Simon Pearson - minor9th.com

Music to wash up to

posted in Life, Music

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It’s Saturday, I’m resting at home recovering from evil cold from hell, and I’m avoiding chores by looking for good music to wash up to.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Martika’s Kitchen – Martika
• The Boy Does Nothing – Alesha Dixon
• Dishwasher – Fujiya & Miyagi
• Soul Kitchen – The Doors
• Wash Your Face In My Sink – Dream Warriors
• I Get Wet – Andrew W.K. (remember him?!)
• Soft And Wet – Prince
• High And Dry – Radiohead

Got any suggestions? Add them to this spotify playlist.

And now back to the grind.

What I listened to in 2008

posted in Life, Music

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Thanks to the awesome LastGraph, I’ve mined my last.fm profile in a very elegant and beautiful way to look at listening habits over 2008, with the output below. No big surprises here. Had a couple of weeks off in late October/November so big chunk of listening there. Intriguied by a burst of listening to The Who last January. Might be time for another Baba-binge.

What I listened to in 2008, originally uploaded by minor9th.

I’ve also created a playlist of things which I enjoyed or discovered in 2008, which is presented below with mp3 links where I could find them. I’m sure I can help you out if you’re after an easier-to-digest version of the below…

1. Feel the love – Cut Copy
2. Paris Is Burning (Cut Copy Remix) – Ladyhawke
3. How We Became – Jeremy Warmsley
4. Quiet Houses – Fleet Foxes
5. Falling out of Reach – Guillemots
6. Grounds For Divorce – Elbow
7. Ada – The National
8. Edith and the Kingpin – Joni Mitchell
9. The Rip – Portishead
10. Black And Gold – Sam Sparro
11. Bring It Home – Nitin Sawhney feat. Imogen Heap
12. Lump Sum – Bon Iver
13. Sex On Fire – Kings Of Leon
14. Bleeding All Over You – Martha Wainwright
15. Possibly Maybe – Final Fantasy & Ed Droste
16. Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenoceros (Featuring Rhymenoceros and the Hiphopopotamus) – Flight Of The Conchords
17. A-Punk – Vampire Weekend

The sounds of early 2008

posted in London, Music

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Here are a few things I’ve been listening to so far this year – I’m on the look out for some new aural stimulation, and trusty last.fm recommendations can only go so far before you need a bit of good old word-of-blog, so if you have a minute let me know what’s been floating your musical boat in the comments…

The Fourers

Sing-along pop/rock – Next To Nothing has me adding my own questionable vocal harmonies. In the shower. Whilst my housemate’s friends cower in the bedroom next door. They do fall into the indie four beats / four chords trap occasionally but hey, they’re called The Fourers, and they normally manage to save themselves from oblivion with unexpected synths and the odd melodic turn.

Thomas Truax

The whole world should go and see Thomas Truax. With some unlikely raw meterials such as motors, spoons, wheels, spokes, a comb, some strings, ducting, dogs and moons, this man creates nothing short of a genius. He’s playing around the UK in March and April. Book it, book it, book it now. Diddly-do.

The Feeling

What’s their new single about, exactly? The thing I liked about The Feeling last year was that they had an instant, viral appeal. I couldn’t stop listening to the ebola-esque 12 Stops And Home, but it really wiped me out after a few weeks. On this single, they’ve pulled out considerably more than 12 stops: more is more, apparently, and I personally think they could’ve done with paring things down a bit, and perhaps lending a few of the extraneous leftovers to…

Hot Chip

…, who have really excelled themselves with the yawning void that is Ready For The Floor (listen). It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d be stuck in front of on the nightbus when trying to sleep. Not really a desert island disc (though it’d be fun to watch Joanna Lumley reprise her role as Girl Friday with this as a looping soundtrack).

Rod Thomas

Repeaters have more fun with Rod Thomas. First heard at Glastonbury last year, you can often hear him around various underground stations putting his Welsh-valley lungs to good use. His voice is incredibly strong, and he’s a master both of layering up great pop songs and making his audience fizz. Great stuff.

Belated thoughts on my second trip to Glastonbury

posted in Art, Music, Travel

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What’s brown and sticky? A stick. Oh, and also British music festivals in the summer. Aah Glastonbury and the British weather. You can’t beat it.

So some aspects of this year’s festival were no better than my last experience: planning and successfully executing toilet trips was a thankless task; the food ranged from the sublime to the revolting (never again shall I have a yorkshire pudding at a festival – it’ll be made of discarded flip-flop); the crowd was fairly homogenous despite the “multi-cultural” vibe; good music was plentiful yet people still insisted on playing Zombie Nation at 4am on ghetto blasters; and the mud – which oddly was at its worst and welly-stealingly gloopy when the rain stopped which made me secretly glad of extra rain.

But there was so much good stuff – art for art’s sake, impromptu jam sessions, random acts of generosity, a sense of suspended reality, random encounters with long-lost friends.

And then there’s the music – the sweet music! We tried to avoid the main stages a bit so as not to miss the dodgem diner, the space bar, the rabbit hole and all manner of weird and wonderful tiny things. We saw and heard, in rough order, and with fairly meaningless marks out of 10: Rod Thomas (7), Lana (4), Modest Mouse (4), !!!, Bloc Party (6), Rufus Wainwright (9), Arcade Fire (9), Bjork (8), Andi Neate, Guillemots (4), CSS (7), New Pornographers (8), Calvin Harris (6), The Maccabees, Patrick Wolf (10), Rodrigo y Gabriela (4), David Saw (6), Andy Parsons (9), Bill Bailey (8), Dame Shirley Bassey (10), Manic Street Preachers (6), The Go! Team (9), Radio Luxembourg (9), Gruff Rhys (9).

