Category Archive

I need your help.

I’m poor. In fact I’m less than poor, I’m bloody skint, and living on the goodwill of friends and family. Now don’t weep for me I’m housed, I’m shod and kept relatively comfortable by my own low standards. But I do need your help.

The last thing I have is money to spend on stuff, and stuff includes the renewal of the domain name of this very website.

I need £12 to renew the domain name and am asking you my social media acquaintances for a little help.

WHAT YOU PAY: one shiny pound the next time you see me

WHAT YOU GET: apart from a hug? The offical title of ‘Edge Angel’ and I will write 500 words on any subject you name. I can’t guarantee I will write in your favour but I’m far too arrogant to write poorly so you know I’m going to try my damnedest.

Intrested? Of course you are. Pledges and questions can be directed to the comments and/or my twitter account @probablydrunk.

There is a Birmingham of eternal night, in the back rooms of bars, snooker rooms and clubs where any shaft of light that makes it through the black bags taped on the windows illicet much hissing and clawing at the air. And seeing as human beings are basically solar powered, the people that occupy this world are normally pale and half mad. Making conversation with these refugees is impossible, but occasionally, if you listen, you will get a story.

The man wore a suit, an old suit that hadn’t quite gone shiny from constant wear but had creased encoded into its shape like permanently altered DNA. He told me about the Reality Mills, vast churning machines that have been running since ‘the small minds won’. He swilled the ice long since melted in the scotch and looked down. Apparently they fuelled the mills on the mind juice of the young, a small amount of liquid imagination culled from our arms during our TB vaccinations. It doesn’t hurt, we don’t notice it at that age, we burns gallons of the stuff rubbing one out to everyone female we’ve ever met or planning elaborate lives with ‘Justin floppy haired cocksucker’.

The Mills keep everything going, they keep everything the same. They’re a way of keeping the world mundane, controllable, safe. The whiskey sloshed out of the glass as he waved his hands ‘But sometimes these grey mother fuckers fuck it, they get a bad batch or whatever’ that’s when the interesting stuff happens, the fortean unexplained stuff. Reality is what we agree it is. Too many people have too much invested for everyone tomorrow to all agree bricks are purple, up is down, or money is just paper and flat metal disks. Hence the mills. He talked of the giant concrete hum and the taste of chlorine, he talked of probably having cancer of the teeth and sleeping with his eyes open.

I don’t know why he told me this, I don’t even know if he was aware that I was there while he talked about it. It’s not true, probably.

But it does explain why the news media wants you to enraptured with tired remakes that add nothing or distracted by the tawdry existence of millionaire rapist footballers. Because they know what my raving bar friend knew, that stories have power and dreamers can, and do, change the world.

So were going to do this backwards. Shut up, it’ll be fun

Because I’m a dyslexic idiot I don’t always remember to bring my notebook with me. Also because I’m a dyslexic idiot when I do get a something stuck in my brain it means I have to write it on whatever scrap of paper that comes to hand.

Recently I found a piece of paper in my bag that is obviously a review for some song, but I don’t know which one.

“The small piece of time on a summers day when the clouds gather and the sky os a fire of crimson and pinks. His voice searches through the song, a pilgrim looking for a perfect golden moment. Not realising that the point where the song explodes, where he totally loses control and near screams the lyrics IS that moment. After that the production takes over, every crackle, snap and fuzz of the guitar and slash of the cymbal becomes golden moments themselves fizzing off the song like sparks from a Catherine Wheel.”

Anyone know the song?

The person who jogs my memory get one internet.

Rock And Fucking Roll In The City With No Cars

Smoke is billowing from the crushed cigarette on the empty dance floor. Beside it a long and pointed foot is twisting in time with rock and roll music. It’s jarring to see cigarettes indoors and I’m trying to to remember if the the no smoking indoors rule has made it over here to Italy yet. Of course even if it had, the gig we’re waiting for is in what looks like an abandoned restaurant and is being ran by the first people I’ve seen all weekend who’s scarf didn’t cost more than my entire outfit. I’ve been to a few illegal raves in my Dancing Days and this looked very much like every one I’ve ever been too. Warm beer served in plastic cups and hasty graffiti covering the numerous Health and Safety violations, dirty floors and furniture found on the side of the road. Toilet facilities that start bad and degenerate over the night and the signs on the walls are makeshift and the ones that aren’t are wonky, all these are pleasingly familiar and more so to know that the these markers cross borders.

