Ceramic Hobs/Bidoche Musique Tour

With Heffalump Trap too, the new noise rock combo featuring many Ceramic Hobs, Nigel Joseph & John Tree. Ceramic Hobs are Blackpool's finest psych-noise-punk drongos & Bidoche Musique is an experimental geezer from Switzerland, who will be playing to tapes by France's M Nomized (blast from the past!). Other bands also featuring on some dates, including Drop-Out Wives, Mrs Cakehead & When People Become Numbers...

All the details are here... http://www.batcow.co.uk/alice/

KEEPIN' MY POWDER DRY: 2007 & ALL THAT

I was pleased with how last year's end of year round-up went, so here is another…

It's been a fairly pleasant year. I've turned 30 without getting too grumpy about it & have finally been cajoled into buying most of the magical household boxes that most people would have bought years ago. In fact, in general, it's been a year of saving & hence not my most active 12 months. I seem to have been busy enough at home though, bouncing from one project to another, whether it be attempting to help compile an alternative Lancashire music comp CD for On the Wire (I think its slipped off Steve's priority list); helping to organise a Blackpool tribute night to Sophie Lancaster or recording endless tracks as The Haddenham One. In fact, come to think of it, it's been a heck of a year: I have spent ages researching Blackpool history & putting in applications to list buildings; I have finally kick-started new noise-rock band behemoth Heffalump Trap…the list goes on!

Anyway, here is a bit of a run-down of some of my preferred bits of STUFF from the 0-7…

I reached a major moment of head-shaking whilst watching videos by bands brown-nosed in the free end of year publication provided by Manchester's top independent record store. There was some OK stuff being chatted about, but it's hard to take this pleasant-enough gunk & reconcile it with the great claims being made for it. Wooden Shjips' sixties revival lark is hardly the Velvets & LCD Soundsystem hardly some sort of Zen reconciliation between dance and rock music. It's no wonder I'm so astonished these days when I hit these end of year things & don't know the bands being feted: they're all people I listened to thirty seconds of a year or two back & turned straight off! The only things I went away from said end of year booklet with any interest in were another Optimo mix CD & a pseudonymous Aphex (Tuss) album that had passed me by. Ye gods, even my main man Neil Campbell's recent hot tip Panda Bear doesn't do it for me. He made the fatal mistake of mentioning the Beach Boys in connection with it (well, you could hardly miss it, I guess) & I can't see it as anything other than a pale imitation of them now. The pseudo-psychedelia of some swirly sounds is hardly the equivalent of the clean lines & blue sky thinking of the Wilson lads. It seemed highly appropriate in Vinyl Exchange at the weekend when the trendy CD floor were floating Panda Bear gently across the shop & the basement responded by plonking on Jacko's "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough". Game over. I mean, who do these bedwetters think they are?!

I must admit that I'm always lambasted by my girlfriend for not being a great fan of 'growers' & the current age seems equivalent to Prog in that respect. I'm not even sure it's that though: it's more the fact that that bar a few stray wisps of drone and some predictable breakbeats, most of what is 'in' right now feels like it could have been made anytime in the last forty years (or twenty-five, depending on your taste!). I have definitely developed a very clipped way of listening to new music. Things really do get all of about 30 seconds/a minute to impress me in these days of working & having a fast internet connection, but then stuff coming out ten years ago would have shot my ear canals to pieces within thirty seconds & ya do feel that you kinda know what you're going to like after 18 years of diligently listening to anything & everything put in front of you. My proudest claim is that whilst I may be drifting into some sorta middle-aged grump about the state of new music, it's less to do with it's challenging nature (my Dad was turned off by punk like my Granddad before was by Rock n Roll) so much as the opposite: it's all so tepid & reheated. I mean, I know we are privileged not to be living under the threat of imminent nuking by the Russians or rubbish piling up in the streets, but it's not as if there's nothing to rail against for the wee young 'uns. What's their reaction? "Take a chill pill granddad & listen to some ELP & Pentangle, dude".

Having griped about 70s-style progdom interminably, I have probably undermined the first half of my main argument here, which was going to be 1) that music revivals have finally dawned on me as being on a predictable twenty year cycle (is this news to anyone?) & that 2) we're missing our next musical revolution by a long way.

The twenty year cycle is a fairly blatant run on nostalgia for aging parents & their sprogs & runs thus: First wave of teen music from the fifties gets ECT in the seventies & reappears as American Graffiti, Happy Days, Showaddywaddy et al…sixties moptop tuneage re-emerges as trendy backwards-looking indie fluff & cosmically fairy-dusted psychedelic house music in the eighties…the forgotten seventies underground melting pot of reggae, funk etc gets a new stir in the nineties whilst punk pops up again as grunge & all-encompassing disco as wave after wave of new dance sub-genres…in the noughties, the decade that style forgot remembers it's quirkier side & runs that into the ground as well….Next: acid house.

