Why I'm not convinced by the mixed race Spider-Man...

Today I read in the news that Peter Parker has been killed off and the man behind the Spider-Man mask is now going to be Miles Morales, a mixed race American teenager. I had noticed when I was in a comic shop, with my good buddy Phil Hoile, a week or so ago that there was a special 'death of Spider-Man' comic selling like hot cakes from the counter.

I decided to resist the urge to buy it, as I figured that comic book history is littered with aborted 'death of' stories and I wasn't prepared to succumb to the gimmick. Even the one major hero death that stood from my era of comic book collecting, the death of Robin aka. Jason Todd, has now been rescinded to make for a new story arc.

I had no idea at the time that the storyline was actually a vehicle to change the identity of the man behind the mask, I'd bought the first 30 or so issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, interested in the re-boot and keen to see Mark Bagley taking pencils duties again, but hadn't been following for awhile. Avid readers may have predicted all this from storyline build up.

Now, why do I object to this turn of events, you might ask, especially considering I'm no longer actively reading the storylines?

Well I've a number of points...

1) If they really wanted to do a mixed-race character justice they would create a character from scratch, make him really cool and put all their marketing power into launching him as a major marvel universe event, they wouldn't just slot him into another heroes costume. I'm pretty sure the new black Batman will struggle to gain traction too (launched last month apparently), not because he's black but because he's Batman.

2) You first have to suspend your disbelief that a man bitten by a radioactive spider can develop superhuman abilities and a disproportionate sense of civic responsibility, but you're expecting to do that because your reading a Spiderman comic - next you have to believe that when this superhuman dies another, completely unrelated, superhuman turns up with the same powers and carries on where the old guy left off. How did he get those self same powers? I suppose though this point is a plot contention for a plot I've not read in full, so I could let it slide.

3) It's a gimmick and it's been done before! Remember when Superman died and got replaced by a black guy? No? Well for those of you who've never heard of Steel you can have a quick look through his wikipedia entry: Steel (John Henry Irons). Lets see the timeline of this particular Man of Steel:-

1993 - John Henry Iron's first appearance, a black guy in a steel armour suit with a big hammer. He fills the void left behind after Superman is killed by Doomsday. There are four other 'Supermen' in the story arc, but Iron's, or 'Steel' as he becomes known for ease of differentiation is the one who Lois Lane thinks may have had the soul of the real Superman 'walk-in' to him.

1994 - Within a year Kal-El is resurrected and Steel gets his own solo comic book series, he's no longer considered the actual Superman, but still a hero in his own right.

1997 - A feature film comes out starring Shaquille O'Neal as Steel. It is a commerical and critical flop, not even recouping 2 of the $16 million budget.

1998 - Steel's comic book series is cancelled - the gimmick has worn off. He still appears from time to time as a supporting character/plot device.


Within four years black Superman/Steel was dead in the water.

(4) It's not even the mainstream universe. Ultimate Spider-Man takes place in a different timeline to the rest of the Marvel Universe, so in normal continuity, in the films and the cartoon series on TV Spider-Man is still a white guy, so nothing has really changed. Total cop-out.

I sincerely believe if comic book creators want to give black characters a chance they need to be original. It's not going to work by just giving an old character a different secret identity, or creating a spin-off or sidekick. You can see why they do it, they think the fame of the original character will provide their new version with the boost they need to gain attention. Unfortunately this borrowed sort of fame never seems to last, the children of stars are certain to get exposure because of their famous parents, but unless they're, (a) as talented, (b) more talented or (c)talented in a totally different way from their elders; that borrowed fame will quickly turn to crushing criticism.

Look up any major player superhero and you'll notice (a) they're white and (b) there's been a black version attempted at some point. Another embarassing feature is if you look through this wiki list of black superheroes List of Black Superheroes just look how many of them are called 'black' something. Marvel is actually one of the better companies for characters who aren't caucasian, having introduced some strong characters early on, 'Black Panther' and 'Black Goliath' both turned up in 1966. Goliath doesn't need the 'black' in front of his name any more thankfully.

Still I think the list of latino or asian superheroes will most likely be a lot shorter than the black list, and I'm sure mixed race characters are extremely rare, so it's good Marvel wants to do something about it. For a long time they've probably been the leaders in having a diverse cast of characters in their universe, but this seems like a hackneyed plotline done to death.

Marvel is definitely capable of launching sucessful heroes who aren't average white guys, and it should look at it's own success stories when plotting it's next move... characters like Storm (X-Men), Bishop (X-Men), Skin (Generation-X) and Blade are all original characters whose powers and origin stories aren't built around them being a black replacement/substitute/sidekick for another hero - although it's worth noting Blade is the only one of these whose been succesful enough to tick all the boxes of a major character - own title, television show, cartoon, movie, computer game and action figure.

If they want Miles Morales to last they'll give him his own powers and his own costume to wear and then work on the rest. Make him archetypal, make him appeal to teens as they try and discover themselves. Don't make him just another spin-off.

Progress...

Well, we've had 3 gigs now in 3 months since changing our name to Fragile Creatures... or rather adopting the name Fragile Creatures for the band; I didn't stop being Adam Kidd. Our latest show, last Friday (29th July) at the Green Door Store, was really great!! My friends Foxes! had asked us to open up for their first show in Brighton since November last year. I was at a birthday meal with Adam, Alan and Matt from Foxes! when they told me about the show. They'd said they had a gig coming up at the Green Door and they needed one more band to complete the line-up:- I umm'd and ahh'd about it, as we're concentrating on recording at the moment, particularly as we're still between drummers. The next thing I heard about it I was invited to the gig through facebook and we were already on the bill!!

We were totally blown away by how many people came to see us, especially as we were on at 8pm... and everyone seemed to enjoy the show, particularily the newer songs we played in the second half of the set. When I got home there were several e-mail requests through our reverbnation page to upload some songs for people to listen to. I'm going to have to resist the strong temptation to share at the moment, as what we're cooking up in the studio is too good to go out as 'work in progress'!

We played new song 'The Chemicals' for the first time as a band (I actually performed it with Billy, whose playing cahon for us, at an open mic night the evening before as a warm-up!) and it fit in really well. I've written a number of reggae influenced numbers before, but this one seems different, it's got a pretty unique feel... if I slwo the main riff down a little it could form a basis for a Buena Vista Social Club style lating groove. Aaron and I stumbled over each other explaining what the song was about, he said, 'it's about drugs ladies and gentlemen' and I countered with, 'caffeine'! When I wrote the first lyrics for the chorus, 'the chemicals/ they rot your brain and they drive you wild/ they're everywhere I seem to turn/ I want them all,' I was actually thinking about more than just Class A party drugs. I was thinking about all the tiny little addictions to things like nicotine, sugary drinks, people who have to pop endless painkillers; and how these little chemical interactions drive our lives.

The verses though do tell a story, loosely based on something that did happen to me, about drugs and parties and memory:- although really I feel I'm saying that love is the drug, or rather drugs are a love substitute, taking one to lower your inhibitions to make it easier to find a lover or taking abother to forget a lover you've lost. It's a familiar story.

Anyhoo, don't want to twaddle on endlessly, I shall finish with the setlist as I love a good list:

1. Empty Head
2. This Strange Dance (short arrangement)
3. Just A Fool
4. Fragile Creatures
5. The Chemicals
6. End Of The World (For Two)
7. Stowaways
8. Into The Night

After this show Tom was pretty sure it was the newest material that was strongest, and thinks we should try and get She Makes Me Nervous ready for the next live show (not that we have one booked). For my part I think it's high time we settled the drummer issue, before we do any more live shows - if that takes us out of action for a couple of months, well so-be-it. I'd also like to play on electric guitar on some of the songs. Acoustic has it's limitations - especially my guitar with it's crappy pick-up!

Onwards and upwards! X

Authors voice...

I finished one book today and began reading another one straight away. I am lucky to have had a large pile of interesting books to work through after winning a number of books in a competition earlier this year. It was at a sort of Christmas-like get together for members of my girlfriends' comedy troupe the Maydays, hosted by John Cremer. John likes to give away all the books he's read in a year with a name-that-tune game, this time with Bob Dylan songs covered in a reggae style! The first person to shout out the correct title got to choose from a selection of books:- and there were quite a few I had my eye on, luckily my Bob Dylan knowledge and my reggae deciphering skills enabled me to get about 8 (I think).

I've just finished reading Moondust by Andrew Smith, a book about the moon landers that I thoroughly enjoyed, and have started reading Mud, Blood and Poppycock, a book about the First World War by Gordon Corrigan.

Going from one to the other, and this is early days I might add (I'm only part way through the introduction where Corrigan outlays his intentions for the rest of the book); I am immediately struck by a slight distaste for Corrigan. He wants his book to be a revisionist text, redressing the bias towards pacifism in historical accounts of the Great War.

At least twice already he has taken umbrage with people stating that the war was 'unecessary and tragic' and yet has no problem discussing fondly people who enjoyed their wars, despite playing witness to the deaths of friends and gross humnan tragedy on an epic scale, and I'm only on page 21!

I can see where Corrigan is coming from, no soldier wants to risk their life in a brutal conflict and come home to find they are not venerated by the people back home they thought they were protecting. They don't want to think of their wars as tragic, as a waste of life, it can be belittling in the extreme to be told the focus of your life, whatever that may be, has been ultimately pointless.

