Where Worlds Collide

I sometimes wonder why I bother with The Guardian Music Blog. While Readers Recommend is always fun, and there is the occasional good article, they also publish an awful lot of complete drivel. And in response to this drivel, the comment section all-too-often turns into Usenet on a bad day; the fact that far too many ‘articles’ are little more than trolls doesn’t exactly help.

Alan McGee’s weekly column is one of the worst offenders. Very occasionally he’ll come up with a meaningful re-evaluation of a neglected artist from the 60s or 70s, but all too often he spoils what might have been an interesting article with provocative hyperbole - “ELO were better than The Beatles” was an infamous one. Far more often he’d go on about some mediocre landfill indie band with hype turned up to 11. His lastest is a ridiculous puff piece bigging up Oasis (yet again), which naturally gets shredded by the commentators.

Of course, he will never respond to any comments, failing to recognise the essential two-way nature of blogging. Instead, he comes up with pearls of wisdom like this twitter,

i mean you work in the fields i live in the mansion that’s the way it rolls guardian blog readers.xoxoxoo

Oh yes, that really epitomises The Guardian’s left-of-centre ethos, doesn’t it.

Four pages into the comment thread, a commenter calling himself “Kingspark” comes up with this:

On “Twitter” you invite people to apply to clean the toilets in your mansion. Is that the best you can come up with? Look through the comments. Apart from Paul Brownell’s myriad of aliases - avatthecat, heavytrash, marycigarettes, DoubleDeuceDalton - you’ve only got one fan, Elaine S. She seems like a nice lady. And at least Paul Brownell will always back you up, he’s your employee, isn’t he? He helps you write the blogs and tells you about groups you’ve never heard of and tries his best to make it seem like you’re not completely out of touch.

And I ought to mention that several of those sock puppets have made repeated often unprovoked ad-hominem attacks on myself and others, often in completely unrelated threads (which to The Guardian’s credit have always been removed by the moderators for violating the rule against personal abuse). I consider sending an employee to post under multiple aliases to make it look as if he’s got some supporters isn’t exactly professional behaviour. Using those sock puppets for personal abuse is simply beyond the pale.

Assuming “Kingspark” is correct about those usernames he mentions (and the similarity in writing styles for those aliases he mentions gives me no reason to doubt him), then I don’t think McGee has an awful lot of credibility left. If I was the Guardian Online editor, I would definitely think twice about continuing to employ this man as a contributor.

My online game, KLR has reached a point where I need to introduce some new plot elements. We’ve just seen a major villain taken down in a battle with exploding airships and artillery duels across the city. While there’s some mileage in dealing with the aftermath and fallout of this, the game needs a but more than that to keep the game going.

So, to try and get the creative juices flowing, I decided to select half-a-dozen random songs, and seek inspiration from the lyrics. Since I haven’t ripped most of my CD collection onto my PC, I selected the songs by rolling assorted oddly-shaped dice to determine shelf, CD on shelf and track within CD.

This gave me the following six songs:

Rush - Red Lenses

Here we have a lot of imagery associated with the colour red; sunsets, blood, dancing shoes, the Soviet Union. The nearest analogue to the Soviet Union in Kalyr is probably the Konaic Empire. They are the morally unambiguous villains of the setting.

Iommi/Hughes - Don’t You Tell Me

Am I a sacrifice?
Am I too blind to see?
I’m not a vagabond
I know what is, is meant to be
There is a better way
There comes a time I do believe
There’s a price to pay
I know where you’ve been

Don’t you tell me you don’t know

Seems to be about a betrayal, the exact nature of which isn’t specified. There’s definitely some plot potential there.

Marillion - Easter

The original song, written in 1989, is about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Made more general, a pointless death in a long-running conflict which needs to be resolved.

Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2

OK, so I can’t really fit teachers and education very well, but ‘We don’t need no thought control’ works in a setting where telepathy and mind control are common powers.

Breathing Space - Shades of Grey

There’s no need to pretend now
We all come in different shades of grey

Moral ambiguity - the protagonists of the story arc aren’t flawless, and the bad guys aren’t necessarily irredeemably bad either. But when I’ve got Nicki Jett as a player character, the first bit of that goes without saying, really.

And finally:
Uriah Heep - Time to Live (from Salisbury)

Well I spent twenty long years
In a dirty old prison cell
I never saw the light of day
…
They say I killed a man
But I never told them why
So you can guess what I’ve been through
So for twenty long years
I’ve been thinking of that other man
What I saw him do to you

There’s definitely an NPC with a significant back-story in that song.

Let’s see what I can come up with with that lot. To go into any more detail would be entering into spoiler territory!

Another weekend, more long-distance gigging. This time I found myself making a three hour train journey across the snow-covered east midlands countryside to see York’s Breathing Space play in the Nottinghamshire town of Lowdham, for what turned out to be the first sold-out gig I’ve been to for more than a year. I’d booked a room at the B&B attached to the village pub, where I found many of the usual suspects in the bar. Yes, it was going to be one of those evenings

The Village Hall in Lowdham isn’t your typical rock venue. In fact, it was probably one strangest venues I’ve been to. I’ve known other gigs that have been seated with tables, but never with an pre-arranged seating plan. In this case the organisers put everyone with non-local postcodes down the front, on the basis that we were the hardcore fans who had travelled a long way. The village hall lacks a licenced bar, although they were providing coffee and biscuits. However, they did have a rather splendid arrangement with the pub over the road with excellent selection of real ales, whereby you could bring your pint into the venue provided.

