MOGWAI: my first viewing of ’em, and i think i’ve missed out on their greatest gigs in the past. but when they got it together with their DYNAMICS and VOLUME it blew my hair off. unfortunately there were some slight meandering bits of their set which were kind of a letdown. but in general… woooo

SHIPS A’GOING DOWN: got the whole oxes/shellac thing off to a tee, all stop-start noise-quiet bits. they stopped just short of being too derivative; i just wish they’d looked a bit more enthusiastic on stage!

REYNOLDS: another first viewing for me, and waaaaggghhhh they rule. BUY THE ALBUM, anybody who reads this. it is beautiful and fantastic. why are reynolds not more famous?

PART CHIMP: my god you chimps, why are you so LOUD? but i’m not complaining. i enjoy having bleeding ears when it’s caused by such fantastic, abrasive, aggressive jesus lizard/six by seven magic. amazing.

SUNNYVALE NOISE SUB-ELEMENT: hold on, this is the band I’m in! er, they ROCKED, of course. but seriously; our recent london performance was tons o’fun.

SOUVARIS: are them what we played with at that london performance, and they were sublime and classy and spot-on. especially with a new song which was played last, ending with mike standing atop the bar, rockin’ it like proper rock stars should.

The incorporation of Paypal into eBay has been incredibly damaging on my pocket. Now I can buy things from all over the world without having to leave the (relative) comfort of my red office chair. This could be a good thing – after all, eBay is like the best record shop in the world – but have they given no thought to those of us with absolutely no sense of self control?

I mean, real post – like, parcels and that. Today I received in the mail a load of Shellac goodies (the 1000 hurts album in its nice 12″ box, and a couple of singles), a Q And Not U album (thanks to Ollie for those) and also the new Hood compilation CDs in a rather beautiful handmade hessian bag. It’s days like this that remind me why getting real, physical things in the post is so great.

I have been disqualified for six months and told that if I am caught driving a vehicle within those six months, I’ll be liable for up to a £5,000 fine and a possible six months’ imprisonment. SO, I don’t think I’ll be risking it. But anyway, here are my top three tips for appearing in court:

(1) Smarten yourself up. Wear a tie, get a haircut.
(2) Don’t be cocky. If you know you did a bad thing, don’t try and get out of it.
(3) Be prepared to kiss ass. Nobody except the people in the court can hear you.

Follow these rules and you should be okay. It worked for me, in a way – I was actually told that because of my frank and honest attitude that instead of getting a fine (of up to £1,000) as well as a ban, that the ban itself was punishment enough.

But this whole deal has made me realise that, when it comes down to it, I just want an easy, stress-free life.

i’ll have some of that action

Things I like:
– My Beach Boys car tape which spans their whole career and Brian Wilson’s descent into loopydom within 45 minutes
– The film, 24 Hour Party People
– Oxford, which so far appears to be even more beautiful than Reading
– My new Bialetti coffee maker

Things I don’t like:
– The very real, imminent possibility of a driving ban due to getting caught speeding too many times. And yes, I KNOW it’s my own fault
– Coldness

You’ll have to excuse me if blogging etiquette has changed over the past couple of months and i’m inadvertently upsetting or abusing some of you. ANYWAY i did something that i’d like to share, i went to see some bands last night and they were all great. it was a vacuous pop-sponsored gig at the zodiac in oxford. first up were GIDDY MOTORS who for some reason i expected to be some kind of quirky, shaky indie band, but who turned out to be fiercely full-on intensity in a very complicated, very proficient, very out-there, very NOW kinda way. plus, the lead singer looked like Alex of A Clockwork Orange crossed with Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. hurray! and just as they were becoming ever so slightly samely, AlexFace began stomping around the empty space in the front of the stage, banging a maraca against a tambourine like a deranged fundamentalist christian. double hurray! NOXAGT, next, were very polite (“hello ladies and gentlemen, we’re noxagt from norway”) to make up for, i presume, the absolutely mind-crushing heaviness of their music which was, to put it in the worst, unoriginally journalistic style possible, ‘like shellac falling down a flight of knives into a death metal band’. absolutely bleedin’ GREAT, too. the audience was left reeling after their performance, only to be further bludgeoned into submission by NOUGHT – they played at that AUDIOSCOPE festival, you know – who continued the theme of complicated jazz-style structures as performed by noisy motherfuckers, throwing a power drill and guitar-abuse-with-screwdriver-and-drumstick into the mix. exceptional, and exceptionally original. as were all three of the bands, constantly making me wonder where they get their musical cues from, and constantly amazing me with the sheer precision with which they made their seemingly random and chaotic sounds. you gotta see all these bands!!

