we then had the hottest day i’ve seen in ages, so amy and i just holed ourselves up at wandsworth park with some cider a few good books, the newspaper, some veggie sushi and a whole load of good chats. this month was kida tough on money as we had to pay for the upcoming truck festival and our holiday but the good weather and good company made it one of the nicest summer months i’ve had in years

one of the worst things about being poor is that you have to eat lots of really bad food. by the second week of the month i was starting to have vitamin deficiency due to the huge intake of beige food groups and nothing that event resembled a vegetable. inevitably i eventually snapped and went on a tasty, healthy food shopping binge buying spree. the first night result of which was my legendary vegetarian chili. amy has just started to get into spicy food so i’m starting to raise the heat on some of my dishes a little bit more each time. suffice to say this lovely treat blew both of our heads off. i might post the recipe up here is anyone is interested.

I’m going to finish this up here because I want to do a whole post for Truck Festival. This has possibly been my most dull blog yet.

1. you will arrive at your apartment and the first thing you will do is turn on the tv to see what mtv looks like in another country (aka the european coca cola test)

2. your first trip to the beach will ensure that you spend the initial couple of days looking like a lobster covered in jam

3. also at the beach, you will have sand kicked all over your face by little five year old ‘wayne’ from doncaster. you then seem to be in all the same restaurants as this evil northern family. they grind down your patience so much that you now have tinnitus from turning up your ipod in a futile attempt to drown out their inane northern banter. they too look like lobsters.

4. you will think it is a great idea to spend forty euros on a giant inflatable crocodile, much to the dismay of your girlfriend.

5. you will go to any lengths to make sure your other half doesn’t see the signs for ‘traditional local market – tuesday’. she will see it. you will spend four hours wandering around a car park so hot your eyes melt looking at awful tourist items such as towels with cannabis leaves, t shirts with 2pac and assorted brown leather handbags with beads and colourful stitching. your girlfriend will buy one to get you back for the crocodile.

6. although you have made a mammoth attempt to eat as the locals do your lower intestines have plans of their own. you start having to plan out your journeys ‘in-case you get caught short’

7. you may have been spending most of your time trying to fit into the local culture but at least once you will find yourself in the local ex-pat bar (probably called ‘o mulligans’ or ‘lineker’s’ dependent on whether they serve guinness or carling). You will be so drunk that you start to really think that moving to the town and becoming part of the community is a good idea. you will be given free sugary rum and cokes by the landlady ‘pat’ who will bore you all night about how no-one knows more about northern soul than she does.

8. you will, no matter how hard you try not to, go to a waterpark on the outskirts of town. your sunburn will at this point be beyond unbearable and as you fly down the plastic pipes you will feel like you just gone through a torture scene with jack bauer.

9. you will spill sun tan lotion all over your book on the spanish civil war. you weren’t clever enough to read that anyway. you’ll read harry potter instead.

10. the end of the holiday. you book a taxi hosted by a sweaty twenty five stone beast named juan. he will shout at you in a dialect so obscure he makes ‘teletubby’ look like it belongs on the uk schools curriculum. half way to the airport you then realise that your left over euros and passports are still in the safe at the apartment. you miss your flight.

i totally don’t expect any of this stuff to happen to us though as it is our first trip abroad on our own and it will be magical and special.

the last month has been great. we kicked it off with seeing some old friends from university up in nottingham. one of our friends is seeing a guy who is erving out in afghanistan, and we had a really cool chat about what it meant to be in the military and how he feels about their mission. super cool guy. and he drinks red wine like a fish.

we had some awesome news at work, as our ceo alison wenham found out that she was to be a proud recipient of an obe! no mean feat i tell you! dubbed ‘queen of the indies’ by bella union’s simon raymonde this is a well deserved recognition of the hard work alison puts into the independent music community

my dad has been having a pretty tough year so this fathers day claire and i decided to do something fun for him. we bought him down to stay with me and amy and the four of us had an amazing weekend, lots of talking, laughing and having fun. we took him out to thorpe park as he used to love rollercoasters and we couldn’t get him off the rides! we ate far too much over the few days but i’ll have great memories of that weekend.

I’m not a big fan of shoot-em-ups, or anything where you tend to die fairly easily. I bought Super Street Fighter last week, only to get quite bored after ten minutes of trying to pull off overly complicated special moves.