With a venue that’s not associated with rock bands I wondered what the sound would be like. I needn’t have worried, the acoustics of the hall were excellent, and the sound engineer, perhaps because he’s more used to folk acts, resisted the temptation to turn the PA up to heavy metal volumes. Breathing Space always sound their best when mixed for clarity rather than volume, especially given the power of Olivia Sparnenn’s voice. Those big soaring ballads don’t work so well when turned up to eleven.

Breathing Space delivered a superb set, as good as I’ve seen them play. They had to rearrange a few songs following the recent departure of sax and wind synth player John Hart, mostly with Mark Rowan filling the gaps on guitar. There seemed to be a few other subtle changes; I thought Iain Jennings used a lot more Hammond organ sounds that at previous gigs. The setlist was much the same as last year, but included a couple of new songs which will appear on the third album due in the middle of the year. The slightly proggy ‘Butterflies and White Feathers’, which they first played towards the end of last year gets better and better each time I hear it, and the newer ‘Below the Radar’, which I’d not heard live before, is a powerful hard rocker. They closed, as usual, with a powerful version of the old Mostly Autumn classic, ‘The Gap Is Too Wide’, which always brings out the goosebumps.

All this was enthusiastically received by an audience that wasn’t made up of existing fans, wasn’t a ‘prog’ audience, and quite possibly wasn’t really even a rock audience. Which all goes to prove there’s an audience out their for Breathings Space’s brand of progressive-tinged classic rock if people are aware of their existence.

A web-based bus slogan generator to make your own version of the infamous “atheist buses” you can see in the UK. Unfortunately the full lyrics of Marillion’s “This is the 21st Century” don’t fit.

We’ll start with the rather obvious H.P.Lovecraft version

One for this Saturday’s gig in Lowdham

And finally, the obligatory gamer one:

I started my live music for 2009 with two gigs on two nights by the same band, in two completely different cities.

While Friday night’s gig in Swansea was really a warm-up for the high-profile London show the next day, it also featured a one-off guest appearance from violinist Liz Prendegast, who’d played on several songs on the album “Visionary Position”.

The Garage is quite a nice little venue; capacity of perhaps 200, although it was nowhere near full. Unfortunately the gig did suffer from a disappointingly high level of background chatter which was noticeable during the quiet bits. And everyone hung at the back of the room despite Anne-Marie Helder trying to persuade people to move forward.

Panic Room’s set suffered badly from technical glitches, the worst of which was Anne-Marie’s microphone not being switched on at the very beginning, resulting in a false start to ‘Electra City’. But the band managed to rise above the gremlins, and played an entertaining and varied set lasting not far short of two hours. While they played some favourites from their debut album, such as the atmospheric epic ‘Endgame’ and the arabesque ‘Apocalypstick’, those amounted to something like a third of the set.

Some of the newer material they’d been playing at the end of last year have already become live favourites, such as the spiky guitar-driven rocker ‘Go’ and the industrial-sounding ‘Black Noise’, and they added another couple of brand new songs for their first live airing; of those ’5th Amendment’ was the most impressive. Anne-Marie did her customary mid-set acoustic solo spot, of which the a cappella ‘Hadditfeel’ was the highlight. They ended with their groove-orientated cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘No Quarter’, including a few bars of ‘Kashmir’ for good measure. When she joined them on stage, Liz’s electric violin added an extra dimension to the sound, especially on the ‘Apocalypstick’ and ‘No Quarter’. I’d love to see her accompany the band for a whole tour.

Saturday’s gig at The Peel was the replacement for the show in April cancelled due to power failure, and this rescheduled gig attracted the largest crowd I’ve seen at a Panic Room gig to date, while I don’t think they quite sold out, the place was pretty much full. Support was prog veterans Jump, who delivered a highly entertaining set; a band I’m getting to like more and more every time I see them. John Dexter Jones is a great frontman; while he looks a bit like Morrissey, he sounds more like Fish; you can certainly hear the influence of both Marillion and Fish’s solo material in their sound.

Panic Room then delivered the best performance I’ve seen them play to date. Playing a shorter set than the previous night, they went pretty much full tilt all the way through, high energy levels, fantastically tight, and hugely appreciated by the crowd.

What I love about this band is that while they’re all clearly virtuoso musicians, they always play exactly what the songs need and no more; they never descend into the sort of self-indulgent noodling that ‘prog’ is all-too frequently accused of. And I think the fact that I’ve got several of their new songs stuck in my head means they’re capable of writing memorable songs that ought to appeal to mainstream audiences. And after many years as a backing singer to Rachel Jones in Karnataka and Heather Findlay in Mostly Autumn, Anne-Marie Helder proves she’s in the same league as either of them when it comes to fronting a band herself.

Their next gig is in Stocksbridge near Sheffield in March.