Shambolic rock god Pete Doherty has invoked the vampyric wrath of Tory leader Michael Howard.
Howard said: "Here you have a man who takes drugs and gets locked up - yet ends up on the front pages."
Er, yes, Howie, that's how newspapers work.
Maybe the Conservative leader should cast his mind back to his stint as home secretary when he released a chap called John Haase onto the streets.
Haase was a well known drug pusher who was let out of jail a paltry ten months into an 18 year sentence. The dealer would have been delighted to rejoin his notorious gang which included Paul Bennett, also released by Howard, and speed dealer Simon Bakerman.
Bakerman's cousin is thought to have had a lot to do with Haase's release. Step forward notorious drug runner, er, MP Michael Howard.
Do I get a job on the Eye now?
Feb 24, 2005
Feb 6, 2005
What I'm listening to at the moment
Mercury Rev: The Secret Migration [beautiful, delicate and every so slightly pagan]
Super Furry Animals: Songbook Vol 1 [how many memorable tunes can you fit on one greatest hits?]
The Dears: Lost In The Plot [morrissey eat your heart out]
The Strokes: Room On Fire [not as lo-fi anymore, but still a top rhythm section]
Various Artists: Future's Burning [bloc party, franz ferdinand, 22-20s etc]
What I wish I wasn't listening to at the moment but I keep hearing it on TV
The Killers: Somebody Told Me [Mr Brightside was a good single, but they can just piss off with their rhyming of "confidential" and "potential".
What I want to hear more of
The Duke Spirit
Super Furry Animals: Songbook Vol 1 [how many memorable tunes can you fit on one greatest hits?]
The Dears: Lost In The Plot [morrissey eat your heart out]
The Strokes: Room On Fire [not as lo-fi anymore, but still a top rhythm section]
Various Artists: Future's Burning [bloc party, franz ferdinand, 22-20s etc]
What I wish I wasn't listening to at the moment but I keep hearing it on TV
The Killers: Somebody Told Me [Mr Brightside was a good single, but they can just piss off with their rhyming of "confidential" and "potential".
What I want to hear more of
The Duke Spirit
Jan 2, 2005
My New Year: pub, Gorman, egg, pi
My New Year's Day evening was spent in the pub with Al, Becca, Eek, Kid Mingus and Laura.
Laura is a pedal optician, which means she makes knees bendy or something. Eek was arrested once for scuba diving on the wrong side of the sea, but he still thinks Billy Ocean is actually an ocean so what does he know.
I've never seen Al wear a hat.
Anyhoo, Eek and I stayed up watching Dave Gorman, drinking whiskey and talking about the Pixies until 6am, after which I grabbed three hours sleep before guzzling a fried-to-death breakfast from Tesco's cafe.
Fry-ups with an albeit mild hangover have a way of re-stablising your life, kind of yinging your yang or something like that. In fact, I swear to you the eggs looked like this...
By the way, my New Year's Resolution is to learn pi to 100 decimal places. Off the top of my head, this is what I've learnt so far:
3.14159265358979323846264338--
--some way to go, but I have a very bad memory, and Jeremy Clarkson's talking about engineering on the telebox so I've forgotten what this blog was about in the first place, so I had better go before I forget how to do other stuff. Like, erm...
Laura is a pedal optician, which means she makes knees bendy or something. Eek was arrested once for scuba diving on the wrong side of the sea, but he still thinks Billy Ocean is actually an ocean so what does he know.
I've never seen Al wear a hat.
Anyhoo, Eek and I stayed up watching Dave Gorman, drinking whiskey and talking about the Pixies until 6am, after which I grabbed three hours sleep before guzzling a fried-to-death breakfast from Tesco's cafe.
Fry-ups with an albeit mild hangover have a way of re-stablising your life, kind of yinging your yang or something like that. In fact, I swear to you the eggs looked like this...
By the way, my New Year's Resolution is to learn pi to 100 decimal places. Off the top of my head, this is what I've learnt so far:
3.14159265358979323846264338--
--some way to go, but I have a very bad memory, and Jeremy Clarkson's talking about engineering on the telebox so I've forgotten what this blog was about in the first place, so I had better go before I forget how to do other stuff. Like, erm...
