It's business time.
Can't be sure, but I think I was on the radio this week. Even more implausibly, on a business programme.
I know. You don't need to say it.
Of course, Brian Harries, on the very good-hearted local station Hope FM, had no idea who I was or what my credentials as a businessman were likely to be, as I perched opposite him in the sumptuous Romanesque marble-and-drapes surroundings of Studio 1 in the roof of the YMCA in Bournemouth. And after explaining it to him on air for a bit, I'm not sure he was any the wiser.
But he did kindly let me attempt to be funny for the shameless majority of an hour on his lunchtime programme, on Tuesday. You know, in that way of mine that would get you sighing: "Ah, Mo..." with a little empty look of pity, before you go get on with some real work. You know the way. You do.
Brian firstly introduced me as his long-lost twin.
"So, explain it to me, Timo," he then said, looking be squarely and beardedly in the the eye, "how does your business survive?"
Now, a lesser man in my position would have frozen like a severely under-RAMed PC being asked to suddenly process a high definition broadcast-quality final render of an entire Pixar movie. Not me.
I simply said cooly: "Some creatives feel that it's good to specialise and get really good at something. That's not me." And looked him straight back in the eye like this made sense. Holding in the strong urge to additionally blurt out: "Titting about on the radio like this doesn't help me knuckle down any, mind."
What a pro.
Despite this, Brian was generous in his warmth and welcome of my particular brand of unrehearsed 'personality'. And he described Momo's music as "stupendous", which I politely asked the work experience lass, Paige, to write down somewhere obvious.
So thanks to Brian and the Hope FM crew for inviting me on and not throwing me straight off, and to Suzy at Strawberry Fields for once again being my schedule's personal Shuffle function.
As I posted on the Business Show FB wall later, don't let Brian Harries' wan elfen translucency fool you, he is not so easily upstaged.
Listening as I type to Annie Mac on Radio 1, I don't know why I ever imagined that Momo would make more sense on a popular urban electro dance music show. Really.
---
Friday, May 13, 2011
Thursday, May 05, 2011
In words and tweed:
Sort of playing the Day of Hugs festival.
Well, when your publicist asks politely on Monday morning whether you can do a gig on Friday evening, you don't immediately say yes, do you? Not when you'd told the band we all had a couple of months before any live dates and we might as well all go for G&Ts at the Swell Chaps Dead Creative Bar instead of practice.
I wish band life was like this for the Electro Pops Orchestra. Lounging together everywhere in casual sartorial brilliance like an eclectic gang of hipsters in a series of knee-bucklingly-cool Mad Men social scenes. If I can muster the costume and photography budget for the boys, we will spin this fable in the publicity shots.
In reality, the boys are too cool to be just lounging around within reach of Kimmerage on Good Friday evening and I stepped into the fray intrepidly alone. Sans cool gang to do most of the work for me.
But yes, Momo:tempo did play an exclusive pre-season, out-of-the-blue, boutique set at the Friday night warm-up to Dorset's very friendly Day Of Hugs festival, Easter Friday night.
We didn't exactly bill it as a Berk & A Laptop set, but I shall be doing so from now on. Entertainment can, it turns out, sometimes be portable, even for an electronic musician.
What the punters made of Momo's assertive electro-pop cabaret at half-midnight in a blacked out tent in a heavily socialised haze, lord knows. But I'm well used to that look. Somewhere between What the hell is this happening in front of me and: Is it wrong or at least too soon to admit liking this? To say nothing of: Is it me or is that actually tweed?
I may produce a range of Momo-branded tees:
FREE
YOURSELF
FROM THE
FETTERS
OF
CREDIBILITY.
[Download Momo:tempo at…]
Best bit may well have been watching everyone try to process all this while I belted baritone Yiddish lai-lai-lais at them, arms flung wide over the relentless international theatre of The Travel Writer. Was worth it just for that.
Ah. Who wants to fit in anywhere anyway. Not when you're already having fun.
Look out for more live dates soon.
Sort of playing the Day of Hugs festival.
Well, when your publicist asks politely on Monday morning whether you can do a gig on Friday evening, you don't immediately say yes, do you? Not when you'd told the band we all had a couple of months before any live dates and we might as well all go for G&Ts at the Swell Chaps Dead Creative Bar instead of practice.
I wish band life was like this for the Electro Pops Orchestra. Lounging together everywhere in casual sartorial brilliance like an eclectic gang of hipsters in a series of knee-bucklingly-cool Mad Men social scenes. If I can muster the costume and photography budget for the boys, we will spin this fable in the publicity shots.
In reality, the boys are too cool to be just lounging around within reach of Kimmerage on Good Friday evening and I stepped into the fray intrepidly alone. Sans cool gang to do most of the work for me.
But yes, Momo:tempo did play an exclusive pre-season, out-of-the-blue, boutique set at the Friday night warm-up to Dorset's very friendly Day Of Hugs festival, Easter Friday night.
We didn't exactly bill it as a Berk & A Laptop set, but I shall be doing so from now on. Entertainment can, it turns out, sometimes be portable, even for an electronic musician.
What the punters made of Momo's assertive electro-pop cabaret at half-midnight in a blacked out tent in a heavily socialised haze, lord knows. But I'm well used to that look. Somewhere between What the hell is this happening in front of me and: Is it wrong or at least too soon to admit liking this? To say nothing of: Is it me or is that actually tweed?
I may produce a range of Momo-branded tees:
FREE
YOURSELF
FROM THE
FETTERS
OF
CREDIBILITY.
[Download Momo:tempo at…]
Best bit may well have been watching everyone try to process all this while I belted baritone Yiddish lai-lai-lais at them, arms flung wide over the relentless international theatre of The Travel Writer. Was worth it just for that.
Ah. Who wants to fit in anywhere anyway. Not when you're already having fun.
Look out for more live dates soon.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The sea.
The sea.
Sometimes life is like being afloat on a raging sea in a little rowboat, just trying not be washed overboard.
So sang Neil Hannon in a song that has always made me think of my father – a tune called Charmed life.
Dad spent much of his time living with the attitude of someone who considered their life to be a charmed one, and did it with a touch of theatrical cheek reminiscent of this twinkly Divine Comedy song. Shame I never got to play it to him; I remember him for that thankful, upbeat attitude more than I do for the slow debilitation of his last months, or the many trials he took on in his 74 years.
Of course, typical of his instinct to combine a little theatre with a little passion and a little pragmatic risk-dodging was his life-long affinity with tall ships and his apparently equally life-long avoidance of the sea.
---
Now, whether you ever set foot on a real boat or not, Neil's simple lyrical point rings instantly true. Metaphorical boats seem to have figured often in my private journals over many years – despite the fact that my own idle affinity is with flying.
I've spent some of the last few days, however, literally trying not to be washed overboard, somewhere off Plymouth. ..While taking careful extra risks to wash some things very definitely overboard, on the shameful occasions my brave belligerence with the methodical Cardinal Chunder briefly caved.
Four nights bunking in berths with some old friends and bobbing about with a couple of new ones was a healthy alternative to another embattled week in the bunker; I took my journal and jotter pad and didn't feel the urge to touch them all week. Hanging off sheets and hanging onto my breakfast filled each day's imagination sufficiently it seemed.
---
I'm grateful to the good skipper King and the rest of the gang for inviting me help crew a another remarkably organised demi voyage – this time aboard a beamy 44-footer. Because, apart from all the fun and fine cheeses, sailing reminds me of the need to feel a little pushed.
So much of our modern life is comfortable, even when we feel justified in moaning about it. Physical effort is a good perspective-giver – and, much like running, sailing cleverly uses the body to get to the brain. It hands out numerous contemplative life lessons in its careful risks and little co-ordinative demands.
Effort and teamwork dawn on you as costly concepts when a boat needs getting home safely in all weathers and all stomach conditions. If you don't stop mewling over the gunwale and start winching the mainsail to wind, who will?
Another kindly member of the crew, is who. But the fact remains, it makes you realise that you too are another member of the crew.
Naturally, much of the time British weather will pack in far more different life lessons afloat than life itself will dish out in the same time – stretches of plodding calm with little wind in the sails can last for a long time in daily life, but just a morning off the Eddystone lighthouse. And at the end of four days of bare-boat chartering, if you're able to afford it, you're highly likely get to go home to a stable bed and pull the warm sheets over your head.
When life breaks a wave over your bows, it's unlikely to be so easy to dry out, I think.
---
I'm prepping to steal one of the bank holidays to mix an album version of the tunes I've written for Rampage's last major TV production involvement – Lyndey and Blair's Taste Of Greece. As you may have heard me say, it's been a thoroughly positive project for Momo, producing some of our nicest little tunes and I hope the bootleg soundtrack to a few friends' summers this year. And part of the feel-good on screen was young Blair himself – Australian TV chef Lyndey Milan's charming, buoyant son.
An actor and voice-over artist and clearly fit young chap in his late twenties loving life – and bringing a very likeable amount of it with him wherever he goes, it seems. It worked nicely in the show and I've certainly been hoping to meet him for a beer one day.
Today I had an email at tea time that blew the wind out of my sails a little – for in the small hours of Sunday morning, Blair died in Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred hospital. Apparently of acute myeloid leukaemia, more or less out of the blue.
---
Not knowing Blair myself, I can say little. Other than that this is still shocking news. My heart is sincerely with his mother and family, which seems to have included a lot of people.
What can any of us do in our little rowboats, when all we want to do after some weather is get carried away by the tide?
With sadness, I think of Blair and trust that all those who have felt swamped by this week's sudden news will remember the life and the theatre and the fun he brought them sooner than the sadness of his premature leaving.
We make sense of the sea largely by sharing experience. And always we survive the sea by pulling together. Somehow. Despite how we're feeling.
A little helplessly, I say: bon voyage, to a bon viveur.
x
---
Blair Milan: Sydney Morning Herald.
Sometimes life is like being afloat on a raging sea in a little rowboat, just trying not be washed overboard.
So sang Neil Hannon in a song that has always made me think of my father – a tune called Charmed life.
Dad spent much of his time living with the attitude of someone who considered their life to be a charmed one, and did it with a touch of theatrical cheek reminiscent of this twinkly Divine Comedy song. Shame I never got to play it to him; I remember him for that thankful, upbeat attitude more than I do for the slow debilitation of his last months, or the many trials he took on in his 74 years.
Of course, typical of his instinct to combine a little theatre with a little passion and a little pragmatic risk-dodging was his life-long affinity with tall ships and his apparently equally life-long avoidance of the sea.
---
Now, whether you ever set foot on a real boat or not, Neil's simple lyrical point rings instantly true. Metaphorical boats seem to have figured often in my private journals over many years – despite the fact that my own idle affinity is with flying.
I've spent some of the last few days, however, literally trying not to be washed overboard, somewhere off Plymouth. ..While taking careful extra risks to wash some things very definitely overboard, on the shameful occasions my brave belligerence with the methodical Cardinal Chunder briefly caved.
Four nights bunking in berths with some old friends and bobbing about with a couple of new ones was a healthy alternative to another embattled week in the bunker; I took my journal and jotter pad and didn't feel the urge to touch them all week. Hanging off sheets and hanging onto my breakfast filled each day's imagination sufficiently it seemed.
---
I'm grateful to the good skipper King and the rest of the gang for inviting me help crew a another remarkably organised demi voyage – this time aboard a beamy 44-footer. Because, apart from all the fun and fine cheeses, sailing reminds me of the need to feel a little pushed.
So much of our modern life is comfortable, even when we feel justified in moaning about it. Physical effort is a good perspective-giver – and, much like running, sailing cleverly uses the body to get to the brain. It hands out numerous contemplative life lessons in its careful risks and little co-ordinative demands.
Effort and teamwork dawn on you as costly concepts when a boat needs getting home safely in all weathers and all stomach conditions. If you don't stop mewling over the gunwale and start winching the mainsail to wind, who will?
Another kindly member of the crew, is who. But the fact remains, it makes you realise that you too are another member of the crew.
Naturally, much of the time British weather will pack in far more different life lessons afloat than life itself will dish out in the same time – stretches of plodding calm with little wind in the sails can last for a long time in daily life, but just a morning off the Eddystone lighthouse. And at the end of four days of bare-boat chartering, if you're able to afford it, you're highly likely get to go home to a stable bed and pull the warm sheets over your head.
When life breaks a wave over your bows, it's unlikely to be so easy to dry out, I think.
---
I'm prepping to steal one of the bank holidays to mix an album version of the tunes I've written for Rampage's last major TV production involvement – Lyndey and Blair's Taste Of Greece. As you may have heard me say, it's been a thoroughly positive project for Momo, producing some of our nicest little tunes and I hope the bootleg soundtrack to a few friends' summers this year. And part of the feel-good on screen was young Blair himself – Australian TV chef Lyndey Milan's charming, buoyant son.
An actor and voice-over artist and clearly fit young chap in his late twenties loving life – and bringing a very likeable amount of it with him wherever he goes, it seems. It worked nicely in the show and I've certainly been hoping to meet him for a beer one day.
Today I had an email at tea time that blew the wind out of my sails a little – for in the small hours of Sunday morning, Blair died in Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred hospital. Apparently of acute myeloid leukaemia, more or less out of the blue.
---
Not knowing Blair myself, I can say little. Other than that this is still shocking news. My heart is sincerely with his mother and family, which seems to have included a lot of people.
What can any of us do in our little rowboats, when all we want to do after some weather is get carried away by the tide?
With sadness, I think of Blair and trust that all those who have felt swamped by this week's sudden news will remember the life and the theatre and the fun he brought them sooner than the sadness of his premature leaving.
We make sense of the sea largely by sharing experience. And always we survive the sea by pulling together. Somehow. Despite how we're feeling.
A little helplessly, I say: bon voyage, to a bon viveur.
x
---
Blair Milan: Sydney Morning Herald.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Whole minutes of heroic work.
Whole minutes of heroic work.
55 of them. Or was it 53?
To be honest, I was concentrating so carefully on getting over the line without giving up and sauntering over to shake hands with the crowds, I forgot to look at the clock.
And this is how you can tell a winner. As I rounded the last corner and could see the pier, two kilometers in front of me, I realised that it should be just at this point that the instinct to Really Go For It should kick in. The winner would think this without thinking.
Whereas the average me, at this point, will think: "Oh, come on – we've essentially done it; let's give up" and go on to instantly think about cups of tea and a nice sit down. I had to fight this instinct right the way up to the finish line. Crowds leaning over the barriers cheering us all on for the last 100 meters didn't so much spur me on as galvanise the more motivational forces of pride and shame to stop me from pulling up with a sigh and wandering past the clock checking my nails to join the medal queue.
But, yes – on Sunday morning, I joined with a heartwarming Pier Approach-ful of other semi athletes and hobbled round with my gammy leg to complete 10K in 55 minutes. Or possibly 53. But without giving up. A personal best, from someone who hadn't run more than twice round a sports hall without stopping for fluids in his life, a week before the Bournemouth Bay Run. Can't complain.
---
Of course, as I carefully pointed out to Nick, co-founder of Team Daisy, I was clearly showing them some love of significant proportions by turning up and joining in.
Not merely by agreeing to run ten whole kilometers without pulling over for coffee at any point – only pretending to peel off and sprint oh-so-amusingly into Urban Beach as the masses thronged by the famously congenial seafront bar – but more significantly by agreeing to the team dress code. A tee shirt.