He makes some good points already, and reasons and argues them well, but I'm afraid he may miss the point in all this bad press the old wars have gotten. It's surely a good thing that the global conflcits of the 20th Century are deeply unfashionable and unthinkable in todays climate. We don't mind sending a few troops to tag along to America's latest evangelist drive to inflict it's own corrupt version of capitalist democracy on a far off alien land, perhaps to keep men like Corrigan feeling useful; but overall we'd like to pretend that we're all anti-war and pro-diplomacy and that our governments will do anything in their power to avoid large-scale and long-term conflict. This is the result of decades of bad mouthing those wars.

Perhaps Corrigan is right that the commanding officers of British forces in the First World War have gotten a raw deal in the history books... his description of what the average person thinks of WWI is accurate and his debunking very interesting so far, so I will no doubt read the whole book, and maybe by the end I'll have forgiven him for his soldierly attitudes and conservative values.

The thing that really struck me though, immediately within a few sentences, is that compared to Andrew Smith, whose been a cosy companion for the last month with Moondust, I just am not going to like Corrigan. It's fascinating how easily I am swayed to like or dislike an author, or the voice he chooses to use. Andrew Smith's enthusiasm for the moonmen was infectious and the book turned into a real page turner for me, even though I was never really that bothered before. I even felt compelled to watch Apollo 13 after finishing, even though I ignored it the first time round, thinking it would be boring. Smith's novel is a personal journey - what did the moon landings mean to him and what did they mean to the moonwalkers themselves and what did it mean to Smith that they meant what they meant to the moonwalkers? (I could be shot for that terrible sentence construction).

I don't think it's just a case of having an interest in the subject and therefore liking the authors voice, I tried to read one of Richard Dawkins books once and, despite agreeing with almost everything he said, I hated the way he said it. You could feel the hubris dripping from each sentence. He's not just an aetheist, but an evangelical one. He is contemptuous of anyone whose beliefs differ from his own, it would appear, and therefore he's almost unscientific! Science is about theories: proposing one and supporting it with evidence whilst being able to adapt if the evidence proves your assumptions were incorrect. It seems unfair to outright dismiss peoples feelings of spirituality... one thing a number of moon-voyagers had in common was discovering a sort of spirituality in space in spite of their scientific backgrounds. On the return journey, staring at the distant earth as it grows larger in the portholes, several of the moonmen speak of an awakening spiritual sense, of a connection to the universe they'd not felt before.

Some went on to define this as god, and worship that deity as they saw appropriate. I got a glimmer that it could be that 'god' is a human desire to put an unarguable answer to an unknowable question... and clearly up there in space you'd be pretty overwhelmed by the vastness of the unknown - I'd imagine the guys that orbitted the moon (waiting to collect the guys on the surface after their exploration) mast have had the most accute experience of this as they passed round the dark side.

I suppose the point I'm fumbling into here is that our awareness of the unknowable questions is the crux of the unique mental capacity that seperates us, as far as we know, from the other animals here on planet earth. God then, would have been invented as an early method of preventing our awareness of these ultimate questions from over-powering us and shutting us down. The universe is vast and unknowable, but we can blame that all on 'god' and get on with our lives... as our lives have become more advanced 'god' concepts have generally become abused, because they require a fixed position, an ideolgical standpoint. You can't shift your ethics to fit the current situation if your ethics are based on a fixed idea of god, attached to a time and a place and some holy books. This lack of adaptability is what's made religion become increasingly irrelevant to modern societies which might be why I have difficulties liking Dawkins and Corrigan too.

I sense from them a similar fixed position, like the opposing forces digging in to their trenches in the Great War. Dawkins wants to raise up Darwinian evolution and selfish genetics and I imagine him having trouble shifting position if fundamentals of his science were disproven. Corrigan, although I'm probably being unfair basing so much on a handful of pages, seems unable to regret the past, he wants to glorify the sacrifice of brave warriors, but can't see that when we venerate the heroes of one generation we feel the call for new heroes in our own and that actually the future world would be a far better place if there were no soldiers left anywhere.

Andrew Smith, by contrast, is hard to put down because his book is infused with the desire to learn more about a fascinating subject and in so doing bring it to a wider audience, rather than a desire to correct us all in our wrong thinking about a subject the author knows far better than us.

Another book I read very recently, that I've been trying to think of a way to slip in to this discourse is Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi. Hers was a voice I enjoyed thoroughly, and hers a story I valued learning. I think, with Iran being the subject of a lot of hostile news reporting and American fears that developing nuclear power stations and early attempts at a space programme (I believe they recently put their first sattelite in space) will inevitably lead to nuclear weapons; this book should be widely read here to give some historical context to the situation there. (I'd like to say more about it, but feel like this blog is already over-long)

I've always been deeply suspicious of America (who landed men on the moon with NASA and dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end Japan's involvement in WWII) when they talk of a foreign policy desire to prevent other nations from acquiring nuclear power or the capability of launching objects into space. It seems wrong that they can have something, continue to use it and then decide it is unsafe for the world for other places to obtain it - it's extremely arrogant. If we all shared our technologies and promoted their peaceful applications we'd end up saving a lot of the world's resources from being wasted as they are pumped into armed conflict.

One of Smith's salient points about the Apollo programme, in discussing the cost and whether or not it was worth it, was that although the price tag of $25.4 billion is shocking, and unforgivable when compared to US shortfalls in healthcare, housing and education throughout the period; the Vietnam war cost America equivalent to $662 billion over the same 10 years.

If I ever have kids they'll certainly be playing with toy spacemen and not toy soldiers.

Slow Wednesday Reflections...

Well it is incredibly slow today, which is going to give me the opportunity to write a few words while I watch repairmen fixing the door to the little housing office where I work part-time. A while back the office was converted to have better disabled access, but whoever did the planning hadn't realised that an arm installed to open the front door at the push of a button would be defeated by the latch of the existing lock. After a few weeks of sticky ineffective opening a bright spark in the estate services team jammed a screw into the latch allowing the disabled door open button to work again, although it would occasionally stick when the screw worked its way loose.

Yesterday one of our housing officers spotted this screw, and unaware of the mismatched door aparatus removed the screw. Within a few hours the problems this had caused for people trying to get into the building added up and a repair team were called for, the guys who have arrived this morning and fixed the problem while I was writing these two paragraphs. They've removed the latch from the door, which means that the door will open at the push of a button, but it also means it will fly open from a gush of strong wind and I will get very cold hands!! It seems the days are numnbered for this little office anyway, with plans to merge us into some sort of 'hub' building in the deeper darker depths of whitehawk, so I won't be suffering cold hands for many months.

Hopefully by then my burgeoning music career will have reached a point where I can leave the council. I think it's a good organisation (currently the only green led council in the UK I believe) and a worthy thing to be a part of, but I have deliberately stuck myself in a particularily menial role, so I can concentrate most of my efforts on said music career. Last night I had a pretty positive meeting about our future recording plans and it sounds like we're setting up a label to release an EP... during our chat the possible name of Hub Records sprung up - so interestingly I could be seeing myself avoiding the councils hub by starting one of my own!

On Saturday we played our second ever live show as Fragile Creatures as part of an open air street party called People's Day. We were the last act on the mainstage at 5pm, so it felt a little bit like headlining our first festival! There was a large and very supportive crowd of people watching us which grew as we played and included the oldest and youngest members of the audience dancing. The really encouraging thing about this all was that, apart from a couple of our girlfriends, this was a crowd who had never heard of us and never heard our songs before - they loved it and we even got asked to play an encore. Afterwards I was approached by an agent from an international booking agency... I think it's a bit premature to expect anything to come of that, but I would jump at the chance to play concerts in New York, London or Dubai (the cities listed on the front of his business card)... although with some slight reservations about the latter, I've heard some interesting stories, enough to give me pause for thought.

Here's the setlist:

1. Fragile Creatures
2. This Strange Dance  [we cut this one down from it's usual 6 minutes to more like 4]
3. End Of The World (For Two)
4. Stowaways
5. Just A Fool
6. Empty Head

encore: Into The Night

...and here is a video from the show of us performing End Of The World (For Two) that a good friend of mine posted on youtube. I remember saying to him afterwards something like, "did you see how many camera phones were pointed at us? We'll probably end up all over youtube tomorrow." and he, with a knowing smile said, "Yes. You will."

Here it is:

Jogging, performing, recording, reinstalling...

It's been a busy couple of weeks, I suppose, looking back now things I did a week ago seem like they could be a month ago, which is quite refreshing as time normally seems to be speeding up to me these days. The band has been busy in persuit of results and I've had my head buried in various life admin tasks.

A week ago on Saturday we played our first show as Fragile Creatures at the Unitarian Church, Brighton. We played there a couple of times as Adam Kidd Band and vowed not to return after some really shambolic nights. The lovely church acoustics are excellent for voices but throw in a rock drum kit and you'll hear nothing else, it also seemed like a tough place to convince people to go to, people seem happy to watch a street gig when they set up on the steps, but venturing inside is another matter, particularly with no bar to speak of.

