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.

On Dublin and floor candy

Well it seems I am off to a reasonably slow start with my blog. I think it has been a week since I made an entry, but no bother. I imagine it takes time and effort to establish a rhythm for effectively reporting the everyday.

I went to Dublin at the weekend for my Great-Aunty Mary's 80th birthday, it was quite a bash so I won't try to list all the family I saw! Mary lives in Kilbarrak, a suburb in Ireland where they filmed Roddy Doyle's, 'The Commitments' and 'The Van'. In fact the pub we had the function in, colloquially known as the foxhole but actually called something like the Fox and Hare, was the very same pub they used in both films (I am told, although it has been years since I saw the Commitments and I don't think I've ever seen The Van but apparently Doyle had a good rapport with a lot of the folks in the area during filming and even apparently stopped into Mary's for tea a couple of times during filming. Barrytown in the books is meant to be modelled on Kilbarrak). It was good to go back to the motherland and reconnect with family and it was lovely to have made it on a happy occasion and not a funeral (my last visit was to bury my Great-Uncle Paddy, a great man). Apparently Mary wasn't too keen on having a fuss over herself initially, but when my cousin Cyril told her it would either be the party or her funeral she acquiesced!

I took Heather with me, which, as we were shown around town on Saturday by my cousin Pardraic who kindly put us up for the weekend, resulted in a lot of 'put a ring on her finger' related teasing. We saw some great stuff from the Book of Kells in Trinity College to parts of Chester Beatty's incredible collection in  Dublin Castle. They were displaying bits of the Shahnama, which is a fascinating collection of early Persian/Iranian tales. I'd love to read a translation some day, I'm a keen aficionado of tales of kings and heroes. At the end of the weekend I am pleased to say that Heather has acquired a taste for Guinness... which has long been my favourite tipple. I think I may have tried a bit of my first pint in Ireland when I was about 12; and can quite clearly remember it being the first pint I bought myself in a pub back home in Brighton, aged 15. It's become a lot harder to buy a pint when you're young nowadays, I often find myself asked for ID and I'm not far off thirty!

We returned to Brighton leaving me just an hour to set up my newest toy before rehearsal. I am now the proud owner of a Pog2, which is an incredible pedal from Electroharmonix (EHX). The Pog2 is a pitch pedal, which reproduces the sound you are playing in two octaves below the original signal and two octaves above, making 5 octaves in total... so when you play a chord it has the potential to be huge! To control this mass of frequency there is an attack filter (which smooths off the front of the sound, sort of fading in the note) a low pass filter (allowing you to control how soft or sharp the end tone is) and a detune filter (sort of like the pitch equivalent of chorus, I guess). All of these options can be used alone or in combination and you can save 8 presets! It's qualified for far more than I currently use it for, with particular strengths in creating a 12 string guitar sound or a fairly passable hammond organ tone, which is great as it'll keep on giving me new tones to try out on songs and get excited about!

Not one to be outdone I found when I got home that Tom has also been shopping for floor candy. He picked himself up a pre-'81 Boss Chorus pedal, which creates an excellent chorus tone. Tom took great pleasure in showing us all how perfectly he could recreate the guitar sound from Sweet Home Alabama. He's also picked up a 'Double Muff' pedal by EHX, which he's using for a fatter distortion sound than his Maxon OD-9 (an excellent updated version from the original manufacturers of the Ibanez Tube Screamer).

My band are currently rehearsing twice a week to super-polish some songs for recording and in the sessions we're working with Sweeval, our sound-engineer and noise-guru. He's been encouraging Tom and I to complete a mission I had already begun: removing the multi-effects unit from my effects chain. With the addition of the Pog2 I was able to try this for the first time and it was amazing what a difference it made. I've been using an old Boss Me-33 for some time, which is great in many ways, but the quality of tone is just not quite professional standard. As soon as you remove one of these digital multiple processors from the chain you get a completely different sort of response from the guitar. There is so much more detail of tone and the guitar so much more responsive to your playing dynamics. I also found the multi effects gave a split second delay between pressing the switch and the effect coming on, which is totally unacceptable really!

Currently I have the following set up on the floor:

EHX Pog2 ->
Boss DD-20 Gigadelay (for most of my delay sounds: has 4 save-able prests which is dead handy) ->
Boss TU-2 (tuner) ->
Boss DD-3 delay (set up for a subtle slap-back delay) ->
Boss BD-2 blues driver (distortion, although I use very little of it nowadays).

So I'm nearly complete and almost ready to build myself a proper fixed-position pedal board. Next I'd like to get a Maxon AF-9, which is an auto-filter that they modelled for the Guitar Rig VST I've used with cubase. I want to use the effect to replace phaser sounds I've used in the past, an auto or envelope filter is kind of like an auto-wah, but with the AF-9 they've made a much smoother, subtler sound than those sort of effects usually deliver. Whenever I've used it as a VST I've found it can make a great 70's reggae tone which is what I hope to get out of it. Aside from that I could probably squeeze in one more box, and that would have to be some sort of crunchy-distortion pedal that compliments the blues driver. I can't wait!

Adam.x