about five times for it to be anywhere near OK which gave only a bit of time for Burly. By the end we were getting away with it but again it didn’t seem to matter a lot as it was still really funny doing it. I don’t think we wanted to fall apart in front of a room full of people but it’s amazing how little thought we put into the fact that we were supposed to be doing this in front of an audience, not just to make us giggle and lark about.

Jumpers was pretty full which meant that I got a bit flustered when I got there trying to find a safe place for the stuff and knocking over Roger’s drink in the interim. This carried on as I was paranoid that beer would get spilled on Fists’ £300 Korg or my QY70. With loads of people, beer and metal tools in close proximity to electricity and instruments, I got the first fear that something expensive could go wrong as we set up.

Damian and Kerry played first with a quiet song they’d written plus a couple of covers including the Monster Mash that roger joined in with from the audience.  It was really nice and of the seasoned show-offs there they were probably the most authentic non-proper band and I hope it’s encouraged them to put something together and play again.

The burly Nagasaki set went a TREAT. By our standards we didn’t make much in the way of ‘mistakes’ (that calibration is set at pretty high so while there were a catalogue of fluffs, we expected those) and it RULED doing Handyman with Theresa.  A few months ago we talked about the song and sung a bit on the way to the bus stop from a night out and now we’d added Burly Nagasaki’s to the cannon of covers.  Theresa played the expensive Korg and I played my bit of wood with a tin of nails elastic banded to it and a nail driven in to it that I could hit with a hammer in the second half as well as playing my saw by hitting the edge with the handle of my hammer while we both traded lines.  We re-wrote the lyrics so that whenever TJ sang she had to sing it as reported speech so:

I fix broken hearts I know I really can

Became He fixes broken hearts he knows he really can.

With the added hurdle that cramming the extra syllables in creates.  This also had the added benefit that in practice we had two sheets coded with our bits on that we would  forget and use one as a master so that one week we’d have the boy one with one set of highlighting , the next the girl one with another so we could easily sing the wrong gender and the wrong person’s line.  I don’t know why we didn’t throw blindfolds and boxing gloves into the mix while we were at it.

For Burly Nagasaki Theresa had the QY70 playing a kind of Chinese chime/choir hybrid sound which she flipped between octaves with for the parts and I played mandolin.  TJ was LEAD SINGER because she’d made up the tune and had the cool phrasing and after a bit Anders held up the megaphone for her to sing into so that people could hear her sing ‘Steam Train Truck taking motherfuuuuuuuuuuuuckers  toooooooooooooo jail’ and ‘ You fuck with him and he’ll fuck up your face’.  There’s a bit in each verse where a bridge comes in and in practice the lead up got longer each verse.  Theresa took this to an AMAZING extreme on the last verse where it went on forever so I was giggling.  The last thing we expected was the big singalong but that completely RULED.  The whole set was all the fun of the fair and if you look at the facebook photos you can tell.  We even got our second gig! Nick offered us a slot at the Jam Café at the Hockley Hustle. Music is sooooooo EASY!

Next up was the Tom Thomas club doing that ‘this is how we do it’ song which was, again a mixture of Nick’s over-the-top earnest singing ( I swear he’ll burst out crying one day) and far too competent melodica playing and Tom’s long-hurricaned (that’s like long winded but more and that…) MCing.  Every Tom Thomas club set is like the last scene of a 1980s film where it all works out in the end for the main characters while the ‘colourful’ characters are doing the prom finale.  Proper non-proper!

You’d think that that would be the end of it with the official entertainment over but there was still the judging of the craft competition which me and Theresa did.








  As ever the standard was high and our winner was the model penis with built in party popper that would explode from the end (genius).  Unfortunately the Loughborough contingent (ha ha) who made it had left so we were regrouping and picking another one when people started shouting ‘give it to Jim, give it to Jim’, so we turned round and were greeted by the most bafflingly amazing site in history.




As great as this photo is it doesn't recreate the drama of my personal BRAIN MOVIE of the moment.

I have no idea what possessed Jim Brower to do this but we HAD to give him first prize because whatever the competition brief no one could have beaten that!

