Seasonal cheers.
This may sound daft, but we have our tree up.
Well, you know – most years, we get most of the way through December before decorating. This year, we figured we'd go for a cheering American-style month-long holiday season. Had my first mince pie; had my first listen of Christmas Crooners this morning.
But kicking off the festive sing-song is a piece of work that Tempo has spent half the summer playing with – for tonight, the ad is premiering.
At 8.50pm, The Euronics will perform their brand new electrical soul classic, This Christmas you could save – right in the middle of The X Factor on ITV1.
Do please watch and cheer on little Mr Plug and his band.
And I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my long-suffering downstairs neighbours when they hear that bleedin' tune come at them out of the telly instead of the ceiling.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Just a MIN.
Just a MIN.
So, there are jobs. Then there are pitches. Then there are award ceremonies.
And then there are the things you're trying to keep half a brain on in your real life.
As November spools past, I seem to have survived them all, even if nearly all of them have felt rather like some sort of pointless penance – like a time-wasting detention to just get through, so you can go home. Not to actually get anything for at the end. Just out.
Given the efforts involved in executing most of them, and the level of skill I and my team members all seem to have invested in them, it's interesting that the one to feel like the most fruitful was the one where all I did was fall into someone's car for five hours and get carried to a free dinner.
People always focus on the lunch. Turns out they should turn their blagging efforts to somewhere past tea time.
---
The MIN awards in Manchester this week came for me on the back of a long old week in the early-morning/late-night saddle. I was knackered, as Gel, Deb and Steve from Thinking Juice whisked me off to the North for a be-bibbed-and-tuckered freebee. And I knew that they were each just as knackered. So who, I wondered sleepily in the back seat, who exactly would be in any fit state to drive HOME again the next morning?
That I was able to swan around in a tux with them and be there when they came within a gnat's hat of winning Agency Of The Year – before being allowed to take home the South West Agency Of The Year piece of trinketry – was an honour, I should say. Those guys can hold their heads up with anyone in a room full of UK agency creatives. In truth, I think they could honestly hold them a lot higher.
If any of us could hold up our heads at all by the next morning.
It felt like one of the more rewarding moments of the last few months, not because the award was for anything I had done, but simply because being with those you care about at little key moments are, I've long believed, the real gems to be grabbed on your life journey.
A noble and dedicated philosophy that has seen me passably rich in such things and otherwise working out of my bedroom at nearly 40.
---
After today, for various reasons, I essentially just want to go to bed. Having made it this far now seems like payment enough. It may sound defeatist – but firstly, I'm a lover not a fighter, remember, and secondly, if you're not a believer in plateaus you haven't climbed high enough yet.
Not a single one of the many investments Momo's creatively made this year may bear fruit. Working your ass off isn't enough to fight the force of some narrative directions. But that's fine. There are following chapters.
Remember, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix seemed an interminable drag to read the first time. But it was essential to the rip-roaring plot denouement of the series.
Right now, I'm grateful for being given any chance to fall flat on my back for a moment.
So, there are jobs. Then there are pitches. Then there are award ceremonies.
And then there are the things you're trying to keep half a brain on in your real life.
As November spools past, I seem to have survived them all, even if nearly all of them have felt rather like some sort of pointless penance – like a time-wasting detention to just get through, so you can go home. Not to actually get anything for at the end. Just out.
Given the efforts involved in executing most of them, and the level of skill I and my team members all seem to have invested in them, it's interesting that the one to feel like the most fruitful was the one where all I did was fall into someone's car for five hours and get carried to a free dinner.
People always focus on the lunch. Turns out they should turn their blagging efforts to somewhere past tea time.
---
The MIN awards in Manchester this week came for me on the back of a long old week in the early-morning/late-night saddle. I was knackered, as Gel, Deb and Steve from Thinking Juice whisked me off to the North for a be-bibbed-and-tuckered freebee. And I knew that they were each just as knackered. So who, I wondered sleepily in the back seat, who exactly would be in any fit state to drive HOME again the next morning?
That I was able to swan around in a tux with them and be there when they came within a gnat's hat of winning Agency Of The Year – before being allowed to take home the South West Agency Of The Year piece of trinketry – was an honour, I should say. Those guys can hold their heads up with anyone in a room full of UK agency creatives. In truth, I think they could honestly hold them a lot higher.
If any of us could hold up our heads at all by the next morning.
It felt like one of the more rewarding moments of the last few months, not because the award was for anything I had done, but simply because being with those you care about at little key moments are, I've long believed, the real gems to be grabbed on your life journey.
A noble and dedicated philosophy that has seen me passably rich in such things and otherwise working out of my bedroom at nearly 40.
---
After today, for various reasons, I essentially just want to go to bed. Having made it this far now seems like payment enough. It may sound defeatist – but firstly, I'm a lover not a fighter, remember, and secondly, if you're not a believer in plateaus you haven't climbed high enough yet.
Not a single one of the many investments Momo's creatively made this year may bear fruit. Working your ass off isn't enough to fight the force of some narrative directions. But that's fine. There are following chapters.
Remember, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix seemed an interminable drag to read the first time. But it was essential to the rip-roaring plot denouement of the series.
Right now, I'm grateful for being given any chance to fall flat on my back for a moment.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
High Noakes.
High Noakes.
I stumbled across something quietly wonderful this afternoon.
Chewing over a new Monster Master Über To Do list after a hefty-ish week of mopping up various ends of jobs to go to print, I was scrolling around for some pleasant background entertainment when I found a little delight. Which induced a most unexpected little reverie.
In the smokey, dyed-diesel-plume wake of the news that the last British bastion of daring-do, splay-bursting, delta-nining chapdom has admitted a filly into its ranks, the BBC had placed some intriguing links on its homepage.
One was an interview with Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, the first female pilot to join the Red Arrows Ruddy Marvelous Aerobatic Display Team – a typically British forces kind of thoroughly nice lass who seemed at a loss to explain why none of the splendid female piloting talent of the RAF has donned the Reds' flight suit and caught the keys to one of their little Hawks before.
The other was... a complete episode of Go with Noakes from 1976. The one where he flew with the Arrows for himself.
---
Clicking the Play icon, I didn't quite know what to expect, after 35 years. But as the ledge John himself strolled into shot with trusty hairy TV partner Shep, in glorious 70s Filmgrainovision – doing that double act they always did of one of them spouting even, Yorkshire train-of-thought rambling while the other looked disinterested – I felt a lump rise in my throat.
---
That was my childhood. My safe, hopeful, much-loved childhood. And how I got away with enjoying it as such for the whole time, I've never worked out.
But John Noakes' safe, clear tones – friendly but tinged with just enough adult authority, mixed perfectly with the constant possibility of a dry, silly quip – were a huge comfort to a generation of us exploring the world around us from the safety of gently irradiating new colour televisions.
I learnt more about the Red Arrows from this gloriously be-side-burned, be-sensible-haircutted 30 minutes than I remember from any other time. Why, I didn't realise it was so easy. They're making it up on a stick and a wink way more than you'd think up there. John even did it. Which means I now really want to do it.
"Here" said his pilot, "take the stick. Forget the rudders, they're just there to rest your feet on. Now, put it hard over... Whoop! Heh-heh. There. You just did a roll. Easy eh?"
Hell, yeah. Letme-letme!
As he then watched the jolly fine chaps open their season with a display over Whitby bay, I thought of all those childhood memories of standing on similar cliffs at Bournemouth, waiting for the nine red darts flash overhead from behind us in a suddent screech at precisely On Time O'clock.
And as I saw a little 70s chap sitting in his Dad's arm, in little shorts and a little home-knitted jumper, I couldn't help picturing a very similar little chap of a very similar age, in a very similar little outfit sitting expectantly in the crook of his own daddy's arm, some 300 miles south, that same afternoon probably. And I felt an echo of the same comforting thrill of formative times.
It was wonderful.
This was the same daddy, incidentally, who would, upon hearing the Black Dyke Mills Band strike up with the gloriously whimsical theme tune, always say: "Ah there are the Black Mills Dyke Band again." Every time.
Then I remembered when Go with Noakes secretly filmed at my school, just a year or two later. And I kind of wished the BBC would post up that episode, to see if I recognised any of the big-haired, be-flared youngsters from the year above me at St Katherine's CE Primary, who got to go do the adventure exercise circuit up on Hengistbury Head with television's nicest, pre-Ant & Dec double act.
I may e-mail them and ask for the whole bally series to go up.
Mean time, check this out for yourself. It'll get you high on the funny reality of your childhood. Because it wasn't just a pre-digital age daydream. You were there.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml?all=2&id=5328
I stumbled across something quietly wonderful this afternoon.
Chewing over a new Monster Master Über To Do list after a hefty-ish week of mopping up various ends of jobs to go to print, I was scrolling around for some pleasant background entertainment when I found a little delight. Which induced a most unexpected little reverie.
In the smokey, dyed-diesel-plume wake of the news that the last British bastion of daring-do, splay-bursting, delta-nining chapdom has admitted a filly into its ranks, the BBC had placed some intriguing links on its homepage.
One was an interview with Flight Lieutenant Kirsty Moore, the first female pilot to join the Red Arrows Ruddy Marvelous Aerobatic Display Team – a typically British forces kind of thoroughly nice lass who seemed at a loss to explain why none of the splendid female piloting talent of the RAF has donned the Reds' flight suit and caught the keys to one of their little Hawks before.
The other was... a complete episode of Go with Noakes from 1976. The one where he flew with the Arrows for himself.
---
Clicking the Play icon, I didn't quite know what to expect, after 35 years. But as the ledge John himself strolled into shot with trusty hairy TV partner Shep, in glorious 70s Filmgrainovision – doing that double act they always did of one of them spouting even, Yorkshire train-of-thought rambling while the other looked disinterested – I felt a lump rise in my throat.
---
That was my childhood. My safe, hopeful, much-loved childhood. And how I got away with enjoying it as such for the whole time, I've never worked out.
But John Noakes' safe, clear tones – friendly but tinged with just enough adult authority, mixed perfectly with the constant possibility of a dry, silly quip – were a huge comfort to a generation of us exploring the world around us from the safety of gently irradiating new colour televisions.
I learnt more about the Red Arrows from this gloriously be-side-burned, be-sensible-haircutted 30 minutes than I remember from any other time. Why, I didn't realise it was so easy. They're making it up on a stick and a wink way more than you'd think up there. John even did it. Which means I now really want to do it.
"Here" said his pilot, "take the stick. Forget the rudders, they're just there to rest your feet on. Now, put it hard over... Whoop! Heh-heh. There. You just did a roll. Easy eh?"
Hell, yeah. Letme-letme!
As he then watched the jolly fine chaps open their season with a display over Whitby bay, I thought of all those childhood memories of standing on similar cliffs at Bournemouth, waiting for the nine red darts flash overhead from behind us in a suddent screech at precisely On Time O'clock.
And as I saw a little 70s chap sitting in his Dad's arm, in little shorts and a little home-knitted jumper, I couldn't help picturing a very similar little chap of a very similar age, in a very similar little outfit sitting expectantly in the crook of his own daddy's arm, some 300 miles south, that same afternoon probably. And I felt an echo of the same comforting thrill of formative times.
It was wonderful.
This was the same daddy, incidentally, who would, upon hearing the Black Dyke Mills Band strike up with the gloriously whimsical theme tune, always say: "Ah there are the Black Mills Dyke Band again." Every time.
Then I remembered when Go with Noakes secretly filmed at my school, just a year or two later. And I kind of wished the BBC would post up that episode, to see if I recognised any of the big-haired, be-flared youngsters from the year above me at St Katherine's CE Primary, who got to go do the adventure exercise circuit up on Hengistbury Head with television's nicest, pre-Ant & Dec double act.
I may e-mail them and ask for the whole bally series to go up.
Mean time, check this out for yourself. It'll get you high on the funny reality of your childhood. Because it wasn't just a pre-digital age daydream. You were there.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/aerialjourneys/5328.shtml?all=2&id=5328
Monday, November 09, 2009
I remember 1989.
I remember 1989.
Twenty years. I guess it seems that long.
So much has happened since the Berlin wall fell in a colourful spill of people, but it's also kind of gone fast. In fact, I wonder whether the intimation in Jon Snow's tone tonight was that it's hard to imagine a world with the cold war now – a fact perhaps astonishing after so little historic time. Whatever, Channel Four News gave tonight's celebrations in the German capital a slightly misty-eyed lead story status. And rightly so.
It's poetic to suppose that of all European nations emerging from the 20th century, Germany should be the one to give the world one of the most potent symbols of reconciliation – that footage of teenagers dancing on the Brandenburg gate in November 1989.
Or was it Wind of change by The Scorpions?
Anyway – no, east and west are not fluidly one country yet. Not in the fullest sense. And I'm not sure if they can be – no slashed wound heals without a scar where the tissue knitted back together. But the practical cost, as in South Africa, is still worth paying. Surely. Living apart is ultimately more unsustainable than working together. It just is. Your identity has to be strong enough to cope with the change.
And I'm pretty sure most Germans think the same in the end. They're very sensible people. They made Wind of change the 10th best selling record in Germany of all time.
---
I remember reading something in a text book while still at school, some while more than twenty years ago. I remember that reading it at that time seemed a little shocking. Just bold. Ballsy of the writer, I thought.
