Levellers

As opposed to being a tall fat man, as I’m more accustomed to being!  It was great to see Jon Sevink of The Levellers fame performing with Dan Donnelly of, um, Dan Donnelly fame (well worth checking out, an excellent singer-songwriter).  Ferocious Dog were supporting, although they took to the stage last – possibly as a concession to the potential for bad weather – either way, it worked really well and a splendid night was had by all, and everyone got home in one piece despite the worry the wintery weather threatened to pose.

Unusually for me I didn’t dutifully record or snap lots of pics – indeed, only the evidence of attending at all is the photo Chris kindly took for me included above.  However, I have my memories – and they’re awesome!

So back in June I mentioned some obscure song that pops into my head occasionally out of context, and Amanda was kind enough to leave a comment identifying it.  It was part of a small songbook called ‘Piper’s Mountain’ – a Music Workshop for Primary Schools issued by BBC Radio for Schools in 1986.

Thanks to the wonders of Amazon Marketplace I found a copy for the princely sum of £3, and couldn’t resist getting it to jog my memory.  As well as music it contains a comic-strip based story about a trio of adventurers visiting the moutain where the Pied Pier of Hamelin led a bunch of children.  Now there was an odd mixture of royalty and a witch living there – all of whom enjoy youth beyond their years.

The secret to this is their lack of greed and coveting of things.  A couple of the adventurers though attempt to throw a spanner in those particular works – because they have decided to try to sell stuff to them… which is where the Giant Ginormous Cataloge comes into being… which is one of the numerous songs in the book…

… the only other one I remembered was one entitled “You Can’t Have Everything”, a song based on the premise that you couldn’t have everything because you wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it.  I do recall this leading to some quite heated debate on the playground – because if everything automatically included the concept of everywhere as well (which I seem to remember thinking it did), then it was perfectly feasible to have everything, as you would have everywhere in which to keep it!

So, for the sake of posterity, here are the words to the song I remembered at least… I bring you, The Giant Ginormous Catalogue…

The Huge Ginormous Catalogue has everything for your home
From a range of bedroom carpets to a plastic garden gnome
If you want a conversation piece to knock the neighbours dead
How about our grand piano that converts into a bed?

Chorus:
It’s easy as falling off a log
When you order from the Giant Ginormous Catalogue
The order from the Giant, the Huge Ginormous Giant,
You order from the Giant, Ginormous Catalogue. Hi!

The Huge Ginormous Catalogue has everything for your pet
You can get a special discount if you order through your vet
We’ve got paddling pools for polar bears and tea for chimpanzees
And we do a special circus kit for pet performing fleas

Chorus

The Huge Ginormous Catalogue has everything made for sport
We will even paint the markings on your garden tennis court
And if coming last on sports day is the most you’ve ever done
We do silver-plated trophies to pretend that you have won!

Chorus

The Huge Ginormous Catalogue has everything for your life
Simply call up our computer for a husband or a wife
We could sell you Tower Bridge, ‘cos we’ve got everything in store
We’ll make any crazy promise just to keep you buying more!

Chorus

So there you have it.  For those of you of a certain disposition the sheet music can be provided!!  Now I just need to track down the random thing we did about a music competition along a similar lines and my underwhelming rediscovery of what passed as musical teachings at Primary School will be nearing completion.. all together everyone.. “The Black-bird sings… A tune-ful song.. with turns and trills so fine..”

In other news I took delivery of a DVD and CD recording of the Levellers performing on their Levelling the Land tour back in March, which has my name printed in it.  I’m quite happy about this and am in the midst of ripping it to pop on the iPad!

Aside from the Levellers of course, each of whom are great levellers – but I digress before I started.  The song that opens with the lyrics in the title is about heroin addiction, but can speak ‘the c word’ I’ve written about before.  This time it’s struck a little closer to home, indeed, it did some time ago – my Grandad now finds himself on a hospice ward in Nottingham’s City Hospital with probably less than a week left to live.