When we were offered this latest show there seemed to be a number of factors that would improve that outlook. For starters we would be playing acoustically, so it was more likely people would be able to hear the music as we intended; the show was part of Brighton Fringe festival, which lent publicity an air of professionalism and we were supporting a Serbian folk singer - Lady Jalena... which sounded like the sort of thing that would pull in the festival crowd.

When we arrived it seemed that things were not going to run according to plan, by this time they had already abandoned the idea of charging £5 and had made the night a fundraiser for amnesty international, which wasn't a problem - we weren't expecting to get paid anyway. Then we found out that Lady Jalena was still stuck in Serbia and another act from the bill, Martyna, had called in sick. Furthermore the PA system was limited to a couple of speakers and a four channel desk... so no monitors and not even enough mics and stands for our four vocals! To top it all of it looked like we would be going onstage during the Champions League Final.

We were determined to put on a good show regardless of any difficulties, particularly as we'd recruited a cahon player (Billy Protheroe) for the gig and rehearsed with him every day for a week! A couple more acts had been found to start off the night and Kate, a great sounding group with a harp, had been bumped up from first on to headliners (we weren't quite sure why, but we weren't complaining - happy with the penultimate slot we'd been booked to do). When our turn to take the stage came the room was practically empty and we were convinced we'd be playing to our girlfriends and Tom's sister! I sarcastically took the mic and said something like, 'yeah, we're onstage now you can all come out from where you're hiding'... and people actually did! By halfway through our first number the room was looking comfortably filled and we played a great set - with a couple of brand new numbers. Into The Night ended up being a weak point, with my acoustic guitar suddenly jumping up in volume and the groove being somewhat elusice. That aside the night went really well. Here's the setlist:

1. Stowaways - first ever performance
2. Fragile Creatures
3. Just A Fool
4. Slow Down
5. A Message
6. Into The Night
7. This Strange Dance
8. End Of The World (For Two) - first ever performance
9. Empty Head

The previous Sunday we'd had a brand new demo of End Of The World (For Two) played on the BBC South Introducing show by Simon Price. I ran into Simon in a bar a few days earlier and he told me he was taking over the show again from regular host Phil Jackson. I vowed to get him a new song recorded in time for it (to help promote the Unitarian Church gig)... and then promptly fell ill for three or four days. So then on the Friday and Saturday I managed to get the guys from the band over seperately to put down their parts in my home studio. We were all really pleased and a little surprised with the results so less than 24 hours after my final mix the song was going out live on a bbc broadcast!

Then on bank holiday Monday we went in for a day at Brighton's Metway Studio to record Stowaways with Toby May on drums and Matt Twaites engineering. Again we were both surprised and very pleased with how good the results were... there's even talk of Stowaways as a potential single. Still it might not be this recording, and I'd rather not jinx it by saying any more on the subject!

In other news my computer died recently, I turned her off at the mains and then she could no longer find windows. I think this was an issue with Sata drivers (having my OS on a Sata Drive) and windows XP... but I cannot claim to be any sort of expert and had to resort to calling in the big guns (Dad!) to help me sort it out. This has meant a clean install and thankfully my DVD drive has started working again! I think I learnt a valuable lesson tough - I am a lot more productive at home when I can't get online as easily! With my PC down I spent a lot more time working on my laptop, recording demos and grabbing time to spend on my Kiyomori project. I'm glad it's working again now, after the busyness of the last coupld of weeks I've felt in need of a wee break and a return to streamed entertainments... last night I caught up on my southpark!!

Finally jogging... a couple of months ago I ran the Brighton Marathon. If you'd told me at age 18 I was going to run 26 miles in 3 hours 47 minutes I would probably have laughed at you! I did it though in the last few days I've found the lure of remaining fit too hard to resist. I don't have any intention (at the moment) of competing in an event again, but my girlfriends flatmate has signed herself up for the London marathon in April next year. When she did the Brighton marathon in its inaugural year several of her toenails fell off!

I seemed to fare a lot better with my first bash at a marathon so I've offered to train her a little, so the long slog isn't as much of a shock to her system. Now, I only trained for three intensive months and loosely for three months, to build up my general fitness. We are way ahead of schedule, but I've suggested we run 6 miles once a week until we're within three months of the even when we'll go into a stricter regime.

On Thursday last week I went out in the midday sun and attempted a run to Rottingdean and back, to prove I could still do it myself to myself before I started trying to give instruction to someone else! I made it but had to stop twice - the gps tracker on my phone told me I'd started out running at 8 miles per hour and kept that up for 2.5 miles. Considering my average marathon pace was about 6.5 mph I was really killing it (and my chances of completing the 6 miles) so I slowed down and managed the rest of the run at a more reasonable pace. Then on Sunday morning I did again, but this time as a supposed trainer! It went much better yesterday, with a nice even pace throughout and only taking a short break to walk up the steep hill from the undercliff walk to the clifftops by the marina.

I think I'm going to enjoy the 6 mile a week fitness drive a lot more than the intense scheduling of trying to build up your distance to marathon length. Still, 6 months of 6 weekly milers and we should be able to hit the longer distances without too much worry.

Time to sign off methinks, another long blog that's probably vaguely tedious. Nonetheless I do see myself as more of a diarist than a reporter... so this is all you're getting out of me!!!

X

I Saw Something Die

This morning I was wakling to work and enjoying the suinshine on my face when I heard an almightly thud up ahead, which I, at first, thought was the sound of a bus colliding witha blossom filled low lying branch - for as soon as the thud sounded the sky was filled with white blobs that I, at first, assumed were blossom. It swiftly dawned on me that it was a bit late for blossom and as I drew closer I realised the blobs were downy feathers. Closer still I spotted the body of a wood pigeon, trying desperately to suck in its last breath. The bus had collided with the bird in flight and now it was just roadkill, everyone watching looked mortified. Poor thing. I felt the event had a sort of melancholic beauty to it and decided to write a haiku, as it seemed appropriate form for to express such a feeling.

Sad blossoms floating.
Feathers in the morning sun.
Twitching. Bus queue frowns.

Progress with the Unfinished|Unreleased project...

When I talked about finishing off the unfinished Kiyomori album last week I wasn't sure if I'd actually ever do it!! A number of factors ought to have conspired against me - I shouldn't have found the time, I might not have had the resources - I ought to have started it, gotten bored and then not finished!! Instead things are looking pretty good. I'm already most of the way there, I'd say, although with each day I seem to find a half finished song tucked away on an old hardrive or something and I start wondering if it ought to be included or not and as my tracklist reaches the higher teens I start wondering if it is more of a double album!!

Part of me wants to call it quits now and leave off songs like Rendition, Not In My Name, Deliverance and Invisible Hands... as we never played them live, Sean never settled on bass lines that I can try to replicate and I never finished the lyrics. Part of me wants to finish those and include a couple of weird songs I found last night 'unittled E min thing' and 'Control' - which was about the fourth time we tried to write a song called Control at Sean's behest!!

So anyway, those decisions are yet to be made so I shall present another list (love lists) of all the potential songs and the state they are in. '*'s next to tracks that are finished.

*1. Banging - finished contemporary demo

2. Deliverance - no verse lyrics, no bass-line... good drum and guitar take with working structure.

*3. Dance Like A Robot - finished contemporary demo

4. Not In My Name - no verse lyrics, no bass line... reasonable guitar and drum take.

*5. Fighting Fire With Fire - thought I'd lost this one but found another copy of the original session, bass was all on keyboards and a little thin so I recorded a bassline, mixed it and now it's finished.

*6. Unsung|Unstrung - Now finished, with synths, bass and additional vocals.

*7. Puppet On A String - finished contemporary demo

8. Gekokujo - Almost finished - need to try and mix it so the new vocal hides the old better (mix has vocal so can't get rid of original ad-lib

9. Invisible Hands - have recorded new bass and guitar. Need to write lyrics, record vocals and find Easy Rider samples.

10. What Goes Around - Good version available with adlib vocals - need to record the written lyrics over this and mix it so the new vox replace the old.

*11. Bird In A Cage (Part 2) - finished with new bass-line, synth, extra vocals

*12. The World They Built For Us - finished contemporary demo

13. More To Lose - needs bass/synth/extra guitar (possibly)

14. Tick Tock - nearly finished, added midi drums to original demo and bass/guitar/synth now thinking it could do with strings!!!

*15. Virtually - I remember Kiyomori played a versions of Virtually a few times, but forgot we'd recorded this version, which was only missing a bass line, so I finished it off.

16. Control - kind of weird little rough thing... repeats same thing for about 2 mins might be nice as a bonus or interlude

17. Untitled Emin - this jam had a lot of potential... nice bass line/sound from Sean. Not sure if I can make something useable out of what I've found and the opening adlib lyric - "something in her eyes said no" Is creepy in the extreme... so I'm thinking about ditching this one!!

On blogging and mucking about with old Kiyomori mixes

I had been thinking of my blog as a sort of semi-private thing, but looking at the stats today it seems I'm probably wrong. Much of what I've done online in the last few years has been music related, and I've done what I can to promote it to my friends, and anybody else I can reach, asking all to listen to what I've been doing. There's been a lot of self-promotion and that does tend to be the way of the internet and social networking, often we find we're only listening to one person's self-promotion in the hope they will reciprocate when we've got something to say ourselves!

