Dandy Dan RIP

We randomly caught the end of Bugsy Malone on Film Four yesterday evening, and we thought that the kid who played Dandy Dan (centre, above) - real name Martin Lev - looked familiar. So we looked him up on imdb and it turned out that he committed suicide in 1992, aged 33. His death may have had something to do with the fact that he suffered from M.E., but there's very little information about him online. My future viewings of Bugsy Malone will always be twinged with sadness.

hooray for bats

Amazingly, there are far fewer moths in Sheffield than in Newcastle.

I hate moths.

Spiders, I can deal with, but moths - no no no.

Love Bjork

YouTube has changed music so incredibly. But better than being a way to access new material, it's an archivist's dream. Hence I stumbled across this little performance of Unravel by Bjork. Amazing.



PS. If anyone has bought Volta, can they give me the lowdown? I'm a bit skint at the moment . . .

Waterstones: for fuck's sake!

Who is that favourite children's author of Norwegian ancestry who wrote such classics as 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and 'Matilda'? Yes, the legendary Roald Dahl. And can you get all of his books from Sheffield city centre's only Waterstones? No. What the fuck is going on? You can't get a copy of Revolting Rhymes and you can't buy The Witches.

I feel betrayed.

Radiohead UN-medley

This from Radiohead's blog, Dead Air Space, is ace. Nigel Godrich keeps the splices of reel that get edited out of songs and sticks them all together on a reel. You can hear what it sounds like on the blog under 13 June. Interesting that Godrich doesn't record digitally - or maybe they record the masters onto tape to achieve the final sound . . .

The recording techniques of producers and engineers to get certain sounds is sometimes really fascinating. I was thinking this because I was on the Foals myspace (quite liking their song 'Mathletics' which, despite the title, is only in 8/8 time - nothing math-y at all) and saw this picture of them in the studio:


And like the geek that I am, I was interested to see how the snare's been softened by a shirt and there's a great big blanket over the front of the kick. You can totally hear the effect on the kick, but I'm not so sure about the snare . . .

I love the producer's role in recording. There's a DVD with the version of London Calling I have, and there's so many hilarious shots of Guy Stevens crawling under the piano and clinging onto Mick Jones' leg etc. It's a hard won thing, the right sound . . .

Recently, Google has been letting me down. Twice I've searched song lyrics to find an artist or title, and both times to no avail. It makes me wonder if at some point I've substituted completely different words. I usually hear lyrics weirdly anyway, sometimes to comic effect. On Saturday, we ended up at Penelope's (newly opened former casino adjoined to the Odeon, bizarrely. It had this amazing casino carpet covered in clubs and kings) and Darlings of the Splitscreen played. They're really awesome both recorded and live, and their harmonies and beats are killer. Anyway, I remember thinking one of their lyrics was a little unusual: "my situation is tenable." What a strange thing to sing, I thought, without it occurring to me that I might have misheard. The next morning Ian was singing, "my situation is terrible," and suddenly the world made more sense. However, that song will remain bizarrely businesslike to me. In my head now it's, "my position is untenable."

What a non-story. Shut up, Jess.

I bought 'Easy Tiger' and it's slightly disappointing - if you can purport to be disappointed when you were expecting to be. However, I'm completely in love with the song "I Taught Myself How to Grow Old". I must have listened to it a dozen times today, in addition to having sung it myself over and over after working out some chords. Overall, I much prefer '29'.

This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Families are so fucked up, and it's boring me now, like watching the same episodes of "Brothers and Sisters" (whose central axis is the theme of familial dysfunction) again and again. Hilariously, I doubt the family members themselves ever know just how fucked up each of them is. Really, you should ask each person's friends, former friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and then, once you'd filtered out their own baggage, you'd see the damage from every angle.

When I was 17 I thought of going to university in America quite seriously. Maybe if I hadn't got a boyfriend then I would've gone . . .

Crime Scene

I was sat in the garden this morning eating by bowl of supermarket-version-of-special-K, as per usual. Then a mound in my peripheral vision brought my attention to a disturbing sight: a bunch of fluffy grey, white and black feathers. I scrutinised them closely, looking for evidence of a struggle, an assassin (cat? owl?), but to no avail. There was no blood, but some of the feathers were bunched together, like they'd been pulled out in a handful. What upset me is that the flight feathers were clearly too small to have been from a dozey pigeon, and the only birds whose colours match the feathers are coal tit and great tit fledglings. The fledglings are admittedly pretty careless, and wouldn't have lasted very long in a more cat-prone area. But one casualty out of dozens isn't so bad.