Musical revolutions have previously been well-established as being a late-decade regularity all the way from rock n roll through flower power & punk to acid house. Yet one really does wonder why we've been so short-changed in the last decade or so. I guess the principal reason is our spoiling of ourselves, gorging ourselves in the internet age upon every scrap of music from around the globe & exhausting every new micro-scene within months. The nineties for me was a fantastic, colourful decade of many possibilities, which is now predictably derided as old hat by the current young turks (just wait til we look back critically at THEIR decade!). The best aspect at the time was the feeling that you could dabble in any musical styles you wanted. However, that has arguably proved to be the reason we can't focus on anything in particular as a touchpaper-lighting phenomenon…or is it the lack of new, era-defining narcotics? Drum n Bass felt musically weird enough to knock people sideways in the nineties, but it just wasn't a scene with aims beyond itself. Arguably the closest thing to that we have at the moment is Emo, but their music is the worst dreck imaginable!

So what DID I like this year? Well, like last year, the emphasis was just on hearing more music I liked rather than listening to new stuff exclusively. Hence, most of the MP3s I have tagged as 2007 seem to be my own productions (!) & the better end of the pop charts. I still think the biggest potential revivals missed out on by the fashionistas in recent years are Go Go & Noise Rock (which is rallying a bit but hardly at a late eighties/early nineties peak). Both of these areas seem to have potential for going new places & neither really got where it should have done originally. I tend to tell people that the stuff I find most exciting right now is the various goop derived from the UK Garage scene, the slow doom metal junk (what DO you call this? Drone Doom, did I read somewhere?) & the continuing sprawl of experimental/noise thingums. Even this seems a bit of a lacklustre claim though: all the above are arguably old hat themselves by now & none of them are about to explode a generation into some sort of rabid mouth-foaming state of declamation. The noise thing is essentially an art scene that has continued unabated for decades without doing much more than dent the public consciousness (which is why I think tying it to rock music is the real path to glory). The Drone Doom stuff I adore but must admit that even I don't listen to at home extensively. The UK Garage stuff: well, the Grime folk wore themselves out arguing before they could really achieve anything other than a clutch of exciting singles & Dubstep is a great addition to the melting pot but hardly the sound of revolution (unless you hear it in a club, blah blah blah).

1) Little Man Tate - I've professed my unlikely love for these indie scamps before. They snaffled me up as a Mypsace pal recently, which just makes me like them even more. Sorry I missed you at the Empress, ya Yorkshire gets! "Sexy In Latin" & "House Party At Boothy's" are the best ones.

2) Avril Lavigne "Girlfriend" - I kinda like her more when she was less "Complicated" (boom boom), but this was an undeniable pop hit.

3) R Kelly "Trapped In the Closet" second batch - The saga continues. Patchier but at times even more creative than the first lot, especially the final episode so far, where the inter-locked phonecalls took me to some kinda intense area of Kells-worship only usually reserved for American teenagers (no, not THAT kind of worship).

4) Rigamortis "Pillface" - I think I remember reading this was BY Pillface actually, but thats how it came up on the computer. Pacman In Gabba. Smurf is a great man.

5) Sean Kingston "Beautiful Girls" - More than anything, its just great to hear the "Stand By Me" bassline back again. Anything that crosses a bit of reggae into the mianstream is fine with me too.

6) The Klaxons - I was more disposed to dislike this band than anyone, as I came across them whilst looking for stuff by the original band of that name: imagine my disgust! As it happens, I kinda like em, although I agree that they were hardly Mercury fare. For all the experimentation of other bands, the simple conceit of taking some beautiful & aggressive rave songs & making them into indie anthems was brilliant. I don't see "Golden Skans" as the key here at all: I was won over by "The Bouncer" (wow) & "Its Not Over Yet". I'd settle for them doing the same thing for years to come.

7) Lazytown "Bing Bang" - First came into my sights whilst I sat in one of Blackpool's grittiest pubs with Nigel Joseph & Philipp Monopolka. It sounded brilliant immediately & made sense eventually. Hell of a pop tune.

8) Mika "Grace Kelly" - In the Year 25-25, every entertainer will be camp. Not sure about the follow-ups, but this was a slap across the face from a real Brit maverick.

9) Hadouken! - One of those bands that people are initially startled by & then turn on in seconds. I've only really got well into "That Boy That Girl", which is very obviously based on Dizzee & Wiley tracks from several years ago, and I disliked em when I saw em on telly, but theres no denying how much I still like that track. Slightly disappointed that I missed them & their similarly weirdly-named comrades at the gig in Preston.