Venice is surprisingly free of subcultures and even in this very niche environment most of the crowd still look no more than casual, maybe ‘studenty’ at a push. There is one punk behind the hole in the wall serving as a makeshift bar and he’s either stoned, stupid or both. But that’s fine as most people seem to have bought their own anyway.

Zona Bandita is on a backstreet hidden by the bus station, the entrance is no more than a wooden shed door. We arrived at the time we saw advertised on the photocopy I pulled off a pillar while sightseeing at 11. We see perhaps three people at the bottom of a path and decide to go for a drink until it’s a little less sketchy. There is literally nowhere else open, we spend an hour wandering down alleys and side-streets, of which Venice is blessed with an abundance. An hour later we return, the place isn’t exactly jumping but there is music so we give a man with a beard five Euros and walk in. One of the most interesting things about travelling is not only learning the similarities, but also learning the differences, the customs and cultures of other places. Tonight we learnt that, in Venice, if a gig is advertised to start at 11, only tourists turn up before one.

The music is Rock and Roll, not the abstract Rock and Roll that most guitar based bands use as an ideology and excuse to throw bar stools at groupies. But actual Rock and Fucking Roll, the music that invented the teenager. Switch blade steel guitars, 4:4 heartbeat time and Brylcream hair. It’s ace. The DJ’s, and a little later, the bands, are wearing tight sharp suits, slicked down parted hair, and sport some sort of trimmed facial hair.

Somehow the DJs signalled that the gig was about to start without moving, speaking or stopping the music and the room went from ten to a hundred people and a lot of smoke. The first band is a two piece called Wildmen, it’s a lucky break for them that the makeshift stage has just enough room for both of them. I’m always happy to see a singing drummer, although for most Phil Collins probably shat in that shower for good in the eighties. They described themselves as ‘Garage Blues’ on the flyer, ‘garage’ seemingly being Italian for ‘raw unpolished screaming passion’. Any two piece with guitar and drummer are now going to be compared with the White Stripes, in this case the Wildmen stand-up to that comparison delivering stripped down bluesy rock and roll that occasionally bubbles into breakneck guitar and fast driven thumping drums. The crowd don’t applaud between songs but rather stand baffled like participants in a musical hit and run.

Then there is a hassle of leads, people and steel, the sort of hassle that can only come from trying to fit a six piece band on a stage that struggled with two. Just as the crowd start drifting away the front man of Vomit Tongues throws his mic into the air, catches it with a flourish and a guttural scream kicks off a sound that is somewhere between early punk and diet-pill speed rock and roll. The performance is a blur interspersed with gaps so the guitarists can retune their guitars and plug the leads back in, some would point out that this could be overcome by not smashing the necks of their guitars against the cymbals, crowd surfing and spitting at each other. But fuck those people, they know nothing of Rock and Fucking Roll.

These gaps are odd, but give the now dancing, bouncing crowd a breather. When the songs finish the band go from being Dionysian infused raw nerves, screaming personifications of our unconscious passion of life, and go back to being shuffling awkward young men, then with a rebel yell and a slam on the bass drum they go back to being avatars of abandon.

Not only one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a while, but the sort of gig that gives you back the joy of loud music back to an old tired heart.

Guilty Party’s myspace

Suicide has touched my life a few times, not least of all because it seems to one of the biggest killers of my extended family, after heart disease and alcoholism. I once had to kick down the door of a bathroom and take a person very close to me to hospital after a they took a fistful of painkillers with vodka chaser. Even now I’m not against suicide totally, but stories like THIS are still very sad.