I’ve been to see him a few times – principally just to give comfort by my presence rather than being any practical help, as well as a bit of moral support to my Dad who’s been performing heroics in both visiting and practical duties.  It was difficult to listen to Grandad fretting about – of course – Granny and her wellbeing, but also the worries and niggles of every day life that, even now, he is only just managing to let go of and let us take away from him.

Seeing a man who hasn’t always been easy to get along with, but has always been there, stripped of his dignity and self-sufficiency is really rather tough – despite the fantastic care he receives from the wonderful staff at the hospital.  But you know, you can kind of accept it as what life throws at us, and at the end of the day you just kinda have to deal with – as Shakespeare would have it – the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I thought that at least until today when I visited along with my Granny.  My Granny suffers with a case of dementia which means her short term memory is not great.  This means that my parents and aunty get the heartbreaking scenario where Granny discovers Grandad is terminally ill, again, like some sort of sick version of Groundhog day.  Fate is a cruel mistress indeed.

All being well his suffering won’t be for much longer, then we face the prospect of at which point – if ever – Granny will be able to commit his passing to her permanent memory.  Ouch.  What a sad way for three score plus years of marriage to be drawing to an end.  I always relish getting involved with my work’s events to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support regardless, but this year’s events it will be with a bit more gusto.

In cheerier news my replacement phone got sent out today.  God that sounds shallow.

The Levellers - in Glasgow the night before we were to see them..

It’s no secret on these pages about my mild obsession with all things Levellers – and they didn’t disappoint last night to pick me up after another serving of turd courtesy of Forest.

I hotfooted it straight from the City Ground to meet the rest of our group going to the gig, and we headed straight to the early-opening Rock City.  Spotted Jen, Amanda and Brian at the front of the queue, as ever!

Also saw the perpetually dishevelled Mr Chadwick ambling up the other side of Talbot Street, I imagine having had a few cheeky pints down at Langtry’s.

First up though were The Wonderstuff, a band I was dimly aware of ‘in the day’, and have been listening to more recently – wondering why I didn’t know more about them.  At least, two of the original band were there – but they were great fun.  Miles certainly seemed to be genuinely enjoying his time on the stage and this was infectious into a greater degree of crowd participation than you’d usually get for a support act.

I watched the support from a cunningly secure eyrie on the balcony which provided a cracking view of the stage, but was a bit distant.  The big plus side for The Levellers in this gig – the 20th anniversary of Levelling the Land – was that they were playing it in order, so I knew which songs were coming up.  After a montage of political imagery the boys took the stage, and I’d found myself a suitable spot in the mosh pit as they broke straight into One Way.

The thing that struck me, around three people from the front in the middle of the stage, was the volume of people around me singing along with every song.  This is an album that, twenty years on, still speaks to people with the ferocity it did back in the day – indeed, the crowd singing competed with the PA which I’ve never experienced before.  It’s quite moving really.  Impressive too that people were finding the air to belt out singing whilst leaping around and the usual pushing and shoving!

As the half-way point of the album was reached a selection of B-sides featured whilst the virtual LP or tape was being turned over.  I was starting to tire from my proximity to the stage, but really wanted to be up close for Sell Out so toughed it out to do just that – it was a worthy endeavour, it’s probably one of my favourite songs on the album.  It’s followed by probably the first song of theirs that ever really ‘hit’ me back in the day.

Another Man’s Cause is a timeless anthem and sadly seemingly always relevant – it’s also a quieter song.  My timing was pretty good in making a tactical withdrawal to the balcony from this point, because I wanted to hear the band rather than the fan singing at this point.  It worked really well – I’m getting a bit too old to last a whole Levs gig in the mosh pit!  Being right at the front is okay, but 3-5 people back is hard work!

Eventually Beanfield ends the album proper – there was time for a few extra tracks like Cholera Well and Beautiful Day before oddly we were outta there by 10pm, a bizarrely early finish.  Having had a fair bit to drink throughout the day though, I was ready to head home rather than stay out.  I think I made the right call – including the chicken tikka kebab from Victoria Kebab on the way to the taxi.