However blogging has always seemed to me to be somehow more private, I kept a blog on myspace for a long time and over the years I've found myself glancing back through it as one would an old diary. Sometimes that's been practical, like re-learning the lyrics to an old song I'm busting out; and at others it's just been to remenisce and wander through my old thoughts. I never really got a sense that I had readers or that people were following my sporadic blogging. Apart from very occasionally from a handful of close friends I never really got any responses to my monologues, so I started to think of them as an externalisation of my internal thought processes, or perhaps a way of organising my thoughts before I take them out in public with me.

Today I glanced through the statistics and saw that I've actually had over 100 views, although I'm sure many of those actually came from my returning visits to check my discography entry against recordings I actually had and editting the entries to better reflect reality. Interestingly though I can see that I've had visitors from here (England), Australia, Iran, Germany and America; and that's made me realise how once those thoughts are out there they've been published publically and may come up in google searches on any of the subjects I've discussed. Hopefully this new appreciation of the workings of the blogosphere won't overly affect the things I choose to write about, although I'll happily admit I'll try more than ever to avoid the overly personal... I have no desire to air my dirty laundry in public.


The discography project led me to rediscover a whole bunch of material by my old band Kiyomori that we recorded either while the band was in the process of forming or after we'd recorded and self-released the Uprising EP and started making demos of new material that we hoped to eventually record as an album. For a few years now I suppose I've felt slightly irrationally ashamed of the stuff we did as Kiyomori, the mixture of politics and heavy rock is certainly not to everyone's taste - but I think I started to forget it was to mine! The Manic Street Preachers were one of the first bands I really fell in love with and the Holy Bible, the most visceral of their early albums, was easily my favourite.

I suppose another reason for my Kiyomori-related dispassion was the way in which our plans to follow Uprising with a proper album just slowly stagnated and fell apart. After recording the EP in France we returned home, designed the sleeve, got some copies made and even some badges!! We got copies for sale in local record shops and we got local radio shows to play us, so things seemed to be going well. Then I'm not really sure what went wrong, our promotion of Uprising seemed to stop and we didn't actually release the EP online until a year later, by which point we we'd already decided not to play some of the songs off it any more and we certainly weren't promoting it. At the same time we'd also started the demo's for the album in ernest, making pretty decent home recording versions of songs that had made it to the live set, including Puppet On A String (with some excellent synth work from Tim Mantle), Bangin', The World They Built For Us and Dance Like A Robot. After that we stopped working together effectively, we started lots of things and finished nothing.

I think ultimately we each wanted the band to go in slightly different directions... to my mind we already had an albums worth of material that we just needed to spruce up a bit and then record properly, but this wasn't the album everyone wanted to make. Sean was increasingly vetoing songs and after having many of my ideas rejected I stopped coming up with stuff, I felt like I had no idea what the desired material was supposed to sound like so I stopped trying to write it. We stopped gigging and found ourselves endlessly jamming a handful or riffs and grooves searching for the songs within them that stubbornly refused to materialise... for some reason that just put an image in my head of that Mighty Boosh episode where they come across Razorlight searching in the desert for the 'new sound'.

Anyhow, this discourse on Kioyomori's untimely end has been a detour I really wanted to talk about a new project I've set for myself, I rediscovered a whole load of the songs we'd started recording and not finished and decided that, combined with the 4 songs we already completed home demo's for, they'd make a pretty bloody good album. So I've begun to finish them off for a laugh! A lot of these tracks all come from one session where Ben and I recorded ourselves jamming our way through all our unfinished songs at the time. I had put guide and sometimes ad-libbed vocals on some of them and Ben had cut the more confused jams up into working song structures. When we took this work to Sean he wasn't really into it so it was all abandoned, but I think there are some real corkers in there and I wanted to hear them (sort-of) finished. It's not an easy task, I'm working on top of rough mixes so I can't take anything away (which would be really helpful for some of the ad-libbed vocals that make no sense) but it is quite fun and I can't wait until I've finished and I can sit back and enjoy the Kiyomori album that never was!!

Notes:
Work so far: -

Gekokujo - Rough mix had ad-libbed vocal, guitar, drums and a bass line in the verses (Sean wrote the riff). I finished off the lyrics, matching them to the ad-lib and recorded vocals and put a bass guitar and synth on the track. Currently I'm trying to mix it so the new vocal disguises the old ad-lib, but it's never going to be perfect.

Unsung|Unstrung - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Most of the lyrics were written, so I've just added vocals to reinforce the guide and added bass, additional guitars and keyboards.

Bird in a Cage (Part 2) - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Again I reinforced the guide with more vox, put a bass and some synths on the track... I had to rebuild the intro and outro too as the original was too slapdash for even my DIY tastes.

Tick Tock - We played this live as Kiyomori a number of times but never made a demo. A few years ago I made a ropey home demo with an extra instrumetal outro I had been working on, but my demo never had any drums as I had nothing to make drums with at the time. I've been playing around with writing drums for it using midi, but can tell already this is going to take awhile, I played some beats in using a keyboard, but I'm going to have to go through bar by bar and match the beats to the odd timing of the track, which wanders from the click quite badly and has a different tempo on the outro.


Other tracks:-
Fighting Fire With Fire - I'm gutted about this, we spent ages on it and it was the closest to the standard of the four we considered finished. Sadly it looks like we never mixed it down and Ben's computer has a terrible worm, I booted up the session the other day and tried to mix it down but it only managed 25 seconds before crashing and even then some of the guitar tracks have disappeared. I'll try again to get it off there and failing that I'll record it again from scratch so there's a record as I love the song and it's bizarre structure.

Rendition, Invisible Hands, Deliverance, Not In My Name - I never finished the lyrics to these songs but luckily I have versions with drums & guitar and versions with drums/guitar and adlib. So it should be easy to add bass, vocals and synths when I've written words based on the ad-libs.

What Goes Around - I have a version of this with Ben playing the bass and me doing a terrible ad-lib. Annoyingly there's no instrumental version so I'm going to have to sing the already finished lyrics over a load of gibberish and try to hide it in the mix... nearly finished though and also one we played live once.

More To Lose - I was surprised when I listened to this, it was much more finished than I had thought. I thought it was an abstract collection of ideas but it actually has verses and choruses and all you'd expect. It's drums, guitar and an ad-lib vocal, but the ad-lib vocal actually makes a sort of sense so this one just needs a bass-line and some synth work and it's finished!

On state visits

The Queen begins her historic state visit to Ireland today and I can't help but feel annoyed by it. When president McAleese says it's, 'absolutely the right moment,' for the Queen to visit she can't have been thinking about the economy. There's plenty of republican blood flowing through my veins, from the Irish side of my family, yet I'm not violently opposed to the monarchy here in Britain. I'm happy to ignore them as long as they don't insist on rubbing salt in our wounds - like the recent royal wedding. We're facing a tory government (I'd call them the coalition, but I think Clegg and his cronies leave their liberal and democratic credentials at the door when they turn up to cabinet) who are imposing a diet of strict economic cuts on the nation and they choose to hold an elaborate wedding ceremony with a security bill that costs us more than G20. By all accounts Will's wedding dwarfed the cost of Charles' and all this in a supposed age of austerity.

No the Queen's visit to Ireland is surely both expensive and inappropriate and it reminds me of the popes visit to England last year, which cost UK taxpayers up to 12 million - with the national secular society claiming that hidden security costs, like extra policing, could have seen us paying up to 100 million. I was baptised a Roman Catholic, but I can imagine that particularly grating with all the C of E lot. The 2001 census showed only 9% of the UK population are Catholic and Henry VIIIth got rid of the pope ages ago, the Act of Union in 1707 cemented that. He's just not relevant in England, so then why did we invite him for an expensive state visit?

I can only think that our current government are fans of pomp and circumstance, they want these over blown state occasions and state visits as a tribute to traditional power centres and a spur to some misplaced sense of nationalism. I can imagine them salivating now over the royal photo-ops at next years olympics. I suppose it is marginally better than Maggie Thatcher casting herself as Queen in welcoming back 'our boys' from the folly of the falklands.

So why are the Irish playing along? By all accounts the Queen's visit is costing them equivalent to £6.2 million, add to that the state visit by Obama later this year and you've got the Irish police force worrying their entire annual budget is going to be eaten up by two parasitic sightseers. Everyone understands when the Queen goes to visit somewhere like New Zealand - where, I've been told, the Maori chiefs wrote a letter to the queen asking her to become sovereign... obviously that's a very rose-tinted over simplification of events, but once New Zealand was opened up to the world (by Captain Cook - a Brit) it's leaders decided British rule was preferable to lawless traders and settlers. Nonetheless, there are many members and former members of Britain's once great empire who have fond memories of Britain and monarchy; in Ireland the history is bitter, don't mention Oliver Cromwell, don't ask how many good potatoe crops got exported to England during the potato famine that killed so many, don't mention Bloody Sunday or internment (and I could go on and on).

I do have a theory though, everyone in England must remember the headlines late last year when Britain made out it was single-handedly (alongside the rest of the EU and the IMF) rescuing the Irish economy. You can imagine Osborne insisting on an humiliating Royal visit as part of the deal, particularily if I'm right about this governments desire to make us all more nationalistic. People put up with a lot of shit when they're patriots, just look at all those guys coming back in body bags or with limbs missing from the 'war against terror'. I think that's what Cameron is really after when he talks about the 'big society', he wants us all to muck in together like it's WWII, so he can reinforce the old guard elites of the tory heartland and roll us back to the 80's (or worse) in terms of the welfare system, education and the NHS with a minimum of 'unpatriotic' complainers.

