Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Having been unable to achieve a great deal yesterday on account of the strange power situation that left us with everything working except the computers (at least until the circuits blew a second time), any attempts to get back on track today have been stymied by a pointless Directorate meeting that ate most of the morning and another, equally pointless Divisional meeting later this afternoon. I mean, come on guys. Anyone who complains about missed deadlines this week will get the full power of the stare.

Still, this evening I am leaving early. We – Furtle and Yours Truly – are off to Wembley Arena to see Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard, supported by Steel Panther. I understand this latter mob to be heavily influences by Spinal Tap. I am unsure what to expect.

The gig starts bizarrely early at 6.30pm. I imagine that it will finish equally early so the aging rockers can be tucked up in their hotel beds with a mug of Ovaltyne by 23.00.

Rock’n’roll ain’t what it once was.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to it; I’ve never seen any of the three bands live or indeed half dead, so it will be interesting. And it looks as though, Jubilee Line permitting, we will be able to get back to the Gin Palace at a reasonable hour (by which I mean midnight) for a school night.

The question of the day for me is, “Has Paul McCartney finally gone off his rocker?” What with Ringo (Peace and Love, Peace and Love) deciding not to sign any more autographs and being particularly odd in his method of communicating this, it seems that age is beginning to tale its toll of the surviving members of the Fab Four.

It seems that a track they laid down in 1967 for an electronic music festival and which had been thought to be mythical, really does exist. Macca wanted to put it on one of the Beatles’ anthology series, but the others vetoed him.

The track is apparently called Carnival of Light and never released because the other Beatles thought it too adventurous. This description of the recording method suggests they were right:

Sir Paul explained: "I said all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn't need to make any sense. Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around.
"So that's what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It's very free."
The track was played just once, at the festival, and is said to include distorted guitar, organ sounds, gargling and band members shouting phrases such as "Barcelona!" and "Are you all right?"

Bearing in mind that the Beatles issued Lennon’s Revolution 9, one of the biggest pieces of bollocks ever committed to tape on the White Album, and that Lennon went on to even stranger stuff with Yoko, which is considered bizarre even today, 40 years on, it suggests that Carnival of Light should stay in Macca’s personal collection only.

“Too adventurous” in context sounds rather like Sir Humphrey suggesting to Jim Hacker that it is a “brave decision” ie probably best not done.

Still, what do I know?

Coming soon to the Caddyman collection of listening pleasure, two little CDs that I've had on my Amazon wish list for a while and which have recently dropped in price to a level I think almost demands their purchase.

I have noticed recently that record companies have woken up to the potential of their more obscure back catalogues and that some interesting and rarely heard stuff is beginning to see the light of day for the first time in four decades.



Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls 1965-68 and Tell Him: The Decca Years by Billie Davis, a singer whose accident proneness ensured she never reached the hights of fame enjoyed by Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw or Dusty Springfield

Daily Telegraph, April 28, 2007

Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls 1965-68

This Collection of 40-year-old Gallic pop is distinguished by its delicious melody and sophistication, but also clinging to it is an unmistakable whiff of cabaret kitsch. Beautifully orchestrated and featuring names such as Les Roche Martin, Christie Laume, Ria Bartok and, less obscurely, Sandie Shaw, it's a sliver of semi-forgotten musical history pitched midway between show tunes and cheeky Parisian strip-parlour sass. Naturally Serge Gainsbourg puts in an appearance, crooning on Michele Arnaud's Les Papillons Noirs, which he also wrote.

One last time:



The BBC report that Isaac Hayes died Sunday 10 August at home in Memphis, Tennessee aged 65. The cause of death is not yet known.

The obituary is here.

Shame he was a scientologist.

There’s an article in today’s Times - more precisely in the Times 2 section of the paper that one or two of my friends may find interesting. I am thinking particularly of (in no particular order) telemeister, fractalgeek, rumfuddle, jimfer and possibly keresaspa. I have rooted around on the Times Online website and can’t find the article there to link to, so I am typing a précis of it here. If you disagree with the text, remember that I am only reproducing the salient parts of the article; they’re not my words, but this sounds very interesting to me.