10) MIA - I feel myself rolling my eyes a bit at MIA. She is a woman of the world in every way & therefore more justified than many to mix up her influences, but I never hear much more than the influences themselves. Its always that way with genre-benders: ADF spring to mind. I've always felt that its best to listen to the people doing the original stuff (in this case principally bhangra) rather than imitations. Nevertheless, she has come up with some party-starters again & "Boyz" is the best I've heard from the album so far.

Other stuff that did it for me…

HeF's productions - I think these eventually end up under the Taurus Board aegis. I seem to have got onto HeF's list of recipients now & receive all sorts of fantastic techno & breaks tunes by the Blackpool recluze. In the same way as his pal RooH from the Hobs, I just wish he'd release the damn things...

Higgins & Sick 56 "We Are the Nutters"/"Back Henry Street" - I started going to Blackpool matches early this year with my girlfriend & much as I love the Nolans, new theme songs are appreciated a lot. That there are songs in the canon to cover inna punk stylee is heartening. I believe the latter (outwardly less inflamatory) one even got played at the ground one week: more of that please!

Benga & Coki "Night" - A late tip-off gets this dubstepper through the door. I'm disheartened that you still only have to go through the old uppy-downy bass motions to get a tune recognised as the shizzle, but it does have a certain charm

Bodyrox "Yeah Yeah" - Somehow exactly what I wanted all the electro-revivalists to do ever since the turn of the decade.

Care Bears On Fire

Cascada "Everytime We Touch" - I think this was last year really, but the Scouse House tearjerker continued to vogue its way through 2007, like a knife through butter, at the school I work at. The only real contender has been the Broomstick Song, which is only a Masters At Work bootleg, innit.

John Clyde-Evans - Back in the saddle.

iTunes Podcasts - I would like to be extolling the virtues of iTunes podcasts at this end of the year, as I spent weeks basking in the wonderful content which I've previously mentioned on this blog. As it happens, some wacky iTunes update midyear seemed to do something weird to the programme & led to me doing something else that resulted in me accidentally deleting umpteen MP3s. I went to bed early in a sulk. iTunes gets the gasface. Quality content though.

The Haddenham One stuff - My own corner. I've been very pleased this year to finish off some brilliant tunes with Stan and start a bunch on Audacity myself. If they ever see the light of day, watch out for "909", "Green Eggs & Ham", "Strip A Real Male...", "timorous", "Duurty", "Live In Terror" & the Mrs C remix "On A Roll" amongst others. My Hobs remixes already popped up on the latest godspunk comp, which I reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

Hal McGee "Beat Frequency" - The Florida resident gets a mention more than anything for having continued to relase stuff consistently for something like 25 years. Dedication, thats whatcha need! I've ended up back on his mailing list & this was the one I valued most this year - eerie theremin junk from a master of improv.

Handsome Furs "Cannot Get, Started" - One of the iTunes lists I am on is the Subpop one & whilst its galling how poor some of their acts are these days, I realised how good this one is whilst compiling this list. Jennifer Gentle, CSS, Lonely Dear, Constantines & Pissed Jeans were kinda kooky too. Subpop: still giving it a bloody good go in 07.

Intravenous In Furs' 'proper' album & "Coffin Leather" booty CDR - Simon from IV In Furs/the Hobs mercilessly bootied up the latter late this year & it got the reviews it deserved: a great improv set from the pseudo-unsavoury characters, capable of driving some freeform ideas through without having to stop to string up any dulcimers.

Neg-Fi

Mark Ronson - I've not heard the whole of the album, but the tester is the fact that I seem to have heard more of this than any other pop album this year. My girlfriend shook her head at the Kaiser Chiefs cover & I never liked the Radiohead track to start with, but I felt a smile creeping across my face nevertheless. I loved his classic bling rap slate "Ooh Wee" with Ghostface Killah but I was a bit trepiditious about this lurch towards the mainstream. Little did I know who he'd been producing along the way. I bet he's had an interesting few years. I like "Oh My God" & "Valerie" (stick it up yr bum, Phil Collins haters), but the clincher for me is the grave-robbing use of Ol' DB on Britney's "Toxic", a version that sits very nicely next to Mrs Cakehead's own sexadelic version from a year or two back.

Rotello "Necrocunnilingus" - An excellent addition to the Extratone canon!

Samim "Heater" & Claude Von Stroke "The Whistler" - Quirky electronica at its best. Ad music rocks. I presume the Grid will be making a comeback on the basis of this?!

"Crank Dat Spiderman"

T2 "Heartbroken" - The Niche Garage scene is one of many over the years that has blossomed in the north to complete indifference in the south. In actual fact, I'm pretty sure it took off c/o EZ in London, but has now become a northern preserve, mixing Speed Garage revivalism with a love for LARGE house tunes with FAT basslines. T2 seemed to get varied reviews, as befits an accidental scene figurehead. To me it sounds pretty much like a Niche stencil & hence absolutely fine as an end of year round-up contender.