We hung around until the end of Jumpers and got some cool complements for Burly then because half of us had the next day off, we headed on to the Tap and Tumbler to play the funniest game of mixed triples pool where everyone’s skill level was so low that it was literally a game of chance.  We got kicked out just before closing time and went to the Turf Tavern where Nick realised that he’d left his bag behind containing:

A megaphone

A Melodica

A Curly wig

Children’s craft materials

Last night was the last Burly Nagasaki practice….well, we’re having a panicy run-through before going to Jumpers.

The Burly Nagasaki set-up is Me and Theresa playing instruments that we don’t normally do.  We’re doing two songs; Handyman by Del Shannon / Jimmy Jones and our own composition Burly Nagasaki which imagines Burly as a superhero – part wrestler who has been fixed by science to have rockets on his feet and a tiny atomic bomb for a head to be used only in emergencies.  He’s very violent but saves more lives in the long run (maybe).

For Handyman, Theresa is playing the keyboard and singing and I’m playing a bit of old futon wood with two nails in it and a dax hairwax tin full of nails elastic banded to it that I shake and hit with a hammer.  I’m also playing my saw but not with the bow, I’ll be hitting the edge with the wooden handle of the hammer.  In rehearsals I have cut my finger on the saw and dropped my hammer on Thresa’s foot because in the middle of the song I have to quickly put down the percussion device and pick up the hammer while resting a saw on my knees.  Safety in Mind.  For Burly Nagasaki Theresa is playing the QY70’s tiny keyboard, flipping up and down octaves for the sections and I’m playing the MANDOLIN which I learned on TUESDAY.

We love Handyman, it’s a great song unless James Taylor is winning a Grammy for turning an upbeat rocker into a depressing dirge.  We listened to loads of versions of it for ‘preproduction’ including the Jimmy Jones version which is truly wonderful and Del clearly borrowed some of the falsetto stuff from it and made it his trademark, Frank Black does a cool version with Teenage Fanclub but doesn’t falsetto on it strangely because Frank can falsetto as high as the moon and back in a beat. There’s a reggae version which is also pretty cool.  It’s one of those great fifties pop songs like That’ll be the day where some rock n roll geek is telling the ladies what’s what?

Hey Girls Gather round, Listen to what I’m putting down

Woo Baby,  I’m your handyman

I’m not the kind to use a pencil or rule, I’m handy with a love and I’m no fool

I fix Broken Hearts, You know I really can

If your Broken Hear needs repair, I am the man to see

I Whisper sweet things, you tell all your friends and they’ll come running to me

Here is the main thing I want to say, I’m busy 24 hours a day

I fix Broken hearts you know I really can.

Genius! Who had the onions to start a song with ‘Hey girls, gather round’ – come and check me out and that.  It does advocate word of mouth advertising as well.

Del’s mate who I should look up the name of because he was a synth genius does one of his high-pitched solos with that hand-made machine and Theresa has learned this.  We did use some old Casio and Yamaha Keyboards but the QY70 had much better sounds but when we couldn’t work the midi properly Theresa is now using a proper Korg.  Don’t worry thought, the ‘amp’ is some computer speakers that are about the size of a coffee Jar.  Non Proper or die!

The next bit of my Livejournal is a song writing tutorial.  This is how the hitmakers work. Feel free to follow this method and make your fortunes but If I see these teaching materials in £800 per weekend courses, I’m ringing Nelsons!

How the magic is made

For Burly I started the song by writing lyrics for a verse and a structure for the song where the verses are childishly violent and sweary and the bridge sentimental counterpoint:

Burly Nagasaki’s out bangin’ heads

He’s Kickin’ ASS and SPRAYING RED

Criminals are crying begging for their lives

Some are in the Hospital and they won’t survive

But there’s one thing that they don’t know

He’s just looking for a heart to love him so

At this point there was no melody, maybe some rough chords and no chorus.  The idea was that we’d knock these up together and I asked Theresa to write lyrics for another verse.  In the mean time I went to town on this one, partly as a tongue in cheek over exaggeration.

Burley Nagasaki’s tearing up the place

You F**k with him and he’ll F**k with your face

He’ll tear you a new A*****e if you do a crime

And if you give him any s**t he’ll just rip out your spine

But there’s one thing you don’t understand

That he’s searching for someone to hold his hand

At first we both realised it needed toning down but as time started to get scarce it STAYED IN.

