You Are Allowed to Enjoy This...

I know it is a terrible habit to Google oneself. In fact, to Google oneself sounds as if it is a euphemism for shaking hand's with the wife's best friend or wrestling with the one-eyed trouser snake, but I digress. In between searching for hardcore dwarf porn and giving my life saving's to Nigerian scammers, I often find my music being used by all sorts of people for all sorts of purposes.

This following clip, I think, is a comedy sketch. The reason I am unsure is that it is in Italian and I don't speak Italian apart from bonjourno and ciao, etc. so one must assume it is funny. Mind you, the product featured in the sketch does actually exist. You can buy alarm clocks that whizz around the room like that.

Anyhow, they have used my track "Loops and Scales" as the soundtrack to the "advert". I think it's cool. I also think it is another great example of how the net can help us cross pollinate our arts to create wonderful new things...like this!

Meanwhile, in the village, the rumour mill is nine months too late...ha ha ha ha!

This link came my way via the MediaGuardian website. This is basically a lesson on how not to write for a local paper and would make a great case study for those would-be journalists interested in libel law and not to settle your personal animosities using a newspaper column.

The background of this is that Leader of the Isle of Wight council David Pugh, a single man, takes out a fellow single lady from the pensions office as his "date" at the Council Ball. Unfortunately, said lady can't hold her booze makes a show of herself and causes a major confloption, of which said council leader is completely unaware. However, the reporting of this evening is neither delicately handled nor sits within the realms of journalism. Meanwhile, her ex-husband is skulking in the shadows armed with a video camera and viddies the drunken lady outside the venue and posts it on YouTube. Creepy stalker type behaviour alert!!!

This is a tittle-tattle piece written by someone with issues and proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that you do need an office full of sub-editors working on the local press, because whoever owns the Isle of Wight gazette is probably having kittens now. I hope Mr Pugh has an expensive lawyer. We've all had too much too drink and acted daft, or been around someone who makes a show of themselves under the influence - thankfully, a guttersnipe reporter hasn't been around to stitch us up.

It certainly doesn't make you want to visit the Isle of Wight in a hurry! Pass it on...

This is more like the flipside to "Give It To You". It's one thing to give something away willingly than to have someone come along and take something from you. One thing I've learnt over the past couple of years is that there are plenty of people out there who will fuck you over for the sake of a penny. That's what this song is about. It's about those petty-minded simplefolk who are just rotten to their fucking core. The one's who spend their whole life making a game of fucking people over. You know who you are. I know who you are. The thing is that I am not slave to money, you are. So fuck you, slave. I am free.

As we have young kiddiwinks in the house, I have adopted a new style of singing (if it can be called singing). It's more lips pressed against the mike and plenty of articulation rather than the process of expelling air from my lungs. Volume is a minimum and then maximised in the recording software using plenty of EQ and gain. I hate my voice. I think it sucks. I am still of the belief that guitarists should keep their traps shut and play their fucking guitars. But sometimes you build up a body of lyrics that need to be articulated. And this is that time. So I apologise for offending your sensibilities. This glitch in the matrix will be momentary. Normal service will be resumed once the new collection of recordings is finished. Title of the new album is: "The Luckiest Man in the World".

Here are the words to this little ditty so you can sing-along in the bouncy ball stylee...

Never Enough

The arrogance and ignorance
Means its never enough
To steal what is mine
And lie to my face
When confronted
Act like a mistake

The greed is one thing
But the games you play
And the things you say
Are beyond the pale
Didn't you think
I could work it all out

It's never enough
Never enough
I could give you everything I have
And you'd smile at me and extend a hand
Because it's never enough
Never enough
You could take everything I own
And still be hungry and want more
Because it's never enough
Never enough
Never enough
Never enough

You know the price of everything, but the value of nothing
And while you do your best to amass your pile
The more you need, the more you want
And money can buy you love and influence and power
But remember that the wages of sin is death

The learning curve gets steeper
As the malevolence gets deeper
But this is an education
You can't afford to buy

The thing is I can always change
But you will always stay the same
Like a book left open at the same old page

It's never enough
Never enough
I could give you everything I have
And you'd pretend that you could be a friend
Because it's never enough
Never enough
You could take everything I own
But you'd still leave the knife sticking out my back
Because it's never enough
Never enough
Never enough
Never enough

Every man, woman and child has their price
From a million pounds to a bar of chocolate
In this world it appears anyone can be bought
By while you have to take the things I've earned
I transcend the need to worship at the shrine of the false idol: money

This is the bedding track for a song with words called "Never Enough". The lyric concerns greed and the age-old fact that the more money you want the more money you need. So many people chase the dollar and find themselves corrupted by their need for cold, hard cash. But more so, it is about those people who will stab you in the back for the chance to screw you out of a pound.

The interesting thing about this track is that it is the first time I've used the Superior Drummer 2.0 software I purchased a month or so ago in order to generate the drum track. In the past, I've programmed the drums myself using a Boss DR880, but this new software allows me to drag and drop pre-rendered midifiles onto a grid and come up with realistic sounding drumparts on the fly. So yes, it is another way for me to cheat - so no more crappy drum programming for me, perhaps? No, I still love my DR-880 and it is good to get your hands dirty.