Courtis "Broken Walkman Resarch" - Courtis' relase for meeeeeeee....and a lovely one at that. He can spin gold out of anything.

lowercase music - This year's most amusing microgenre, to rival Extratone last year & Screwed & Chopped before it. Look it up on Wikipedia!

Swizz Beatz "Its Me Bitches" - A slightly overhyped talent this year, but one I've always had a soft spot for. This was the best of the new ones.

NIN "Survivalism" - I mainly bought this because it was an unheard-of 9" record (what an anal so-&-so!), but it is well worth having. I believe he has put out a bunch of 9"s now...snap em up, collector fiends.

Casual Seizures stuff - Manchester noise freakery. Send for it. Lovely artwork too.

Operation Sound Sytem In Leicester CD - Quality room-shaker bizness from the Preston sound system.

Smell & Quim Live In Leeds - I wasn't there but it looks & sounds like it was a hell of a show...

Ceramic Hobs "Al Al Who" - Bit of an anti-climax for me by the time it got here, as I'd heard it all umpteen times, but some great tracks & well divorced from the disconnected feel of the first couple of CDs.

Astral Social Club "Neon Pibroch" CD - Another perfect release from Neil.

Seriously Out There CD comp - I couldn't pretend to like everything on John Tree's comp of stuff that came out of his Preston College music course's class of 2007, but there were some pretty impressive slices on there.

Super Furry Animals "Show Your Hand" Picture Disc - Lovely item, lovely tunes. I should probably bow down before this most relaxed of bands. If Creation hadn't collapsed, they might've flukily made it big.

Tiny Masters Of Today - Not quite worth the hype but mindblowing considering how young they are. Hope they don't get messd up along the way.

...jeez I'm lacking new vinyl...somebody send me new vinyl!!

Lily Allen "LDN" - Obviously I heard this out of the traps, but its grown on me significantly in the wake of the Ronson LP. Class tune & spot on sentiments about the capital.

Ronald Binge "Sailing By" - Included on a Tom Middleton comp, and rightly so. Lovely to hear the Radio 4 diehard given its due respect. I hear it so much & it never dies.

Blue Smarties "I Feel Like Ian Beale"

Edgar Broughton "House of Turnabout" - I'd always heard these were a bit of a psychedelic folly, but this tune sez otherwise. Latino-inflected suaveness.

Diblo Dibala "Matchatcha Wetu"

Pain Teens "Death Row Eyes" - Every year.

Shazza "Bajo Bongo"

Tanya Stephens "Yu Nuh Ready For This Yet" - Anyone know who covered this dancehall classic for the recent TV ad?

Luther Vandross "Shine" - This was last year really (well, actually, er, 2005 at the latest). Great song though. Rivals "Never Too Much" as my fave. Do I sound shallow? There ain't nothing shallow about a scene based around people in Fleetwood who dance rabidly to dead people's confessions of love from thousands of miles away. That is profound, dude.

Kersal Massive "Don't F*ck About" - Recorded last year at the latest, but a cult that built this year. Glad it has got as far as it has. Stu Smear deserves some kinda pay-off for championing it.

Joe Tex "I'll Never Fall In Love Again" - One of my favourite songs, and a great reinterpretation by one of the most underrated soul stars. Heaven.

Jarmels "A Little Bit of Soap" - I finally got round to checking out the sample sources for "Three Feet High & Rising" & this was the best - what a compliment!

Jack Charman "The Wibbly Wobbly Walk" - Music Hall really needs a boost.

Human Beinz "Nobody But Me" - Dedication to your cause sees you right. I felt I really ought to check out the student film awards disc that dribbled into school at some point in the past few years. A great promo vid for this forgotten Nuggets gem was included therein. A love affair was born. What a tune.

Fifty Foot Hose - Wow, what a discovery! Wikipedia was the unlikely source on the kings of psychedelic 60s noise rock!

Orb "Perpetual Dawn" Weatherall Remix Picture Disc - I've been collecting some eBay picture discs for my walls & this is the very best. A hidden classic (I'm sure it was compiled onto one of the remix collections - if it wasn't, it should be.) A bassline from heaven too.

Shriekback "Hand On My Heart" - Another picture disc that proved a wise investment. Can Adrian Sherwood do no wrong?

Yello "I Love You" - The most confusing of all the picture discs I picked up this year. A really underrated band.

Donald Banks "Status Quo" - Finally picked up a 7" of this elusive Go-Go classic

Gouranga Powered Band - What a catch to find TWO CDs by them in a Preston charity shop. Grind it out, hare rama.

Butsch "Global Transfer"

Bow Wow Wow "I Want Candy"

Curious old 12"s - I've finally realised that I can actually find interesting old cheap 12"s in Empire Exchange & Vinyl Exchange, just as I could in Cambridge, Leeds & London...in fact, the Manchester scene is even better, with weird 80s 12"s that say little more than "909" or "Remix" on them. Thats positively pervy to a record collector!