Because he said something almost blithely about how history warned us that the Berlin Wall could not possibly stay standing for long. That one day it would surely fall.
Now, if you weren't around then, this statement will probably seem self evident. To be filed under 'Duh!' – along with other statements, like: 'Cod sci-fi TV soap Defying Gravity walks a fine line between likeably daft and annoyingly stupid' or: 'Gordon Brown's government is already putting things in boxes'. It's just obvious.
But, really. Back then the wall seemed immovable. Utterly. A symbol of a status quo beyond any challenge. This writer's worldly wisdom seemed simply audacious to my 15-year-old self; back then, the only way to combat the Berlin Wall from Bournemouth was to buy a nuclear bunker for the garden. I remember seeing them for sale at the Hurn air show, next to the only just retired Vulcan bomber.
And yet, just a month after my 19th birthday, down it came. Surprising everyone – not least of which the important handful of soon-to-be-former soviet state heads, which duly rolled in the coming two years.
---
Annoyingly, I almost got to go to Berlin that summer. Some church thing. I could have seen the wall in all its terrifying actuality for myself to marvel my kids about years later, if I'd been put on the right list. Or if I'd had kids.
I ended up in Düsseldorf. Singing hymns in the town square or similar. And, weirdly, Caroline happened to be passing through the city with her family at exactly the same time; I remember calling her from a phone box and almost being able to meet up. But not.
Not a great 'I remember 1989' story, I know.
Still, to celebrate, 20 years on, I'm going to Düsseldorf without her again next week. Re-live the important personal moments. ..Of how we weren't in the right place at the right time on at least a couple of counts.
While I'm there, hunting for that phone box, I may also see if I can squeeze in some site visiting with Jules for our client's show.
Either way, I know one thing. I still want to wave a flag when I see that footage. Or when I hear the 10th best selling German record of all time.
Yes, I remember it well.
Well, no. Of course I have no idea where I was on the actual night. I mean it was ages ago...
Twenty years. I guess it seems that long.
So much has happened since the Berlin wall fell in a colourful spill of people, but it's also kind of gone fast. In fact, I wonder whether the intimation in Jon Snow's tone tonight was that it's hard to imagine a world with the cold war now – a fact perhaps astonishing after so little historic time. Whatever, Channel Four News gave tonight's celebrations in the German capital a slightly misty-eyed lead story status. And rightly so.
It's poetic to suppose that of all European nations emerging from the 20th century, Germany should be the one to give the world one of the most potent symbols of reconciliation – that footage of teenagers dancing on the Brandenburg gate in November 1989.
Or was it Wind of change by The Scorpions?
Anyway – no, east and west are not fluidly one country yet. Not in the fullest sense. And I'm not sure if they can be – no slashed wound heals without a scar where the tissue knitted back together. But the practical cost, as in South Africa, is still worth paying. Surely. Living apart is ultimately more unsustainable than working together. It just is. Your identity has to be strong enough to cope with the change.
And I'm pretty sure most Germans think the same in the end. They're very sensible people. They made Wind of change the 10th best selling record in Germany of all time.
---
I remember reading something in a text book while still at school, some while more than twenty years ago. I remember that reading it at that time seemed a little shocking. Just bold. Ballsy of the writer, I thought.
Because he said something almost blithely about how history warned us that the Berlin Wall could not possibly stay standing for long. That one day it would surely fall.
Now, if you weren't around then, this statement will probably seem self evident. To be filed under 'Duh!' – along with other statements, like: 'Cod sci-fi TV soap Defying Gravity walks a fine line between likeably daft and annoyingly stupid' or: 'Gordon Brown's government is already putting things in boxes'. It's just obvious.
But, really. Back then the wall seemed immovable. Utterly. A symbol of a status quo beyond any challenge. This writer's worldly wisdom seemed simply audacious to my 15-year-old self; back then, the only way to combat the Berlin Wall from Bournemouth was to buy a nuclear bunker for the garden. I remember seeing them for sale at the Hurn air show, next to the only just retired Vulcan bomber.
And yet, just a month after my 19th birthday, down it came. Surprising everyone – not least of which the important handful of soon-to-be-former soviet state heads, which duly rolled in the coming two years.
---
Annoyingly, I almost got to go to Berlin that summer. Some church thing. I could have seen the wall in all its terrifying actuality for myself to marvel my kids about years later, if I'd been put on the right list. Or if I'd had kids.
I ended up in Düsseldorf. Singing hymns in the town square or similar. And, weirdly, Caroline happened to be passing through the city with her family at exactly the same time; I remember calling her from a phone box and almost being able to meet up. But not.
Not a great 'I remember 1989' story, I know.
Still, to celebrate, 20 years on, I'm going to Düsseldorf without her again next week. Re-live the important personal moments. ..Of how we weren't in the right place at the right time on at least a couple of counts.
While I'm there, hunting for that phone box, I may also see if I can squeeze in some site visiting with Jules for our client's show.
Either way, I know one thing. I still want to wave a flag when I see that footage. Or when I hear the 10th best selling German record of all time.
Yes, I remember it well.
Well, no. Of course I have no idea where I was on the actual night. I mean it was ages ago...
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Global outlook.
Global outlook.
So I'm sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City.
I don't know how I found myself apparently pretending to be an international, ex-pat-type business person – I'm just a simple-minded creative. I like titting about with words and tunes, and sitting about with chums and coffees. I can hardly suddenly successfully convince everyone I've actually been some big shot serious person underneath it all, all along. Can I. Really.
So what am I doing in a hotel in Kuwait City?
Well, I can't be sure, but it rather looks like what I've been doing is planning how to muck about with creative stuff for some undeniably nice people I've spent the last couple of days sitting around tables of food and coffee with, while trying not to come off as someone pretending to be some big shot serious person. That and making a lot of jokes, obviously.
And it also looks like I've found myself in the middle of a significant chunk of work out here in the desert. Between all the wonky English jokes, Julian and I have put together a very serious proposition for our emerging friends out here. It'll stretch us – it'll stretch me. But I went out on my own to enlarge my outlook – and I'm looking forward to us helping each other do just that.
---
The thing about the real global outlook – the one getting on with itself, far outside the tiny ring-fenced reality of the Nick Griffins of this world – is that it doesn't in fact look like the sleekly soulless Business section of your stock photography website. You knew it wouldn't – nothing human could possibly exist there. There in that God-awful eternity of hand shakes and thumbs up and hour glasses running out and people in suits punching the air. But I'll bet even you didn't realise the new global economy would turn out to be quite so... tacky.
The new world order would appear to be a steakhouse restaurant chain in the lobby of a business hotel chain, themed in a plastic version of the Wild West, administered by Koreans in chaps and stetsons, frequented by Arabs in kafirs and Nikes, and cleaned by the people of the Indus. Observed by middle-aged English businessmen who've married Thai women and retired to Dubai. Soon to be invested in by Russian gangsters. And speaking Mandarin.
Is this more or less frightening than 1984? Is it more or less stupid sounding now than the idea of Communist conformity or Nazi purity?
The outlook for the global economy is as multi-coloured as a tasteless fast food logo.
But it's free.
And it makes us open our eyes to eachother.
Because the reality, when you sit down in the plastic Wild West and engage it in conversation, is human shaped.
The differences between people can be perspective changing – especially if you don't want to get arrested. But I'm coming home at the end of the week reminded that the reason a simple-minded creative like me can float his little business boat on this bewildering, complex sea of change is because of the similarities underneath the stetson brim. Or the kafir folds.
A person you like is a person you like, wherever you find them. And I like this.
Even if piped karaoke covers of pop favourites forces my fingers into my ears while I'm sitting there, I shall continue to keep my eyes open.
So I'm sitting in a hotel in Kuwait City.
I don't know how I found myself apparently pretending to be an international, ex-pat-type business person – I'm just a simple-minded creative. I like titting about with words and tunes, and sitting about with chums and coffees. I can hardly suddenly successfully convince everyone I've actually been some big shot serious person underneath it all, all along. Can I. Really.
So what am I doing in a hotel in Kuwait City?
Well, I can't be sure, but it rather looks like what I've been doing is planning how to muck about with creative stuff for some undeniably nice people I've spent the last couple of days sitting around tables of food and coffee with, while trying not to come off as someone pretending to be some big shot serious person. That and making a lot of jokes, obviously.
And it also looks like I've found myself in the middle of a significant chunk of work out here in the desert. Between all the wonky English jokes, Julian and I have put together a very serious proposition for our emerging friends out here. It'll stretch us – it'll stretch me. But I went out on my own to enlarge my outlook – and I'm looking forward to us helping each other do just that.
---
The thing about the real global outlook – the one getting on with itself, far outside the tiny ring-fenced reality of the Nick Griffins of this world – is that it doesn't in fact look like the sleekly soulless Business section of your stock photography website. You knew it wouldn't – nothing human could possibly exist there. There in that God-awful eternity of hand shakes and thumbs up and hour glasses running out and people in suits punching the air. But I'll bet even you didn't realise the new global economy would turn out to be quite so... tacky.
The new world order would appear to be a steakhouse restaurant chain in the lobby of a business hotel chain, themed in a plastic version of the Wild West, administered by Koreans in chaps and stetsons, frequented by Arabs in kafirs and Nikes, and cleaned by the people of the Indus. Observed by middle-aged English businessmen who've married Thai women and retired to Dubai. Soon to be invested in by Russian gangsters. And speaking Mandarin.
Is this more or less frightening than 1984? Is it more or less stupid sounding now than the idea of Communist conformity or Nazi purity?
The outlook for the global economy is as multi-coloured as a tasteless fast food logo.
But it's free.
And it makes us open our eyes to eachother.
Because the reality, when you sit down in the plastic Wild West and engage it in conversation, is human shaped.
The differences between people can be perspective changing – especially if you don't want to get arrested. But I'm coming home at the end of the week reminded that the reason a simple-minded creative like me can float his little business boat on this bewildering, complex sea of change is because of the similarities underneath the stetson brim. Or the kafir folds.
A person you like is a person you like, wherever you find them. And I like this.
Even if piped karaoke covers of pop favourites forces my fingers into my ears while I'm sitting there, I shall continue to keep my eyes open.
Friday, October 30, 2009
X.
X.
I haven't seen a single second of it.
Not a clip. Not a pic. Not a quote.
This year's X Factor is a complete mystery to me. Who are these 'twins' people speak of with such derision? And how can I generate a Facebook campaign with even half as many signatures on it as their I bet I can find a million people who hate the twins group? Some of us can only dream of such exposure.
It's not that I took some high-minded decision not to partake in the shiny ITV1 shenanigans. I think watercooler telly is not only the most transatlantic of phrases I could have made up there, it's one of the saving graces of modern life. Something we can share with strangers.
It's just that, well... when am I ever going to be in the mood to watch a programme that is as much about toe-curling car-crash talentlessness as it is about soulless slickibility. (Yeah, chew on that, automatic spellchecker.) I mean, I have enough of all this at home.
---
One of the key daft things about working at Momo is the split personality it requires. Yes, it keeps me entertained, swapping hats as I do, but it begs the question: When am I going to knuckle down with something and start to get properly any chuffing good at it?
I've spent today generating big sheets of layout paper with numbers scribbled all over them. Next week, Julian and I are in the Middle East, trying to convince a significant client that we do in fact know our seating facilities from our articulation in the arm – and for this we obviously need to demonstrate fairly clearly that we know what we're talking about.
Now, you might say that given my preponderance of coping with too much to do by winging things shamelessly, this is an uncomfortable state of affairs for my company's creative director to find himself in.
But, while I'm putting together a strategy and a budget for something that will take a year for us to deliver to a growing international business, I'm also trying to release a record.
If nothing else, this presents a significant challenge to choice of haircut.
I mean, two more different markets I could not be trying to serve. And there is only so far the idea of 'idiosyncratic' will get you before you luck out, suddenly very obviously dressed for the wrong context.
---
Thing is, big break for Momo:typo as this gig would be, I do feel happy that we can help the client. We've done some great work for them before and we've got some great people involved, ready to jump all over it. I'm mainly just, kind of, excited. Sure – I'll need to wear a tie when operating this side of the business. This side of the business is often talking in board rooms and sensible grown up places.
But, y'know, I rarely wear a tie to these places. I prefer to be conspicuously human in formal environments – so long as I look like I know what I'm doing there in the first place. The human bit is, in fact, the whole point of my work. And these days, I'm more likely to put on a tie to go talk to some musos – a nice, trendy slim one. I think I did, in fact, recently.
It was a meeting about our little bit of conspicuously shiny ITV-type work, going out in time for Christmas.
Olu and Lou are seasoned musos, each having been signed to majors at some point in their careers and each knowing a thing or two about being very cool very naturally. I'm not sure whether they noticed and appreciated my nice trendy thin tie or not, when we met the first time to discuss Thinking Juice's little advert for the telly. I'm sure they did.
As amusing as the paying demands of advertising are, it's still hard not to feel something uncomfortably approaching serious pride in some bits of work you get to contribute to in this business. Silly does not always equal ridiculous. At least, not when you receive the cheque.
Squeezing into their roof-top studio with three brass players, or hearing the session cut of the strings part in the mix for the first time, I feel as comfortable with the work we're turning out here as I do anything grown-up enough to dress open-necked in the boardroom.