Two other things I should mention: firstly the guy in the next tent who snored ferociously in a slightly tuneful way (other tenty neighbours referred to him as Dinasour Man), and secondly Giles’ storming impression of the Bassey in a pink blanket when we were in the never-ending queue to leave the site in sideways sheets of rain. Priceless.

Eurovision freakshow contest

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You might as well watch the Eurovision song contest with the sound off these days, according to EuroGuru Tim Moore. Winning, apparently, has everything to do with the visual theatrics of each country’s 180 seconds of glory. He should know – he’s written a whole book about it.

Perhaps he’s right: the winner and the runner-up of the Helsinki muso-circus both glued me to the television. Firstly the bottom-slapping antics of Su Pollard and Gary Glitter’s secret lovechild (left), and secondly the is-he, isn’t-she Jack Osborne impersonator from Serbia whose whiny key-change-tastic sopfest romped home to first place. They were mesmerising, and even when you put visuals aside they scored about a million points on our home-made scoresheet. But then, so did Scooch (they even featured a band member with an interchangeable head), and they scored just 19 points. Despite having all the right ingredients to avoid nul points, the poor souls will be flying their flag at half mast for the rest of the week. So perhaps success at Eurovision is always going to be completely random, political and downright bizarre.

And what next for Scooch et al? Will they trade in their remaining traces of dignity like 1992 Irish winner Linda Martin, whose lingering fascination with all things EBU led her to present the results of the televote this year? After their brief stint on European airwaves, will they be sticking to more domestic routes in future? Are there any airlines that fly directly between student unions?

Not the fortunate ones

posted in London, Music

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Straight men of the world: do you listen to Cyndi Lauper at full volume on the tube? Do you just want to have fun? You big Girl?

Charlotte Church intimidates me

posted in Celebrity, Music, Television

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Barely 21, Welsh songstress-turned-TV-sleb Charlotte Church has announced that she’s preggers.

Come on Charlotte, just slow down and let the rest of us feel good about our achievements! You’ve already been a child star, successfully morphed your angelic-voiced 13-year-old self into a filthy-sounding twenty-something vixen without going off the rails like one of your American contemporaries. Your boyfriend is about five times bigger than you. You’ve called Gary Lineker a muppet.

What’s next? Are you going to knock out a PhD by the time the little one’s born? Perhaps stand for PM? Reveal a secret aptitude for flying fighter jets?

Plotting disaster

posted in Film, Music

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In Year 7 English at school, I distinctly remember our teacher telling us that the first rule of creative writing was a good, well-planned plot. A harsh but fair woman, she ridiculed anyone whose tales had even a whiff of ‘and then I woke up and it was all a bad dream’. So why do Hollywood blockbusters think they have a right to disappoint us in the same way?

Yesterday, behind a pillow and courtesy of our brilliant new tellybox, I watched The Day After Tomorrow. Besides the intended ridiculousness of the plot, and a stupendous number of other goof-ups, I was pretty angry that after a steady period of getting worse and worse and worse, three continent-wide storms literally vanished into thin air, shocking everyone on the ground. Even astronauts in space (can’t have a disaster movie without some incidental astronauts) were astounded, even though they had bugger all else to look at. Five minutes of major/modal orchestral swooning and a bit of heroic presidential fluff later, the film is over. My pillow’s covered in sick.

I felt exactly the same way about War of the Worlds. Massive thunderbolts, bloodsucking, a futile war waged by puny man on these mammoth beasties from Mars. Everyone’s dead. Brilliant! All that’s left is for Tom Cruise to have his eyes plucked out and the film will be over and I can gleefully recommend it to all my friends. But no: the beasties get a cold and everyone’s fine. There’s a certain beauty in mankind being saved by one of its greatest nuisances, the rhinovirus. However, I think Friedman, Spielberg and co must’ve been contractually obliged by the money morons to tack on a feel-good ending. Pass the bucket. Only one good thing came out of the ludicrous ending: it gave John Williams a breather from wasting a whole orchestra solely on making menacing, chromatic, brass-led stabbing noises.

Ironic then, that The Science of Sleep – a film entirely about the beauty and power of dreams, and with the most simple and loosest of plots, floated my boat entirely. It wasn’t all that surprising, since we watched it at the lovely Electric Cinema and I’m a big fan of Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That said, it was a real tonic to watch a film with no particular agenda other than just to be a bit beautiful and quirky. More of that, please.

On gig stalkery…

posted in Music

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Mika @ Popstarz (in fitting drama queen pose), originally uploaded by minor9th.

So far this year, the gig quota has been pretty excellent – if a little exhausting.

The definite low point was Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, who spoil wonderously complex and interesting drum/guitar/synth interplay with a wiry, creepy-dancing lead singer whose voice I found excruciating live. Using only his vocal chords, he made me feel like he was scraping wire wool around the inside of my skull. When he got his megaphone out I nearly threw things.

All the other gigs have been pretty inspiring though – and have involved an eerie number of double-take incidents. At Metric and Imogen Heap we saw Simon Willison but were too afraid to say hello, so, er, hello Simon. At Ray Lamontagne (beardy and a bit dreary, but I had good company so all was fine) I spotted Tamsin Grieg and donkey man from Green Wing in full flow, and at Regina Spektor (so good and quirky!) I stood next to a man wearing the same shoes as myself. Mum’s been to Zara, then.

Which only leaves Scott Matthews and Mika to mention – and goodness only knows the disaster which would ensue if someone paired up Matthews – the Wolverhampton boy with a Texan soft spot – with Mika, a camped up version of Mick Jagger without the lips. Perhaps a duet of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5? I live in fear…

The Electrofunk-daddy Superstar Break

posted in Humour, Music, Web

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Now you too can cook up some seriously cool beats. Warning: quite high in phat.