Wearing tee shirts with shorts takes me back to games lessons at school. This is not my best look. The fact that I will now be appearing in umpteen photographs looking, at least in my head, like I did in the famously incongruous photo of me sitting next to, I think, Daley Thompson in an inexplicable sponsored sporting something when I was 13 is an act of generosity indeed.
In this absurd captured visual moment, Daley looks muscularly bored and vaguely humiliated by having to sit anywhere in frame with a skinny sweat-slick-fringed sports-shy sweets scoffer who any legendary decathlete should rightly have despised. I'm pretty sure he could sense, with finely-nuanced instinct, the unmistakable presence of the haunted fear of balls and of catching and of winning.
How did an icon of physical prowess and country-representing determination find himself sitting next to the sort of despicable underachiever who would try to worm out of games at every opportunity, play talentlessly in the appalling school band just so he could use his 'music' badge to whiningly jump the queue for lunch, and who would go on to get Bs in Art and English Language O level and be too apathetic to be proud of the two feebly best grades of his life? I almost disrespect him for doing so, had he not had some contractural obligation with his sponsor.
Well, so I tend to feel like that guy on the occasions I'm forced into an ill-fitting tee shirt. And trying to compensate with charisma is an often ill-advised tactic, just making it all worse, somehow. Really, it's best you weren't there.
Still. Despite the inner demons and a dicky pull on the calf before I even crossed the start line, I'd say the chance to be a part of Team Daisy was a great honour. Nick and Emma attracted 20 runners to join in, from clouds of friends across the country who all swooped in to stand with them in their incomprehensibly hideous hour of need. And they've already raised over eight grand for their chosen charity so far.
Sitting in their sumptuous garden that afternoon, marquees groaning with friends and food and music and love, I felt a bit inadequate next to their decathletic-like heroic efforts. How anyone loses their first child in labour and turns it into an athletics team and a garden party and photos in the Echo and nearly ten grand's worth of giving is just humbling. And, in a way, empowering. If you have a will, life can always find a way.
So, as I start a new working week and attempt to scale the mountain again, I shall do so with a little more determination. And a few days of slightly fewer carbs.
And I will remember little Daisy. Lovey, though you didn't even get an hour to make your mark, you've still made a difference to lots of people. And lots of people will remember your name. I'm proud to have worn it on a tee shirt.
Good work, poppet.
---
( PS: Since discovered my chip time was 54:32. Climbed a mighty 18 places from the start to the finish, coming in 571st out of over 1300. ..And go on. Click to pics 1 and 2 on this page of thumbnails for the proof that we were actually there. I should have followed Nick's brother's lead by turning up in a comedy wig and moustache, appearing in the middle of all the team shots and not actually running the race. Seems obvious now. )
55 of them. Or was it 53?
To be honest, I was concentrating so carefully on getting over the line without giving up and sauntering over to shake hands with the crowds, I forgot to look at the clock.
And this is how you can tell a winner. As I rounded the last corner and could see the pier, two kilometers in front of me, I realised that it should be just at this point that the instinct to Really Go For It should kick in. The winner would think this without thinking.
Whereas the average me, at this point, will think: "Oh, come on – we've essentially done it; let's give up" and go on to instantly think about cups of tea and a nice sit down. I had to fight this instinct right the way up to the finish line. Crowds leaning over the barriers cheering us all on for the last 100 meters didn't so much spur me on as galvanise the more motivational forces of pride and shame to stop me from pulling up with a sigh and wandering past the clock checking my nails to join the medal queue.
But, yes – on Sunday morning, I joined with a heartwarming Pier Approach-ful of other semi athletes and hobbled round with my gammy leg to complete 10K in 55 minutes. Or possibly 53. But without giving up. A personal best, from someone who hadn't run more than twice round a sports hall without stopping for fluids in his life, a week before the Bournemouth Bay Run. Can't complain.
---
Of course, as I carefully pointed out to Nick, co-founder of Team Daisy, I was clearly showing them some love of significant proportions by turning up and joining in.
Not merely by agreeing to run ten whole kilometers without pulling over for coffee at any point – only pretending to peel off and sprint oh-so-amusingly into Urban Beach as the masses thronged by the famously congenial seafront bar – but more significantly by agreeing to the team dress code. A tee shirt.
Wearing tee shirts with shorts takes me back to games lessons at school. This is not my best look. The fact that I will now be appearing in umpteen photographs looking, at least in my head, like I did in the famously incongruous photo of me sitting next to, I think, Daley Thompson in an inexplicable sponsored sporting something when I was 13 is an act of generosity indeed.
In this absurd captured visual moment, Daley looks muscularly bored and vaguely humiliated by having to sit anywhere in frame with a skinny sweat-slick-fringed sports-shy sweets scoffer who any legendary decathlete should rightly have despised. I'm pretty sure he could sense, with finely-nuanced instinct, the unmistakable presence of the haunted fear of balls and of catching and of winning.
How did an icon of physical prowess and country-representing determination find himself sitting next to the sort of despicable underachiever who would try to worm out of games at every opportunity, play talentlessly in the appalling school band just so he could use his 'music' badge to whiningly jump the queue for lunch, and who would go on to get Bs in Art and English Language O level and be too apathetic to be proud of the two feebly best grades of his life? I almost disrespect him for doing so, had he not had some contractural obligation with his sponsor.
Well, so I tend to feel like that guy on the occasions I'm forced into an ill-fitting tee shirt. And trying to compensate with charisma is an often ill-advised tactic, just making it all worse, somehow. Really, it's best you weren't there.
Still. Despite the inner demons and a dicky pull on the calf before I even crossed the start line, I'd say the chance to be a part of Team Daisy was a great honour. Nick and Emma attracted 20 runners to join in, from clouds of friends across the country who all swooped in to stand with them in their incomprehensibly hideous hour of need. And they've already raised over eight grand for their chosen charity so far.
Sitting in their sumptuous garden that afternoon, marquees groaning with friends and food and music and love, I felt a bit inadequate next to their decathletic-like heroic efforts. How anyone loses their first child in labour and turns it into an athletics team and a garden party and photos in the Echo and nearly ten grand's worth of giving is just humbling. And, in a way, empowering. If you have a will, life can always find a way.
So, as I start a new working week and attempt to scale the mountain again, I shall do so with a little more determination. And a few days of slightly fewer carbs.
And I will remember little Daisy. Lovey, though you didn't even get an hour to make your mark, you've still made a difference to lots of people. And lots of people will remember your name. I'm proud to have worn it on a tee shirt.
Good work, poppet.
---
( PS: Since discovered my chip time was 54:32. Climbed a mighty 18 places from the start to the finish, coming in 571st out of over 1300. ..And go on. Click to pics 1 and 2 on this page of thumbnails for the proof that we were actually there. I should have followed Nick's brother's lead by turning up in a comedy wig and moustache, appearing in the middle of all the team shots and not actually running the race. Seems obvious now. )
Monday, March 28, 2011
QBST.
QBST.
At last. Sound a little horn that sounds like a bee playing a swing number in a little bee big band that sprays multicoloured pollen from the brass – the winter is over.
Bloody nora. What a long one. How long ago do bright young days of summer seem? The clocks going forward on Sunday morning has given the evenings a properly surreal sense of light and spring jollity, distinctly at odds with all we've become meteorologically accustomed to and with just about everything on the news.
Blossom in the garden? Fragrant fecundity on the air? Grass clippings on the garden path? Has the world gone mad?
Maybe. For in these times of upheaval and change and shifting social points of reference, I may be adding to the entropy of comfort.
Sunday morning I ran eleven kilometers in about an hour.
Me.
I know. Apologies for continuing to upset your understanding of the world.
---
Don't feel too destablised. I plodded unathletically so you wouldn't for a moment feel you couldn't have done a more impressive job of it, had you seen me pass by. But, y'know – it's further than I've ever run before without wising up and jogging off left into a café.
The Bournemouth Bay Run is next Sunday, and at least I now know what the distance will feel like. Of course, I bet I'm the sap who stays back with the two slow ones in solidarity for the team, while the others pee off for the glory. But still, I'm hardly doing this for glory, am I. My surest way to sporting glory is the one I've always instinctively adopted: don't turn up in the first place. Lord, yes.
---
Still, the underlying nagging surreality of just about everything at the moment is there in the gorgeous weather too, it seems. For working here in the new studio with the windows and door open, birds twirpling and insects carousing and blooms swooning in the breeze, does all feel weirdly, oddly, disturbingly akin to working in the original shed – the one in my parents' garden – more than twenty summers ago.
Which doesn't feel much like having a job, it has to be said.
Sure, Typo has me busy with various honest bread & butter projects of graphic design and brand comms, while the wider creative To Do list includes some potentially groovy Momo-ey things ahead. So I am holding onto a sense of adult responsibility by confident fingernails, as always.
But… I dunno. The breeze isn't filling the sails sufficiently at the moment, somehow. I recline at the tiller with a beer and squint up at the masthead as the wind arrow swings lazily against the blue canopy of sky sweeping overhead and it's all very restoratively relaxing – but that drooping mainsail is a bit of a disappointment.
---
I think, in fact, it may turn out to be case of Quarter End Droop. Which there are sadly no mineral supplements you can take for.
What I mean is, that we have just three days left of the first quarter of 2011. Goodness knows why I now think in businessy fourths of the year, given that I work in the garden drawing boxes and playing the keyboard badly, but there we are. I am none-the-less psychologically at the end of a chapter this week. A pretty mentally full and, QED, tiring one.
And, as any professional athlete will tell you – and as I can now say from some experience – when a finishing line rounds into view you can basically start to give up.
Thing is, of course, there is much to be doing – Q2 is idly threatening to be a whole new tank of colourful goop to wade through, for which I must be prepped, trained and ready. Momo has gigs to prepare for in June, and sonic sessions are due to start on the great follow-up LP for Tempo next month – about which I am very excited, naturally. And along with all that hoo-hah goes branding development and video production ideas and band practice and costume hunting and… the whole bally shooting match, potentially. To say nothing of all kinds of other creative funny business to engage in while attempting to pay at least some of my bills with a semblance of dignity.
All of which really could turn 2011 into a slightly crazy year by the time the summer's been shooed away by the next bleak midwinter. Man. I'm tired just writing that paragraph.
But from here in the spring garden, all that seems a long way off and not quite real. As I look up at those sails again, I am reminded of the depressing thought that the only way they will be filled is if I take a very deep breath myself…
Well, while this is a dispiriting thing when you're only a quarter of the way into the course and you're already knackered, I am reminded at least that not only is the sun out and the days longer, my aerobic fitness is improving all the time.
>breathes in sharply<
At last. Sound a little horn that sounds like a bee playing a swing number in a little bee big band that sprays multicoloured pollen from the brass – the winter is over.
Bloody nora. What a long one. How long ago do bright young days of summer seem? The clocks going forward on Sunday morning has given the evenings a properly surreal sense of light and spring jollity, distinctly at odds with all we've become meteorologically accustomed to and with just about everything on the news.
Blossom in the garden? Fragrant fecundity on the air? Grass clippings on the garden path? Has the world gone mad?
Maybe. For in these times of upheaval and change and shifting social points of reference, I may be adding to the entropy of comfort.
Sunday morning I ran eleven kilometers in about an hour.
Me.
I know. Apologies for continuing to upset your understanding of the world.
---
Don't feel too destablised. I plodded unathletically so you wouldn't for a moment feel you couldn't have done a more impressive job of it, had you seen me pass by. But, y'know – it's further than I've ever run before without wising up and jogging off left into a café.
The Bournemouth Bay Run is next Sunday, and at least I now know what the distance will feel like. Of course, I bet I'm the sap who stays back with the two slow ones in solidarity for the team, while the others pee off for the glory. But still, I'm hardly doing this for glory, am I. My surest way to sporting glory is the one I've always instinctively adopted: don't turn up in the first place. Lord, yes.
---
Still, the underlying nagging surreality of just about everything at the moment is there in the gorgeous weather too, it seems. For working here in the new studio with the windows and door open, birds twirpling and insects carousing and blooms swooning in the breeze, does all feel weirdly, oddly, disturbingly akin to working in the original shed – the one in my parents' garden – more than twenty summers ago.
Which doesn't feel much like having a job, it has to be said.
Sure, Typo has me busy with various honest bread & butter projects of graphic design and brand comms, while the wider creative To Do list includes some potentially groovy Momo-ey things ahead. So I am holding onto a sense of adult responsibility by confident fingernails, as always.
But… I dunno. The breeze isn't filling the sails sufficiently at the moment, somehow. I recline at the tiller with a beer and squint up at the masthead as the wind arrow swings lazily against the blue canopy of sky sweeping overhead and it's all very restoratively relaxing – but that drooping mainsail is a bit of a disappointment.
---
I think, in fact, it may turn out to be case of Quarter End Droop. Which there are sadly no mineral supplements you can take for.
What I mean is, that we have just three days left of the first quarter of 2011. Goodness knows why I now think in businessy fourths of the year, given that I work in the garden drawing boxes and playing the keyboard badly, but there we are. I am none-the-less psychologically at the end of a chapter this week. A pretty mentally full and, QED, tiring one.
And, as any professional athlete will tell you – and as I can now say from some experience – when a finishing line rounds into view you can basically start to give up.
Thing is, of course, there is much to be doing – Q2 is idly threatening to be a whole new tank of colourful goop to wade through, for which I must be prepped, trained and ready. Momo has gigs to prepare for in June, and sonic sessions are due to start on the great follow-up LP for Tempo next month – about which I am very excited, naturally. And along with all that hoo-hah goes branding development and video production ideas and band practice and costume hunting and… the whole bally shooting match, potentially. To say nothing of all kinds of other creative funny business to engage in while attempting to pay at least some of my bills with a semblance of dignity.
All of which really could turn 2011 into a slightly crazy year by the time the summer's been shooed away by the next bleak midwinter. Man. I'm tired just writing that paragraph.
But from here in the spring garden, all that seems a long way off and not quite real. As I look up at those sails again, I am reminded of the depressing thought that the only way they will be filled is if I take a very deep breath myself…
Well, while this is a dispiriting thing when you're only a quarter of the way into the course and you're already knackered, I am reminded at least that not only is the sun out and the days longer, my aerobic fitness is improving all the time.
>breathes in sharply<
Monday, March 21, 2011
Comic Sans Relief
Comic Sans Relief
This is one of the reasons why I shall always love graphic design:
http://crmag.co.uk/hgAR3d
This is one of the reasons why I shall always love graphic design:
http://crmag.co.uk/hgAR3d
Whelm meant.
Whelm meant.
How whelmed are you?
You can see where I'm going with this. Are you over or under?
I for one currently feel suspended in a sort of twilight world weirdness, by being a little overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. You'd think this might cancel out into a happy equilibrium of being comfortably whelmed. Well whelmed, if you like. But, ah, if only us human persons were simpler creatures.
Actually, give us a few simple things and I think we are simple creatures – a tickle behind the ear when we fancy it, a regular spot of tasty tucker and a new Ikea book case to doze in front of and many a human would be docile and complicit, I'm sure. Being fairly sure the house won't explode inwards on top of them might help the siesta too.
But right now, I'm caught in this nether world of mute stress. And I wonder if it's because I may be currently thinking about things at too many levels at once. ..See? There's another one.