For the same reasons mentioned above, I've kept a fairly low profile out on the boards this year. My clubbing days seem to have shrivelled up like the private parts of an eighty-year old with a troubled prostate, which I put down to a combination of saving money, my girlfriend's loathing of most dance music & the general lack of inspirational dance music at the mo. Blackpool's main dance trend remains Bounce & Donk, which I have more time for than most over-20s, but my occasional no-mates pilgrimages to the expensive crucibles of these styles (as at Deviation in July) tend to end early as I get fed up waiting for the place to fill up enough to warrant me dancing.

Gig-wise, most of my outings have been in Blackpool & its surrounds, barring a few special events. The Blackpool scene has continued to be much healthier than two or three years ago but has dipped a bit since last year's unprecedented heights. I'd love to say that it's just all about having the bands on (which has continued to happen this year), but it has to be said that a crowd remains important & the numbers at the more interesting gigs have dropped, particularly towards the end of the year. Maybe it's to do with the town's student make-up changing or summat. Maybe people just got lackadaisical again. I've certainly been a bit less engaged this year myself. It could do with picking up though, or people have no place to gripe in years to come.

Here's some of the best…

When People Become Numbers – various times, all over Blackpool – Let down somewhat by the loss of half the band to other projects, the best band in Blackpool since I moved here are not quite the same this end of the year but still feel like a pretty decent option for a night out, if you like yr screamo-math-grind gubbins.

Al Duvall & Singing Sadie - Klondyke Club, Manchester, January – I had to travel over to see Al, who I had been trying to get to tour here for some time. It seemed to go well for him & it was fantastic chatting to him during my first visit to this near-legendary venue. The greatest surprise though was Singing Sadie, his antipodean sidekick, who was the feistiest wee lassie I'd met in some time & had a hell of a repertoire of detourned pre-rock n roll numbers.

Sideshow Sirens into Dropout Wives – various times, mainly at Riffs, Blackpool – I was sad to see the early demise of the Sirens (do any bands last beyond a coupla years these days?) but the new band seem to have the potential to be even better, with something of a harder rockabilly edge. Bodes well for next year.

Audio Factory – Beat, Blackpool, February – Amazing how much you can cram in in a year…I can't believe this was less than a year ago. A club night in theory, this was I think the first in a series of mishmash nights of drum n bass/breaks/gabba/hip hop which I'm sad to say I've missed the rest of. It wasn't exactly the sum of its parts, but there was a pretty hefty techno/gabba set by the Terrorist (I think) & the real highlight was me & Keiron separately catching part of an extended freestyle beatbox hip hop sesh in the toilets, featuring some pretty funny lines about coming from Mereside etc. Keeping it real for the 0-7!

Monopolka – Riffs, Blackpool, February – A bit of a low-key visit compared to last year, but we still had the great highlight of all chanting "Massive Ejaculation Guy" over & over at Philipp! A real character. It's strange seeing a few noise acts trickling into Blackpool – the audiences may be bemused, but they do usually seem to get into the spirit of it.

Higher Council of Mars were also on at the above show & there seemed to start to bring together their new sound, perfected at the Blue Room soon after. I'm still telling Ric I thought they were best as a two-piece grinding out never-ending riffs, but they have really come back round to an excellent sound, with the current line-up concentrating on a sorta shredded miserablist black metal sound that's toxic as nerve gas. The February Blue Room show was total magic, with a bigger crowd than I ever imagined them playing to seemingly pretty enthralled by it all. Shows since then have been good too & the recordings are seriously high quality. Another of Blackpool's very best.

Nigel Joseph – Riffs, Blackpool, April – Amusing to go to a midweek show & find more people there to see Keiron's virgin group getting more heads out than the 'proper' bands on. It was a hesitant show but one of a number that solidified previous jams into some sorta idea for a band that might finally now be hitting it off as Heffalump Trap. Lola kept things together nicely on the bass…

Abradab, Gutek & Kaliber 44 – Sanuk, Blackpool, April – I think I covered this before. The best part of having loads of people from Poland in the town has been engaging with their music & whilst I was sorta disappointed that they didn't spin much Polish stuff in amongst the bling-hop beforehand & that the three performed together rather than treating us to three separate sets, it was a very good show.

Some folky band – Staveley Beer Festival, May – There's always one or two of these sorta bands that impress me every year. It was just a village beer festival by a river in the Lake District, but being there by the river drinking beer with my sister-in-law's Hungarian male au pair seemed a good way to hear some old Irish ditties being pumped out for the umpteenth time.

Earthling Society – Riffs, Blackpool, May – Blackpool's biggest band that no-one has heard of in the town itself. We'd been waiting years to see them & they lived up to expectations with a hell of a show, just on the right side of Prog. The band seemed to kaleidoscopically morph with every change. A riot of colour.