As for Obama visiting, his motivation is clear - state visits to Ireland are good for Irish American votes back home and he's trying to make sure he gets re-elected. US Presidents have been playing this card for years and it's apparently quite effective, presumably it's good in some way for Ireland too, perhaps their American cousins remember to send some business back home or maybe there's no perhaps and this flattery comes with more concrete long term financial incentives. The Obama administration are going to have to get a lot of leg work in before the election, for even the gory glory of Osama Bin Laden's final capture, oh, sorry... execution; hasn't seemed to rub off enough on the presidency. Perhaps he should have relented and published photos of the dead dissident with a bullet in the head. I guess all the votes at home he would have gained would have paled to the potential international outcry... Bin Laden, dead without trial, unarmed and shot in the eye by special forces acting in Pakistan without permission. Sounds like a war crime to me, so where was that outcry?

DISCOGRAPHY

This is kind of a discography of intent... by my birthday (October) I'd like to have all of this stuff as a definitive collection, at least for my own records!

[1] rift - "The Opal Fruits" (recorded '97-'98)
1. Be
2. Seatless Lounge
3. Where Did You Go?
4. Losers
5. Purple Haired Girls
6. Jonny Boy
7. TV Dinners
8. Out Of Synch
9. Primary School
10. Tell Me That You Didn't Know...
11. Heartache (Pulmonary Artery)
12. Shopping For Amy
(+'Secret Track')

[2] rift - "EP collection"
{My False Smile EP (99')}
1. My False Smile
2. No Working Title
3. Early Morning Telephone Box
4. Out of Synch (extended version)
{Metway Sessions (00') - I only have poor audio quality for these songs mastered off the radio}
5. Passive Generation
6. Time's Running Out
7. David Jones Is Dead
{Bitter EP ('01)}
8. Bitter
9. Confront Me
10. Heartache (new version)
{Bedroom Sessions ('03)}
11. Don't Change
12. Hikikomori
13. Better Off

[3] Pornography - "Metway Sessions"
1. Kafka Dreams
2. Rozencrancts And Guildenstern Are Dead

[4] Adam Kidd - "...From The Bedroom" ('03-'05)
1. Seven
2. Man In The Business Suit
3. Goodbye To Summer
4. Fallen Angel
5. Butterfly March (instrumental)
6. Wasn't It?
7. Waiting
8. Obsolete|Incomplete
9. Seven Stories
10. Wake Up Tired
11. Better Off
12. Frank Sinatra
13. Another Picture In My Mind
14. After The Storm

[5] Adam Kidd - "B" ('00-'04) 
1. Don't Go Back
2. Honesty
3. What's Up With You?
4. Teenage Excess
5. Mothers Sons
6. Butterflies
7. Good Advice
8. We Started The War
9. Not For You
10. No One Home
11. Lament

[6] Adam Kidd - "B2" ('05-'08)
1. Instrumental
2. Any Other Night
3. Blueprint
4. End Of The Tunnel
5. George
6. Human Beings (Virtually prequel)
7. Rough Music (The Balancing Act prequel)
8. Snow Globe
9.Venus Or Mars
10. Whisper Round The Room
11.Eileen's Bench
12. My Garden's A Park

[7] Kiyomori - "Gestation" ('03-'05)
1. Once Upon A Time (demo)
2. M*A*D
3. Could've Been
4. Dogtopiary
5. Not Scared Of You (demo)
6. Solution
7. Soft Betrayal
8. She Goes On (demo)


[8] Kiyomori - "Uprising" ('05)
1. Time By Myself
2. None Of The Above
3. She Goes On
4. Speak Clearly
5. Once Upon A Time
6. Not Scared Of You

[9] Kiyomori - "Unfinished|Unreleased" ('05-'08)
1. Banging
2. Deliverance
3. Dance Like A Robot
4. Not In My Name
5. Fighting Fire With Fire
6. Unsung|Unstrung
7. Puppet On A String
8. Gekokujo
9. Invisible Hands
10. What Goes Around
11. Bird In A Cage (Part 2)
12. The World They Built For Us
13. More To Lose
14. Tick Tock

[10] Adam Kidd - "Sketch (solo demo's for LFLIIP)" ('06-'09)
1. Virtually
2. Into The Night
3. I Won't Tell If You Won't
4. Sunshine
5. Just A Fool
6. Smile
7. Fragile Creatures
8. Have It Their Way
9. Bird in a Cage
10. Slow Down
11. This Strange Dance
12. A Message

[11] Adam Kidd Band - "Looking For Love In Inappropriate Places" ('10)
1. All You Believe In
2. Fragile Creatures
3. Into The Night
4. Bird In A Cage
5. I Won't Tell If You Won't
6. Just A Fool
7. Empty Head
8. Sunshine
9. Slow Down
10. Virtually
11. This Strange Dance
12. A Message

[12] Adam Kidd - "Skeletons In The Closet" ('10-'11)
1. The End Of The World (For Two)
2. Down In The Basement
3. Stowaways
4. Peter Wallner
5. The Stumbling Block
6. When The Dust Settles
7. The Balancing Act
8. Dear Michael
9. Drink The Cup
10. She Makes Me Nervous
11. Fragments of Memory
12. 5/4-6/4
13. Catching Up

[13 + 14] The Pocketwatchers - "Pocketwatching Vol 1 & 2" ('08-'11)
*not formally collected so random track order
1. Cain
2. Keep Falling (With Love)
3. Santa Muerte
4. Speedball II (remix)
5. Heroes
6. Honesty
7. Hands
8. The Journey
9. Dance With Jolie
10. The Pocketwatchers Theme
11. Attack Of The Wraiths
12. Dimitri's Abortion
13. Synaesthesia
14. Storm Clouds
15. Peter Kicks The Wolf
16. The Cowboy Song

All quiet on the bloggy front?

Yes, I've been silent for a few weeks. There have been lost of changes afoot and I wasn't sure whether to talk about them, or what to say if I did, so I thought I'd keep schtum for the time being. You see, I set up this site as a personal blog, but also with the main purpose of blogging all things 'Adam Kidd Band' related... and then a few weeks back, I suspended blogging activity because 'Adam Kidd Band' ceased to exist.

Fear not though, dear reader, for this marks no end to music-making. We are continuing with the new name Fragile Creatures... which isn't exactly a new name really, it's actually an old song title that suddenly appeared to work conveneintly well as a band name, I'm not sure why we didn't think of it earlier as 'Adam Kidd Band' made me feel a little uneasy every time I had to tell people what my group was called. It wasn't only a name change though, as I doubt that would have caused my temporary silence, no, unfortunately we also asked my brother Ben to leave the band.

All this change his given me a good moment to look back and take stock of where I am and what I've been doing. I've been organising my archive of demo recordings just to get a sense of how much work I have done over the last decade... I turn 30 later this year, so it seems a good time to be doing this archival work, along with running the Brighton Marathon last month (3 hours 47 mins on my first marathon yo!) so I'm in the best physical shape of my life, I know where I've been and I know where I'm heading as I enter my fourth decade!!!

So the batch of songs I've nearly finished recording at the moment can be considered as my fourth solo album - although one of these is more a collection of odds and sods than a distinct period of song-writing, as the other three are. My solo or demo albums are consistently low-fi recordings, I use the recording process as a song-writing tool, finishing off songs by making a sketch of tunes I've been writing on guitar... so they are totally warts and all and not ever really intended for the general public... but I have to confess I am often particularily fond of these versions... as nasty as the production may be (and I'll happily admit to being a terrible drummer/keyboardist), but in these versions the songs are at their purest... the first time they've been performed as a finished song is often in the take that forms the core of the demo/solo album version.

Besides my solo albums, and the Adam Kidd Band album we recorded last year, there's also music I've made with/as rift, Kiyomori and The Pocketwatchers. Rift made the Opal Fruits album (my first) in 1997-8, and followed it with My False Smile EP, Metway Sessions EP, Bitter EP and The Bedroom Demo... all of which could be collected into a 2nd album. Kiyomori released the Uprising EP, but we had a lot of material floating around when we went on hiatus, I've always been keen to collect this stuff together onto a disc as a sort of posthumous album, but I don't have access to a lot of the sessions (if they still exist) and don't even have all the mixes... the Kiyomori beast is not quite dead yet though - we even played a gig this year and now Ben isn't in my band I'd like to keep working with him in some capacity, so Kiyomori may well be it!! The Pocketwatchers have recorded tonnes of material, I saw Andy Haines at the weekend and we agreed it would be a good way to spend a day assessing what we've done and grouping it into collections. I'd say there's definitely 2 albums worth there, possibly three!

 So there you have it folks, including the one I'm working on right now I've recorded at least 10 albums worth of material since I started making my own music, which was probably 1996, or possibly 1995. I'm quite pleased with that!!!

[Think I'll start making the full discography in another blog... I love lists!!!]

We've been doing a spot of recording and Werner Herzog has been filming caves in 3d!!

