Prattle

PhotologComments Off
m posted in General moans on February 25th, 2007

I’m dipping my toe in the local property market again, so I’ve started noticing For Sale signs. And once I’ve noticed the sign, I look at the house/flat it’s advertising, and consider whether or not it would be somewhere I should consider buying. It can be quite a few minutes or hours before I move on to considering whether I can afford to buy it. This new interest in signage has made me look at houses that I’ve walked/driven past for years without really noticing anything about them.

Anyway, I was walking back from the pub on Friday night, and noticed the 2nd or 3rd For Sale sign along a local street. I’d noticed the others, but not interrupted my stride as I mentally banked them for later consideration. But this one made me instantly stop walking and let out an involuntary noise from my mouth. Look;

It’s half a house. Someone knocked down a gate and replaced it with a scale model of a house. I know the photo was taken in the daytime, but this is because I felt the need to verify my memory the next morning. Obviously, despite its handy proximity to my own house, I didn’t really consider it as a rental opportunity, but I was sufficiently curious to look the price up on the web. It may only be 50% of a proper house, but they’re asking £340,000 for it. I suppose that’s the punchline.

Second piece of photo “fun” is below. If you’re having people round to watch the sport on telly, and their side is getting soundly beaten, why not project the half-time score onto the house next-door? To not do so is a missed gloating opportunity.

Glowsticks pt.IIComments Off
m posted in General moans, Music on February 15th, 2007

This time, there really were glowsticks involved. Last night, I unwisely attended a gig that made me feel older than the father of Old Father Time. Older than Old Father Time’s father’s father, in fact. Older than the hills. And so on.

Shortly after getting home from the disturbing experience of the Bristol leg of NME’s New Rave tour, I wrote the following in an email to some people. I reproduce it here, as I don’t think I’ve completely carried the anger over into today. I’ve toned it down a little, in the cold light of day, but want to represent how I felt last night;

I’ve just spent a number of hours in a big room - a room that seemed to be turned on its side, as it was much higher than it was long - knocking glowsticks and whistles out of the mouths of water-drinking Jocastas and Henrys. I know this isn’t the first cultural phenomenon to have come round twice during my life, but it’s got to be one of the most annoying. If I go to a proper gig i.e. one that is for music fans, rather than retarded children, and someone blows a referee’s whistle within leaping distance of my head, I will immediately disable them, hollow out their heads, free their eyes from the sockets and blow into their nose until they make a loud “pheep”ing noise.

CSS were quite good, I expect, but I couldn’t really see them, and I couldn’t hear much after the 2 Unlimited sample, because the sound disappeared up into the uselessly high ceiling, and its remnants were strangled by the braying children and their whistles.

There were empty glowstick packets in the men’s bogs. IT’S JUST WRONG.

If I try to consider it rationally, I suppose I don’t object to New Rave in principle. I object to these bands (Sunshine Underground, CSS and Klaxons) being termed “New Rave”, when they bear no relation to Old Rave. But, if kids want to do something that they’ll be embarrassed about in 6 months’ time, then let them show up at clubs with glowsticks, whistles and white gloves. But these bands…you’d at least expect a tenuous connection to Rave buried somewhere in their music, but it’s pretty difficult to find. Three bands showed up to this gig, and all of them were largely guitar-orientated indie bands, with a disco attitude to the open hi-hat. Franz Ferdinand have already revived that sound, and I doubt they get pelted with glowsticks whenever they take to the stage.

What’s most annoying about it, is that this risks turning gigs into clubs. At clubs, it’s all about the audience/crowd/clubbers, so they prance about in order to get noticed by the opposite (or the same) sex. Like greasy birds of paradise, they leap and whoop, attempting to attract a temporary mate, or a shout out from the DJ. But gigs should really be about the band on stage. And it’d be nice if there was some applause between songs, instead of the TOTP-style shrieking of teenagers and waving of glowsticks.

OK, you want some crowd atmosphere, but you don’t want it to completely envelope the band’s performance. Or at least, you probably don’t want that if you’re 32 years old. If you’re 17 and into New Rave, it seems that this is exactly what you want. So perhaps that’s what the link back to Rave music is; self-absorbed tossers in search of a beat that they can wave their hands at.

I’m not prepared to stand by these comments, by the way. I’m just angry about not being able to see or hear 3 bands who I was curious to see and hear. Glowsticks made it more annoying than it needed to be, I think.

GlowsticksComments Off
m posted in General moans on February 12th, 2007

I’m not a club-goer. I’m not a chav, a teenager or a gay, so there’s nothing much there for me. But on Saturday, I ended up at an indie club, for the first time in about 12 years. We wanted to see a band (Switches) that was playing at the club, so we were required to enter into what felt like the opening scene of Blade (with less blood and more shouting.) After spending about 45 minutes in the packed holding bar, we eventually went down into the main bowels of the ship (the club’s on a boat), and made ourselves comfortable at a balcony table, overlooking the main bar.

As everyone around us got louder and less capable, we sat around feeling old. The music was good, but it couldn’t really be heard over the shouting. At one point, when it was just the two lads at our table, we were joined by Cerys Matthews’s grandmother, who was in search of friendship, shotgun marriage, or drugs. We couldn’t be sure, because she was about 6 pints ahead of us, and was therefore unintelligible. We tried chatting with her, but she seemed to be a bit disappointed that we wouldn’t be friends, so she got up and went back to the table that had just expelled her.

Thankfully, the band came on sometime around midnight, so we headed round to our regular viewing balcony (we’ve been to the venue many times, but not usually when there’s a club night on) and watched in amusement as the band and the front rows of the audience competed over who could behave the most drunkenly. Can’t be sure, but I think the band won;

They were pretty entertaining, though, and seem to have a bulging sackful of tunes that they can rattle through in their own shambolic sort of way. It’s not the most credible list of influences, but they seem to owe a lot to ELO, Weezer, Silversun and Supergrass. Look forward to seeing them play a proper show in the future, when we can mix with similarly miserable fish-out-of-water thirtysomethings, as well as the usual stilt-wearing giant teenagers.