BNP beat Lib Dems in GLA elections in City & East…9.62% to 7.33%…what the fuck is going on.
And Boris Johnson is the mayor.
edit: and how the HELL did 4,754 people vote for the National Front in the South West constituency? that’s…quite a lot of people. And actually, in City & East, 18000 people voted for the BNP. Over half of the people who voted for the Conservatives.
I am getting ready for the blacks and the gays to be deported.
I like riding my bike. My bike doesn’t particularly like me – it only has two gears that work, and I got a flat tyre on my way to the supermarket yesterday – but hey, it’s got to live with me. Living in Muswell Hill, however, proves rather problematic for our relationship – if I want to go anywhere further than either a) East Finchley station or b) my friend Lottie’s house, then there are some quite serious hills to contend with.
Yesterday I thought to myself, I’ll cycle over to Hampstead. Three-quarters of the way up Bishops Avenue on my way to Hampstead, I got off my bike and walked to the Spaniards.
It’s a basic problem of too many hills. If I wanted to cycle to Camden – approximately 5 miles – I would go down three hills (including one rather long and steep one, from Highgate down to Archway) and up one, as well. Hampstead, too, involves two hills, despite being roughly the same height as Muswell Hill. North London is very, very hilly.
Avoiding the notion that perhaps I just need to suck it up and keep doing it until my legs are strong enough, what about CYCLING BYPASSES? You know – “devices which allow some people to drive from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast”. That’d get more people on their bikes, just two lanes going there and back, with exits at various intervals. Perhaps Muswell Hill to Swiss Cottage, with an exit at Hampstead. Certainly Muswell Hill to Highgate. All these places which are vaguely the same height but are hindered by the down-a-hill-up-a-hill problem when working one’s way between the two, and aren’t serviced by the Parkland Walk (see: Highgate-Crouch End-Finsbury Park).
All other route suggestions welcome. I am sure that with this plan I have finally hit the intellectual target often known in life as “genius”, and if all of the pro-cycling mayoral election candidates adopted it as a last minute policy…well, I would expect a very large sum. That’s all I’m saying.
Goes the opening line of ‘Young Lust’ by Sportsday Megaphone, one of my artists. It’s the b-side to his new single ‘LA’, but I think it’s just as good – in a bit of a different way. Hugh Sportsday has just put it up on his myspace, so it’s one to go listen to now.
The backing vocals are done by Hugh’s girlfriend George, which I think is rather a nice touch.
Sportsday will be touring in May with Envelopes and also appearing at The Great Escape. LA is out on 16 June with the album ‘So Many Colours/So Little Time’ following later in the summer. And more dates to be announced very soon.
What happened to the chocolate vending machines you used to get on platforms? Did they ban them at the same time as they banned them in schools? When did they go? How did I not notice? Other than the fact that I never used them…
I love this song. It’s just the right prescription of twee, American indie, melodic and cheery but a bit bleak lyrically, and just bloody brilliant.
Thinking about the Dum Dums just then started me on their second album demos. There’s 18 tracks all in – if they’d just picked twelve, it would’ve been a great record. The song that grabbed me when I first heard any of them was Closer To You (mp3). I wasn’t allowed to keep the CD of demos my friend Kelly played me the first time – so I wrote out the lyrics in an attempt to remember the song. That bit of paper is still on my wall today – note to self, must redecorate!
Funnily enough though, the video for Closer To You reminds me rather a lot of a video made by another band I happen to be rather close with. Have a look…
Closer To You – Dum Dums
Turn It Back – GoodBooks
I am 12 years old and I am in the school canteen. A girl in year 9 – year 9! They’re so cool! – has just sung a song to her friend which I’ve heard before on the radio, and I decide to go and buy it this weekend because I really like it. It’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Thoughts” by the Dum Dums, and it’s the beginning of an obsession.
I am 20 years old and I am in the office of Wichita Recordings. I’m not here very often – getting up and on the tube often seems too much – and too expensive – when I can just work from home – but they’re kind enough to give me a desk all the same. I need a tour manager for a few weeks hence. I ring Steve Clarke, ex Dum Dums bassist and now tour manager. The years in between then and now have been a gradual swap from fan to friend, and so it doesn’t seem like a ridiculous leap to have hired Steve now. We get along well, and it’s not weird at all – it feels more like we have an odd shared history. But if you’d told me that eight years ago, I never would’ve believed you.
