Rock and Roll and Hyperbole: Chris Singleton's Blog

This blog is moving...

2009-12-26T12:30:00.001Z

Just to let you know that this blog is moving.

If you've subscribed to receive email updates, you should receive them as normal.
If you've subscribed via RSS, please subscribe to my new feed at

http://www.chrissingletonmusic.com/blog/rss.xml

The new blog can be viewed at

http://www.chrissingletonmusic.com/blog

which is on my spankingly new website.

Enjoy!

Inlay mockups

2009-12-07T22:42:00.007Z

The saga of my artwork for Lady Gasoline continues. Since you all helped me so much with shaping the cover, thought you might like to look at a mock-up of the inlay. A cool crowd called Verdict in New Zealand will be finishing it off and laying it out properly.

For now it doesn't include the 'be a work of art' stuff - i.e., all the photos of my er, fans...but it will do when completed.

My photoshopping is pretty rubbish - I haven't even managed to take 10 years off me, let alone get the lines straight. So remember, it's all rough, right. Any comments welcome.

Betsey Trotwood gig

2009-12-01T20:11:00.004Z

Just a quick note to remind people of the Betsey Trotwood gig tomorrow, 2 December at 8pm.

It now features 3 acts:

- yours truly: www.singletonmusic.com
- a brilliant folk duo James and Amy: www.jamesandamy.com
- my backing singer and top folk soul brother John Gibbons: www.folksoulbrother.com

It'll be a mix of acousticness, basses and harmonies.

Come along! £7 on door or £5.50 if you buy online in advance from http://www.stubmatic.com/chrissingleton/event/2522

Full details and address also from

http://www.stubmatic.com/chrissingleton/event/2522

One more time...art votes needed.

2009-11-29T11:56:00.003Z

Apologies for bombarding you all with all these art-related questions. But based on your feedback (and of course my own personal preferences) we've narrowed things down quite a lot. I'd like to ask you one more time about concepts. There are basically two mock-ups to choose from (ignore some of the dodgy Photoshopping, but you'll get the idea).

Tell me whether you prefer Option 1 or Option 2...thanks a bunch.

OPTION 1

OPTION 2

Booty artwork

2009-11-25T23:28:00.009Z

Well, when I asked you for your initial views on my artwork ideas for the next album cover...you inconveniently picked the wild card - the idea involving the rather saucy pair of boots.

But I'm listening to you, so I've played around with the idea and mocked up some more boot-related / minimalist ideas. Can you let me know which of the below appeal? Incidentally if you need a bit of sonic inspiration, you can listen to the 'Lady Gasoline' track at http://www.myspace.com/chrissingleton.

Incidentally I'm feeling very sleazy after looking up all these boots on the internet.

OPTION 1

OPTION 2

OPTION 3

OPTION 4

OPTION 5

OPTION 6

OPTION 7

Why I'm not betting on a Tory win

2009-11-22T22:24:00.013Z

For quite a while now the media has been doing a good job of convincing us all that the Tories are on their way back to power. Be it in The Guardian or The Daily Mail, David Cameron has for the past year or so been consistently portrayed as the next PM, and the assumption that the Conservatives will win the next election is now firmly embedded in political journalism.

It’s easy to understand why political commentators are taking a ‘Tories-will-win’ line: Brown is a jaded, unpopular prime minister who presides over an uninspiring administration – an administration which has been finding it hard to appeal to Labour supporters, never mind floating voters. And the Tories have been ahead in the polls for ages.

In strictly democratic terms, the Tories will not win the next election. They will get around 36% to 42% of the vote, with the majority of the country voting the way it always does – for centre-left parties (Labour and the Lib Dems). But under the UK’s antiquated and grossly unfair electoral system, first-past-the-post – which rewards parties that win a minority of the vote with a majority of seats in parliament – a 40% chunk of the vote could still result in the Tories getting back into power.

However, I’m increasingly of the opinion that the Tories may not win a majority in parliament. Instead, I think that a lot of indicators are increasingly pointing to a hung parliament (where no party has overall control).

There are four main reasons why I think the Tories are unlikely to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons at the next election:

1) The Tories have a seriously big hill to climb to reach a majority
The Conservatives need to win 117 seats in the next election to gain an overall majority of one, and 140 seats to win a 'working majority'. This will require at least a swing of 6.9% to the Tories – the biggest swing in 60 years, according to BBC journalist Michael Crick. And I’m not sure that Cameron (a multi-millionaire ex-member of the Bullingdon Club) has sufficient populist appeal to pull that kind of swing off.

2) It’s harder than ever before to secure an overall majority in the House of Commons
As Michael Crick also points out, the number of MPs elected who are not Tory or Labour but “others” (Lib Dems, Democratic Unionists, Respect etc.) has grown massively over the years – from 7 MPs in 1959 to 100 MPs in 2005. The main effect of this has been to create a ‘balance of power’ block in parliament and make it harder for any party (and particularly for the Tories) to win an overall majority of seats in the House of Commons.

3) Constituency boundaries favour Labour over the Tories
According to the UK Polling Report, the way that constituency boundaries are currently defined means that there is an “in-built bias” for Labour in the electoral system that will frustrate the Tories’ attempts to secure a majority in the House of Commons. A combination of out-of-date boundaries, over-representation of Wales and other oddities means that Labour will automatically win “more seats per votes cast” than the Conservatives.

4) The polls are narrowing, and the economy may be improving
Largely because of the above factors, in order to win an overall majority, the Tories need to poll significantly higher than Labour in an election – 12% more, according to Professor Michael Thrasher from Plymouth University. Six months ago, opinion polls suggested that this was not an implausible scenario – many polls had Labour 20% behind the Tories. But today’s Observer poll has Labour on 31% and the Tories only 6 points ahead at 37%. And Labour’s decent bye-election win in Glasgow North East also points to a possible shoring up of their support.

This improvement in Labour's electoral fortunes and its standing in the polls may be to do with perceived improvements in economic circumstances; and if the state of the economy does improve significantly before the election (as many are now suggesting will happen), it may give Brown a boost which further narrows the Tories' lead to a point where they cannot achieve an overall majority.

The next election could be the most fascinating in years. But what happens after it could be even more interesting: a hung parliament might finally lead to the introduction of a fair voting system - Proportional Representation - if the Lib Dems end up being kingmakers and demand it as part of a deal for propping up Labour or the Tories.

My betting career only goes as far as putting £2 on a horse that didn't win the Grand National - but next May or June I might throw a few bob after a hung parliament. And I'll definitely be staying up all night to watch the election.

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Art - your input wanted...

2009-11-21T16:30:00.013Z

Getting ever closer to the release of 'Lady Gasoline', my next album.

I'm now at the stage where we're trying to finalise artwork ideas. This being a new-fangled digital age, I thought I'd throw it out to my little band of online followers for input.

Can you take a look at the below cover ideas and let me know which is your favourite? If you were coming to the music cold (i.e., if you'd never heard my stuff before), which would appeal to you the most?

Each is numbered 1 to 6; please specify the number of your preferred option. Either leave a comment below or on my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/chrissingletonmusic. Feel free to elaborate on why you like a particular cover. Or if you don't like any of them, let me know that too!

Much obliged. Talk anon, Chris.

OPTION 1

OPTION 2

OPTION 3

OPTION 4

OPTION 5

OPTION 6

Charity gig on Friday 16 October

2009-10-12T23:04:00.006+01:00

Just wanted to let you know that I'm doing an acoustic gig for charity in London on Friday 16 October at the Getty Images Gallery, which is just beside Oxford Circus.

It's to support my mate and top bloke Thomas Rigby, who is raising money for two charities: the Bobby Moore Fund for Cancer Research UK (bowel cancer research) and Article 25, a development / disaster relief charity.

If you would like to come, just email mailto:%20info@chrissingleton.co.uk and I will sort you out with a ticket. They cost £20 but the drinks are complimentary. Should be a good night, and it'd be great to get your support.

Venue details are here: http://www.gettyimagesgallery.com/.

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The death of the MP3

2009-10-06T23:26:00.008+01:00

As many of you know, I've been quite an advocate of independent artists giving music away for free. Not because I don't value music, but because I don't think that indie musicians - and many established ones - have much of a choice around this. Digital technology and the internet has created an unlimited supply of recorded music, which means the real cost of it is rapidly approaching zero.

I've tried to take advantage of this as much as I can, by giving away MP3s in exchange for data. The idea being that you get my album free, but I can contact you about other stuff that you might want to pay for, like gigs or t-shirts (I've yet to do the latter: I find the idea of somebody wearing an item of clothing with my face on it a bit perturbing). It's working fairly well, with thousands of people now owning a digital copy of Twisted City, and more and more strangers - yes, strangers! - attending my gigs.

But I'm increasingly aware that this 'business model' is slowly - or perhaps not so slowly - becoming of limited use. This is because like the wax disc, vinyl LP, 8-track cartridge, cassette, minidisc and CD that went before it, the (downloaded) MP3 is going to die out...and soon.

Why is the MP3 in its death throes? Because a combination of streaming and increasingly sophisticated mobile devices connected to the net are starting to give people instant access to vast, online music libraries. Soon, there simply won't be a need for people to store MP3s or carry them around on iPods (believe me, these currently hip devices are going to look very quaint in the not-too-distant future). The humble MP3 represents the last incarnation of paid-for recorded music; and soon it will be a relic of the past.

What this means, of course, is that the current practice of artists giving away downloads in exchange for email addresses is also going to come to an end, and fairly soon. Which is a shame in many ways, as this has created an opportunity for musicians to generate large fanbases, and a cheap means to sell stuff direct to listeners, without record company involvement. If the MP3 is no more, with it dies the incentive for people to submit data for music; they'll just turn to Spotify to listen to stuff instead.

And where will this leave the record companies? It's an interesting question. Obviously if there is no recorded music left to buy, then they can hardly sell it. What they can sell though is concert tickets, because there is still a profit to be made from live performance - you can't make a digital copy of that. The result: record companies are going to have to become concert promoters if they want to survive.

So I think in about 5 years time the de facto model for the industry will be this:

1. Record company signs artist.

2. Record company advertises artist on TV, radio etc., encouraging people to stream their music on Spotify (or whatever the streaming service du jour is in 2014).

3. Fans do what they're told and stream Lady Gaga's new single (or whatever the electro-pop-cum-performance-artist sensation du jour is in 2014).

4. Record company puts on shows for the artist and sells tickets for them, taking a huge cut of sales.

5. If artist doesn't shift enough gig tickets, he or she is dropped, which means, yes, you got it...the artist is beholden to the record company again!

So if I were running a record company right now - and technically with my small label, Brownpaper Records, I suppose I am - I'd be turning it into a promotions company and looking for ways to get as much of the ticket sales pie as possible. And a cut of of everything else that's going too - publishing, sync rights, merchandise and so on. The buzz term for that is the '360 degree' model. I call it the piece-of-everything-you-ever-make-or-I'll-sue-your-ass model.

And if I were an artist, I'd start giving away dem MP3s like mad while you've still got people walking round with iPods. Yes, here it comes, the plug for the album: download it here. Free.

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Your face, on my artwork

2009-09-27T23:18:00.002+01:00

A bit of an odd one this, but I think it could be fun.

As many of you know I've relied a lot on online marketing and social networking to distribute my music over the past year.

In the process I've encountered a bunch of very supportive people who have been incredibly helpful in spreading the word about my stuff and befriending me in every online way possible. If you're reading this, that probably includes you.

To say thanks, I'm inviting you to be a part of the artwork for my new record. You submit a picture of yourself, and - depending on the number we get - it'll end up on an album sleeve. It'll also be used in an online collage too.

With the online collage, when somebody clicks on your image it will take them through to a charity website of your choosing. If it's successful I'm hoping the idea will raise a few quid for 'charidy' as well as being an interesting design project.

So, if you'd like to be a work of art, then just head on over to http://www.singletonmusic.com/art/ where you can read all about the idea. I look forward to your photos.

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Calais

2009-09-22T23:11:00.010+01:00

Images are from the Daily Telegraph.

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Obama's healthcare plan

2009-09-16T22:08:00.010+01:00

Imagine the scenario. Your child is sprawled across the floor, hyperventilating. He can't breathe. He's in a hell of a lot of distress.

For most parents in most first-world countries (and many developing-world ones) the obvious thing to do would be to call an ambulance and get the kid straight to hospital.

But not if you're in America and you don't have health insurance. The resulting healthcare bills mean that before you pick up the phone, you may have to choose between losing your child or losing your house.

Imagine another scenario: you live in the States, you are diagnosed with cancer, and you DO have health insurance. In fact you've never missed a premium payment. You seek healthcare, but you are denied it, because your insurance company has found a loophole in your policy and says you are not eligible for treatment. You can't afford the healthcare costs. You are faced with a long, painful death.

Sadly these are not imaginary situations; they are real and they are experienced by both the uninsured (50 million or so people) and the insured in America.

These two scenarios are just two examples of why Obama's plan to extend insurance and regulate it more rigorously is so important. Unsurprisingly, it is being fought tooth and nail by the American Right, which is using scaremongering and misinformation (or both) to portray the idea of wider coverage as somehow evil and un-American.

The scaremongering comes in the form of horror stories about 'death panels' associated with publicly-owned healthcare (which is not even on Obama's agenda). Arguably the most striking example of this came from the right-wing Investor's Business Daily - it recently made some almost comically wrong assumptions about Stephen Hawking and Britain's publicly funded National Health Service, saying:

"The stories of people dying on [an NHS] waiting list or being denied [care] altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

Stephen Hawking subsequently pointed out that he owed his life to the NHS, saying "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS - I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

If any such 'death panels' exist, they are arguably run by the US insurance companies. They frequently decide who lives or dies based on whether or not there are clauses in policies that allow them to maximise profit by refusing care.

More misinformation comes in the form of the claim that Obama's plan amounts to 'socialisation' of healthcare in the States. This is also daft, because the plan leaves healthcare privately provided. All it does is use public money to ensure that people can avail of that private care more easily.

From a European viewpoint, it is quite incredible that the Obama plan is being portrayed, in any serious way, as socialist - let alone communist. And even when you stop to think about things from an American perspective, the idea of public money being used to finance aspects of public services is not that odd. If those opposing Obama's plan really think that it will leave them with socialised healthcare (whatever that is), they will really need to start worrying about their already socialised policemen, socialised firemen, socialised teachers, socialised highways and - oh yes - a very heavily socialised military.

Lost in the debate are some facts. The US spent $2.2tn (£1.34tn) on its private healthcare system in 2007. That's 16.2% of GDP, nearly twice the average of other OECD countries (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8160058.stm). Yet less people there have access to care, and US healthcare is ranked by the World Health Organisation as 37th in the world, well below (shock!) France (1st), Britain (18th) and even my own little country, Ireland (19th).

In my view, the lack of universal healthcare in the USA is up there with the big crimes against humanity; and the struggle to provide healthcare to every US citizen, regardless of income, is as important as the struggle for civil rights was. Denying treatment to somebody because they are poor is one of the most heinous acts of discrimination; and denying an insured person healthcare to maximise profit is one of the sickest acts imaginable.

For the sake of 50 million uninsured Americans, and the many other insured ones, I really hope Obama pulls these fairly modest reforms off.

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News on the new album and more free music

2009-09-09T23:31:00.003+01:00

A quick update on where I'm at with various bits and bobs. Been so busy that I haven't had a huge amount of time to blog here (I'm sure my legions of readers are very upset about that).

First off, I've finished the new record. Was lucky enough to be able to master it at Abbey Road with Steve Rooke (of Beatles remasters fame), which was brilliant. The provisional release date is 26 April 2010, which is miles away, but that's to give me enough time to do the plethora of things that go with putting out a record. I'll be putting sneak previews of tracks up on the blog, and I might even do some Youtube acoustic versions soon.

Secondly, in the run up to the release, I'm making 'Twisted City' available for free again. The free version contains me popping up now and again in my best south Dublin accent, bugging you to donate to my honesty box, and it doesn't have any bonus tracks on it. Sincere apologies if you bought a copy recently...but hopefully you don't feel too short-changed, and I very much appreciate the support. I'm thinking of sending some extra free content to the people who bought the album - stay posted for more info on that. The free version of 'Twisted City' can be downloaded at http://www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/ - check it out.

Finally, I've got a free EP of new music available. The tracks on the EP aren't on the new album but they were recorded during the sessions for it. Just recommend the free version of 'Twisted City' to 4 mates and you get the new EP totally free. Find out more at http://www.singletonmusic.com/invite/spreadword.htm.

Right, I'm off to bed. Talk soon.

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Mastering the album at Abbey Road

2009-08-22T15:31:00.015+01:00

Well the album is finally done now.

The final bit of the recording process involved a trip to Abbey Road to master the record. Mastering basically means putting the album through a very fancy equaliser, then compressing and limiting the record to beef up the sound.

The mastering equaliser we used at Abbey Road was an old EMI-designed piece of kit from the 70s; despite advances in recording equipment, these EMI mastering consoles remain incredibly popular with artists and producers (due to the way that they give records a more warm, 'analogue' sound) - so Abbey Road haven't got rid of them.

I was very lucky to have a chap called Steve Rooke master the album. He's done a lot of very impressive stuff in the past, but his recent big project was doing the Beatles remasters. I had great fun during our lunchbreak hearing how he went about it. Steve's a really nice chap - not to mention an extremely experienced mastering engineer - and working with him was both a pleasure and a privilege.

I took some shots on the day which I thought I'd post up here - a photo diary of sorts. Hope they're of interest.

The tube station at St John's Wood, the nearest station to Abbey Road. It's got a very funky staircase and lamps.

As I walked down from the tube to Abbey Road, I encountered something very odd, and which looked like it could have come straight out of a Sgt. Pepper-era promo film: a bunch of impressive-looking dudes on horses.

In Abbey Road they have tape machines like this just lying around the place in the corridors. I was drooling over this one. I'm surprised they don't get nicked more often.

This was the mastering equipment that the record went through. It dates from the 70s but people love the 'warm' sound it produces so much that they continue to use it in Abbey Road to this day...albeit hooked up to computers. You can "see" two of my new songs on the computer screen.

And here's yours truly in the mastering suite. I look like death, due to having been up all night putting the final touches to the mixes. A lot of coffee was needed during the session. Excuse my dishevelled appearance.

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What's Rupert up to?

2009-08-09T23:44:00.007+01:00

There's a bit of a buzz going round the newspaper industry right now which involves, rather predictably, Rupert Murdoch. He's been intimating a lot of late that free online news content might soon become a thing of the past, at least where his News International titles are concerned.