I moved from Reading to Oxford, and celebrated by, err… spending a day out in Reading. And now the good things begin: as I waited to buy a selection of obscure indepedent records from the local friendly second-hand record shop, the nice guy who works there, and knows my obscure independent interests, said ‘oh, I sorted out a pile of stuff you might be interested in, it’s over there’. That’s nice, huh? So I take a look through and I’m exceptionally pleased to find the 4 TUNNA BRIX 12″ by Sonic Youth, which I’ve been after for, like, YEARS. It’s the bootleg(ish) 12″ of their Peel Session of Fall covers from 1989. ‘How much?’ I ask. ‘To you mate, five pounds’. Hurray! I think. So much less than the fifteen quid I saw it on eBay for, yesterday. Of course, I know there’s a 7″ of these tracks out there somewhere, too, so now I have to find that…

On account of forthcoming enormo expenditure, I am forcing myself to limit what I spend money on very strictly. This includes records, to some degree – or more specifically, I’m not buying so many random things ‘just to hear what they’re like’, and ending up with piles of half-listened things all over. This has had the fortunate consequence of forcing me to delve into records gone by, so I’ve been rediscovering nice things like the Tortoise albums, lots of crazy old psychedelia, and all of Sonic Youth’s back catalogue. I’m also LISTENING to things over and over now, and become rapidly obsessed with/deeply acquainted with the first two Shellac albums, and OXES of course.

I have also been making interesting food with vegetables, but that’s another story.

I arrived in time to walk through the door and see OXES rocking out, with a high PVC element and an even higher ‘set the tone for a perfect weekend’ element. Truly this was a weekend to remember. Criticisms of ATP I’ve seen so far seem to be based around the premise that this small, independent community thing is in some way inferior to ‘major’ festivals, but everybody – and I mean EVERYBODY – who I spoke to over the weekend, left me thinking “I like this person”. I don’t want to get all emotional, like, and I’m hoping that everyone I spoke to over the weekend wasn’t left thinking “drunken halfwit”, as the weekend for me was equally about the people as well as the music.

That aside, Shellac, huh? One of the best live bands I’ve ever seen – seriously – especially on their Sunday performance which was laser-sharp, super-super-tight and surprisingly humorous. I always imagined Steve Albini to be kind of a nasty guy, but now I think differently. And when, uh, I met him (thanks Marcy, for dragging me over to him) he was FRIENDLY! Even though I must’ve been the fiftieth drunk idiot to want to shake his hand of the hour!

Other highlights: OXES. OXES. OXES. But I don’t want to go on. You can all contact me personally for individualised highlights. Rest assured there were a lot of them.

I went to check out the Body Worlds exhibition thing in London today, and I gotta say that it was BORING. For some reason I was expecting some kind of artistic event, which would leave me shocked and intrigued, but instead I was faced with a Natural History Museum-style exhibit of bodies and body bits in glass cases and unimaginative ‘poses’. I’m as interested as the next person in seeing bodies preserved through the magic of ‘plastination’, with nerves, muscles and bones exposed to varying degrees, but I found this to be a confusing and hastily-prepared show. Maybe it’s because the bodies, despite being real, just didn’t look real, so there was no sense of ‘oh, so that’s how I look inside’, or maybe it’s because it was so busy and full of people who seemed to think that having read one article about how one organ works gave them the right to loudly lecture the other visitors on the ‘precise’ workings of the body, but it was a disappointment. It’s not like you get to see a skinned horse carrying a bones’n’muscles person who’s holding two brains every day, but Body Worlds made me feel like I do. Gah.