Get me: bird detective.

Musicians create book covers

This http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2139740,00.html is hilarious. Six artists have produced front covers for their fave books as part of a Penguin classics promotion. Beck's is really good, Johnny Borrell's is predictably SHITE and some other guy chose to do Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse because, I quote, "Steppenwolf are such an amazing band." I've been chuckling for about 5 minutes.

Patrick Wolf, Ryan Adams and the nature of music and celebrity

Last Friday there was an hour long show of a Ryan Adams and the Cardinals performance on BBC4, which has made me relisten to the few CDs of his in our house, particularly "29". It was pretty stellar, despite the fact that most of the songs they played were off the new album, Easy Tiger, which I don't yet know or own.

I have some real reservations about those sorts of gigs however: I can't remember the name of the venue, but it looked to be a converted church, and wasn't your average hoi polloi gig. Instead, it appeared that a load of posh people were sat at circular tables with their bottles of wine, watching the entertainment in comfort. I can't put my finger on it, but it just doesn't seem right to play or watch a gig like that - not when you purport to be a rock'n'roll singer.

I felt similarly on the occasions that I've seen Gillian Welch and Joanna Newsom (at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester and Leeds City Varieties): the Gillian Welch concert was the first I'd been to where I'd felt underdressed in jeans and converse. The folk there were dressed for the theatre, not for a gig. Obviously, you don't want to go mosh or jump around at these folk and country affairs, but I'd like to not feel like I've stumbled into some upper class concert where the audience (note, not "crowd") felt they had ownership over the artists.

I think it's that for most gigs I feel that I paying to see the act, whereas at these more upmarket venues, you get the sense that the artists are being paid to perform. I know that probably sounds like it makes no sense, but I can't really explain the difference any more clearly.

Anyway, Ryan Adams looked scarily clean-cut in this performance, and when he donned his sunglasses he bizarrely resembled a dark-haired Andy Warhol (see picture). He wasn't playing guitar, and so the vocals were honestly awesome, especially on their cover of "Down in a Hole" by Alice in Chains.

All this clean-cut business made me think about how disappointing it is for fans when whichever stars clean up their act. This infuriates musicians massively, because they like to think that their fans are only interested in the music - it's so much more than that!

Hilariously, it's this issue that Patrick Wolf - everyone's favourite young eccentric - has taken exception to. I say hilarious, because for Patrick Wolf more than anyone else, his entire persona is the package that is marketed and sold to would-be fans. Now, having read his fans' speculations on his personality, he's declared that he will resign from the music business because all he ever wanted to do was to make music. Sorry PW, but you can't be so suddenly naive and bite the hand that feeds you. Everyone who has ever liked music knows that it is as much about a cult of personality as musical endeavour.

That's why all us Ryan Adams fans are hoping that he's still as outspoken and interesting as he was when he was "on the edge", whatever that might mean . . .

Dark windows

I was sitting on Ian's homemade bench (picture coming shortly), reading and writing and taking polaroid pictures of things, and then I desired a cup of tea. As I rose, I looked up at the windows of the flat next door, and I saw a figure jump back from the window. This would be the new housemate of the Scottish PE teacher next door, who I haven't met yet. And for that reason, I found the experience of being spied on a little eery. (Also, how boring is it to look at someone reading? It's not like I was wearing a bikini - I'm in a dress and jeans combo!)

Brighton

London Sightseeing

Natural History Museum

Science Museum

Cemetery Polka

Yesterday started off looking gloomy with the distinct possibility of rain, but at 4 o'clock it turned beautiful. This was extremely fortunate as we were making the long journey by foot to the General Cemetery for a birthday barbecue. That's right - a barbecue in a cemetery, right at the foot of the non-denominational chapel (now all breeze-blocked up and macabre-looking) which people more popularly call a mausoleum because that's what it looks like.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun and many of us played boule, which was all the more hilarious for playing down or up a slope, and more often rolling "into the rough". Fun times.

Today is even hotter, and I'm not sure if I can bear to go outside, but I think I will because being British (particularly a Northerner) means my default setting is to become obsessed over every bit of sun and squeeze all possible sun-burn out of the opportunity. (Not really: I'll just find a shady patch and read.)

PS. "Cemetery Polka" is a Tom Waits song.