50 quid bloke

I don’t generally write about gadgetry on here. But, have just taken delivery of a Tivoli iPal, and feel I just have to share this with the world.
Basically, it’s a Tivoli radio with an audio input, so you can use it both as a radio (portable wiht a rechargable battery), and as a speaker for your iPod (or laptop/ portable DVD player etc etc).
I have decided this is an essential piece of kit, as every time we go away, I have to take - among other bits and pieces - my iPod, a radio, and a set of speakers. And the speakers (a little pair of Sony’s) give a most tinny noise indeed.
The iPal manages to reduce my load by one: replacing the radio and the speakers…and is both a better radio, and gives a much better tone than my speakers.
Best price is from the ever reliable Mann Electronics people at EverythingIpod.co.uk
My only problem with the whole thing is buying a decent analog radio, when I should really be upgrading to DAB. But a)I couldn’t find a DAB radio with an audio input, and b)we have half a dozen radios in our house, and often have three or more on Radio4 at the same time. Digital is normally a second behind, which means we’ll either have one room annoyingly out of synch, or I’m going to have to rekit the whole house out at huge expense (and wastage).

A couple of tracks of his final album, From a Basement on the Hill, have been posted on the Anti label site. Due out in the UK on 18 October, I think. [via Music For Robots]. More info on Sweet Adeline, and a full review on Filter. Sounds as lovely as ever. Not recommended as a cure for depression.

So, Elvis Costello’s latest, The Delivery Man, appears. And as everyone said, it finally sounds like one of his good old albums. OK, the first track’s a little scratchy, but after that, it’s like peak period Elvis (and for me the peak was between Armed Forces and Spike). Some noisy bits; some angry bits, some quiet bits: you know the thing. If you’ve slightly fallen out of love with his last however many albums, you really should get this one.
Also in the post was n.Lannon’s Chemical Friends. I can’t quite remember how I stumbled on this, but from the first bars of the first song, I’m afraid it lost me.
What’s wrong with it? Absolutely nothing, in fact, there’s some lovely bits of songwriting on it. In fact, if I’d heard it about 18 months ago, I’d now be raving about it. The only problem is that it’s yet another bloke with a guitar doing folk with some fuzzy bits on it (Start with Elliot Smith and draw a line to M.Craft, M.Ward et al), and I don’t have space for another one right now.
I feel desperately unfair writing about him like this, but there’s just a bit too much of this ‘nice and interesting’ stuff around at the moment. It’s becoming like boy bands for grown ups. With only one boy in. If you get my drift.
I don’t know why I’m much happier listening to a 50 year old who’s basically managed to do the same as he was doing 20 years ago than I am listening to a 20 something just starting out who both needs and deserves support. But I am. Sorry.

This is clearly something you don’t need to tell Lesbians on Ecstasy. Their first album is out at the end of October, I’m sure a concerted effort by a few thousand people could get them to the top of the download chart.

This week, I have mostly been listening to Ed Harcourt’s new album, Strangers.
Apologies if I’ve told you this before, but I saw Ed Harcourt playing with his first band, Snug, about 8 years ago at the Water Rats. They were supporting Kenickie (Lauren Laverne, etc), who I was going to ask to write a diary for an online magazine we were running at the time. I was so impressed with Snug (a sort of public school version of Green Day), I asked them to write a diary instead. ‘Our lives as a struggling popstar’, that sort of thing. He wrote it, and it was pretty good really. Especially given the fact he was about 17 at the time.
The online mag folded. So did Snug. Ed Harcourt emerged as a solo star - although even after I’d seen him live, I never worked out he was the same teenager who’d written the diary for us. It was only a piece in the Guardian a year after his first album came out, that they mentioned Snug and I twigged.
Is there a point to this story? No, not really. I found myself standing next to him at a bar a while ago, reminded him of the diary - which he remembered (’Ah yes, Guardian bloke’), and I said it was good to see he was doing so well. And we went our separate ways. I sense you’re not particularly impressed, but at least it’s true.
And the album? I love the fact that - despite the fact he’s at heart a piano-man/ crooner - he’s anything but easy listening. Which means that after I’ve had it on repeat in the office for a day, I know I like it, but it’s just going to take a while to find out whether I love it.
Should you buy it? Of course. Hey, he’s a close personal friend of mine, what else could I say?

The mod-pop-punk archives. The Chords, anyone?, or how about the Merton Parkas? All for you to download.

He’s living proof that no matter what you look like, if you tell the world you’re a sex god often enough, people will start to believe you: even Kate Moss. If I’d known this when I was younger, my teenage years could have been very different.
Anyway, his (not so) new album is another sleazy treat (although it misses a bit when he goes all Stevie Wonder on us).
Wouldn’t be half as much fun is he was, shall we say, conventionally good looking.

You may or may not know that I do the admin for the MP3 blogs aggregator.
Have noticed quite a significant increase in the number - and quality - of blogs seeking listings over the last few weeks. It’s also going to be featured in an upcoming edition of Spin magazine, when they write about the whole MP3blogs phenomenon.
The aggregator itself is doing about 5,000 pages a day, which is rather impressive really (and much more than this site). The question now is whether the mp3blog phenomenon is going to survive the inevitable scrutiny of music industry lawyers.
In the meantime, I completely missed this Morning News Roundtable of MP3 bloggers from last month.

‘If you used to love Elvis, you’ll love this’ is the final line from Phil Hogan’s review of the new Elvis Costello album, Delivery Man (released on Monday).
This means me, I guess. I haven’t actually liked a new Elvis album since, well, probably Spike - and that came out decades ago.
So, even though I don’t really know whether I can trust Phil Hogan, I’m going to give this one a whirl. I really want it to be good.
When you think about it, he’s quite a rarity, our Elvis. Although he’s associated with a particular musical time and movement, he’s one of the few performers who have turned into one-man genres (Bowie is the master of this, Sting is also in the club): dabbling with one genre and another often with mixed success (he’s also just released a classical album), but never losing his identity.
I’m interested by him, and he was a big part of my yough, but I’m possibly not so interested that I’d read this new biography of him, even though it’s apparently rather fine.

Yes, I know this was in last week’s paper, but it seems the Martyn movement is taking another significant step forward with Fat Boy Slim sampling Primrose Hill by John and Beverly Martyn on his new album, Palookaville. Can never quite make my mind up on FatBoy albums, but will probably get this one. After all, it’s been a while…