The first thing we did together was for Theresa to write her verse which might have been one of my favourite 20 minutes on earth!

‘Burly Nagasaki’s out Killing cops’

‘No he’s not, he’s a GOOOODY!’.

In the end Theresa’s verse became:

Burly Nagasaki’s out Smashing glass

He’s foaming at the mouth and Kicking Ass

Faster than lightning, harder than nails

Steam Train Truck taking motherfuckers to jail

But he does this with a cold heavy heart

‘Cause deep inside he’s falling apart

So, next I played some chords for a chorus – the usual suspects C-F and Theresa came up with the chorus which pretty much goes

Burly Nagasaki

Burly Burly Nagasaki

Wooooah woah

It’s ultra catchy and we recorded it to a phone quickly before we forgot the GOLD!

Then I played some other chords – more usual suspects C-G and A little girl-group thing that went F-Em-F-G and Theresa made up the melody to the lot complete with Velvet Undergroundy Flaming Lipsy phrasing which RULES so much so that Theresa became LEAD SINGER with me doing chorus vocals, when I remember to.

During one of the last run throughs last night, Theresa stumbled on the words a bit and sang ‘Burly Nagasaki’s out spraying Ass’ which is a different superhero altogether.

We rehearsed from about 8.15-11pm last night.  I think James and Angie might kill us if they have to hear those two songs again.

Tonight: Opening night! Opening Night!

Cool and busy busy weekend!

On Friday I met up with Martha and Theresa at the Lincolnshire Poacher which ruled! Me ad Theresa made up a couple of games (you know, how grown-ups normally do on a Friday night out).  One was I told Theresa the name of a song by a band she knew but where she didn’t know the song and she sung what she thought the song should be.  The second game was to take ART words, the pretentious ones you get on art fliers and the ‘instructions’ at galleries that tell you what the artist was saying because the PICTURES ALONE DON’T DO THAT. So you take a word like ‘Juxtoposition’, ‘Key themes’ or’Dichotomy’ and shoehorn them into traditional rock n roll songs.  Theresa wrote them down and most of them had the word ‘baby in’. It was a cool habg-out and not too much of a latey.

On Saturday I got T-Shirt sulks and demanded that I made a shirt to make up for the John Candy monstrosity.  A lot of my images won’t work with the limits on detail so I decided to make a BLING hello Thor shirt as I know that they have gold / sparkly vinyl in the T-Shirt place.  I successfully di a vector trace and took the image to the shop asking to see what ‘ridiculous’ vinyls thay had.  The guy gave me the book and I tried to look a them subjectively and shortlist but to be honest, once I saw leopard skin the hunt was done. Again, the image was a bit big (my fault, I must get a ruler out against a shirt) but it’s pretty Jungle Rooms.

The We Show up on Radar single Launch was the Bees knees. A hundred and fifty people, some just visiting the liberry seated, watching Andy Radar and friends plus some cool supports amongst a million books and James creeping around with his flickcamera filming the performance, books and my grinning face.  There was cake and wine for sale and the singles RULE in pink vinyl.  There was a cake with the same design as the single being raffled and Rory won it!

I chatted with Becky who said she was hoping to move back to Nottingham and she told me that she had decided to become a hairdresser after realising that she hated office work and sort-of wanted to work in retail because she liked interacting with people.  We talked about that post-graduate preoccupation with office work being the thing to do when most tasks are either ridiculously stressful or boring and it highlighted the psychological paraphernalia that we wrap around different jobs.  They’re not even about status or money and a lot about role. I love hearing about how people find what they want to do (Im always happy when people find WHAT they want to do anyway) and how they get there.  It’s rarely useful to me as I never want to crib their idea but it all adds to what we’re looking for and why and it sent my all-devouring mind off in several directions to procrastinate about all manner things.

After some Alley Café action we went to Fists house and I scored some vegetables in batter with sweet and sour sauce form the Chinese takaway.  Ho lok do sweet and sour fake-chicken and beancurd but I haven’t had stuff in batter like that for over twenty years before I stopped eating meat.  I reckon paracetamol probably taste nice if deep-fried in batter.