Hello,

Adam Kidd Band have just spent a couple of days recording at Oscillate Recordings, in Albourne. It was an odd session for us in some ways, as there is no intention of these particular takes ever seeing the light of day! We've been rehearsing twice a week since the start of the year and these recordings a just a test to see how well the work we're doing is going. It can be difficult to assess how ready for recording a band is without actually recording them... so now we should be able to see. We may well go back in a months time and do it all again! This is all part of a process that's leading us towards a trip to a tip top studio where we'll be recording our first proper release (as long as all goes according to plan!)

I made put a load of clips I recorded on my phone together to make a couple of 'making-of' videos. It's my first attempting at doing anything like this, so the results are understandably shonky. Checkemout:





In other news I went to the cinema yesterday and had my best experience of 3D since Avatar!! Well, really it's probably unfair to even attempt to compare James Cameron's Avatar with Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams... but they are the only two examples I have of 3D cinema that has made me go 'Ooooh', 'Ahhh', and turn my head to one side or the other in an attempt to peer around or into scenes. I went to see Toy Story in 3D but the enhancement was subtle and easily forgotten, Avatar was mind blowing, but sadly the plot was only marginally better than Disney's Pocahontas.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a different prospect all together. Herzog leads a small documentary crew with unprecedented access to the Chauvet Caves in Southern France. People are more likely to have heard of the Lascaux cave paintings, also in France, but Lascaux is now sealed up after years of visitors breathing in the cave caused mould to begin growing on the paintings.

The Chauvet Caves were discovered in 1994, and since then have been sealed off to visitors, with only scientists, and Herzog's film crew allowed extremely restricted access. The paintings in Chauvet are the earliest examples of human beings leaving their mark that we have discovered. The paintings, of horses, rhino, cave lions, bears, antelope, ibex and even a panther; are stunning. Beautifully rendered and less naive than you might expect. Herzog's decision to use 3D was, in my opinion, an excellent one as the paintings make use of the contor's of the cave walls to give their subjects relief and dynamism, as the scenes wrap around walls and into indentations there is a real sense of movement and action. In some cases the animals are depicted with 8 legs - as if 2 frames of an animation are simultaneously visible.

The Caves were in use something close to 40,000 years ago, which is staggering. At some point there was a landslide which blocked the caves original entrance and left it perfectly sealed for millenia. The floor of the cave contains bones and skulls that have been completely covered in the calcium deposits that form stalactites and stalacmites, making them look like rock sculptures rather than rela bones. The humans who used these caves so long ago would never even have seen these features!

I've been working on a new song for a little while, Aaron says it sounds Australian - or aboriginal - and was thinking about cracking out his didgereedoo for it!! I've been trying to finish the lyrics, which are about fragments of memories, both those which we use to piece together the lives of our distant ancestors and the kind our subconscious uses to create our own dreams... as I see that there is a great parallel between our dreams and our image of the past. I'm hoping the eye and brain candy on offer in Cave of Forgotten Dreams will spur me on to finish it!!

Ta-ta.

I've been a bit quiet...

Yup. It's hard to know what to write about sometimes and at others it seems unbearably obvious when one isn't within reach of a computer (and I've refused to attempt to write a blog using my phone thus far). Now I'm afraid returning after an unintended hiatus I'm going to mess with the mood and consistency of the whole thing - of course I know that fear is a pretty meaningless one, particularily considering what a small readership I have!

Nonetheless I'd like to talk a little about the band (how it's going) and song-writing, as I'm going through a little bit of a what could ostensibly be described as a lyrical dry patch. Actually it is more a sort of indecisiveness than actually dryness, I'm happily churning out riffs, melodies and chord patterns but I've been unwilling to committ to subjects or specific lyrics.

The band has been rehearsing the same songs two days a week for the last two and a half months since we got involved with some management at the very end of last year. Later this month we'll be going into Oscillate Recordings to cut some live demo versions. These songs are the same ones we've been playing for a couple of years and they all come from the album we've attempted to record twice (with slightly different track listings) but have yet to release (any of it!). In some ways it feels a bit like two steps forward one step back, but I am much happier with how the tracks are sounding that at any point in the last 3 years since little old me as 'Adam Kidd'became 'Adam Kidd Band' and we started to take it a little bit more seriously!

Don't get excited about this though, for these recordings, I've been told, are never to see the light of day either! They are simply demo sketches for our producer-to-be, so he can work out what production needs doing presumably. So after this batch of demos we get to record some of those songs again and hopefully these will be the golden ones that are good enough for the general public, some come back to me in a couple of months!!

This constant playing of the same 6-9 songs has just started to develop into frustration for the band and it bubbled over in our last rehearsal when Tom Alty led a revolt and played Toto's Hold The Line for the first time in quite a few months. A bit of a release but not really satisfying my own desire to try out a whole bunch of the last batch of songs I've written. I had a very fertile stream of song-writing toward the end of 2010, just as things were looking quiet for the band... I wrote and made demos for a whole suite of songs with lyrics which told dark stories, some of them based on real life events from the media.

These songs probably relate back to I Won't Tell If You Won't (a song that's dropped out of our repetoire now, but was always a standard in the early days of this project) which is a song that contains a story about a guy who discovers his girlfriend is a serial killer, killing off his rivals for him without him knowing it, having discovered what she's doing he's left with the dilemma of whether to help her cover it up or not. This song was pure fantasy, the whole story emerged as I searched for words to disguise the original thrust of the song, which had some vague notions about secrets and fortune in a relationship of mine that had ended. Empty Head, the latest track to be included in our current repetoire, is in some senses the descendant of IWTIYW, this time the fantasy is not as distant from the true story behind the song, I've merely fictionalised and exagerrated characters from real life to create a narrative.

The dark fantasy themes of these two songs led to an entire batch of new songs with lyrics following a similar vein, easily devided into two camps - songs that are fictions built around (or replacing) my experiences and songs that tell other peoples stories. The first camp includes She Makes Me Nervous, The Balancing Act, The End Of The World (For Two), Stowaways and A Stumbling Block and the other camp includes songs like Peter Wallner (about Mr. Wallner who murdered his wife), Dear Michael (about Michael Gilbert, who was kept captive and later murdered) and Down in the Basement (about Josef Fritzl and his family).

I suppose this desire to hide myself in my songs is a natural impulse, an attempt to avoid the bleeding heart miserabilism or (overblown romanticism) of most singer-songwriters. However some recent discussion and more informed opinions about my material have left my head full of musings, which are probably the principle cause for my unwillingness to settle on words right now. I was recently discussing my song Slow Down with a couple of different people on my team and it has been suggested I remove the word 'drinking' from the song, as it is too obvious... it anchors the song to a meaning, it reduces the potential abstract interpretations people can make for themselves by telling them 'this is a drinking song'... funnily enough I think the melody first hit me thinking about how drivers on quiet roads late at night can ignore pedestrians and zip around without considering how dangerous that could be.

The fact is I have often held back from saying something definitive and I think this is an excellent device for allowing a song to be reinterpreted by the audience, so I'm giving some serious consideration to dropping the word... quite a big thing for me (and it won't happen if the song feels disjointed without it). It's also started to make me consider this batch of tracks that actually describe a macabre news story, with accurate information coupled within my own imagined emotional context, and wonder if there is too much truth in those songs. I've actually had some really strong reactions to the song about Fritzl, several people (including band mates) have suggested or asked me not to explain what the song is about before I perform it (perhaps so people can judge it on it's musical merits), I've had people turn their nose up at it and I've had people tell me what a great tribute to Fritzl's long suffering daughter my lyric was.

Now I'm uncertain about it, is it too big a subject. At the time I wrote thiese songs because I spent a lot of time reading news stories in my boring job and these tales had gripped me - they had filled me with a sort of creeping horror, Michael Gilbert's sad story brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion with pity for that poor man, whereas what really interested me about Fritzl and Wallner were the men themselves, what had happened to their humantiy to make them act so cruelly, with such detachment?

I have two songs desperate for words right now, there's a song Aaron and I have been co-writing, which we see as our sequel to Into The Night - it's got pop credentials aplenty but I am struggling to make a decision on lyrical approaches. At first I was thinking about writing it about being persued for money by companies (in my case Brighton Uni after unexpected tuition fees and various credit cards and loans I've been trying to pay back since being armed with them as a foolish late-teen) but I've also been thinking about writing a fiction about Britain after the Roman withdrawal to pin the words to.

The other song is a dreamy number and I've been thinking about writing it about a sort of legacy paranoia - a fear of what will be left behind when we are dead and how that will be interpreted by future generations. I want to marry this idea with an abstract notion... comparing the way that dreams are made up of fragments of our lives that return to us in sleep to archeology and how our image of these people is constructed from a similar jumble of fragments... the past is constantly changing, so how can the future ever be certain?

Anyhoo - that's enough rambling for now, suffice to say I've a lot on my mind and plenty of songs left to write!! If you follow what I do you may want to take this opportunity to make sure you've grabbed all the downloads from my reverbnation page as I think I'm going to be stripping back our public face even further after the weekend... it's time to loose those old sketches, so if you've not downloaded them yet now's the time: http://reverbnation.com/adamkidd

Until next time,

Adam.x

On public toilets.

I've just been reading an article from the BBC online news about public toilet closures being another symptom to expect from the massive cuts in public services currently being implemented by the coalition government. Apparently out of Manchester council's 19 remaining loos 18 are to be closed.

