• …where the fuck is the 13th Note?
• Who goes to Brel for music? (A: people who think Ashton Lane is Glasgow’s East End)
• The Scotia kicks the arse of the Halt Bar if you want authentic.
• When did the folk in Nice N Sleazy become “painfully well-dressed”?
• You put your page break in the wrong place.
• But again, where the fuck is the 13th Note?

Meh I always fall for this kind of commercial website flame baiting. Use the AdBlock firefox extension if you follow that link.

Does anyone really think ATP was better at Pontins? The info for Butlins ATP has just been emailed out including these gems:

What WE Provide!
Butlins Minehead looks out across a superb sandy beach. The site not only has a supermarket, newsagent and cash points, it also has Burger King, Pizza Hut, Finnegan’s fish and chips, Sun and Moon, Skyline Cafe and Yacht Club Dining room. Onsite facilities include a cinema, Splash Water World – a sub-tropical environment that has a huge wave pool, a swimming pool, 3 flumes and also a flume based raft ride – Ten-pin bowling and amusement arcade. Sports include Archery, Football, Basketball, Darts, Petanque, Fencing, Kwik Cricket, Netball, Rounders, Table Tennis, Outdoor Bowls and Crazy Golf.

Meal Deals:
For those of you who have purchased room only accommodation or don’t feel like cooking over the weekend Butlins have put together a breakfast and dinner package at £34.95.

What you get: Full Traditional English Breakfast, Continental Style Breakfast Buffet, Selection of Cereals and Pastries, Fruit, Toast and Tea, Coffee and Fruit Juices. 3 Course Dinner, served buffet style, including Soup, Hot Buffet, Salad Bar, Desserts and Ice Cream, with Hot Drinks and Juices

Amazing. They don’t even brag about the widescreen TVs, framed pictures, complimentary Butlins chocolate and pyramid of single serving milk either.

So, who else is going to Butlins?

Some emails of possible interest

* The legendary Creation compilation Doing It For The Kids has inspired a new 3CD charity compilation which features such Creation luminaries ex-Jasmine Minks members, Ed Ball, and um, one of Hurricane #1. There are also tracks by the likes of Ballboy, Popup, de Rosa and The Orchids. There are only 266 actual copies available, which will be individually auctioned for Yorkhill Children’s Hospital in Glasgow. You can also download the whole thing here for just £6.49 with all proceeds going to charity. Find out more at www.myspace.com/yorkhillproject

* Roger from the on-hiatus Dawn Of The Replicants has set up “a shabby DIY label type of a thing” called Shark Batter with his brother and are releasing a bunch of new things soon including his new band TheStarkPalace, The Stone Ghost Collective and Vacuum Spasm Babies. Have a listen and find out more at www.myspace.com/sharkbatterrecords

* Beginning your email, “Dear Fierce Terrifying Force” is one way to get my attention. Tom Braham is from Southampton and does aa “free weekly show of nit-wit fun and the best bands live in session” by podcast Not sure about “best” but they are certainly big-ish names like I Am Kloot and Six Nation State. Have a listen here.

* It seems to be down just now but hopefully that’s just a blip. wikimobileactunsigned.com is a wiki “for local band scenes across the UK to create and maintain a local directory of useful stuff in their area. Everything from record labels, studios, local papers and radio, gig venues, cd duplication places, t-shirt printing places, etc etc.”  Good idea if people find some time to help out.

That’s all for now.

In the pub last Sunday we found a fantastic mock-tourist guide to Glasgow. It’s so well-designed and understated that we spent the first 5 minutes outraged at the latest Council-sponsored tack.

Foreigners might be unfamiliar with the laughable Scotland with style rebranding / gentrification campaign underway here, much to the amusement of your actual Glaswegians. A black & white photo campaign, much vapid posturing and no recognisable link to everyday life, it’s the public face of an attempt to remake the city as a short-break / conference destination. Thus we have litter wardens dressed as police, sub-Bladerunner video advertising and bouncers repelling the goths from steps at the back of a famous bookchain. A nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

What The Caravan Gallery have done with their garish and glossy Glasgow – It’s so stylish! is skewer those pretensions quite nicely while at the same time celebrating a more “authentic” (yuk) Glaswegian style. Instead of dribbling on about modern architecture they say “Glasgow has a lot of different buildings”, under a photo of the Norfolk St flats and the accompanying slum-clearance survivor. Not pretty but very Glasgow.

The whole thing could have been just a bitter joke but there’s a sense of affection for the people of Glasgow. No resort to the easy neds-&-knives clichés, the targets of the satire are them as need their pretensions punctured: “A dead conifer adds the finishing touch to this ‘aspirational lifestyle’ balcony” of 1.5 square metres. While at the same time, they’ve picked out the scruffy, unashamed but under threat areas like Paddy’s Market: “This is not ordinary soup, this is Hell’s Kitchen soup”.

Try and get hold of a copy (maybe from these guys), it’ll tell you more about Glasgow than a hundred billboards or gritty exposés.

Last 6 mins or so of Bilge Pump in Bletchley. Unbelievable.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAOkyCyKVbA[/youtube]

Well, thanks to our good pals at Microsoft, it looks like songwriters can pack up their guitars and NEVER BOTHER AGAIN, ‘cos they’ve invented a program that writes a song for you if you sing at it. It’s technically pretty impressive, but the funniest bit is the adjustable sliders that add ‘happy factor’ and ‘jazz factor’ to your song afterwards. I like the idea of sliders that let you mess about with the intrinsic properties of songs. Imagine what you could do to The Kooks.

I forsee no sleep ever again. CLICK HERE for random diskant goodness from the archives, then CLICK on the same link in the left sidebar and CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. God, what a lot of amazing nonsense we used to post on here.

(yesyes, there are still many untitled and uncategorised posts back there. I’m not quite that bored, yet.)

Just when you thought Flickr couldn’t get any more addictive or time-consuming, the bastards have added a video function which is amazing. They’ve limited things to 90 secs to give the Flickr videos a feel of moving photographs and give an excellent place to upload stop-frame animations or quick movies you might have filmed on your digital camera.

I put a load up today that have been clogging up my hard drive:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157604455376098/

Obviously it’ll bury Flickr under the weight of German Fetish Porn in about a fortnight but it’s a good idea nonetheless.

The Soundhaus is celebrating it’s 10th birthday this weekend with DJs from (it looks like) all of the nights it hosts and a load of bands playing as well.

Why should you care? Read on… Continue reading »

http://sumlin.muxtape.com/

There you go, couldn’t rename the tracks as it keeps telling me there’s an error so here’s the tracklisting:

• Neil Young – Cinnamon Girl
• Jimi Hendrix Experience – Killing Floor (live)
• The Sonics – Have Love, Will Travel
• Oneida – Doin Business In Japan
• MC5 – Looking At You
• Ike & Tina Turner – Untitled
• Yardbirds – Stroll On
• Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band – Diddy wah diddy
• Sebadoh – Flame
• The Elastik Band – Spazz
• The Buffalo Springfield – Mr. Soul
• Howlin’ Wolf – Wang Dang Doodle