We then went to to Anders and Becky’s for Becky’s birthday and it was just night of hanging out and laughing most of the time.  James kept ratting me off to the Hello Thors for copywrite infringement for my shirt, we got to hear Abi’s D-Frost track, hear about Anders and Becky’s trip to Cuba, witness the most frightening mask/balaclava in the world and re-live the Benny Ramone interview during which I said ‘and the best bit is that he goes around town calling himself Benny Ramone’ to which Tom revealed my ‘Nerve’ by pointing out that I go round passing myself off as Joey Chickenskin which was a fair cop.   I was breaking with tiredness at the end but it’s the hardest place to go home from because there is always someone you want to lark around with for another 20 minutes!

On Sunday I watched some more season 4 wire – I swear as you get to the last 10 minutes of the show you feel SAD that the episode is going to end even if you’ve seen it before.

In the afternoon I went to see Theresa for a Burly Nagasaki Practice. We pulled in 4 hours and wrote a song in that time which is good going when we were both happy to flush away 20 minutes of rehearsal time deciding which keyboard sound to use.  I nearly maimed Theresa with the HAMMER that I use in the show (Is it good practice to rest a saw on your lap and then put down a tin a of nails and pick up a hammer as fast as you can?) and writing our song might have been the funniest thing I can remember.  I had a verse formula, two verses, some chord ideas, no chorus, no melody and a missing verse for us to work on and I’m glad it panned out that way.  I played some chords and Theresa improvised a melody with our sub-childish (as in pertaining to actual children not Billy Childish) lyrics which had great phrasing and inflection which would have beaten the cliché ridden nonsense I would have brought to the table.  In Joey Chickenskin songs, the chords go one way and if you imagine the most obvious melody for that – that’s the one it will be.    Theresa’s was much more interesting and the chorus she came up with is more infectious than THE SWINE FLU!

While we were choosing keyboard sounds we were wary of anything too twee so when a ‘music box’ or Xylophone would come up we described it as Merde-indoire.  For one of  them it was particularly twee and Theresa started making up a song that went:

I Love you

But you don’t love me

So I had some cake

And a cup of tea

I told her that indies would BUY that for a LOAD of cash.

We are one practice away from Thursday.  I predict we’ll be OK but it will definitely be Non-proper.

In the evening I had a drink with Kris sharing my new ‘what do we want to be now that we’ve grown up’ thoughts before finishing off the best piece of television ever made.

Cool Cool weekend!

This week:

Tonight: Going to see Sarah

Tuesday:  Maybe show at chamaeleon

Wednesday: Burly Nagasaki practice

Thursday: Jumpers for goalposts

I think I listen to too many Joey Ramone songs but I always fall in love too hard, too quickly and have to face the consequences.  I think I still love the T-Shirt place but I’m not ‘in-love’ with it after my experience on Saturday which was educational but very disappointing and didn’t let me down gently.  

So last week I had my Chuck Berry shirt and told myself that the image was printed onto the shirt how I’d wanted it to be therefore ANYTHING could be printed on one (logic X Optimism=Fantasy).  So I get to the place with my John Candy image.  It’s taken me a while to make as I’m learning this stuff, I had a photo, slammed the contrast to MAX, fiddled with the brightness to get enough info so that when read with the text and a detailed knowledge of the Blues Brothers, you might be fooled into thinking it was an image of John Candy.

What I didn’t realise was that I’d barely got away with last weeks because while the images are large, the paint program was dumping them at a webby dpi so the image wasn’t high enough quality for the machine to pick up the detail.  What I should have done was said that I’d go home and work on it again, as part of the fun is learning this stuff but the guy was ultra helpful and wanted me to have my John Candy shirt and part of me wanted to walk away with it that day too.  So he fiddled with different ways of doing it before essentially RETRACING the design by hand.  Unfortunately his re-trace didn’t have the vested interest that one I did might have done but I thought it looked ‘OK’ and then he changed the font as he didn’t have the one I’d chosen (I’d looked at about 600 fonts to decide on the one I’d wanted and there wasn’t a second choice in that game).  To be fair, the family guy font was designed to do the same thing so it seemed ‘OK’.  So essentially after he’d spent a LOAD of his time on it we ended up with what was essentially a knock off of my design and I kind of felt obliged to go through with it and sort of thought it’d be OK at the same time. 