Fusion Fridays – Filipinos, Poulton, May – Well thought-of by the ones who went, I only made one of these cosy little do's held in the upstairs lounge of a Poulton restaurant. Put on by top men John Tree & Buzz Bury, the music was certainly high-class (a combination of funky, groovy things from all over the world) & the atmosphere was completed by the frankly bizarre venue, with its only semi-present bar staff, dubious bar snacks & beer & generally quirky/shambolic air. This was NOT, I emphasize, a bad thing. I think it was only really the matter of having to stump for food in order to get in that kept me from going to more. Once they find a venue again, I shall be happy to fetch out my jazz trousers once more.

Personal Sacrifice – Riffs, Blackpool, May – Another gig I can't believe happened so recently. Personal Sacrifice are a very worthy addition to the Felch crew and a great metal band, neither mired in the past or in their own cool. Great leg-dance from the singer too!

Poco Loco with Palatine School of Samba & Baybeat – Blackpool town centre, May – I always have to pick some outings by the bands I'm in myself & this was a goodie, combining an array of samba groups in a loud & surprisingly together jam at the revived Puppet Up festival.

Ceramic Hobs – Riffs followed by West Coast, Blackpool, June – Bet you wondered where they were. Not their first of the year but a memorable affair, with the Felch hardcore seeing em at Riffs first & the band then booked in at the monthly punk do at the West Coast after, for a different sort of gig. A very enjoyable night.

Intravenous In Furs – Royal Oak, Poulton, June – A terrible name for Stormy's revived metal band, but a muscular band nevertheless. I kinda liked COTDEF, which these rose from the ashes of, but these will more than do. GG gets covered, disturbed vocoders are on full & they look like they'd do naughty things to members of your family. It's good to have em in town.

The Pilling Party, June – A pretty regular event now Over Wyre, I'm a bit hazy on who did what (the parties all blend into one a bit), but the highlight was certainly seeing The Earthdoctor (Les) from Wales for the first time in years & being as thrilled as ever by his perfect selection of grooves in the Main Barn! Mrs Cakehead also got various Blackpudlians including myself to help out in what I thought was a superb soundclash of a live set. I played a few Sunday morning no-grooves the next day on the lawn too.

The Rocky Horror Show – Grand, Blackpool, June – Covered elsewhere on this blog.

Ceramic Hobs – Blasted Festival, Number One Club, Blackpool, June – I didn't last out much of this day-long affair. I think I've reached the end of the era, if it ever existed, when I could prostrate myself in front of a dozen brick wall local punk bands in one day. However, the Hobs mid-afternoon jam band show was one of the best of the year on reflection. They got pretty poor reviews from the ex-schoolies I know who were drawn in by the all-age tag, but there were a surprising number of people around, lurking in the corners, taking it all in, and it was great seeing the seven (I think)-piece spread out in a ramshackle way across the stage, with Crossley the Boy Theremin Wonder as much a front-line attraction as anyone else these days.

Beatherder – June – This should have been a real highlight of the year, with me & John Tree & Buzz having been hired to run the chill-out tent at a sizable Lancashire festy. In the event, through no-one's fault, it was literally a damp squib. One of the many victims of the year's dreadful summer, only the first night escaped the torrential rain & churning mud. We had good fun, but its fair to say that we had to fight to. The weather was so bad that the organisers couldn't even arrange time to set up our tent for us to play, but that was the least of their worries. All this made the stuff we did see all the better though. I foolishly opted for sensible behaviour on the Friday (saving myself for the bombastic Saturday that never was), so only really got involved with the Blowjangles set. I was playing some miniature object or other with them for the first time in ages & the 'gig' was a classic Blowjangles affair, starting with a drum circle in the campsite & marching into the main arena to play anywhere & everywhere, including in a secret miniature house in the woods!

The Saturday was already very very damp by the time I got to see the much-talked-about Lancashire Hotpots in the afternoon. Comedy folk songs about Lancashire stuff are a one-trick pony I guess, but they were a real elixir under the circumstances, cheering the growing crowd up no end as many beercans & many smiles were raised. We were going to make it through the rain! The other saviour on the Saturday was Mrs Cakehead, giving a haphazard but pleasantly lengthy show, fuelled by my homebrew & a packed tent (it was raining still!) hungry for whatever bonkers entertainment was put in front of them. With a big line-up, guest players going on & off stage at a rate of knots, and at least a handful who knew the words for once, this one has lingered long in my head. Class.

The Sunday was the wettest of all and it was for that reason that I so adored Pie, who were about all I saw before I trudged to a friend's car & sprayed mud all over my flat. Not a favourite from the couple of recordings I had heard of them playing at the Bacup Footy Club, their rustic sounds made a certain amount of sense out in the countryside in the rain…and they soldiered on as long as feasible before rain stopped the electrics. Good on em. I might have been about the only one watching them, but I came away holding them to my heart.

