My suspicion is that the band are just testing things out rather than definitively recording with a view to releasing new material, but nonetheless, this is incredibly good news. Following plenty of teasers and rumours surrouding the possiblity of Blur recording new stuff, William Orbit – who produced 1999′s 13 – has posted the following on his Facebook page.
Hope it’s not a wind-up.
Ian Birrill, co-founder of Africa Express and all round fount of knowledge about international affairs, flagged this up on Twitter and it’s absolutely bewitching. I’m a big fan of African music generally, but it would take a very hard-hearted music fan, no matter what he or she thought of world music, to find fault with this bit of casual, masterly, euphoric guitar playing.
The star is (according to Boing Boing) “Ronnie Moipolai from Kopong village in the Kweneng district 50 km west of the capitol Gaborone”.
He is 29 years old and goes around the shebeens selling and playing his songs for 5Pula each (80dollarcents). He learned guitar from his now late father, has 3 brothers that also play guitar (KB is one of them), has also a big sister and plenty of kids in the yard. Nobody has a formal job and his mother sells Chibuku beer and firewood they get from the bush trying to make ends meet.
One of my favourite bands release their debut LP tomorrow; Foxes! are a ramshackle, fun indie pop group who started up in Oxford and have since ventured South, as Alan Partridge might say, to lovely Brighton. They’re a great mix of off-kilter, stalling melodies and vibrant pop. Their last single was the super ‘Panda Bear Song’, below. Self titled LP out on Big Salad Records tomorrow. (Incidentally, I note that the same label quietly released the debut record by Milk & Biscuits recently – another band I’ve raved about on this blog). So that’s two records worth checking out.
For Brighton folk, Foxes! will be playing a launch show at the Pavilion Theatre on 16th Feb. Cool.
I hope you won’t regard it as lazy blogging to draw attention to something which has already gone viral, and which you’ll likely already know – but the merits of this lovely bit of political poetry are many and it deserves, at the very least, a second listen.
If you did miss it the first time round, Dean Atta is a young poet whose hastily written poem – which he recited into his iphone and tweeted – about Stephen Lawrence and the use of the word ‘nigger’ in hip hop, has understandably garnered much praise. Here’s Stephen Isaac in the Guardian:
Until last week, Dean Atta was relatively unknown; unless you were deeply immersed in the world of spoken word you probably wouldn’t have heard of him. Then, in the wake of the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence, he wrote his poem I Am Nobody’s Nigger, and took the internet by storm. In five days, his poem had received in excess of 15,000 hits and gained him an extra 1,000 followers on Twitter. The poem was, he says, a reaction to “the injustice of the death of Stephen Lawrence”, and to the loose usage of the N-word. “Watching Panorama, where they reconstructed his murder, and hearing that the N-word was the last thing they said when they stabbed him really struck a chord with me.”
The poem is fabulous. Here is the audio recording.
I Am Nobody’s Nigger by Dean Atta by deanatta
You can read the poem here.
In the meantime, I recently discovered that the only version of L.I.F.E’s classic ‘In Memory’ – a brilliant British hip hop track about Stephen Lawrence – on youtube is corrupted, so I’ve uploaded a new version. It’s had lots of hits in the last few weeks, as you might expect.
This list is not, I think, desperately representative, as I don’t always have scrobble turned on and listen to vinyl half the time – but here, according to Last.fm, are the songs I listened to most in 2011.
Well, this is it. My last song of 2011 is as simple as can be. I recorded it on the 30th December, curled up in bed at about eleven o’clock, playing my ukulele and recording it with my iPad and cheapo headphone-mic. Somehow it seemed better to finish the year with something simple and clean, rather than complex. So that’s it. I’m done. 52 songs, over 52 weeks. And none of it would have been possible without the support and encouragement of my friends. So that’s nice. Here it is.
Inevitable, given my song a week project, that I’d attempt a Christmas song; this one was written and recorded in an single sitting on, you guessed it – Christmas Day, after having sat on my doorstep with a cup of coffee watching people packing up cars. Recorded straight to camera with a bit of overdubbing afterwards. I might buy myself a clarinet next year.
Happy Christmas.
“It’s the first Christmas in a while,
When it’s been so unseasonably mild.
I drink my coffee on the step
and watch my neighbours heading home again.
I watch them go,
oh let it snow.
It’s my first Christmas in this street,
moving from place to place really takes it out of me.
Drinking coffee, watching cars.
Counting presents, counting cards.
I watch them go,
oh let it snow.
I don’t know,
why won’t it snow?”
Ah, now this is a welcome surprise – when I was at University I was massively into a British rap group called Parlour Talk, who made amazing, funny, stream of consciousness hip hop crammed with Blackadder references and broad Bristolian accents. After their awesome debut LP, ‘Padlocked Tonic’, was released in 1999, appearences were few and far between. In 2001 a related group, Aspects, released a decent-ish LP, Correct English, and since then, the collective have been sadly quiet (although doubtless working hard under the radar). Today I found this; a totally brilliant new track by Awkward featuring a rap by Parlour Talk main man Scoutleader Deed. At the same time, I discovered that Aspects have reformed and are doing new stuff.
Fantastic news.
As I approach the end of my song-writing year, I find myself flicking back through the work I’ve done looking for things to tidy up and complete; there have been plenty more songs started this year than there have been finished. As I go, I rarely find much I want to keep; perhaps a drum loop here or an arrangement there. This week’s effort grew out of the latter; a simple passage of synthesized string instruments which lingered after I gave it up, and saw a bit of life injected at the weekend. The song is very simple; for some reason I had in mind a cottage in the footholds of some Welsh valley; and I like one line very much – “you skim off the rind but you know you’re the skin of the peach”.