Then I found out how they do them.  Remember that this costs only £10 and includes the shirt.  What the machine does is create an outline of the image and then cuts it out on a vinyl sheet, then someone has to take the sheet and with a scalpel remove all the detail that you don’t want by hand before pressing the design on the shirt.  I need to ask about the colours available but my guess is that white may be one of least obtrusive as the shirts are mainly aimed at the Hen/Stag market (They seem to do some MAGNIFICENT foil and glitter vinyls which I might make a BLING CRASS T-Shirt with).  The Orange is fluorescent and can be seen from the beginning of time. 

This is what I wanted

This is what I got:

 

WWWWWWW WAIT!


It's only NOW that I realise what he's done wrong!  He threw away the WRONG BIT!   He's Kept the PLACENTA  and thrown the BABY away!

That's AMAZING!


Ignore my hoity toity next paragraph where i talk about the near-miss differences between real and knock off - this isn't a knock off it's a NEGATIVE!

Ivan Brunetti, in his interview in Comic Art or The Comics Journal talks about collecting Disney knock offs as he’s interested in the differences between the real cartoons and the knock offs.  I don’t think I can see the same charm in my knock off.

And SURELY it would be racist to NOT mention that the guy who did it was black!

I now need to recalibrate what I can and can’t do and also get to grips with vector tracing as most of my files are too low-res to use.  Plus I can’t get away with the punk rock high-detailed photo-copy look that I wanted (I spent half an hour manually filling in the gaps between roof-tiles and bricks on a replacements image which I realise is now not practical) and will have to simplify.  I still think I can come up with some cool shirts, but the sky may not be the limit.   It sits between stencil printing which is a bit sloppy and real screenprinting which isn’t cost-effective for one-offs.

The rest of the day was about getting Andy Radar’s single launch date wrong, having a haircut, having a cuppa at Sarah’s, meeting Kris and starting the finest piece of television (again) The Wire Season 4.

On Sunday I sort of caught up on sleep and spent the day with Sarah and Caitlin, playing in the park and chilling out. We took toys to the park but the money that sprite had spent on making their green bottles eyecatching and tactile worked a treat on a seven month old especially when I got it to make the ‘hiss’ noise now and then. Take note Tomy – FIZZY FRED THE FRIENDLY LEMONADE BOTTLE – buy me a TV Yellow Les Paul Junior and you can have that idea – go ahead make your millions!

This week:

Tonight: Work out stuff for Burly Nagasaki

Tomorrow: Rehearsal with TJ

Friday: Hanging with Martha/Friday night stuff

It’s been aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages since I’ve been able to update. Some cool stuff has happened but without my Livejournal I can’t remember what. Some stuff though:

A few weekends ago I went to loggerheads to be filmed for the documentary that Will Robinson is doing on music in Nottingham.  The set up was pretty cool, they’d filmed the bands and were filming acoustic acts in the cave.  Ali (Bonsai Projects) was going to do a short interview ending with a question about the song that was about to be played and then the ‘guests’ filmed a one song performance. I only expected to be there about an hour but stayed at Loggerheads for THIRTEEN HOURS mainly because I split the interviewer duties with Ali and also because the little scene there was so nice. The guys doing the filming and audio were really cool and it was like having our own little telly chat show where we prepped the guests by running through the format and questions and there were all the REAL MOVIE touches like hand clapping to synch sound.  There were bits of down-time where the audio recorder got full and needed to be archived or where the guys filming had to go to the big room to film one of a couple of bands but this was cool, chatting with the musicians and listening to Will playing funny songs.  It was one of those days where you got the sense that some people with some free time and enthusiasm were having a simple try at something that could have been daunting and with a load of hard work hopefully achieved something nice.  It’s hard to say what the film will mean.  At the very least it will be an archiving of who is playing at the moment and will be reframed if anyone breaks it big in any way. Will’s managed to amass an impressive collection of people presumably working for free on the project and I’m excited about the results.

On the same night I played a new song called Swine Flu which is a public information song with a horror movie chorus of ‘You’ve got swiiiiiine Flu, and you don’t know what to do!’ cutting into sober spoken word real-life swine flu tips.  Some Nathan Barleys sung the chorus back to me later in the night so I obviously did something right/wrong.