The original Wicker Man movies is one of my all-time faves up there with 2001, Superman, Confessions of a Pop Performer and Xanadu. But someone has created a rather disturbing spin on an already disturbing story...beholden, dear reader, beholden...

This is a video from some chubby lad called Paul Hawkins and his band The Awkward Silences. I am not sure why I like because both the song and the video are a little rough, but I guess it captures the awkward fizzing energy of younger people who think they are right.

Of course, I also like the Reggie Perrie theme running through the video and it has the same kind of appeal as The Fall or The Wedding Present, so I am beginning to understand why I's likes it.

First of all, I would just like to say that I am not a can of soup. Though I might resemble the Pilsbury dough boy these days, I am not any kind of foodstuff...unless you are higher up the food chain than me, of course!

Why the soup? Well actor cyber-chum (I don't know if he'd class me as that, but I am fond of him because he represents the person I wish I could be rather than the person I am - one of those folks who "can do", whereas "I can't"), Daniel Hoffmann-Gill has written an entry on his blog about the nature of web presence. He is weary...and a little wary...of the amount of web presence out there and the need for it.

I think the gist of his argument is that he doesn't like it, but his entry is so shrouded in double-speak that I am not sure exactly what he's getting at. I think he might be upset at someone. He sounds like he's upset at himself. This is a person who is in a business where he markets himself as a brand in order to make money. He is a tin of beans. He is an ingredient to be plucked off the shelves and to be used when needed. In a way, we all are, I guess.

But there is too much ego and self-promotion on the net. This is a symptom of our media-savvy time and Warhol was way ahead of the game. Fame and self-agrandisement is the order of the day and if you have a home computer and an Internet connection you can self-publish in an instant.

For me, the Internet is the great leveller. In the old days, our news output came from trained journalists and was edited and sliced and diced for our consumption. But now, anyone with a mobile phone that has a video camera can find themselves at the heart of the news. Journalism has been reduced to its basic components, it really is all down to who was closest to the events when then unfolded and did they have their mobile phone pointing in the right direction.

The same can be said of magazines too. This is a world I used to inhabit and in the old days we would write reviews of music, films, computer games and whatever, and people would buy the magazines and, well, read them. Now we can all write a review of whatever we feel like and again the Net is the great leveller because invariably the amateur doing the review has paid good money to get the product has has a genuine interest in its quality. There were many times on the magazines when I'd write a stinky review of a product only to be told by my editor to tone it down and up the rating because the publisher of the software had paid for advertising to appear in the issue. One soon learnt to despise the shackles.

But yes, the Internet is the great leveller, it allows anyone with a modicum of talent to get their stuff out there. A million songs have been heard on the net that would never have been given ears back in the old days. Many musicians from the old world resent this, they say it is a waste of time because we aren't proper musicians who have paid their dues and done the gigs and toured the world. They might be right, but who holds court here? Who has the right to judge?

So why am I here? Why do I have a web presence? I've had a web presence since around 1997. My first website was static with some links to some stories I'd been writing. Yes, I used to give novels away back in the old days. That was before the MP3 music format rocketed into our consciousness.

By 1998, I realised that I could use my computer to record multi-track audio, so I stopped writing as a hobby and began recording music with gusto. The intention was to record and release the tracks on the net...for free... This is something I've done for the last decade. It's true that you can also buy my tunes from the likes of CDBABY and iTunes, but any profit I make in a year might just buy me a packet of new guitar strings. But the point is that without the Internet, I would probably have not recorded all this music. There wouldn't have been an audience. And without an audience there's not much point in me doing it.

Remarkably, this site shifts around 300Gb of music data a month. I don't know who is downloading this stuff or whether they even like it as I get very little feedback, apart from the comments I get via YouTube on the videos I post there (though I only did those for about a year before my interest waned). But I am here to make music primarily. When I was made redundant, I took on the blog format because I enjoyed keeping a diary. Being alone as a freelance writer, doing a blog entry kept me sane. Commenting on the postman or whatever took my fancy was a just a folly.

In fact, most of the Internet is just that - a giant virtual electronic folly.

But since my situation has changed, I've not been able to write much about my real life. It would make very interesting reading, but this is not the time. There will be a time, but it is not now. I think it is useful for us to share human experience via the web, though the candid nature of some of the writings out there seem a little unnecessary. However, while I feel I should defend the average Internet user's rights to self-publish, I am just like DHG, in that I am conflicted by it.

We are sliding down a big electronic hole of the self-obsessed. But this is an extension of our media-driven age. We live in strange times where the notion of celebrity is the be-all and end-all of our culture. To be famous is the only way. To actually use your brain is out of fashion. These are strange times indeed.

Why do this? Why open yourself up? I try not to. Most of my entries are either music related, or reviews of gigs or whatever. I'd like to do more review stuff myself, but with two young children, my time is limited and my music is more important. The most popular pages here are the ones I wrote about "In the Night Garden" or about music gear I've reviewed. So while people are happy to download my music, there aren't that many actually reading these pages.

So maybe I should just shut up and play my guitar, eh?