Cabinet of Curiosities – Winter Gardens, Blackpool, July – I only went to the daytime event & the only music was a guy playing the saw & some colour-coded bells, but its worth mentioning, as it was a good day all in all. A council-funded, limp-wristed attempt to re-engage the public with Blackpool's freakshow past, the numbers weren't huge but the entertainment was worth a few hours of my life. Alongside the very capable contortionists & hula hoop dancers was a full-scale restaging of the now highly unconvincing but brilliantly hyped Headless Woman sideshow & the girl in the goldfish bowl. It was probably pretty scary at the time…

Calculon, Mongoloid Porn Inferno, Earthling Society & Higher Council of Mars – Blue Room, Blackpool, August – I missed the Magpyes yet again, but saw everyone else on one of the bills of the year, put together by Ric of Higher Council. Calculon from Preston were very good & very welcome in our town (come back soon, hardcore kids!) & the new When People Become Numbers–derived Mongoloid Porn Inferno impressed with a slightly more hardcore version of their previous band. Its extremely heartening to be a ten minute walk away from gigs like this – anyone would think it was some studenty district in one of the big cities.

Chicken Master – Riffs, Blackpool, August – Nigel Joseph & co (including myself) having another go at forming up the noise rock band. I'm not sure the band as such worked out as well this time (RooH's computer blew up at the start) but we had the visual excitement of Stan angle-grinding a bass guitar (I missed all this as I hid round the corner at the back). The tape sounds pleasingly noisy.

Mongoloid Porn Inferno – West Coast, Blackpool, September – Another great line-up, this time beset by various technical problems. Only Mongoloid really impressed, but they were AWESOME

Poco Loco – Kendal Torchlight Parade, September – Another very good gig with the samba band, all across Kendal…and I couldn't even go up there without a child from school noticing me! It was a hell of a long drag round the town, but well worth it.

Ceramic Hobs and Everything & The Kitchen Sink – Riffs, Blackpool, October – Caz & Steve's (long overdue) engagement party & probably my favourite night out of the year. There were some other bands on too, but I have to admit to most enjoying EATKS (featuring me, Stan Batcow & co bashing hell out of Stan's junk sculpture) & the Hobs best. After several years & performances, it felt like the first time I'd really felt comfortable with the sculpture, which went down very well. Opinions varied on the Hobs, but I was just stunned how together they seemed with Laurence in on bass & was pleased to hear some new songs coming through.

Editors - Manchester Apollo, October – One of me & my girlfriend's main musical points of agreement since we saw them supporting Franz Ferdinand at the MEN a coupla years ago. They were obviously better in the smaller venue & seemed to have a surprising number of memorable tunes to turn out for what seemed a pretty devoted audience. It eventually lifted off into dizzying emotion at the end, as they drove home yet another of the classics (they all have similar one-word titles that I get mixed up over! It was "Bullets" I think: "You don't need this disease/Not right now". Jeez, get the razor blades out!). I don't go to many big gigs these days, but that was a good one, even if we were shattered from Caz & Steve's party the day before.

Boredoms & Michael Gira – Manchester Club Academy, October – We had been looking forward to & planning this one for several months. It surely can't be true that this is the only gig in the vicinity in the last year or two to pull together me, Stan, Simon, Kate, Andrew Plane Truth & Ric, but its somehow fitting that it was. The main spoiler really (apart from the astonishing ticket price) was the sheer number of people in the venue. With a fairly low stage, it was impossible to make out what was going on half the time. Nevertheless, it was a hell of a show. Gira was dealt perhaps slightly more reverence than he deserves but certainly has a commanding voice & a bit more humour than most of the audience would allow. The Boredoms have changed a lot since the days when I knew their stuff best but now sound like a wonderful modern take on Hawkwind & should be held to our hearts for that. We danced & generally tried to shake up the blackshirts a bit. Great night.

Vertigen, The Eternal Fall & Cauda Pavonis – West Coast, Blackpool, November – The Misery of Sound Goth nights have been a great surprise to me in their diversity over the past year or two & it was a pleasure to work with Andy on putting together a night in tribute to the late Sophie Lancaster. Music-wise, Vertigen were more like Joy Division than anything. A wonderfully nerdy, awkward band of a very individual nature. I was sad to get a Myspace thingy the very next day saying they had split (!) & started again under a new name – oh those sixth formers! The other hit with me was The Eternal Fall, from Spain. I always say how I dislike miserable-sounding music, but from Higher Council to Editors to this lot, misery was curiously 'in' with me this year! The nearest description I could get to was that it was like paint peeling off something….elegantly. A delightfully sad sound.