I’m excited to have discovered SPLAT, the T-shirt printing place on the Victoria Market.  I went by a few weeks ago and saw that they had LOADS of different vectory blocky designed shirts like Nike pastiches and coupled with the fact that the T-shirt guy at the Seaside had said I could have one of thousands of fonts, I realised that the modern printer hasn’t got a load of transfers to iron on but is actually printing from documents which meant that if you made up a graphic, you could have ANY T-shirt in the world! This seems obvious, but I’m not talking about a badly printed photo but all of the cool things that people do with screen printing like relief designs with gaps in where the colour of the shirt forms the design. 

I had a price list saying £10 for one side and £12 for two which I assumed was for text and would go up, maybe beyond budget for something bigger but thought I’d give it a try so I used this photo



of chuck.   

I uploaded it to this site http://www.magnigraph.com/ which I’m assuming does a vector trace on the image. 



I kind of like it but it’s clear that it uses the same tolerance for all images so that as well as flattening some details it introduces some crazy psychadelic artefacts which for the chuck image was cool (just) but there are a lot of images that it doesn’t work for.  Doing some reading and speaking with Angi I need to use Illustrator or something that you can edit the vector graphic with or change the tolerance of the trace with.  For larger images, the vector trace wouldn’t be needed as slamming the contrast up and fiddling with brightness until you get the right level of detail in a simple paint/photo programme should produce the right effect but for smaller images you’d end up with pixelating problems as you increase the size for the shirt that you wouldn’t get with a vecotor image.

Aaaaaanyway that’s for later. I made the image with no background so that there would be ‘holes’ for the design to show through, dumped the image in every format the programme would export as  onto a disc and took it in. 





For some reason they still had to fiddle with it a bit but they printed it for ten quid onto a fruit of the loom shirt! Any T-Shirt you want for a tenner!  When I went to get it and saw it hanging up, my first thought was that it was MAGNIFICENT but then wished I’d visualised 22 centimetres more clearly and maybe shrunk the image and asked them to locate it a bit higher (they have little t-shirt pictures that you can scribble on) maybe added a circle to the rim to make a border but you live and learn!



So yeah! I endorse Splat for all your one-off T-Shirt needs!  Since then I have looked at about thirty possibilities for the next one, Lon Chayney from phantom of the Opera, Wanda Jackson, John Candy 

   

Elvis and Dick Nixon, Mick Jackson and Nancy Regan, Wire Characters (Brother Muzone with the words ‘We are in Baltimore Lamar – Baltimore Maryland’)Martha said I could use her lino prints, there’s that great website with the movie title cards and ‘the end’ cards from thirties films – it’s like the day I got my badge machine! Only the tenners stand in my way!

Last night I met up with Theresa for the first practice or our non-proper band band ‘Burly Nagasaki’.  We made the name up last weekend by each taking a record from the Rescue Rooms shelves and picking our favourite word from the song titles. We’re playing at the non-proper band night at jumpers for goalposts in NOT MANY DAYS so made a start.  There are too many secrets but the plan is TOO AMBITIOUS already (foolishly so) but it will be fun trying and we’ve scheduled two more practices.  I have LUTHIORED a new instrument so I’m like Thomas Truax and that.

That aside I’ve been tired a lot and scratched an itch that I was going to wait six more months for and started watching the Wire again.  It  still completely RULES!  Jaynie was telling me that the Guardian are running a poll to find out the most popular TV show of the 2000s.  Apparently the HBO biggies and other box set favourites are all on there in tiny numbers but with about 30% of the vote, the community of peers that we live among agree that the finest piece of television of the decade happens to be…….Top Gear.  The Guardian.  Top. Gear. Rapture take us now!

I saw Transformers which was a two and a half hour film about robots (HONK! HONK! HONK!) where you became bored shitless at the relentless action.  The thinking must be that we will never not be excited no matter what they make stuff do and no matter for how long.  There’s something terribly wrong with falling asleep while giant robots are fighting and at the very least it means that someone has wasted millions of dollars.