With over 1000 ‘friends’ on Facebook how can we explain that a human person reaching out to other human people can not get the response they need? Most people reading the headline will understand ‘friends’ in the context of Facebook doesn’t mean the same as friends in meatspace: a ‘friend’ on Facebook can be ‘person I added so I could see their holiday pictures of them in a bikini’, ‘person I went to school with, don’t really know any more but added while nostalgic and drunk’ or even ‘person with cool profile picture’. I have over 200 Facebook ‘friends’; god knows how or why because I rarely check it. The point is, the headline of ’1000 Facebook friends’ means nothing because that’s not how social networking works.

Social capital is the measurement of influence a person has in any social network*: a celebrity will have more social capital because of the reach of his network and the weight of his words, an expert will have more social capital in certain situations, or person who’s connection is entertaining on the network itself has capital because of the entertainment that connection provides. An interesting example of social capital working is a missing girl being found due to the retweeting of the appeal (she’s since been found). A person with a thousand followers we expect to have a lot of social capital, because of the amount of connections they have, and they must be useful somehow right?

So, how can someone with so much perceived social capital have so little help when it was needed most? Well most would say is that it was squandered, the more you ask from your network the less you should expect, if someone is needy, dull, or asks to much then they lose their currency. Spent with none earned back. And its a peculiar Facebook etiquette norm that ‘unfriending’ someone is a particularity strong statement, so dispute the connection being loose to the point of none existence the digital link labelled ‘friend’ still remains. If we were honest we could all prune these ghost friends out of our digital lives and be left with a solid, honest core of real friends instead of ‘friends’.

But social capital is a game, a framework with labels and rules that we apply to the new world of social media so we can make sense of it because that is how our brains are wired. We are programmed to receive stories and games and will use them to make the world seem logical and linear. I think online we are removed from the real and its easy to push the right pedals to get our reward pellets and forget the people we touch are real. Maybe if one of the ’1000′ friends, that had lived close by, had seen the inevitable result of Simone’s story instead of playing the social media game it would have been different.

The tools are not to blame here, I don’t think anyone is. That’s not to say we can’t learn the lesson.

When I first started using the Internet properly back in 2004 or so, I made contact with a girl on messenger. I never met her, saw her, or knew anything about her other than what we told each other in that rectangle in the corner of the screen. It was innocent enough, I cant even remember what we chatted about. I did get the impression that she had some body issues, but nothing major. Over the space of a week her messages got more and more depressed, I urged her to get help or go talk to someone close, but she shrugged it off. One night she told me she was going to take all of her mom’s sleeping tablets and signed off “Goodbye, perhaps forever” and never signed on again. After about a week of worrying I did a search on her name trying to find out something, anything, and I found her user name on another messenger service; active and well and friends with someone else. I never contacted her.

Does that mean now would I be more wary of supposed ‘cries for attention’, more cynical about online grandstanding? No, especially not now. To quote the article :

“A spokeswoman from the mental health charity Mind said suicide threats should be taken seriously: “It is a myth that people who talk about suicide don’t go through with it. They are very likely to have spoken about their feelings of desperation to others.” “

*look I know its more complicated than than that, for more HERE

Context is King

“You can’t sedate the things you hate” Somebody told me that when I was a teenager and I duly scrawled on my school bag and have spent the next fifteen years with it rattling around in my brain hole trying to work out what it means. I think it means that you shouldn’t spent too long dwelling on the stuff that annoys you which is a good message and seeing as I had a three stomach ulcers by the time I was twenty, one that I’ve could have learnt a lot sooner.

As such, there are very few band I hate, I suppose the blandness of Keaneplay Patrol stamps my hoof somewhat, Bono is a twat buts its hard to hate a band that produced Achtung Baby an album with the best opening riff I can think of – that muted, distorted guitar scratch laying the base to the build up of pop industiral classic The Fly.*, even Take That, a band my teenage self would have loved to meet in a alley armed with a golf club and a potato peeler have recently been redeemed by being quite nice, if somewhat dim human blokes and releasing some interesting pop music.

No for me to truly hate a band they would have to be not ony musicly offensive, but visually offensive and re-inserted into my conssiuoness enough to be on my hate-rader for a long time. So ladies and gentleniods, I give you N-dubz.