A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before John Clarke

Robert Johnson is widely considered the greatest of all the prewar blues singers. Before he died at the age of 27 in 1938 … he had cut tracks such as Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Ramblin’ on my Mind, Love in Vain and Hellbound on my Trail, which, through countless reissues, have gone on to influence a whiole generation of rock stars including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards…

Yet now it appears that none of us is hearing Johnson the way he actually sounded. Blues fans in Japan apparently think Johnson’s recordings are playing too fast. Slow down the recordings by 20% and … you hear the music transformed, “a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with a sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him”.

If we are to accept this claim, then every one of Johnson’s 12 78rpm records and all of the reissues since have been giving us a distorted view of the man Clapton claims was the world’s greatest blues singer.

…several other 78s recorded in the 1930s have been slowed down … to obtain the correct pitch at which they were cut.

But for blues fans brought up with the Johnson records, this is almost heresy. Why didn’t any of the musicians who knew Johnson … ever mention it, and why should every one of (his) records … have been speeded up?

Samples of the music slowed down can be found here: www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html and you can buy a CD of 24 reduced-speed Johnson tracks.

There is an article in today’s Times about the importance of the guitar riff in rock music. They call it the cornerstone of rock. For those as is interested, the article can be found online here.

The online version of the article does not include the top ten riffs of all time as decided by, er… probably the Times. There is a link you can follow to listen and vote for your favourite, but I don’t think there’s a list as such. Here I have included the top ten list as it appears in the printed version (without the commentary), starting with number one and working down to ten:

1 Smoke on the Water: Deep Purple
2 Whole Lotta Love: Led Zeppelin
3 Satisfaction: Rolling Stones
4 There She Goes: The La’s
5 Come On Everybody: Eddie Cochran
6 Smells Like Teen Spirit: Nirvana
7 Seven Nation Army: White Stripes
8 I Love Rock’n’Roll: Joan Jett
9 Sweet Child O’Mine: Guns N’ Roses
10 I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor: Arctic Monkeys

So the question is, what’s on that list that shouldn’t be, and what’s missing that should?

Interrupted sleep last night on account, I think, of two things.

Firstly I expended a great deal of nervous energy during the day. I’m not usually like that at interviews, but yesterday I was. I was wound up like a clock spring and found it hard to relax at any point. I’m not sure how I managed to work myself into that state: I am usually quite placid and let things wash over me.

Secondly, being games night, we ordered in a takeaway and last night it was pizza. As I’ve observed before, I love pizza, but the feeling is not reciprocated. I thought I’d got away with it, but no – at 5.30 this morning I awoke with indigestion – not as bad as on other occasions, but enough to wake me up. I had woken up briefly before then, but without the acid, which is why I thought that I’d dodged the bullet. Sadly it seems that the bullet was travelling a little slower than usual.

Anyway, the upshot is that I am a little tired this morning, though the coffee will kick in shortly I have no doubt.

On the way home last night I picked up Goldfrapp’s new album, Seventh Tree. I have only managed to have a cursory listen to the first few tracks, but it sounds promising. A more in depth listen tonight, with luck. I also picked up Katie Melua’s latest album, though I haven’t listened to it yet. Such is the quality of her voice, that I can even forgive the awful words of the first single from the album, Mary Pickford. Actually, that’s a lie: the words are really awful and I have to consciously ignore them to listen to Katie’s singing voice. I expect that song was written by Mike Batt:

( Lyric hidden to preserve readers’ sanity )

I mean really, there should be laws against this. The interweb confirms that this was perpetrated by Mike Batt. Kudos to the man for discovering her, but minus several million points for “guiding” her into recording songs like this and minus several million more for writing them in the first place. He’ll have her recording a new arrangement of The Wombles next.