It's all a bit of a weird cross-over, I'll grant you. But I'm oddly comfortable with Momo's split personalty as I prepare for the Autumn shift.
Don't ask me what it is, but something tells me it's too soon to cut my hair.
I haven't seen a single second of it.
Not a clip. Not a pic. Not a quote.
This year's X Factor is a complete mystery to me. Who are these 'twins' people speak of with such derision? And how can I generate a Facebook campaign with even half as many signatures on it as their I bet I can find a million people who hate the twins group? Some of us can only dream of such exposure.
It's not that I took some high-minded decision not to partake in the shiny ITV1 shenanigans. I think watercooler telly is not only the most transatlantic of phrases I could have made up there, it's one of the saving graces of modern life. Something we can share with strangers.
It's just that, well... when am I ever going to be in the mood to watch a programme that is as much about toe-curling car-crash talentlessness as it is about soulless slickibility. (Yeah, chew on that, automatic spellchecker.) I mean, I have enough of all this at home.
---
One of the key daft things about working at Momo is the split personality it requires. Yes, it keeps me entertained, swapping hats as I do, but it begs the question: When am I going to knuckle down with something and start to get properly any chuffing good at it?
I've spent today generating big sheets of layout paper with numbers scribbled all over them. Next week, Julian and I are in the Middle East, trying to convince a significant client that we do in fact know our seating facilities from our articulation in the arm – and for this we obviously need to demonstrate fairly clearly that we know what we're talking about.
Now, you might say that given my preponderance of coping with too much to do by winging things shamelessly, this is an uncomfortable state of affairs for my company's creative director to find himself in.
But, while I'm putting together a strategy and a budget for something that will take a year for us to deliver to a growing international business, I'm also trying to release a record.
If nothing else, this presents a significant challenge to choice of haircut.
I mean, two more different markets I could not be trying to serve. And there is only so far the idea of 'idiosyncratic' will get you before you luck out, suddenly very obviously dressed for the wrong context.
---
Thing is, big break for Momo:typo as this gig would be, I do feel happy that we can help the client. We've done some great work for them before and we've got some great people involved, ready to jump all over it. I'm mainly just, kind of, excited. Sure – I'll need to wear a tie when operating this side of the business. This side of the business is often talking in board rooms and sensible grown up places.
But, y'know, I rarely wear a tie to these places. I prefer to be conspicuously human in formal environments – so long as I look like I know what I'm doing there in the first place. The human bit is, in fact, the whole point of my work. And these days, I'm more likely to put on a tie to go talk to some musos – a nice, trendy slim one. I think I did, in fact, recently.
It was a meeting about our little bit of conspicuously shiny ITV-type work, going out in time for Christmas.
Olu and Lou are seasoned musos, each having been signed to majors at some point in their careers and each knowing a thing or two about being very cool very naturally. I'm not sure whether they noticed and appreciated my nice trendy thin tie or not, when we met the first time to discuss Thinking Juice's little advert for the telly. I'm sure they did.
As amusing as the paying demands of advertising are, it's still hard not to feel something uncomfortably approaching serious pride in some bits of work you get to contribute to in this business. Silly does not always equal ridiculous. At least, not when you receive the cheque.
Squeezing into their roof-top studio with three brass players, or hearing the session cut of the strings part in the mix for the first time, I feel as comfortable with the work we're turning out here as I do anything grown-up enough to dress open-necked in the boardroom.
It's all a bit of a weird cross-over, I'll grant you. But I'm oddly comfortable with Momo's split personalty as I prepare for the Autumn shift.
Don't ask me what it is, but something tells me it's too soon to cut my hair.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Therapy.
Therapy.
I have no particular need of therapy at the moment. Other than as I always do, for the backdrop, bedrock barking. Things are okay, I should say – but busy.
People like busy people. It sounds credible. It's a good problem. But you can be busy being an arse, remember. And I should know.
No, I'm thinking of a type of therapy that's so universal, so multi-practical, so everyday-useful I mention it now as a helpful daily tip, should you find yourself 'busy'.
Need a pep?
Pertness pooped?
Feeling less than frisky?
Really f***ing depressed?
I defy you to find me a human condition that is not downright righted by taking the following simple steps:
1: Locate a music playing device. A proper one, not a phone. One you can annoy the neighbours with (which if you do, you can instantly return to point one to feel better again, remember).
2: Locate a playable copy of Earth Wind & FIre's tunes In the stone and Star.
3: Turn up volume a tad beyond Loud Enough.
4: Press Play.
Really. I frankly DARE you to try to prove me wrong. I would prescribe this on the NHS for people with the most fearsome personal obstacles to overcome. Only I might prescribe the whole damned Greatest Hits for hardcore cases.
Trust me. I'm not mad.
Despite being off to the physical therapy of a circuits class.
I have no particular need of therapy at the moment. Other than as I always do, for the backdrop, bedrock barking. Things are okay, I should say – but busy.
People like busy people. It sounds credible. It's a good problem. But you can be busy being an arse, remember. And I should know.
No, I'm thinking of a type of therapy that's so universal, so multi-practical, so everyday-useful I mention it now as a helpful daily tip, should you find yourself 'busy'.
Need a pep?
Pertness pooped?
Feeling less than frisky?
Really f***ing depressed?
I defy you to find me a human condition that is not downright righted by taking the following simple steps:
1: Locate a music playing device. A proper one, not a phone. One you can annoy the neighbours with (which if you do, you can instantly return to point one to feel better again, remember).
2: Locate a playable copy of Earth Wind & FIre's tunes In the stone and Star.
3: Turn up volume a tad beyond Loud Enough.
4: Press Play.
Really. I frankly DARE you to try to prove me wrong. I would prescribe this on the NHS for people with the most fearsome personal obstacles to overcome. Only I might prescribe the whole damned Greatest Hits for hardcore cases.
Trust me. I'm not mad.
Despite being off to the physical therapy of a circuits class.
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Old blogger.
Old blogger.
It's not exactly been a jolly bloggy kind of few weeks, it has to be said. The pithy mirth and incisive observation you've come to rely on, oh utterly imaginary reader, have not been bubbling in the gullet ready to spill out of the creative windpipe into an entertainingly explosive coughing fit all over the Mac monitor quite as normal. I have had indigestion. Or whatever the upright version of constipation would be, suffered metaphorically. Off-colour in some way, anyway.
Which you undoubtedly are now after that little picture.
My point is that the only news I've had and the only interesting happenings I've witnessed in that time would have been so tedious to report, I'd have had no trouble conjuring a pretty accurate atmosphere of slow death. And, like every Hollywood take on the second world war ever released, the point of all this is hardly historical realism, is it.
You come here for succinct entertainment and pseudo-clever enlightenment mixed with just a self-affacing twist of zeitgeistian insight, masquerading only flimsily as proper personal journal. There's no way I'd expect you to read what I'm REALLY doing every day, any more than you'd expect me to give you what you really want – detailed but readable proof that my life is actually fairly devoid of any truly decent stories, star-struck chance happenings, big creative achievements or half way sodding decent pay packets.
---
So yes, I've not been in the mood to rock the blog. Not had time either, really.
Not the way I wanted to start my 40th year.
For I have. Today. Today marks the completion of my 39th year on Earth and the inexorable skid through my fortieth into my actual fortieth birthday, one little year from now. I have, as my sister put it, just one year left of legitimate kidulthood.
I don't know what's more tragic – that my generation's main claim to fame is that it invented this shameful reflection on our inability to grasp responsibility, or that I would describe any occurrence of it, at any age whatsoever, as legitimate.
Age itself hasn't usually been an issue for me, I have to say. The numbers are pretty meaningless. If only they'd take the hint and consistently feel so.
The numbers are, in fact, more than meaningless – they start to sound just ridiculous. I mean, who the hell would let an arse like me near the age of 40? I'm the same time-wasting bastard I was two decades ago. What am I going to do with an adult age like 40? Really? Find a point to all this arsing about all of a sudden?
I think we all tend to be judged on track records. And there's plenty of track behind me now, apparently. And not many records.
Apart from this heavily edited and incidental blog, anyway.
I suspect I know exactly what I'll do with an adult age like 40.
Put it off for a year.
It's not exactly been a jolly bloggy kind of few weeks, it has to be said. The pithy mirth and incisive observation you've come to rely on, oh utterly imaginary reader, have not been bubbling in the gullet ready to spill out of the creative windpipe into an entertainingly explosive coughing fit all over the Mac monitor quite as normal. I have had indigestion. Or whatever the upright version of constipation would be, suffered metaphorically. Off-colour in some way, anyway.
Which you undoubtedly are now after that little picture.
My point is that the only news I've had and the only interesting happenings I've witnessed in that time would have been so tedious to report, I'd have had no trouble conjuring a pretty accurate atmosphere of slow death. And, like every Hollywood take on the second world war ever released, the point of all this is hardly historical realism, is it.
You come here for succinct entertainment and pseudo-clever enlightenment mixed with just a self-affacing twist of zeitgeistian insight, masquerading only flimsily as proper personal journal. There's no way I'd expect you to read what I'm REALLY doing every day, any more than you'd expect me to give you what you really want – detailed but readable proof that my life is actually fairly devoid of any truly decent stories, star-struck chance happenings, big creative achievements or half way sodding decent pay packets.
---
So yes, I've not been in the mood to rock the blog. Not had time either, really.
Not the way I wanted to start my 40th year.
For I have. Today. Today marks the completion of my 39th year on Earth and the inexorable skid through my fortieth into my actual fortieth birthday, one little year from now. I have, as my sister put it, just one year left of legitimate kidulthood.
I don't know what's more tragic – that my generation's main claim to fame is that it invented this shameful reflection on our inability to grasp responsibility, or that I would describe any occurrence of it, at any age whatsoever, as legitimate.
Age itself hasn't usually been an issue for me, I have to say. The numbers are pretty meaningless. If only they'd take the hint and consistently feel so.
The numbers are, in fact, more than meaningless – they start to sound just ridiculous. I mean, who the hell would let an arse like me near the age of 40? I'm the same time-wasting bastard I was two decades ago. What am I going to do with an adult age like 40? Really? Find a point to all this arsing about all of a sudden?
I think we all tend to be judged on track records. And there's plenty of track behind me now, apparently. And not many records.
Apart from this heavily edited and incidental blog, anyway.
I suspect I know exactly what I'll do with an adult age like 40.
Put it off for a year.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Yelp.
Yelp.
Here's the truth: I don't get us. Us lot – humans.
I mean, I do – I can yelp at the moon with the craziest of them. But we are mad bastards.
I mean, how is it that we can meet each other in the street on most days and more or less come off as grounded, sensible neighbours who can be trusted to help each other out in an emergency – and yet manage to produce armies of flesh-eating zombies as soon as someone rings the Oh Shit bell?
I mean, really – where do all the monsters come from? Where are we hiding them?
---
Something I'm largely ignorant of is the conflict in Sri Lanka. What sparked the Tamil Tigers' two decades or however long of dissent and fighting against the government, I don't know. I've not been to the country. I hear it's beautiful.
But lastnight, I heard just a clip of an interview with a woman who'd escaped from the final throes of the war in the north of the island, earlier this year. She described scenes of carnage beyond counting.
She said that in one place she found herself, 'everywhere was bodies'. Everywhere she looked she saw corpses. Not just fallen or left, but piled.
She ran to the local hospital. They had no more room for bodies of people – there too, they were piling them in corridors and side rooms.
Where did all these dead people come from? And, more to the point, where did their killers come from?
---
This morning, an account by a woman who walked for miles to escape the fighting in the Somalian capital Mogadishu, left me wondering the same thing. She said she was so repeatedly robbed as a refugee, and so subsequently malnourished, her dreadful appearance must have been the only thing that saved her from being raped. She said that most other women with her had been, by the time they reached the coast.
It resonates with stories from the genocide in Rwanda more than a decade ago. And perhaps, in a sense, with others from the war in the former Yugoslavia – neighbours and ordinary locals appearing to develop an overnight thirst for eachother's blood and suffering.
In the case of Sri Lanka, it was government forces apparently dishing out the death. In Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, in the broadest terms, tribal friction had embedded itself in identity like a sleeper cell, so they say.
But whatever uniform you're wearing, or given at birth, you are still you when you make your choices. Even when you're part of a system trained to execute orders.
You're still you. Aren't you?
And in Somalia? Well, it's just about every conceivable element of conflict all thrown in together, isn't it? Identity, politics, poverty, money, geography – it sounds like every slavering, blood-shot, howling vision of hell ever hallucinated. It sounds like Dante's fucking Inferno. And yet, the woman this morning could still remember 'how beautiful Mogadishu was before the fighting'.
Can anyone imagine the Dish as beautiful? From the ignorant snippets of it we digest quickly from the news, it has become another Beirut or a Belfast – a place synonymous with destruction.
---
It seems incomprehensible. I don't understand where the sheer numbers of rapists and murderers appear from, when the trumpet of chaos bleats. And the level of depravity and cruelty lept to so quickly in war zones. I can't picture that happening in Bournemouth.
I feel sure that young men and women serving with British forces in Afghanistan at the moment might be able to look me thoughtfully in the eye as I say this.
