50 quid bloke

All songs that were played by John Peel, put together, quite wonderfully by Graham Steel, here.

Today’s album (and I’m trying to do one a day, this week) has been No More Cities by The Dears. Uncut loved it. Me, I’m not so sure.
They’re Canadian, but it’s clear the swallowed the Smiths whole during their teens (one track is called Postcard from Purgatory and they admit as much in their first par of their online bio). And the problem is, I was never really into the Smiths.
It also sounds a bit like Neil Hannon’s Divine Comedy. And, as hard as I try, I’m not really into that, that much either.
They use a lot of punctuation in their song titles. And not just exclamation marks! The Second track, for example is ‘Who Are You, Defenders Of The Universe?’. It’s probably the best on the album, and at sometime in the future, I’ll probably put it on a compilation CD for someone, but I’ve listened to it quite a few times and can’t quite work out how/ whether/if the title refers to it.
It also made me think whether there’s a single other track I could think of with a comma and question mark in it.
If this doesn’t sound like a completely gushing recommendation: well, it isn’t. Not bad. But not quite worth crossing the road for.

There’s a new version of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ in the pipeline. Travis, Coldplay, The Darkness and Keane are involved: whichis slightly better than Westlife; McFly and Eamonn. I think. Although, I can see Busted staying out of the action.

I’ve always had a bit of a love/ hate thing going with swimming as a form of fitness. At one level, I am - or at least I was - quite a decent swimmer; and it’s exactly the sort of exercise I need to stop myself turning into a middle aged slug. On another level, frankly, it’s incredibly boring.
‘What you need,’ I always say, ‘is a radio or mp3 player that you can listen to underwater’. And it seems the great god of Gadgets (blessed be he), has heard my prayers: here is the Oregon 128mb underwater mp3 player/ fm radio courtesy of IWantOneOfThose.
I have a mental picture of me gliding up and down swimming pools, listenign to talking books and latest albums and the Today program. I can feel myself getting fitter, just looking at the order form.
Then again: if I get it..I’ll never have an excuse not to go swimming again.
Be careful what you wish for, as they say….
Update May I also introduce the Swimp3 player (of course) from Finsinc. [Press release (.pdf)]

OK, so Live Aid is well worth revisiting for its 20th anniversary (and see Word Magazine this month) and it’s nice when you here the odd surprise oldie revamped (Beck’s Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometimes at the end of Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a real treat), But, Channel 4’s 80s thing and the endless gush about Duran Duran makes me want to weep.

But this is where we were for the last week. Away from music, on the whole. Full album on Flickr

No blogging till I’m back. All I can say is that the iPal/ iPod combination is the greatest portable audio solution I’ve yet tried. And, tragically, I can admit to having tried quite a few.

On the Today programme, to be precise. Talking about his new classical release. ‘I don’t see it as classical,’ he says, ‘it’s just music for an orchestra, the fact it’s on a classical label shows they need to expand their repertoire’.
They also played the opening bit from teh first track on The Delivery Man, that goes ‘I don’t wanna taaaaallk’ which I thought was a right old racket when I first heard it, but now quite like.
Will I buy the classical one - sorry the orchestral one? Oh no.

Well, it’s all going Six Feet Under’s way at the moment. I almost gave up on the OC because of that whole idiotic thing with psycho Oliver. Rather like Ryan, it’s something I just can’t forgive Marissa for; and while I’m watching it again, some of my unbridled enthusiasm has been lost.
Watching the West Wing gets tricker and trickier as my beloved has decided she hates it. ‘It’s all mumbling.’ she says before asking a load of questions about what’s happening, which reveals the fact that I don’t quite know what’s happening, and barely catch one word in five that they say. But they’re all very busy and it’s : very important and it’ll all probably end up ok in the end after some tough decisions have been mades.
She has however, also taken time to give me a precise who’s who and what’s what of One Tree Hill. And I can feel it starting to have a pull over me. The only problem is that each character seems to have about five signigicant incidents happen to them in each episode: slow down, I say.
Soprano’s: well, there’s still a few episodes waiting for me on TiVo. Seems that Tony and Carmella’s divorce is going to be quite rocky. Who would have thought it?
Which brings me back to Six Feet Under: God it’s good at the moment. Everyone’s lives are falling apart. Keith’s slept with a woman; and so’s Claire - well almost. Brenda got caught with Nate by Joe - and now they seem back on the cards. Rico’s heading for divorce, and so probably are Ruth and George the geologist. What more could you ask for
Oh, I also saw a documentary about the end of the dinosaurs. Apparently there were two asteroids, not one. Hundreds of thousands of years apart. Or maybe they just caught a cold.

So, I’m sitting here waiting to see if I’m lucky enough for the BPI to target me as an evil uber downloader. On recent form, frankly they wouldn’t have a case (about 10 dodgy downloads in the last year), but errr…let’s just say I’ve got a fair bit of previous.
However, my defence is ready. It goes something like:
Three or four years ago, I had pretty much given up buying anything new except the odd DJ mix. Why? Because I went to clubs and bars, but listened to Radio 4 and watched exactly the TV I wanted through TiVo (even then). In other words, no music radio, no Top of the Pops. I also found most of the music mags on the market either juvenile or too, too worthy and dull. My radar started and stopped with the Guardian’s Friday review.
So, I had cut myself out of the usual promotional loop for new music. The route that the industry has built up over the last few decades.
If I went to HMV and bought a load of stuff that took my fancy, more often than not I’d hate it, because I had no idea what I was buying.
Then came two things: Audiogalaxy (in its glory days), and Uncut magazine’s covermount CDs.
Over a period of about six months, I discovered a whole world of music that I’d basically never have found. Most of what I downloaded has since been lost and deleted, but I’ve probably bought more CDs in the last 12 months than at any time in my life. And I have the Amazon invoices to prove it!!! And I’m still going.
Admittedly, these days, I prefer Word’s covermounts (when they can afford them) to Uncut’s. And I prefer the odd (normally legal) track from an MP3 blog, to the spyware horrors of KaZaA. But the principle remains.
So, had the industry managed to do away with covermounts and downloads (its two current bete noirs) then, they’d have made a lot less money out of me - and, I suggest people like me.
Not sure if it’ll stand up in court…but I rest my case.