I’ve been spectacularly lax on updating this site really.  Life’s kinda ticking along which doesn’t inspire updates – I suppose it should do still, but I’m lazy too.

However, excitement is mounting for me as The Levellers come to Nottingham on 12th March as part of their 20th anniversary tour for Levelling the Land.  To say I’m unfeasibly excited by this prospect is a massive understatement.  Of course, in football too Forest remain in the mix for promotion but have faltered of late in their form – hopefully they can get back to winning ways tomorrow when Hull come to town.

Other excitement for a gadget-nut like me is that we’ve bought some new home entertainment things – after our last ‘proper’ telly blew up (probably because one of the winged menaces landed a direct hit down the back of the air vents) we’ve made do with a smaller cheap one – which has done admirably.  We are finally joining the proper HD revolution though.

We are planning on wall-mounting the new telly in a recess in the chimney breast – this will prevent our feathered friends from sitting on top of it you see.  Over-engineering, perhaps – but it will look pretty too.  To go with the telly we have an alarming array of wires and peripherals to plug into it, as well as a splendid hand-made unit to house them.  That arrived today.

Unfortunately the builder who is going to do the difficult bit for us is tied up for three weeks so we’re going to have it set up on the new piece of furniture in the interim, which is pretty exciting in itself.  We’ll be a three-console household which feels rather decadent, particularly since I’m not a particularly hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination – but well, meh.. the PS3 is also an excellent blu-ray player and media streaming device which was the main reason.

Finally a blast from the past caught up with me – Audiogalaxy was my favourite p2p downloading means in the early noughties.  I used to install the satellite application on my work PC which had uber-fast internet connectivity and then remotely send whatever music occurred to me whenever to it, then brought them home on zip disks (remember them?!) to add to my library.

After it was closed down – understandably given the questionable legality of the operation – it was a real bind.  Well, it’s back – albeit in a very different, but still bloody useful, guise.  You see, you can install their ‘helper’ programme on your computer housing your music collection – and then access that collection wherever you are with an internet collection or, for iPhone users at least, on your phone.

Nice features like integration with Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook are good bonuses, and I’m hoping that in the future they might enhance the social media aspect of the project by enabling you to listen to your friends’ music collections etc – really cool, I like it a lot.  It means I can refine the music I carry around with me on my iPhone now and free up space for, well, other stuff (as yet to be determined).

Good to have you back, Audiogalaxy!  Rapidly approaching is my birthday and then a week-and-a-bit break in Dorset which I’m looking forward to, could use some down-time!

After a mini-splurge of blog posts (by my standards) I’d half forgotten about it again. Oops. I can remember when I used to be able to write something every day (on a dim, distant and long forgotten website, thankfully – I doubt it was very interesting!), but perhaps have swung a little too far the other way.

There’s been a few reasonably eventful things occuring that are worthy of mention – hot off the press was that some bastard saw fit to take a screwdriver to my car lock and half-inch my stereo.  Very saddening, not worth an insurance claim really, and made a real mess of the cabling I’d carefully arranged to get everything working just how I wanted.  Not much more to say on that, it dismays me that people will so readily show no regard for other peoples’ things.

Sounds quite materialistic when you put it like that, but still.  Given the relative rarity of my car I suppose the lack of massive damage to any difficult to source parts are a positive factor in this – had they elected to smash a window or do more serious damage to the door panels it would’ve been a real ballache.  As it is, my car does lock – but has a gouge signposting how to make that not the case, and a gaping hole where the stereo was that hasn’t been adequately compensated for by playing music through my phone speakers in the slightest!

Still, the bodywork repairs will need to take priority I suppose – but I feel very unmotivated to deal with it at the moment.

On the plus side, next week I’m taking part in a charity football match between the BBC and Boots to raise cash for Children in Need.  I say taking part, I actually put the team together for the Boots side.  Due to the general awesomeness of my colleagues and their eagerness to participate we may have a few too many players – but it should be a chuckle.  It kicks off at 7:45 at Carlton Town FC on Tuesday 16th November if you fancy a giggle.