So interesting, as an aside, that two of the most level-headed, likeable and positive people to have perhaps ever appeared on Channel 4's post-supper comfort Location location location were lastnight's couple, Chris and Nikki – a major in the Paras and a flight lieutenant in the RAF, respectively. If you were looking for it, at least in the edit, there was a self-effacing note of dignity brought to the usually agonising proceedings of middle class people enjoying their freedom by whining about only having a £500,000 budget to buy a home.
I shamelessly love Phil and Kirsty. And I whine about property often. But its interesting to observe people who are trained in the art of self control – trained specifically so they can be fit to defend our right to make TV about banal comforts.
---
As the debate around healthcare in the US begins to pull in ever more inflammatory language, and a barking, screaming, hair-pulling, goggle-eyed, yelping madness seems to be supplanting the country's pragmatic conversation about how best to sustain its society, I wonder how close to childish lunacy even the most idyllic models for living really are.
Is there a better dream than America? And are more petulant, ignorant voices to be heard hollering so loudly anywhere else on Earth?
But whether Bournemouth, Beirut or Belfast; Berlin, Boston or Baltimore – we humans are the only common factor in these different scenes. And, if you think about where people in these different cities find themselves in 2009, our ability to rebuild, to transform, to totally re-invent our vision of these places, and of eachother, seems as remarkable perhaps as our lurking and utterly universal weakness for fear.
Here's the truth: I don't get us. Us lot – humans.
I mean, I do – I can yelp at the moon with the craziest of them. But we are mad bastards.
I mean, how is it that we can meet each other in the street on most days and more or less come off as grounded, sensible neighbours who can be trusted to help each other out in an emergency – and yet manage to produce armies of flesh-eating zombies as soon as someone rings the Oh Shit bell?
I mean, really – where do all the monsters come from? Where are we hiding them?
---
Something I'm largely ignorant of is the conflict in Sri Lanka. What sparked the Tamil Tigers' two decades or however long of dissent and fighting against the government, I don't know. I've not been to the country. I hear it's beautiful.
But lastnight, I heard just a clip of an interview with a woman who'd escaped from the final throes of the war in the north of the island, earlier this year. She described scenes of carnage beyond counting.
She said that in one place she found herself, 'everywhere was bodies'. Everywhere she looked she saw corpses. Not just fallen or left, but piled.
She ran to the local hospital. They had no more room for bodies of people – there too, they were piling them in corridors and side rooms.
Where did all these dead people come from? And, more to the point, where did their killers come from?
---
This morning, an account by a woman who walked for miles to escape the fighting in the Somalian capital Mogadishu, left me wondering the same thing. She said she was so repeatedly robbed as a refugee, and so subsequently malnourished, her dreadful appearance must have been the only thing that saved her from being raped. She said that most other women with her had been, by the time they reached the coast.
It resonates with stories from the genocide in Rwanda more than a decade ago. And perhaps, in a sense, with others from the war in the former Yugoslavia – neighbours and ordinary locals appearing to develop an overnight thirst for eachother's blood and suffering.
In the case of Sri Lanka, it was government forces apparently dishing out the death. In Rwanda and in Yugoslavia, in the broadest terms, tribal friction had embedded itself in identity like a sleeper cell, so they say.
But whatever uniform you're wearing, or given at birth, you are still you when you make your choices. Even when you're part of a system trained to execute orders.
You're still you. Aren't you?
And in Somalia? Well, it's just about every conceivable element of conflict all thrown in together, isn't it? Identity, politics, poverty, money, geography – it sounds like every slavering, blood-shot, howling vision of hell ever hallucinated. It sounds like Dante's fucking Inferno. And yet, the woman this morning could still remember 'how beautiful Mogadishu was before the fighting'.
Can anyone imagine the Dish as beautiful? From the ignorant snippets of it we digest quickly from the news, it has become another Beirut or a Belfast – a place synonymous with destruction.
---
It seems incomprehensible. I don't understand where the sheer numbers of rapists and murderers appear from, when the trumpet of chaos bleats. And the level of depravity and cruelty lept to so quickly in war zones. I can't picture that happening in Bournemouth.
I feel sure that young men and women serving with British forces in Afghanistan at the moment might be able to look me thoughtfully in the eye as I say this.
So interesting, as an aside, that two of the most level-headed, likeable and positive people to have perhaps ever appeared on Channel 4's post-supper comfort Location location location were lastnight's couple, Chris and Nikki – a major in the Paras and a flight lieutenant in the RAF, respectively. If you were looking for it, at least in the edit, there was a self-effacing note of dignity brought to the usually agonising proceedings of middle class people enjoying their freedom by whining about only having a £500,000 budget to buy a home.
I shamelessly love Phil and Kirsty. And I whine about property often. But its interesting to observe people who are trained in the art of self control – trained specifically so they can be fit to defend our right to make TV about banal comforts.
---
As the debate around healthcare in the US begins to pull in ever more inflammatory language, and a barking, screaming, hair-pulling, goggle-eyed, yelping madness seems to be supplanting the country's pragmatic conversation about how best to sustain its society, I wonder how close to childish lunacy even the most idyllic models for living really are.
Is there a better dream than America? And are more petulant, ignorant voices to be heard hollering so loudly anywhere else on Earth?
But whether Bournemouth, Beirut or Belfast; Berlin, Boston or Baltimore – we humans are the only common factor in these different scenes. And, if you think about where people in these different cities find themselves in 2009, our ability to rebuild, to transform, to totally re-invent our vision of these places, and of eachother, seems as remarkable perhaps as our lurking and utterly universal weakness for fear.
Friday, September 11, 2009
So Tong, then.
So Tong, then.
In a typical Friday style, I've been in the studio for a while. So long, in fact, that I have removed the empty cafetiere and mug from the little table in the window and replaced them with a full bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir and a glass.
So it's a year since we were braving mudslides at Robin Hill country park, over on the island for Bestival. It's begun again over there now and they're forecasting great weather. And Kraftwerk. And stupid sci-fi costumes.
..What am I doing here, again?
Pouring a glass and saying cheers, actually. Turns out it's Pete Tong's last 'welcome to the weekend' tonight.
Yep, it's come around already. And it turns out too that the Essential Selection is as old as our marriage. Eighteen years.
I feel a genuine sadness. This news just makes me feel that little bit more sad than I did already.
---
How many Fridays felt that bit better because of this show? I don't want to overstate it – wait 'ill I've polished off the glass – but whether we were cooking damn fine chile or driving somewhere to meet chums, watching the sun go down in the Arnewood kitchen window or watching the countryside slip past the windscreen on some evening A-road somewhere, this was how we knew it was the weekend.
When I think back to these years and this little joyful detail of our average week, I shall probably think of listening to a live version of World Hold On from one of Pete's Ibiza shows one summer, while we were stuck in a stationary traffic jam in North London one sunny summer evening. What a strangely nice memory.
Still, sentimentality never built the future, eh.
Think I might keep this cork on my desk, though.
One more tune, mate – it's three minutes to the end of the show.
..Finally it's happened to me? From 1991? The year it started; the year we were married.
Good choice.
Somehow, we shall keep dancing.
Cheers.
In a typical Friday style, I've been in the studio for a while. So long, in fact, that I have removed the empty cafetiere and mug from the little table in the window and replaced them with a full bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir and a glass.
So it's a year since we were braving mudslides at Robin Hill country park, over on the island for Bestival. It's begun again over there now and they're forecasting great weather. And Kraftwerk. And stupid sci-fi costumes.
..What am I doing here, again?
Pouring a glass and saying cheers, actually. Turns out it's Pete Tong's last 'welcome to the weekend' tonight.
Yep, it's come around already. And it turns out too that the Essential Selection is as old as our marriage. Eighteen years.
I feel a genuine sadness. This news just makes me feel that little bit more sad than I did already.
---
How many Fridays felt that bit better because of this show? I don't want to overstate it – wait 'ill I've polished off the glass – but whether we were cooking damn fine chile or driving somewhere to meet chums, watching the sun go down in the Arnewood kitchen window or watching the countryside slip past the windscreen on some evening A-road somewhere, this was how we knew it was the weekend.
When I think back to these years and this little joyful detail of our average week, I shall probably think of listening to a live version of World Hold On from one of Pete's Ibiza shows one summer, while we were stuck in a stationary traffic jam in North London one sunny summer evening. What a strangely nice memory.
Still, sentimentality never built the future, eh.
Think I might keep this cork on my desk, though.
One more tune, mate – it's three minutes to the end of the show.
..Finally it's happened to me? From 1991? The year it started; the year we were married.
Good choice.
Somehow, we shall keep dancing.
Cheers.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
09.09.09 09:09
09.09.09 09:09
(Bugger.)
09.09.09 21:09
Yes, alright. I missed the proper one this morning.
But here we are in the next best thing. I was working through the proper one and here I still am – for the record, doing another part of this giant pitch for a particular international client.
Coo-er. Sounds glam.
It's not. I do this in my bedroom, remember.
Anyway. A neuf.
---
(And for the record, ignore the demented clock on the post bar below – I hit Post at EXACTLY nine minutes past... oh even I'm not listening any more.)
(Bugger.)
09.09.09 21:09
Yes, alright. I missed the proper one this morning.
But here we are in the next best thing. I was working through the proper one and here I still am – for the record, doing another part of this giant pitch for a particular international client.
Coo-er. Sounds glam.
It's not. I do this in my bedroom, remember.
Anyway. A neuf.
---
(And for the record, ignore the demented clock on the post bar below – I hit Post at EXACTLY nine minutes past... oh even I'm not listening any more.)
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Rain and rowlocks.
Rain and rowlocks.
At last.
At long, chuffing last.
Miserable weather.
>CRACKS OUT LACED FINGERS AND PULLS IN CHAIR<
I can finally get some decent work done.
---
Of course, it's not helpful to a normal household rhythm, but gloomy teatimes can be a great time for the brain to find creative traction. The more the rain slips down the window, the better it seems; the fuller the gutter, the firmer the grip.
Now that I have low lights on and ridiculous jazz courtesy of FIP, I can feel productivity seeping through my veins again, bringing Momo's mojo to life.
I've found some gorgeous afternoons draining productivity this summer. The ability to make decisions sometimes, worryingly, just departs and I've spent hours scratching at the layout pad and the screen and the kettle, muttering motivational mantras to no decisional avail. I loath it. I've left school. I hate the suspicion that I need a scary maths teacher to help me get through a piece of work.
Momo does, of course, operate like a business even with me at the helm. Writers may get to lie in until noon and then gaze forlornly at daytime telly until cake time, but my little studio always has something sensible in actual production, with things like deadlines and phone calls and emails and budgets and strategies and clever-dick ideas to administer.
Beats me how I let this happen.
But, even so, when you are the business and the Brilliant Brain fairy leaves your shoulder, it doesn't feel encouraging.
So a bit of cosy rain tonight feels like a refreshing shower to the outlook.
---
It's something to do with my ever-deepening love affair with Autumn, of course – the season of fresh starts. I've been actively waiting for it this year, despite loving impromptu sunshine and family and lazy riverbanks and discovering the lunacy that is the invention of rowing, on days like Monday's bank holiday.
All very good and much appreciated – but that's the point, after all. Summer should really be the time to let go of the reins a little; create the rhythm of a restart at the back-to-school time of year.
I think, though, this year's been a bit of an exaggeration for me on that score because of Momo's preponderance of cranium-aching projects over the balmy months. If everything on your creative schedule at any one time is strategic stuff – fathoming marketing campaigns, or website structures – you're in danger of running out of buffer space in the brain, let me say.
I rather prefer having some of the projects on the schedule near their end and needing some pretty artwork finishing or fancy words filling in.
Still, if I can keep with it enough – and if this rotten and therefore inspirational weather digs in properly – the cranium aching of this summer may well lead to a very interesting final quarter of 2009 for Momo. Both Tempo and Typo.
---
I should feel encouraged, I guess. Most of the time I keep Momo on a steady course down stream nicely. Al hamdu li lah. But as I approach the beginning of this funny business' eighth year – eighth, for Pete's sake – I am certainly ready to see a new season unfold around me.
If this rain keeps up, of course, it may really float Momo's little rowboat.
But, as I have now learned with blistered palms thanks to the hire place on the river at Wareham, pulling for all you're worth just to go backwards seems like an awful lot of rowlocks.
At last.
At long, chuffing last.
Miserable weather.
>CRACKS OUT LACED FINGERS AND PULLS IN CHAIR<
I can finally get some decent work done.
---
Of course, it's not helpful to a normal household rhythm, but gloomy teatimes can be a great time for the brain to find creative traction. The more the rain slips down the window, the better it seems; the fuller the gutter, the firmer the grip.
Now that I have low lights on and ridiculous jazz courtesy of FIP, I can feel productivity seeping through my veins again, bringing Momo's mojo to life.
I've found some gorgeous afternoons draining productivity this summer. The ability to make decisions sometimes, worryingly, just departs and I've spent hours scratching at the layout pad and the screen and the kettle, muttering motivational mantras to no decisional avail. I loath it. I've left school. I hate the suspicion that I need a scary maths teacher to help me get through a piece of work.
Momo does, of course, operate like a business even with me at the helm. Writers may get to lie in until noon and then gaze forlornly at daytime telly until cake time, but my little studio always has something sensible in actual production, with things like deadlines and phone calls and emails and budgets and strategies and clever-dick ideas to administer.
Beats me how I let this happen.