Not clever levels, you understand. Even D:Ream's enthusiastic keyboard player could quickly lose me, had he gone too much further over the event horizon in lastnight's Wonders of the universe. Properly clever I am not.
But from pictures around the Pacific rim, to voices across the Middle East, to the backdrop of our national story, to the tapestry of our little town, to the seismic testimonies of the individual lives around us and the daily tasks ahead of us, I could easily feel so overwhelmed by the complex narrative of everything that I feel practically powerless. Reactively demotivated. Sofa bound.
How the hell would I cope with worrying about my children on top of all that?
Probably the same way I cope with worrying about my social life – by putting all my efforts into keeping the near-impossible equilibrium of trying to get them to laugh and trying to get them to stop laughing. That might keep me mentally occupied until they left for uni. Not that they ever would.
Honestly, I am considering never leaving my little creative bunker.
After all the talking and thinking and feeling and not feeling and making tea and humming and hahing and pacing and list-making and pencil end-chewing and hand-wringing and even bell-ringing – what to actually DO? Where, I mean, to start? ..With… everything.
Bah.
If anyone has any good ideas about where I can actually turn out to be any ruddy practical use, would they forward them on, please. Otherwise, I shall continue to stand back and do my bit by trying not to be some clumsy oaf in the way of all the real humanitarian talent. Ask me to pass something to you. I might manage that. ..So long as you explain clearly what it is and where I can find it and what the difference is between my arse and my elbow.
And this is probably what it means to feel whelmed. For the ancient word actually means to be capsized. Taking shelter under your upturned boat, in fact.
Except.
Except I have actually decided to cautiously crawl out from under my upturned life raft and be a bit Forest Gump about the whole thing – by mutely starting to run.
A little person called Daisy will be on my mind as I run, and though running is not much practical help for anything, it is at least a response that involves the heart as well as the hands and feet.
http://www.justgiving.com/timo-peach/
You know CPR, right?
How whelmed are you?
You can see where I'm going with this. Are you over or under?
I for one currently feel suspended in a sort of twilight world weirdness, by being a little overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. You'd think this might cancel out into a happy equilibrium of being comfortably whelmed. Well whelmed, if you like. But, ah, if only us human persons were simpler creatures.
Actually, give us a few simple things and I think we are simple creatures – a tickle behind the ear when we fancy it, a regular spot of tasty tucker and a new Ikea book case to doze in front of and many a human would be docile and complicit, I'm sure. Being fairly sure the house won't explode inwards on top of them might help the siesta too.
But right now, I'm caught in this nether world of mute stress. And I wonder if it's because I may be currently thinking about things at too many levels at once. ..See? There's another one.
Not clever levels, you understand. Even D:Ream's enthusiastic keyboard player could quickly lose me, had he gone too much further over the event horizon in lastnight's Wonders of the universe. Properly clever I am not.
But from pictures around the Pacific rim, to voices across the Middle East, to the backdrop of our national story, to the tapestry of our little town, to the seismic testimonies of the individual lives around us and the daily tasks ahead of us, I could easily feel so overwhelmed by the complex narrative of everything that I feel practically powerless. Reactively demotivated. Sofa bound.
How the hell would I cope with worrying about my children on top of all that?
Probably the same way I cope with worrying about my social life – by putting all my efforts into keeping the near-impossible equilibrium of trying to get them to laugh and trying to get them to stop laughing. That might keep me mentally occupied until they left for uni. Not that they ever would.
Honestly, I am considering never leaving my little creative bunker.
After all the talking and thinking and feeling and not feeling and making tea and humming and hahing and pacing and list-making and pencil end-chewing and hand-wringing and even bell-ringing – what to actually DO? Where, I mean, to start? ..With… everything.
Bah.
If anyone has any good ideas about where I can actually turn out to be any ruddy practical use, would they forward them on, please. Otherwise, I shall continue to stand back and do my bit by trying not to be some clumsy oaf in the way of all the real humanitarian talent. Ask me to pass something to you. I might manage that. ..So long as you explain clearly what it is and where I can find it and what the difference is between my arse and my elbow.
And this is probably what it means to feel whelmed. For the ancient word actually means to be capsized. Taking shelter under your upturned boat, in fact.
Except.
Except I have actually decided to cautiously crawl out from under my upturned life raft and be a bit Forest Gump about the whole thing – by mutely starting to run.
A little person called Daisy will be on my mind as I run, and though running is not much practical help for anything, it is at least a response that involves the heart as well as the hands and feet.
http://www.justgiving.com/timo-peach/
You know CPR, right?
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Taking the plunge.
Taking the plunge.
I have, it seems. And only six weeks late.
Now, now – don't come over all Kevin McCloud on me; what's a few more days of going quietly demented in a cluttered upstairs room? Mr Rochester's misses did it happily for years without anyone finding out. I'm confident I had a good fortnight left in me before I'd set fire to myself in the attic.
But ring out the damp towels and perhaps a few bells, for I am in no need of being hosed down – I have taken the above mentioned plunge and am writing this from the glorious and modest new environs of Momo 2.0, with the first fresh cafetiere duely decanted.
The Momo Grados, the durbek I haggled for very ineffectually in Cairo and the old Illy tin of pens are all symbolically in place around the new working space – and I've played the first musical sounds through the studio speakers. I chose a little Horrace Silver, to make the place sound instantly cool and chic and sophisticated. In the forlorn hope that this will all one day rub off on the puttering boob swinging around in his chair in the middle of all this pre-ambling ambience.
I'm in.
Yep, the old desks will need replacing and we have yet to install the ordered chaos of a wall of shelves, to say nothing of anywhere for you to sit were you to drop in, or of any of the half ton of creative crap still strewn around the surprisingly large new bedroom upstairs. But still, like Flynn, I am in. And typin'.
---
If I don't shatter something expensive and somehow irreplaceable on this very sophisticated slate floor within the week, I shall ask someone high up somewhere for some sort of certificate of unbelievableness. And also for a few smart rugs, while I'm asking.
And I have yet to test the fortitude of the sound restrictive technology built into this little music fortress for the sake of the neighbours – tootling jazz tunes don't really push the bottom end. But here on a Sunday morning, I haven't the courage to take Deadmau5 out of the safe sonic confines of the little CD radio player we've had him in during decorating; the big monitors will have to wait for a dead Tuesday afternoon or something before being warmed up any.
Still, all this fussing and fuddling about aside, I shall be coming to work tomorrow morning for the first time in eight and a half years to a working environment that looks half way professional.
I do, yes, miss the bright orange room I played in for a decade. But don't kid yourself any more than I will be that this very slightly more grown-up-looking space will not be a glorified play room. On the contrary – stand back, this is what I do.
---
First bit of work won't be musical, however. If I can relocate my missing director from his lengthy travels around the globe, I believe we have a signature tune to finish for our new travel series, but otherwise the next important thing on the Momo:tempo agenda is… a new album.
Yes. Believe it, giddy fan. Have a sit down.
And yes. I. Am. Excited.
But… Before making a sonic start on all that, I suspect there is a bit more notebook-carrying & scribbling to do, as well as a spot of new-software-installation-nightmaring to do.
And besides, today I am modestly attempting to develop a proposal document for an entire arts festival.
I tease with this, of course. And yes, of course, it's an idea with such sizeable practical ramifications that the chances of I and the fledgling team gathering around it blanching at the delivery schedule of it at some point early on are very high indeed.
Yet. Sometimes you feel compelled to give up a few weekends to build an ark in the garden.
Nope. No bloody antelope usually turn up, I know. Which is usually a good thing if alligators and the entire arachnid family also follow suit.
Then again, whether it's been raining a lot lately or not, there is simply a time occasionally to take the plunge and dive right in. The time for piddling in the shallow end is over. It is time to jump over the side.
..Now. If someone would like to tell me what all this means, you shall find me in the kitchen making some more coffee and choosing background music.
Welcome to the future, gang.
---
I have, it seems. And only six weeks late.
Now, now – don't come over all Kevin McCloud on me; what's a few more days of going quietly demented in a cluttered upstairs room? Mr Rochester's misses did it happily for years without anyone finding out. I'm confident I had a good fortnight left in me before I'd set fire to myself in the attic.
But ring out the damp towels and perhaps a few bells, for I am in no need of being hosed down – I have taken the above mentioned plunge and am writing this from the glorious and modest new environs of Momo 2.0, with the first fresh cafetiere duely decanted.
The Momo Grados, the durbek I haggled for very ineffectually in Cairo and the old Illy tin of pens are all symbolically in place around the new working space – and I've played the first musical sounds through the studio speakers. I chose a little Horrace Silver, to make the place sound instantly cool and chic and sophisticated. In the forlorn hope that this will all one day rub off on the puttering boob swinging around in his chair in the middle of all this pre-ambling ambience.
I'm in.
Yep, the old desks will need replacing and we have yet to install the ordered chaos of a wall of shelves, to say nothing of anywhere for you to sit were you to drop in, or of any of the half ton of creative crap still strewn around the surprisingly large new bedroom upstairs. But still, like Flynn, I am in. And typin'.
---
If I don't shatter something expensive and somehow irreplaceable on this very sophisticated slate floor within the week, I shall ask someone high up somewhere for some sort of certificate of unbelievableness. And also for a few smart rugs, while I'm asking.
And I have yet to test the fortitude of the sound restrictive technology built into this little music fortress for the sake of the neighbours – tootling jazz tunes don't really push the bottom end. But here on a Sunday morning, I haven't the courage to take Deadmau5 out of the safe sonic confines of the little CD radio player we've had him in during decorating; the big monitors will have to wait for a dead Tuesday afternoon or something before being warmed up any.
Still, all this fussing and fuddling about aside, I shall be coming to work tomorrow morning for the first time in eight and a half years to a working environment that looks half way professional.
I do, yes, miss the bright orange room I played in for a decade. But don't kid yourself any more than I will be that this very slightly more grown-up-looking space will not be a glorified play room. On the contrary – stand back, this is what I do.
---
First bit of work won't be musical, however. If I can relocate my missing director from his lengthy travels around the globe, I believe we have a signature tune to finish for our new travel series, but otherwise the next important thing on the Momo:tempo agenda is… a new album.
Yes. Believe it, giddy fan. Have a sit down.
And yes. I. Am. Excited.
But… Before making a sonic start on all that, I suspect there is a bit more notebook-carrying & scribbling to do, as well as a spot of new-software-installation-nightmaring to do.
And besides, today I am modestly attempting to develop a proposal document for an entire arts festival.
I tease with this, of course. And yes, of course, it's an idea with such sizeable practical ramifications that the chances of I and the fledgling team gathering around it blanching at the delivery schedule of it at some point early on are very high indeed.
Yet. Sometimes you feel compelled to give up a few weekends to build an ark in the garden.
Nope. No bloody antelope usually turn up, I know. Which is usually a good thing if alligators and the entire arachnid family also follow suit.
Then again, whether it's been raining a lot lately or not, there is simply a time occasionally to take the plunge and dive right in. The time for piddling in the shallow end is over. It is time to jump over the side.
..Now. If someone would like to tell me what all this means, you shall find me in the kitchen making some more coffee and choosing background music.
Welcome to the future, gang.
---
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
End of the beginning.
End of the beginning.
I am onto disk four.
Over the last couple of days I have, between working on comparatively noddy music cues of my own, been working through the quadruple box set of John Barry: The Collection.
Latter-day Bond composer and arch Twitter wit, David Arnold, referred to him as The Guvnor. Many called him a legend. His family and friends simply knew him, I think, as a very funny Yorkshireman.
I know him only through his music, as the bloke who first managed to intrigue a rosy-cheeked childhood Timmy with the idea of actually liking orchestral music. Took a long while, but it was John Barry's scores that helped sow the seed of understanding for me, I think.
And I guess, if we know someone only through their art, then their death can't connect too fully; their art is still with us. Still, the idea of such a character and talent and big name of British cinema gone through a heart attack this week is sad news.
---
What was it? In the cloud of acclaim that swells around many an accomplished obituary, what was it about John Barry's music that could stand a chance of connecting with a thirteen year-old filling his head with Street Sounds electro and Kraftwerk, for example? What made him 'great'?
Five Oscars, four Grammys, the odd BAFTA and Golden Globe, and decades'-worth of iconic film names against your own – including eleven Bond flicks - might make you feel pretty great. By all accounts, John didn't change with the success. Perhaps true Yorkshiremen don't, whichever part of the world they live and work in.
I think, trying to analyse it in the back of my head since Monday's news, it comes down to one very vague word: atmosphere.
John Barry did that magical, mercurial thing so essential to film music, and any affecting music – he created atmosphere.
---
Yes, but how?
I guess it starts with a natural and – if I dare say such a casually diffident thing about such an arguably beyond-angelic human gift – reasonably straightforward ability to write tunes. Barry always created very recognisable melodies and comfortably flowing themes.
Despite the 20th century's laudably conceptual efforts to bash a good tune to bits in the desire to see music, as everything, in a new way – and as much to simply overthrow the naff, I should think – the power of a good tune is as strong as ever. And crucially, it is often at its strongest in the context of a dark, flickering movie theatre.
There is something weirdly compelling and affecting about a ruddy great riff repeated uncomplicatedly or a huge theme turned over and over against pictures on a big screen in the isolation of I Payed HOW Much For This Ticket?! attention. It gets to you. And the simpler, the apparently often better. Weirdly, given how much you're giving it attention.
I suspect strongly that Barry knew this. And I suspect it was on instinct when he looked at a movie scene, as much as any conscious strategy as a composer.
His arrangements of his simple tunes are always elegantly calm. Even when making a drama. Everything sits in its place in the orchestral pallet in a very considered way. Everything feels reassuringly deliberate.
Perhaps you could argue that his music is a pleasing synthesis of old fashioned and contemporary, which to audiences in the late sixties and seventies worked a particular kind of magic – since taken a little more for granted.
His ability to create something musical you could take out of the theatre with you – a hummable, recognisable theme – is old school, but his lack of snobbery in the face of a consistent time signature or a repeated phrase, more in keeping with a bit of pop music, is of its more modern time. He may not have been drawn to make arch modernist machine-like music like a contemporary such as Philip Glass, but Philip Glass is an acquired taste to say the least. John Barry makes sense to everyone.
---
Melody, clarity, consideration, structure. Fine, fine and blah, blah. Composers stuff – excuse me while I YAWWWN. But where is the spark of magic? What makes it, if there is one? Where am I hearing it, at least?
I think for me it might turn out to be something buried in the man's psyche as a jazz musician.
Yes. Everyone likes to claim or demonstrate the understanding to bestow the influence of jazz. Everyone secretly wants to be a public clever-dick. Lord knows I do.
But it's simply true that Barry was, as a musician, a horn player. And no-one plays the horn without being surrounded by an awareness of jazz.
Interesting then, isn't it, that one of the signature sounds in John Barry's arrangements is the strings - it's those strings, baby. They speak for him all the time. He puts those big tunes right up top in the mouths of the strings. Not the horns. Not usually. Why?
It comes back, I suspect, to his presumably innate sense of atmosphere. Strings are the orchestral cat-gut short-cut to atmosphere and emotion. They just are.
But when you put that together with a very calm clear structure of sound AND an understanding of how jazz harmonies zing like no others, you have the ingredients for some true cinemagic.