As a child growing up in the 1980's I can clearly remember walking around town in Brighton with my Mum cursing Thatcher for all the toilets that had closed. Later as a teen in the 90's I can remember feeling very sheepish about asking to use the toilets in pubs or shops, I think I may have seen a 'for customer use only' sign at a decisive point and have always felt funny about asking ever since! My worst teen experiences are great examples of how the few toilets left open were poorly maintained.

On my 15th birthday I arrived in Brighton Station with an almighty hangover after a very odd evening attending the funeral service and wake of the dean of St Paul's cathedral. There was an elaborate do in some sort of Guildhall building, with canapé’s, ice sculptures and women with wine bottles filling your glass after what seemed like every sip - I had a glass for red in one hand and a glass for white in the other (this may have been inappropriate for a funeral wake, but I didn't appear to be the only one, just the youngest, most impressionable one)!

Waiting in the taxi cue at Brighton station the next morning after a tumultuous train ride home it was no surprise I felt a little queasy and unfortunately threw up all over my smart funeral shoes. I had down into the basement of Brighton Station (an area which is no longer a public part of the building) to try to clean up my shoes but found the toilet in a terrible state. Very few of the lights were working and there was toilet tissue and water everywhere, I tried to enter a cubicle to get some toilet roll to clean off the offending chunks only to find someone had shat all over the floor of the darkened cubicle and I now had my own puke and somebody else’s poop on my shoes.

Another experience I find creeping into my consciousness comes from a public toilet I once visited in Brighton Marina. The toilet was outside and underground, accessible via some concrete stairs, it could have been a cold war nuclear bunker. Downstairs it was very, very dark and dingy, from what I could make out of the facilities in the green-ish blinking half light I couldn't imagine a toilet attendant had visited in a long time. I took up residence in one of the cubicles to attempt my business and shortly after heard another man enter, breathing heavily. He took the cubicle next to me and, I kid you not, he started to masturbate, at least that's what it sounded like. I don't know if he was some sort of pervert who was turned on by the thought of wanking within earshot of a much younger man or if he hadn't seen me go in and was just desperate to bat one out after a particularly sexual moment in ASDA, either way it was a very unpleasant experience and not atypical of public toilets in the late 80's-early 90's.

Although many of the buildings that used to be public toilets were sold off by the council (with at least two becoming rehearsal rooms!) the late 90's and 00's certainly saw a mini-renaissance in public convenience in my opinion. Certainly toilets that had long been out of use along the seafront were re-opened and have been well maintained ever since, on my running route I pass at least four, council-run, bright, clean (ish) conveniences. Those basement toilets never returned in Brighton Station but a pre-fab building sprung up behind WH Smiths. It may well demand 20p at its turnstile, but it's clean and the faeces tend to end up in the toilet bowl, not on the floor, in my experience. The park by the pavilion also boasts a very central convenience, which often has a toilet attendant. I don't think my marina experiences would be repeated here.

I can only hope the drastic cuts Manchester council have had to make to their lavatories don't come to us down south. Unfortunately hoping may not be enough.

[the BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12405259]

On running, running and running some more.

I am currently training to run the Brighton Marathon on April 10th. It is a strange and somewhat out of character activity for me to have willingly chosen to participate in. I officially signed up at the end of January, although, thankfully I had been running for a week or so before then. I suppose now, a few weeks in the full horror of what I have undertaken to achieve is starting to dawn on me.

I suppose one of the things that motivated me to attempt the marathon was running in a charity 10km race last November. My girlfriend lives above a pub and some of the regulars had organised a team to run the race for Brighton Housing Trust. As someone who works part-time in the housing department of my local council I am aware of what excellent work they do, and, in a climate of government spending cuts, organisations like BHT need all the help they can get. I roped Aaron in to run with me then as, besides being an excellent keyboard player and backing vocalist, he's a fully qualified personal trainer and has run a marathon before.

The night before that race day turned out to be a surprise birthday party for our old friend Jonny in the pub closest to our old school, which we somehow managed to frequent throughout sixth form. The Dyke Tavern has recently been transformed into a family oriented gastro pub... gone are the two pool tables, the darts, the bar billiards, the indie-jukebox and the cheap, fatty baguettes; replaced with a more mature clientele and a prohibitively expensive (for me) menu. However, on that night they were boasting a guest ale at £2 a pint. All thoughts of saving pocket and preserving race form were chucked out the window and we both drank about eight pints of the stuff!

The next day we made it through the race in a fairly reasonable 52 minutes, suddenly I felt like I actually could be athletic, even with a tonne of booze in my gut. The flames of my future marathon acquiesce had been well and truly stoked.

Flash-forward to now and the harsh reality of marathon running... 10km is nothing it turns out! 10km is 6.2 miles and a marathon is 26 miles 385 yards or 42.2 km... so over four times the distance! Which means if I could run at exactly the same pace it would take me 3 hours and 40 minutes to complete the marathon, which is no mean feat. I'm actually aiming for roughly 4 hours 15 minutes, but that's still going  to be damn tough, just to keep running, as I've been finding in training this last week.

Here's a little peak into what I've been doing in the last week:

Thurs 3rd Feb - I did a 7 mile run.

Fri - rest

Sat - I did the 7 mile run again, this time in the drizzly rain - my first run in really unpleasant conditioins.

Sun - I was going to attempt a 13 mile run (from Kemptown to to Rottingdean, then turn back and run to Hove lagoon and then back to Kemptown)... unfortunately the first 7 miles of the journey over the cliffs to Rottingdean and back in strong winds absolutely killed me, on the way back I was running as hard as I could up hill and into the wind but not really moving anywhere!

Mon - Aaron realised we were a week out on the running schedule he'd been following, we were meant to do 15 miles on Sunday! We decided to reorganise the schedule to set us up to do the 15 miler on Saturday coming and ran a 6 mile fartlek... fartlek is a sort of training where you sprint for a set distance then slow jog the same distance and then sprint again. Repeating this for 6 miles is one of the hardest things I've had to do so far!

Tues - We ran another 6 miles together.

Weds - I was going to run again yesterday but my legs were so sore from four days in a row I decided to rest them... which means

Today - I'm going to have to attempt some sort of run, but not too much so I don't exhuast myself for the 15 miles on Saturday morning! Killer. I could probably bang on for hours about nutrition and stuff, but I'll leave it at that for now, there's plenty of weeks to go before the actual run and so I'm bound to give a progress report before then. Today should be day one of not smoking or drinking ( more than a pint a day, which is apparently good for you!) so I'll have to see how well that goes (may well be essential to manage the big run)!

Please donate to my charity (Teenage Cancer Trust) they're awesome (and I need to raise £650)!!!

http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=AdamKidd

On Mubarak and Myspace...

Briefly on myspace now, don't want to give it the time of day but I do have an additional gripe I wanted to get off my chest. It seems like proof myspace is determined to become the North Korea of social networking sites. I decided, as you might have realised, the stop using myspace as a blogging space. That was why I first went there, so it's been my main blog home for over five years. Once I'd set up this page I posted final entries on my myspace page blogs letting people know I'd moved here. When I tried to click on the link I posted in the myspace blog (to come here) I got this message:

Sorry, you have reached a link that is no longer accessible due to one or more of the following:

-      A reported spammer site

-      A reported Phishing Site: A site designed to trick the user into giving up user name and passwords.

-      A site which contains malware

-      A site that currently contains a lot of spam

-      The user entered HTML syntax was inaccurate.

My initial reaction was that I must have somehow put the link in incorrectly, so I returned, edited the blog, made sure it had the right URL, put in the right html, but all to no avail. Myspace is blocking links to blogger... which means myspace thinks blogger is a spammer/phishing/malware portal or it is deliberately trying to isolate itself from the increasingly integrated social networking community. It shows that the team Rupert Murdoch has put behind myspace, since they bought it, haven't understood what makes social networks tick: you have to get the user generated content right first, ease of use and compatibility with other popular sites (not dogged resistance to them and poor attempts at copying them). Know what you're good at and do it well, once you're good at it the community will build and you can start trying to turn a profit from them, not the other way round.

Now for Mubarak; I want to write about him because I am aware that there is a lot of unrest in Egypt at the moment, a popular movement (somewhat inspired by the Jan 14th uprising that overthrew Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia), but I realise I know very little about him. What follows will sort of be thinking out loud - getting an overview (using limited web based sources of information - primarily the questionable source of wikipedia - I'm not trying to get definitive answers just slightly broaden my knowledge base).

Mubarak became president after the assassination of President Anwar El Sadat. Sadat was killed by Islamists who, amongst other things, were outraged at his peace treaty with Israel in a series of meetings facilitated by US president Jimmy Carter. Mubarak continued friendly relations with the US, when George Bush snr. wanted allies for Gulf War I in 1991 Mubarak and Egypt eagerly stepped up. At the end of the war Egypt was forgiven about 14 billion of its national debts by America, the Arab states of the Persian gulf and European allies. Mubarak maintained a strong alliance with Israel, but was opposed to George W's Gulf War, as he felt it was more important to settle the Israel/Palestine issue first.

