It was the release that started Time Travel Opps. 100 copies with hand-typed covers, and a picture of a robin. We gave them all away in the days running up to Christmas. A few went on mail order, but most went for free in the pub. We liked the idea of music being a token of Christmas cheer because…well…it is.

My new violinist Anthony Saunders spent the weekend at my house for a charity gig we were playing, and Sunday morning we were tinkering with new music…Anthony said he had wanted to write a Christmas song this year. I told him that I’d written one in 2003, so we figured out how to play it and made this video:

That’s the room the song was written in. I’ve moved out and back in since then. It’s a great house. I think most of my music is about it…or at least inspires me to do some of it. Anyway…Happy Merry Christmas. The original tracks are up on Bandcamp for you to download for free, or whatever sum you fancy paying:

It’s the second time I’ve seen the first BTTF on the big screen, but only the first that’s not been off a DVD. The one tiny tiny tiny tiny little criticism I had was that it didn’t seem that the sound had been given as much restorative/enhancing attention as the digital transfer of the picture. Back To The Future has some of the best and, in places, most subtle sound design around. From all the different 1950’s references popping up around Hill Valley through adverts, megaphones, conversations, and jukeboxes…through to Silvestri’s bombastic soundtrack…right the way to my favourite of all film/sound moments – the disappearing hand in the mid-8 of Earth Angel.

You know the bit…everything is going well and Marty is there strumming the chords…”This is for all you lovers out there”…George and Lorraine are dancing and then the annoying guy comes over and pushes George away. Discordant strums begin. Marvin Berry looks a little concerned. Marty looks at the photograph in the headstock of his guitar and sees his brother and sister have disappeared and that he’s next and…oh no….HE CAN SEE THROUGH HIS HAND. This is it. After all that effort it’s all over. And you didn’t even notice that while Marvin is supposed to be singing, “I fell for you, and I knew the vision of your loveliness”, instead the orchestra is going crazily, threateningly, terrifyingly all over the place but then George realises he’s just grown balls and the music all but disappears until he says, “Excuse me” and pushes the guy aside and part of the main theme build-up comes in and then stops as if teetering over a cliff and then George reaches in for a kiss and then you hear it…in the background…”I’ll be the vision of your happiness, Whoah whoah whoah” AND THEN THE WHOLE ORCHESTRA COMES IN and Marty can play the guitar again and everything accompanies that final chorus of Earth Angel…

Holy Smokes.

While writing that I got a massive Proustian rush. My heart rate is still going a bit mad.

It is without a doubt the finest marriage of story, picture, performance, soundtrack, sound design, and song. Something to aspire to. So it would’ve been the icing on the cake for them to really go to town on it…although it was still an amazing experience. Here’s the bit I’m on about…sound without image…

If they can’t dance they can’t kiss and I’m history

I need to calm down. How about these posters by Jamie Bolton that I got sent this morning. Very minimal…very calming…

- The one about the thumping bass room
- The one about the amateur dramatic room
- The one about the kidney shaped Hollywood party pool room.

In the background there’s at least one nice piano in there, a good few guitars, and a few turntables. Nice one. Here ’tis:

“The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognised for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a past and its present. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.”

- John Berger, Ways Of Seeing, Pelican 1972

Speaking of John Berger, he’s just released a collaboration with John Christie and the mind-blowing Gavin Briars. Briar’s score is stunning. It’s called ‘I Send You This Cadmium Red‘ and it’s brilliant.

In fact, it makes me want to go to any record shop right now. But I’ve got too many things to do up here on the top floor of the mill I suppose.
There’s nothing like walking out of a proper record shop with a proper record.
Mailorder is exciting, but the online browsing/finding/buying experience isn’t as exciting as the physical one. I literally get goosebumps even if something looks similar to Red House Painter’s Rollercoaster LP. Derby has just got an independent record store back from the dead – BPM. From what I remember it was the main one once, dealt with everything, and then got marginalised by Way Ahead’s indie/rock A-Z prowess, and mainly dealt in House and Trance. Now it’s back it’s a one man job and is so far just full of fairweather stuff retrieved from fallen record shops or dead people. But there’s some gems. I got ‘Blood’ by This Mortal Coil last week on double LP. Beast of a record. Once the chap gets on his feet I can’t wait for the distributors to start chucking new releases his way.