---
Though I risk boring you sideways with the little 'knowledge' I have on any technical subject whatsoever, it is worth noting that jazz likes things to clash. Notes in particular. Personalities often. Budgets and expenses almost always.
But on the piano keyboard at least, you can see the energy a clash of notes creates. A typical 'jazz' chord essentially shoves in a fistful of notes in the middle. But it's because those notes in the middle, making a brain-tingling something are actually notes at the top, but dropped down into the energy of the chord.
Whuh?
Scales. Doh Rey Me Far So etc. A musical key has eight normal notes in it from one octave up to the next. If you number those notes, a typical pop music chord uses notes 1, 3 and 5 to make a basic, essential harmony. Ta-daaahh. Music. Harmony. The very outer gates of writing a tune.
Now, up top, notes 6, 7, even 9 – yes, 9 – start to add a weird flavour to the harmonies. They don't play ball with the main notes. They sort of subvert them. Accent them. Annoy them, but tickle the brain. And they unlock different progressions of notes and harmonies that start to do arguably more interesting things than safer pop harmonies.
There's a whole debate there. And ultimately, you're sometimes in a conspicuously jazz mood – say, when making a cafetierre and reaching for am intellectual-looking book… as if you ever get time for that – and sometimes you want to be able belt out a karaoke chorus. It's all good.
The relevance of all this unschooled music waffle is that John Barry took some of those troublesome, jossly, Jolsony, clashing jazzy notes out of the scrum of a smokey piano chord, scrubbed them off, suited them up, smartened their hair, straightened their bow ties and placed them elegantly into the mouths of the strings.
When everything is calmly, harmoniously structured, to very deliberately and with no fuss have the violins descend semitones or sustain the minor seventh, creates tension. A very controlled, deliberate kind of tension.
It creates atmosphere.
Jazz, respectfully subverting the mainstream.
And just occasionally doing something bare-facedly sassy with the horns section as well. I mean, come on – James Bond's own theme is a sudden riot of swing chutzpah. It's bonkers. And it grins from ear to ear.
And, though Monty Norman's name is against that particular piece of legendary music, I suspect privately he simply wrote the almost-naff guitar riff. I'd put money on the belief that it was John Barry who wrote the swinging blast of horn section finery that kicks in after it.
Masterfully instinctive. Warmly clever. Reassuringly witty. Universally likeable.
What a legacy to leave behind.
---
As I consider all this at the start of a new creative year for me, I am beginning to wonder whether my own staggeringly more humble musical abilities and achievements are facing an end too. The end of their beginning.
Or are we ever past the beginning of our work and learning?
I don't know. As a musical great closes his book of work, I feel like I've barely opened mine, even after all this time.
Or maybe it's just that listening to his music makes me feel as excited as a kid all over again. I can certainly feel quite an atmosphere.
John Barry – a creative inspiration and example. Here's to the future.
I am onto disk four.
Over the last couple of days I have, between working on comparatively noddy music cues of my own, been working through the quadruple box set of John Barry: The Collection.
Latter-day Bond composer and arch Twitter wit, David Arnold, referred to him as The Guvnor. Many called him a legend. His family and friends simply knew him, I think, as a very funny Yorkshireman.
I know him only through his music, as the bloke who first managed to intrigue a rosy-cheeked childhood Timmy with the idea of actually liking orchestral music. Took a long while, but it was John Barry's scores that helped sow the seed of understanding for me, I think.
And I guess, if we know someone only through their art, then their death can't connect too fully; their art is still with us. Still, the idea of such a character and talent and big name of British cinema gone through a heart attack this week is sad news.
---
What was it? In the cloud of acclaim that swells around many an accomplished obituary, what was it about John Barry's music that could stand a chance of connecting with a thirteen year-old filling his head with Street Sounds electro and Kraftwerk, for example? What made him 'great'?
Five Oscars, four Grammys, the odd BAFTA and Golden Globe, and decades'-worth of iconic film names against your own – including eleven Bond flicks - might make you feel pretty great. By all accounts, John didn't change with the success. Perhaps true Yorkshiremen don't, whichever part of the world they live and work in.
I think, trying to analyse it in the back of my head since Monday's news, it comes down to one very vague word: atmosphere.
John Barry did that magical, mercurial thing so essential to film music, and any affecting music – he created atmosphere.
---
Yes, but how?
I guess it starts with a natural and – if I dare say such a casually diffident thing about such an arguably beyond-angelic human gift – reasonably straightforward ability to write tunes. Barry always created very recognisable melodies and comfortably flowing themes.
Despite the 20th century's laudably conceptual efforts to bash a good tune to bits in the desire to see music, as everything, in a new way – and as much to simply overthrow the naff, I should think – the power of a good tune is as strong as ever. And crucially, it is often at its strongest in the context of a dark, flickering movie theatre.
There is something weirdly compelling and affecting about a ruddy great riff repeated uncomplicatedly or a huge theme turned over and over against pictures on a big screen in the isolation of I Payed HOW Much For This Ticket?! attention. It gets to you. And the simpler, the apparently often better. Weirdly, given how much you're giving it attention.
I suspect strongly that Barry knew this. And I suspect it was on instinct when he looked at a movie scene, as much as any conscious strategy as a composer.
His arrangements of his simple tunes are always elegantly calm. Even when making a drama. Everything sits in its place in the orchestral pallet in a very considered way. Everything feels reassuringly deliberate.
Perhaps you could argue that his music is a pleasing synthesis of old fashioned and contemporary, which to audiences in the late sixties and seventies worked a particular kind of magic – since taken a little more for granted.
His ability to create something musical you could take out of the theatre with you – a hummable, recognisable theme – is old school, but his lack of snobbery in the face of a consistent time signature or a repeated phrase, more in keeping with a bit of pop music, is of its more modern time. He may not have been drawn to make arch modernist machine-like music like a contemporary such as Philip Glass, but Philip Glass is an acquired taste to say the least. John Barry makes sense to everyone.
---
Melody, clarity, consideration, structure. Fine, fine and blah, blah. Composers stuff – excuse me while I YAWWWN. But where is the spark of magic? What makes it, if there is one? Where am I hearing it, at least?
I think for me it might turn out to be something buried in the man's psyche as a jazz musician.
Yes. Everyone likes to claim or demonstrate the understanding to bestow the influence of jazz. Everyone secretly wants to be a public clever-dick. Lord knows I do.
But it's simply true that Barry was, as a musician, a horn player. And no-one plays the horn without being surrounded by an awareness of jazz.
Interesting then, isn't it, that one of the signature sounds in John Barry's arrangements is the strings - it's those strings, baby. They speak for him all the time. He puts those big tunes right up top in the mouths of the strings. Not the horns. Not usually. Why?
It comes back, I suspect, to his presumably innate sense of atmosphere. Strings are the orchestral cat-gut short-cut to atmosphere and emotion. They just are.
But when you put that together with a very calm clear structure of sound AND an understanding of how jazz harmonies zing like no others, you have the ingredients for some true cinemagic.
---
Though I risk boring you sideways with the little 'knowledge' I have on any technical subject whatsoever, it is worth noting that jazz likes things to clash. Notes in particular. Personalities often. Budgets and expenses almost always.
But on the piano keyboard at least, you can see the energy a clash of notes creates. A typical 'jazz' chord essentially shoves in a fistful of notes in the middle. But it's because those notes in the middle, making a brain-tingling something are actually notes at the top, but dropped down into the energy of the chord.
Whuh?
Scales. Doh Rey Me Far So etc. A musical key has eight normal notes in it from one octave up to the next. If you number those notes, a typical pop music chord uses notes 1, 3 and 5 to make a basic, essential harmony. Ta-daaahh. Music. Harmony. The very outer gates of writing a tune.
Now, up top, notes 6, 7, even 9 – yes, 9 – start to add a weird flavour to the harmonies. They don't play ball with the main notes. They sort of subvert them. Accent them. Annoy them, but tickle the brain. And they unlock different progressions of notes and harmonies that start to do arguably more interesting things than safer pop harmonies.
There's a whole debate there. And ultimately, you're sometimes in a conspicuously jazz mood – say, when making a cafetierre and reaching for am intellectual-looking book… as if you ever get time for that – and sometimes you want to be able belt out a karaoke chorus. It's all good.
The relevance of all this unschooled music waffle is that John Barry took some of those troublesome, jossly, Jolsony, clashing jazzy notes out of the scrum of a smokey piano chord, scrubbed them off, suited them up, smartened their hair, straightened their bow ties and placed them elegantly into the mouths of the strings.
When everything is calmly, harmoniously structured, to very deliberately and with no fuss have the violins descend semitones or sustain the minor seventh, creates tension. A very controlled, deliberate kind of tension.
It creates atmosphere.
Jazz, respectfully subverting the mainstream.
And just occasionally doing something bare-facedly sassy with the horns section as well. I mean, come on – James Bond's own theme is a sudden riot of swing chutzpah. It's bonkers. And it grins from ear to ear.
And, though Monty Norman's name is against that particular piece of legendary music, I suspect privately he simply wrote the almost-naff guitar riff. I'd put money on the belief that it was John Barry who wrote the swinging blast of horn section finery that kicks in after it.
Masterfully instinctive. Warmly clever. Reassuringly witty. Universally likeable.
What a legacy to leave behind.
---
As I consider all this at the start of a new creative year for me, I am beginning to wonder whether my own staggeringly more humble musical abilities and achievements are facing an end too. The end of their beginning.
Or are we ever past the beginning of our work and learning?
I don't know. As a musical great closes his book of work, I feel like I've barely opened mine, even after all this time.
Or maybe it's just that listening to his music makes me feel as excited as a kid all over again. I can certainly feel quite an atmosphere.
John Barry – a creative inspiration and example. Here's to the future.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Take the A game.
Take the A game.
I did my best at circuits tonight. Made a bit of effort. Gently pushed myself to reclaim some of the positive mental altitude after a slough of December.
I came home and gave a little speech, inspired by a gently inspiring chum in a quiet, bohemian pub lastnight, about bringing my A game to things from now on.
I received a phone call less than five minutes later asking why I wasn't at a meeting. With the minutes from the last one. Everyone was there. Waiting.
What we've learned from all this: Bring your A game or don't bring yourself. And don't be a natural and complete bum head.
Good work so far, 2011.
---
I did my best at circuits tonight. Made a bit of effort. Gently pushed myself to reclaim some of the positive mental altitude after a slough of December.
I received a phone call less than five minutes later asking why I wasn't at a meeting. With the minutes from the last one. Everyone was there. Waiting.
What we've learned from all this: Bring your A game or don't bring yourself. And don't be a natural and complete bum head.
Good work so far, 2011.
---
Friday, December 31, 2010
Big life.
Big life.
On this morning’s Desert Island Disks, the very last one of 2010, Kirsty Young asked her castaway, shoeless sixties pop soul singer, Sandy Shaw, whether she considered herself to have a healthy ego.
Sandy replied: “Oh definitely. My husband says it’s the size of a good few solar systems. But I prefer to call it my big life.”
Having finally caught up with the last ever season of bonkers science fantasy TV convolution, Lost, the night before leaving to spend new year with loved ones in Sussex, I wonder if any ponderings of my own life on a desert island – whistfully wandering barefoot along the beach when I should be fashioning something vital, probably – would turn out to be not so much black smoke and broken mirrors but a realisation that a lot of pointless running around disappointingly wound up with me simply being dead for a lot longer than I’d realised.
If so, can I state now that I’ve long had my suspicions.
Thinking of loved ones who’ve said goodbye to other loved ones this Christmas, however, quietly asks the question again: How big will your own life adventure have turned out to be?
How big will you have made it?
---
Those important figures who’ve left some people who figure pretty importantly in my own life at the end of these twelve months happened to demonstrate something of a smallness of ego, actually. Without diminishing the complexity of the stories they left behind. You don’t always have to belt out a show tune in a spotlight to grab the emotional attention. A quietness falling silent can leave a deafening emptyness.
At the end of a difficult year for countless people in as many different ways, I wonder how easy it will be to party tonight – the turning of it from an end into a beginning.
Considering 2010 here on the last day of December, I’m not sure how much the Big Society has changed modern Britain for the better yet, for example. We’re only six months into our bold coalition vision, but I think our annual dream of a Victorian-looking Christmas comes complete this year with the added realism of many of us pulling suitably austere expressions of repressed misery as we consider the workhouse and child labour and dying of something ghastly in a bitterly cold room.
Though you can take an analogy too far – the UK is currently doing all this without the backdrop of a burgeoning manufacturing base.
No, I think what we all desperately need now is a more precious comodity; a spot of sunshine. After starting and ending 2010 with blizzards and closed roads and heating bills we can’t afford, it’s surely time for some metaphorical and literal sunshine.
And I’d like to help.
---
Do you remember what happened this year in between all the freezing fun?
Go on, think. Bet you’d forgotten.
A summer. One of the best we’ve had in the UK for a decade at least. Really. We did.
Back in June I wrote that we were in the middle of:
“..a summer so hot and sunny and summery, it’s blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. ..Now? How long ago does that feel? We’ve been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There’s a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks’ takeaway Chardonnay glasses.”
Now? How long ago does that feel?
Thing is, as I end the year, I am straining to inhabit a creatively summery vibe – which I hope to be able to pass on to you soon. For I’m writing the little score to a TV show set in a part of the world I now feel astonished to have never visited – Greece.
I mean, why have I never seen this ancient heart of Europe for myself? How have I never pottered from the Parthenon to an Athenean taverna, or driven the meandering hills of the Polipanese, or dozed on the beachfront of an Agean island?
Well, musically, I sort of have now. Without leaving Southbourne. Thanks to Benny and the gang at Rampage, who’ve been making this little odyssey for an Australian production team. And I wish I could post up some of the results right away, to warm your winter blues. Try to hang on until the end of January if you can.
---
Ending the year on such a musically sunny note forces me to remember through the murk of a chilly first winter in a new home that still feels like someone else’s domus and into an anno-more-positivus-than-I-may-compos. ..Though I think I may be getting my cod ancient Greek muddled up with my cod Latin there. But run with the philosophy of the precarious segue, polit.
For I should remember that for Momo, 2010 has been significant. I confess to ending the year too pooped to party-pop, after twelve months of draining the emotional batteries a bit, beaving away in a dark room alone rather far from sunlight.
But if I can steal two seconds over the To Do list-heavy Christmas week to consider what’s happened this year, I should possibly feel nothing less than excited.
For, though my little creative life looks no bigger than it was twelve months ago, with no killer punch breakthroughs to headline a Christmas letter with, I will wake up in 2011 not where I was.
Momo:tempo – music – has filled most of my agenda since January. If not my wallet. Though it’s contributed to that too.
And the real contribution I should understand it’s made has been to the rather more valuable treasure pocket of my soul.
No one may be listening, but I am doing what my soul has told me to do all my adult life – make sweet little tunes. I’ve made a lot of them this year, as I listen to a bootleg compilation of some of the sweetest moments to my ear, as I continue to search for that musical sweet spot. I can’t quite imagine our home without so many of them that didn’t exist as we celebrated Christmas 2009. Ask me for a secret copy if you fancy.
But perhaps the thing to most treasure is that I no longer need to worry that ‘nobody is listening’ or ever say such a thing. For a handful of people who mean a great deal to me now are listening. Intently. And I’m not sure what else might matter to a creative than that; one or two of you will ask for that bootleg Momo:tempo 2010 sampler, I know you will. And I can’t say thankyou enough.