Two years on from the Dum Dums and it’s not that they’ve lost my heart, far from it. When I think back to the days (/months/years) after them splitting up, I almost think it was the biggest heartbreak of my life to date. It took me years to get over them. But the Pixies got me – hearing Doolittle for the first time was a revelation. They became my new obsession and I loved every little bit of them, every BBC session, every cover, every Spanish word I didn’t understand. When they reformed for some shows, my mum let me skip school the morning the tickets went on sale so I could get hold of some. My mum is awesome, but she does not condone playing hooky – I like to think her letting me off was her way of saying she understood.
So then this evening I went to see The Breeders, Kim Deal (of Pixies fame)’s band with her sister Kelley. My friend Ben came with me; we met four years ago through the Pixies, so it seems fairly natural. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been properly fan-ish at a gig – turning up over an hour before stage time (normally I’m at least five minutes late), going to the front (normally, even seeing a bit of someone’s head is the standard), jumping up and down during songs (‘Cannonball‘ particularly – everyone was). So it feels strange afterwards to bump into some friends of mine – Ben and Janine from Wichita, Bart from Domino, and Paul from Truck – and be given aftershow passes. An aftershow pass? For the Breeders? What the FUCK. If you’d told me that five years ago, I never would’ve believed you. The band weren’t there…but that’s not the point.
It’s a funny old thing. My life is far from ideal, far from enjoyable half the time – though I’m fairly sure that’s more my head making trouble for myself than any external factors – but there are always small victories. Never would I previously have thought I’d get an aftershow pass for the Breeders, and with the band present at their own aftershow or not, it feels a bit like a quick pat on the head for my younger self. “Look at then, and look at you now!”.
I discovered this evening that a girl I vaguely know now does regional press for Beggars, including the Breeders. She’s been round the country with them on their UK dates these past couple of weeks. Tonight she told me that at one point Kim bought her some Tampax, and she thinks it might be a highlight of her life. Sad as it sounds, if it was me it would be mine too – those tiny moments with the bands you adore that make it seem like your life isn’t wasted, everything isn’t futile, we’re not all going to die in a global warming credit crunching disaster. If getting an aftershow pass for the Breeders is one of those, then I’m happy for this evening.
I love this band. They make me want to run around in circles very very fast before collapsing on a small patch of grass
My ex girlfriend keeps on writing about the new Elbow album, saying that the first track, Starlings, is the closest thing she’s ever heard that sounds like the musical representation of falling in love. I’m biased in listening to it because I know it’s me she’s thinking of when she says that, but I think she’s probably right.
I have always liked Elbow a lot, though I’ve never quite been sure if I get them. There’s always been something I’ve not been able to grab onto. Listening to them now – and going back to their third album, Leaders of the Free World – I think I am just about getting them. And getting what I never got, which is that they’re pretty beautiful, really, and not very self indulgent. I briefly wondered if it’s that I am not very good at listening to sad music, before remembering that Grace by Jeff Buckley is one of my favourite albums ever, and I’ve listened to it over and over and over again in the past seven years. But Buckley is self indulgent, both vocally and instrumentally, both for him playing and for the listener. Elbow are far more…self contained. Straight forward. There’s no thrashing about, or moments of complete total extreme vulnerability that suddenly hit you. It’s just all really really really good wonderful songs that break your heart a little bit to listen, because they’re pretty vulnerable the whole way through. I think that was hard for me to grab onto when I was a teenager; I just didn’t know what to do with it. As if it all had to go somewhere, or identify with something, or soundtrack something and be awfully poignant. And now I feel like I can appreciate it and love it even if there is none of that aural urgency and excitement that I love so much about a lot of other pieces of sad music. Maybe that’s my ears growing up a little bit.
And if Starlings on The Seldom Seen Kid is the sound of falling in love – I can’t find it online, and I don’t want to be the one to leak it, so no links there – then I think, probably, My Very Best is the sound of falling out of it. At least this time round.
Keep your sympathy, don’t need the healing to start. You’ve gone, gone and made a beautiful hole in my heart.
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