Dec 31, 2004
Dec 26, 2004
Never trust a man in a hood
Now that Chrimbo is over, with all its tension, drama and shiny baubles, you really ought to treat yourself to a lighter look at Christmas.
When I say 'lighter', I actually mean disturbing. It depends whether you think crying children are funny.
Either way, never trust a man in a hood... Clicky click.
Happy end-of-Christmas to you and yours.
When I say 'lighter', I actually mean disturbing. It depends whether you think crying children are funny.
Either way, never trust a man in a hood... Clicky click.
Happy end-of-Christmas to you and yours.
Dec 9, 2004
The Concretes: The future of animal sex belongs to women
Legendary rock martyr Kurt Cobain said once "the future of rock belongs to women."
It's true that bands like Sahara Hotnights and the Donnas do rock more than a piece of sticky sugar with words written through the middle.
But the biggest rocking rockiest band are the beautiful Concretes, who are fronted by a girl, don't make their guitars scream and probably don't even break a sweat on stage. Strange, then, they can get away with a brilliantly animated video that has the most thinly veiled reference to bestiality since Prince Charles first bedded Camilla.
Now that's rock. The video is the Concretes' new single Warm Night and you can click here to see the video on the NME website without signing up for any stupid mailing lists and stuff.
It's true that bands like Sahara Hotnights and the Donnas do rock more than a piece of sticky sugar with words written through the middle.
But the biggest rocking rockiest band are the beautiful Concretes, who are fronted by a girl, don't make their guitars scream and probably don't even break a sweat on stage. Strange, then, they can get away with a brilliantly animated video that has the most thinly veiled reference to bestiality since Prince Charles first bedded Camilla.
Now that's rock. The video is the Concretes' new single Warm Night and you can click here to see the video on the NME website without signing up for any stupid mailing lists and stuff.
Dec 1, 2004
Fuzz love two job
The following things have made me happy recently...
1) I have a new job.
b) I have been buying up Starflyer 59's back catalogue. I now have a pristine Fell In Love At 22 EP from the second-hand bit of Amazon. EP Nights is a top choon.
iii) It's Two tonight in the Northern Quarter. Full report on this blog soon.
4th) Simon Pegg is working on a comedy-with-police film called Hot Fuzz.
That's all. I'm off to whistle merrily down the street now.
1) I have a new job.
b) I have been buying up Starflyer 59's back catalogue. I now have a pristine Fell In Love At 22 EP from the second-hand bit of Amazon. EP Nights is a top choon.
iii) It's Two tonight in the Northern Quarter. Full report on this blog soon.
4th) Simon Pegg is working on a comedy-with-police film called Hot Fuzz.
That's all. I'm off to whistle merrily down the street now.
Nov 23, 2004
Gig review: Stephen Devine, Night & Day café, November 15th 2004
It’s not unusual for me to walk out of the Night & Day £3-a-bottle the poorer and my ears bleeding like the lifts out of the Shining. It’s normally because I have seen a band so distatefully dire, I want to go home and dance to my food blender.
Fortunately, this didn’t happen until the fourth band tonight. I don’t know their name and I don’t care, as they made Maroon 5 sound like Slayer.
The third band were excellent, however, with a stack of good songs, a rack of exaggerated hair and a nice line in stooping. It’s such a shame they were called Fans Of Kate.
Meanwhile, the first band were called the Likes. They were a macho Coral whose lead singers had voices so low, I swear to this day they were transmitting subliminal orders to buy badges from their badge stand. Yes, a badge stand. What the Likes lacked in personality, they more than made up for with effects pedals. Bless.
No it’s the second band, or rather soloist Stephen Devine, I was here to see tonight. One man and his acoustic guitar couldn’t have been more out of place than if Divine himself had waddled onto the stage. At least Stephen had a sampler as an extra ‘band member’. And yes he really did introduce his ‘band’.
Devine (the non-drag one) opened with Do You Think They Know and yes it does start off sounding a bit like the Levellers, but this is ditched pretty promptly with a sequence of sometimes haphazard chords and an ending of such volume and intensity, you could actually see his tonsils.
Can You Wait was the first track to showcase his layered guitars party trick, sampling and looping as he goes to create a rich acoustic mantra with more nods to Underworld than anyone of the singer-songwriter ilk. The song was spoilt, however, by a plebeian sound engineer with mud in his ears; the crucial bass drum was lost. The song also sounded a little rushed, losing the sense of space that makes Devine’s experimentalism work so well.