But, even so, when you are the business and the Brilliant Brain fairy leaves your shoulder, it doesn't feel encouraging.
So a bit of cosy rain tonight feels like a refreshing shower to the outlook.
---
It's something to do with my ever-deepening love affair with Autumn, of course – the season of fresh starts. I've been actively waiting for it this year, despite loving impromptu sunshine and family and lazy riverbanks and discovering the lunacy that is the invention of rowing, on days like Monday's bank holiday.
All very good and much appreciated – but that's the point, after all. Summer should really be the time to let go of the reins a little; create the rhythm of a restart at the back-to-school time of year.
I think, though, this year's been a bit of an exaggeration for me on that score because of Momo's preponderance of cranium-aching projects over the balmy months. If everything on your creative schedule at any one time is strategic stuff – fathoming marketing campaigns, or website structures – you're in danger of running out of buffer space in the brain, let me say.
I rather prefer having some of the projects on the schedule near their end and needing some pretty artwork finishing or fancy words filling in.
Still, if I can keep with it enough – and if this rotten and therefore inspirational weather digs in properly – the cranium aching of this summer may well lead to a very interesting final quarter of 2009 for Momo. Both Tempo and Typo.
---
I should feel encouraged, I guess. Most of the time I keep Momo on a steady course down stream nicely. Al hamdu li lah. But as I approach the beginning of this funny business' eighth year – eighth, for Pete's sake – I am certainly ready to see a new season unfold around me.
If this rain keeps up, of course, it may really float Momo's little rowboat.
But, as I have now learned with blistered palms thanks to the hire place on the river at Wareham, pulling for all you're worth just to go backwards seems like an awful lot of rowlocks.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Sheesh.
Sheesh.
I learned something depressing today.
>DEEP BREATH<
Turns out my occasional recreational toke on a shisha pipe is going to kill me after all. And as punishment for my smugness about its 'practical harmlessness', rather faster than a cigarette, apparently.
Great. Spent my life walking the remarkably high-minded line between having never smoked and being socially unphased by the idea of people smoking, and then it turns out my multi-cultural affectations are going to punch me in the lungs for being a pretentious arse. Fair enough I suppose.
A study by the Department of Health and the Tobacco Control Collaborating Centre – you know them, right? – has revealed some allegedly shocking levels of Carbon Monoxide.
>SIGH-COUGH!<
Turns out half an hour on a hookah is, at its measurably very best, significantly worse for you than a fag. In fact, in many instances apparently, an average shish sesh outstrips a ciggy by factors in the hundreds for CO levels.
And to add cultural insult to circulatory injury, a London shisha bar owner mentioned that he doesn't ever inhale when he's using one. Like you're not supposed to.
So I should stop filling my lungs with this stuff, then? You tell me this now?
But it's so sociable. I really enjoy breaking out the pipe occasionally. Never put anything more relaxing in it than humble oriental apple resin, you understand, but it's a nice thing to hand round the table after you've mopped up the last of your baba ganoush and your lamb tabouli, don't you think? Right?
Oh fine. Right. So don't break out the hubbly bubbly.
---
I can hardly have any complaints otherwise today, though.
I've spent half of it sifting through the schedule to construct various strata of To Do lists from the chaotic debris of a busy couple of weeks. And I've been doing so after a weekend that was a much looked-forward-to long one that's subsequently etched its blatant idleness all over my face. Really. I have stupid ski-jock panda eyes from staring at the skies in sunnies.
After a few days of shamelessly lounging around the vast front lawn of Laura and Chris's place on the Westcliff, sipping champers and nibbling strawberries, while tracing the lazy arcs of various acrobatic aero displays over Bournemouth's fairly amphitheatrical bay, I feel nicely head-cleared again. Gorgeous weather for four days, basically, while a selection aviation engines purred and roared their poetry over the seaside atmosphere. Lovely. These are the days, and all that.
The ones that will help you say: "meh – fair enough" when it all goes belly up.
The secret to switching off in such a Carefree Git-like manner though, is tying up loose ends before you clear off. Wiping the ol' slate. Putting out the mental moggy and leaving a note for the mental milkman. Clunking the door closed on a clean house as you leave with a full case.
I managed to push the wraparounds up the nose and fold the hands behind the remarkably successfully disengaged bean as I did for three whole, luxuriant days purely thanks to the number of serendipitously positive notes on which last week was mercifully ended – the most significant and serenading of which being the pertinent one. The one you need to take note of. The album.
The album.
Yes. Really.
If I could relax on the lawn at all for a couple of precious days, it was partly because I could bask a little in the mental warmth of having posted a complete pre-mastered version of The Golden Age to Jamie on Saturday morning. Yes, again, really.
No, really.
Ish. The 'ish' being that it's not completely right, of course. So just hold your horses.
It's not a version I'll be putting in anyone else's hands until I've heard his immediate verdict and given him my lengthy Well Obviously It Won't Be Like That list. Various levels are off and numerous details are not quite right and a session is missing... but, ah, it is in shape. It does exist. ..I can now hear it from start to finish.
There is now no smoke to hide behind.
>DEEP BREATH<
So now, back to work, I have to start resolving what the hell to do with it.
Sheesh.
I learned something depressing today.
>DEEP BREATH<
Turns out my occasional recreational toke on a shisha pipe is going to kill me after all. And as punishment for my smugness about its 'practical harmlessness', rather faster than a cigarette, apparently.
Great. Spent my life walking the remarkably high-minded line between having never smoked and being socially unphased by the idea of people smoking, and then it turns out my multi-cultural affectations are going to punch me in the lungs for being a pretentious arse. Fair enough I suppose.
A study by the Department of Health and the Tobacco Control Collaborating Centre – you know them, right? – has revealed some allegedly shocking levels of Carbon Monoxide.
>SIGH-COUGH!<
Turns out half an hour on a hookah is, at its measurably very best, significantly worse for you than a fag. In fact, in many instances apparently, an average shish sesh outstrips a ciggy by factors in the hundreds for CO levels.
And to add cultural insult to circulatory injury, a London shisha bar owner mentioned that he doesn't ever inhale when he's using one. Like you're not supposed to.
So I should stop filling my lungs with this stuff, then? You tell me this now?
But it's so sociable. I really enjoy breaking out the pipe occasionally. Never put anything more relaxing in it than humble oriental apple resin, you understand, but it's a nice thing to hand round the table after you've mopped up the last of your baba ganoush and your lamb tabouli, don't you think? Right?
Oh fine. Right. So don't break out the hubbly bubbly.
---
I can hardly have any complaints otherwise today, though.
I've spent half of it sifting through the schedule to construct various strata of To Do lists from the chaotic debris of a busy couple of weeks. And I've been doing so after a weekend that was a much looked-forward-to long one that's subsequently etched its blatant idleness all over my face. Really. I have stupid ski-jock panda eyes from staring at the skies in sunnies.
After a few days of shamelessly lounging around the vast front lawn of Laura and Chris's place on the Westcliff, sipping champers and nibbling strawberries, while tracing the lazy arcs of various acrobatic aero displays over Bournemouth's fairly amphitheatrical bay, I feel nicely head-cleared again. Gorgeous weather for four days, basically, while a selection aviation engines purred and roared their poetry over the seaside atmosphere. Lovely. These are the days, and all that.
The ones that will help you say: "meh – fair enough" when it all goes belly up.
The secret to switching off in such a Carefree Git-like manner though, is tying up loose ends before you clear off. Wiping the ol' slate. Putting out the mental moggy and leaving a note for the mental milkman. Clunking the door closed on a clean house as you leave with a full case.
I managed to push the wraparounds up the nose and fold the hands behind the remarkably successfully disengaged bean as I did for three whole, luxuriant days purely thanks to the number of serendipitously positive notes on which last week was mercifully ended – the most significant and serenading of which being the pertinent one. The one you need to take note of. The album.
The album.
Yes. Really.
If I could relax on the lawn at all for a couple of precious days, it was partly because I could bask a little in the mental warmth of having posted a complete pre-mastered version of The Golden Age to Jamie on Saturday morning. Yes, again, really.
No, really.
Ish. The 'ish' being that it's not completely right, of course. So just hold your horses.
It's not a version I'll be putting in anyone else's hands until I've heard his immediate verdict and given him my lengthy Well Obviously It Won't Be Like That list. Various levels are off and numerous details are not quite right and a session is missing... but, ah, it is in shape. It does exist. ..I can now hear it from start to finish.
There is now no smoke to hide behind.
>DEEP BREATH<
So now, back to work, I have to start resolving what the hell to do with it.
Sheesh.
Monday, August 17, 2009
"The Golden Age of Explora –
>SHUFFLE<
>HORN SQUEEKS<
(Ready, everyone?)
>AHEM!<
"The Golden Age of Explora –
– whuh?
Oh bugger. What, still?
Right. Well so it's too soon to do the big fanfare (sorry chaps – see you at Tuesday practice) but The Golden Age is none-the-less very close.
No, now less of that attitude. It IS nearly done.
Currently, these are the headlines:
• all horn sessions are done and edited into shape.
• cello sessions are done and awaiting mixes.
• almost all tracks are creatively finished.
• problem track Just passing through is almost on the mat but still slugging it out with me.
• awaiting strings for Waiting is a bit like being on holiday.
• we still have no opening micro track.
• we still have no album cover, but the cover artwork style is all together and looking fab.
So it's, y'know, almost there. 'So near', etc.
---
It's been a mammoth weekend. I've barely left the house. Between this and a fairly monsterous pitch for Typo, I've been bending the bean and the eyesight rather heavily.
But the end is in sight on both counts. If I dare believe it.
Now, clear up this tinsel and put away the chairs. Someone else needs the hall.
>HORN SQUEEKS<
(Ready, everyone?)
>AHEM!<
"The Golden Age of Explora –
– whuh?
Oh bugger. What, still?
Right. Well so it's too soon to do the big fanfare (sorry chaps – see you at Tuesday practice) but The Golden Age is none-the-less very close.
No, now less of that attitude. It IS nearly done.
Currently, these are the headlines:
• all horn sessions are done and edited into shape.
• cello sessions are done and awaiting mixes.
• almost all tracks are creatively finished.
• problem track Just passing through is almost on the mat but still slugging it out with me.
• awaiting strings for Waiting is a bit like being on holiday.
• we still have no opening micro track.
• we still have no album cover, but the cover artwork style is all together and looking fab.
So it's, y'know, almost there. 'So near', etc.
---
It's been a mammoth weekend. I've barely left the house. Between this and a fairly monsterous pitch for Typo, I've been bending the bean and the eyesight rather heavily.
But the end is in sight on both counts. If I dare believe it.
Now, clear up this tinsel and put away the chairs. Someone else needs the hall.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Welcome to the weekend.
Welcome to the weekend.
I guess all things must change.
I just sort of periodically hope that this doesn't apply to all things. Y'know?
There is one thing in particular that I didn't dare contemplate would change any time soon. Just because it would be so, well, wrong. But it has changed. Or will be changing. And I have mixed feelings about it.
Because, from September, Pete Tong will no longer be welcoming us to the weekend.
Ee-GAD.
---
The thing I love about radio generally is how it gets in your head. It moves in with you and follows you around the house – though not in a creepy lodger kind of way. In a comfy chum kind of way. Or a learned chum kind of way. Or a groovy, energetic, well-connected, Will Make The Effort To Go Clubbing For You chum kind of way. I like that guy. All these guys. And, as any entrenched Radio 4 listener will tell you, these broadcast backdrops to your life can become part of the very fabric of it – the mucking about with of which is potentially upsetting.
Witness my month of measurable grief when Mark and Lard split. Those bastards left me all alone. With Steve Wright.
---
Now, the Radio One Friday evening schedule has been as much an irrational comfort to us as any nerve-steadying shipping forecast or gentle willow-crack heart-warming conjoured by cricket coverage. Just knowing it's there is nice. It makes it Friday. Pete Tong makes it Friday. Moving him is like, I dunno, moving the Today programme to a timeslot after everyone's gone to work.
>shudders<
My mixed feelings about his sacred show being moved are as they are because jolly good taste-setter and all-round radio poppet, Annie Mac, is swapping slots with him – he takes over the Mash-up slot at 9.00 on a Friday evening, and she will be booting up the weekend for us at 7.00.
Now, we've famously loved young Maccers' little electro-beat show from the beginning. Even memorably starred in it once. ..Slash, momentarily wrecked its credibility. She is, I guess, as worthy a successor to the Essential Selection as you could wish for really – in fact, hearing bits of her sitting in for Zane Lowe this week, I can't help feeling that most of the country would feel pretty happy about her being on the wireless every night of the week.
..But, isn't the Mash-up's music more of a 9.00pm thing? More quirky and varied; Pete's slick grooves just feel more early evening chic, somehow.
Ah, well. I shall tune in to both and be thankful for each show's different comfort appearing out of the unique funding of my license fee. Hadn't planned to redecorate my Fridays but we shall bravely adapt. And really, you couldn't wish increasingly legendary status on anyone more deserving than the blessed Maccers. So toot that air horn someone.
But.
Hmm.
Just perhaps...
..if even the most immovable things can yet be moved, when least expected, upsetting everyone's comforting frame of reference... could that even include something as ludicrously unlikely as the blatant unfinishedness of Momo:tempo's debut album? More even than that, it's wanton ignominy?
Surely not. Some things DON'T change.