On the flipside, I got this through the post today, and (as is now typical to point out on this here) there’s some nice links and thoughts on time therein lifted from the liner notes…

“Time Out is a first experiment with time, which may well come to be regarded as more than an arrow pointing to the future. Something great has been attempted…and achieved. The very first arrow has found it’s mark.”
- Steve Race

These guys are the best kind of people. Really. I met them at The Victoria Inn in 2002. Since then I’ve made sure to go and be with them at least once a year. It’s a poor year when that doesn’t happen. The title of this film, made about their recent shows since the release of their incredible fourth album ’sfortuna’, translates to ’self-congratulation’. Literally, I guess that would be a kind of bad thing…but these guys haven’t got a self-indulgent bone in their collective body. It’s more like the celebration of The Self. If you meet these guys you’ll have a good time, and probably end up laughing until you throw up, even though you can’t understand a word they say. Go and download ’sfortuna’ from them for free here, then order the 12″ (it sounds immenso), then go and see them and say “Hi”.

I’m proper chuffed. It’s a well nicely produced webzine. My track loads up as you open it in your browser, and the interface is nifty and smooth. Using your arrow keys you can skim through the ace content, and it’s all really clear and quick loading. There’s also a PDF download so you can put it on a device or something. I think if you tried to print it out it would take ages and screw you for ink, but it’s not for printing…it’s a WEB zine.

The track is Francis Thompson and it’s from the album I’ve been talking about. I’ve put four more tracks up on Soundcloud for people to try out in their ears…see how they fit. If, using the soundcloud player, you listen to After Catalunya, Four Million Silhouettes, and A Lullaby Hum then pop over to Blank Media Collective and listen to Francis Thompson then you’ve heard Side A of the album. Magic.

Friday March 19th in Nottingham at Lee Rosy’s Tea Room – playing with one of my all time favourite lyricists, songwriters, guitarists, etc. Geoff Farina (Karate, & Secret Stars), and Chris Brokaw (who’s been in some fecking awesome bands like Codeine and The New Year). Proper gutted I won’t get to see them play until Leeds the following week as I’ve got to shoot off straight after I play, but I’m hoping we can have a cup of tea and a natter beforehand.

Monday 29th March in Derby at Vines – I’d never heard of Stairs To Korea before I got asked to play this one, but I have now, and I’m glad, and I can’t wait to see him play live. Reminds of Plans & Apologies. He proper sounds like Dave Williams, and can dish out long strings of tastily assembled words and a crafty melody like I only wish I could.

I’m finishing the recording of the Emphemetry full length this week, before going over to Berlin next week to mix and master it with Nils Frahm. Then, in April, will start playing more and more, starting with a gig with dbh, probably in his kitchen.

It’s such a beautiful thing, that moon. I’ve been consciously obsessed with it since the third year of Junior School, when I did a project about space. I stayed behind in the small library reading about the Apollo missions, and pestering the off-duty teachers and cleaners about Apollo 11 (pronounced, for a while, ‘A polo’) and how it landed on the moon.

I remember every feature of the day the Moon blocked out the Sun. It was cloudy, but it went from early afternoon light to twilight in a moment. And the birds stopped singing. And, like the moon landing 40 years ago, you had this sense of everyone watching the same thing. I can understand why there are ‘Eclipse chasers’ in the world. I don’t blame Brian May for running after them, not one bit.

I remember a couple of years ago watching the Lunar Eclipse. The full moon went from white to red. Deep red. Devil red. It glowed, and I looked at it through binoculars remembering the often forgotten thing that you can actually see a hell of a lot of the moon through binoculars. This photo of the lunar eclipse is one of my favourite photos.

I love ambient music. It makes me think of the moon. None more so than Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Daniel Lanois’ soundtrack to the moon. In fact, that was made to a go with a collection of archive film NASA put together in the eighties. I bet that’s floating around now. Mental note – find that film, stick it on a projector in a dark hall and get lost in the moon. But yeah, music that makes me think of the moon or is about the moon or sounds like it’s about the moon. Hum’s ‘Apollo’ is a favourite. Not just because it’s very lunar and restrained and has a tender tension to it that gets stretched out over it’s duration until the final drop down as ‘the tether is slipping from its knot’.

It’s got everything that song. It’s about the thing I think about more and more as I get older and read about psychology and philosophy more and more – the effect of seeing the Earth from outside of it, of being far away, of being completely alone, of being one of only a few to go to a place that everyone can see but no-one can get to. Then, on the return, of being so ridiculously famous, heroic, flawed, misunderstood, commoditised and maybe even betrayed. It’s also a love song – it’s about the astronaut’s wife. Not the film. It’s about missing someone and wanting them not to risk their life, and it’s about not being able to not do that.