Alan Wake is however my kind of game. The kind of thing where I will be playing until 5 in the morning and Amy will come and find me in a super vegetated state of freaked out stupor. Anyways, I’ve been a total geek and pre-ordered the Limited Edition version, which is probably just more crap that I don’t need.

Most of the records I found were because I spent hours in my local record store, talking to the staff and other customers about the newest releases. I also spotted at many of Norwich’s music haunts, spending my hard earned cash in crabby venues and discovering local, UK and international bands that passed through that fine city. I would also rely on the music press, NME, Melody Maker and Teletext’s Planet Sound. The views and opinions of well informed journalists helped me decide which records I would rush pick up on Monday lunchtime.

But your average music buyer was never that involved with their local music scene. Your average music fan was more likely to pick up the latest Jonathan Ross endorsed album because of the huge amount of marketing spend thrown at them by the major labels. Walking into their local Virgin or HMV was an assault on any strand of musical individuality that person may have had. Gone were the hours of hunting around record racks for those hidden gems, instead we were presented with what were being told to buy by the racks of special offers and biggest releases.

But now, we have a wealth of opportunities to discover, consume and recommend new music. We have Spotify and the hordes of music streaming services to deliver cheap if not free music to our desktops, We have Apple’s all seeing music hard/software to make sure that no train journey is ever without a soundtrack. And we have blogs upon blogs of music press to recommend music to us. It’s become so easy to be a music fanatic. When I was a kid, I had to work so hard to build up my record collection, and was never more proud that when people saw it they informed me I was a music geek. But now even my Grandma has access to milliions times more (free) music than I did as a 15 year old.

Is this better for us as music fans? Yes and no. Yes because we now have the ability to pick out any one song from around the world and throughout history at the click of a mouse, and we can do this through a multitude of devices in our homes and offices, phones, computers, MP3 players, TV’s and games consoles. Great, I’ve always wanted to listen to Spiderland by Slint while I was doing my washing up. No, because we have had all the passion removed from our music consumption.

But what is the cost of this? The cost is forgetting what it feels like to discover how you feel when you collect all the EPs, singles album and picture discs of of some obscure 80′s hair metal band. The cost is not making mix tapes for girls made out of records you have lovingly poured over for hours. The cost is buying a well selected gift for your Dad and him saying ‘I could have just listened to that on Spotify’. The cost is a devaluation of music that will run far beyond us getting ‘value for money’. The cost will be that many artists will not be able to continue to put out constant out put because they don’t get any money from a stream of their album. The cost of this fast food influenced culture of music consumption runs much deeper than you think.

I’m no angel, I love Spotify, and am never further than five foot from my iPhone. But once in a while I head out of my flat, go to the nearest music store and pick up something I’ve never heard of. Maybe you could try it, you may be pleasantly surprised.

I do not have fine taste in movies, I do not even hold in high regard the art form that is cinematography. So unashamed am I of my dedication to the low brow films that have peppered my youth and adulthood, that when discussions of films come up, I will state my intentions and leave the spewing of post fixes and bizarre referencing to my friends. I am happy to talk for hours on end about music and books, things that I get really passionate about, but with movies, I treat them as pure entertainment.

The way I see it is that anything that comes through my TV, while I’m drinking tea on (our massively uncomfy sofa) is intended to entertain me. And I wish not to immerse myself in the intellectual separation of entertainment. I would just cause arguments. I’m not saying that cinema isn’t an art for worthy of powerful discussion, I just choose not to.

It is with this thought in my mind that I would like to talk about how excited I am to watch 2012 with the ever so ropey, John Cusack. Most of our DVD collection seems to be a collection of superhero movies, romantics, 80′s/90′s sci-fi and horror and then a few choice cuts. Taking quite a stand on our shelves is disaster movies. We seem to like nothing more than settling down to watch some mass scale destruction, preferably at the hand of mother nature (I’m thinking massive volcano, earthquakes and my personal favourite, tidal waves) (I’ve just realised this post may not be the most politically correct I’ve done, but hey). So we have planed in a trip to the cinema to see the latest disaster movie 2012 (don’t worry, no jokes here about the probable failure of London’s Olympic offering), which from what I hear is a three hour melting pot of every disaster movie you have ever seen.

I like these kinds of movies as I love that feeling of ‘What would I do?’, there is always a section in all of these films where someone has to make a decision whether to head to the Government’s secret bunker or stay with their loved ones. I also enjoy the stream of identikit scientists in each film (frizzy hair? Check. Spilt coffee? Check. Quiet yet ever-so slightly mad demeanour? Check).

