WALK TOWARDS THE BEER

Got a new contract, came right out of the blue yesterday morning with a call then telephone interview today. It's three months at an online gaming company in soho.

I nearly missed the call yesterday - I was walking across Exmoor to Combe Martin which is about 3 hours. I realised I'd walked about ten minutes into a zone of no phone coverage and was about to start back, changed my mind and just kept going forward and two minutes later phone rang :-)

Lesson : when in doubt WALK TOWARD THE BEER

(in this case the divine Exmoor Gold in The Focsle)

Black Sabbath's Paranoid with added Hound of the Baskervilles (in German)

To celebrate the release of Black Sabbath 13 I give you the awesome Schlager version of Paranoid - with added lyrics to include the Hound of The Baskervilles...

Courtesy of the 6 music freakzone special earlier this year

Spring 2013 music, Sabbath 13, QOTSA ..Like Clockwork

Latest contract is in City of London is just exhausting.. but the views and some of the new sounds are nice.

The just released Rick Rubin produced Sabbath reunion (13) is surprisingly good. Obviously not as good as the first four but on a level with the Ozzy-less classic Heaven and Hell which I've slowly come to appreciate. Lyrics are a but clunky and the drumming is a bit flat but Ozzy sounds amazing. (His voice isn't better but he seems uses it more effectively). 

And the riffs.. oh the riffs.. never mind Iron Man.. this is the stuff Galactus might knock off in a bored moment

but

the new Queens of the Stone Age (...Like Clockwork) is f

***

ing mind blowing.. and I highly recommend you give it a listen if that way inclined..

you know

when a great band really hits the sweet spot

when it

 produces something that sounds like a compilation album. It's still mean and evil QOTSA but there is a lot more variety in

here than you might think.

Like piano provided by - Elton John

What with the new Bowie, and a pretty good Depeche Mode album 2013 is shaping up to be a top year for old gits

 - note to self I must check out Savages and Bastille 

I'm glad to say I have at least bought the new Joy Formidable album, Wolf's Law, which is currently rocking out the car

and let me plug a fun chatty music podcast which is a good source for new stuff, I obviously should have been listening earlier

http://kickoutthejams.podomatic.com/

who I discovered at I'll Be Your Mirror

Spook Country

After slating it online earlier,
I've just finished the Spook Country unabridged audio novel. Must say I really, really enjoyed Spook Country 2nd time around as an audio book when I pretty much hated it first time around.

At first read Spook Country is definitely the most impenetrable, pretentious, inconsequential William Gibson novel. Given a second chance though, the ripe prose is beautifully poetic in places, the crazy detail is mostly surreal spy-fi (Hubertus Bigend's mag-lev bed, a bulgarian pistol that shoots salt, voodoo spirits that possess cuban spies) and the shaggy dog story plot is actually a very bitter Gibsonian version of Cohen Brother's moronic spy movie Burn After Reading. This is Gibson at his most political, and there are even supernatural overtones. He's always been a cool cold blooded writer, almost like Cronenberg or Brett Easton Ellis, but Spook Country is really seething with anger at the Bush era.

Spook Country's embarrassing tech, "locative art", that looked already out of date in 2010 now looks quite possible, as
'augmented reality', with the arrival of Google Glasses.

What I most like SC about it though is how it serves to set up Zero History. As if characters like Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition cannot be topped, he spends the majority of book II just setting up their replacements for book III, which is as much a direct continuation of Spook Country as Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited (something else 100% better second time around) is the main feature after apparently pointless the Hotel Chevalier short film which precedes it.

Of course this presents Zero History as a main feature, an epic modern spy tale, Thunderball set in the West End, when it actually is just another pretty silly London caper about a defunct rock band, an eccentric ad agency and a super secret pair of jeans ... but in these decades beyond Neuromancer you take your William Gibson with as much Wes Anderson as Bruce Sterling and you just learn to smile at the detail.

Early morning drives are perfect

After indescribably idyllic drive to and from Devon I find perfect parking opposite flat behind a gorgeous black Lambo. If the TT is an inanimate object how do I know it's grinning?

Best thing about London flat is I arrive and leave when I want. Saturday I morning left at 3.30am from North London, drove straight to Woolacombe beach beneath a rubenesque moon and a magnificent sunrise, arrived at beach in perfect sunshine for 7.30. Barely saw another car. Sunrise over the empty M4 listening to the 6 Music freakzone is quickly becoming my favourite thing.

Beach with the Goodes excellent, as was Ben and Johans roast Sunday dinner

Just left Parracombe at 5am to get in London for a much more leisurely 10am.

Since deciding to use the time I would otherwise have been struggling to sleep I estimate I have avoid 15-20 hours of just sitting in traffic. I don't know what I'm more happy to see the back off, car jams or insomnia

Yeah Yeah Yeahs Film and Book recommendations from I'll Be Your Mirror 2013 program

Thank you Yeah Yeah Yeahs for making me aware of Slints the Locust and .. various over acts I would never have otherwise come across.

Anyway - to pay you back, for the benefit of other fans back  : here are your book and film
recommendations from the festival program. I'll be looking out for these.

I'll Be Your Mirror 2013

This is my previous experience of this festival - I may have been
optimistic expecting to get treated like this a second time

Perhaps reflecting the rest of the country, and the fact that ATP is
very sadly coming to an end, this festival was a shadow of its former
self.

It was much smaller for a start. What amounted to the 2nd Stage last
time was completely closed this time around, leaving only a much
smaller room as well as the main hall which often featured queues to
get in and out. The ability to wander around nearly all of Ally Pally
was a major feature of last time. I NEARLY convinced someone else to
come along this time just based on seeing Ally Pally itself. For half
a century is magnificent venue has been looking for an event which
exploits it's run down Victorian splendour to the full - seeing PJ
Harvey perform Let England Shake in here before seemed to briefly
capture that potential - is there a promoter out the with the
imagination to do it again?

First shock - no Mojito bar :-(

And mojitos orders at the standard bars were about the worst I've ever
had. As to the other booze, I don't mind paying through the nose for
good beer at a festival, but paying £4.50 to see someone pour beer out
of a can is downright insulting.

Food was heavily cut back to about four or five overused stalls - I bought two (ok) burritos during the day down to lack of choice and they came out with a pungeant vengeance later.

To be fair the venue never looks full to capacity, perhaps because they are careful with hype - not wanting to attract a mass market and go the way of Glastonbury..

Glastonbury Festival moaning
Crazy that people are still fighting for tickets to Pilton when events like I'll Be Your Mirror are being ignored - but then 100,000's of people turn up to Glastonbury just to stagger around drunk for for days, piss on someone else's tent and then go back and claim they are interesting because of it. From being the festival that made me feel like the most boring straight in the world in 1992, Glastonbury now is 90% comprised of people dressed like they've just come back from back packing around Thailand,  and today makes me feel like the drug dealer in Withnail and I.

So maybe ATP are smart to keep it small and we were all just lucky to be treated like royalty last time.