In a way, the song is kind of trivial in that he’s going away, she’s pissed off, but he’s got to do what he’s got to do and by god he’ll do it, but she’s pissed off, and that’s on his mind. But then there’s the second verse about “blankness and darkness like underneath the leaf, has settled on me here and scraped away the sound”. It’s the solitude that gets me I think. Love songs can talk all they want about being alone, there’s no-one aloneness more complete than that in space. Not in my imagination anyway. And it’s presented lyrically and musically by Hum in the most perfect way when, like the Derby Playhouse production Moon Landing, it could be over the top, dramatic, garish, and down-right cheesy. There’s none of those things in the story of the Apollo missions.

So as a hats off to the boys on the moon, and what that meant, and everything that happened afterwards, I knocked up a cover version of that song that I like about people who went to the celestial body that I love. It probably needs a good old mastering to squash the bass but I didn’t have the time, and I wanted it to be ready for today.

To the moon.

“It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.”

The BBC Magazine have just popped this gem of an article up. They gave 13-year old Scott Campbell (seen above) a walkman to use instead of his mp3 player. Surprisingly, apart from the strange social reactions he got, the walkman seemed to do rather well – especially the two-headphone feature. Mine didn’t have this, but I wish it had (giving your friend the other headphone meant losing out on panned tracks in stereo). A friend of mine told me that the day the third Propagandhi album came out, him and some friends split the signal using a headphone mixer, but that this gave each set a fraction of the usual volume, making it almost impossible to hear above the rumble of the school bus.

Just writing this little bit about the BBC article has got me thinking about how cassettes have played a massively important role in my world. I’ve got boxes and boxes of them at home, mainly full of 4-track recordings that you can’t play on a normal system (because for quality it records at just over twice the normal speed of a cassette player, and in one direction in 4 separate streams where a normal system would split the tape into two (sides A and B)). I’ve got boxes still of albums I had on vinyl or CD that were laboriously recorded onto tape and labelled so that I could listen to them on the move, or in the car, or at work. Or even more laboriously recorded from the radio after hours spent hanging on the pause button waiting for one particular song. Or putting the tape recorder with a built-in microphone in front of the TV to record the score from Jurassic Park as the credits rolled on the screen. Ditto for the Quantum Leap theme. and Back To The Future.

It’s blatantly obvious that cassette tapes aren’t better quality than mp3s or Cds. But at the time they were the best thing going…they were versatile, they allowed anyone who wanted to to grab sound and keep it for themselves. Anyone remember this:

Cassettes got the music industry scared, because consumers could do things for themselves. I’m not going to start rehashing things about DIY music, self-publishing, anti-piracy and DRM that have been better said by other people…but safe to say that even if cassettes are obsolete (which I don’t think they are, but I’ll get to that in a minute), they’ll be around as long as vinyl. They might not have as high a financial or nostalgic value as wax, but they won’t be a redundant part of music history from a historical, creative, or even commercial standpoint. Peter Broderick just released a cassette of ten songs on a label called Digitalis, that does limited runs of exclusive music on tape. It came out mid-April, and it’s a collectors item now. Same as the Algernon Cadwallader demo tape. In fact, tons of those bands on the east coast of the USA still release their demos on cassette as well as mp3 download. Free mp3 download as well (just see If You Make It for a massive list of punk demos – there are some gems in there).

One of my favourite bands of all time, and one I’m lucky enough to know personally and to have toured with – Fine Before You Came – have just released their new album for free online, but are having it pressed up onto vinyl, cd, and cassette by a variety of labels.

I’m thinking of what my point is in all this. I think my point is that music is awesome, and if digital has given me anything, it’s given me back the time I spent labeling cassettes and hovering on the pause button, and allowed me to use that time to listen to even more music. But I’m glad that I lived through the eighties and had the experience of the clunkiness and the labeling and the pause button and the not-being-able-to-get-high-speed-dubbing working…as it’s given me an appreciation of the time and effort that goes into making something so that others can appreciate it too…and for me that translates into a pathological attraction to the hand-made, and a respect for the creativity of others, and an excitement for the future of non-DRM/creative commons/independent music from the perspective of creator and rabid consumer.

“Perhaps that kind of anticipation and excitement has been somewhat lost in the flood of new products which now hit our shelves on a regular basis.”

…but perhaps that anticipation and excitement has moved towards something else, something a little more intangible – human creativity. I hope so anyway.