I Saw Harry Potter IV which is a two and a half hour film about a boy-wizard (HONK! HONK!HONK!). I kind of liked it but that has guilt attached to it because they are ‘reading’ a book to me that I’ve been too lazy to read myself.  As ever they are tough movies to do because the rules have to change for an audience with such expectations and with JK Rock n Rolling deciding that 500+ pages was the right length for a children’s book, their hands are kind of tied so I think they did their best to keep my interest over that epic time.  I think the films do fall down in that in most films the most visually exciting thing is left until last.  In those books, often the most emotionally interesting thing is left until last and while there is cool stuff going on, it doesn’t always top what we’ve seen visually earlier on so you spend the first half going ‘coo!’ and the last hour going ‘The Air Conditioning in here is on full, there are twenty people here I’m cold and dehydrated, I wonder if I’ve got any texts from people…..shit…why is he in that room again?’.

I’m wondering if I need to do some pre-swine flu precautions this evening like stock up on supplies and go to the laundrette as I sat next to Lucy on Monday and she now has it. I did get a text from Lucy last night but didn’t read it until after I’d hung out at Sarah’s and played with Caitlin so I’m hoping that I didn’t catch it on Monday more so that I didn’t pass it on than because I don’t want the Swine Flu.

We went out on Monday evening for Lesley’s Birthday to the Fox in Basford but I got there too late for Thai food because I had to rehearse a bit for the weekend.  I have no idea what comes over me when I go shopping for presents for Lesley but ever since I gave her the ROYAL DAULTON CRYSTAL GOLF BALL, it’s been chubby brown biographies and this year I went down the biography route again with the Roger Moore one, which to be fair I expected to be entertaining based on the Live and Let Die commentary but I went too far by buying the Cliff Richard one as well which may also prove to be entertaining in that from flicking through, Cliff’s M.O. is to complement someone and then say something mean about them, ie He says that Michael Jackson’s Thriller was one of the best Albums ever before going on about his thin voice (this is coming from CLIFF) but the best bit is that he keeps going on about ‘If there was no Elvis there would be no Cliff’ which is funny because apparently he says this at shows and his disciples reply, panto style, ‘yes there would’.  The way he describes it, he’s telling it straight but they don’t get it so I picture him trying again and again to earnestly convince them but they’re too stupid to not treat it like a joke.  Cliff also had the opportunity to Meet Elvis (Roger Moore DID meet Elvis) but didn’t take it because he didn’t want his picture taken with Elvis at that time because ELVIS LOOKED FAT.  My take on this is that these comments got back to Elvis at the time and spiralled his decline into food and amphetamine yoyo-binges therefore CLIFF KILLED ELVIS (not really libel lawyers, only for entertainment purposes).

The hang out was cool, doing the quiz and shooting the shit.  Dan won sixty quid on sticky 13s and then swapped his pack of cards which then won someone else a load of money.  We speculated on the science and probability that if he hadn’t swapped would he have won again or would the infinite conditions have been disrupted so that other cards were picked?

Last night I chilled out around Sarahs, ate fish and watched lord of the rings one speculating that Gandalf was stupid in not noticing that he was talking to Christopher lee and then being surprised that he turned out to be the baddy. That’s like talking to Jet Li in a film and being surprised when he kicks your head in a bit.

So now the waiting begins.  Has the fortress been breached by H1N1? The lads in my immune system are pretty INSANE for a fight at this point as I spent 1991-94 with colds four months of the year working on childrens wards turning my immune system into NAVY SEAL SPECIAL FORCE-MARINES.  Without my immune system his rifle is useless, without his rifle, he is useless.  If I give them a bag of satsumas, a couple of paracetamol and  then the sporting handicap of loads of diuretic tea they can pretty much lay siege to anything (I’m going to die of the swine flu aren’t I) Ebola, Captain Trips, fractures.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Piggy isn’t having his neck snapped by mercs emerging from just inside my mucous membranes as we speak.  My immune system aint fighting Piggy’s war by Piggy’s rules! They’re the meanest motherfuckers in the valley.

Cool weekend.