Well, good luck to him. Rupert may have been pretty shrewd with regard to his business dealings in the past - and this is possibly why the press are taking this idea seriously - but in the long run, I can't possibly see this idea of paying for news content working. Here's why:

Firstly, the internet doesn't respect copy protection. Once one person has content, countless other people do, because copying and distributing a file is insanely easy. There has been much energy expounded and cash spent by record companies to copy-protect their content - and all in vain: getting free albums is easier than ever (legally or illegally). There is nothing to suggest that the newspaper industry would be any more successful in putting a wall around text, which from a technical viewpoint is even easier to copy than music.

The second reason that copy-protecting newspapers will not work has to do with something that - somewhat ironically - Murdoch is very fond of: competition. Even if he finds a viable way to protect his content, where will that leave him? Competing against a bunch of other news organisations that are all offering their content for free. He's partly aware of this, which is why his titles are attacking the BBC so much for publishing free news content...but even if the Beeb was forced to remove or scale back its online news (not entirely unthinkable if the Tories get in next year), there would still be thousands of alternatives delivering quality, free, online news output. And that's before you even consider the blogosphere, an increasingly trusted source of news and comment (if all the big newspapers were to put their content behind a wall, bloggers would have a field day).

Before charging for his content, Murdoch would do well to check out a book called 'Free: The Future of a Radical Price' by Chris Anderson. In it Anderson shows how companies are increasingly using the power of free services or content to access new markets and generate profit. The classic example he cites is Ryanair: it gives its flights away for free in order to sell a bunch of other stuff: car hire, travel insurance, accommodation, train tickets, bus tickets, scratch cards, credit cards...the list is endless. But to date it has worked, albeit at the expense of horrible flights for its customers. And the reason that it has worked is that in truth Ryanair is not actually an airline but a provider of travel services (and anything else it can flog). The free flight is the turnkey that unlocks other - and very big - markets for the company.

And digitally, the power of free content is even more pronounced. Because of its cost-free, copy-and-paste nature, digital technology effectively creates unlimited supply. And as any economist knows, when there's unlimited supply, the price of what's being supplied will drop to zero; it cannot but become free.

Murdoch - and any other digital content provider - can try to fight this; but it's a losing battle. Whether you're a rock band, a filmmaker or a journalist, you simply have to face the fact that the internet is going to make your content available for free, whether you like it or not. Content creators have a choice: to restrict content, and put themselves at a massive disadvantage, or to think creatively as to how they can unleash the power of free content and distribution. It amazes me that somebody as savvy as Murdoch isn't aware of this, and it makes me wonder if there is some ulterior motive behind his floating of his idea of charging for content. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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A tour of my studio

2009-07-16T23:50:00.002+01:00

One for the musical nerds amongst you: a video tour of my little studio, where I'm recording my latest (ahem) opus. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/chrissingletonmusic#play/all/uploads-all/0/amvSKMQ5GBI. It features me commenting on bits of recording equipment, an old organ, guitars and photographs of John Lennon.

I'm hoping to make a few more of these little videos; future ones might actually involve some music...stay posted and I'll try to make the videos a bit more exciting in future...maybe some tap dancing or something is in order, to liven them up a bit.

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Be the first to hear my new album

2009-06-27T22:15:00.005+01:00

Ok, so the new record's nearly done. It's 99% mixed. One more track, the dubiously titled 'Lady Gasoline' (a daft title and no relation to 'Lady Madonna' - I swear), needs to be recorded but then that's it...and then off to to master it and put it to bed.

Things being the way they are however, it's going to take a while before it gets released. I've got to work out how to actually put it out. Do I go physical? (That's not a sex thing, it means manufacturing cds!). Do I just put it out digitally? Do I encourage punters to buy it on iTunes or just ask them to buy it direct from my site? Do I tell people to listen to it on Spotify? The whole way that artists flog albums these days is a minefield and, while we're at it, an enigma wrapped in a mystery too.

Well that's for me to worry about. However, if you'd like to get a copy of the album before anybody else does, here's your chance. Anybody who posts threads on my messageboard - http://www.singletonmusic.com/messageboard/ - between now and 31 July will be automatically entered into a competition to get an advance copy. The more interesting your posts, the greater a chance you've got of winning.

Incidentally the judge's decision on who is the most interesting poster is final and I'm the judge. Get posting!

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Thrifty Styley

2009-06-24T19:38:00.006+01:00

As you probably know I'm a big fan of music promotion on a tight budget, and have come up with all manner of ingenious ways to spam - sorry "befriend" - you in various online contexts.

I'd just like to give a shout out to a blogging accomplice of mine who has recently started a blog about how to be thrifty when it comes to doing stylish things with your house. I've yet to follow any of the sage advice on her blog, as my idea of a stylish home is one with lots of guitars in it...but for those of you who are interested in being funky with your home whilst keeping the purse-strings firmly shut, the blog is full of very good and credit-crunch friendly tips.

Please check it out and subscribe if you can at http://thriftystylishhome.blogspot.com/

(Normal rock and roll and hyperbole services will resume shortly).

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Syndication

2009-06-16T16:58:00.005+01:00

Budding - or not-so-budding - musicians are naturally drawn towards social networks. In fact, I'd say the explosion in the popularity of social networks owes a lot to bands and artists going round 'befriending' people (a misnomer if ever there was one - and that's coming from a musician - 'bespamming' would be more appropriate!).

It's easy to see why: since their earliest days, social networks have offered bands (and indeed brands) a cheap way to connect with other people and to display their wares easily on a digital plate.

However, social networking has got to the point where there now are multitudes of communities to focus on - or worry about. Bands will know that keeping people engaged with these communities relies on there being interesting content regularly posted on these sites. But keeping tons of social networking presences up to date is extremely laborious.

Thankfully, there is a way around this, and it comes in the form of syndication. Recently I made a decision to use this blog as the main source of my content, and to feed it through to all my profiles. I started off by doing this mainly through importing this blog's Atom feed into Facebook pages, Last FM etc., but I'm now going to be using a tool called Ping to spread my blog's content all over the interweb.

If Ping does what it says on the tin, when I post this blog it should show up literally anywhere I've got a social networking presence - and that's a whole load of places: Myspace, Facebook, Last Fm, Twitter, iLike and more (it's getting faintly ridiculous!). Ping has been around for a while and I'm possibly a bit late to the party, but my hope is that from now on if I write stuff here, anybody else who has a whiff of interest in what I'm doing should get updated...without me having to worry about using javascript to import RSS feeds or copying and pasting content. There's a whole load of other snazzy (but probably pointless) stuff I can do with Ping too - for example, I think I can just text Ping if I want a message about the poo my cat is currently doing to appear on 20 social networks at once.

I'll let you know how I get on. If you're reading this successfully, it's probably worked!

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Facebook vanity URLs

2009-06-15T18:45:00.005+01:00

The eagle-eyed social networkers amongst you will no doubt have noticed the launch of Facebook's vanity URLs on Saturday; individuals can now register a Facebook URL with their name plonked at the end of it - i.e., www.facebook.com/chrissingleton. If you've got a page with over 1,000 members, you can assign a Facebook URL to that as well.

I'm trying to work out what the benefits of this are to musicians (or indeed anybody else trying to flog stuff on an unsuspecting public). One of them is convenience. If you've got a Facebook page or profile, you can now just whack www.facebook.com/yourname on your marketing material. More importantly, there are probably some interesting search engine implications associated with having a vanity URL. I reckon that when you google a band with a Facebook page / profile associated with them, we'll now see the Facebook page come higher up in the rankings, because URLs that contain keywords have a positive impact on search results.

How useful the latter will be depends on how the band in question use Facebook; if it's your main marketing tool then search results displaying your Facebook page more consistently are unquestionably beneficial. If Facebook is not your main way of communicating with your fans, then it's better to use search engine optimisation and a lot of linking to ensure that the web presence you really want to push comes up top of the tree.

Very famous bands (or indeed brands) will be able to benefit from vanity URLs for another reason: people are lazy and will expect top-selling rock acts (or companies) to just have a Facebook page by default. So they won't bother searching for a band or brand's Facebook page, they'll just type www.facebook.com/u2 (or similar) directly into the browser.

Regardless of the benefits to those of us who wish to use Facebook to flog our wares, I've got a feeling that the whole search engine thing is ultimately more about Facebook than its users...the more Facebook can get associated with other people's content in search engine results, the more visits it will get to its site, and the more advertising revenue it will generate.

Anyway, now that I've waffled on about vanity URLS, do feel free to befriend me at mine: www.facebook.com/chrissingleton. It has a certain ring to it, don't you think? Makes me feel kinda vain. If you want to register your own vanity URL go to www.facebook.com/usernames.

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Remembering the Roses

2009-05-30T09:10:00.008+01:00

As the song goes, it was twenty years ago today, that Sgt Pepper taught the band - oh hang on, wrong album. Sorry. It was twenty years ago this month that The Stone Roses released their self-titled debut; and about thirteen years ago since I heard it for the first time. I was wandering fairly aimlessly around Clontarf in Dublin (worked up, if I recall correctly, about a girl who wasn't paying me sufficient attention) and I had a copy of the album, on cassette, in my cheapo walkman.

Despite the poor quality of my headphones (big fluorescent orange foam objects that I'd bought from a pound shop), as soon as I hit play, I knew the record was going to become the perfect soundtrack to that moment - and to that time in my life in general. Apologies for waxing lyrical here, but listening to it was like being let out of school early on a blisteringly hot summer's day; a first kiss; sagging off for a cheeky pint when you know you should be doing something officious. (See, I told you I was about to wax lyrical).

More simply put, it was a beautiful record. When it came out in 1989, its stunning melodies, jangly guitars, backwards tracks and close vocal harmonies must have represented an oasis (no pun intended) in the desert that was 1980s music. It was a return to decent record-making, and marked the advent of a 90s music scene - Britpop - which, whilst having a silly name, nonetheless brought with it better songs and hairdos than had been seen in a very long time.

And speaking of an oasis, The Stone Roses really set the tone for the 90s. The band that went on to dominate the decade, Oasis, were frequently likened to the Beatles - but any Stone Roses fan knew that in many respects, it was actually the Roses that were being ripped off - their look and Ian Brown's performance style in particular.

Oasis went on to outsell the Roses and become something of a national institution that the Roses never really were; but one thing Oasis never had, in my view, was the sense of mythology that surrounded the Roses. A lot of the great albums / bands are draped in this sense of mythology - to think of the classic Beatles, Pink Floyd or Velvet Underground albums is to immediately call to mind a tapestry of images, characters and stories that becomes interwoven and infused with the music itself and adds a sense of magic to it. It's a mythology that I think Oasis have strived for and tried to manufacture - watch that DVD about the making of their last album for a prime example of this - but have never been completely successful with. In contrast, The Stone Roses were a band that had this mystique / mythology in spades: Ian Brown's sullen stage act and almost whispered vocals; John Squire's Jackson Pollock-inspired artwork; lyrics that made dark and mysterious references to Christian myths.

"The Stone Roses" was the perfect name for the band and their first album; the juxtaposition of the hard and the soft in the title summed up the music perfectly. Their debut album was full of sunny music but also dark and enigmatic themes: when you pause to consider the lyrics of Made of Stone, for example, you realise that lurking underneath its gorgeous melody is a fantasy of killing off a lover.

20 years on, The Stone Roses is a record which still stands the test of time; it's regularly voted one of the top albums of all time in those polls that music magazines seem to feel the need to do every six months. It continues to inspire bands like Kasabian, Doves and Elbow. My own songwriting still references them a bit too (although not as much as when I was a teenager - you should have heard how ridiculous my efforts to copy Ian Brown's vocal style sounded).

It's a beautifully sunny day today, and I think I'm going to try to find the time to find a contraption, without big orange foam headphones, that will let me walk around the place listening to this album. Different city this time, but, for 40 minutes or so, probably the same feelings.

If you've got memories of the first time you heard The Stone Roses, I'd love to hear them - so do leave a comment. Cheers!

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Chris Singleton music - for just a quid

2009-05-23T15:14:00.005+01:00

As you may have noticed I've been experimenting a lot with how I get my music out to new audiences; in the past I've given away a lot of free music, and operated honesty box policies on downloads.

I'm currently trialling a system where you can choose what to pay for my last record, 'Twisted City', with prices starting from £1. It's a bit different from my previous honesty box payment system, because the more you pay, the more content you get (there are bonus tracks, e-books, downloadable videos and more on offer).

If you're curious, just hop on over to http://www.singletonmusic.com/buyalbum/choose/ where you can find out what it's all about. The bottom line though is that if you want to, you can download my entire last album for just a quid!

I hope you enjoy. If you have yet to sample my music, you can do so at http://www.singletonmusic.com/, where a free 3-track EP is available.

In other news, I'm nearly there with the new record - I hope to have it all done and dusted by the end of the month. Will keep you posted on that.

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We're closing in...

2009-05-21T22:32:00.007+01:00

At the end of my road there is a bus stop. For ages it had a poster slapped on the side of it which featured a rather rotund woman on it. Accompanying this image were the words 'We're closing in' and an encouragement for members of the public to dob in benefit cheats. Helpfully a hotline was provided for said dobbing-in purposes.

Now, forgive me if I'm wrong but it looked suspiciously like the woman on the poster in question was yes, poor, and dear me, coming out of a house on a council estate. Ah, I get it now - the people who are ripping off the system are without exception poor and they live in council estates.

I never liked this campaign, because at the same time that I was encountering these posters, I seemed to be reading more and more about this little thing called the credit crunch, caused by insanely wealthy bankers, who flagrantly abused the system to the point where it collapsed and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer - and there was a distinct lack of posters critical of them.

It all seemed pretty hypocritical to me then, but it seems incredibly hypocritical now. The expenses scandal has highlighted that the political class which organised this campaign and paid for it with, yes, taxpayers' money were, dear me, benefit thieves themselves.

(Incidentally I don't know why I'm saying 'dear me' a lot - perhaps I have had a pint too many and I'm overdoing the incredulity. Apologies.)

Right, so now that it has become clear that the money that I thought I was paying in tax to fund, you know, things like schools and hospitals is also bankrolling duck islands, moat-cleaning, property 'flipping', taxi-rides to Celtic games, capital gains tax avoidance, gardening costs, porno films, porticos, helipads, nappies and plasma TVs, I fully expect my bus shelter to feature a publicly-funded poster of my local MP looking shifty and being closed in on. And I don't want them to forget the hotline either.

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The charts they are a-changing

2009-05-06T23:44:00.002+01:00

Traditionally, music charts have been all about music sales. You sell records, you get in the charts; you don't, and you spin yourself as an serious, tortured act with a cult following who wouldn't be seen dead on a hit parade. Frankly, I know which camp I'd rather be in.

The UK (and other) charts have undergone a number of changes over the past few years. As physical cd sales declined, the chart rules were modified so that MP3 sales on iTunes and other digital retailers were taken into account. This led to some interesting effects: popular album tracks started entering the single charts; and obscure songs that had not been released as physical singles started to make surprise appearances, due to positive word of mouth and "grassroots" followings of underground acts.

The charts may be about to undergo another profound change. This is because I think that conventional sales - upon which charts are built - are on the way out. It seems increasingly likely (thanks to services such as Spotify) that people soon won't buy MP3s or cds any more, but will stream whatever songs they like over the internet (either on a subscription basis or by agreeing to hear adverts between tracks).

If this happens, the focus of charts is inevitably going to switch away from sales to the number of plays of particular songs. To a certain extent, this is already happening. The music social network Last FM currently tracks what its users are playing (see http://www.last.fm/charts for what's currently hot) and Spotify also shows you how popular tracks are as you play them.

In many ways, this emphasis on how many times songs are played is a more accurate reflection of the popularity of music than music sales. After all, a lot of people may buy a track - say, a novelty or charity single like Mr Blobby - only to rarely play it. Equally, a great album, released by an independent artist, may not sell many copies but get repeated plays by a dedicated, small following.

Interestingly, what all this raises is the possibility that some sort of 'song quality' indicator may emerge - something that goes beyond telling us how many people own a song, and lets us know how many people actually like a song. We could arrive at this indicator by dividing the number of plays of a track by the number of people playing it; for example, if 10 unique Spotify users play a song 100 times, you could give the song a popularity rating of 10 (100 divided by 10). But if the same 10 users played another song 1000 times, that track would have a popularity rating of 100 (1000 divided by 10).

Listening to music has traditionally been viewed as an intensely subjective experience, but what examples like the above point to is that maybe beauty does not entirely lie in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps certain songs have intrinsically good qualities that charts have not, hitherto, been able to highlight accurately. Online data could change all that, and start to highlight the fact that some songs have inherent and enduring appeal.

As with so many other things right now, the internet is allowing us to measure our behaviour in entirely new ways - and leading us to make remarkable conclusions about things. I wasn't really expecting the net to tell me how well-written a song is; but it's now looking like a distinct possibility. To conclude, the internet will become a rock critic.

Crikey.

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Spotify

2009-04-28T21:08:00.002+01:00

A while ago I wrote about the future of rock and roll. The future, in my view, was that that rather than being bought, music would either be swapped for data (email addresses), or would be provided through an on-demand streaming service where listeners stream tracks for free so long as they listen to ads.

The 'music for data' half of that future arrived a while ago, with Radiohead's 'honesty box' release, In Rainbows; the second half has now arrived too, with the release of Spotify.

Spotify is a program which, once installed on your computer, allows you to legally stream pretty much any song you want (using an iTunes-style interface). But every three songs or so, you have to listen to an advert before you can play another track. Alternatively, you can pay £9.99 a month to listen to as much ad-free music as you like (about the cost of a newly-released chart cd).

Spotify represents a revolution in how we consume music - and if this way of listening to music becomes the norm (which I'm pretty confident it will), the implications for the music industry are enormous. There are three areas which I think will be particularly affected.

First, I've got a feeling that Spotify will slowly spell the end of the line for iTunes and other digital download services. Ok, so you can't currently download anything from Spotify on to an MP3 player - you have to play tracks through a computer that's connected to the internet. But that scenario is likely to change quite quickly, thanks to mobile broadband connections. If people can start streaming music from the internet onto their mobile phones using Spotify and 3G connections, then the need for MP3s becomes redundant (indeed, a Spotify application for the iPhone is already being discussed).

The second big impact is going to be on radio stations that primarily broadcast music. If a mobile phone version of Spotify comes along, you can pretty much take any music with you, anywhere. I'd be amazed if this didn't have an impact on the likes of Radio 1 and Radio 2. They might have to change their content somewhat to attract new listeners - I can imagine a lot more chat or documentaries about particular artists becoming a part of their schedules, to compensate for the fact that people are getting their music on the go elsewhere.

Finally, it's going to impact artists. If Spotify or a similar service becomes the de facto way to listen to music, then the whole idea of physical album sales is finally dead. Musicians will generate income from each play on Spotify - the PRS will make sure of that - but I doubt it will be as much as the income that physical cds used to bring in. Also, if the number of people who listen to radio stations falls, then so will royalties, so it will be hard for us rock and rollers to make money that way too.

