It’s like a piece of time travel… my first generation 5GB iPod is getting hard to charge and put new music on, as its Firewire connector is dodgy - and the Firewire port on my PowerBook is broken which doesn’t help.
When the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.
I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook - but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde - in the good old days it was all so much quicker.
All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac - which only has USB 1.0 - and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ - I said movies - and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…
After a strangely satisfying day at work I feel like I’m on a roll. I’m reading a great book (thank you Sarah) - a Douglas Coupland that eluded me - Eleanor Rigby. Pretty much every page has a beautiful idea or joke - like the idea that the reason that the FBI witness relocation program is so successful is because anyone who goes on it gets shot. Genius!
And I’ve rediscovered a lost gem in my CD collection (thank you Smilja wherever you are) - Are You Okay? by Was (Not Was). It’s from 1990! It still sounds great! It has an up-tempo song that’s actually about domestic murder! It has Leonard Cohen singing about Elvis’s Rolls Royce! It has a song - oddly not heard on the radio much since 9/11 - called ‘I Blew Up The United States’! And I feel better than James Brown! I feel better now. How do you feel?
One of the unexpected pleasures of having young children who play rugby on a Sunday morning, is that one of the other dads just lent me Mark E Smith’s autobiography. I’m glad I didn’t shell out for the hard-back as it’s a slim volume, but I did chuckle at the things he had to say about the BBC and Johnny Cash.
They’re an odd bunch at the BBC. I remember having to meet these two media graduates just before they started filming that documentary… what a pair they were! One of them was this girl, a festival type, a Jo Whiley-ite. She’d just come back from some festival or other, and that was all she could talk about… First thing she did as she sat down was cross her legs as if she was about to do some fucking yoga - a modern hippy, in other words. I offered to buy her a drink but she’s like, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly have another drink. I drank so much at this festival’… and she never made an effort to get her round in. What are they teaching them at the BBC?
I liked the way everyone started jumping on the Johnny Cash bandwagon as well. If you were a Cash fan in the 70s people thought you were a racist. Nobody admitted to it… I find it horrible the way they’ve made money out of him, releasing all these maudlin recordings. Give me early Cash any day… The film was a disgrace as well… Would you rather see Walk the Fucking Line with River Phoenix’s daft brother or Cash Live at San Quentin?
And just the odd beautiful turn of phrase:
You can bet some strange things go on behind the doors of the FA. They’re like a cult; a randy cult souped up on good wine, expensive fruit and nice clean sausages.
They’ve all gone home. All gone home. All of them.
And I am in here and she in there with her head on the desk and I am wondering what she is doing.
And I think if I keep playing music louder and louder then it will all go away.
We had a challenge in the office the other day to play ‘happy song’ tennis, we each had to play a happy song off our iPods or computers in turn. I could only find ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO. I don’t think there is any other happy music on there but then my iPod and laptop are not on speaking terms so it’s a bit hard to do anything about that.
Apparently the new Portishead album - which I love - is ‘depressing’ and ’scary’. What the hell did anyone expect? An album of Aqua covers? The song from Lazy Town?!? FFS…
I love Portishead. I bought their first single ‘Numb’ in a record shop (remember them?) in Greenwich purely on the strength of the name of the band - I knew nothing about them. Then I saw them live twice, once in a tiny club on Regent Street just before they got big. I even liked their second album. But I didn’t hold out much hope for album number three - ten year wait. Admirable though this work rate is - 3 albums in 14 years - they did seem to have become a bit ‘up’ themselves.
Listening to Third for the first time now on last.fm, it’s clearly a fantastic record. Their second album was too much like the first - this new one is pleasingly bonkers. There are real drums, there are synthesizers, there are drum machines… and banjos! ‘The Rip’ is utterly beautiful, and ‘Machine Gun’ sounds much more delicate (and brutal at the same time, if that makes any sense) than it did on Jools Holland. Portishead – The Rip
File under jazz. File under psychedelic. File under folk. File under Jefferson Airplane. File under Joy Division. But on no account file under ‘trip hop’.
One of the things I really miss about Gideon Coe’s daytime BBC 6Music show is his ‘Wednesday Wist Wagon’. So, in homage to it I invite you all to climb aboard my Sunday Sadness Stagecoach. Here are four songs to make your heart ache just a little bit - and here’s the thing: they are all off the same album.
One of the unexpected consequences of having the decorators in (not a euphemism for anything, but now you mention it…) was stumbling upon a 4AD compilation CD from 1995 called ‘Facing the Wrong Way’. I’d forgotten how wonderful this album was. And it’s chock-full of wist.
So here are snatches from:
‘Summer Dress’ - Red House Painters
‘You Sweet Little Heart Breaker’ - Air Miami
‘Love Songs on the Radio’ - Mojave (actually Mojave 3 but this CD must pre-date the change of name)
‘Cheap Cuts’ - Liquorice
I know the Air Miami track is probably too thrashy for most people to consider it wistful but the title alone qualifies it. And the Liquorice track is probably a bit too feisty, but I love the lyrics and couldn’t not include it. And hey, I did drop ‘Valley of the Morning Sun’ by Kendra Smith which is utterly lovely but the lyrics are just bonkers and I have no idea what it’s about. (Aviation. Just looked it up). And it is my list.
LOVE SONGS ON THE RADIO - Mojave 3
She looks just like an angel
When she walks across the room
She shines tonight
Her golden light
Is everything I need
Lovers all around her
She wears them like her jewels
My friend says she’s all he needs
To feel alive
Love songs on the radio
His sweetheart lies in bed
She’s dreaming of the things he said
She’s hoping that he’s well
the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.
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