Further happier news is that The Levellers are touring in March and I managed to coerce a few people to come with me to the gig at Rock City in Nottingham.  In addition to that I bought a ticket to their current tour for next week, I’m heading to that on my own (although I know at least a couple of people who will be there!) so that’s something positive to be looking forward to next week.  This current tour marks the 20th anniversary of their debut album A Weapon Called the Word.

In March they are touring the 20th anniversary of Levelling the Land – probably their best-known album and is a big chunk of the body of their work that made me have such an enduring love affair with their music.  So all in all, it’s been a Levellers-tastic kinda time of it what with the recent trip to see Mark Chadwick without the rest of the boys too – although that, the previous Levs gig and the next Levs gig I go to will have all been solo efforts – so I’ll be glad to have some company in March!

The other big waste-of-time-and-cash in my life aside from my car is of course Forest, and whilst they’ve not had a blistering start to the season we’re not far off the par we set for ourselves last year – but off the field nonsense between board and manager is a heady brew to make my fellow fans often act like idiots.  As a natural conflict avoider I find that incredibly offputting so I’ve found myself heading to less away games this season so far – and home games (despite on the whole decent results) have become more of a chore.

Underpinning and over-arching all these unexciting trivialites is of course the fact it’s Movember, so I’m in the midst of growing a magnificent moustache, for which you could sponsor me if you wanted to.  Currently I have an accompanying goatee arrangement, although I might shrink that down over the rest of the month until I’m left with just a ‘tache.  An influx of sponsorship would certainly help that along.  Amusingly, and to link a couple of threads of this post together, I’ve joined the Levellers ‘group’ on the Movember website so any sponsorship I accrue will also go towards their group total.

I could have probably written all of that by saying “Shit happens, but life goes on.”  (in fact, I might make that the title!).  Ooh, oh yes, on friday morning I get to go to police HQ and see them get all CSI on my car which will be amusing – whilst I don’t hold out much hope of them catching the perpetrators it’s a good thing that they’re at least showing some desire to.  In the meantime I’ll keep an eye on eBay for the things that went missing…

Justin Bieber: Irritating pop-goblin rendered lovely by technology...

I hadn’t heard of who Justin Bieber was until some Twitbook type campaign tried to get him to play some gig somewhere or other.

Even when I found out his identity I wasn’t in a rush to hear one of his songs particularly, so filed him in the back of my mind in the place where other such nonentities are placed to be ignored when they may encroach upon my daily doings.

Until today.

Thanks to my friend Alex’s awesome discovery, there appears to be a way to render this flaccid excuse for music into something beautiful.  By stretching out the song ‘U Smile’ by 800%, suddenly the squeaking histrionics is transformed into a beautiful ambient soundscape lasting over 35 minutes.

If you like a bit of ambient music I think you’ll really enjoy it.  I’ve just downloaded it in mp3 form, I reckon it could make awesome ‘go to sleep’ music – and you can check it out by utilising the handy music player widget thing just below this paragraph.

Tantalisingly on the artists’ SoundCloud page are instructions on how the slowed-down version of the Bieber song was achieved.  Instructions that I have followed, and am eager to share.  Whilst I’m pleased to have heard Justin Bieber 800% more slow than his producers intended, I still have no desire to listen to him at full speed.

So what if I were to slow down a song I actually knew really well and liked?

Well that’s precisely what I’ve done – rather than go for squeaky safe pop music (which admittedly not many examples of which fall into the two above categories!), I decided to go for something that you would never ever consider as anything approximating ambient.

Ladies and gentleman, I invite you to take an ambient journey into the world of Motorhead, and their seminal hit ‘Ace of Spades‘ slowed down by the same 800% as the Bieber experiment linked above*.  I think I’d go as far as to say it’s been an interesting experiment!