Ultimately what all this spells for artists is that in future, the real money is going to be in gigging. Instead of record deals, we'll be looking for promoters to put us on a tour - in fact, I think the record companies are slowly morphing into promoters.

That's because a live performance by your favourite band in a real venue is one thing that the internet can't yet provide...but watch this space.

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The 3-D internet

2009-04-06T22:56:00.008+01:00

There's been a lot of talk about Google Streetview of late (the UK version of which launched recently). Most of it has been about privacy issues. The press focussed on the fact that people were likely to get caught out (or perhaps burgled) as a result of that black car with the Googlecam on top doing the rounds. Love affairs blown. Joints cased. Dudes walking into sex shops in Soho being highly embarrassed.

Well, perhaps that may be so. But the real story is far more interesting.

What Streetview does is give us a hint of the way that the internet is going: 3-D. With Streetview, you can walk down a street, take a left turn, swing around, cross the road, have a look at something that catches your eye - all rendered beautifully. It's extraordinary.

If I may be so bold as to make a prediction, I reckon what will happen next is that certain businesses will allow users to 'go into' buildings - to click on them and be taken inside. At the moment, using Streetview, you can just 'stand' outside say, WH Smiths at Kings Cross. But in time I reckon you'll be able to click on it, go in, stroll down an aisle and order some books. Or click on a Domino's Pizza, have a bit of a stroll around and order, well, a pizza. Go into a HMV and buy a record. Walk sheepishly into the aforementioned shop in Soho and order something for the weekend. Or perhaps you might do something slightly more cultural and explore the exhibits of the Tate Modern - yes, you might one day be able to look at a urinal and a pile of bricks in an entirely new way altogether, and from the comfort of your own home.

If this comes to pass, we're going to be looking at a 3-D internet, where sites are no longer flat pages but virtual places to be explored (and most likely, shopped in). In fact, some of this has already been happening to a degree: the Second Life community is a 3-D online world which can be explored in the manner I'm describing. And people spend millions in its virtual shops. But so far, its userbase is still only a small percentage of internet users.

A more 'general' shift to 3-D seems like the logical next step for the net - where the 3-D, virtual world becomes the default browsing experience. Websites are still, generally speaking, flat pages with text and images on them, but the creation of Streetview gives us a glimpse of an internet which is really more of a virtual world; where websites could be housed within virtual buildings; where a chatroom is a virtual bar.

And technology being what it is, all this could get very sophisticated, and fast. Virtual reality isn't just about a visual experience; there are a host of devices - from headphones to helmets to 'wired' gloves - which all serve to make the virtual experience more physical. If the internet goes 3-D, computers get very fast, and physical devices are made available that let everybody 'touch' the virtual world, we are suddenly in the realm of science fiction: the holodeck from Star Trek's Next Generation.

Captain Picard aside, in the not too distant future, the internet could well morph into a virtual world that is indistinguishable from our own. It sounds far fetched, but so did the motor car, electricity and a mouse that grew a human ear on its back.

So bizarrely Google Streetview raises an existential question. If the internet goes down this route, it will become a man-made universe, perhaps one day turning into a digital dimension running in parallel to - and feeling just as 'real' as - our own. This points to the obvious: is 'real' life actually just a digital, virtual experience? After all, pretty much all life in our 'real' universe works like a computer program, built by a set of coded instructions in our DNA. And (okay, paraphrasing a bit here) physics is basically all about electricity and numbers - just like the internet.

Damn, it's The Matrix. A Keanu Reeves film explaining the meaning of life. What an annoying conclusion to have to come to. But believe me, not as weird as you might think.

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Jade Goody dies

2009-03-23T22:34:00.018Z

Anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer knows that the disease can be summarised in one word: horror. The horror of diagnosis. The horror of knowing that days are numbered. The horror of saying goodbye. The horror of the physical pain. The horror of losing hair during treatment. The horror of treatment failing. The horror of blindness. The horror of organs shutting down one by one. Morphine. Losing consciousness. Death.

However, for anyone who (thankfully) hasn't seen a cancer death first hand, this reality has - up until now - remained relatively hidden. Although the 'one in three of us will get cancer' statistic is regularly bandied around by the press, I've never seen anything in the papers that really conveys what cancer means - until now.

With Jade Goody's death, there has been a sea-change in how cancer is presented to us by the media. For the first time, every minute detail that families of cancer victims are all-too-painfully aware of has been put in front of people. From the morphine machine in the wedding dress to the onset of Jade's blindness, the horror of cancer has, arguably for the first time, been really laid out for all to see. On TV, on the front pages of tabloids, on the internet, in office conversations, everywhere.

For me (and I'm sorry if this sounds harsh) Jade Goody didn't really offer much when she was alive, but her public death - whilst sad - has had very positive ramifications. More people are going for smear tests, donations to cancer charities are up; cancer awareness has increased. But the most important outcome is this: we are too good at hiding realities, but for once, the horror of cancer has been revealed. It's sad (although probably fitting) that it took a reality TV star to give us a dose of real life.

Or real death.

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Microsite for Betsey gig

2009-03-16T20:02:00.006Z

A very quick one this to point you in the direction of a little microsite for my Betsey Trotwood gig.

Go to http://www.singletonmusic.com/betsey/ where you can buy a ticket (recommended as the venue is small), download a free EP, look at press coverage and invite your friends to the show.

Incidentally tickets are only £10 now - costs of show fell so I passed it on to the punters...

Hope to see you at the gig. All the best Chris

Britain for sale

2009-03-11T00:15:00.004Z

Living in Britain as something of an outsider (sort of: I'm Irish but of a lot of English descent), I perhaps get more wound up than most by the anti-Johnny-Foreigner attitude that is expressed by the British media.

Now don't get me wrong - there is plenty of antipathy towards foreigners in Ireland - but the levels of hysteria expressed by the British press about immigration and the hatred directed towards all things to do with the European Union are in another league. And you see this hatred expressed by individuals too, with people I know joining Facebook groups such as "I was born in the UK so why the fuck do I have less rights than immigrants" or "This is our country and if you don't like it fuck off". No doubt the constant barrage of foreigner-bashing headlines in the media inspires the negative attitudes and the Facebook group names (and incidentally, I find it interesting that the more right-wing the group, the more the work 'fuck' appears in it).

The impression that the press gives is one of Britain being a perfect country with a perfect identity that is somehow sullied by these bad people from abroad interfering with it. But the problem with this (aside from the obvious) is that the British press also seem to hate their own state, and the idea of their own government 'interfering' either.

As such, most British newspapers have campaigned for decades for the Government to keep out of owning or running British public services - and successfully too. Railways, electricity, gas, airports, airlines, ferries, telecommunications and even water have been taken out public ownership and placed in the hands of wealthy private owners.

The irony of all this, is that the new private owners in question often tend to be...yes, you guessed it, foreigners. The French provide a hell of a lot of UK electricity. A Spanish company runs most of the big airports. American healthcare companies are cherry-picking bits of the NHS. If Mandelson gets his way, we might have a Dutch company delivering mail. God knows who's running the railways (the train operating companies certainly don't).

Remember British Rail? Sealink? British Gas? British Telecom? You, the Brits, used to own and run them. You don't any more. They are all in the hands of various rich people, many of them from abroad. The nationality of these private owners doesn't bother me; what frustrates me is the fact that public services have been placed in the "care" of private owners at all.

When a public service is privatised what typically happens is this: a middle man gets put into the mix (interestingly, something that successful companies always try to avoid). The service often remains bankrolled or underwritten by you and me, the taxpayer, but the middle man (Johnny Foreigner or Paddy Englishman, I don't care) has to make a profit. In order to facilitate this profit, invariably one (or all) of the following things needs to happen:

more tax has to be spent on giving our middle man his profit
the Government has to reduce the level of access to the public service because it now costs more
the middle man has to reduce the cost of the service by cutting corners or staff pay (both detrimental to the quality of the service)
the taxpayer, in addition to paying for the service through tax, has to provide a top-up payment to facilitate the profit (that's why UK rail fares are extortionate!)

The counter-argument to the above is that the private sector adds 'rigour' and competition. It's apparently meant to be more efficient than the public sector. Well, private sector 'rigour' and 'efficiency' don't seem all that appealing in the light of the credit crunch - if the private sector can't even get private finance right, how on earth is it meant to cope with public services?

As for competition, it doesn't (and can't) exist for many of the public services that have been privatised. Privatisation hasn't provided me with a range of choices when it comes to things like water, buses or trains. I'm stuck with what's provided - the middle man for my area. (I'm currently using Russian gas and French electricity and I have to get a bus owned by a company that operates transport in Germany and Denmark. Again, not that I mind the nationalities - it's the nature of the ownership that worries me).

Whatever the debate about efficiency, there is still the issue of accountability to think about. "Public service" means just that: serving the public, not making some guy rich. Should a health service be run to make somebody a profit, or should it serve the interests of everybody? Should an environmentally-friendly train journey cost two to three times as much as travelling by car, just so First Great Western can stay in business? Should something as fundamental to life as water be controlled by a company, or should it belong to all of us?

As for rich foreigners, it's hardly surprising that the press has no problem with them owning British public services. After all, they've got a little thing for owning British newspapers too. Isn't that right, Mr Murdoch? Mr Black? Mr Lebedev?

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Betsey Trotwood show in April

2009-02-08T00:21:00.006Z

Just to let you know about another London show coming up - I'll be playing the Betsey Trotwood in Clerkenwell on 1 April. It'll be another full band show, so I'm quite excited about it. I love, er, playing with my band - such great musicians. And I've heard great things about the venue too.

Tickets are £10 plus booking fee (75p). This is a slightly higher ticket price than for the recent Troubadour show, but the increase is not for profiteering reasons (I haven't quite worked out how to make a profit yet!). Basically the venue is gorgeous but tiny and order for us to break even, ticket prices have to be a bit higher. I hope it won't deter you from coming along.

If you do want to attend, please get your ticket ASAP to avoid disappointment - the capacity of the venue is only 50. Tickets are available to buy online at http://www.stubmatic.com/chrissingleton/event/317

I'm working on getting some fantastic special guests to play at the show, and I'm really looking forward to it. Hope to see you there.

The politics of snow

2009-02-05T23:03:00.009Z

Being a simple Irish country boy*, I never fail to be amazed at how people overreact to things here in the UK.

It snowed. And people didn't go to work. And kids threw snowballs at people, including me -the cheeky scallywags (thankfully no rocks, otherwise I would have upgraded 'scallywag' to an expletive). And all of a sudden we've got a political row going on. About snow. The Daily Telegraph is moaning about schools being shut, and whinging that the UK's lack of preparedness for adverse weather is costing the economy billions. And so on. Even the Guardian's making a big deal about it.

Interestingly, in this era of triangulation, the politics of snow divide along traditional left / right lines. The Right are all complaining that years of state nannying (not that I've seen much nannying post-Thatcher) has left us without the grit (pardon the pun) to get up and go to work/school. The Left attribute the inefficiencies in clearing roads to privatisation and the sub-contracting of road-salting. Question Time was a hoot tonight because of the impassioned feelings and debate about snow (incidentally, Will Young's out-of-depthness added to the hilarity, particularly when he tried to answer questions about Carol Thatcher and gollywogs. Mind you, he's a brave man for going on that show).

I like to take a political stance on almost everything - to the point of annoying everybody - but in this instance my response is: it snowed. It was a bit of a laugh. We all built a snowman. Kids - shock! horror! - got a day off school. This kind of thing doesn't happen very often (I think the last snowfall like this in Britain was nearly 20 years ago), and it was good fun. Once again, the UK press has totally overreacted and tried to whip up anger over nothing.

There are lots of things that we could be worried about right now, but not snow. Frankly the weather was a welcome distraction from all those gloomy reports about the economy.

Here's my take on it anyway: British snow for British snowmen.

* technically I'm not from the country, I'm from Dublin - and I'm not entirely Irish either. My father comes from the south of England.

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Twitter

2009-02-02T23:16:00.006Z

Hmnn...interesting. Everybody is currently talking about Twitter the way that we all went on about Facebook a couple of years ago. Even though Twitter's been around for a while, I think it's only now that widespread take-up of it is starting to happen. Maybe it's something we've all got to do in a recession.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is basically a way of telling people what you're up to at a given point in time. It's pretty much like a Facebook status update, but I think what makes it a little bit more interesting than that is the way you can syndicate your twittering quite easily across the web. One status update can be broadcast across a wide range of networks - say what you're doing on Twitter, and it can appear on your Facebook page, website, blog and so on.

I'm not sure what the advantages of this are yet, compared to syndicating other content, but more and more people are twittering, so there is probably something in it - at the very least, some sort of market. As such, I'm going to find out how musicians can use Twitter to flog albums and gig tickets. If I come up with any interesting 'learnings' (to use a horrible management-speak word that should be banned) I shall think about letting you know.

If you are arsed, my rather uninteresting twittering can be heard at http://twitter.com/chrissingleton.

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Special guests at the Troubadour show

2009-01-21T23:56:00.004Z

Hello all,

Would just like to draw your attention to the special guests at the Troubadour show.

They are the fantastic Silverfall and John Gibbons.

Silverfall are racking up great reviews and some nice airplay too. Their musical influences encompass David Bowie, Coldplay, RufusWainwright, Jewel and others too numerous to mention; you can check out their melodic acoustic sound at http://www.silverfall.info/.

John Gibbons - who will also be doing vocals during my set - has one of the most soulful voices I've ever encountered. He regularly gigs with the likes of The Killers, Razorlight and Cat Stevens and I'm really delighted he's doing a set for me. You can check him -and his multiple influences out at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=53284211.

Look forward to seeing you there.

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George Bush, in numbers

2009-01-19T23:41:00.007Z

Years in office: 8
Elections stolen: 1
Gore's majority over Bush in the 2000 popular vote: 543,895
Civilians killed in 9/11: 2,974
Civilians killed in Iraq: 98,731 (Iraq Body Count website - others estimate it higher)
Total violent deaths in Iraq: 151,000 (World Health Organisation)
Wars launched: 2
Civilians killed in Afghanistan: 8,000 - 26,873 (various)
US soldiers killed in Iraq: 4,229 (iCasualties.org)
Poodles: 1 (that would be Blair)
Global credit crunches sparked by US subprime mortgage crisis: 1
Cost of Bush bank bailout plan: $700bn
Number of people in US currently without healthcare: 45 million (BBC)
National US debt: $11.3 trillion
US carbon emmisions: 6,049,435 thousand metric tonnes (CDIAC)
Current Bush approval rating: -33 (ABC)
Weapons of mass destruction found: 0
Days left in office: 0

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Facebook friendship

2009-01-14T19:17:00.012Z

Time to revisit what stills seems to be the social network du jour, Facebook.

Thanks to Facebook, I am now 'in touch' with a hell of a lot of people that I haven't seen in a very, very long time. Old school pals, former band mates, general weirdos I don't know particularly well - the list goes on. There's even the odd ex-girlfriend in there, and, hardy har, some normal ones too (if you're reading this in Facebook, you can try to work out which category you belong to).

I'm not sure why, but I tend to accept most friend requests, and befriend most people I see popping up as 'somebody I might know'. It's probably fair to say that I am a textbook example of what is known as Facebook Sluticus - that weird specimen that adds literally anyone, including a friend's friend's milkman, as a Facebook friend. Part of that, no doubt, is due to the fact that I am just nosey about your life, and I want to sell you a CD. (Sorry if I've just devalued our Facebook friendship, dear reader, but there you go).

But despite being reacquainted with all these figures from my past, I don't really have a relationship to speak of with most of them. I occasionally comment on somebody's status, or write a bit of crap on their wall, but that's about it. With one or two exceptions, the only Facebook friends I ever see in real life are the ones I hang out with anyway.

That's not to say for a moment that I don't want to see my 'virtual' set of friends. It's just that, well, it never seems to happen. Plans are made to meet up, but we never get round to it; somebody's pet rabbit dies, they bail out, we don't catch up. I'm not sure why this cancellation nearly always occurs - unless my Facebook friends are trying to tell me something - as everybody involved always seems very keen on meeting up. It just never seems to happen.

I'm not alone in observing this: lots of other Facebook users I've spoken to have described Facebook friendship in exactly the same way. The phenomenon generally consists of getting back in touch with somebody that you lost contact with (and being very pleased to be reacquainted with them), only to then never really meet up, or to have very little contact with them afterwards - online or offline.

The sentence I usually hear straight after this description of Facebook friendship is this: "Oh well, you lose contact with people for a reason, don't you?". And that sentence is usually followed up with an implication that the reason contact was lost was because the friendship wasn't all that anyway.

I don't necessarily agree with the idea that you lose contact with people because they're a pain in the ass. I like many of the Facebook friends I never see just as much as those 'normal' friends that I see all the time. But I do agree with the idea that you lose contact with people for specific reasons. In my case, there are two reasons: geography, and lack of time.

With regard to geography, there are plenty of Facebook friends who I would like to go for a pint with. But they are scattered around the globe. And even when the Facebook friends in question are London-based...well, London's so big that a round trip to see some of them can take three hours.

The other reason I've lost contact with (sometimes dear) friends is because the older you get, the less time you seem to have. Part of that is down to the fact that as you age, you tend to acquire more responsibilities every year (kids, high-maintenance partner, more work - delete as appropriate) and less time for that pint with, say, the Facebook friend. And time seems more precious, because psychologically, the years seem to fly by so much faster. An old work colleague of mine (who incidentally I've yet to encounter on Facebook) maintains that this is due to the "telescopic effect of ageing" - numerically, every year is a smaller fraction of your life to date, and is perceived as being shorter as a result. Anyway, it certainly feels as though the closer you get to clog-popping time, the more everything in your life starts competing more heavily for your minutes...and my guess is that the Facebook friends who you haven't seen in aeons get pushed down the priority list in favour of a curry and Newsnight.

Interestingly, if geography and "time-poverty" are the drivers behind friendship loss, they are the engine of Facebook friendship gain - and explain, to an extent, the success of this social network. Facebook is so good at reunfications (however superficial) precisely because it is accessible globally, and because it saves people time: it would take ages to ring everybody up to see what they're doing. Why bother when it all comes up in a news feed?

Facebook certainly satisfies my curiosity: it is intriguing to see what the class babe looks like ten years on, or to see if the school bully's children look resemble him. Or if that pet rabbit makes it through the night. On paper, though, there's lots of reasons to dislike it - it's clearly a nosey parker's paradise; it trivialises friendship; it was designed for advertisers as much as for individuals...

...But do I like it? I don't know why, but I do. Maybe it's because without it, chances are you probably wouldn't have read this.

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Losing a war

2009-01-08T20:59:00.016Z

It's a slightly odd coincidence that the BBC's dramatisation of The Diary of Anne Frank is being broadcast this week, as the Israeli army intensify their attacks on Gaza.

Both stories have dominated my TV viewing this week, and both deal with the same thing: innocent civilians, from minority groups, hiding from death meted out by a powerful war machine. Both are horrendous to watch unfold.

In the Middle East, it's bewildering that a people who were the victims of such injustices during the Second World War are now treating another minority group so badly. This is not to equate what Israelis are doing in Gaza with the Holocaust, but it's hard, when hearing some of the news coming out of there right now, not to experience similar feelings of horror and disgust.

Two incidents in particular stand out: the deliberate bombing of UN schools full of civilian refugees, and the news that emerged today about Israeli soldiers finding but not helping four starving and injured children who were clinging to their dead mother. When these kind of events occur in a location which is often described as a 'ghetto', they evoke a horrible irony.

This is not for a moment to suggest that Hamas are a force for good in the world, or that Israelis have not been victims of horrible attacks too. But Israel's response to the Hamas rocket attacks has been of such a ferocious, brutal and indiscriminate nature that it is hard not to draw the conclusion that this is not, in any sense, a fair fight.

And that's why Israel has lost this war, even if a military victory is secured and no more Hamas rockets are fired. The horrible pictures being beamed around the world of injured, dying or dead civilians in Gaza tell a powerful story: that Israel is using its overwhelmingly strong military force to hurt innocent, vulnerable people. Israel has little to gain from this story, and certainly not the thing it waged this war to protect: security. The terror Israel is unleashing on civilians is not going to go unnoticed, sadly, by terrorists.

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Gaza

2009-01-03T01:02:00.006Z

Preview of Troubadour gig in SW5 Notebook

2009-01-01T14:43:00.005Z

Happy new year everybody.

Just a quicky this: in advance of the Troubadour show, Abi Millar from SW5 Notebook interviewed me about various bits and bobs. You can check out my rambling responses to her questions at

http://www.singletonmusic.com/notebook.pdf

Toodle pip for now, and hope to see you at the show.

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Goodbye Harold

2008-12-28T10:21:00.008Z

I was lucky enough to meet Harold Pinter once, at a talk he gave at the British Library about his screenwriting career. I asked some daft question about pauses and then vaguely insulted him by telling him (whilst sheepishly getting his autograph) that my favourite play of his was a sketch he wrote called Men for Sale (which has not gone down in history as, er, his greatest piece, and in fact he barely remembered it himself).

It's very sad to see him go. Before I tired of the drama scene, and started pursuing a career in an even sillier one (music), I directed some of his plays. Not entirely successfully I must add - particularly where Betrayal was concerned. The whole point of that play is that the story is told backwards, but in my production a cock-up backstage one night led to it being told the other way round (i.e., forwards!). Quite funny in retrospect, that, although my actors were rather non-plussed.

Anyway, there have been glowing tributes written about Pinter in the past few days. I'll leave the accolades about his work to the theatre critics, but there is something I'd like to point out about Pinter which nobody in the press really seems to have dwelled on in the obituaries: the man had an incredible fondness for (and knowledge of) London bus routes.

Now, bringing public transport into the arts is a lonely (and not altogether cool) task - and, with my last record Twisted City being 'set' on the Tube, I should know. It involved making a complete twit of myself at times, doing album launches on tube trains, gigs on buses and so on (much of that was fun; however, it involved lots of blushing and bad press headlines like 'Why Chris is bus-king' - see http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBNHznnqxw for some particularly embarrassing ITV footage of my antics).

But fortunately, thanks to Pinter, I wasn't alone in this odd combining of the arts and public transport. Pinter, it seems, had a very keen interest in London bus routes and frequently brought them (or general bus-related conversation) into his plays and novels. The Caretaker, The Dwarfs and Request Stop all show off Pinter's interest in London buses and their routes, and I'm very grateful that somebody else in the arts - particularly as great a writer as Pinter - wasn't afraid to bring this rather geeky interest into their work.

So goodbye Harold: master playwright, political activist...and public transport enthusiast. I'll miss you, but probably for slightly different reasons to everybody else.

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Oasis

2008-12-11T22:15:00.005Z

I've always been a bit ambivalent about Oasis. One the one hand they bring back good memories. Memories of being in my late teens in the nineties...which entailed, as you might expect, stripey turtle-necks, being drunk, chasing girls, playing the guitar badly, Trainspotting (the film, honest), talking shite...and learning how to be a tree (I studied Drama at university). All to the musical backdrop of tracks like Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger. Those songs always remind me of fun, innocent times - times when Oasis' Roll with it was up against Blur's Country House for the number one spot, there were no responsibilities to worry about, no fear about the future and no agonising about a career in music - or any other career for that matter. We were invincible and, so it seemed, were Oasis.

On the other hand, I've always been deeply unimpressed by them - for two reasons. One: the vast majority of their songs sound like a cover version of the Beatles' classic Rain (and in fact, that was Oasis' original name). Two (and a related reason this): their unrelenting obsession with the Beatles.

Now don't get me wrong: I love the Beatles. They inspired me to learn how to play the guitar and embark on an incredibly foolish musical journey. I have ripped them off mercilessly in my own music. But Oasis take their admiration to a level far beyond that of most admirers. Their haircuts, their lyrics, their guitars, their videos, their choice of recording studio...everything about them has always seemed to say less about their own identity than that of the Beatles. Although Oasis write their own material, they often seem to resemble a sort of weird Beatles tribute band.

Maybe that's highly intentional, and part of the marketing plan - after all, the Beatles are rock icons that are deeply loved. You can go a long way by trading on associations. But to believe that is to do Oasis a disservice: their love for the Fab Four has always come across as genuine, and has certainly been long-lasting.

I guess it's the 'long-lasting' aspect of this love which I find irritating. In the nineties, when the Beatles were doing their Anthology TV series, and we had the whole 'Britpop' thing going on, the Oasis-Beatles-60s revival stuff seemed novel and interesting - and in tune with the times. Thirteen years on, encountering Beatles-infused lyrics like "Love is...a magical mystery", Beatles-infused song titles like "Bag it up", or Beatles-infused videos that look like the Yellow Submarine film is not hugely inspiring. And a lot of the new material still sounds like Rain.

But I'm going to forgive Oasis all that. Because I love their new single, I'm Outta Time. I think it's a fantastic song, even if the lyrics make no sense at all and it's a complete Lennon rip-off (though I can't talk: I'm completely guilty of bad lyric writing and ripping Lennon off). I would go so far as to say, controversially, that it's the greatest track they've put out; the production is engaging (that irritating Day in the Life piano reference aside), the melody is a treat, and well, it's just a great song.

To my mind, Noel has written three or four very good songs - Don't Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall, Live Forever and Roll With It...and the rest sound like Rain. I think this new single is better than all of those songs (with the exception of Rain of course) - and it was written by Liam. I've got a sneaking feeling that Noel knows this.

Normally at this point in a blog I try to write something witty and come to some sort of conclusion. I'm afraid I can't here. Basically I sometimes like Oasis; sometimes I don't; I like their new single. Did you need to know this? Probably not.

I think all the above says something about blogging.

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Music personality test...

2008-12-07T21:21:00.002Z

So I've made a little viral - the 'music personality test'. It's a silly idea and probably not entirely cool, but I'm experimenting with it anyway to see if it is any use in getting my free album download out and about.

Basically, you answer a series of questions based on your taste in music and are told what your 'music personality' is (prepare to be insulted by the way).

Find out what it's all about here: www.singletonmusic.com/musicpersonalitytest/

Obviously, since it's a viral, I'd appreciate it if you could forward it to people...

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London show announced for 29 January

2008-11-29T11:43:00.006Z

Just to let you know about a gig I'm doing on 29 January 2009. Hear Twisted City live plus some brand new material.

Tickets are very limited - Buy yours online now!

CHRIS SINGLETON AND BAND, LIVE AT THE TROUBADOUR
263-267 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 9JA - buy ticket.

29 January sees a full-band show by Dublin singer-songwriter Chris Singleton. Chris' music is a mixture of three classic Bs - Beatles, Bowie and Bolan - and his recent album 'Twisted City' wowed critics. He's been described as 'one of the most promising songwriters to emerge this year' by Clash Magazine, and the Irish Times reckon he's making 'some of the best pop/rock you are likely to hear this or any year'. His show at the Troubadour promises to be a corker. At the show you'll be able to pick up a limited-edition EP which features brand new tracks, which Chris and his band will also be playing live.

Joining Chris on stage will be vocalist John Gibbons (Razorlight, The Killers), guitarist Stelios Kalisperides (Shalamar, Jocelyn Brown), bassist Zane Maertens (Pearl Kaufman, Nestor Torres) and drummer Ben Woollacott (formerly of The Veils).Chris' "Twisted City" is available as a free download for a limited time only - you can get it now at http://www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum.

Tickets to this gig are very limited - buy yours online now.

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New Chris Singleton songs

2008-11-18T22:56:00.005Z

A quick note to let my devoted following [sic] know that I've put 3 new tracks up on my Myspace page, www.myspace.com/chrissingleton. These are

Lose It
Bad Ambitions
Let Me Out

and I hope you like them (despite the quite awful Myspace compression).

Unlike my last album, 'Twisted City', my new stuff has a lot more musicians on it (I'm not, hardy har, playing with myself quite so much).

The first two tracks feature the velvet backing vocals of John Gibbons; the third features the soulful sweetness of Jane Fraser. On bass for 'Lose It' and 'Let Me Out' we have the one and only Zane Maertens; the prince of precision, Ben Woollacott plays drums on 'Bad Ambitions'. Our electrician Peter Rollinson, who is also a damn fine trumpet player, is the boy behind the brass on 'Bad Ambitions'. I'm on the vocals, axes (guitars) and keys.

Do let me know what you think of the songs by posting a comment - I'm interested in hearing what people make of the new stuff.

Also, please excuse the silly adjectives employed above to describe my musicians - I went to see Leonard Cohen the other night and he introduces his musicians with such hilarious flair that I felt compelled to use some of my own daft phrases in this post. Apologies to all involved.

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The luxury of daft ideas

2008-11-07T13:31:00.007Z

I read an article in today's Irish Times by a guy called Turlough O'Sullivan. He's the director general of Ibec, the Irish employers' representative body. In the article, he complains that "Ireland simply cannot afford the luxury of public service" and calls for cutbacks and dramatically reduced headcount in them (in the light of the current recession).

This got me thinking about the quality of Ireland's public services. Or lack thereof.

Let's be clear about this: Irish public services, by comparison with those of most other European countries - including some much poorer ones - are pretty awful. Let's take some examples. There is no free healthcare. Going to see a GP will cost you 50-60 Euros. Seeing an ear consultant (and I speak from experience here) can involve a waiting list of one year. Dental care is inordinately expensive (so much so that in the light of the economic downturn, people are starting to view it as self-indulgent - and I have that information from a dentist). There is still no train to Dublin airport (and rail travel between regional towns/cities doesn't really exist). A letter posted from outside Ireland will take about 5 days to be delivered, after it has arrived in Ireland. There is no underground in Dublin, and the two tram lines there don't even connect. Buses are infrequent and the capital still doesn't have an integrated ticketing system.

I know I sound like one of those annoying people who's lived outside the country for too long, and maybe I've become said irritating type, but whenever I come back to the country I really am shocked at how poor the public services are. The contrast with Ireland's nearest neighbour, the UK - a country not renowned for the quality of its public services - is unbelievable. British public services start looking incredibly good once you've come back and tried to use the Irish ones.

Which brings me back to Turlough O'Sullivan. He is clearly having a laugh when he uses the word luxury in conjunction with Irish public services. There is absolutely nothing luxurious about them.

There is an obvious counter-argument to his recommendations of cutbacks: investing in quality public services, its staff and associated infrastructure can create jobs, and thus spending, and thus economic growth. Not to mention an improvement in the quality of life.

But I think the real reason why O'Sullivan likes the idea of cuts in our public services (and for the people who run them) is because people like him don't use them. I would suspect that he can afford a very nice health insurance package, generally travels by car instead of public transport and pays extra to courier mail when he needs quick and reliable delivery of it. These kind of people are not best-placed to make sweeping pronouncements on services that they don't use, and which other people rely on.

Ultimately if Ireland wants to be the modern country that its political and business leaders have been waxing lyrical about for quite a while now, it needs proper, sustained investment in its public services. What it definitely can't afford is cutbacks - or the luxury of daft ideas.

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Goodnight and Good Luck

2008-11-05T03:57:00.005Z

03:57. I'm hoping that by the time I finish this post, we'll have a winner. I am jacked. Still, this feels a lot better than 2004 and 2008, when I was jacked and unhappy.

Been instant messaging my good friends James and Amy throughout the night. They live in Australia, and they are cheering Obama on too.

An interesting aspect of this election is the amount of electronic commentary going on about it. People are staying up all night and writing Facebook status updates on it. Or instant messaging each other. Or writing fairly bad blogs about it (sorry).

That's it! He's won. Incredible. We've got a black leader of the free world. Who seems like a nice guy. And I can go to bed.

Goodbye Mr Bush. You could co-exist peacefully with a fish, but that was about it.

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Ohio for Obama - and Mormons for McCain

2008-11-05T02:55:00.003Z

2:56. Well it's looking positive for Obama with, it seems, Ohio in the bag and positive noises coming out of Florida. Unless the Republicans have some 2000-style dirty tricks up their sleeves, it's looking okay for the skinny kid with the funny name.

I'm hoping they call Florida for Obama soon so I can go to bed. Utah, where the Mormons live, has just gone to McCain.

I admit this hasn't been the best live-blogging ever; I've just emphasised how much I want to sleep for the past few posts. On the plus side, I've managed to mention Mormons in a post - that's a first for me.

We've moved from beer onto tea now and it is waking us up a bit though.

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Uncheerful Republicans

2008-11-05T02:07:00.004Z

It's 02:10. I had a power nap and a sip of beer and I awoke just to hear David Dimbleby say he's off to look for some 'uncheerful Republicans'. They are apparently uncheerful (is that a word?) because Fox News, that bastion of truthful reporting, has called Ohio for Obama. But Dimbleby has said that Fox News isn't good enough for the BBC to consider the state called (good on you David), so we are reserving judgement here on the couch.

All the pundits on the Beeb are now talking like Obama's won the election. But as David has pointed out, we don't know if Obama's won any swing states yet.

Maybe some chickens are being counted?

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My eyes hurt

2008-11-05T01:45:00.003Z

Ok, so it's 1:45 and my eyes are starting to hurt a bit. I'm trying to live-blog the US election because it's meant to be a historic night. Yawns abound right now in North London though, and eyelids are drooping. Not because it's dull, but because, well, it's 1:45.

As things stand, Obama leads by 103 to 49 electoral college votes. No swing states really have entered the equation yet though.

I think we'd all be quite keen on going to bed really. So hopefully our man will win. We've got mini-bottles of champagne (ok, cheap sparkling wine) standing patiently by in the fridge which we will crack open if Obama does the business.

Incidentally, my girlfriend thinks this blog is a bit dull and I shouldn't be posting it. Sorry. But is 1:45 in the morning. Did I mention that?

Just read over it again and I agree with her. It is dull. Oh well.

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Waiting for the man

2008-11-05T00:35:00.003Z

Well, I thought it only appropriate to write something. It's 12:37 and there are three of us on the couch (no, this isn't one of those blogs). We're all glued to the TV and very much hoping that the good guy wins the US election.

Of course, who the good guy is depends entirely on your political viewpoint, but for us it's Mr Obama. I like him because as Bruce Forsyth pointed out on last week's Strictly Come Dancing (my girlfriend makes me watch it) he sounds kind of Irish - Mr O'Bama to you.

Anyway we're all rooting for him, and this is why:

1) We liked the typeface on his campaign materials - great logo, nice slogan and a tasteful use of colour.

2) He's not George Bush.

3) He doesn't pronounce 'terrorist' like 'tourist'. I like to travel and I'm fed up of this war on tourists. Ryanair have been very active on that front.

There are more profound reasons why we want him to win - he'd probably do a better job on world peace, the environment and the global economy, and hopefully won't go starting illegal wars on spurious grounds - but right now, we just want him to win. Fingers crossed.

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Bad for the Brand? Russell, Jonathan and the BBC

2008-10-30T19:27:00.009Z

The guy across the road in our corner shop reliably informed me that only two people complained when Brand and Ross left their inappropriate messages on Manuel's - sorry, Andrew Sachs' - answer phone. A week later, the Mail on Sunday kicked up a fuss about it. And now, after most of the UK press have gone mad for this story, there are apparently 27,000 or so people moaning to the BBC about it.

My first thought on it all is this: do these people have nothing better to complain about? (Mind you, I probably have something better to do than blog about it).

My second thought: do these journalists have nothing better to write about? I mean seriously. We're in the middle of a credit crunch. America might be about to elect its first black president. Afghanistan needs a lot of work. Peter Mandelson's back in town and looking rather peculiar in ermine. But what does The Times, that so-called 'serious' paper, the paper of record etc., go and put on its front page? A story about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand making silly phone calls.

These stories have certainly had results. Brand's gone. Woss is in the doghouse for three months. BBC Radio 2 Controller Lesley Douglas has resigned. And senior BBC staff are having to apologise profusely on all their competitors' stations. The Beeb has taken a big hit here.

To my mind, the story that we should be focussing on is not the incident but the reaction. I'll come to that in a minute, but ok, let's look at the incident.

Two fairly funny guys make some inappropriate phone calls to a man who played a fairly funny Spanish waiter in the 70s. The calls involve a reference to the fact that one of them had slept with his granddaughter, who, incidentally, describes herself as Voluptua, a 'satanic slut'. (Grandpa was in Fawlty Towers - one of my favourite shows - so I expect he's got a sense of humour). The funny guys apologise, albeit a bit badly, and slowly. Nobody notices really - until the Mail on Sunday drags up the story a week later. And suddenly people all over the country are 'extremely offended' by this 'completely unacceptable' behaviour.

Well, if those sensitive souls are that easily offended, maybe they should consider some other BBC output which, to my mind anyway, is far more offensive - but which hasn't led to any resignations (that I know of anyway). I'm talking about that wheelchair sketch in Little Britain: it has probably caused much more distress to disabled people and their carers than any ill-judged phone call.

(Or perhaps, if you are particularly touchy, you could complain that Sach's 70s portrayal of a Spanish waiter was a bit racist - I liked it though).

In essence, this was an error of judgement. Brand's producer should have been more on the ball, the people involved should have apologised to the poor satanic slut in question (and Manuel) a bit quicker and we should have all moved on with a collective yawn.

Ok, so that's the incident dealt with. Now for the reaction, which is the real story.

When the press gets its knickers in a twist about something as trivial as this story, the old 'cui bono' question has to be asked. Who benefits from all this hoo-ha? You might think it was just a case of newspapers employing the age-old tactic of trying to sell newspapers by publishing sensational stories on their front pages (at the expense of proper ones), and there may be some truth to this.

In my view though, there is more to it than that; something more profound. I think a large section of the British media hates the BBC. They hate it for two reasons: commercial and ideological. And I feel this hatred is why they have blown this dodgy phone call saga out of all proportion.

Commercially, the BBC represents a massive threat to Murdoch's empire, particularly his TV one. It's arguably the only media outlet that represents any substantial threat to Sky and the Murdoch hegemony. This, I think, is partly why the Murdoch-owned Times ran a front-page story on Brand and Ross. It shouldn't have been a front-page story; not in these troubled times. Perhaps when The Times ran this story as its main headline it gave it a gravitas it didn't deserve, and perhaps this was intentional.

I feel, however, that opposition to the BBC on ideological grounds is the more powerful driving force behind all this. The BBC represents something that directly challenges the views of the UK's extraordinarily right-wing press: it is a highly successful, publicly-owned and publicly-funded organisation. Post Thatcher and Blair it is one of the very few public services that still exist in Britain - and certainly the only one to be routinely called 'world-class'. Its existence is anathema to the right-wing press; they regularly call for it to be privatised.

So it's hardly surprising that the press would want to make a big deal out of this. They have, subtly or otherwise, done all they can to undermine an institution which they view as a threat, and diminished its standing.

In reality, the BBC is this: a much-loved institution that we all share in, and which produces some of the world's best TV and radio. It's a shame that its reputation is suffering unduly for this storm in a teacup.

On a final note, what I find the most amusing thing about all this is that Andrew Sach's granddaughter Georgina Baillie is now (nearly) a household name. Frankly I'd never heard of her before - maybe these phone calls have been the best thing to ever happen to her career. And I never knew what Manuel's real name was either.

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Michael Foot and the credit crunch

2008-10-17T22:38:00.006+01:00

For many years now, Michael Foot has been derided as the Labour leader who authored the 'longest suicide note in history' - the very left-wing 1983 Labour manifesto.

Interestingly though, one very important part of the manifesto - the pledge to nationalise banks - is now official policy of some of the most right-wing governments on the planet.

It's quite funny seeing neo-con George Bush and Gordon Brown (one of the most right-wing Labour Prime Ministers ever) carrying out Michael Foot's policies.

It's a very topsy-turvy world right now.

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The Beatles didn't break up

2008-10-09T21:29:00.005+01:00

Post Beatles break-up, John Lennon said that those people clamouring for a Beatles reuninon could just put their own Beatles album together - one track from a Lennon solo album, another from one of Paul's, one from George's and so on...

In this age of iPods this is now an intriguing possibility, and putting together 1970s Beatles albums is surprisingly satisfying. To my ears, for example, the first 1970s Beatles album, possibly called 'Instant Karma', would have had the following tracks on it:

Side 1
1 Instant Karma
2 Every Night
3 Isolation
4 My Sweet Lord
5 Junk
6 Jealous Guy
7 Maybe I'm Amazed

Side 2
1 Too Many People
2 Love
3 Imagine
4 Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey
5 All Things Must Pass
6 The Back Seat of My Car
7 Oh My Love

And I think it would have made a good album too.

This little exercise got me thinking about why Lennon and McCartney's 70s solo albums ended up being inferior to their Beatles ones. Rock critics usually attribute this to the lack of the Lennon-McCartney dynamic and intra-band competition; I think this is partly true, but I also have a slightly different angle on it.

As a proper solo artist (i.e., not seven-writers-on-my-record James Blunt), you have to write 10-14 songs on your own. But whilst in the Beatles, John and Paul only had to contribute 5 or 6 tracks to each album (and let George get a couple in). Obviously it's much easier to write 5 good songs a year than 14, and you can devote more time to producing them. When the Beatles broke up, the demands of putting out one solo record a year (or sometimes two) meant that John and Paul had to fill whole albums with material - something that is much more difficult to do and which they weren't used to. Which invariably led to fillers like Lennon's Oh Yoko (which has the same melody as Three Blind Mice), or McCartney songs with titles like Single Pigeon (classic).

But when you take 5 or 6 of their better efforts from their solo albums and put them in the same pot, as I did above, you do end up with a record that shapes up pretty well, and had George Martin been at the wheel, might have sounded damn good. Don't think Single Pigeon would have ended up on a 70s Beatles album somehow though.

Feel free to post your own 1970s Beatles albums below.

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There goes the economy...

2008-10-07T22:50:00.009+01:00

Right, so it looks like the global economy's about to go down the loo. The UK government is nationalising a load of banks. The US government has effectively brought Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae back into public ownership (very oddly-named institutions by the way - remind me of a Rod Stewart song). All over the world, governments are doing the same, stepping in to protect citizens' savings and trying to keep national economies afloat.

Nationalisation has been, for the past 25-30 years or so, a filthy word. Common - but not good - sense has prevailed that public equals bad and inefficient; and that private equals good. This is daft, as anyone who has ever got an overpriced, overcrowded train in England can testify, but it has nonetheless led to all manner of privatisations, or marketisations of things that were formerly publicly-owned.

All over the world, governments have handed over things as vital to everyday life as hospitals, transport systems, water and education to the 'care' of big business. This is true particularly of the UK, where there are hardly any publicly-owned public services left. The ones that are still state-owned, like the Tube or the NHS, have been forced to involve private sector organisations heavily in their operations, leading to things like the billion-pound Metronet fiasco and filthy hospitals. We've also seen dodgy educational establishments being set up that allow rich individuals to invest a certain amount and, wait for it, set the curriculum.

But now it seems that the rules are being rewritten: it seems as though there's a bank nationalisation every day of the week now. Why? Because, with banking, the private sector has failed massively - to the point where governments have no option but to do what governments are elected to do: a bit of governing. The private sector might have been able to get away with running public services badly and expensively for years, but it's harder for the government to sit idly by and be all laissez-faire when people's houses and savings are on the line.

But what's really important about the banks' failure is this: the private sector is meant to be good with private finance. If it can't even get that right, why on earth should it have anything to do with things as fundamental as drinking water, education and healthcare?

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Girls Aloud get me thinking

2008-10-06T18:56:00.007+01:00

Just when you're getting over an incredibly funny quote from a rock star (see my earlier post on Noel Gallagher's Irishness), along comes another, from none other than Chris Martin:

"I love Girls Aloud. I'm obsessed with Girls Aloud. I've been trying to write them a song and I can't come up with anything good enough. They're amazing. It's the combination of extreme physical attraction and fantastic music. I think they might be the ultimate form of life."

Well I don't know what Chris Martin's missus has to say about that (if I said that I'd be in trouble with mine), and I'd stop short at calling them the ultimate form of life, but - shock! horror! - I think he actually might be onto something. The people who put that band together have been very, very, very clever: combining some of the best-looking provincial girls going with some of the best pop writers and producers around. Throw in some videos which just stop short of being soft porn and you've got a recipe for success. Actually now that I read over that, maybe that isn't that clever at all; it's bloody obvious. But it's very effective.

At this point I am sure you think I'm off my rocker regarding the pop/production bit (I'd say most red-blooded males agree with the first bit though). But let's look a little bit closer at the music. It's bloody good. Okay, so the lyrics are pretty trite ("I'm just a love machine, feeding my fantasy" anyone?) but the tunes are excellent, and the production is cutting edge. Take their track Biology, for example - it starts off as glam rock, goes a bit pop, then disco, then back to glam rock...you don't hear that kind of thing very often. It's not as good as Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, but it employs the same kind of genre-bending tactics, and it's really refreshing to hear that kind of music in the charts. It's pop, but not as we know it Jim.

The guy who writes most of their stuff is a chap called Brian Higgins, who runs a production house called Xenomania. It's not just me that admires his writing - the Guardian's Alexis Petridis has this to say about his work:

"Listening to [Girls Aloud's second studio album] What Will The Neighbours Say?, you constantly get the impression that Higgins and Xenomania are enraptured by the possibilities of pop music..."

I don't always agree with Mr Petridis, and I'm still peeved that he didn't review my last record, but I'm with him on this one - he's spot on. On the best Girls Aloud records, you hear Higgins not playing music, but playing with it. At this point in pop/rock history there are just so many things you can pick and choose from when you're making a record...but most big-selling 'credible' acts just don't. Take Chris Martin's band for example - you don't hear any genre-bending there at all really. Or The Editors. Or Oasis. Or Damien Rice. Or, sadly these days, Radiohead. It's the same old sound, tweaked a little bit for each record, but wheeled out pretty much without fail on every occasion. Higgins, on the other hand, makes the most of the vast sonic possibilities that we now have at our disposal. Albeit sometimes in a casual and trite way - but it's always fun, and at times brilliant.

So that's why I'm enjoying Girls Aloud records. They plunder from the past. They use the latest production toys. They switch styles on a whim. The only thing is, of course, that the girls themselves don't have much to do with it; you get the feeling that Higgins really could have got any girls with decent voices to do the singing. They do a competent job, but I know plenty of female singers who can perform just as well as them.

But when pop looks and sounds this good, it seems churlish to complain.

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Noel Gallagher is Irish!

2008-10-05T00:13:00.006+01:00

I just had to laugh at this from Noel Gallagher in the Irish Times:

"I clearly remember my mam saying to me and my two brothers when we were growing up: 'You're only English because you were born here.' And with a mother from Mayo and a father from Co Meath, there's not a drop of English blood in me. I recently had a child with my Scottish girlfriend, and there's no English blood in him at all.

"I feel as Irish as the next person. The first music I was ever exposed to was the rebel songs the bands used to sing in the Irish club in Manchester. Do you know, I think that's where Oasis songs get their punch-the-air quality - from me being exposed to those rousing rebel songs. It was all rebel songs and that godawful Irish country and western music."

Now, not that I give a shit as I'm not into any form of nationalism, English, Irish, Welsh or otherwise...

...but Noel, you're famous (amongst other things) for playing a Union Jack guitar and inventing Britpop.

Good try though to get the Irish fans onside. I might go on about my Irish roots for the next record I put out...hang on though, I think I might actually be Irish?

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The difficult second album

2008-10-04T23:36:00.003+01:00

I always laughed at the hoary old phrase 'the difficult second album' which is routinely wheeled out by those reviewers who are reviewing well, a difficult second album. Now I'm not laughing. It's bloody difficult.

I'm currently working on said difficult second album. Well actually it's my fourth, but I'm rather particular about which of my albums I release.

Anyway, the point is, it's proving difficult to finish. Why? I've boiled it down to three issues.

The first is lack of time - living in London seems to do weird things to your diary and keep you away from the studio.

The second is lack of energy: I'm cagey about my age, as once you pass the grand old age of 10 the music industry doesn't seem to want to know about you...but lets just say that when you pass the fucking awful age of 30 (damn!) you lose a bit of your mojo. It's like a musical biological clock starts ticking or something - you want to make records more, but you seem less able to do so. I stress that this isn't equivalent to losing talent - at least I hope not - but it's hard to go at making records hammer and tongs the way I used to when I was a pain-in-the-ass 21 year old (reminds me of Pink Floyd: "and then one day you find...ten years have got behind you". Yuck.).

The third is fussiness: because I mainly produce my own stuff, I am all too aware of my deficiencies behind the desk. Bizarrely I can make everybody else who comes into my studio sound great in 5 minutes, but it takes me bloody ages to feel satisfied with my own music.

But I'm finally getting to that stage where I feel the pieces are falling into place. There are two songs in particular that are turning out very well - 'Lose it' and 'Lou Reed'. The latter was a throwaway song, but it's now actually one of my favourites. But a load of my record still sounds crap. I'm going to be working on this difficult album for quite a while I reckon.

In other news I am currently watching the "top 50 most embarrassing pop moments ever" on BBC 3. Not sure it's the best use of license fee-payers' money, but it's pretty entertaining.

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Oh and by the way, which one's pink?

2008-09-29T22:53:00.004+01:00

Just finished watching a BBC documentary about Pink Floyd. Saw it a couple of years ago, and presuming they're showing it again because of the sad death of Rick Wright.

At their peak (apologies to Barrett fans, but that's 1973 for me), they really were an amazing group. Watching the documentary, it brought back memories of the first time I listened to The Dark Side of the Moon, in 1996. Seems like an age ago now.

Like a lot of albums, I got it from my Uncle Cormac, who had clearly played it to death before lending it to me. It was very scratchy, but the crackles and pops didn't detract from the magic of the music - or discovering it.

It quickly became my favourite album, and remains so. It has it all: brilliant melodies, incredible playing, (controlled) experimentation, big themes, pointed lyrics and a lush Abbey Road production, on my favourite recording medium, tape.

It does that thing to me which much-loved music tends to: it transports me to another time. When I hear it I'm at the end of a student party in Rathmines, a bit worse for wear, drifting off to sleep, knowing I've got a lecture on Greek tragedies in the morning.

The band might have had other ideas of what this record would evoke, but there you go.

Obama v McCain: who won the first debate?

2008-09-27T11:39:00.009+01:00

Well I didn't stay up till the wee hours to watch the debate, I caught up with it on CNN this morning. I had a boiled egg to go with it, and a nice cup of tea.

My gut feeling on presidential debates is that they tend to be about the 'presidential' and not about the 'debate'. There seems to be an almost platonic ideal of what a president should look like (or come across as) and the televised debates between candidates give the US public a chance to see how the candidates conform to that ideal.

This is not a good thing: it places personality over policies. When personality politics takes over, affable guys or gals with very bad ideas can end up in power. When you think about the 2004 US election, even with all his visible faults, and having conducted a disastrous war, George Bush looked and came across more like a 'typical' president than John Kerry (the fact that he actually was the president probably helped). Did that sway the election? Well, I think it certainly improved Bush's chances of winning.

This kind of silliness is not restricted to the US: it's fairly obvious that the Tories' good performance in the polls is due in no small part to the fact that David Cameron looks more like a PM, and is a better communicator, than Gordon Brown (although, policy-wise, Gordon hasn't made it easy for himself).

Anyway, back to the US presidential debate itself. Who won? Well, most right-wingers, I expect, will have agreed with what McCain had to say, and most left-liberals will have sympathised with Obama.

As with most elections, it all comes down to the floating voters - and here's where the "presidential ideal" comes in. If 'independent' or 'indecisive' voters cannot differentiate between the policies and content of the candidates (despite there being clear differences in the approaches of McCain and Obama), it probably means that they are going to look for the candidate who appears most presidential. Who was that?

Well, intriguingly, neither of the candidates looked hugely like a conventional president: we saw an old white guy and a young(ish) black guy slugging it out. This is possibly what makes this race so interesting: the parties have plumped for candidates who do not look like, and certainly don't talk like, the presidents of recent times. McCain comes across as a sort of friendly grand-dad, who will sit the voter on his knee and give him a boiled sweet, and Obama sounds like a toned-down version of Martin Luther King.

If neither of them looked quite like a president, the question becomes one of whom came closest. And, on balance, my answer is Obama. He looked slightly more presidential, slightly more authoritative than McCain. It's easier - in my mind at least - to imagine him giving a presidential address to the nation, or greeting foreign dignitaries in the Rose Garden.

Will this be enough, though, to win him the election? Let's see: there are still dirty tricks (Democrats are already going to court to try to stop Republicans from denying the vote to certain social groups) and possibly racism (are Americans prepared to elect a black man yet?) to overcome.

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A message from Bob

2008-09-26T20:17:00.005+01:00

Those boffins at Sony BMG have come up with a rather good viral e-marketing campaign to promote the latest incarnation of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (must be at least the third Dylan greatest hits album they've put out, but there you go).

The viral is based around the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues promo clip, which features Bob standing behind the Savoy Hotel in London, holding up cue cards for his audience. These cards contain lyrics from the track, which he flips through as the song plays.

The viral microsite allows you to write your own message on each card that Bob is holding, and then he flicks through your message for your friends. So you could write something like 'Hi mate, I'm in Spain, shagging your girlfriend' or something equally inappropriate, send it to your mate, and Bob will do his thing with your message to the tune of Subterranean Homesick Blues.

My description of it doesn't do it justice - you should try it out for yourself at http://dylan.sonybmgmusic.co.uk/create. It's a good laugh, even if I can't imagine traditional Bob fans being too enthused by it. But then again, maybe it's not about traditional Bob fans - perhaps the record label are trying to expose Bob's music to a new audience. The only problem with that though, is that Subterranean Homesick Blues is not, in my view at least, one of his best tracks, and if I was coming cold to Dylan, I wouldn't be too turned on by the song. Also, I might not be familiar with the promo clip and wonder why a scruffy looking guy down an alley was telling me my friend was shagging my girlfriend.

I like it though.

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Ah come on now Gordon...

2008-09-23T23:20:00.009+01:00

Alright Gordon, fairly decent speech today but no cigar.

Here are some ways you can get my vote back (not that it was going to the Tories, I'm probably going to abstain at the next election, in protest at all the parties offering more or less the right-wing fare).

1. Introduce a fair voting system -- PR. That'll stop the Tories winning 60% of the seats when only 40% of the electorate votes for them. Yes, that's right fellas, somewhat unbelievably Britain is, and traditionally has been, a left-leaning country...it's just that the voting system is rigged to reward right-wingers with an incredibly disproportionate number of seats.

2. Bring the railways back into public ownership. I'm tired of paying daft money to travel for 45 minutes on a train. Paid £43 for a return trip from London to Oxford recently - nearly 50p a minute. Seriously. And while you're at it, please do something about the use of the word 'customer' on the railways. I am a P-A-S-S-E-N-G-E-R.

3. Stop privatising the Health Service. In Ireland, that little country to the west of Wales where I originate from, they rely on private operators to a silly degree for healthcare and the natives have to pay 60 Euros every time they see a GP. That is more painful than whatever they went to the doctor with in the first instance.

4. Stop foreigners buying British newspapers and slagging off, er, foreigners on the front page.

5. Ban Carol Vorderman (although admittedly Countdown kinda did that recently).

6. Buy my album.

7. Make Geoff Hoon do a humorous dance.

8. Make love not war.

9. Stop grumpy musicians from making lists (D'oh).

10. See point 6.

Etc., etc...just give us some decent Labour policies. While you still can, because you'll be out on your ear one way or the other soon. Feel faintly sorry for you, but I haven't forgiven you for Metronet and for letting First Great Western run anything. Particularly a train to Oxford.

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Blogger's block

2008-09-09T21:58:00.002+01:00

I've been feeling a bit uninspired lately. Maybe it's because I'm too busy, maybe it's because I'm too knackered or maybe it's because my girlfriend has yet to buy a laptop, but I feel I've got the equivalent of "writer's block"...let's call it blogger's block. So I thought I'd write a blog about not blogging.

There are plenty of things I want to write about, but seem unable to due to lack of time or energy.

The things I want to wax lyrical about this month are:

Determinism: does free will exist?
David Cameron: why he is so wrong about the causes (and treatment) of poverty.
Musicals and why they are full of fantastic pop songs.
The lack of good signage in Ireland (seriously).

If you have any views on any of the above, do let me know as I may refer to your thoughts in the relevant post.

If I ever write it.

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Sarah Palin...and Ireland?

2008-09-04T21:14:00.008+01:00

I read some interesting little posts about Sarah Palin today (the self-styled pit-bull terrier with lipstick, running for Vice President in the US elections) on the Slimming for the Beach and Maman Poulet blogs.

Apparently she's travelled outside of the United States three times. One of her visits abroad was to Ireland.

Now, being Irish myself, I was interested to hear this, and I was wondering where she went to. Giant's Causeway? Trinity College? Ring of Kerry? Glendalough? The Guinness Storehouse? Malahide?

Nope.

Turns out, it was Shannon Airport.

That's where planes returning to the US do a stopover to refuel. Passengers get out of the plane for a little bit and get back on again.

Made me chuckle that.

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Dawkins and Darwin

2008-08-19T20:34:00.009+01:00

I really enjoyed Richard Dawkins' recent television series about Darwin, The Genius of Charles Darwin. Dawkins is treated like a god by atheists (or at least a pope), and it's easy to see why. He's a very intelligent guy who is passionate about evolution as the explanation for the development of life, intelligent or otherwise; and he explains how it all works brilliantly. Not for him the creationism or 'intelligent design' theories propounded by many religious groups.

I'm sold on evolution as the explanation of how life developed, and even more so after watching Dawkins' series. The evidence for evolution is there in abundance - in fossils, bones and DNA - and Dawkins' presentation of it, despite my prior knowledge of how the process generally works, was illuminating. Dawkins described nature as it really is: an arms race between species, with only the winners getting to pass on their genes - resulting, over time, in the emergence and development of different kinds of creatures.

Above all though, The Genius of Charles Darwin depicted how bleak evolution is. Natural selection isn't concerned with morality; it is all about effective mechanisms passing their genes on, regardless of what the mechanisms in question do. This is why parasites that feed on young children's eyes have evolved successfully, or viruses like AIDS. When you look at these horrendous examples of nature's handywork, it almost seems as though they in themselves argue against the existence of a creator, or certainly a benign one. What kind of creator, for example, would want to create cancer?

Looking at the biological evidence presented by Dawkins and other scientists, and the sheer brutalness of nature, I'm convinced that natural selection, not godly intervention, is the driving force behind the development of species.

What still confuses me though, is the context in which all this happens. Natural selection has to operate in accordance to the laws of physics: it can't circumvent fundamental laws/units or concepts such as matter, time, space, or gravity - regardless of how much a clever insect wants to pass on its genes. There is an order in the universe which all processes and entities have to obey. The apple must fall from the tree; the electron has to spin around the atom; a triangle has to have three sides.

Which inevitably leads to that age-old question: why? I don't think Dawkins or Darwin, for all their brilliance, offer us an answer to that. Accepting the reality of natural selection - and it is very real - doesn't detract from the other reality, which is that we may be naturally selected, but we're still living in a very odd (if beautiful) universe with lots of big balls going round other big balls. I find this profoundly weird, and natural selection doesn't explain the origin of the laws of physics, or, let's face it, natural selection. Frankly, I want to know why the universe was created the way it was, and why its fundamental units facilitate natural selection.

It is nature's fundamental laws - for laws they are - that leave the door open in my mind to the existence of a creator. During my time on this particular big ball, I've never come across a physical law that natural selection was responsible for (and not a civil servant). Earthly laws, at least, are created; could the physical ones be?

If a creator is responsible for the laws of the universe, I'm not sure whether he, she or it is a God, and I certainly think that if he/she/it exists, it's not necessarily benign, and maybe it's not even clever. Part of me suspects that the universe may have been created by the cosmic equivalent of a GSCE science student who heated up some dodgy chemicals using his Bunsen burner when his teacher wasn't looking (I know I tried that in the lab; somebody's probably blogging about it at a microscopic level right now).

I remain a big fan of Dawkins and I love his work; he's really got me thinking about nature. But more than that he's got me thinking about why nature exists at all. And neither he nor any religious figure has ever answered that one satisfactorily for me.

There's always the comments section of this blog though - feel free to have a bash.

West Side Story

2008-08-14T19:32:00.000+01:00

Right, so off to Sadler's Wells for the first time to actually see a performance, rather than drink in the bar.

I went off theatre a bit after doing a degree in it - over the course of four years I saw (and occasionally contributed to) so many bad plays that I felt that a (poorly paid) life in the theatre just wasn't for me. Most directors I met were charlatans and most actors I encountered had bigger egos than mine (quite an achievement) so I opted instead for an attempt at a career in an even filthier, stupider business (music).

So in short, I haven't been to see a show in a while.

So why did I relent? Well, simply because the show that was on was West Side Story, of which I am a very big fan. There are some fantastic numbers in it - America, I think, is one of the best pop songs going, containing some incredibly sharp lyrics that provide a very apt social commentary on today's United States, never mind that of the era which produced the musical (the 1950s).

Try these:

I like to be in America! / O.K. by me in America! / Ev'rything free in America. / For a small fee in America!

or

Buying on credit is so nice / One look at us, and they charge twice / I have my own washing machine / What will you have, though, to keep clean?

or

Life can be bright in America / If you can fight in America / Life is all right in America/ If you're a white in America

So what did I think of the stage version? I felt it was a bit of a curate's egg; if I were a judge on one of those ghastly shows presented by Graham Norton, I'd have given it five, or maybe six out of ten.

Maybe my seat was the problem - watching the show as though I were in a helicopter definitely didn't help. I might have felt a bit warmer towards the performance had I been closer to the action (there were, after all, lots of skimpily dressed dancers to admire; despite my best efforts, my seat and eyesight prevented me from appreciating them to the full).

A bigger problem than my not being able to admire the scantily-clad dancers properly was arguably the set. In its day West Side Story was one of the most realistic, or naturalistic musicals going (if bursting into song a propos nothing can ever really be considered that realistic). But with this version, the set designer opted for minimalism - there was barely anything on stage, and the odd items we did get to see didn't look very 'period'. Despite this, the costume designer had opted for fairly authentic 1950s garb, so a very odd little world - a mismatch of real and unreal - was created on the stage. Maybe that was the intention, but it didn't really work - it felt oddly cheap or something, as though they had run out of money when it came to the set.

However, I think that what made me feel most unimpressed by the stage show was something the cast and crew couldn't really do anything about: the 1961 film version. The movie is so spectacular, containing such exhilarating performances, that whenever you thought of them during the stage version, it couldn't help but feeling a bit flat.

Take a look at the film version of 'America', below. Even in pixelated Youtube, you can't help but think that Rita Moreno's performance is one of the most exuberant, sexy performances ever to grace the silver screen. And the prancing dudes are pretty cool too.

In the stage version, this number sadly didn't have the prancing dudes - they were offstage doing something else, so the girls had the debate about the merits of America, or lack thereof, amongst themselves. As a result the piece didn't have half the sexual tension of the film version, or the 'battle of the sexes' angle.

In any event, despite my misgivings, the Sadler's Well version was great in one respect: it revived my interest in West Side Story, and has got me spending far too much time looking at dancing Puerto Ricans on my computer...and I feel faintly in love with Rita Moreno, below.

West Side Story also got me thinking about how some of the best pop songs ever are to be found hidden in camp musicals - but more on that in another blog post.

//

The easiest way to support my music yet...

2008-08-09T21:05:00.006+01:00

I've developed a nice little online gadget which makes it really easy for my supporters (slightly embarrassed to say fans) to spread the word about my music. I got the idea from the rather nifty 'Facebook Friend Finder' technology.

I'd be really grateful if you could use it to spread the word! Just...

Go to www.singletonmusic.com/invite/tellfriends.htm
Enter your email address and password (for example, your Hotmail email address and the password for that account).
You'll see a list of all your contacts, and you can select which ones you'd like to send my free album to.

To use it you'll need to have one of the following webmail accounts: Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Lycos, ICQ, Rambler, Fastmail, Live, Katamail, Mailcom or Rediffmail. If you don't have one of those, you can use my other tell-a-friend tool here.

Your details are not stored, and your contacts will not end up on my mailing list. It's dead easy to use, you'll be supporting independent music, and your friends will get a free album. That link again is www.singletonmusic.com/invite/tellfriends.htm.

Ah go on.

//

Music by numbers

2008-08-05T17:31:00.001+01:00

A while ago, I wrote a blog post about the increasing importance of data to musicians. The gist of it was that in the burgeoning 'free music' era, bands and musicians should aim to capture the details of people who are downloading their songs for free. The idea being that even if artists are not making money directly from recorded songs, they can generate income in other ways by marketing merchandise, tours and so on to fans whose email addresses they have obtained.

There's another type of data which is of increasing significance to musicians, and it doesn't necessarily involve email addresses. It's statistical data.

With the rise of social networks like Facebook, Myspace, iLike and Last FM, musicians now have a plethora of ways to measure how many people are listening to their music. For example, any band with a Myspace page will be able to see how many plays of their songs they are getting; which tracks tend to be more popular; and how many songs are downloaded (as opposed to just listened to). On iLike, there are similar statistics, which again let musicians see how many plays their tracks are getting, and other interesting counts, like how many people are adding a band's songs to Facebook pages and how many people are sharing particular songs with friends.

These statistics tend to focus on two things: popularity of songs, and listeners' behaviour. Both are of enormous interest to musicians.

The popularity measurement is fairly straightforward. Thanks to Myspace and Facebook a band can put up, say, five tracks on a profile and run an unofficial focus group on which of their songs would make the best singles (depending on how commercial-minded the band is, the tracks that get the most plays).

Looking at listeners' behaviour is more complicated, but extremely interesting. Thanks to social networks (and other sites) you can examine what listeners are doing with music. With a bit of investigation, you can find out who is

adding your song to their social networking page
dedicating your songs to friends
listing themselves as being a fan of your music
recommending you as an artist to online communities
feeding back on your music
talking about you behind your back

The list goes on, depending on which websites a you are using, but essentially, when you look at the data, pictures of behaviour emerge that can influence how bands and artists communicate and build relationships with fans.

All sites are not equal when it comes to music statistics though. Of all the social networks that I've used to promote my music, the one I trust the most for music statistics is Last FM. This is because it doesn't just measure online plays of music - it goes far beyond that. Every time a registered Last FM user plugs their iPod or MP3 player into their computer, it looks at what they've been listening to and uses it to compile statistics; the same happens when a user plays a cd on their PC. The statistics are extremely comprehensive too, with charts being compiled on a band's most popular songs overall, by week or over a 6 month period. And you can see exactly who's been playing your music, and how much.

Crucially, Last FM distinguishes between listeners and plays. This is not the case with Myspace, where you can only look at the number of plays of songs - there is no listener data. This is pretty useless really; generally, once a Myspace page is visited by either a human or a search engine webbot, the play tally goes up, regardless of whether the song has been listened to by the human or, er, webbot in question. And unlike Last FM, none of the data is stored; once you've removed a song from your page, the data goes with it.

In essence though there is a lot to be gleaned from the musical information that the web provides - by looking at who is playing your music, and what they're doing with it, I think it is possible to grow fanbases and understand what makes people tick musically. But it's hard work, and you have to be able to work out the good stats from the bad.

If you want to check out some of my statistics, my Last FM profile is at http://www.last.fm/music/Chris+Singleton.

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David and David

2008-07-30T23:16:00.007+01:00

David Miliband's article in today's Guardian seems to have provoked a lot of speculation about whether or not he'll take a shot at the Labour leadership.

Whilst battling a horrendous hangover this morning, I read said article. It wasn't much of a hangover cure (and certainly not as effective as the bacon sandwich which was also being consumed at the time).

Despite the media fuss, basically what Miliband is offering is exactly what Brown is currently providing - Blairite "reform" of public services (read creeping privatisation). The 'platform for change' that his article refers to is more of the same, albeit maybe at a faster pace.

What David Miliband might be able to provide which Gordon seemingly cannot is a bit more personality. He's definitely more likeable and seems more at ease with the media. I could see him having a reasonable chance of improving Labour's situation should he become leader (then again, it couldn't get much worse).

If Miliband does lead Labour into the next election, it will amount to a personality contest between two rather well-to-do Davids. This is because Miliband's New Labour politics are so close to Tory positions that there will be little for voters to choose from except the likeability of the respective Davids. Once again, voters will be denied a proper choice, and will have to elect a right-wing government or a er, right-wing government.

In other words, it would be like voting for David...or David.

//

Chris Singleton on iLike

2008-07-26T12:07:00.004+01:00

This is a post for those of you using iLike - would be grateful if you could 'iLike me' (another weird social-networking verb is creeping into my lexicon).

If you are on Facebook:

Visit http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/artist/Chris+Singleton and click the 'Click to iLike' button (you may be prompted to log in / add the application).

Then, please dedicate a song of mine to your friends: just scroll down a bit to 'featured songs' and pick a song that you'd like to dedicate. I suggest 'Worry Number One', as your friends will be able to download that MP3 for free, but feel free to choose whichever one you'd like.

If you are not on Facebook:

Go to http://www.ilike.com/artist/Chris+Singleton/songs and click the 'Click to iLike' button.

Many thanks,
Chris

Mrs Thatcher and the state funeral

2008-07-19T19:18:00.005+01:00

So Thatcher is getting a state funeral.

I'll have more to say about that another time, but what I'll say now is this: Thatcher always fought intensively for a smaller state and low public spending. It's deeply ironic that there is going to be a big state-organised event when she dies, which will cost taxpayers millions.

I wouldn't mind so much if it were a party celebrating her departure, but the event is actually going to be in her honour.

Perhaps some of the people who got rather rich when she sold off our public services might be better placed to organise and finance the funeral.

//

New track: "Bad Ambitions"

2008-07-17T23:34:00.006+01:00

Hello all,

If you go to my Facebook page, you can stream one of the tracks I'm working on for my new album:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chris-Singleton/6947253243?ref=ts

Scroll down a bit and click 'Bad Ambitions' - it's one of the tracks in the music player. You can also hear it on Myspace but it sounds pants on there (Myspace MP3 compression is rubbish!). Listen to it on headphones, not tinny cheap computer speakers, and play it loud please.

The song features the fantastic drumming of Ben Woollacott, who is kindly helping me out with some tracks at the moment. He's doing some fab overdubs and I'm really pleased to be working with him. We recorded some of this song down in Hackney's Exostudios, and the rest in my own setup.

Assuming you like David Bowie mixed with Blondie, it should hopefully appeal. We still need to tidy a few things up on it, add some more strings and maybe some soulful John Gibbons backing vocals, but it's getting there. Enjoy it while you can 'cos I'm taking it down in a couple of days!

Knives out for the economy

2008-07-13T22:50:00.004+01:00

There are two things which seem to be dominating the UK news at the moment: the state of the economy, and knife crime. Both serious topics.

But I can't help feeling that the more the media tell us that the economy is deteriorating, and that knife crime is spiralling, the worse the economy gets (because people are scared to spend their money) and the more kids carry knives (because they're scared of being knifed).

I may be wrong, but it feels to me that we're all talking ourselves into bad situations, or reading ourselves into them.

English newspapers being (broadly) the muck that they are, they are clearly using both stories to sell papers, but I reckon it's time for a bit of calm-headedness. Or else more kids could die - and the economy will get so bad that we'll cut back on buying papers.

Obviously Murdoch will worry more about the latter.

//

Songwriting

2008-07-10T18:13:00.010+01:00

Been talking to some mates about songwriting lately, and reading some blogs about it. Several musicians I know have recently done courses on the subject, facilitated by people who are presumably qualified to instruct others in the art of songwriting. It got me wondering whether you can actually teach somebody how to write a song.

The way these songwriting courses seem to work is that there are various workshops where an 'expert' in songwriting imparts words of wisdom on how it's done to an audience of (presumably) aspiring songwriters. Then everybody pairs off and writes songs together, and there's a bit of a love-in where everybody's efforts get discussed en masse at the end of the day.

Thinking back to how I learnt how to write songs, I suppose that in a roundabout way, somebody did show me how to do it: Lennon or McCartney, but (sadly) not in person. From listening to their songs, I worked out how to structure my own, write a Beatle-esque melody, harmonise and so on. As a precocious songwriting teenager, I copied the poor band shamelessly (some would say that I still do -- and that I'm still precocious). I listened to them non-stop and tried to soak up as many of their ideas as I could; and in their day, the Beatles did exactly the same, with Elvis and Chuck Berry. This 'soaking up' forms the building blocks of every songwriter's music (there's no such thing as an original idea after all).

This makes me think that a) songwriting is, initially at least, all about copying stuff and b) other musicians influence songwriting immensely. Which leads to this: how good a songwriter you are will depend in no small way on your ability to copy things (think of it as similar to being a good draughtsman) and on the quality of the musicians you are copying.

In other words, if you're into James Blunt, you're fucked.

Of course, the thing about these songwriting workshops is that it's highly unlikely that the great songwriters are going to turn up at them to do a spot of teaching (you're probably going to get somebody who had a bit of a hit in the 80s or knew a man down the pub who did). And if you were lucky enough to have a great artist show up, would they really be able to teach you anything?

If McCartney decided to give a masterclass in songwriting, I'd love to attend it: he is universally acclaimed as one of the best writers the world has known, and he is a massive inspiration to me. However, I still doubt there is anything he could verbally articulate that that could teach me how to write a song. In fact, and being slightly cruel here, he hasn't written a good one himself in quite a while -- so if he can't teach himself how to do it again, how on earth would he instruct me? I'd say he'd be more interested in suing me for occasional attempts at plagiarism.

The other thing about songwriting which makes me think that it is difficult to teach is the personal dimension. The great songs are all inspired by personal traumas or joys. I could not imagine anybody at a songwriting course being able to supply either of those on tap (well, unless a certain Mr Blunt I referred to earlier was doing the teaching -- there would be plenty of trauma in that instance). The great songwriters do not overtly teach; we listen to their music and absorb their ideas over time.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh on the notion of songwriting classes. There are very basic elements which I suppose can be taught: structures (intro/verse/bridge/chorus -- you know it all now), and maybe some history around the topic. But not much more.

However, I'm quite Cartesian at heart, and in the spirit of trying to teach people how to write a song, I'm going to give it a bash. In a mathematical way. Here's an equation which I think will predict how well you will be able to write a song:

Ability to rip an artist off + quality of artist being ripped off + own personal experience/inspiration = Quality of song

Sadly the word 'quality' crops up too many times in my little equation. Quality is an impossibly subjective notion: one man's meat will inevitably be another man's poison. So even if somebody thinks they know how to teach somebody else how to write a fantastic song...somebody else will think that the song that ends up being written is, quite frankly, shit.

My conclusion: songwriting can be learnt, but it sure can't be taught.

Scouting for Girls...

2008-07-03T17:30:00.006+01:00

Well, I'm just back from a well-deserved break in Italy. It was great. Visited an island that had a volcano on it and smelt of farts; went on a trip at sea that involved a small boat, a singing captain and no life jacket; saw a Pizza called 'McDonalds Pizza' which had chips and a burger on it (note: didn't order it, just looked at it). All in all a good holiday.

The one thing I'm extremely glad I didn't encounter was any Scouting for Girls songs. As I lay back on the beach, reading my overpriced international edition of the Guardian and getting a Cornetto all over my chest, I was listening to the stuff that they're currently playing on Italian radio. Much of it was the same as what is dominating the airwaves in the UK right now: Estelle, Duffy, Mark Ronson doing his celebrity karaoke thing - but thankfully there was absolutely no Scouting for Girls.

Clearly the Italians have taste (when it comes to music - we shouldn't forget that they recently re-elected Berlusconi.)

Now, I've been at the receiving end of rock criticism, both good and bad, so I tend not to write blog posts slagging off other music. And I don't want to encounter the inevitable response of 'You're jealous - they're selling more albums than you'. Or the 'You can't argue with popularity' argument. (Popularity is hard to argue with. Mind you, Hitler, Thatcher and James Blunt all enjoyed massive degrees of it).

But I'm sorry, I simply have to make an exception to my 'no slagging musicians off' rule for Scouting for Girls. I can't bear them. It pains me to have to hear them every time I turn on the radio.

In one way, what they've done is quite an achievement: they've effectively released pretty much the exact same single 3 times. And they've got massive airplay on each occasion.

The formula is simple: a tune with one note repeated ad nauseum, some staccato piano, and a pained, earnest voice singing any of the below trite lyrics:

She's so lovely, she's so lovely, she's so lovely, she's so lovely
or
Elvis isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead
or
I miss a heartbeat, I miss a heartbeat...

The band will also stop at various points in each song, and sadly, just as you think it's over and you're getting a much-needed respite from the staccato piano and crap one-note tune, they'll start up again, singing the same crap one-note tune again over a backdrop of staccato piano.

I just don't get it. Or maybe I'm getting old. But I have to say, I think this is the worst band I've ever heard. Westlife appeal more and I bloody hate them too.

But one way or the other, if this continues I'm moving to Italy. If you haven't heard them yet (unlikely), go to http://www.myspace.com/scoutingforgirls. Bring earmuffs.

//

Your very own White Album

2008-06-19T23:10:00.009+01:00

I was reading a book recently by a chap called David Quantick called 'Revolution' which is about the making of The Beatles' White Album. It was entertaining, but ultimately not very enlightening, and certainly wasn't in the same league as Ian MacDonald's similarly-formatted 'Revolution in the Head'.

In any event it reminded me that this year is the 40th birthday of the record.

I first heard The White Album in Cologne, when I was 11 or 12. At that point I'd absorbed all the Beatles albums that happened to be in my parents' record collection or which they had copied onto tapes (tapes, remember those?) . They had all of them except The White Album and Abbey Road (more on the latter another time).

We were in Cologne because my parents were during a tour of Europe of sorts - my dad is an academic, and at the time we were driving round Europe in a blue and white VW camper van, stopping off at various university towns so that he could be suitably professorial (I'm sure he would put it differently, but you get the gist). We had stopped off at my uncle Ciaran's place, who at the time was in his mid-20s and living with a bunch of slightly eccentric Germans. One of them had the White Album on a couple of cassettes.

Well God, I didn't know what to make of the album (nor did the Germans when I woke them up with it every morning for a week). I loved 'Back in the USSR', misheard the lyrics of 'Sexy Sadie' as 'Sex is easy' (very exciting that for a 12 year old, I must say), and was utterly bemused by Revolution 9.

And I still don't know what to make of it. There are some fantastic songs on it, but as a whole it leaves me somewhat cold, or bemused. I think that I agree with George Martin's initial assessment, that the band should have opted for what would have been an incredible single album, rather than a double one. To my ears, the record sounds like a load of amazing songs interspersed with a load of bootlegs; indeed, much of the Anthology stuff that came out years later could have happily sat on the White Album - it certainly reminded me of it.

Many will swear by The White Album in its entirety. For those of us who are less gone on tracks like 'Wild Honey Pie' or 'Don't Pass Me By', it presents us with a fascinating (and fun) opportunity: to edit it down, and make our own 'single' album version of it. The idea being to reduce the 30 songs to, say, a more manageable 12-14. After some reflection, here is my perfect White Album - if you've got your own, I'd love to hear about it.

My ultimate White Album:

1. Back in the USSR
2. Dear Prudence
3. Happiness is a Warm Gun
4. Martha My Dear
5. I'm So Tired
6. Why Don't We Do It in the Road?
7. I Will
8. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
9. Sexy Sadie
11. Revolution 1
12. Cry Baby Cry

I know, it's sacrilege. But it would have been bloody good, eh?

//

Like a goat: misheard lyrics

2008-06-18T19:32:00.009+01:00

I was on a short break in Kerry recently when I heard a track come on the radio by Sam Sparrow. It was the first time I heard it and I was convinced, listening to it, that he was singing "like a goat, like a goat, like a goat". In fact, he was singing "black and gold, black and gold, black and gold" and the song has since become a bit of a hit.

Which got me thinking about other misheard lyrics. And I did some googling and came across quite an entertaining site, www.kissthisguy.com. It's an archive of misheard lyrics which takes its name from Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze' track - there's a line in the song where he goes "Scuse me while I kiss the sky", but many people heard it as "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy".

On www.kissthisguy.com you can find a veritable treasure trove of misheard lyrics submitted by music fans (mind you, I don't think all of them were misheard, I think some people submitting them are being mischievous, or clearly have very odd ears).

How and ever, some of my favourites from the ones I found on the site are:

Robert Palmer: "Might as well face it, you're a dick with a glove" (instead of "might as well face it, you're addicted to love" from Addicted to Love)
REM: "Let's pee in the corner, let's pee in the spotlight" (instead of I'm Losing my Religion's heartfelt "That's me in the corner...")
Beatles: "Something in the way she moos, attracts me like no other lover" (instead of Something's "Something in the way she moves...")
Beatles: "Michelle, ma belle, some say monkeys play piano well" (convinced somebody's having a laugh with that one).
JLO: "Don't be fooled by the socks that I got..." (socks instead of "rocks").

All this reminds me of two incidents from my youth. One was singing in a church choir at Christmas and desperately trying to slip"While shepherds washed their socks at night" into the famous carol. And giggling appropriately.

The other was when I recorded a song containing the words "Looking in your dark brown eyes". Back in the nineties, when I was a whippersnapper, I had a Tascam 4-track casette machine which I used to record my "music". It it had fantastic thing on it called 'varispeed' wheel which you could use to speed up songs, and give them some zip. Problem with doing that was that the song didn't just get faster, it went up in pitch dramatically. And it tended to have rather disturbing effects on lyrics: in this instance, it turned "Looking in your dark brown eyes" into "Looking up your dark brown ass".

I, being familiar with the lyric, didn't notice this. But I'm convinced to this day that the girl who I had a crush on, and whom I sent the song to, definitely heard the 'ass' version, and unsurprisingly I didn't hear from her again.

Misheard lyrics can be bad for your love life.

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No more beers on the tube

2008-06-01T15:46:00.009+01:00

As someone who has done slightly odd things on the tube in the past - I launched an album, played a gig and shot a video on it - I'm sad to see Boris' alcohol ban on the Underground come into force.

It's a typically hypocritical conservative idea. The Tories go on ad nauseum about 'creating a smaller state' and encouraging 'freedom', yet whenever they get their hands on power they have no hesitation in using the state to interfere - in the worst possible way - in people's lives. Rather than use the state to provide useful things that increase people's freedom (like the freedom not to be sick that a a decent public health system provides) they use it to take personal freedoms away - in this case, the freedom to have a beer on the tube.

This ban is not just hypocritical, it's downright daft, because it's probably going to cause more problems than it solves. It's meant to curb anti-social behaviour, but, assuming there's no loutish behaviour involved, there is nothing particularly anti-social about having a drink on a train; that's why train companies routinely sell alcohol on their trains.

From now on, if somebody has a can of beer on the tube, somebody else is now going to have to take it away from that person. And I personally think that taking a can of beer off some one who is intent on drinking it is going to generate a lot more anti-social behaviour than would have occurred had you just let that person get on with it. Particularly if that person is drunk. Or has violent tendancies. Or has violent tendancies when drunk.

The other issue is that people who might have started their night with a beer on the tube may well drink before they get on it - on the way to the station or in a pub. So from now on drinkers may actually be more pissed before they get on a tube - which is actually more dangerous: think of all those drunk people using those big escalators.

All in all the ban smacks of puritanism. It's ill-thought through and is already causing anti-social behaviour...the 'swansong' party for drinking on the tube last night led to four assaults on staff and 17 arrests.

Typical Tory thinking. Or lack of it. And the way things are going, we're going to get a lot more of that kind of rubbish in two years time...

The story of stuff

2008-05-30T20:58:00.005+01:00

Being somebody who spends far too much time on the internet, I don't often come across sites that blow me away. But this one did: http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Check it out. Make sure your sound is on, wait for the video/animation to load and click play.

Three more songs for you...and the honesty box

2008-05-26T00:14:00.004+01:00

This a post mainly for people who availed of the free download of 'Twisted City'. Firstly, I hope you enjoyed it!

Secondly, you're probably aware that there's an 'honesty box' which you can donate to if you're feeling generous. Donating means that I can a) record more independent music and b) promote it, so I'm always extremely grateful to anyone who helps out. The honesty box is powered by Paypal, so it should be nice and secure. The honesty box is at www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/honestybox.htm.

As a mark of my appreciation to anyone who donates, I'm now making three bonus tracks available to anyone who puts a few quid in the box. These are the studio-recorded 'Streetlight', 'Somebody's Shoes' and the radio version of 'Gimme Something' (which features a rather different ending to the album version). To pick up your tracks, just donate and when you get to the the screen thanking you for your donation, make sure you click the 'return to donations co-ordinator' button.

So yes, that's a blatant bribe!

Don't worry if you've already donated - I'm going to send out an email to all the people who've already donated over the next couple of days with a link to the 3 songs.

If you'd like to hear some new music I've got in the er, pipeline, click www.singletonmusic.com/podcasts.htm. Enjoy.

A bientot, all.

Crewe and Nantwich

2008-05-20T23:03:00.006+01:00

Looks like Brown's in trouble. The Tories may well win the Crewe and Nantwich bye-election (I was there recently actually - lots of trains).

His problem is that people either vote for ideas or personalities. Since the Tories and Labour now have more or less the same ideas (cut taxes, sell off the public services and hitch yourself to US foreign policy) it's going to all boil down to personalities.

Given the choice, people are likely to vote for the guy who's a bit smoother and upbeat - and that's David Cameron (I'm not, obviously).

I don't think Labour can win an election without either a fundamental change in its policies or a fundamental change in its leadership. It will be interesting to see if the Crewe and Nantwich bye-election leads to either.

Become a friend on Facebook

2008-05-18T10:51:00.002+01:00

Quick one this, I've set up a profile on Facebook for my music related activities (as opposed to a group or page, which I already have...so late-naughties).

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1219795541 is the address.

Feel free to add me as a friend, write on my wall, do all that social networking stuff.

Ways you can support Chris Singleton

2008-05-02T12:44:00.009+01:00

Hi all,

Here's a post about how you can support my music. Thanks to all of you who already have helped out! Please do as many of the below as you can, as it will help spread the word about new indie music.

1. Download my 'Twisted City' album free
You can get it at www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum.

2. Tell all your friends about the album

Use my tell-a-friend tool at www.singletonmusic.com/invite/tellfriends.htm.
Post the link www.singletonmusic.com/freerecord/ on any messageboards or social networking sites you use (Facebook, Myspace etc.

3. If you like the album, please consider making a safe, secure donation
You can donate as much or as little as you like using my Paypal honesty box. This really helps finance the recording and promotion of my music. (Note: Paypal pages sometime takes a few seconds to load, please be patient).

4. Play the album to friends, colleagues and family
Play 'Twisted City' to people you know whenever you get a chance - put it on at work, at parties or in the car.

5. Support me on Facebook.
First, put "Chris Singleton" in your favourite music section. Then...

Add me as your friend here
Become a fan here (and remember to click iLike this artist button)
Join my group here.

6. Become a fan on Myspace
If you use Myspace, add me as your Myspace friend. You can also add one of my songs to your page and post a bulletin about my free album to your friends.

7. Support me using iLike
Go to http://www.ilike.com/artist/Chris+Singleton and click the 'Click to iLike' button.

8. Support me on Last FM
If you you use Last FM, become my friend and scrobble me whenever you play one of my tracks on your computer.

9. Subscribe to my blog for news, more free stuff and ways to help
Just go to www.singletonmusic.com/blog.htm for details.

If you do the above 9 things, I can't guarantee you good luck / sex / health (delete as appropriate...) for the rest of your life...this isn't one of those dodgy chain letters!

But you'll be doing me a big favour and helping me to make more independent music available.

Many thanks for your support,
Chris

Live in London? Read this for the good of your health!

2008-05-01T13:36:00.005+01:00

Dear All,

Some politics at lunchtime for you...

If you live in London, no doubt you're aware that today is the day that we're all voting in the Mayoral Election.

I don't want to come over all Bono, but it'd be great if you could join with me in doing your best to stop Boris getting elected.

That basically means giving Ken Livingstone either your first or second preference vote today. Ken may have his foibles, but they pale in comparison compared to what Boris would bring to London: he has a history of rascism, corruption and ineptitude - not to mention extreme right-wing opinions.

For years Boris has written a Daily Telegraph column and otherwise communicated his views and opinions, which include:

fanatical support for the Iraq war
fanatical support for George W Bush (he campaigned for him to win the US elections in both 2000 and 2004)
opposition to the Kyoto protocol on climate change (which every single developed country in the world apart from Bush's USA has now signed up to)
opposition to the minimum wage- support for rail privatisation (the cause of the current chaos and high fares)
opposition to the congestion charge
opposition to paternity leave
the belief that South Africa under Nelson Mandela represented “the majority tyranny of black rule”
such vocal and sustained criticism of the inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder case that Stephen's non-partisan mother has said he is “definitely not the right person” to be Mayor.

Given all the above, I can only see our quality of life in London being damaged were he to get elected. Boris may be funny, but the prospect of him having so much influence over our lives (in areas of transport, crime, security and much more) is no joke.

So please get out there and do whatever you can to stop Boris. You can start by copying and pasting this message and sending it to friends, but above all, get out and vote for Ken.

Many thanks and please excuse the politics! I'll start talking rock and roll again soon...

Best, Chris Singleton

Demo of 'You Came With A Bang' now on my Myspace page

2008-04-23T23:44:00.002+01:00

I've slapped up a demo of 'You Came With A Bang', one of the tracks I'm working on for my new album, on my Myspace page.

You can listen at www.myspace.com/chrissingleton

There's also a podcast available featuring a lot more tracks in progress on my site, www.singletonmusic.com - see the 'podcasts' section.

New Chris Singleton site goes live

2008-04-21T17:47:00.002+01:00

My new site has (finally!) gone live at http://www.singletonmusic.com/. It was long due a revamp - the reason I've updated it is mainly because I wanted to integrate some 'Web 2.0' stuff, like blog feeds, videos etc.

There's a whole load of free stuff on there, including a complete download of 'Twisted City' and a preview of some new material I'm working on.

Check it out and give me your thoughts.

Stop Boris

2008-04-08T23:01:00.002+01:00

Boris Johnson looks like he's in with a shout of winning the London mayoral election. If you, like I, am appalled by the prospect of having a small-minded, racist, miserly and bumbling idiot as our dear leader, then please consider doing your bit to stop him.

There's a non-partisan website here with some good suggestions as to how you can do your bit:

http://www.stopboris.org/

It has posters you can put in your window, a Facebook application, and a full list of Boris policies which make for frightening reading.

Please do your bit.

//

The Charlatans miss a trick - or do they?

2008-03-13T22:13:00.005Z

The Charlatans are the latest in the line of well-known acts (including Radiohead and the Nine Inch Nails) to release their album for free on the internet. It's downloading on my PC as I type. Following on from my recent post about 'the future of rock and roll', it seems as though that future - where musicians do not make money from recorded music but use it as a stepping stone to sell other stuff - is moving a step closer.

What confuses me about the Charlatans' move is that they seem to be ignoring the 'sell other stuff' bit of the free album approach, because they are not capturing data during the exercise. In other words, they haven't asked fans to submit an email address in order to access the download. You just click the link and it starts downloading.

This means the band have lost the opportunity to email tour dates or merchandise offers to the people who have downloaded the album for free. They haven't even done an honesty box thing, so that they can generate income from people who want to donate what they think the album is "worth".

Either the Charlatans are being very clever or very stupid - and I'm trying to work out which. There is a big upside to making the album available without any strings attached: they'll definitely get far more downloads of it. I know from looking at the statistics from my own free album offer that of the people who go to www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/, one third download the album; I'm fairly sure that my asking for an email address is putting the other two-thirds off.

If more people download The Charlatans' album, there's more scope for a big "word-of-mouth" effect about the band. I can see why this could be extremely useful in attempts to increase awareness of up-and-coming acts...but the Charlatans are, if not necessarily a household name, a well-known band who have had several number one albums.

The best explanation I can think of for their approach to this free release is that the band are aiming to get the largest number of people possible downloading the album, generating as much positive word of mouth about it, before doing away with the free download and making only a paid-for release available. The hope being that the bigger word of mouth effect generated by the 'no strings' free release will boost sales of the paid-for copy. The wished-for scenario being something like:

Mr A: "Oh have you heard The Charlatans' new album, it's great."
Mr B: "Cool - must go and grab the free download."
Mr A: "Actually it's not available for free anymore - you have to get it in the shops or on iTunes."
Mr B: "Ok I'll do that."

This is fine, assuming the album is very good; if not, the band risk bad word-of-mouth publicity which could actually impact negatively on sales: if it's crap, and it's free, why on earth would you pay for it? There is also the possibility of their core fanbase, who typically propel The Charlatans to the top of the charts every time they put an album out, not being quite so energised to go out and buy the cd if they already have the free download. And the thing most likely to happen during Mr A and Mr B's exchange is that Mr A will offer to send or burn Mr B the album for free anyway.

Another interesting aspect of this free release is that it is being done conjunction with the popular indie station XFM - you have to go to their XFM website to download it. This makes me wonder if XFM paid the band to release the album "catch-free" on their site. I'm puzzled though as to why this would be the case - if I was an XFM marketeer I would have viewed this as an opportunity to capture email addresses not only for the Charlatans but the radio station too.

There is one final possibility: that The Charlatans are simply being altruistic. After all, they must have a bob or two after all these years, and they may honestly be interested in giving their music away for free (although I doubt it). That's fine for established bands, but this approach poses problems for up-and-coming acts.

I still feel that new bands need to get something when they release their music: if not income, then the possibility of future income, via an agreement between the act and the downloader to swap the music for the opportunity to communicate about live performances, merchandise and so on. Speaking as a musician, when you attempt to forge a career out of it, music is simply too time, energy and money consuming to be given away for absolutely nothing. If recorded music is good, then it does have a value, and even if that's no longer going to be measured in immediate financial terms, we've got to remember - particularly in the dawn of this free-album era - that this value does exist.

Right. Moralising done - now go get my album for free at www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/. The Charlatans' record is available at http://www.xfm.co.uk/news/2008/download-charlatans-new-album-for-free?&DCMP=EMC-EMR2007 //

Podcast of new Chris Singleton material

2008-03-05T18:03:00.006Z

As you may or may not know, I'm recording a new album right now - a follow up to 'Twisted City'.

I've put together a podcast featuring some works in progress and some background to the songs. The recordings are still very rough and ready but the podcast will will give you an idea on the way the album is panning out.

The podcast is downloadable at www.singletonmusic.com/high/csingleton-new.mp3. It's quite a big file so it may take a moment or two to download.

If like what you hear and want to get your hands on the current album, 'Twisted City', for free, you can do so at www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/

Incidentally I'm a bit stuck for a title for the new record, so if anything jumps to mind, let me know!

Chris Singleton retains the copyright to all tracks in the podcast, and all rights are reserved //

The future of rock and roll

2008-02-29T23:39:00.007Z

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to put out a physical cd in the UK and Ireland recently. Happily, it picked up good reviews, some national airplay and I got on the telly doing quirky gigs on London public transport. But the lack of a marketing budget, big-budget video, TV plugger, print advertising etc. meant that it was going to be very hard to compete with records from established acts. Whilst it's safe to say that the critical reaction to the album was very positive (this was much to my relief), with my resources -- and even with the PR help of a major in Ireland -- I simply couldn't reach enough listeners to sell the cd in big quantities. I hate admitting that, but there you go. I still fly on budget airlines, in other words.

Now that all the singles have been released from the album, I reckon I've sold as many copies of 'Twisted City' as I'm likely to, in the UK and Ireland at least. But I'd still like the distribution of the album to continue in some shape or form, and I'd like to keep introducing the music to new ears.

This is why I've embraced what may become known as "the Radiohead model" of distribution: offering a download of the album to listeners at no financial cost.

Commentators made much of the fact that Radiohead allowed people to pay as much or as little as they liked for the download of 'In Rainbows'; I think they missed the point. Radiohead were after email addresses as much as the donations. Think about it: as a result of their experiment, Radiohead probably now have the means to communicate, entirely free, with their ENTIRE fanbase. And sell future products, tours and merchandise to them direct (which is the most effective way of selling). There are companies who would absolutely kill to have their entire customer base on a database, and spend vast quantities of time and money trying to achieve this; in a matter of weeks, Radiohead compiled a massive mailing list and, incredibly, made money in the process of doing so (through the 'honesty box' aspect of the exercise). Very clever stuff.

With the advent of 'free album' distribution, I can't see paid-for music continuing for much longer. It's so ridiculously easy to copy and share music that paying for it seems arcane. Once somebody has an album, everybody has it. When an album is just a set of files, there becomes no effective difference between a paid-for set of files and a free set of files. I hate thinking of music in these terms, and I always pay for albums, but the reality of the situation is that most people are looking at music in this clinical way.

It means that the income which pays for new music (and salaries...) is going to have to come from other sources. I see two main ways in which artists and labels are going to make money in the future:

1) By selling band merchandise / gig tickets direct using the email addresses gathered during 'free album' releases. Only stuff which can't be 'copied' electronically will be worth selling.

2) By making albums available for free on sites on which paid-for adverts are displayed.

The second scenario worries me somewhat, as we may end up in a situation where, like commercial radio, advertisers dictate what is and isn't "acceptable" (this is why there is so much Celine Dion on the radio).

The bottom line is that musicians are going to have to get a lot smarter about how they get their music out there. In the future, it may be the case that instead of musicians fighting for the attention of majors, we'll fight to get the biggest database, or to get more of our 'free albums' out to people than the other guy. It's going to be as cut-throat as ever, regardless of the internet revolution. That's why I want to get in early with the whole free download experiments.

As for the free Radiohead album, with the exception of one song, 'Body Snatchers', I don't like it. I paid for The Bends and OK Computer; they were much better. Or maybe I just think that because I parted with cash?

You can download Chris Singleton's 'Twisted City' album free at http://www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/

New Chris Singleton Facebook Page

2008-02-13T13:01:00.003Z

Dipping my toes into the world of Facebook pages...by setting up a Facebook page (for my musical activities). Will be interested to see how it takes off, compared to Myspace. Will be putting up new tracks, photos etc. as they arrive.

So I'd be very grateful if you could visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chris-Singleton/6947253243?ref=ts and click 'Become a fan'. Then click 'Share with Friends' to share the page with the world and his wife.

You may need to log in to your Facebook account before you can become a fan or spread the word. Would really appreciate anything you can do to help promote this page!

Many thanks, Chris

New photos of recording

2008-01-22T23:57:00.001Z

Have some new pictures of the recording of my new album up at

http://www.myspace.com/chrissingleton (scroll down a bit) or click the 'pics' link.

We've been working in my little studio and also in Exostudios in Hackney. I'll be posting some new songs up soon for you to have a listen to but for now you'll just have to look at the piccies and use your imagination (that sounds saucier than I meant it to).

The record has a much more 'live' feel to it that 'Twisted City' - am working with loads of different musicians, from gospel singers to moody pianists to jazz vocalists and it's great fun.

The recording process has been interrupted somewhat by a nasty cold (can't sing with this little beauty) but it's going well on the whole.

Only problem is a title. I'll be inviting people to give me their thoughts on that one soon.

Magical Mystery Tour?

2008-01-09T20:22:00.000Z

If you're stuck for something to do in London at the moment, then you might consider this: a 'musical' trip through the city. Here's what it's all about...

'Twisted City' is a record about London. Every song is a stop on the line of a tube journey; the 'Twisted City Tour' takes you on that journey, through streets of London, buses, boats and tubes. At each stop you play the relevant track from 'Twisted City' on your MP3 player. The whole thing is free (bar public transport costs) and you'll get a free album and PDF guidebook to steer you on your way.

It's really easy to take part:

1. You download the album free.
2. You put it on your iPod or MP3 player.
3. You print out the PDF guidebook and follow the instructions for a great day out.

You can get the album and the guide book free at www.singletonmusic.com/twistedcitytour/ - and I hope you enjoy your tour.

(Those of you who already have the album can download the PDF guidebook directly at www.singletonmusic.com/twistedcitytour/twistedcitytour.pdf).

I'm scared...

2008-01-06T01:40:00.000Z

Everybody's talking about "the skinny kid with the funny name" (Obama) winning the Demcocrats' Iowa caucus, but meanwhile, let's have a look at the guy who who one the Republican one, Mike Huckabee.

I looked him up on Google and visited his official site. When I clicked on the section about "where he stands on the issues", I encountered some very scary reading.

Religion
"My faith doesn't influence my decisions, it drives them." Good to see rational decision-making is alive and well then. Not a good start.

Health:
"We don't need universal health care mandated by federal edict or funded through ever-higher taxes." Yeah right - what happens if you have no health insurance, or a policy with a health insurance company that won't pay up if you're sick?

Taxation
"I am running to completely eliminate all federal income and payroll taxes. And do I mean all - personal federal, corporate federal, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, self-employment." Well clearly he doesn't want to spend tax dollars on healthcare (see above...), but where is the money for silly little things like education, roads, police, firemen etc. going to come from if he abolishes tax?

Security
"I believe that we are currently engaged in a world war." Hello???? Aside from being an incredibly daft statement, it's a insult to anyone who fought in a real world war, or people whose loved ones died in one.

Seriously, the guy is a neocon nut. And theoretically could be the next president of the USA. Hope the skinny guy with the funny name can stop him. Although apparently the skinny guy receives a hell of a lot of money from the health industry cowboys...so let's not get too excited, even if he wins.

The Radiohead Experiment...An Update

2008-01-01T14:49:00.000Z

An update on the progress of my 'Radiohead experiment' (giving away my album for free and letting people donate an amount of their choosing to an honesty box if they want).

The average donation so far is £3.90 - however, the percentage of people donating is very small: only 3% of people who've downloaded it have paid for it. As far as I know the percentage of people paying Radiohead for their album stands at 38%...much higher. Easy to understand the difference in percentages though. Radiohead are an established act, and paying punters know that they should be getting a good product for their couple of quid. With a less well-known act (putting it mildly...) like me people are taking more of a chance with a free album - it might be rubbish.

But annoyingly, the net result is that in experiments like these, people are happier to pay millionaires for 'free' music rather than to support indie acts. I suppose that happens in conventional cd sales too...but it's still a pain in the arse. Not that I'm bitter though. And the object of my experiment is to get my music to a wider audience, and in that respect it's working very well.

You can get the album 'free' at http://www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/ (ah go on, give us a pound).

Happy New Year incidentally!

I'm doing a Radiohead

2007-12-11T19:07:00.001Z

Inspired by Radiohead and The Charlatans, I've decided to jump on the "free album" bandwagon.

In other words, I'm going to make my record, 'Twisted City', available for free - but for a limited period only.

You can get your copy at www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/

If you like it, there's an honesty box that you can donate to when you download it. So far I'm running at 14p an album....hmnnn.

Hurry up and get yours.

Immigration

2007-11-29T23:58:00.001Z

Just watched Question Time on BBC and heard a load of people moaning about immigration, and the lack of border controls in the UK.

The moaners tend to be the same people who don't have a problem with the British Empire and, say, the invasion of Iraq. That would be, er, British people going over and settling in other countries. And, generally speaking, not in the back of lorries but in tanks or battleships.

The other complaint was that British identity is effectively being ruined or distorted by immigration.

Well, given that the so-called British identity (which Scots and Welsh people are arguably not that keen on anyway) is effectively the product of years of immigration - including, shock horror, a fair bit by the French - it's a fairly meaningless term.

English is a Germanic language anyway.

The whole thing is bollox.

My dad's English by the way, so this isn't some anti-British rant. And my mum's from Mullingar - actually I have an issue with Mullingar people being let into Dublin.

Sicko - Michael Moore's new film

2007-11-23T23:34:00.000Z

A non-musical post this one.

Saw Michael Moore's film 'Sicko' last week. Which is about American healthcare - or lack thereof.

As is the case with Moore's other films it had some flaws, mainly to do with a bit of selectiveness with the truth and a 'well-I-never' faux surprise at the existence of publicly-funded, universal health systems in Britain and France. Yep, they do exist (although probably not for much longer, if in Britain the Blairite 'reforms' continue and in France, Sarkozy has his Thatcher moment).

But 'Sicko' is one of the most moving films I've seen. I was expecting it to deal with the issue of the millions of Americans who don't have health insurance (and thus no healthcare) but it dealt more with the Americans who do have health insurance...and no healthcare. In other words, it tells the stories of the victims of insurance companies - organisations who look for loopholes in insurance policies to actively deny people treatment and maximise profit.

For me there was one overwhelmingly touching part of the film. It dealt with a woman whose husband got cancer. He had health insurance, but despite his family having paid money to an insurance company for years, and having found an exact match for a life-saving bone marrow transplant, the company wouldn't pay for his treatment (on entirely spurious grounds). You see footage of the guy with his son, laughing and chucking a football about, and then you hear the wife explain how, after the final decision by the insurance company not to pay up, she came home to find him hiding in the toilet, crying. His pride made him repeatedly ask her to go away, but finally he explained that he wasn't afraid of death; he just didn't want to lose his wife and son. I can't explain how sad this was to see and hear, but it reduced me and my girlfriend to tears.

There are lots of other examples in Sicko of how American health insurance companies use red tape and loopholes to deny people life-saving treatment. The film makes it very clear that once you introduce the profit motive into health insurance, it is in the insurer's interest, wherever possible, not to pay claims. And that only leads to people who need healthcare being denied it. And the whole thing made my blood boil.

It makes me feel glad that in the UK we have the National Health Service, which, for all its flaws, does not make income a prerequisite for life-saving treatment, or require you to be insured by an unscrupulous company before it lets you past the doors of its hospitals. Sadly, whether the NHS will continue to offer good, free healthcare is open to question; both the main political parties in the UK seem quite determined to let private companies become more and more involved in running it. That will bring the aforementioned profit motive, and the results will be distastrous - if profit becomes king in the UK, healthcare will eventually become the preserve of the well-off; or, private companies (read 'middle-men') will charge the government (read 'tax-payers') so much that it becomes unaffordable, and the quality of care will deteriorate to the point of no return. Needless to say, some camera-friendly Tory (read David Cameron) will then pip up that it's time to privatise the whole thing - and bye bye free healthcare.

If you don't believe me, watch Sicko.

Here's a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ot7BnvD7yQ.

On singing...

2007-10-12T22:47:00.000+01:00

I'm working on a new album right now. The 'difficult second album'. Except that I've been making albums for quite a while now and I reckon this one is technically my fourth. But I've only released one record, so as far as my adoring public is concerned, this is technically still my second album. Or second 'released' album. Except that I haven't released it yet.

Anyway, semantics aside, it has been quite difficult making it so far. I'm bloody busy right now (still plugging "Twisted City" and engaging in other miscellaneous activities which I won't bore you with). I'm making the record in two stages: one, I'm recording the guts of the songs in my own little studio; two, I'm taking the tracks to another studio and tarting them up - replacing drum machines with live drums, keyboards with real pianos, hell, I might even get somebody in to do lead vocals.

I jest of course; how could I deny my dulcet tones to my multitude of fans? But sometimes I think it would be much nicer to get somebody else in to do the singing. This is because for me vocals are by far and away the hardest part of recording - particularly when you're recording them yourself. It's the musical equivalent of staring at yourself in a mirror and looking anxiously for every sign of a grey hair, wrinkle or general blemish. Which of course I never do - I leave that to my girlfriend. She doesn't have any of the aforementioned, but every day she convinces herself that she does.

To make matters worse, I have a good microphone. It's one of the most expensive things I own - it cost me about 1,000 Euros - and as a result it captures things 'honestly'. Which means it captures bad notes very accurately. So you end up doing lots of takes. And then listening to them with the most critical pair of ears imaginable.

Fortunately though, modern recording technology is perfectly capable of making a silk purse from a sow's ear.

Anyway, the album is coming on a bit. I've got about 8 songs shaping up nicely. It's different to 'Twisted City' - I can't explain why, except that it seems more 'colourful'. There's a wider variety of sounds on it, which with my synesthesia thing going on, makes it seem a bit more visually exciting to me (if you can describe an album that way without sounding bonkers). And some Neil Young influenced guitar solos seem to be sneaking their way in.

In other news, I'm watching Saturday Night with Jonathan Ross. Jools Holland is on. I'd like to go for a pint with him one day, he seems like an interesting fella. He's got a slightly squeaky voice too, which I like.

My virtual tape

2007-09-22T13:16:00.001+01:00

I've gone a bit retro and modern this month, by releasing a 'virtual tape'. It contains two free tracks, and people can pass the tape along to people (which I'm strongly encouraging...).

Just click the tape below (if it's visible in your browser) or visit www.singletonmusic.com/tape.htm to get at the songs...start spreading the news...

Where's my head at.

2007-09-13T13:35:00.000+01:00

I noticed that we're about mid-way through September and I haven't written anything here for a bit. So I thought I should put some drivel down!

I'm gearing up for the final release from 'Twisted City', Pieces/Gimme Something, on Monday. It's a double A-side, and with this last single, I've got a real 'end-of-term' feeling about the album now. I'm getting ready to stop plugging it and to pick up a guitar and make a new racket.

Releasing the album has been a very interesting, often challenging thing to do. For years I sat on the material and I think I almost didn't want to put it out, because it wasn't ready. I wanted to get it to a stage where it sounded so good that everybody would like it. Obviously that's a very silly idea, and, once the album came out I got over that pretty quickly. I'm pleased with the reviews - particularly Tony Clayton-Lea's in the Irish Times - but you can't please everybody with an album, and the idea that you can perfect a record indefinitely until it reaches some ideal condition is daft. But you don't always realise that when you're in the middle of making it.

With the new album that I'm recording at the moment, I'm taking a different approach - I'm speeding through stuff. That's not to say that I'm holed up in a studio with a bunch of amphetamines (although that might be one way of doing it), but I'm trying to get takes down quickly and have a slightly more 'warts and all' approach to it.

I haven't come up with a name for the album yet. Whereas 'Twisted City' is all about London, this record is entirely concept-free and any themes that come out of it are not planned. I think there's going to be more emotion and more styles in the new record.

I'm hoping to put some rough mixes up on Myspace soon enough for people to listen to. For now, stay tuned to Radio 2, as 'Pieces' is getting the odd spin. I still think that's one of my better tracks, and one day twould be nice to see it riding high in the charts. But alas, until the powers that be take a chance and do a bit of playlisting, I'll just have to be content with considering 'Twisted City' as a cult classic (as it was referred to in a recent review) rather than a multi-platinum selling one.

That new album title - answers on a postcard please...

Greystones harbour

2007-08-11T02:07:00.000+01:00

Before I moved to London, I lived in Greystones for many years, and I've spent a lot of time in the beautiful Victorian harbour, just walking on the beach or enjoying a pint and watching boats come in.

I'm really saddened to see that developers have been given the go-ahead to build all over it. In other countries, the harbour would be preserved, treated as 'listed'.

I've set up a Facebook group that people who want to campaign against this development can join. If you use Facebook, please do everything you can to spread the word about this group, which is dedicated to using what little time is left to save Greystones from losing something which is really worth treasuring.

The group is here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4311437482&ref=mf

Thanks,
Chris