I think that many people, myself included, would only know how to deal with the many situations proposed by these movies if we were actually catapulted into them. Faced with a morals over self preservation decision is always tough, but happily, I don’t have to, as I’m on my sofa, watching other people having to make that choice.

Reviews and articles are mixed for the movie, most pointing out the never ending luck of the main protagonist, but that’s ok. But if it was me, directing these films, there would be one thing I would change. I would mix my next favourite kind of films, shark movies, into the mix. Sharks and tidal waves, that would be amazing.

“Sharks In A Wave” jdirected by James Farrelly. Coming Summer 2010.

That sounds great to me. Look out for it.

The main point of this blog was to present to you a playlist, it’s a playlist that I feel is perfect for a reflective Autumn, get this up on Spotify and head down to Wandsworth Park to kick some leaves around. It did me a world of good. Please get the playlist here , and have a listen while you read the descriptions.

1. Todd Rundgren “Can We Still Be Friends?”

I went to see Vanilla Sky years ago with my sister, and despite the rest of the world discarding that movie as one of Tom Cruise’s worst ever films, we were both drawn into it’s tale, not for the sometimes over complex reality warping story, but for the elegant portrayal of human loss and love. This song is kind of off kilter but kicks in at a really poignant part of the film, makes me feel all edgy, but I totally imagine being all wrapped up in the park to this.

2. Kevin Devine “You’re Trailing Yourself”

This goes in totally just for the reason that I’ve had so many walks in the Autumn to this track after a drunken night out when you have made a fool of yourself. It’s so visual, a constant flow of images that snap together like puzzle pieces to make a stylised movie about a guy that just can’t help but say the wrong thing all the time.

3. The Beach Boys “Tears In The Morning”

This 1970 cut from the ‘Sunflower’ album breaks my heart every time I hear it. I know it’s lame that anything with a shuffle beat and a accordion makes me think of Autumn in Paris, but this song full drags you through the Le Bois de Vincennes by your gut. Sickly sweet harmonies parade around a desperate young voice. Classic break up music.

4. Elliott Smith – Any song you like really

It’s undeniable that Elliott Smith is pretty much the master of ‘on-your-own-songs’.

5. Local Natives “Wide Eyes”

Ok, this is a wild card, being a new band and all, but this album opener is a slice of melancholic praise is I have ever heard one. Sitting somewhere within some of the flash in the pan indie heavyweights at the moment (Vampire Weekend, Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses) and something a little more classic and lasting, this track is made for the movie of your life. It won’t outlast the decade, but is a perfect testament that there is some great music being put together out there.

6. Red House Painters “Grace Cathedral Park”

The ever-so-slow-and-openly-warming sound of Red House Painters is never one that fails to make me get totally choked up. A band that has gone on to influence countless literal miserablists (Mike Kinsella anyone?), with their open guitar tunings and one droning song styles (not a bad thing!), they open up their best box of tricks with this track that provides a fantastic opportunity to reflect on the season’s beginning.

7. Gene “London Can You Wait”

Heading back to my 90’s musical discovery days. Back when I begged my mum everyday for an Adidas jacket al a Damon Alban, my sister passed me “To See The Lights”. I guess this was way before I really understood the importance of The Smiths and Moz, and it must have filled that gap for me that exists in most boys. Also the guitar tone is really something, sounds like honey. A lament for a rainy leafy London.

8. Owen “I Woke Up Today”

I’m getting old. I have got grey spots in my beard and I’m getting a great Irish widow’s peak. This track from aforementioned Mike Kinsella (AKA Owen) is a homage to feeling that bit weather worn. The cascading acoustic guitar lines fit the falling leaves just right. I listen to this song at least once a week as it reminds me that I’m not the only one feeling so old these days.

9. Van Morrison “Cold Wind In August”

I love all those stories that you hear about Van Morrison. You know those ones about him storming off stages, being rude to people in the front row, banning drinking at his shows. They make this guy seem like such a mockery of himself that it’s often easy to forget that he is responsible for so many great songs. But this B-side to “Moondance” is a sickly smooth slow stomper of a track with those ever present New York brass sections and vocal quartet so note perfect they sound like a full choir. It may be a month too early, but it sums that feeling that colder times are just right round the corner. In my opinion, I hope he keeps making a fool of himself, and keeps that voice going for many years.