---
2011 will be another hard working one for Momo. But as we finally paint the walls and plug in the electrics of a symbolically brand new studio this week, I can’t help wondering if this new year that we’ll be hugging in tonight won’t be a big one for our household at least. One with adventures in it we can’t foretell.
As I think of those who won’t be with us this new year, and hold tight for a moment those who will be, I hope to say with spotlight off and ego sensibly compact and travel-sized, that I am looking forward to doing something partly inspired by them all which makes life as big as I know how to make it – create a little sunshine in the gloom.
I wonder if 2011 will be, in some new ways, about bringing people together to make a little sunshine.
I can’t say I’d ever wish to have romantic notions about being marooned. About being deserted inescapably. But getting washed up on a foreign beach with eachother is something quite different. The start of what the process of living life is really all about – so raise your glass to them with me:
To new adventures, gang.
x
On this morning’s Desert Island Disks, the very last one of 2010, Kirsty Young asked her castaway, shoeless sixties pop soul singer, Sandy Shaw, whether she considered herself to have a healthy ego.
Sandy replied: “Oh definitely. My husband says it’s the size of a good few solar systems. But I prefer to call it my big life.”
Having finally caught up with the last ever season of bonkers science fantasy TV convolution, Lost, the night before leaving to spend new year with loved ones in Sussex, I wonder if any ponderings of my own life on a desert island – whistfully wandering barefoot along the beach when I should be fashioning something vital, probably – would turn out to be not so much black smoke and broken mirrors but a realisation that a lot of pointless running around disappointingly wound up with me simply being dead for a lot longer than I’d realised.
If so, can I state now that I’ve long had my suspicions.
Thinking of loved ones who’ve said goodbye to other loved ones this Christmas, however, quietly asks the question again: How big will your own life adventure have turned out to be?
How big will you have made it?
---
Those important figures who’ve left some people who figure pretty importantly in my own life at the end of these twelve months happened to demonstrate something of a smallness of ego, actually. Without diminishing the complexity of the stories they left behind. You don’t always have to belt out a show tune in a spotlight to grab the emotional attention. A quietness falling silent can leave a deafening emptyness.
At the end of a difficult year for countless people in as many different ways, I wonder how easy it will be to party tonight – the turning of it from an end into a beginning.
Considering 2010 here on the last day of December, I’m not sure how much the Big Society has changed modern Britain for the better yet, for example. We’re only six months into our bold coalition vision, but I think our annual dream of a Victorian-looking Christmas comes complete this year with the added realism of many of us pulling suitably austere expressions of repressed misery as we consider the workhouse and child labour and dying of something ghastly in a bitterly cold room.
Though you can take an analogy too far – the UK is currently doing all this without the backdrop of a burgeoning manufacturing base.
No, I think what we all desperately need now is a more precious comodity; a spot of sunshine. After starting and ending 2010 with blizzards and closed roads and heating bills we can’t afford, it’s surely time for some metaphorical and literal sunshine.
And I’d like to help.
---
Do you remember what happened this year in between all the freezing fun?
Go on, think. Bet you’d forgotten.
A summer. One of the best we’ve had in the UK for a decade at least. Really. We did.
Back in June I wrote that we were in the middle of:
“..a summer so hot and sunny and summery, it’s blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. ..Now? How long ago does that feel? We’ve been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There’s a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks’ takeaway Chardonnay glasses.”
Now? How long ago does that feel?
Thing is, as I end the year, I am straining to inhabit a creatively summery vibe – which I hope to be able to pass on to you soon. For I’m writing the little score to a TV show set in a part of the world I now feel astonished to have never visited – Greece.
I mean, why have I never seen this ancient heart of Europe for myself? How have I never pottered from the Parthenon to an Athenean taverna, or driven the meandering hills of the Polipanese, or dozed on the beachfront of an Agean island?
Well, musically, I sort of have now. Without leaving Southbourne. Thanks to Benny and the gang at Rampage, who’ve been making this little odyssey for an Australian production team. And I wish I could post up some of the results right away, to warm your winter blues. Try to hang on until the end of January if you can.
---
Ending the year on such a musically sunny note forces me to remember through the murk of a chilly first winter in a new home that still feels like someone else’s domus and into an anno-more-positivus-than-I-may-compos. ..Though I think I may be getting my cod ancient Greek muddled up with my cod Latin there. But run with the philosophy of the precarious segue, polit.
For I should remember that for Momo, 2010 has been significant. I confess to ending the year too pooped to party-pop, after twelve months of draining the emotional batteries a bit, beaving away in a dark room alone rather far from sunlight.
But if I can steal two seconds over the To Do list-heavy Christmas week to consider what’s happened this year, I should possibly feel nothing less than excited.
For, though my little creative life looks no bigger than it was twelve months ago, with no killer punch breakthroughs to headline a Christmas letter with, I will wake up in 2011 not where I was.
Momo:tempo – music – has filled most of my agenda since January. If not my wallet. Though it’s contributed to that too.
And the real contribution I should understand it’s made has been to the rather more valuable treasure pocket of my soul.
No one may be listening, but I am doing what my soul has told me to do all my adult life – make sweet little tunes. I’ve made a lot of them this year, as I listen to a bootleg compilation of some of the sweetest moments to my ear, as I continue to search for that musical sweet spot. I can’t quite imagine our home without so many of them that didn’t exist as we celebrated Christmas 2009. Ask me for a secret copy if you fancy.
But perhaps the thing to most treasure is that I no longer need to worry that ‘nobody is listening’ or ever say such a thing. For a handful of people who mean a great deal to me now are listening. Intently. And I’m not sure what else might matter to a creative than that; one or two of you will ask for that bootleg Momo:tempo 2010 sampler, I know you will. And I can’t say thankyou enough.
---
2011 will be another hard working one for Momo. But as we finally paint the walls and plug in the electrics of a symbolically brand new studio this week, I can’t help wondering if this new year that we’ll be hugging in tonight won’t be a big one for our household at least. One with adventures in it we can’t foretell.
As I think of those who won’t be with us this new year, and hold tight for a moment those who will be, I hope to say with spotlight off and ego sensibly compact and travel-sized, that I am looking forward to doing something partly inspired by them all which makes life as big as I know how to make it – create a little sunshine in the gloom.
I wonder if 2011 will be, in some new ways, about bringing people together to make a little sunshine.
I can’t say I’d ever wish to have romantic notions about being marooned. About being deserted inescapably. But getting washed up on a foreign beach with eachother is something quite different. The start of what the process of living life is really all about – so raise your glass to them with me:
To new adventures, gang.
x
Friday, November 12, 2010
Not a Christmas album.
Mid November, then, and the year is running away. It has clearly had enough. It is upstairs now, stuffing things into a case with as much hurried dignity as possible. Of course, as it rushes around the bedroom trying not to freak out completely in front of you, you might be able to stall it with some Can't We Talk About It line. Or an instinctive Baby, It Will Be Different This Time, even though you've no idea why it will be different this time. But essentially, the writing's on the calendar.
A Dear Jan, if you will. Hand delivered.
The point is, 2010 is soon to dump you. And you had such plans.
I certainly had some plans. But I didn't imagine that one of them would be to decide in mid November to write an album in time for Christmas.
---
Something has dawned on me this week with a little extra clarity. Not the fact that as the year approaches its end I am still inexplicably an idiot and not a sudden clever person. I have this written over my desk in case I should forget. Simply says: 'You're an idiot.' I find it relieves the pressure.
No, this dawning realisation was about the job of writing music, given that I've written a fair bit of it in the last eleven months.
Catching up with director Ben and nosing around the cool new offices of Rampage Studio in an impressively central bit of London town on Monday, our conversations left me with something to think about. Namely, that I'm not writing two telly scores for him – I'm writing a telly score and a fully-fledged, sun-drenched, deep-vibed chillout album.
Ah.
What's the difference?
We have two little TV shows on at once between us, to say nothing of any other work, and I marvel that Benny boy is still functioning with such customary politeness, having had about eight hours of sleep since May of last year. I'm not sure how he's able to stand. Or blink.
But in discussing the two projects, I began to see something of why he was yet to fall in love with the tunes I've been writing for the second show, a travel doc around Greece. Given that a couple of the first tunes out of the box have me smacking my lips with vain pride and foolish ideas of blowing the whole budget for bazouki and flamenco guitar on them. ..Why the 'meh'?
There is a subtle difference between the two in the way they use music. One uses it like a TV show score – snapshot atmospheres to place you in various different locations emotionally. And I have been having some loosely chaotic fun with penny whistles, mandolins, tambourines and ukuleles over the past few weeks as this first project is set in the UK. The almost dozen tunes written for that edit are finding homes fast.
The second show, however, uses music like picked tracks from existing artists. The Oh Good It's This One approach, showcasing slick shots of beautiful Aegean scenery.
The upshot realisation is this. And I think you'll find it a profound one: This second approach takes sh**loads more work.
---
Now, of course it's all work. And it's all fun. And what I've just said there isn't really true. But a very great deal of screen music has to be deceptively simple.
I mean, a very complex mix of sounds and rhythms can't half get in the way sometimes. I'm a big fan of Less Is More to picture anyway – and not just because it makes you look a lot more egotistically restrained and intellectually creative just by getting to spend a little more time in the local caff. I like this.
Very simple tunes can still have a magical effect on screen. One big riff with a beat feels fab in the cinema. One hummable string line from the orchestra repeated enough times pulls at the tear ducts in a very satisfying way.
Of course, where budgets are bigger, the composer has more work to do to create the atmosphere an audience may be expecting. As Bond composer David Arnold recounted, a sound engineer once told him he should hope not to write any more machine gun chase scenes; The orchestra has to make a very involved, big noise for minutes on end just to sound appropriately like a big budget action film, only to be almost drowned out by explosions and gunfire and metal screeches. But that's what's needed.
With budget telly, however, you're not getting to score umpteen parts for an orchestra. It's you and a box of tricks and a little sweat and half your fee going on a clever soloist of some kind that delivers. And typically, the work is in sheer numbers of cues per half hour, rather than depth of arrangement in each tune. Often, TV will bounce from one mood to another to segue through the time cheerfully – up to 40 bites of music in 22 minutes of screen time in some cases. Eesh.
When you're talking travel docs in particular, the most vital job you'll do is make sure the viewer feels very instantly like they're in Hong Kong, or Marakech. The really obvious thing to do is, in some clever way, what you do. You just do. And I find working up a local flavour like this great great fun; writing simple atmospheric tunes rather suits Momo, as you might imagine. But it's not the place for production as deep and laboured as a Momo:tempo album. All those complex beats and layers of production would just get in the way.
..Except, I may now be wrong on this. Cranking out tunes to a deadline and a budget is one thing. And I've rather loved the work that's come out of doing this all year.
But our Greece project is, it makes me realise, different. What, I dawningly realised on Monday, walking through London's chilly evening lights to the Tube, Ben wants me to do… is write a new Momo album, from which he can select tunes to showcase.
Deadline's mid December.
I am now, as you might imagine, sitting down with a layout pad and a keyboard and a gigantic pot of coffee and a prayer cushion.
What I am not doing under any circumstances is writing a Christmas album. Just an album for Christmas. One that sounds like a big bath of Greek sunshine.
Feeling the heat a bit here. But no running away; just a spot of sweat.
---
Mid November, then, and the year is running away. It has clearly had enough. It is upstairs now, stuffing things into a case with as much hurried dignity as possible. Of course, as it rushes around the bedroom trying not to freak out completely in front of you, you might be able to stall it with some Can't We Talk About It line. Or an instinctive Baby, It Will Be Different This Time, even though you've no idea why it will be different this time. But essentially, the writing's on the calendar.
A Dear Jan, if you will. Hand delivered.
The point is, 2010 is soon to dump you. And you had such plans.
I certainly had some plans. But I didn't imagine that one of them would be to decide in mid November to write an album in time for Christmas.
---
Something has dawned on me this week with a little extra clarity. Not the fact that as the year approaches its end I am still inexplicably an idiot and not a sudden clever person. I have this written over my desk in case I should forget. Simply says: 'You're an idiot.' I find it relieves the pressure.
No, this dawning realisation was about the job of writing music, given that I've written a fair bit of it in the last eleven months.
Catching up with director Ben and nosing around the cool new offices of Rampage Studio in an impressively central bit of London town on Monday, our conversations left me with something to think about. Namely, that I'm not writing two telly scores for him – I'm writing a telly score and a fully-fledged, sun-drenched, deep-vibed chillout album.
Ah.
What's the difference?
We have two little TV shows on at once between us, to say nothing of any other work, and I marvel that Benny boy is still functioning with such customary politeness, having had about eight hours of sleep since May of last year. I'm not sure how he's able to stand. Or blink.
But in discussing the two projects, I began to see something of why he was yet to fall in love with the tunes I've been writing for the second show, a travel doc around Greece. Given that a couple of the first tunes out of the box have me smacking my lips with vain pride and foolish ideas of blowing the whole budget for bazouki and flamenco guitar on them. ..Why the 'meh'?
There is a subtle difference between the two in the way they use music. One uses it like a TV show score – snapshot atmospheres to place you in various different locations emotionally. And I have been having some loosely chaotic fun with penny whistles, mandolins, tambourines and ukuleles over the past few weeks as this first project is set in the UK. The almost dozen tunes written for that edit are finding homes fast.
The second show, however, uses music like picked tracks from existing artists. The Oh Good It's This One approach, showcasing slick shots of beautiful Aegean scenery.
The upshot realisation is this. And I think you'll find it a profound one: This second approach takes sh**loads more work.
---
Now, of course it's all work. And it's all fun. And what I've just said there isn't really true. But a very great deal of screen music has to be deceptively simple.
I mean, a very complex mix of sounds and rhythms can't half get in the way sometimes. I'm a big fan of Less Is More to picture anyway – and not just because it makes you look a lot more egotistically restrained and intellectually creative just by getting to spend a little more time in the local caff. I like this.
Very simple tunes can still have a magical effect on screen. One big riff with a beat feels fab in the cinema. One hummable string line from the orchestra repeated enough times pulls at the tear ducts in a very satisfying way.
Of course, where budgets are bigger, the composer has more work to do to create the atmosphere an audience may be expecting. As Bond composer David Arnold recounted, a sound engineer once told him he should hope not to write any more machine gun chase scenes; The orchestra has to make a very involved, big noise for minutes on end just to sound appropriately like a big budget action film, only to be almost drowned out by explosions and gunfire and metal screeches. But that's what's needed.
With budget telly, however, you're not getting to score umpteen parts for an orchestra. It's you and a box of tricks and a little sweat and half your fee going on a clever soloist of some kind that delivers. And typically, the work is in sheer numbers of cues per half hour, rather than depth of arrangement in each tune. Often, TV will bounce from one mood to another to segue through the time cheerfully – up to 40 bites of music in 22 minutes of screen time in some cases. Eesh.
When you're talking travel docs in particular, the most vital job you'll do is make sure the viewer feels very instantly like they're in Hong Kong, or Marakech. The really obvious thing to do is, in some clever way, what you do. You just do. And I find working up a local flavour like this great great fun; writing simple atmospheric tunes rather suits Momo, as you might imagine. But it's not the place for production as deep and laboured as a Momo:tempo album. All those complex beats and layers of production would just get in the way.