I suppose they first came to my attention when I saw them on the television and I thought ‘what kind of prick would wear a tiny hat? And was instantly reminded of ‘the idiots’ in Nathen Barley that the protagonist rails against. While youth fashion and culture is supposed to be oppositional and confrontational; hoodies are scary because we can’t see faces and a throwback to the word ‘hoodlum’, baggy clothes are easier to hide weapons in and in LA during the nineties were a sign that you had the hand me downs of a much bigger angrier sibling, and not wearing a belt to keep your trousers up is in sympathy with friends who are in prison and not allowed to wear belts. But what is the significance of the tiny hat? I’ll tell you, none, not one, that boy is a bafflingly tiny penis with a baby’s hat balanced on the bellend.

But Dappy has got form, his ‘gangsta’ roots are real, this brave manchild having been arrested for things like, spitting in a girls face, swearing on a plane, threatening to shoot someone with a gun he didn’t have, shooting a girl on the bum bum with a toy gun he did have, and getting caught smoking in the toilets of Alton Towers. I made none of them up. Dappy is the vicious spoiled jealous little prick in the playground not even the bullies wanted to play with.

Of course the incident that really sticks in my mind is the Chris Moyles interview where he copied down the number of a person who called him ‘a little boy in a silly hat’ so he could threaten and abuse her later WHILE BEING THE AMBASSADOR FOR AN ANTIBULLYING CAMPAIGN WHOS FOCUS WAS CYBER-BULLYING.

This is what would happen if you gave a nine year old a 10 grand and three days to make a music video. To be honest I have no idea about much of their music so just googled their name and this is the first that came up. Not much to say about it really, its weird that they keep mentioning ‘Facebook’ sub-Black Eyed Pea’s production and Dappy’s contribution being the stand out weakest.

*Although recently while watching ‘Taken’ a film about a girl who is kidnapped while travelling round Europe, when I found out the character was supposed to be following U2 on tour I did secretly hope they’d cut her fingers off or something.

I’ve been thinking about hope a lot, I think there are two emotional states that music lends itself to as a medium. Hope and Pain, and at the moment, both are pushing my buttons. You know the buttons, the ones at the back marked ‘please don’t fuck with or Danny may start crying on a bus’. Children Of The Revolution is a another song ultimately about hope. The chugging guitar verses pushes along at exactly the rate I imagine the moving track did at the Rover plant half my family worked at before it closed. This was the Seventies, a decade so drab that its teenagers escaped into a musical fantasy called ‘Glam’, when the walls were brown and cream, when the hippies had kids told them they could be anything they wanted and had there hearts broken ten years later when all they wanted was cocaine enemas and Gucci wallet made from real tramps balls. The Seventies where a cheated generation, a group that didn’t get to go to the party but spent all next day hearing stories about how great it was, the grinding chugging guitars are a reflection of this slog through banality, even the string section is muted and churning chopping in at the the end of the verses like the whine of a steel stretching. We’re given hope though, during the chorus Marc Bolan’s voice escapes the dirge and soars briefly. That escape is hope and that brief hope is all any of us need because it’s through music that we escape grey reality and turn into the glitter kids with fairy wings that Marc saw us all to be.

When I hear this song I feel guilty that I sometimes live too much in the chugging grind and not soaring on fairy wings.

context

Last weekend I experimented with running a live running blog from the genre smashing Supersonic festival. It seemed suitable to be trying something as experimental and weird at THE experimental weird music festival. I have always been interested in the notion of writing being a performative act, probably because its one of the few arts where process is so divorced from the product and the consumption is always done so privately, more probably because I’m a massive show-off.

My goal was to fire off the notes by sending emails from my phone, these would be grabbed by a postorous blog, which would then update my twitter stream with a link to my blog post. Essentially I suppose a job which really could have been done by a version of twitter that allowed updates with no character limit.

The notes ranged from one word descriptions “French” to larger paragraphs and stream of nonsense. Basically exactingly the sort of notes I would have written in my standard issue art wanker’s moleskine. I realise that these notes are not really interesting per say, OK in the notebook they have a certain attraction as a glimpse of what actually happens inside my head. I think the context of real time and the poetic nature of unedited ideas made them something more than a couple of good lines and a drunk man trying not to repeat himself.