..Unless this weekend does what it's supposed to.
---
Pips, sirens, beats – "Welcome to the weekend."
It's 7.00pm on a Friday as I type now and Pete is kicking things off noisily around the flat. I'm sipping a cream soda but plan to turn it into a G&T shortly, to go with my aim of actually working up something cool and definite for the album artwork tonight.
You see, I'm working to a bit of an actual deadline on all this now. Stalwart, long-term TC Peach supporter, Jamie Lee, has become so insensed at the number of years he's had to wait for an original recording from said obscure artist, he's promised some kind of record store rage if he returns from his family's extended break in France at the end of the week to not find a preview copy of The Golden Age of Exploration sitting on his mat.
Thing is, as one of fewer long-term fans than I have digits, Jamie represents a percentage mailing list loss I can ill afford. True, he's hardcore – he doesn't count Chaser or Beyond the storm as legitimate albums and claims to have been therefore waiting since 1997 and Worship the system for a proper pop record from me. But he did direct my first pop video – Thunder in the hills, which for my hair alone should never make it to YouTube – and does genuinely seem to actually like the music itself.
For this reason, I am entrusting the first ever preview listen of the whole new tune fest to him – to tell me straight what he's been prepared to tell me in the past. Namely, when he thinks I'm embarrassing myself.
---
Think about it. I need someone to do this. I can't see anything about The Golden Age straight anymore. I have no idea if I'm some mad Victorian barron, spending a fortune on an elaborately inept invention that high society will have to humour me about, even as it titters in ever-more to-my-face ridicule about it. I need someone to hear this rubbish and warn me off.
I already know it's a music album bereft of proper credibility, in Essential Selection or Mash-up terms. It's too much of a process of exploration – partly hence the name – to be undone and made 'cool' by a berk like me.
Yet, is it still legitimate? I think – no, I suspect, – it... is. But I could do with at least someone else thinking so too before I press the button on a thousand hard copies of the blasted thing.
---
Brekkers with Gel in the Cali this morning saw us lingering an extra ten to chat music. I shared with him my inordinate excitement – eclipsing quite predictably the reasonably full-on workload in the Typo studio at the moment – about doing something I've dreamed of for years.
Putting real strings on a piece of music.
Yes, this is very normal for many musicians with a budget, but this week I could hardly contain my Bless Me enthusiasm at finally getting a simple little CD in the post for three tracks to have a cellist and violinist session on.
I spoke with Simon the cellist tonight and his solo work on Identity and Duality respectively is all but done. And frankly, I can't wait to hear how this makes these two distinctly thoughtful chapters of the new album sound.
But more than this, I've decided to put my hand in Momo's pocket for something rather special to end the whole long-player with – strings on Waiting is a bit like being on holiday, the album finale. It's such a sun-drenched kind of refrain, it would just be such a classy way to leave the musical moment. If any potential listener can get through all the fannying around and stupid shenanigans before that, anyway.
Sadly, I have to wait until the end of the month before the violinist is back from holiday. But I am fully prepared to. I AM SO EXITED.
Gellan, on hearing this, was a total mate and simply said he couldn't wait to hear it all.
---
I don't know. I've operated in such comprehensive musical obscurity, unable to pull together all my musical experiences and explorations before now, the idea that me and my natural naffness might make a record that can almost stand up in the arena of credibility – or even get a couple of people to listen to it – well, that seems too much to imagine. Doesn't sound very Real World to me.
Yet.
I'm getting one or two more people around me give me that look. That look that I'd get just very occasionally from a single very timely person, telling me that they totally loved what I'd done. Just when I was about to give up.
Bloody thanks, single timely person.
Like that one lass running across a field to me just as I was leaving another essentially-empty gig at a small local music festival, some dozen years ago. Or that one bloke asking for a CD just as I was packing up from a sparce show at The Gardening Club on some nameless Wednesday. Like, thanks. For sharing our madness, just when I was on the cusp of sanity.
But now I'm getting more unhelpfulness. The sort of little things that I am powerless to resist.
Simon's growing interest in it from one cello session. The affection from Gel, Zo and the Thinking Juice gang about it. The sudden online airplay from one unknown DJ last month. The out-of-the blue contact from a young chap last week saying he's 'never been more excited about waiting for a new album' than since discovering it. Mark the drum's fantastically encouraging excitement about forming the live band for it. John the horn's professionally experienced keenness this week to stay involved and do more sessions.
It.. it sort of feels like I should still, insanely be doing this. I told Gel I couldn't really put all this out there, but I'm... darn it, it's out there. I'm feeling it.
Now. I realise that all that this massive response so far adds up to is just a tiny group of positive friends sincerely wishing me well and a couple of possible random nutters, I know. Yet, tiny world as this may be, it's very nice. And it's been steadily increasing my tempted sense of excitement.
---
Don't get me wrong – this record won't be properly right. Take heart – remember that I simply don't know what I'm doing enough. I am, lest we forget, just some chap making music that's not very hip, simply to please himself. And that's not going to change, of course.
So you won't have to redecorate your life's frame of reference any time soon, I shouldn't think.
But it's all rather good fun, isn't it?
---
So, after a week of bending my head around website structures and pitch strategies and brochure copy and emailers of news, I am staying at the Mac and shipping in the pizza and turning up the dance music tonight, to see if I can make a credible brand for The Golden Age out of the print making session that the creative superforce Sarah G-H kindly helped me with in her studio a couple of weeks back.
Then I have two days to wrap up all the edits, sessions and unworking bits of Momo:tempo's debut album musical creative, in order to actually, definitely, possibly complete it.
I guess all things, even this, must change eventually.
Maybe.
I guess all things must change.
I just sort of periodically hope that this doesn't apply to all things. Y'know?
There is one thing in particular that I didn't dare contemplate would change any time soon. Just because it would be so, well, wrong. But it has changed. Or will be changing. And I have mixed feelings about it.
Because, from September, Pete Tong will no longer be welcoming us to the weekend.
Ee-GAD.
---
The thing I love about radio generally is how it gets in your head. It moves in with you and follows you around the house – though not in a creepy lodger kind of way. In a comfy chum kind of way. Or a learned chum kind of way. Or a groovy, energetic, well-connected, Will Make The Effort To Go Clubbing For You chum kind of way. I like that guy. All these guys. And, as any entrenched Radio 4 listener will tell you, these broadcast backdrops to your life can become part of the very fabric of it – the mucking about with of which is potentially upsetting.
Witness my month of measurable grief when Mark and Lard split. Those bastards left me all alone. With Steve Wright.
---
Now, the Radio One Friday evening schedule has been as much an irrational comfort to us as any nerve-steadying shipping forecast or gentle willow-crack heart-warming conjoured by cricket coverage. Just knowing it's there is nice. It makes it Friday. Pete Tong makes it Friday. Moving him is like, I dunno, moving the Today programme to a timeslot after everyone's gone to work.
>shudders<
My mixed feelings about his sacred show being moved are as they are because jolly good taste-setter and all-round radio poppet, Annie Mac, is swapping slots with him – he takes over the Mash-up slot at 9.00 on a Friday evening, and she will be booting up the weekend for us at 7.00.
Now, we've famously loved young Maccers' little electro-beat show from the beginning. Even memorably starred in it once. ..Slash, momentarily wrecked its credibility. She is, I guess, as worthy a successor to the Essential Selection as you could wish for really – in fact, hearing bits of her sitting in for Zane Lowe this week, I can't help feeling that most of the country would feel pretty happy about her being on the wireless every night of the week.
..But, isn't the Mash-up's music more of a 9.00pm thing? More quirky and varied; Pete's slick grooves just feel more early evening chic, somehow.
Ah, well. I shall tune in to both and be thankful for each show's different comfort appearing out of the unique funding of my license fee. Hadn't planned to redecorate my Fridays but we shall bravely adapt. And really, you couldn't wish increasingly legendary status on anyone more deserving than the blessed Maccers. So toot that air horn someone.
But.
Hmm.
Just perhaps...
..if even the most immovable things can yet be moved, when least expected, upsetting everyone's comforting frame of reference... could that even include something as ludicrously unlikely as the blatant unfinishedness of Momo:tempo's debut album? More even than that, it's wanton ignominy?
Surely not. Some things DON'T change.
..Unless this weekend does what it's supposed to.
---
Pips, sirens, beats – "Welcome to the weekend."
It's 7.00pm on a Friday as I type now and Pete is kicking things off noisily around the flat. I'm sipping a cream soda but plan to turn it into a G&T shortly, to go with my aim of actually working up something cool and definite for the album artwork tonight.
You see, I'm working to a bit of an actual deadline on all this now. Stalwart, long-term TC Peach supporter, Jamie Lee, has become so insensed at the number of years he's had to wait for an original recording from said obscure artist, he's promised some kind of record store rage if he returns from his family's extended break in France at the end of the week to not find a preview copy of The Golden Age of Exploration sitting on his mat.
Thing is, as one of fewer long-term fans than I have digits, Jamie represents a percentage mailing list loss I can ill afford. True, he's hardcore – he doesn't count Chaser or Beyond the storm as legitimate albums and claims to have been therefore waiting since 1997 and Worship the system for a proper pop record from me. But he did direct my first pop video – Thunder in the hills, which for my hair alone should never make it to YouTube – and does genuinely seem to actually like the music itself.
For this reason, I am entrusting the first ever preview listen of the whole new tune fest to him – to tell me straight what he's been prepared to tell me in the past. Namely, when he thinks I'm embarrassing myself.
---
Think about it. I need someone to do this. I can't see anything about The Golden Age straight anymore. I have no idea if I'm some mad Victorian barron, spending a fortune on an elaborately inept invention that high society will have to humour me about, even as it titters in ever-more to-my-face ridicule about it. I need someone to hear this rubbish and warn me off.
I already know it's a music album bereft of proper credibility, in Essential Selection or Mash-up terms. It's too much of a process of exploration – partly hence the name – to be undone and made 'cool' by a berk like me.
Yet, is it still legitimate? I think – no, I suspect, – it... is. But I could do with at least someone else thinking so too before I press the button on a thousand hard copies of the blasted thing.
---
Brekkers with Gel in the Cali this morning saw us lingering an extra ten to chat music. I shared with him my inordinate excitement – eclipsing quite predictably the reasonably full-on workload in the Typo studio at the moment – about doing something I've dreamed of for years.
Putting real strings on a piece of music.
Yes, this is very normal for many musicians with a budget, but this week I could hardly contain my Bless Me enthusiasm at finally getting a simple little CD in the post for three tracks to have a cellist and violinist session on.
I spoke with Simon the cellist tonight and his solo work on Identity and Duality respectively is all but done. And frankly, I can't wait to hear how this makes these two distinctly thoughtful chapters of the new album sound.
But more than this, I've decided to put my hand in Momo's pocket for something rather special to end the whole long-player with – strings on Waiting is a bit like being on holiday, the album finale. It's such a sun-drenched kind of refrain, it would just be such a classy way to leave the musical moment. If any potential listener can get through all the fannying around and stupid shenanigans before that, anyway.
Sadly, I have to wait until the end of the month before the violinist is back from holiday. But I am fully prepared to. I AM SO EXITED.
Gellan, on hearing this, was a total mate and simply said he couldn't wait to hear it all.
---
I don't know. I've operated in such comprehensive musical obscurity, unable to pull together all my musical experiences and explorations before now, the idea that me and my natural naffness might make a record that can almost stand up in the arena of credibility – or even get a couple of people to listen to it – well, that seems too much to imagine. Doesn't sound very Real World to me.
Yet.
I'm getting one or two more people around me give me that look. That look that I'd get just very occasionally from a single very timely person, telling me that they totally loved what I'd done. Just when I was about to give up.
Bloody thanks, single timely person.
Like that one lass running across a field to me just as I was leaving another essentially-empty gig at a small local music festival, some dozen years ago. Or that one bloke asking for a CD just as I was packing up from a sparce show at The Gardening Club on some nameless Wednesday. Like, thanks. For sharing our madness, just when I was on the cusp of sanity.
But now I'm getting more unhelpfulness. The sort of little things that I am powerless to resist.
Simon's growing interest in it from one cello session. The affection from Gel, Zo and the Thinking Juice gang about it. The sudden online airplay from one unknown DJ last month. The out-of-the blue contact from a young chap last week saying he's 'never been more excited about waiting for a new album' than since discovering it. Mark the drum's fantastically encouraging excitement about forming the live band for it. John the horn's professionally experienced keenness this week to stay involved and do more sessions.
It.. it sort of feels like I should still, insanely be doing this. I told Gel I couldn't really put all this out there, but I'm... darn it, it's out there. I'm feeling it.
Now. I realise that all that this massive response so far adds up to is just a tiny group of positive friends sincerely wishing me well and a couple of possible random nutters, I know. Yet, tiny world as this may be, it's very nice. And it's been steadily increasing my tempted sense of excitement.
---
Don't get me wrong – this record won't be properly right. Take heart – remember that I simply don't know what I'm doing enough. I am, lest we forget, just some chap making music that's not very hip, simply to please himself. And that's not going to change, of course.
So you won't have to redecorate your life's frame of reference any time soon, I shouldn't think.
But it's all rather good fun, isn't it?