But d’you know what’s depressing, and I never thought I’d say this, I think I prefer Justin Bieber to Motorhead!  It was also quite impressive that Cat identified the artist upon first listen despite not knowing what I was up to… definitely more foreboding and malignant sounding that lil’ Justin though.

Having gotten over the technical wibblery (ie. me being a bit of a fucktard) I continued the theme, and this result I’m really pleased with – so below is the Levellers (a fairly obscure album track) ‘Maid of the River’ – one of my favourite ever songs, rendered much slower, and it’s nearly as beautiful as the original, and pisses on Bieber.  Oh yes.  Fuck you, Justin!

Have a listen to the following wonderful epic, and then go and get yourself some Levellers albums, because they’re awesome at full speed too!

*Footnote – it would have taken considerably less time if I’d paid attention to the instructions rather than leap in and create a 36 hour rendering of Ace of Spades by using the wrong ratio measure, the file clocking in at over 1GB!

There’s only a couple of bands I generally buy all the output of without question, one is – perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me – the Levellers, and the other is the Prodigy.  As such I opted to take the unusual step of plugging their very-soon-to-be-released album as upon first few listens, it’s a dramatic return to form.

The Prodigy perhaps don’t really deserve such loyalty for recent output.  I grew up very much with Jilted as a soundtrack, and despite latterly finding it the beginning of a decline – The Fat of the Land provided a soundtrack and seminal genre-defining tracks (Firestarter, Breathe) to a fairly significant period in my life, so I have retained a lot of fondness for it, although a glance at my iPhone tells the story – I’ve chopped out the chaff and retained the eight tracks I like.  Jilted I’ve dropped only the incongruous ‘One Love’.

Of course, it all started with the release of Experience – but that’s an album I picked up on latterly having been seduced by Jilted.  However, it does include such gems as Charly and Out of Space so it can’t be ignored completely – nonetheless I digress completely, we’d got as far as The Fat of the Land.

After this there was the interlude release of Liam Howlett’s ‘Dirtchamber sessions’ which had a Prodigy logo on it – I’ll be honest, I bloody love this, it’s basically Liam mashing up tracks before mashing up really was part of the general consciousness.  They then released the rather lazy and ill-fated ‘Baby’s got a temper‘ single – a time when I wondered whether they’d produce any decent output again (although it featured an interesting video).

Another gap, where presumably some more snowboarding took place, and ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ arrived.  I like this album, but it’s a Liam Howlett project really – it has some cracking tracks on it, and some fillers – it doesn’t feature Keith or Maxim.  One of the tracks also featured on a BMW advert I think!  It’s good, and it has unmistakable Prodigy-like elements, but it wasn’t great – things were declining.

Yesterday I listened to their latest album, due for release next week, and was pretty much blown away.  It starts with some proper head-juddering tracks that frankly have to be listened to loudly.  I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that this is perhaps the album that The Fat of the Land could have been.  Whilst it doesn’t (and what could?) eclipse Jilted, it competes and is a great natural progression.  A build upon that style with a few flashbacks to the more overtly dance roots from which they came from.

I love it.  I most definitely recommend availing yourself of it when it is available – whilst clearly I already have the means to listen to it I shall be purchasing too next week.

I just scrape in to the realms of being semi-literate, crossing off 13% of this list of books, most of which look terribly boring, and a number of which I read as a child or was enforced to through study (although some of which, I’m looking at you, Thomas Hardy!) I never finished despite completing exams about them!

The key is thus:

Bold means I’ve read them
Underlined means I might intend to read them (or it, in my case!)
Italic means I love them (I bolded them too, since presumably to love a book one must have read it?)

You might want to join in too via the means of copying and pasting.  Or you may not!   

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – I liked bits of Revelations.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – does listening to the Kate Bush song count?
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger – came highly rated, it was bobbins.  American bobbins at that.
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres 
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – it’s a great Levellers song, though!
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – I was meant to for English Lit, but it was dull.
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel – I was disappointed this wasn’t about the number.
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding 
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – Is that where the Clash song comes from?
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo