After a life of drugs, guns, and jail time (or what his record company calls an “uncanny knack for entangling himself in endless legal snafus”), rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard dies at the age of 35. Of a heart attack. At work.
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11Nov04 — 6
Mixing By Committee
Thank you for the truly helpful and insightful comments you’ve emailed/posted about the rough mixes of my latest song. I have tried to take them all into consideration in making these: big MP3 [5 MB] smaller MP3 [3 MB] Windows Media [2.5 MB] Ogg [4 MB] Cliff’s sharp ears in particular generated a lot of […]
Read More11Nov04 — 15
v. v. shit
Bridget Jones II is so bad on so many levels that it will be difficult for me to keep this post deservingly short. If you’re in a hurry, read my title. [But first, in answer to Eric’s thoughtful enquiry, I have not been following anything like my usual routine lately. That, my being ill over […]
Read More04Nov04 — 2
Dub Be Good To Me
Thank you to the people who were nice about my music. I’d just like to point out that Barry W, who I swear I have never even heard of before, was scarily perceptive on all fronts when (after being nice) he typed: “It had a real film soundtrack feel to it – I saw a […]
Read More03Nov04 — 3
My Excuse
Yes, I’ve been away for a couple of days, making music. In the past, bands I have sung with have banned me from writing songs on my own, because, without a collaborator to keep me in check, mine all sound like the work of Lenny Kravitz armed with a thesaurus. Working alone for the first […]
Read More28Oct04 — 7
My Gay Trousers
My friend Leasey told me today that she and her girlfriends are going to take me out “on the pull” to a place where repetitive beats are played and alcoholic drinks are served. She has ordered me not to wear my “gay trousers” lest the straight women think I am not interested in them. Apparently […]
Read More27Oct04 — 0
Future News: November
Live from next month, more of “Pooter’s Futures“: The Middle East The body of one of the militants believed to have been responsible for the bombing of the Hilton hotel in Taba on Egypt’s border with Israel has been washed up on a bank of the river Nile near the Egyptian town of Aswan. When […]
Read More15Oct04 — 1
Working Like A Dog
My guitar teacher [he’s the one about to fall into the audience] started teaching me A Hard Day’s Night a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t tell me whether it opens with Gm7 add 11 or G llsus 4th. He just told me to stop fussing about the details, enjoy it, and wobble my head […]
Read More27Sep04 — 0
Return Of The Genome
Saturday’s Telegraph magazine’s weekly Social Stereotype invented a media-friendly academic called “Damian”*, so it’s perhaps not the best time to tell you that I’ve been commissioned [dahling!] to do the cover story for an upcoming edition of geek glossy Linux User. It will be an update of this piece about the human genome project(s) that […]
Read More26Sep04 — 2
Terror In Cambridge
Location, location, location: not living in an area of the World currently suffering under UN monitoring means that these are the two most frightening things that happened to me yesterday… 1. My guitar teacher wants me to learn the off-beat strumming of Supertramp’s Give A Little Bit. To do this I have ripped the song […]
Read More26Sep04 — 1
New Yorke New Yorke
Ten years ago when I was in a funk metal band called Tick Tick Boom, screaming about terrorists (as opposed to now, making jokes about them on the Web), our terrifyingly loud, half-Indian drummer Neil Kumar cultivated a running gag about how, one day, Frank Sinatra would cover some of our angrier numbers in a […]
Read More24Sep04 — 7
It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World
Hollywood nymphets cower in the jungle, vainly trying to hide their voluptuousness from James Brown as he looms in the background, poised for another brush with the law. Is this the best pulp book cover ever? (via the comments of Harry’s Place) UPDATE: Damn! As Dave points out, we’ve been rumbled and they’re blocking our […]
Read More20Sep04 — 3
NB
Right now, tens of thousands of older brothers are telling their younger sisters that Natasha Bedingfield (down from number 7 in the UK singles chart* to number 11 yesterday) is “teenybopper crap” and that Green Day (straight in at number 3) are punk kidz keepin’ it real. That Bedingfield bint doesn’t even write her own […]
Read More20Sep04 — 0
Grainy
I don’t believe that adults find it harder to learn than children; just that adults find it harder to be wrong. Learning is about being wrong over and over again until you are almost right. As I get older I find it harder and harder to make things that I’m happy with. There are presently […]
Read More08Sep04 — 0
An Alanis Moment
My friends will, I think, smile wryly at the news that PooterGeek is the sixth hit on Google for “beneficial effects of marriage“. [I could explain the “Alanis” reference here, but why bother shooting a fish in a bucket when plenty of people have bagged it already, including this guy? He’s wrong about her singing […]
Read More30Aug04 — 6
Charlotte Jones Is Everywhere
When I was about 16, Charlotte Jones, now a playwright, beat me in the final of a public speaking competition. Because we were released from the green room to compete one-at-a-time, I didn’t meet her in person until a couple years later when we wound up undergraduates at the same college. We then spent far […]
Read More30Aug04 — 1
The Decline And Fall of British Popular Music: Part XXXVII
Nick Barlow at What You Can Get Away With links to this piece by Sandy Hunter about errors made by the judges in that international gathering of peaceful competition, the World Air Guitar Championships (“If you are holding an air guitar you cannot hold a rifle”). Nick Barlow asks, why no air drums? Sandy Hunter […]
Read More16Aug04 — 1
Retro-Blogging
One day in the nineties, my friend Hind, woke up and left her student house to go for a walk in Oxford. She threw on a sloppy sweater, pushed her hair into something like a do, and strolled up the Cowley Road towards the city centre. Some French schoolkids walked past her. One saw her, […]
Read More15Aug04 — 0
Straight Outta Pangbourne
Listening to Vibe in the shower today, I was stunned when Aretha’s “Respect” failed to shame completely the current single that followed it. Cherie’s “Number 1” is sung so well, pumps along so brightly, and is produced so smartly that you’d never guess she was from, er, Berkshire. As is sadly so often the lot […]
Read More07Aug04 — 3
Much-More-Material Girl
Looking at the photo that illustrates this article, you have to wonder just how many M&Ms were made available for her backstage during Madonna’s last tour.
Read More06Aug04 — 0
Competition For The Carpenters And The Osmonds
In the race to be weirdest family pop act of all time, the Trachtenburgs are driving a station wagon very fast. [Thanks to James “le goth” Arthur of Richard‘s film composition course. Requires RealPlayer.]
Read More05Aug04 — 2
Not Exactly Heroes
How’s this for ‘Blogger solipsism? Two people whose work I admire have died this week. Henri Cartier-Bresson is the second. Check out the retrospective at Magnum. (While I’m on the subject, have a look at this very un-H C-B Photo of the Week at photo.net). The way things are going, Aretha Franklin had better remember […]
Read More21Jul04 — 0
Quadrophenia
This reminds me of those long-gone days when Michael Jackson was blacker than me and his fans were madder than both of us. Jackson wrote the song Billie Jean about a stalker of his who clambered over a wall, chased him round his swimming pool, and claimed that she was carrying twins—only one of which […]
Read More09Jul04 — 0
Losing Weight, Putting On Airs
Here's something to do after you've spent time on your scales. I blame The Darkness.
Read More06Jul04 — 0
Buy The CD. Listen To The Band.
Tonight in Brighton, A3 Music, purveyors of this fine album, will be staging another showcase for their artistes. One of the acts will feature two hardened old music business pros on piano and drums respectively and a geek on vocals. Happy am I to be growing old at a time when The Young People are […]
Read More27Jun04 — 1
Hit Me Baby One More Time
When Dolly the Sheep was cloned from a single cell of her mother/twin's udders, one of the science-fiction-horror side-effects of the manner of her conception was the premature ageing of Dolly's own cells. Someone should tell Britney that the terrible downside of being created from a flash-frozen scraping of Madonna's left breast is that she […]
Read More23Jun04 — 4
Festival Round-Up
Despite featuring the towering talent of Morrissey, this year's “alternative rock” Lollapalooza tour in the States has had to be cancelled because of poor ticket sales. You mean the young (ha!) people don't want to hand over their hard-earned to witness the still-fresh and boundary-breaking virtuosi of the Pixies and Sonic Youth? Say it isn't […]
Read More23Jun04 — 0
Whoda Thunkit?
Join me on the bleeding edge of radio broadcasting, where Tony Blackburn and Cliff Richard form a radical alliance against corporate music programming. No, I'm serious. The cheesy, 61-year-old Blackburn is a true rebel and has put his job on the line to prove it. I find myself in the disturbing position of supporting him […]
Read More15Jun04 — 6
The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores
Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet, Boy George of Culture Club, Kim Wilde of, er, Kim Wilde; the list is far longer than it should be, but the the top of the roll of annoying 80s has-beens competing for a timeshare on another fifteen minutes is the neck-snappingly overrated Morrissey [helpful of them to name his […]
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