..Except, I may now be wrong on this. Cranking out tunes to a deadline and a budget is one thing. And I've rather loved the work that's come out of doing this all year.
But our Greece project is, it makes me realise, different. What, I dawningly realised on Monday, walking through London's chilly evening lights to the Tube, Ben wants me to do… is write a new Momo album, from which he can select tunes to showcase.
Deadline's mid December.
I am now, as you might imagine, sitting down with a layout pad and a keyboard and a gigantic pot of coffee and a prayer cushion.
What I am not doing under any circumstances is writing a Christmas album. Just an album for Christmas. One that sounds like a big bath of Greek sunshine.
Feeling the heat a bit here. But no running away; just a spot of sweat.
---
Monday, November 01, 2010
The launch of a grand expedition, without the fanfare.
The launch of a grand expedition,
without the fanfare.
Well, so, here it is. Embarkation day.
Amid a flurry of... one bit of local publicity, and no oompah band on the quayside, the Momo:tempo debut LP sets sail today. Flourishing its topper to a tiny but appreciated handful of enthusiastic well-wishers.
For The Golden Age of Exploration has been released today. Into the wild.
It's out as a download initially. Physical copies are still rather rare preview animals but proper CD editions will be available in due course, most notably to be picked up at live events.
Which, speaking of, no – didn't happen this week as hoped. So we're looking towards Christmas for a local live blast of some tunes from the album, plus one or two other treats we have in mind... if we can find a ruddy venue in our own town that's suitably salubrious and happy to host a noisy horn section and an unfunny faux posh tit for forty minutes.
---
I'd like to say that I spent today doing press conferences and a glitzy launch do somewhere, or at least having coffee in a favourite civilised haunt, but I am, alas, tidying the temporary studio enough for a tech chap to find his way into it later. Bet Duke Ellington didn't let printer problems slow him down. Never mind.
I'm also doing a few less than exciting-sounding administrative things and some little jobs for Momo clients that have been piling up after a couple of weeks of laters and earliers that have left me with more character than normal around the eyes.
Still, November 1 dawns as a good day, I must say.
Sunny and bright, with exciting early progress on the development of the new studio and some very nice early cuts of things to a couple of scores for the telly I have on at the moment. Pete the string pulled a blinder on Friday in particular, getting a session back to me for a couple of cues in time to make a first full episode cut to the client. Sounds sumptuous, and I wish I could post it already.
In the spirit of Russell Cotes
Meanwhile, the very nice Pat Gough from erstwhile local publication, The Daily Echo, was kind enough to take me to coffee one morning recently, and wrote up his impressions publicly right here. Lord knows why he and his editor thought it worthy of space on the flatplan, but still.
Very kindly too, Kerry Curtis, marketing manager of the Russel Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, allowed us to do our photo shoot in there.
It's not explicit in the article but I was expressly keen for the chance to do so for two reasons – firstly because Mr and Mrs Cotes' beautiful house is such a suitably sumptuous repository of their own mementos of exploration, but also because I so love the place as an icon of Bournemouth.
..And, okay, thirdly because I've long had a soft spot for the elegantly saucy statue at the top of the grand staircase. Girls in their knickers can be art, everyone.
I shall wax lyrical about the museum more in future, but I am humbly chuffed to be associated with the place in any small way. Go there, if you haven't lately.
So. On to new adventures now? Definitely.
---
without the fanfare.
Well, so, here it is. Embarkation day.
Amid a flurry of... one bit of local publicity, and no oompah band on the quayside, the Momo:tempo debut LP sets sail today. Flourishing its topper to a tiny but appreciated handful of enthusiastic well-wishers.
For The Golden Age of Exploration has been released today. Into the wild.
It's out as a download initially. Physical copies are still rather rare preview animals but proper CD editions will be available in due course, most notably to be picked up at live events.
Which, speaking of, no – didn't happen this week as hoped. So we're looking towards Christmas for a local live blast of some tunes from the album, plus one or two other treats we have in mind... if we can find a ruddy venue in our own town that's suitably salubrious and happy to host a noisy horn section and an unfunny faux posh tit for forty minutes.
---
I'd like to say that I spent today doing press conferences and a glitzy launch do somewhere, or at least having coffee in a favourite civilised haunt, but I am, alas, tidying the temporary studio enough for a tech chap to find his way into it later. Bet Duke Ellington didn't let printer problems slow him down. Never mind.
I'm also doing a few less than exciting-sounding administrative things and some little jobs for Momo clients that have been piling up after a couple of weeks of laters and earliers that have left me with more character than normal around the eyes.
Still, November 1 dawns as a good day, I must say.
Sunny and bright, with exciting early progress on the development of the new studio and some very nice early cuts of things to a couple of scores for the telly I have on at the moment. Pete the string pulled a blinder on Friday in particular, getting a session back to me for a couple of cues in time to make a first full episode cut to the client. Sounds sumptuous, and I wish I could post it already.
In the spirit of Russell Cotes
Meanwhile, the very nice Pat Gough from erstwhile local publication, The Daily Echo, was kind enough to take me to coffee one morning recently, and wrote up his impressions publicly right here. Lord knows why he and his editor thought it worthy of space on the flatplan, but still.
Very kindly too, Kerry Curtis, marketing manager of the Russel Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, allowed us to do our photo shoot in there.
It's not explicit in the article but I was expressly keen for the chance to do so for two reasons – firstly because Mr and Mrs Cotes' beautiful house is such a suitably sumptuous repository of their own mementos of exploration, but also because I so love the place as an icon of Bournemouth.
..And, okay, thirdly because I've long had a soft spot for the elegantly saucy statue at the top of the grand staircase. Girls in their knickers can be art, everyone.
I shall wax lyrical about the museum more in future, but I am humbly chuffed to be associated with the place in any small way. Go there, if you haven't lately.
So. On to new adventures now? Definitely.
---
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Jean and Michael.
Jean and Michael.
How do you judge the impact of a person's life?
..Why not ask an impossibly broad question? I know.
I ask because it's a question that never really goes away when you work for yourself all day, doing very little to do with disaster relief say. And also because two particular people have posed the question to me anew lately. By dying.
They didn't die together. They didn't know of each other at all. And, in truth, I knew neither of them really at all either – one of them for many years, and one of them since the Wednesday before last.
---
There is a brutally efficient way to measure a life's impact. Efficient because you can simply count it – and it's the one we all feel the pressure to add to from time to time: Numbers Of Units Shifted.
You can fairly simply consider the influence of someone's life by that reckoning. Which is, presumably, why Rupert Murdock is a hero to some.
He turned a fledgling British satellite broadcast business with a handful of staff into a business empire large enough to bias the entire media political debate of the most influential country on Earth. The self-proclaimed Reasonable of America have had to rally on Washington DC this weekend to try their best to be even noticed by the US media, such has been the glare and noise of Murdock's sensationalist influence through Fox News over years.
But if that's the measure of a human life, then most of us will never flicker the scale of impact, will we?
And if it turns out that those who have seemed to shift enough units to make the impact-o-meter make a sudden oofing noise actually find the experience of shifting those units pretty empty and meaningless in the end anyway, then what's the point of that exactly?
No. If all you want to do is add to a balance sheet, you may find in the end that it's equally taken away something from another column – the one snootily marked Your Soul.
I suspect that making a meaningful impact has more to do with being prepared to stand up and be counted. As you.
---
Michael Larsen was young when he died, just over a week ago. He was 28. He grew up in Downtown Minnesota, a very ordinary city in America, and went to the local high school. But, though I had never heard of him, a lot of people in the Hip Hop community certainly had.
Under his stage name Eyedea, he'd built an impressive reputation over ten years as a freestyle rapper – a champion of underground verse. Rising up through Emcee battles and taking prizes at prestigious competitions like Scribble Jam, he showed a formidable confidence.
Young Michael could pull rhymes and thoughts out of thin air with effortless dexterity.
I heard about his premature and unexplained death from UK rapper and writer, Scroobius Pip. Pip's own credentials were there in his impassioned blog post about just how much Eyedea's talent and attitude had affected him.
I then clicked to a YouTube link of Eyedea freestyling on the influential Wake Up Show. What a watched dawned on me as something very sobering – natural talent. Undiluted, unselfconscious – if that doesn't sound ironic when describing a freestyle rap battle champ – and challenging to all pretenders. This guy didn't have to spend hours labouring over verse, he just tapped into the ether and pulled it out of the air.
It reminded me of the early days of Hip Hop that added something to my young teenage years, and how much I marveled then at how some guys could just do such things with words without chewing a pencil end and practicing.
And it was clear he'd been loved for his gift. Now, inexplicably, that gift was gone. And for many people, it was obviously leaving a big hole.
---
Jean was someone I knew through our little local church. She must have been, I should guess, somewhere nearing her 80s when she died, but for the last 20 of those at least, she was a regular supportive face at the various incarnations of the little Southbourne fellowship we so often found ourselves turning up at.
Some people seem to become old people. Any old person you don't know is just an old person when you're young, I guess. But there are some who defy the aging process in your mental image of them – perhaps because you simply know them as people and are as baffled as they are that the numbers on their clock have apparently added up so much, or perhaps by sheer force of their personality. Some people appear to get comfortable acting old, despite all the discomfort. And some people have a light in their eye that marks them out as a person, not a type of person. Some people look as if they still get it.
Jean still got it. Or at least, my impression of her when we occasionally swapped greetings was that she still got it. Whatever it was. She was funny. She had a sharpness of witty response that showed self awareness. And when someone looks like they are aware that they are in the room, usually, other people are too. I always was.
Which is why, perhaps, hearing that she was no longer in the room left a proper moment of absence in my mind. As little as I knew Jean, that twinkle of hers was the spark of life itself, and it immediately left a negative shape by going out.
I would judge that by simply being herself, Jean made quite an impact with her life. Perhaps the most crucial kind. An encouraging one.
---
One commentator on this morning's A point of view described the loss of her school art teacher. She was, to over-simplify an eloquent ten minutes of heart-felt description of this creative woman, an obvious force of nature. The sort that often finds it hard to find stability in their private life, and hard not to influence everyone they meet publically.
And perhaps a former art teacher who enthused about how to see the world in every colourful sense is the perfect person to illustrate the best way to measure a life's impact.
Inspiration.
If you can generate even a little of that in someone else, you are perhaps adding in microcosm to the greatest impact the universe has ever felt.
Life itself.
Here's to Jean and Michael. They will be missed.
---
How do you judge the impact of a person's life?
..Why not ask an impossibly broad question? I know.
I ask because it's a question that never really goes away when you work for yourself all day, doing very little to do with disaster relief say. And also because two particular people have posed the question to me anew lately. By dying.
They didn't die together. They didn't know of each other at all. And, in truth, I knew neither of them really at all either – one of them for many years, and one of them since the Wednesday before last.
---
There is a brutally efficient way to measure a life's impact. Efficient because you can simply count it – and it's the one we all feel the pressure to add to from time to time: Numbers Of Units Shifted.
You can fairly simply consider the influence of someone's life by that reckoning. Which is, presumably, why Rupert Murdock is a hero to some.
He turned a fledgling British satellite broadcast business with a handful of staff into a business empire large enough to bias the entire media political debate of the most influential country on Earth. The self-proclaimed Reasonable of America have had to rally on Washington DC this weekend to try their best to be even noticed by the US media, such has been the glare and noise of Murdock's sensationalist influence through Fox News over years.
But if that's the measure of a human life, then most of us will never flicker the scale of impact, will we?
And if it turns out that those who have seemed to shift enough units to make the impact-o-meter make a sudden oofing noise actually find the experience of shifting those units pretty empty and meaningless in the end anyway, then what's the point of that exactly?
No. If all you want to do is add to a balance sheet, you may find in the end that it's equally taken away something from another column – the one snootily marked Your Soul.
I suspect that making a meaningful impact has more to do with being prepared to stand up and be counted. As you.
---
Michael Larsen was young when he died, just over a week ago. He was 28. He grew up in Downtown Minnesota, a very ordinary city in America, and went to the local high school. But, though I had never heard of him, a lot of people in the Hip Hop community certainly had.
Under his stage name Eyedea, he'd built an impressive reputation over ten years as a freestyle rapper – a champion of underground verse. Rising up through Emcee battles and taking prizes at prestigious competitions like Scribble Jam, he showed a formidable confidence.
Young Michael could pull rhymes and thoughts out of thin air with effortless dexterity.
I heard about his premature and unexplained death from UK rapper and writer, Scroobius Pip. Pip's own credentials were there in his impassioned blog post about just how much Eyedea's talent and attitude had affected him.
I then clicked to a YouTube link of Eyedea freestyling on the influential Wake Up Show. What a watched dawned on me as something very sobering – natural talent. Undiluted, unselfconscious – if that doesn't sound ironic when describing a freestyle rap battle champ – and challenging to all pretenders. This guy didn't have to spend hours labouring over verse, he just tapped into the ether and pulled it out of the air.
It reminded me of the early days of Hip Hop that added something to my young teenage years, and how much I marveled then at how some guys could just do such things with words without chewing a pencil end and practicing.
And it was clear he'd been loved for his gift. Now, inexplicably, that gift was gone. And for many people, it was obviously leaving a big hole.
---
Jean was someone I knew through our little local church. She must have been, I should guess, somewhere nearing her 80s when she died, but for the last 20 of those at least, she was a regular supportive face at the various incarnations of the little Southbourne fellowship we so often found ourselves turning up at.
Some people seem to become old people. Any old person you don't know is just an old person when you're young, I guess. But there are some who defy the aging process in your mental image of them – perhaps because you simply know them as people and are as baffled as they are that the numbers on their clock have apparently added up so much, or perhaps by sheer force of their personality. Some people appear to get comfortable acting old, despite all the discomfort. And some people have a light in their eye that marks them out as a person, not a type of person. Some people look as if they still get it.
Jean still got it. Or at least, my impression of her when we occasionally swapped greetings was that she still got it. Whatever it was. She was funny. She had a sharpness of witty response that showed self awareness. And when someone looks like they are aware that they are in the room, usually, other people are too. I always was.
Which is why, perhaps, hearing that she was no longer in the room left a proper moment of absence in my mind. As little as I knew Jean, that twinkle of hers was the spark of life itself, and it immediately left a negative shape by going out.
I would judge that by simply being herself, Jean made quite an impact with her life. Perhaps the most crucial kind. An encouraging one.
---
One commentator on this morning's A point of view described the loss of her school art teacher. She was, to over-simplify an eloquent ten minutes of heart-felt description of this creative woman, an obvious force of nature. The sort that often finds it hard to find stability in their private life, and hard not to influence everyone they meet publically.
And perhaps a former art teacher who enthused about how to see the world in every colourful sense is the perfect person to illustrate the best way to measure a life's impact.
Inspiration.
If you can generate even a little of that in someone else, you are perhaps adding in microcosm to the greatest impact the universe has ever felt.
Life itself.
Here's to Jean and Michael. They will be missed.
---
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Renuisance.
Renuisance.
And so here it is. The last day of my thirties.
I'd like to say that I'd given this significant calendarial moment some weighty emotional consideration as I watched it march toward me out of the diary, but the truth is that I've spent so much of this year either waiting for files to upload to music websites or waiting for unforeseen problems from solicitors or waiting in queues for telecom call centre operatives that I've kind of backed into it with a little surprised yelp. This big yeti of a date.