I’m not finished with the live blogging, mark my words.

What I would have liked to happen is the notes that I send automagically grab a picture of what I’m talking about , paste the text over the top and send to the blog. Now to me a techno idiot this is a perfectly reasonable request. But I’ve realised that for this little trick to happen some major things would have to happen.

1. Photo’s would have to uploaded in real time, now I’m presuming serious photographers don’t do this for several reasons; first, the raw photographs is not a finished product, there is any number of processes and finishes that a good photographer applies to a picture before its done, that’s not even mentioning cropping and discarded the 30 – 40 terrible shots before you get to the perfect one, also the technology for instantly uploading the large files is impractical and expensive. I imagine this will change though, its a rule with technology that the price comes down and the spec goes up, and with the continuing trend for cloud computing, storing your TIFF’s on a little card that slots into your machine will seem antiquated.
2. I don’t know if the technology for sensing on a picture which parts of the photograph is light and dark, negative or positive space is quite there yet. This is not a bad thing though, it allows for the happy accident so necessary for the creative process. The finished file would have to be saved in such a way that all the elements are customisable.
3. Tagging would have to get far better. The thing that has always struck me about tagging is that it seems so haphazard. One letter out and it misses all the others. I’ve never seen it but it has to exist – I would like when you start to write a tag that a box opens with all the other very similar tags come up, maybe location sensitive, maybe with the most popular being bigger? I don’t know. Could a tagbot not read the words in the post and suggest popular tags? I’m fully expecting some of the bigger brained boys to come and tell me off at this point for going off half cocked so don’t be afraid to point stuff in the comments.

Tiny word bombs of colour and noise is that too much to ask?

I did have @docdelete knock some of these together but getting permissions of the various photographs authors has become such a ballache that by the time I do the festival will no longer be relevant. Which is another problem with my little scheme, I honestly couldn’t even guess at the future of intellectual rights and copyright law, but it would be nice if each picture was embedded with a code that directed people to the authors website when clicked, or even just alerted the author to its use.

***

If people want to have a go at figuring out what this could look like here are my notes

Necro Deathmort -

Massive echoy sound, like the vast waiting room to hell.

Maybe a mistake mentioning angels earlier, dirtier than that. Steam powered angels, pressing brain buttons.

High arches and vaulted ceilings in the old theatre, dirgey bass lines but ascending melodys, that is actually lifting spiritually. Engrossing and involving industrial. Dry ice helping atmosphere of desecrated church vibes.

Potent and hopeful, like an angel crying you to orgasm.

Fukpig –

disorganized aggression, sublimely fast.
A driving pattern to the chaos. A boot of hard. Glorious in its driving disorder.
With bands like Fukpig you have to accept that you won’t understand the lyrics. You just know that the screeching is sincere and powerful, a vocalist controlling the stage with screeching and need.
Lead singer lurched himself into the crowd. Mix of crowd, photographers and security 
Bouncy punk bass lines over dark shoutcore.
Lead singer looks like a hobo Rasta Biggles.
Whole band like a more earnest version of Slipknot, like they’re from Birmingham and don’t care if they ever get laid.

Drumcorps -

There’s not many bands that can intimidate using sound check. But the dreadlocked gnome technician produced a set of sounds so relentless and angry. I wanted to move away from the speakers.

Disorientating techno noise, hard enough that It should be weaponised.

Gut Punching insanity from a spindly dread locked yank. On a table.

Trying to express what pain taste like through the ears of a drug fucked fairy.

Vocals as pointless as ear protectors.

Still a live hair metal edge to what is essentially a live gabba industrial sound.

Deep metal riffs after a long sonic into. Punched afterwards with hyper drum techno scream noise.

Fuck everything I just said, the guitar lead in, for this next song show a musical sincerity you wouldn’t have guessed.

The fact its now degenerative into a bass line that is making my balls resonate, but still sound personal, is brilliant..