Help Me, a desperately quiet anti-anthem of tortured desire is one of those Really Good Tunes that puts a flag on Devine’s song-writing talents and waves it as though the Queen’s in town. “I just want to go hooome with you” he pleads before telling you he’s bleeding and his tragic heart is broken. Talk about needy. The simplicity of this song speaks for itself, and no amount of mud in anyone’s ears could mess this one up.
The wistful vibe was carried into Comfort Me, the title track from his CD. It takes some courage to sing so quietly into the hip void of the Night & Day. It doesn’t work as well as Help Me, and sits the artist firmly in the singer-songwriter vein when I suspect his blood should be pumping down more experimental arteries.
Which brings us to Slow Down, his opus, his epic, his big tool that wrenches conversation into submission. The sound man has nipped to Boots for cotton buds just in time for an ever-so-simple quiet song that loops and builds and layers until it’s funking out like the Chili Peppers and Devine is spinning around on the spot like, er, Kylie Minogue. Here we have a singer possessed by everything Stephen ought to be about: repetition, beauty, simplicity and passion.
This is the sound of someone still looking for completeness in his music, with the result that some songs are better than others, and some songs’ mothers are better than other songs’ mothers. But he found that completeness at the end, leaving us wanting more and not begging for the strange rhythms of our food blenders.
Which is divinity in itself, I suppose.
Fortunately, this didn’t happen until the fourth band tonight. I don’t know their name and I don’t care, as they made Maroon 5 sound like Slayer.
The third band were excellent, however, with a stack of good songs, a rack of exaggerated hair and a nice line in stooping. It’s such a shame they were called Fans Of Kate.
Meanwhile, the first band were called the Likes. They were a macho Coral whose lead singers had voices so low, I swear to this day they were transmitting subliminal orders to buy badges from their badge stand. Yes, a badge stand. What the Likes lacked in personality, they more than made up for with effects pedals. Bless.
No it’s the second band, or rather soloist Stephen Devine, I was here to see tonight. One man and his acoustic guitar couldn’t have been more out of place than if Divine himself had waddled onto the stage. At least Stephen had a sampler as an extra ‘band member’. And yes he really did introduce his ‘band’.
Devine (the non-drag one) opened with Do You Think They Know and yes it does start off sounding a bit like the Levellers, but this is ditched pretty promptly with a sequence of sometimes haphazard chords and an ending of such volume and intensity, you could actually see his tonsils.
Can You Wait was the first track to showcase his layered guitars party trick, sampling and looping as he goes to create a rich acoustic mantra with more nods to Underworld than anyone of the singer-songwriter ilk. The song was spoilt, however, by a plebeian sound engineer with mud in his ears; the crucial bass drum was lost. The song also sounded a little rushed, losing the sense of space that makes Devine’s experimentalism work so well.
Help Me, a desperately quiet anti-anthem of tortured desire is one of those Really Good Tunes that puts a flag on Devine’s song-writing talents and waves it as though the Queen’s in town. “I just want to go hooome with you” he pleads before telling you he’s bleeding and his tragic heart is broken. Talk about needy. The simplicity of this song speaks for itself, and no amount of mud in anyone’s ears could mess this one up.
The wistful vibe was carried into Comfort Me, the title track from his CD. It takes some courage to sing so quietly into the hip void of the Night & Day. It doesn’t work as well as Help Me, and sits the artist firmly in the singer-songwriter vein when I suspect his blood should be pumping down more experimental arteries.
Which brings us to Slow Down, his opus, his epic, his big tool that wrenches conversation into submission. The sound man has nipped to Boots for cotton buds just in time for an ever-so-simple quiet song that loops and builds and layers until it’s funking out like the Chili Peppers and Devine is spinning around on the spot like, er, Kylie Minogue. Here we have a singer possessed by everything Stephen ought to be about: repetition, beauty, simplicity and passion.
This is the sound of someone still looking for completeness in his music, with the result that some songs are better than others, and some songs’ mothers are better than other songs’ mothers. But he found that completeness at the end, leaving us wanting more and not begging for the strange rhythms of our food blenders.
Which is divinity in itself, I suppose.
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