However I'm supposed to be feeling about it, decade number five does indeed begin tomorrow.
And they're telling me it's when my whole life will begin.
This first bit doesn't count, apparently.
Thank crap for that. Because everything will be different this time, baby, I promise.
---
So how will I be reborn, d'you think? In this whole new life?
Well, it is true that I have already been radically re-cast as a house owner. Like a terrible format change to court a whole new audience. It's not realistic. The characters just wouldn't do that.
I mean. Me. Living in a whole bleedin' house. I've been a flatlander all my life and now I get to both go up to bed AND just outside to the garden. Weird. I sometimes have to go up to the bedroom just to look down at the garden before going down and out to it, just to feel normal when taking the bins out. I'll acclimatise, I'm sure.
It's true too that, though the Arnewood studio is now gone, with a must-be-admitted moistening of the eyes, the forthcoming weeks will see a less romantic-looking but worryingly proper-looking new studio take shape. Momo 2.0 is on the way, I can say. Though you can bet your life that while it will involve a spot of nice re-badging, there will be little fundamental overhaul of the basic operating system.
And, dare I consider it, I have slightly more work lined up for Momo:tempo in the coming weeks than Momo:typo, as I write. That's new.
I even have an album coming out officially. November 1st, they say. That too, is conspicuously new. Even if the tunes aren't. Or the continuing lack of launch gig venue.
But maybe, if some whole new 're-birth' is meant to kick in on Wednesday morning, I need to make it happen. By levering open the little-accessed maintenance panel that adjusts the attitude matrix.
Not that I'm not sure I want to go tinkering with any matrices. This is all very cosy, this Doesn't Really Count life so far. Wouldn't be pleased if I woke up in a blinding glare with a black Charlie Brooker leaning over me in a terrible pullover, mumbling that I've never used my eyes before and that I'd better get used to hard bunks, strip lights and hand-pumped toilets. And giant metal spiders trying to kill me with lasers.
No, maybe it's simply time again to go find out some shet.
---
Every now and then – I think it's happened once before – my personal ignorance reaches such conspicuous levels that I start to notice it. Find myself saying garish faux pas like: "Who's Justin Beiber?".
It's then that I need to Go Find Out Some Shet.
Now, anyone normal and lucky enough to live in the information age would simply flick to Wikipedia and momentarily find some made up facts about the subject in hand, easily sufficient to satiate the vain impulse of ignorance, and so move on. I do this too. But I'm wondering whether it's time for something more. Something a little more deliberate. A little more studied. Determined. Goal-minded. Something a lot more branded.
A renaissance.
I am thinking it's time I filled in some more blanks. Found out who this Justin Bieber really is. And Che Guavara. And the president of Belize. Or Belgium, come to that.
I am thinking of going so far as to use the ol' online mutterings here to post the results. A kind of selectively educative journal. But don't hold your breath. Not until I've found out exactly how long the human respiratory system can let you do that for, anyway.
Of course, the pressure to do this regularly could just be annoying.
Mean time, I need to pull some trousers over these pants and write a piece of music for a commission given to me lastnight – by lunchtime.
Not sure a convincing way to renew my whole life is with another last-minute deadline.
Creating new music for cash. How annoying.
Happy birthday.
---
PS: Some chap from the local paper's Society magazine is wanting to interview me this week, so perhaps I'll ask him as a professional journalist and news hound if he can think of any interesting and unexpected ways to start my forties. Given that my life so far apparently needs rebirthing.
I'm not sure this will start the interview in an interesting way. I may have to take some props. And some made-up facts.
And so here it is. The last day of my thirties.
I'd like to say that I'd given this significant calendarial moment some weighty emotional consideration as I watched it march toward me out of the diary, but the truth is that I've spent so much of this year either waiting for files to upload to music websites or waiting for unforeseen problems from solicitors or waiting in queues for telecom call centre operatives that I've kind of backed into it with a little surprised yelp. This big yeti of a date.
However I'm supposed to be feeling about it, decade number five does indeed begin tomorrow.
And they're telling me it's when my whole life will begin.
This first bit doesn't count, apparently.
Thank crap for that. Because everything will be different this time, baby, I promise.
---
So how will I be reborn, d'you think? In this whole new life?
Well, it is true that I have already been radically re-cast as a house owner. Like a terrible format change to court a whole new audience. It's not realistic. The characters just wouldn't do that.
I mean. Me. Living in a whole bleedin' house. I've been a flatlander all my life and now I get to both go up to bed AND just outside to the garden. Weird. I sometimes have to go up to the bedroom just to look down at the garden before going down and out to it, just to feel normal when taking the bins out. I'll acclimatise, I'm sure.
It's true too that, though the Arnewood studio is now gone, with a must-be-admitted moistening of the eyes, the forthcoming weeks will see a less romantic-looking but worryingly proper-looking new studio take shape. Momo 2.0 is on the way, I can say. Though you can bet your life that while it will involve a spot of nice re-badging, there will be little fundamental overhaul of the basic operating system.
And, dare I consider it, I have slightly more work lined up for Momo:tempo in the coming weeks than Momo:typo, as I write. That's new.
I even have an album coming out officially. November 1st, they say. That too, is conspicuously new. Even if the tunes aren't. Or the continuing lack of launch gig venue.
But maybe, if some whole new 're-birth' is meant to kick in on Wednesday morning, I need to make it happen. By levering open the little-accessed maintenance panel that adjusts the attitude matrix.
Not that I'm not sure I want to go tinkering with any matrices. This is all very cosy, this Doesn't Really Count life so far. Wouldn't be pleased if I woke up in a blinding glare with a black Charlie Brooker leaning over me in a terrible pullover, mumbling that I've never used my eyes before and that I'd better get used to hard bunks, strip lights and hand-pumped toilets. And giant metal spiders trying to kill me with lasers.
No, maybe it's simply time again to go find out some shet.
---
Every now and then – I think it's happened once before – my personal ignorance reaches such conspicuous levels that I start to notice it. Find myself saying garish faux pas like: "Who's Justin Beiber?".
It's then that I need to Go Find Out Some Shet.
Now, anyone normal and lucky enough to live in the information age would simply flick to Wikipedia and momentarily find some made up facts about the subject in hand, easily sufficient to satiate the vain impulse of ignorance, and so move on. I do this too. But I'm wondering whether it's time for something more. Something a little more deliberate. A little more studied. Determined. Goal-minded. Something a lot more branded.
A renaissance.
I am thinking it's time I filled in some more blanks. Found out who this Justin Bieber really is. And Che Guavara. And the president of Belize. Or Belgium, come to that.
I am thinking of going so far as to use the ol' online mutterings here to post the results. A kind of selectively educative journal. But don't hold your breath. Not until I've found out exactly how long the human respiratory system can let you do that for, anyway.
Of course, the pressure to do this regularly could just be annoying.
Mean time, I need to pull some trousers over these pants and write a piece of music for a commission given to me lastnight – by lunchtime.
Not sure a convincing way to renew my whole life is with another last-minute deadline.
Creating new music for cash. How annoying.
Happy birthday.
---
PS: Some chap from the local paper's Society magazine is wanting to interview me this week, so perhaps I'll ask him as a professional journalist and news hound if he can think of any interesting and unexpected ways to start my forties. Given that my life so far apparently needs rebirthing.
I'm not sure this will start the interview in an interesting way. I may have to take some props. And some made-up facts.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Last waltz.
Last waltz.
You won't have seen it. You're too young. You're too lofty. You're too intellectual and just too cool.
But my studio looks just like it.
The last episode of Blake's 7.
Budget for special effects is about right.
Surrounded as I am by boxes and packing crates, I am reminded of the little waltz around the bridge of the Scorpio that Tarrant performed in his console seat, as the ship plummeted to its destruction on Gauda Prime, showering him in a few sparks, turning the lights off and on a bit and turning his place at the apparent helm into a very low octane kind of ghost train ride.
Hit me like a slug to the chest when I was ten.
---
With all but total life support off here now, I am down to the bare essentials: an internet connection and a hi fi. And even these will not last much longer now. For I am about to bail out.
Tomorrow we move.
And to mix my low budget television metaphors horribly, I don't know whether I'm about to regenerate or just get killed off in a death dive into a squashed looking planet named after an intergalactic cheese.
---
Most things are in boxes. But still much more parcel tape gun work to do yet, be sure.
Yet, before I commit the final act and unplug the studio and switch off Momo's phones and internet connection and music, I am listening to a soundtrack that could not be more appropriate in my own mind.
The Gotan Project, La Revancha Del Tango.
Never listened to this supremely daytime, work-helping new-tango soundtrack in the evening before, but I have been saving it for now, the final moments. The last CD to get played. Just because it transports me to the optimistic early days of Momo like no other record. Not for some clever, universally obvious thematic meaning. It just so does.
One last tango in the bright orange room I have loved working in for eight years.
One final strut past the window before I shut off the machines and let this wonderful chapter of our lives – a decade of learning to fly creatively – crash into history.
For new adventures await.
Yet old memories, the fondest of them, will live on in the mental construct of this space that I will take with me and visit often. This creative home.
As the breezy, un-philosophical music spools to the end, I shall feel deeply for all the good things that have happened to us here, and how simply happy we have been in the home's comforting calm, despite the sadnesses trying to challenge it from time to time. They never quite won out.
The many instances of dad's practical handiwork around me here will probably make me pause a moment even longer tomorrow. And I hope to toast the old girl – this hundred-year-old house – with a few tears before I walk up the hill one last time and leave the keys with the agent.
For I am very grateful for those adventures had here.
But I wonder whether they will pale in comparison to the ones coming.
x
You won't have seen it. You're too young. You're too lofty. You're too intellectual and just too cool.
But my studio looks just like it.
The last episode of Blake's 7.
Budget for special effects is about right.
Surrounded as I am by boxes and packing crates, I am reminded of the little waltz around the bridge of the Scorpio that Tarrant performed in his console seat, as the ship plummeted to its destruction on Gauda Prime, showering him in a few sparks, turning the lights off and on a bit and turning his place at the apparent helm into a very low octane kind of ghost train ride.
Hit me like a slug to the chest when I was ten.
---
With all but total life support off here now, I am down to the bare essentials: an internet connection and a hi fi. And even these will not last much longer now. For I am about to bail out.
Tomorrow we move.
And to mix my low budget television metaphors horribly, I don't know whether I'm about to regenerate or just get killed off in a death dive into a squashed looking planet named after an intergalactic cheese.
---
Most things are in boxes. But still much more parcel tape gun work to do yet, be sure.
Yet, before I commit the final act and unplug the studio and switch off Momo's phones and internet connection and music, I am listening to a soundtrack that could not be more appropriate in my own mind.
The Gotan Project, La Revancha Del Tango.
Never listened to this supremely daytime, work-helping new-tango soundtrack in the evening before, but I have been saving it for now, the final moments. The last CD to get played. Just because it transports me to the optimistic early days of Momo like no other record. Not for some clever, universally obvious thematic meaning. It just so does.
One last tango in the bright orange room I have loved working in for eight years.
One final strut past the window before I shut off the machines and let this wonderful chapter of our lives – a decade of learning to fly creatively – crash into history.
For new adventures await.
Yet old memories, the fondest of them, will live on in the mental construct of this space that I will take with me and visit often. This creative home.
As the breezy, un-philosophical music spools to the end, I shall feel deeply for all the good things that have happened to us here, and how simply happy we have been in the home's comforting calm, despite the sadnesses trying to challenge it from time to time. They never quite won out.
The many instances of dad's practical handiwork around me here will probably make me pause a moment even longer tomorrow. And I hope to toast the old girl – this hundred-year-old house – with a few tears before I walk up the hill one last time and leave the keys with the agent.
For I am very grateful for those adventures had here.
But I wonder whether they will pale in comparison to the ones coming.
x
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Blitz and mortar.
Blitz and mortar.
It's a sort of cross between praying and illustrating how far you've had it up to.
The 'time-out' signal.
I've been upwardly jabbing my fingertips into a downward palm mutely for some weeks now. And no amount of stoic cups of tea could have floated me through the blitz of it: moving house.
I have yet to move house still, you understand. The actual trauma of piling all our worldly crap into a wheelbarrow and wobbling it around the block is still ahead of us and I really couldn't care less.
Drop my vintage china. Cartwheel my fridge down the stairs. Saw my sofa in half to get it through the door. Don't care.
And inevitable weeks without internet access at home, while people on the sub continent show me super-human levels of patience on the phone while simply repeating that the engineer in my area is still booked up until Christmas? Pah. No kind of trauma to me now.
Do your worst, forces of removals chaos – because the relief of finally getting solicitors to let us move our ruddy lives ON at long long last has made me so giddy I have been walking the grid of streets nearby hugging random English people to within an inch of their social conventions, tears streaming down my blood-pressure-blotched face, holding them until they too are sobbing, out of the incomparable shame of sheer cultural awkwardness.
---
The truth of English people as a society is, of course, not only do they feel uncomfortable showing un-earned emotion, they also can't abide bureaucracy. Plus they have a perverse sense of humour, delighting in things backwards.
Which is presumably why they have a housing system designed to be as bureaucratic and likely to induce significant outbursts of decidedly uncomfortable emotion in front of strangers as humanly possible.
And why they have built their entire modern economy upon this process.
---
One estate agent, a friendly client, unconnected with our sale and purchase, responded simply to my property market indigestion: "Politicians are all frustrated lawyers. Country's run by 'em."
And I heard a little penny drop.
Now, it's worth saying up front that I shall be reclining in a hot tub with a solicitor, a former solicitor and a barrister at the weekend. Each of them happens to be remarkably thoughtful and, well, human. This is in large part why they are not just friends of mine, but friends I am prepared to strip to my shorts in front of and percolate warm fluids around myself with.
But evidence like this not withstanding, the job of a solicitor is really that of a sort of vaguely ennobled engineer.
---
As I have said before, we really do rather sort of completely need engineers. I walk over bridges and under glass roofs and through under-sea tunnels because of them. If foppish daydreamers like me were professionally responsible for turning their hands to such things I tell you I would never leave the house. I would never get IN the house in the first place.
Thus we need engineers to be utterly nutterly anal about nuts, bolts, ones, twos, cantilevers, plumb lines and flat-out level-headed detail. Or just about everything will fall down.
But as I have also said before, engineers really do rather sort of completely need other people around them to point out the obvious needs of, ah, actual humans. Because squishy soft pheromone-crazed, half-baked-inspiration-prone animals do not behave like helpfully well- programmed robots.
Which is a fact that precisely incurs the need for the law. And precisely annoys the tits off your average lawyer.
---
To get its own back, the legal profession in Britain helpfully assumes the reigns of authority in all significant transactions of life, to ensure an objective engineering of all parties' responsibilities and rights and so secure fairness and equity and, effectively, harmony in society – and then sods off on holiday without telling anyone.
Now now. Everyone needs a holiday; I know all too well how much my three legal examples have earned their place in that hot tub and how much, frankly, we probably just need to hold each other and rock together gently there for a while. So I dehumanise only for a pithy moment to exact a knowing smirk from you. There it is.