I shot the video in Cambridgeshire visiting my parents; the explosions of seeds from the bloated bullrushes counts as one of the most memorable things I saw, never mind filmed, in 2011.
Oh look, here’s Sam on lead vocals, with Dan and AS on back up. Sort of.
I put together this music slowly, over the course of the year, looking for an opportunity (or the courage) to do a rap over it, and eventually chickened out. But over the course of the year I’ve swapped lots of voice messages with Sam, who’s over in Paris, so I thought I’d put some of those rambling messages to use.
Most of our musings and conversations over the year have related to various projects we’re undertaking, and our shared need to focus on things. So there’s our chorus.
I love this one; I was very proud of ‘Done Driving’ when I recorded it a few weeks ago, but Dan gave me the idea of trying a remix rather than a new song. That felt, on the face of it, like a bit of a cheat, so I decided to do it only on the condition that it was a radical re-vamp rather than just a slightly adapted take. Specifically, I wanted to change the mood without altering the basic bones of the song; so this version features almost all of the components of the original but filtered through a totally different mood; so we have upbeat horn breaks where before we had moody introspection. Thanks to Dan for a really good video, as well.
As with so many of my songs this year, I’d struggle to tell you what this one is about, but I can give you an exact geographical reference for where I was, mentally, when I wrote it. Literally, I was in my flat in Brighton, but everything about the song somehow is located for me by the Stuyvesent High School in Manhatten, just across from Jersey City over the Hudson River. That sounds horribly pretentious, but I have a clear memory of standing there trying to hail a cab a year or so ago, and somehow, early in the writing of the song, that memory came back to me and infected the song. Conversely the video, very literally, is set in my flat – you can tell, perhaps, that these flowers are a touch past their best.
I try to write a bit about each song I do here, but sometimes other things seem more relevant. This is a nice enough song, I think, but the moment I paired it with the images below, filmed by Dan the morning after our friends Ali and James got married, it meaning got lost a bit. So instead of rattling on about the song, I’ll just mention what a glorious day we had with our friends, and how nice it was wondering through the fields and orchard the next morning.
Very early this year I asked my friend Pete if he’d be interested in helping me write a song, and he immediately sent through some guitar stuff for me to work with. Almost immediately I was struck with paralysis and the files sat on my hard-drive untouched for about six months. Pete is one of the best friends I’ve ever had and the co-architect of some of the happiest afternoons and evenings of my life, playing with my band, so working together on a song meant a lot and I wanted to get it right. Eventually I dug the files out and worked them up into something that I’m very happy with, sounding, as it does, very like the kind of song which me, Pete, Andy and Ali wrote in the early 2000s. So of all the songs I’ve worked on this year, this is probably the most important to me.
Sometimes songs come together incredibly easily and it’s always a little bit wonderful when they do – especially if they’re super tuneful, as this one is (or at least, super-tuneful compared to my usual fare). If I remember right, I wrote it during Question Time. So there’s a tip.
Lyrics and chords; why not play along.
Because I’m writing so frequently, and seeking to prevent things from sounding samey, I’ve noticed little trends in terms of how I arrange songs – early on I was introducing electronic elements and looking to borrow from dance music and hip hop in how I structured things; a bit later I seemed to be working hard on intricate string arrangements. Following that, I concentrated hard on glockenspiels and harps, looking for warm ringing sounds to offset the bleakness of my strumming. Recently, I’ve used woodwind instruments and accordians, instruments I wouldn’t have dreamed of incorporating twelve months ago. I dunno if these surface differences keep things interesting for my listeners – assuming I have any – but they certainly keep things fresh for me. Anyway – here’s an example of the more organic sound I’ve opted for recently. This one’s called ‘Aldrington’.
For this week’s song, I was satisfied to shy back from creating something with a verse and chorus and, for the first time, dispense with lyrics. For reasons I’m not altogether sure of, I’ve never listened to any instrumental rock music; the likes of Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor bore to me tears, although when you consider that I very much like listening to Durutti Column, jazz and modern classical stuff, perhaps it makes more sense to simply say I don’t like post-rock. Either way, I always think it’s rather pointless writing music and not lyrics, but that’s my own prejudice and one I should get over. For this, I tried.
It’s really just a slightly awkward riff, looped with some weird distortion over the top – but I’m pretty pleased with it. My friend Dan shared it with a friend of his, Linda, who took a bit of time out of her day to dance along; and Dan created the accompanying video. Thank you, both.
The song is called, aptly, Forty – it’s the fourtieth song in this project.
Get up to date with the other 39 songs here.
This song is really just another collection of images, inspired by a walk through Brighton on a foggy morning this week; watching prescription lines snake out of chemist doors and postmen rattle their carts down Buckingham Road. It ends with an image I didn’t spot, but which sprang organically to mind as I was writing – that of kids on bridges, noting down trains or dropping pebbles on cars. Lyrics below.
There’s a stupid typo at the end there; ‘kids go two ways, getting older / up on the footbridge / carrying notepads or boulders’.
I feel like talking about this song is kind of pointless when the obvious point of interest is Dan’s regal, rather scary video, made using his brother’s iPad and some somewhat emerging technology. The song itself is about being over sentimental and squeamish. Which I am.
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