If companies sponsored album covers
Monday, June 27th 2005
The ILM massive seem to have outdone themselves this weekend. Check out this thread for all sorts of goodness.
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The Boo Radleys
Friday, June 24th 2005
It's fair to say that The Boo Radleys are one of my favourite bands and it's great that they are getting the 2CD Anthology treatment (out July 4th pop fans). There's an official website gone up here and if you want to read the excellent site about their best album (and one of the best albums of the 90's) then go here.
No doubt I'll have more to say on them in the future.
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See What I Mean About Oasis
Thursday, June 23rd 2005
From this weekends Observer Music Monthly, David Walliams from Little Britain interviews Noel Gallagher:
"DW: Ricky Gervais told me there's a story that Liam thinks Spinal Tap are a real band. Is that true?
NG: Yeah, he thought they were real people. We went to see them play in Carnegie Hall. Before they played, they came on as three folk singers from the film A Mighty Wind. We were laughing and he said: 'This is shit'. We said: 'No, those three are in Spinal Tap. You do know they are American actors?' 'They're not even a real band?' 'They're not even English! One of them is married to Jamie Lee Curtis.' 'I'm not fuckin' 'avin that,' he says, and walks off right up the middle of Carnegie Hall. He's never watched Spinal Tap since. He'd seen the film and loved it and thought they were a real band.
...
DW: The Office is the last truly great thing. That'll take some beating. Do you and Liam go around [imitating the Little Britain characters] going 'I'm a lady!'
NG: Liam hasn't got a sense of humour, fucking full stop. Like with Peter Kay. If you're a northern guy about our age, all the reference points are spot on - you can't not like him. We were on the tour bus one night and somebody put [a] Peter Kay [DVD] on and I thought: 'This is going to be a fucking disaster.' There's a few Mancs in our crew and everyone was laughing their heads off. And Liam's just sat there going: 'He's a fucking fat cunt, fucking shit, fucking fat idiot.' So he gets up to go to the bog and someone goes: 'Why doesn't he like Peter Kay?' Because he'd been to the NME Awards when Liam won a trophy for being hero of the year - and Liam wouldn't go up and fucking collect it. He had on this big white fur coat. So Peter Kay brought his trophy over to him and went 'Ere you are lad'. And as he walks off, he goes: 'Me mam's been looking for that coat.' Fucking uproar! I was laughing like fuck."
Disagree with the fact that's impossible to dislike Peter Kay. His stand up is really lazy simply pushing the audience's nostalgia buttons with nothing interesting to say about the things he reminisces about. The whole Bullseye routine is just rubbish. Phoenix Nights mind you is a brilliant piece of work and I love it dearly but you can forget the standup.
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Gigs
Thursday, June 16th 2005
Reading Graham's post over here, it's prompted me to start posting about some of the live gigs I've seen as I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm glad that he's got his thoughts on his first gig down in writing whilst it's still reasonably fresh in the mind. Most of my live gig experiences that I think back on, I end up wishing that I could go back and relive those special moments so that they were clearer in the mind than they are at the moment. There are flashes of rememberance of every gig I've been to but no solid technicolour memories. That might be much to do with my poor recall of things past but it's also just the nature of live music. It's a passing thing, it's purely of the moment and it can't be recaptured once it's gone. Even if you turn up a recording of the gig it's never going to be the same as it was when you were standing there listening to it. In fact live recordings can suddenly just expose all those defects that you hadn't noticed or hadn't cared about when you were there in the moment. Brian Wilson is a case in point. There's a lot you'll forgive the man when he's sat up there on stage given what he's been through to get there but you're a lot more unforgiving when those vocal performances are exposed to the cold light of a digital recording playing in your living room.
So I guess I'm going to randomly pick some gigs that I've been to and try and recapture what I can remember about them Some of them might be short, it might be really uninteresting things I can remember but lets see where it goes.
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Garden State
Monday, June 13th 2005
Quite a downbeat film really which was maybe not what I was expecting. A bunch of fucked up people going nowhere, locked into their small town stasis and all numbed by drugs in some way. All very sad but the feeling was of it not being as deep as it liked to think it was and the ending was a little predictable and pat. I didn't feel the surge in my chest that I think they were aiming for with the final moments. Still, I quite enjoyed it and it was certainly never boring, the running time flying by. Who knew the guy from Scrubs was capable of writing and directing that?
Funnily enough reminded me a bit of another Natalie Portman film 'Beautiful Girls' although this was really no where near as good as that. That was another low key film about someone returning to the town they grew up in and meeting the people they grew up with (amongst much else). Like the nice moments in Garden State regarding The Shins 'New Slang', 'Beautiful Girls' features a great musical moment although in that film it's Neil Diamond's 'Sweet Caroline'!
You can add to this list 'Singles', another film that springs to mind at this point. It's an early Cameron Crowe film set in grunge era Seattle and for some reason gives me the same warm glow inside that I get from Beautiful Girls. They're not fresh in my mind enough at this point to allow any further analysis beyond saying check them out.
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Oasis
Friday, June 10th 2005
Reading some of the interviews that the Gallagher brothers have given in support of their new record and having heard some of the tracks from it the thought strikes that maybe every three or four years they should just come out and do a whole bunch of interviews without any record actually being released.
God knows their interviews are way more entertaining than any music they are producing at this stage.
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Roger Manning website
Thursday, June 9th 2005
Roger Manning, keyboard player and songwriter with Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, Beck, Air and TV Eyes amongst many many others has a new website up here
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