If I have a point – or the strength to make one after trying to buy a house as an Englishman in his own country – it is simply that what I have learned is missing from the house buying process in the jolly ol' Green And Pleasant, is someone who actually knows what the Elgar's arse is going on.
Forgive my Anglo Saxon. But tedious frustrations from my own unremarkable little life aside, it is the thing that seems needed for my countrymen as they seek for some reason to rebuild their nation's economy on the same property market foundations it failed on last time: a role somewhere in the chain that can pull together… well, everything.
Estate agents can START everything.
Solicitors can STOP everything.
No-one seems empowered to DRIVE anything.
Which is perhaps why I should have stopped feebly making pathetic time out signs all summer and put my hands on the bloody wheel. Even if my metaphorical motor is on the back of a tow-truck.
Still. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to bear in mind when observing all this from a comfortable cultural distance is that mostly, eventually, we seem to get there. And perhaps most perversely, thanks to a lot of people trying to help each other out when things appear to turn grim. Like humans.
Like Brits in the blitz.
Jeepers we just love all this, don't we?
See you round the corner. I'll have the kettle on.
It's a sort of cross between praying and illustrating how far you've had it up to.
The 'time-out' signal.
I've been upwardly jabbing my fingertips into a downward palm mutely for some weeks now. And no amount of stoic cups of tea could have floated me through the blitz of it: moving house.
I have yet to move house still, you understand. The actual trauma of piling all our worldly crap into a wheelbarrow and wobbling it around the block is still ahead of us and I really couldn't care less.
Drop my vintage china. Cartwheel my fridge down the stairs. Saw my sofa in half to get it through the door. Don't care.
And inevitable weeks without internet access at home, while people on the sub continent show me super-human levels of patience on the phone while simply repeating that the engineer in my area is still booked up until Christmas? Pah. No kind of trauma to me now.
Do your worst, forces of removals chaos – because the relief of finally getting solicitors to let us move our ruddy lives ON at long long last has made me so giddy I have been walking the grid of streets nearby hugging random English people to within an inch of their social conventions, tears streaming down my blood-pressure-blotched face, holding them until they too are sobbing, out of the incomparable shame of sheer cultural awkwardness.
---
The truth of English people as a society is, of course, not only do they feel uncomfortable showing un-earned emotion, they also can't abide bureaucracy. Plus they have a perverse sense of humour, delighting in things backwards.
Which is presumably why they have a housing system designed to be as bureaucratic and likely to induce significant outbursts of decidedly uncomfortable emotion in front of strangers as humanly possible.
And why they have built their entire modern economy upon this process.
---
One estate agent, a friendly client, unconnected with our sale and purchase, responded simply to my property market indigestion: "Politicians are all frustrated lawyers. Country's run by 'em."
And I heard a little penny drop.
Now, it's worth saying up front that I shall be reclining in a hot tub with a solicitor, a former solicitor and a barrister at the weekend. Each of them happens to be remarkably thoughtful and, well, human. This is in large part why they are not just friends of mine, but friends I am prepared to strip to my shorts in front of and percolate warm fluids around myself with.
But evidence like this not withstanding, the job of a solicitor is really that of a sort of vaguely ennobled engineer.
---
As I have said before, we really do rather sort of completely need engineers. I walk over bridges and under glass roofs and through under-sea tunnels because of them. If foppish daydreamers like me were professionally responsible for turning their hands to such things I tell you I would never leave the house. I would never get IN the house in the first place.
Thus we need engineers to be utterly nutterly anal about nuts, bolts, ones, twos, cantilevers, plumb lines and flat-out level-headed detail. Or just about everything will fall down.
But as I have also said before, engineers really do rather sort of completely need other people around them to point out the obvious needs of, ah, actual humans. Because squishy soft pheromone-crazed, half-baked-inspiration-prone animals do not behave like helpfully well- programmed robots.
Which is a fact that precisely incurs the need for the law. And precisely annoys the tits off your average lawyer.
---
To get its own back, the legal profession in Britain helpfully assumes the reigns of authority in all significant transactions of life, to ensure an objective engineering of all parties' responsibilities and rights and so secure fairness and equity and, effectively, harmony in society – and then sods off on holiday without telling anyone.
Now now. Everyone needs a holiday; I know all too well how much my three legal examples have earned their place in that hot tub and how much, frankly, we probably just need to hold each other and rock together gently there for a while. So I dehumanise only for a pithy moment to exact a knowing smirk from you. There it is.
If I have a point – or the strength to make one after trying to buy a house as an Englishman in his own country – it is simply that what I have learned is missing from the house buying process in the jolly ol' Green And Pleasant, is someone who actually knows what the Elgar's arse is going on.
Forgive my Anglo Saxon. But tedious frustrations from my own unremarkable little life aside, it is the thing that seems needed for my countrymen as they seek for some reason to rebuild their nation's economy on the same property market foundations it failed on last time: a role somewhere in the chain that can pull together… well, everything.
Estate agents can START everything.
Solicitors can STOP everything.
No-one seems empowered to DRIVE anything.
Which is perhaps why I should have stopped feebly making pathetic time out signs all summer and put my hands on the bloody wheel. Even if my metaphorical motor is on the back of a tow-truck.
Still. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to bear in mind when observing all this from a comfortable cultural distance is that mostly, eventually, we seem to get there. And perhaps most perversely, thanks to a lot of people trying to help each other out when things appear to turn grim. Like humans.
Like Brits in the blitz.
Jeepers we just love all this, don't we?
See you round the corner. I'll have the kettle on.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Unpeeled.
Unpeeled.
Have you heard of it? Music review site, Unpeeled is, by all accounts, rather credible. Properly so. It's read, for one thing.
But it's unusual in one respect: It has reviewed Sweetseeker by that bloke from Momo:tempo.
And it appeared to like it.
---
I've had a fairly jolly morning, I should say. I spent it with one new piece of music ringing around my head on loop as I finished a mix for a radio ad for Thinking Juice. An almost daftly happy, breezy, borderline-camp affair, full of rich swooping strings – courtesy of Mr Pete Whitfield once again, who has brought the whole thing to life with his spot-on-first-time takes which I was dropping in over breakfast.
This put a huge jolly smile on my face. When you hear some version of Third Floor, Love Department posted on the Momo site, you'll know why – as Caroline deftly put it earler: "It's a sort of cross between Are you being served and Love Boat".
Well, quite.
I should feel some shame about this I suspect. But instead, of course, I think I nailed it.
Thing is, something else dropped in over breakfast which also put a huge jolly smile on my face, which the jollyness of Third Floor, Love Department seemed simply to score aptly.
It was an email. From Shane O'Leary, erstwhile proprietor of Unpeeled. Giving me the heads up on his review and pointing me to his site. I learned later, from new Head Of Music PR at Momo, Virginia, that this is something he only bothers to do if he, y'know, really likes what he's reviewed.
Yes. Likes it.
My work.
And there I am while reading his über-hip missive listening to a cross between Are you being served and Love Boat.
But let's hope the good Mr O'Leary never hears that, eh. He currently seems to be under the impression that…
[I can't bring myself to type it. It makes such little sense…]
..Momo:tempo is credible.
..!
You can see the review in action here (scroll down a bit) or read the body of it below.
Jeepers, Misses. Read those words.
And yes. I have a PR department. And so far, she's made this happen already. Fill you in a little more soon.
---
UNPEELED.NET
MOMO:TEMPO: "Sweetseeker" (Momo Creative)
RELEASED? 13th September.
SOUNDS LIKE? There are parts of London populated almost entirely by people who believe
that Nathan Barley is a drama series. These people will believe that Momo Tempo looks great, but sounds like crap. We, on the other hand know that Nathan Barley is an underrated slab of irony and that while Momo Tempo looks pretty rough, he sounds gorgeous. This is a sonic manifesto that boldly announces an intention to deceive, "I'm feeling sly" is the drawl of the micro second for the batteringly busy 'Toffee Mix' of the jazz-funk reconceived by the dancing robots of "Sweetseeker". All, you may think, very nice, but "The Golden Age Of Exploration" grinds it to dust with a cybernetic Stevie Wonder workout.
IS IT ANY GOOD? When passion, obsession and sheer, fucking naughtiness collide with tip-top clever bastard business, it's going to be great and it is.
Have you heard of it? Music review site, Unpeeled is, by all accounts, rather credible. Properly so. It's read, for one thing.
But it's unusual in one respect: It has reviewed Sweetseeker by that bloke from Momo:tempo.
And it appeared to like it.
---
I've had a fairly jolly morning, I should say. I spent it with one new piece of music ringing around my head on loop as I finished a mix for a radio ad for Thinking Juice. An almost daftly happy, breezy, borderline-camp affair, full of rich swooping strings – courtesy of Mr Pete Whitfield once again, who has brought the whole thing to life with his spot-on-first-time takes which I was dropping in over breakfast.
This put a huge jolly smile on my face. When you hear some version of Third Floor, Love Department posted on the Momo site, you'll know why – as Caroline deftly put it earler: "It's a sort of cross between Are you being served and Love Boat".
Well, quite.
I should feel some shame about this I suspect. But instead, of course, I think I nailed it.
Thing is, something else dropped in over breakfast which also put a huge jolly smile on my face, which the jollyness of Third Floor, Love Department seemed simply to score aptly.
It was an email. From Shane O'Leary, erstwhile proprietor of Unpeeled. Giving me the heads up on his review and pointing me to his site. I learned later, from new Head Of Music PR at Momo, Virginia, that this is something he only bothers to do if he, y'know, really likes what he's reviewed.
Yes. Likes it.
My work.
And there I am while reading his über-hip missive listening to a cross between Are you being served and Love Boat.
But let's hope the good Mr O'Leary never hears that, eh. He currently seems to be under the impression that…
[I can't bring myself to type it. It makes such little sense…]
..Momo:tempo is credible.
..!
You can see the review in action here (scroll down a bit) or read the body of it below.
Jeepers, Misses. Read those words.
And yes. I have a PR department. And so far, she's made this happen already. Fill you in a little more soon.
---
UNPEELED.NET
MOMO:TEMPO: "Sweetseeker" (Momo Creative)
RELEASED? 13th September.
SOUNDS LIKE? There are parts of London populated almost entirely by people who believe
that Nathan Barley is a drama series. These people will believe that Momo Tempo looks great, but sounds like crap. We, on the other hand know that Nathan Barley is an underrated slab of irony and that while Momo Tempo looks pretty rough, he sounds gorgeous. This is a sonic manifesto that boldly announces an intention to deceive, "I'm feeling sly" is the drawl of the micro second for the batteringly busy 'Toffee Mix' of the jazz-funk reconceived by the dancing robots of "Sweetseeker". All, you may think, very nice, but "The Golden Age Of Exploration" grinds it to dust with a cybernetic Stevie Wonder workout.
IS IT ANY GOOD? When passion, obsession and sheer, fucking naughtiness collide with tip-top clever bastard business, it's going to be great and it is.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Nomardy.
Nomardy.
A week in France can be very good for the heart and very bad for the arteries.
What's bad for both is attempting moving house.
Back from hols in the good Gallic countryside, in a friendly corner of extended Normandy called the Mayenne, I am facing a new week that I always knew could be a bit of a mardy / merdey one. For, in principle, this is the week we move house.
In principle, it will be the first time that Momo has ever been unplugged and relocated. In principle therefore, it is the week I say goodbye to the blessed Arnewood Studio.
Ripping the needle from the swelling Elgar as heartfelt reflections rise on this matter, I am instead facing the tiny and desperately boring matter of whether I should or should not book people to help us stand an earthly chance of moving our entire worldly life to a new space on Friday.
On FRIDAY.
And still we don't know if we can exchange.
Oh dear Lord how can something so dull be so freeeeeaking teeth-grinding?
Never mind a week of smelly Camembert and two bottles of fab French blonk a night, my heart's more likely to arrest trying to stay chilled about HOW BLOODY LONG ALL THIS IS TAKING WITHOUT US KNOWING IF WE REALLY ARE GOING TO MOVE BLOODY HOUSE OR WHETHER SOME FREAK BLOODY THING WILL STOP US AT THE LAST BLOODY MINUTE.
Readers in Pakistan may wish to send me, by return, letters and messages of perspective-giving, to help take my mind off the sickening introspection.
Meanwhile, I am apparently charged with being creative today. Retakes for a couple of score ideas and a magazine and some websites or somesuch to be looked at.
Think I might just get back in the car and keep driving.
Because if people call me back today and say we're actually completing our ruddy Vente on Vendredi, then the semaine's insanity will really begin.
It's 8.30am and I think it seems reasonable to have a drink to help my mental santé.
---
A week in France can be very good for the heart and very bad for the arteries.
What's bad for both is attempting moving house.
Back from hols in the good Gallic countryside, in a friendly corner of extended Normandy called the Mayenne, I am facing a new week that I always knew could be a bit of a mardy / merdey one. For, in principle, this is the week we move house.
In principle, it will be the first time that Momo has ever been unplugged and relocated. In principle therefore, it is the week I say goodbye to the blessed Arnewood Studio.
Ripping the needle from the swelling Elgar as heartfelt reflections rise on this matter, I am instead facing the tiny and desperately boring matter of whether I should or should not book people to help us stand an earthly chance of moving our entire worldly life to a new space on Friday.
On FRIDAY.
And still we don't know if we can exchange.
Oh dear Lord how can something so dull be so freeeeeaking teeth-grinding?
Never mind a week of smelly Camembert and two bottles of fab French blonk a night, my heart's more likely to arrest trying to stay chilled about HOW BLOODY LONG ALL THIS IS TAKING WITHOUT US KNOWING IF WE REALLY ARE GOING TO MOVE BLOODY HOUSE OR WHETHER SOME FREAK BLOODY THING WILL STOP US AT THE LAST BLOODY MINUTE.
Readers in Pakistan may wish to send me, by return, letters and messages of perspective-giving, to help take my mind off the sickening introspection.
Meanwhile, I am apparently charged with being creative today. Retakes for a couple of score ideas and a magazine and some websites or somesuch to be looked at.
Think I might just get back in the car and keep driving.
Because if people call me back today and say we're actually completing our ruddy Vente on Vendredi, then the semaine's insanity will really begin.
It's 8.30am and I think it seems reasonable to have a drink to help my mental santé.
---
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
19.
19.
So here we are. One short of a very full sounding number indeed.
An ignoble digit, you might say; how do you celebrate it? I don't think a romantic anniversary dinner for two would be enhanced by Paul Hardcastle's 1980s pop oddity about the Vietnam War. Though I think some mix of it or other was probably still in the charts when the good woman I now live with tied the knot with me that day in the summer of 1991.
For yes, today is our wedding anniversary. Bless me, but how young were we?
Not young enough to be stopped, evidently. But I still don't feel old enough to know better. It still seems like it was a really very good idea. Perhaps my last one.
I can live with that.
---
So here we are. One short of a very full sounding number indeed.
An ignoble digit, you might say; how do you celebrate it? I don't think a romantic anniversary dinner for two would be enhanced by Paul Hardcastle's 1980s pop oddity about the Vietnam War. Though I think some mix of it or other was probably still in the charts when the good woman I now live with tied the knot with me that day in the summer of 1991.
For yes, today is our wedding anniversary. Bless me, but how young were we?
Not young enough to be stopped, evidently. But I still don't feel old enough to know better. It still seems like it was a really very good idea. Perhaps my last one.
I can live with that.
---
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