10. James Carr “The Dark End Of The Street”

Weddings. They are great, especially ones where you drink too much Guinness and slouch in a chair while the slow dances kick off. This song reminds me of those kinds of weddings for some reason. The Percy Sledge version has one of the best uses of a Hammond organ you will ever hear, it evokes so many memories for me, especially that ‘They’re gonna find us!’ bit. If I ever got married in the Autumn this would be the track I’d want to have a first dance to. His almost nasal vocal quality opens up a plethora of sentimental warmth that you can’t help but get sucked into the tale of hidden yet celebrated love. Man, I’m getting all mushy. A great song, and one that you need to have in your daily playlist.

11. Percy Sledge “A Whiter Shade of Pale”

Talking of the old PS and his ever present use of Hammond organs, my final track for the playlist is his version of Procol Harum’s legally bruised classic. Almost revamped into a solemn club version, this track still manages to control your insides with what is possibly one of the best opening lines ever in a song; “We skipped the light fandango, turning cartwheels across the floor, I was feeling kinda sea sick”. Timeless, refined and instantly gratifying, this version blows away the original. Haunting and yet subtly inviting.

Ok, so that was my Autumn walk playlist, I hope you enjoyed it!

The second kid of drunk is the kind of drunk that I like to do whilst listening to bands like Cloak/Dagger. This involves starting the day by brushing your teeth with Tequila, heading out to a house party after having a few beers with your buddies, getting totally loaded on whatever you could get your hands on, act inappropriately to the party’s host, throw up down the back of their sofa, break some bottles in a car park on the way to a show, getting in without paying, doing a tonne of shots, spinning round in the middle of the floor until my stomach decides that the rules of gravity do not apply to recently ingested alcohol and eventually pass out on a bench somewhere in Hammersmith.

It was one of those moments that you think about your heroes/musical idols and how you just don’t expect them to depart from this odd world. Perhaps it’s a testament to a slightly morbid mind, but I’ll often put on a record by an artist I really love and think how I just couldn’t imaging a world without them. I guess it’s that dreaded ‘breaking’ BBC news report informing us of another loss to the world. It was always that feeling with Michael Jackson, Amy and I had tickets for his O2 shows, and we never once considered ‘a life without MJ’. It’s not that they always have a huge impact on your daily life, it’s not like a family member being snatched from your grasp. No, it’s more like being used to having a full set of teeth all your life then loosing one, that gap just feels…weird. You always expect them to be there, making music, playing shows, being ‘Weller’ or ‘Moz’ or ‘MJ’. But after all, they are human beings, as much as we hold them up to be more than that.

It was a really strange experience being at that Birmingham show on Friday, people almost in tears at seeing their hero signing for them, pouring out his soul, while his witty passing comments passed over the dull Brummie majority of the audience. All I could think while stood between the Treseme and the Listerine mouthwash was how terrible it would be if that really was Morrissey’s last ever performance. I’m so thankful it wasn’t as I still feel this man has more bite and bark left in him for a few more years, and he will continue to show a further generation of musicians how to create with sincerity. And perhaps, I will take that thought with me in whatever I do. That could be the last cup of coffee I ever make, that could be the last time I catch my train, that could be the last time I listen to Solsbury Hill, this may even be the last time I tell her how much I love her. But it’s not, and you cannot spend your life waiting for that, waiting for that BBC breaking news report on your life.

Much in the same way that you have to treat every day like it could be our last, let’s enjoy the bands and artists we love now, celebrate their lives and support their music now, not just once they have left the stage, and the record labels release 1983 discarded singes as ‘brand new material’ for the world’s wannabe music journalists to critique and dissect. Artists have the right to defend attacks on their art, MJ hasn’t been able to do that, and with a recently slurry of ‘un-Moz approved’ albums and DVD’s, I’m pretty sure that the copyright vultures would soon be sniffing over Morrissey’s work not long after he exits smiling.

Well, grim post, but one I needed to get off my chest, I have also quit smoking again, and this time I need to stick to it, I have been feeling a little worse for wear and need to get myself back in fightin’ order. Next week sees a meeting with my Dad at a London Irish rugby match, for which I’m sure that many pints of the black stuff will be drunk. Until then, I have a tonne of work to do this week. SO until next time, stay safe and have fun.