Mubarak has stayed in power this long whilst maintaining the thinnest veneer of democracy. In his wikipedia entry it doesn't say he was elected president in '81, it says he 'assumed the presidency'... whatever that's supposed to mean. Mubarak and his family are extremely wealthy; estimates put him at having a personal/family wealth of around $40-70 billion USD, much of this wealth accumulated from military contracts while he was in the air force according to an ABC News report. I don't suppose it's the norm for military officers to expect such massive remuneration for 'service'. Mubarak was Commander of the Air Force, Egyptian Deputy Minister of Defence and air chief marshal before becoming president, showing how powerful a force he was within the military.

Mubarak was able to win referendum elections in '87, '93 and '99 largely because no one could run against the president due to the fact the Peoples Assembly played the main role in electing presidents (presumably Mubarak also had control of the Peoples Assembly to guarantee those re"elections". Under pressure for reform there was a multi-candidate presidential election in 2005, but with Mubarak controlling the media, the electoral institutions and security it was unsurprising he won. However there have been growing independent media outlets and of course internet access (I saw a graph on the bbc a week ago that said 20% of Egyptians used the net, much higher than most of their neighbours) and so popular displeasure at Mubarak's undemocratic reign and policies have grown to fever pitch. It looks like he'll be stepping down soon enough.

It's funny that I visited Egypt in 2008 and had absolutely no idea about any of this, and no one told us, or hinted at it. Our guide had been explaining a newspaper to me, but I guess it must have been one of the many in Mubarak's pocket. Although I learnt that the Egyptians didn't have any time for Sarkozy; and not much for Blair, no one was going to turn around and tell me that Mubarak was essentially a military dictator in all but name. I suppose America were inclined to keep him in place because although his reign has been most likely illegal (according to international law) he has contributed to stability in the region (in America's favour) by keeping peace and diplomatic ties with Israel (who are largely rejected by members of the Arab League).

Similarly Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia has a military background, having earned degrees in American and French specialist military schools (the Special Inter-Service School and Artillery School, both in France, and the Senior Intelligence School and the School for Anti-Aircraft Field Artillery, both in America). After high profile military and diplomatic careers Ben Ali -ahem- 'assumed the presidency' on the grounds that the incumbent, Habib Bourguiba, although Fulvio Martini, former head of the Italian secret service later said that Ben Ali had been put in power by the power of a military putsch, allowing Bourguiba to flee (and preventing him from performing rough justice executions on the bombers).

In '99 Tunisia had its equivalent of Egypt's 2005 presidential elections: only Ben Ali got a highly unlikely 99.4% of the vote. Under Ben Ali's thinly veiled military dictatorship human rights suffered along with freedom of the press (surprise, surprise). Ben Ali won another sham election in 2009, but it would seem the high employment caused by the global reception has galvanised people against him, leading to the popular uprising that overthrew him last month. In the aftermath arrest warrants have been issue for the fleeing Ben Ali, for illegally taking money out of the nation, and illegally acquiring real estate and other assets abroad.

I wonder if Mubarak will face questions about those old military contracts that made him so personally rich, but I suppose there are ways of legally enriching immorally, such as the UK bankers receiving excessive bonuses, despite the financial collapse and the fact they were bailed out by public money - or the shocking figures Tony Blair now makes for consulting work. I figure Blair probably handed out a few of those lucrative military contracts during Gulf War II to assist him in accumulating so much wealth after office.

On Blair, kettles and posh pop stars.

I was woken for work this morning by radio 4 and the smarmy tones of Tony Blair weighing in on the situation in Egypt. He seemed to be saying something about having supported Mubarak continuing to hold power (for 30 years) as the lesser of two evils to maintain the status quo in Israel. The status quo in Israel seems to involve illegally grabbing land off the Palestinians in the west bank, so I'd question if you wanted to support that status quo, but I was half asleep, so I won't labour the point, I may have misheard. I also thought I heard him complaining about some destabilising leaks (presumably wikileaks), saying they were leaked with a 'heavy-spin' - it was during Blair's rise to power that I learnt the meaning of spin, so he should know.

He woke me up last week as well (radio 4 again, not in person!), saying: "The fact is they are doing it because they disagree fundamentally with our way of life and they will carry on doing it unless they are met with the requisite determination and, if necessary, force," about Iran. It's funny, because I could so easily imagine Amadinejad saying exactly the same thing about western imperialism. Blair wasn't very good at clarifying exactly what it was Iran are doing this time, perhaps wary of litigation. The US and Britain have been posturing over Iran for years, I do hope it doesn't boil over.

Which leads me neatly onto my next topic. It's incredibly cold today and sitting on the front line in the housing office has given me freezing hands as the cold air rushes in with every new visitor. These cold hands prompted me to a rare activity, I went to the office kitchen to make myself a tea to warm said hands. Now I am an avid tea drinker, but not much of a tea maker, I remember my old house-mate Samara saying I was a tea junkie, but only because I said yes every time she offered to brew one, I wasn't filling in extra teas in-between. This tea habit developed when I was first renting and sharing a house, we used to have a lot of visitors so we derived a few house rules to stop us from having to bend over backwards to accommodate them; 1) the last person in has to answer the door and 2) whoever says 'tea' has to make it. I got very good at not saying 'tea'! In my recent trip to Dublin the complete opposite attitude is adopted to visitors, I don't think I've drank as many cups of tea in a weekend before in my life!

Back to today: when I got into the kitchen I noticed we had a rather nice, retro-styled, new kettle by silvercrest. I was, however, puzzled by an odd dial on the side of the kettle. I'd never seen one before, but it had a min-max dial, presumably to change the temperature the kettle reaches before switching off automatically. My immediate reaction was, 'what madness is this', until I considered it a little more carefully. Remembering my days in a coffee shop I recalled that the optimum temperature for tea brewing is as close to boiling as possible, whereas boiling water for coffee can burn the beans and impair the flavour, 88o is better, so suddenly the kettle makes sense and I want one!

Now for my final topic for the days musings, the item that followed Blair on radio 4 before the walk to work: the present prevalence of posh kids in pop music. Nowadays, apparently, the charts are filled with kids who either went to private schools or illustrious stage schools, whereas in the 60's heyday pop was a place working class heroes could make their names. Comparing the charts now with the equivalent point in the 90's shows a massive reversal in the fortunes of the parents of the major players (presumably)!

Pete Waterman weighed in saying that there's a lot of snobbery in the music industry, I think he slightly missed the mark when he complained that they wouldn't look at anyone who didn't have O-Levels (which is what they used to call GCSE's in case you, dear reader, are very young) or go to University. The coalition government may seem determined to put class divide back into education, but, certainly when I was doing it was perfectly possible to get good grades and go to university without a rich mummy and daddy to pick up the bill. However I think he hit the nail on the head when he said, "I think that when all the A&R people wear Jack Wills clothes it tells you where they're going."

I don't even know what Jack Wills is, but I'm assuming it's an extremely expensive brand not to be pondered by the likes of me. If the music industry are populated by the rich and privileged they are most likely to continue what they've done for centuries in this country: preserve their wealth and class through thinly veiled nepotism. Now I'm not claiming to be extremely poor, I'd say I'm probably somewhere in the middle class, and I'm not claiming the poor aren't nepotistic; it's just more damaging to society when the rich are, as the gap between rich and poor has continued to grow, even through 10+ years of Labour. I've no doubt it will get even worse under the Condemnation government, so perhaps this new upper class music phenomenon is just a sign of the times. The music industry is a bit of a playground, the chances of actually making a decent wedge as a performer are pretty slim, so I guess it makes sense it's more and more a pursuit of the moneyed classes.

The sad thing, to my ears, is that the rich stars listed in the articles are making such bland music: we've got Florence Welch, Chris Martin who really make me cringe while others like Jamie T, Jack Penate and Noah and The Whale have just about managed to bore me. Charlie Fink(from Noah and the Whale)'s comment shows how little he understands the issue, "I don't think with our songs where we come from really comes into it, because it's rare that we write about it." Of course not, Charlie, no ones going to write a passionate song about their parents being comfortably well off enough to send them to a posh school, no ones going to write a song about not having to struggle to but your first instrument and not having to juggle three jobs to keep your head above water while you tried to break into your chosen profession.

Still, I'm sure I'm being unfair now and making tonnes of assumptions about Mr Fink, merely because a bbc article states he went to a private school. My Mum sent my little sister to private school, I still don't really understand why, but she's near bankrupted herself in the process. It's could take it as a kick in the teeth, that my brother and I had an education now deemed inadequate for my younger kin. Class is a tricky issue and it is good advice to tread lightly, indeed the grass is often not as green as you might expect. The fact remains though, the wealthiest are getting wealthier and wealthier all the time and that is incredibly unhealthy for society.

We're going to need some schemes to get instruments in the hands of the young and poor if we want a future for working class guitar based music... have you seen the price of a drum kit these days? Ben didn't have one of his own (that wasn't a battered, toneless assemblage of hand-me-downs) until well into his late 20's. One dot they didn't join in the BBC coverage is that this is not just the era of upper class bands it is also the era when bands have been selling really badly (compared to their more profitable, seemingly working class, urban hip-hop/r'n'b counterparts). So maybe money should be left to do the buying and poverty the selling? Nah:- I don't believe that for one second. Fact is diversity is key, keep a flow of people who are representative of the society they are selling to in music, because people need music they can relate to, whatever their background.