Pierre Bastion

French.

Delicate clockwork noise dohickies with jazz like sound structure. Big screens with a live feed from his steam-punk wanking machines.
Tiny underwater trumpet, unprobable objects with a dreamlike sound to match.
Big crowd, lots of beards and one girl in front of me even nodding along with the semi structured wonka-esqe tinker noise
Quite charming actually, music as tiny spectacle. Repeated refrain of old toys overlaid with mechanical persuasive elements. Like when in a dream one setting blends into another as the scenery fades, so do the musical elements blend and wind down.

Factory floor

three people took to the stage, two scruffy men and a small lady in fashionably baggy plantation trousers and black bangs.
The music is complex sample drum and synth sounds that build and weave with the raw guitar sounds made by the girl. She uses sticks, samplers and a viola bow to produce these sounds and is more likely to be banging it that strumming. Then the live drums kick in, hard, quick and loud. All of a sudden the hipster uncle that has been make the samples and synths sounds becomes a melody and the driving drums make it techno and hard techno, the sort I sent my twenties sweating to in small clubs.
It’s a hobby of mine to watch drummers expressions while on stage, they’re normally hilarious. From straight aggression to bewildered fear. Factory Floors drummer had a look of pure concentration that looked on his young furry face like a hamster performing heart surgery.

Black Sun Drum Corps

I did wonder if I was going to catch the star of these, luckily they drum paraded around the festival and led us all into the stage where we greeted to a stage of distorted guitars and a circular space cleared in the middle for the drum corps.
a Scottish piper with voodoo face paint pounding heavy metal rhythms. Shouting staccato grunts and orders like he was leading an army of the dead. could turn into a great standard metal sound, if there was less theatre and fewer drummers. Better than that. The drummers arnt miked at all, but the still cutting through the deep bass on stage.

See this for sense this

Whale – Hobo Humping Slobo Babe

If you’ve ever surfed, then you’ve surfed badly, and if you have ever surfed badly you have wiped out, fought to get your head above the water, only to have a wave crash down on your head. Expected, but surprising nonetheless, this song starts like that. Straight out like an overhand left you never saw coming. This is a brilliant move because the singers grotesque parody of sugar innocence is made all the more saccharine when counterpointed by the crunching guitars and drums , although I will admit her voice is a little overproduced. But, frankly, after the stomping shout along chorus you’re are ready to catch your breath and grateful of the rest. One thing I noticed when listening to this back is the bouncy driving bass that captures that moment during the quiet part of these songs where you would prowl around making eye contact and smiling waiting for the next opportunity to slam yourself into that person you’ve just grinned at

Another song from my youth that captures such a small but important piece of my life, but easily couuld have been Firestarter by Prodigy, Insane In The Brain by Cypress Hill or Sugar by System of a Down. Back when dancing was uninhibited and sweaty fun in rooms, where sweat dripped from the walls and everything was sticky from cheap vodka and coke.

My on going saga wrestling with this

Radiohead – Just

Now those that know will have heard me rant a little about Radiohead, this is because they are noodling art school self involved sonic masturbation at its least self aware, and most of there recent output makes Lou Reeds Metal Machine Music seem like fun Europop. I’m not against music being a little challenging, but unlistenable and smug is where I tap out. Its a shame because their first two albums are works of brilliance, no less self involved than the later output but are teenage albums and demands the sincerity of slammed doors, bad haircuts and sulky rebellion. Their interest in musical landscapes and the craft of music as ambient noodlewank is only hinted at in The Bends. Their mastery of the now musical cliché of building up, cutting out the drums, and then kicking in is superbly defined and far above the now recognised masters of the era who used it to define rock music in the 90′s, bands like RATM and Korn.

I heard ‘You Do It To Yourself’ very early as a teenager and the song stuck, whatever happened since then, whatever bit of misfortune or stickiest of sticky situations, I would know that my sense of humour is returning when the song kicks in in my head like a fucking ringtone. Soundtrack of the bad times turning good, and ironically the herald that I’m not taking life too seriously, enjoy it in all its angsty goodness.