---
So, after a week of bending my head around website structures and pitch strategies and brochure copy and emailers of news, I am staying at the Mac and shipping in the pizza and turning up the dance music tonight, to see if I can make a credible brand for The Golden Age out of the print making session that the creative superforce Sarah G-H kindly helped me with in her studio a couple of weeks back.
Then I have two days to wrap up all the edits, sessions and unworking bits of Momo:tempo's debut album musical creative, in order to actually, definitely, possibly complete it.
I guess all things, even this, must change eventually.
Maybe.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Eighteen and expecting.*
Eighteen and expecting.*
Just over a week on from an old friend's happy wedding and from happily making jokes at his expense in front of all his other friends, I find myself looking at today's date in the diary and remembering a similar day a couple of worlds away.
Eighteen years ago, Caroline and I demonstrated our decision to stop mucking about and step up.
For, betrothed by our villages as a peace accord I think, our childlike selves took vows to laugh at eachother's jokes and to inspect eachother's unmentionable ailments until one or both of us dropped with the emotional effort of looking interested.
To her eternal and almost saint-like credit, eighteen circuits of the Earth later, Caroline still lets slip the odd unguarded titter at my shrinking gene pool of jokes. Which might have been reason alone to keep me interested all that time, clever girl.
But the truth is, of course, when someone consistently impresses you with who they are, it's hard not to stay interested.
And if, on top of this, they're consistently nice to you… well, the shoes are staying off and under the table, aren't they?
..Though I would say it turns out that this happy equilibrium depends rather on you giving them as many reasons as you can humanly think of for them to be nice to you. One of which might be pretending to play it cool at a very early stage – something which can for a while take the kind of herculean creative effort of a hormonal young man that could alternatively have been very usefully channeled into a career or something. Sure – tell 'em you've fallen in love. But not every ten minutes from about half an hour after meeting them. Not if you want it to last, loverboy.
---
Approaching life's middle eight, I marvel at anyone's ability to find someone who can keep time and tune with them. To find someone who's willing to join the band at all seems remarkable, but to find someone who can stick with the piece through numerous time signature and key changes and still have intuition enough to improv a little before coming back in on cue for the big refrain together at the end seems too much to ask. Not least of all because it sounds as if you're asking them to marry a jazz musician.
No, to have survived so many over-stretched metaphors, flowery language and inexplicably stuck drum machines on stage and to still be arsing about enjoying ourselves as ever we were is something I don't really know how to say thankyou for.
But the fact that my long-suffering wife would, if made to read this, simply sigh and get on with something useful rather than carefully packing a case and leaving without a word is something you should show her some reverence for.
I do.
---
When I think of the different relationships around us during those eighteen years – or twenty-one really – I think I'm mainly thinking that no marriage survives in a vacuum. It needs relational air to breathe.
For those whose paths have had to separate during that time, I pause with some reverence. And for those who have helped us build something consistent through changing circumstances, by being consistent with us and eachother in all their different shapes of relationship, I simply mumble a thankyou prayer.
Because, just over a week on from Julian's wedding and remembering my own, I can picture that he, for example, was at both. And interestingly, from a different but distantly related social family, so too was Mikey – Best Manning at the first, creating a party atmosphere with decks at the second. ..As too was his wife, then girlfriend, Emma.
I think, when friends demonstrate that they think it's worth sticking around – at least, those that are somehow able to – you get to see over time why commitment is really so groovy.
Without the cloud of people who were there in August 1991, tripping over Caroline's beautiful long train in the barn dance, and who weren't there but who I can't somehow believe weren't, and who were but aren't around with us now – and even those who never joined us at all, though we hoped they might – without them and the thought of them, I might not be still coming home to this remarkable woman's embrace every night.
(..Except, she comes home to me. But, y'know. Don't pick at the mood.)
So I'm thinking, here's to the next eighteen years, gang. Wherever we find ourselves on this particular Monday, whatever has or hasn't happened to us as we'd hoped, whatever is present, whoever is absent, when it feels things should really be somehow otherwise... I'm still expecting all kinds of good things. You've shown us an uncountable many already.
xxx
*Don't get excited. Read to the end. It's a play on words thing.
Just over a week on from an old friend's happy wedding and from happily making jokes at his expense in front of all his other friends, I find myself looking at today's date in the diary and remembering a similar day a couple of worlds away.
Eighteen years ago, Caroline and I demonstrated our decision to stop mucking about and step up.
For, betrothed by our villages as a peace accord I think, our childlike selves took vows to laugh at eachother's jokes and to inspect eachother's unmentionable ailments until one or both of us dropped with the emotional effort of looking interested.
To her eternal and almost saint-like credit, eighteen circuits of the Earth later, Caroline still lets slip the odd unguarded titter at my shrinking gene pool of jokes. Which might have been reason alone to keep me interested all that time, clever girl.
But the truth is, of course, when someone consistently impresses you with who they are, it's hard not to stay interested.
And if, on top of this, they're consistently nice to you… well, the shoes are staying off and under the table, aren't they?
..Though I would say it turns out that this happy equilibrium depends rather on you giving them as many reasons as you can humanly think of for them to be nice to you. One of which might be pretending to play it cool at a very early stage – something which can for a while take the kind of herculean creative effort of a hormonal young man that could alternatively have been very usefully channeled into a career or something. Sure – tell 'em you've fallen in love. But not every ten minutes from about half an hour after meeting them. Not if you want it to last, loverboy.
---
Approaching life's middle eight, I marvel at anyone's ability to find someone who can keep time and tune with them. To find someone who's willing to join the band at all seems remarkable, but to find someone who can stick with the piece through numerous time signature and key changes and still have intuition enough to improv a little before coming back in on cue for the big refrain together at the end seems too much to ask. Not least of all because it sounds as if you're asking them to marry a jazz musician.
No, to have survived so many over-stretched metaphors, flowery language and inexplicably stuck drum machines on stage and to still be arsing about enjoying ourselves as ever we were is something I don't really know how to say thankyou for.
But the fact that my long-suffering wife would, if made to read this, simply sigh and get on with something useful rather than carefully packing a case and leaving without a word is something you should show her some reverence for.
I do.
---
When I think of the different relationships around us during those eighteen years – or twenty-one really – I think I'm mainly thinking that no marriage survives in a vacuum. It needs relational air to breathe.
For those whose paths have had to separate during that time, I pause with some reverence. And for those who have helped us build something consistent through changing circumstances, by being consistent with us and eachother in all their different shapes of relationship, I simply mumble a thankyou prayer.
Because, just over a week on from Julian's wedding and remembering my own, I can picture that he, for example, was at both. And interestingly, from a different but distantly related social family, so too was Mikey – Best Manning at the first, creating a party atmosphere with decks at the second. ..As too was his wife, then girlfriend, Emma.
I think, when friends demonstrate that they think it's worth sticking around – at least, those that are somehow able to – you get to see over time why commitment is really so groovy.
Without the cloud of people who were there in August 1991, tripping over Caroline's beautiful long train in the barn dance, and who weren't there but who I can't somehow believe weren't, and who were but aren't around with us now – and even those who never joined us at all, though we hoped they might – without them and the thought of them, I might not be still coming home to this remarkable woman's embrace every night.
(..Except, she comes home to me. But, y'know. Don't pick at the mood.)
So I'm thinking, here's to the next eighteen years, gang. Wherever we find ourselves on this particular Monday, whatever has or hasn't happened to us as we'd hoped, whatever is present, whoever is absent, when it feels things should really be somehow otherwise... I'm still expecting all kinds of good things. You've shown us an uncountable many already.
xxx
*Don't get excited. Read to the end. It's a play on words thing.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
After-dinner chocks.
After-dinner chocks.
Today is the centenary of Louise Bleriot's powered flight across the English Channel – his first, and everybody's.
Looking at the faithfully restored replica of his flimsy, wing-warping, stick-string-and-oil-gauge monoplane, I am moved into an instant and unsurprising Edwardian reverie. How I have always wished I could have been one of those magnificent men, etc. Without the inevitability of fighting in the Great War, obviously. But with the aviation fashion. Obviously.
Msr B's little aircraft is also, it must be spelled out, not sturdy looking. Flimsy, even.
Which brings me to my Best Man's speech.
---
Today is also Julian and Angela's wedding. And looking at the picture postcard perfection of the setting lastnight, with the almost hand-painted cloudscapes sliding over the undulating crop fields and verdant woods, little chapel perched on the hill against the sky behind the playful country marquee... I did think: "Shame I'm going to ruin all this pastoral ambience with desperate bum gags or similar...".
I won't. Of course.
I think the speech is pretty tame and only titter-inducing at best. But I'd better get my hairy ass in the shower and get bibbed and tuckered pronto, and try not to think about whether the jazz band will ever find this random field on the Sussex/Hampshire border.
Should be a very special occasion. But I'll be relieved when we've finally survived all the up-tiddly-ups and dumped it on the deck in one piece.
After-dinner chocks away then.
Today is the centenary of Louise Bleriot's powered flight across the English Channel – his first, and everybody's.
Looking at the faithfully restored replica of his flimsy, wing-warping, stick-string-and-oil-gauge monoplane, I am moved into an instant and unsurprising Edwardian reverie. How I have always wished I could have been one of those magnificent men, etc. Without the inevitability of fighting in the Great War, obviously. But with the aviation fashion. Obviously.
Msr B's little aircraft is also, it must be spelled out, not sturdy looking. Flimsy, even.
Which brings me to my Best Man's speech.
---
Today is also Julian and Angela's wedding. And looking at the picture postcard perfection of the setting lastnight, with the almost hand-painted cloudscapes sliding over the undulating crop fields and verdant woods, little chapel perched on the hill against the sky behind the playful country marquee... I did think: "Shame I'm going to ruin all this pastoral ambience with desperate bum gags or similar...".
I won't. Of course.
I think the speech is pretty tame and only titter-inducing at best. But I'd better get my hairy ass in the shower and get bibbed and tuckered pronto, and try not to think about whether the jazz band will ever find this random field on the Sussex/Hampshire border.
Should be a very special occasion. But I'll be relieved when we've finally survived all the up-tiddly-ups and dumped it on the deck in one piece.
After-dinner chocks away then.
Monday, July 20, 2009
"Cheese so strong, it'll blow your head off".
"Cheese so strong,
it'll blow your head off".
There is a reason some creative friends call on Momo's services.
While trying to deliver some sensible things, like designs for a little DM campaign and the build artwork for a couple of websites for a couple of Momo's clients, I dropped into the groovy offices of Thinking Juice this time last week to chat through a pitch idea with Gellan.
"I've got you in for this," he said, uncovering some scamps for a TV storyboard.
"It's a singing inanimate household item I can't identify for confidentiality reasons." I said.
"That's right," he replied simply, "and if we win an award for most annoying advert this Christmas, I will feel we've done our job properly."
He paused. "That's where you come in."
---
It goes without saying I suppose, that I subsequently found myself somehow squeezing in the time to write a 30-second demo of an unrestrainedly cheesy 70s Soul Group-style finger-clicking seasonal exhortation to buy certain retail goods. You're not surprised, I can tell.
Tired and marginally deadline-pushed one evening, I found myself sitting in front of the mic at some 9.00pm, directly over the heads of the undoubtedly relaxing neighbours downstairs, feeling a bit grouchy, and having to loudly croon about 'super-dooper savings' or similar in four-part harmony through a forced grin. They can hear if you're grinning or not, you know.
Gellan had the decency to play it in his packed pitch meeting a couple of days later.
If it's had the same effect on them as it's had on me every damn day since I released it into the wild, it will have blown his chance of ever getting to work with these people. They will be cursing him regularly for haunting their eternity with the damn thing. Some of them may even have ended it all, who knows.
Last time he briefed me to be even cheesier than normal – designing the packaging for Wyke Farms' TNT cheddar, 'cheese so strong it'll blow your head off' – we won an award. And had security advisors tell us it should be pulled from all supermarket shelves.
Don't dare brief Momo:fromagio – I'll give you exactly what you ask for every time.
it'll blow your head off".
There is a reason some creative friends call on Momo's services.
While trying to deliver some sensible things, like designs for a little DM campaign and the build artwork for a couple of websites for a couple of Momo's clients, I dropped into the groovy offices of Thinking Juice this time last week to chat through a pitch idea with Gellan.
"I've got you in for this," he said, uncovering some scamps for a TV storyboard.
"It's a singing inanimate household item I can't identify for confidentiality reasons." I said.
"That's right," he replied simply, "and if we win an award for most annoying advert this Christmas, I will feel we've done our job properly."
He paused. "That's where you come in."
---
It goes without saying I suppose, that I subsequently found myself somehow squeezing in the time to write a 30-second demo of an unrestrainedly cheesy 70s Soul Group-style finger-clicking seasonal exhortation to buy certain retail goods. You're not surprised, I can tell.
Tired and marginally deadline-pushed one evening, I found myself sitting in front of the mic at some 9.00pm, directly over the heads of the undoubtedly relaxing neighbours downstairs, feeling a bit grouchy, and having to loudly croon about 'super-dooper savings' or similar in four-part harmony through a forced grin. They can hear if you're grinning or not, you know.
Gellan had the decency to play it in his packed pitch meeting a couple of days later.
If it's had the same effect on them as it's had on me every damn day since I released it into the wild, it will have blown his chance of ever getting to work with these people. They will be cursing him regularly for haunting their eternity with the damn thing. Some of them may even have ended it all, who knows.