I read somewhere that their contract runs out with this album, so maybe she can ditch his Svengali-like presence and get herself a music arranger who can come up with better words.

Luckily the rest of the album is rather better, but I suspect that I shall be starting each listen from track two.

I see that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has died aged about 91.

The most flamboyant of the self-styled Indian gurus to emerge from the Woodstock era, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a man of charisma, energy and untold riches, credited with setting the Beatles and other stars on the path to spiritual enlightenment.

Sexy Sadie
Sexy Sadie what have you done.
You made a fool of everyone.
You made a fool of everyone.
Sexy Sadie ooh what have you done.
Sexy Sadie you broke the rules.
You layed it down for all to see.
You layed it down for all to see.
Sexy Sadie oooh you broke the rules.
One sunny day the world was waiting for a lover.
She came along to turn on everyone.
Sexy Sadie is the greatest of them all.
Sexy Sadie how did you know.
The world was waiting just for you.
The world was waiting just for you.
Sexy Sadie oooh how did you know.
Sexy Sadie you'll get yours yet.
However big you think you are.
However big you think you are.
Sexy Sadie oooh you'll get yours yet.
We gave her everything we owned just to sit at her table
Just a smile would lighten everything
Sexy Sadie she's the latest and the greatest of them all.
She made a fool of everyone
Sexy Sadie
However big you think you are
Sexy Sadie.

There seems to be something wrong with our email this morning, which is good. I don’t like having a gazillion emails to sift through, worry about, ignore or discard before I have properly woken up. I think it is creaking back into life, but each individual email is being patted down, having its visa checked and questioned by the server before it is let through. This takes time.

I tried out the new exercise bike last night; I got a little hot before I did the 15 minutes I had promised myself, but I did a little over 10 minutes, covered a virtual 5.05 km (I must work out how to set it to virtual miles), burnt off around 110 calories (it’s very unfair how hard it is to burn off calories, when it’s so damned easy to put them back) and managed to get a reasonable heart rate measurement that showed I was working but not killing myself. I expect that the fact I only did a little over 10 minutes and that on setting number 2 might raise the eyebrow of derision in some quarters, but in my defence, other than walking, it is the first significant exercise I have taken in 20 years (I played a game of football in the park about 25 years ago, and I once ran after someone who had dropped a necklace).

I like to think of it as a start.

I shall have to sit down and read the manual so that I can learn to program the bike to vary the resistance as if I were actually travelling somewhere, a few hard bits for uphill and a few easy bits for down. The theory is that if, in conjunction with my altered food consumption (it is NOT a diet), about 15 minutes a day on the bike (working up to 20 or 25 in due course) will mean that my slow spiralling descent towards ill health and a daily hatful of medication will be halted and reversed before I actually need them. Maybe in due course I shall be able to come off the blood pressure meds, too. Who knows? The world is my lobster.

I think tonight I shall use my MP3 player to while away the time as I pedal. Five or six songs should do it nicely, although I could kill myself if a couple of my favourite progressive bands kick up. Maybe I should take it off shuffle and pick an album with tunes about three to four minutes duration. As much as I like them, I don't want a Bill Bruford drum solo to be the last thing I hear on this earth.

Not for another forty or more years, anyway.

I have recorded and transferred a fair amount of music over the past day or so and thought that I'd treat myself to a download of Mark Ronson's version of Valerie since I'd been nattering about it. Anyway, the bit that involved me parting with cash worked perfectly. The bit that involved me getting the track less so.

To begin with, the application suggested that I could pick it up the next time I logged in, except that after three attempts this was clearly not going to work. A bit of routing around showed that the software I was using was version 2.3 and there was a version 4.01 available. Thinking an upgrade would help, I downloaded and installed it. Right. The download I'd paid for disappeared entirely.

I am now waiting and hoping that a friendly email enquiry will work. I don't know why it's suddenly got so difficult to buy music online. I never used to have this trouble.