On Friday evening I was going to stay in after a Jumpers fairly-latey and sleep debt but at about nine I decided to go to The Chameleon to check out Maniere des Bohemiens (there are loads of letters that are wrong and accents missing from that title) and I’m glad I went. Apart from the guys in the band and Natalia I pretty much chilled out on my own which was good, I got the chance to write some notes for a Comprachicos song I’m working on slowly and was too tired to be any kind of company.  It was a really nice and different night in that it was held in the bar where the band set up on the raised part and because of the music and set-up, it seemed like you could have been on holiday.  Nick was pleased with himself and kept dropping perls to the audience as well as setting up a whip-round.  They are such great musicians, Bob is technically amazing but totally improvisational and during the break he was playing along to Johnny Cash over the speakers in his style which was cool.  It was just what I needed a chill out and excellent chill-out music for a couple of hours.

On Saturday I woke up in a weekend-long gloom which I did my best to fairly successfully shake off and took my bike to the shop to find out about repairs and they said it couldn’t be safely fixed because of the aluminium frame which may have hidden breaks in it after they bent it. This is a shame as although the claim should sort out a replacement, the bike has obvious sentimental value in that Deb bought it for me.  I may buy a ‘banger’ to tide me over until it gets sorted as I’m not getting exercise and I’m spending too much on trams and cabs in the middle of summer.

I met up with Kris for a bit before heading to the Hubb to check out JAYNIE’S NEW BAND! I’m almost a bully lampooning Jaynie’s string of abandoned music projects, mainly because I know she would be great but laziness and nerves have left a million projects in their wake so I was surprised to get a text saying that she was finally playing and needed to check it out.  It was her friend and bandmate Hannah’s birthday party so there was a RIDICULOUS amount of different cakes there and the ‘on at nine’ time got gradually moved back as more and more people did a couple of songs until they finally went on after midnight.  In the interim, the room, made up mainly of people in their early twenties was SPRINGSTEEN MAD, playing Brooooooce covers and CDs.  There was also a girl playing cool ukulele songs  and a few small bands.  It was getting excruciating waiting but Jaynie’s band were cool.  She was playing a keyboard and Rob was playing her Daisy rock guitar and the band were a kind of indiepop band with backing provided by a Nintendo DS and shouty vocals. I thought they were great and it was made more surreal that the room had become a cross between a wedding reception and one flew over the cuckoos nest at that point with a woman line dancing on her own. Jaynie came off saying ‘that was shiiiiit’ before we told he it was great after which she said ‘That was AWESOME’.  So Rob made his stage debut last week and Jaynie this week.

On Sunday I went to see a Sartre play Huis Clos (no Exit?) that Natalia was in with Kris downstairs at Lee Rosys. I loved it, it was excellently acted especially as two of the cast had had nine days to prepare for a dialogue heavy piece.  It was set in a Purgatory/Hell which worked well in the Lee Rosy Basement in that you could hear people from the café above and was about people’s individual potential torments (I won’t ruin it in case anyone goes as it’s still touring around small venues like the Jam Cafe). There was a Q&A afterwards which gave you the impression of a warm and enthusiastic cast fielding questions about the play itself and their interpretation.  It was a really impressive project and performance and I’m glad that we found out about it.

I had planned to go to Splendour but found out on Saturday that it was sold out which panned out OK I think because I mainly wanted to see the Pogues not in the rain but wasn’t sure if that would have been an upsetting prospect anyway as I love the Pogues and I don’t think I could have handled my internal monologue if Shane had turned out to be incoherent.  The live album from 2003 is hideous and I was putting a lot of hope on the story that he had new teeth but from the couple of people I spoke with afterwards, he was a mess so it was probably better to have missed it.  We hung out for a bit then I got some Broadway Bites action and discovered that anchovies are not for me – I’m still not happy with eating fish mixed in with other things and it seemed weird to have FISH PIZZA (well, it didn’t seem weird at ATP when I was pouring grated cheese on top of fish in batter but that’s a different sort of fish pizza).

I then went to see The Moon with Theresa which is a clever film and one that leaves you feeling like you have genuinely been cooped up in a spaceship.  It’s pretty much impossible to talk about it without ruining it but it’s definitely worth checking out.  Afterwards we chatted for a bit in the Broadway hatching our camping plan for August once we tell everyone and get them to come. It was a nice chilled out end to a weekend shooting the shit about stuff.

This week:

Tonight: Lesley’s Birthday

Wednesday: Hanging out with Lucy

Thursday Hanging out with Holly