Last time he briefed me to be even cheesier than normal – designing the packaging for Wyke Farms' TNT cheddar, 'cheese so strong it'll blow your head off' – we won an award. And had security advisors tell us it should be pulled from all supermarket shelves.
Don't dare brief Momo:fromagio – I'll give you exactly what you ask for every time.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Fruit Bastilles.
Fruit Bastilles.
Bon quatorze juillet!! YAY!
Les bollox á la bourgeoisie! Eh, mes amis?
..er... eh? Hoh-heehoh!
..Qwuh?
..Hier?
>SIGH/SHRUG<
Naturellement.
Dak. Or.
>DROPS BAGUETTES IN BIN, FLOUNCES OFF, WITH A QUICK SMEER OF DRAWN-ON TWIRLY MOUSTACHE ON CUFF OF STRIPED JERSEY<
>KICKS OLD BIKE<
>THROWS ONION AT KID<
Bon quatorze juillet!! YAY!
Les bollox á la bourgeoisie! Eh, mes amis?
..er... eh? Hoh-heehoh!
..Qwuh?
..Hier?
>SIGH/SHRUG<
Naturellement.
Dak. Or.
>DROPS BAGUETTES IN BIN, FLOUNCES OFF, WITH A QUICK SMEER OF DRAWN-ON TWIRLY MOUSTACHE ON CUFF OF STRIPED JERSEY<
>KICKS OLD BIKE<
>THROWS ONION AT KID<
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Tour de force.
I guess you could say that a little sign of having at last begun to leave emotional kindergarten on your journey to Actual Adulthood is when you realise that romance isn’t just about emergency Valentine’s cards.
If you’ve only recently twigged that 'romance' is a code word for two very different things at once depending on which side of a relationship you’re on, I must point out that this doesn't count. Grasping the fact that the word can mean 'chocolate' to one of you and Special Occasion Sex (SOS) to the other doesn’t qualify you as an emotional mentor. It just means you might understand your disappointment better. But, y'know. Perhaps even that's a start.
No, the truth of the word romance is that it isn’t restricted to relationships at all, of course.
..Though, I should also point out that saying this in lofty tones on the morning of a significant birthday/anniversary/Valentine's day, imagining the assertion to be your new style of gift to the occasion, still means you're an idiot. Don't ask why, just go buy some chocolates now.
Div.
---
But, ah – romance.
Romance is, of course, all at once a wildly flimsy, silly thing and a captivatingly wonderful, energising thing. You usually get it into your head in the absence of hard facts – often despite them, which is how robust this flimsy thing is. In fact more even than that, romance is rarely the friend of logic.
The magic of it is that, once you’re past the I Really So Love You Darling stage and have moved on to the Who’s That Bigger Person I'm Sure I've Seen Sharing The House With Me And My Kids stage, you can adapt the afor-mentioned silly flimsy feelgood to work on a place or a thing or an idea or... anything. It is, after all, an idea – a jolly scrummy, possibly fwuffy, undoubtedly impractical, proudly unempirically-appealing idea of something. And don't it warm your cockles?
Of course, I can work it up about almost anything.
I'll even get nostalgic for Charlie Brooker's acidic, billious moaning, after he's finally locked away for walking into Trafalgar Square with a flamethrower and red-eyed tears of regret for humanity's lostness. ..See? I feel lump in my throat about it already. I love that man. That nearly broken man.
But right now, I am feeling it for a bike race.
---
We used to dream about driving the support cars in the Tour de France. Years ago, when we watched it after school. We used to turn up Pete Shelley's strangely affecting theme tune to the Channel Four coverage and wish we were chasing the peleton across the swooping Gallic countryside for three weeks of the summer. Or even better, driving the motorcycle cameras.
For me, the romance comes in a kind of crossing of romantic lay-lines, converging on the world's most iconic cycle fight. It's the Wimbledon or World Cup of cycling. But without the BBC coverage. Or any upper body mass index whatsoever.
Really, think about it – what's not to love? Almost a month of constant evolving road shots and helicopter shots of the French countryside, from coastal plain to mountain peak. A final stage that stops Paris for a day, as the measurably superhuman madmen still pedaling chase eachother over the cobbles of the Champs Elysés and round the Concorde.
And what superhuman madmen. An entire working day in the saddle almost every day for over three weeks. 3,500 KM. Just try to imagine that kind of endurance. Doing ONE day at thirty to forty KPH for over six hours would kill most of us. And then there's the sprinting. The whole concept of actually racing each other. Knocking time off. ..Knocking time off? Off your life, mate.
And people do die on the TDF. If you've seen the speeds they come down the mountains on two very very skinny wheels in nothing but body paint, you'll know why these chaps with Spielberg-alien stick-thin arms are Herculean bloody demi-gods of courage and physical achievement.
Freaks, in other words. And who doesn't love a bit of mawkish freakshow? Really?
---
I think I could watch it on a three-week loop in a womb tank. What with Phil Leggit's soothing tones – as synonymous with cycle TV as Motson to footie, or Walker to F1 – and all that road movie footage, sweeping past the poplars and swooshing past the streams of people delirious with joy at seeing this legendary, chain-shlinking titan reesh past their noses in under an Earth second. Well worth the enormous car park fee that second.
But also, I love it because it is an expression of that idea of Europe that I've manufactured for myself and insist on cherishing.
That silly, romantic idea, largely removed from reality's brutal drudgery, of a sedate melting pot of intense historic culture, of cafés and quirky TV, of slick logos and rank oddness. Of groovy accents and fantastic food. Of... Europe. A collection of countries and outlooks that together create something wondrous in the bosom. At least for me. A great comfort of possibilities and fine living and just ponsing (or possibly pensing) about in an endless succession of spankingly lovely, uplifting places.
A comfort that dare not look upon the ugly truths of division and corruption and bureaucracy lest it forget itself and spend not its euros on holiday there every year.
---
Any notional love I profess for the Tour de France is not borne out by knowledge or commitment, of course. Don't be silly now.
I still have no idea what consitutes tactics in cycling. Not Dying should be enough.
The bloke who crosses the line first on any day... wins? Right? Well no. Well, yes – he wins the coveted green jersey – given to the bloke who does indeed cross the line first to win that Etape or stage and get the most points. Fair enough – wheel on the French trophy birds, he's less Not Dead than 150 other blokes that day.
But he could be nowhere in the actual race – the race for the sacred maillot jaune – the yellow jersey.
I know, I don't really get it.
I always fancied the King Of The Mountains title. Not because I'd contemplate cycling those tarmacked cliffs in the Alps instead of nipping off to a cable car, but because the jersey is a very confident polkadot pink on white. Properly cool graphic style.
But if I am that extra bit taken with the romantic idea of this gruelling, bespoked madness, it is for one extra reason. Little did Géo Lefèvre – lunatic journalist with L'Auto magazine in 1903 who's deranged vision the French frenziedly bought into – realise that his work would inspire another very firmly European idea, eight decades later. Electronic music.
Every time I watch the TDF, I think of Kraftwerk. A formative musical love for me that, as you know, provokes a particularly comforting, if inexplicable, swell in my bosom.
As the peleton morphs and flows through the rolling French scenery, I think of four German blokes and their seminal electro-pop 12" Tour de France. And then I think of their love of cycling – and the fact that they buggered off from the studio for years, not for beer, bongs or birds but bikes. To go cycling.
And if that doesn't make your warm little heart beat a bit faster, you have no romance left in you.
I guess you could say that a little sign of having at last begun to leave emotional kindergarten on your journey to Actual Adulthood is when you realise that romance isn’t just about emergency Valentine’s cards.
If you’ve only recently twigged that 'romance' is a code word for two very different things at once depending on which side of a relationship you’re on, I must point out that this doesn't count. Grasping the fact that the word can mean 'chocolate' to one of you and Special Occasion Sex (SOS) to the other doesn’t qualify you as an emotional mentor. It just means you might understand your disappointment better. But, y'know. Perhaps even that's a start.
No, the truth of the word romance is that it isn’t restricted to relationships at all, of course.
..Though, I should also point out that saying this in lofty tones on the morning of a significant birthday/anniversary/Valentine's day, imagining the assertion to be your new style of gift to the occasion, still means you're an idiot. Don't ask why, just go buy some chocolates now.
Div.
---
But, ah – romance.
Romance is, of course, all at once a wildly flimsy, silly thing and a captivatingly wonderful, energising thing. You usually get it into your head in the absence of hard facts – often despite them, which is how robust this flimsy thing is. In fact more even than that, romance is rarely the friend of logic.
The magic of it is that, once you’re past the I Really So Love You Darling stage and have moved on to the Who’s That Bigger Person I'm Sure I've Seen Sharing The House With Me And My Kids stage, you can adapt the afor-mentioned silly flimsy feelgood to work on a place or a thing or an idea or... anything. It is, after all, an idea – a jolly scrummy, possibly fwuffy, undoubtedly impractical, proudly unempirically-appealing idea of something. And don't it warm your cockles?
Of course, I can work it up about almost anything.
I'll even get nostalgic for Charlie Brooker's acidic, billious moaning, after he's finally locked away for walking into Trafalgar Square with a flamethrower and red-eyed tears of regret for humanity's lostness. ..See? I feel lump in my throat about it already. I love that man. That nearly broken man.
But right now, I am feeling it for a bike race.
---
We used to dream about driving the support cars in the Tour de France. Years ago, when we watched it after school. We used to turn up Pete Shelley's strangely affecting theme tune to the Channel Four coverage and wish we were chasing the peleton across the swooping Gallic countryside for three weeks of the summer. Or even better, driving the motorcycle cameras.
For me, the romance comes in a kind of crossing of romantic lay-lines, converging on the world's most iconic cycle fight. It's the Wimbledon or World Cup of cycling. But without the BBC coverage. Or any upper body mass index whatsoever.
Really, think about it – what's not to love? Almost a month of constant evolving road shots and helicopter shots of the French countryside, from coastal plain to mountain peak. A final stage that stops Paris for a day, as the measurably superhuman madmen still pedaling chase eachother over the cobbles of the Champs Elysés and round the Concorde.
And what superhuman madmen. An entire working day in the saddle almost every day for over three weeks. 3,500 KM. Just try to imagine that kind of endurance. Doing ONE day at thirty to forty KPH for over six hours would kill most of us. And then there's the sprinting. The whole concept of actually racing each other. Knocking time off. ..Knocking time off? Off your life, mate.
And people do die on the TDF. If you've seen the speeds they come down the mountains on two very very skinny wheels in nothing but body paint, you'll know why these chaps with Spielberg-alien stick-thin arms are Herculean bloody demi-gods of courage and physical achievement.
Freaks, in other words. And who doesn't love a bit of mawkish freakshow? Really?
---
I think I could watch it on a three-week loop in a womb tank. What with Phil Leggit's soothing tones – as synonymous with cycle TV as Motson to footie, or Walker to F1 – and all that road movie footage, sweeping past the poplars and swooshing past the streams of people delirious with joy at seeing this legendary, chain-shlinking titan reesh past their noses in under an Earth second. Well worth the enormous car park fee that second.
But also, I love it because it is an expression of that idea of Europe that I've manufactured for myself and insist on cherishing.
That silly, romantic idea, largely removed from reality's brutal drudgery, of a sedate melting pot of intense historic culture, of cafés and quirky TV, of slick logos and rank oddness. Of groovy accents and fantastic food. Of... Europe. A collection of countries and outlooks that together create something wondrous in the bosom. At least for me. A great comfort of possibilities and fine living and just ponsing (or possibly pensing) about in an endless succession of spankingly lovely, uplifting places.
A comfort that dare not look upon the ugly truths of division and corruption and bureaucracy lest it forget itself and spend not its euros on holiday there every year.
---
Any notional love I profess for the Tour de France is not borne out by knowledge or commitment, of course. Don't be silly now.
I still have no idea what consitutes tactics in cycling. Not Dying should be enough.
The bloke who crosses the line first on any day... wins? Right? Well no. Well, yes – he wins the coveted green jersey – given to the bloke who does indeed cross the line first to win that Etape or stage and get the most points. Fair enough – wheel on the French trophy birds, he's less Not Dead than 150 other blokes that day.
But he could be nowhere in the actual race – the race for the sacred maillot jaune – the yellow jersey.
I know, I don't really get it.
I always fancied the King Of The Mountains title. Not because I'd contemplate cycling those tarmacked cliffs in the Alps instead of nipping off to a cable car, but because the jersey is a very confident polkadot pink on white. Properly cool graphic style.
But if I am that extra bit taken with the romantic idea of this gruelling, bespoked madness, it is for one extra reason. Little did Géo Lefèvre – lunatic journalist with L'Auto magazine in 1903 who's deranged vision the French frenziedly bought into – realise that his work would inspire another very firmly European idea, eight decades later. Electronic music.
Every time I watch the TDF, I think of Kraftwerk. A formative musical love for me that, as you know, provokes a particularly comforting, if inexplicable, swell in my bosom.
As the peleton morphs and flows through the rolling French scenery, I think of four German blokes and their seminal electro-pop 12" Tour de France. And then I think of their love of cycling – and the fact that they buggered off from the studio for years, not for beer, bongs or birds but bikes. To go cycling.
And if that doesn't make your warm little heart beat a bit faster, you have no romance left in you.
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