Half Man Half Biscuit & Calvin Party – Tower Lounge, Blackpool, November – I wasn't sure if it was Calvin Party til the last number, when they morphed from a pretty sturdy support band into something much more special, by way of their old favourite "Mass". I'd been waiting all year to see the reformed band, & that one number was worth the wait. Half Man Half Biscuit were all I hoped for & more…the MORE bit being the only problem. I didn't realise quite how expensive a gig it would be, quite how many nerdy singalong trainspotter fans they have & quite how long they were going to play. Cut a quarter of an hour off & exchange some of the all-knowing for some inquisitive enthusiasts for half the price & it would have been perfect! As it was, I'll admit to being halfway to becoming one of the trainspotters myself & happily chanted along to the complexities of any number of their quirky one-offs about subjects as diverse as fenland market towns (a proud moment for me!) & members of nu metal bands going for papal visits. Quality entertainment, and the clarity of sound they required too (a rarity).

Kaiser Chiefs – MEN, Manchester, November – Our enormodrome gig for the year. It was good to catch up with their progress after seeing them at the Apollo a coupla years ago. I'm not quite sure why the Kaiser Chiefs are such a target for gripers – they always seem to be genuinely entertaining & to have an alternative & worthwhile view on the world. If they happen to be popular enough to fill a barn as big as the MEN, that's fine with me. I should imagine they're very very pleased to have made it that far after years of languishing on the pub scene. What I particularly liked last time was "Caroline Yes", where they extended a good groove from "Employment" into a gargantuan, stomping riffathon. They unsurprisingly left such things behind this time, but there will still moments, as in the medleying of one of their enormohits ("Oh My God"?) with something new, when they drove the riff through like a train & you could so tell what a great band they would be in a nice little venue like Riffs. I guess we'll just have to wait til the last snow has gone…

Judge Mental & the Heavy Dread Beat - West Coast, Blackpool, December - Its difficult to review Judge Mental, as they always do the same set, and have done for ten or twenty years. Conceptual guff aside, I'd love to hear some of the other ones being done, but its great to hear them back in the saddle anyway. Pumf's top act ever, I suspect.

Ceramic Hobs & Barbarians – West Coast, Blackpool, December – I sadly had to leave before Litterbug got into the swing of things, but they would have had a hard time topping the extraordinary performance of Barbarians, possibly the best thing I've ever seen anywhere in Blackpool. The Manchester godz of noise made an unholy racket that they freely admit doesn't translate to recordings very well, based around thumping huge lumps of metal on other huge lumps of metal. The best bit for me was the fact that it was all so 4 REAL – Stuart & co clearly didn't care much about the fact that they were close to decapitating me half the time in the name of their art! The metal bar parted my hair a few times and I was encouraged on to my jerky drunken stagger-dance, which is always a good sign.

I've continued to catch up on my pre-video/DVD/download days this year but haven't seen millions of brand new films. The best new film might remain the astounding Last King of Scotland, from January. Forrest Whitaker was born to play Idi Amin & swallowed up the whole screen making up for all the semi-reasonable roles he's muddled his way through on the path up to this. Uganda looks beautiful (if that was where they shot it!). Great soundtrack too.

Art School Confidential says it is a 2005 film on the DVD, but that feels severely wrong. Either way, it was a hell of a film, every bit & more capable of meeting the exceedingly high expectations I had of Clowes & Zwigoff after the successful transfer of "Ghost World" to the screen. For anyone who has been within a sniff of an art college, it is perfect. I was looking forward to seeing the four page strip stretched over an hour and a half. In fact, I don't think a single panel was reused in the film - the vision was that strong. Clowes rocks. But gently.

The Bourne Trilogy - I finally caught up with these this year & was fairly well gobsmacked. These built well beyond the original schematic, I suspect. A bit stroboscopic, but pretty exciting by the same token. I particularly love the fearless refusal to subtitle odd bits of foreign chit-chat: we're all part of a global melting pot, right? How hard can it be to guess a few lines of German? Gold-plated spy shizzle...fe real.

Harry Potter & Whatever It Was This Time - I kinda like these, I've decided, although I wouldn't go near the books. Celebrities certainly seem keen to get involved - you can't go five seconds without seeing another high profile cameo. Ripping stuff - the kids must love it all.

Harsh Times (an offering from last year, I think?) starred Christian Bale, who was excellent as usual, this time as a sketchy homeboy trying to do the right thing but invariably doing just the opposite.

London To Brighton - Severely depressing gritty realism about under-age prostitution in the capital. Essential viewing.

The Number 23 was a bit of a disappointment, after Jim Carrey had seemingly turned himself round in the last few years. There has been a hell of a lot said about the number 23 over the years & the film had the potential to get into some very mysterious territory. Although it went some way towards that & made use of every available opportunity to throw the number in, it wasn't quite the mystical ride it could have been.

This Is England - Not quite what I was hoping for, but a great addition to the 'Gritty British realism' genre, all the better for having unlikely actors from Emmerdale in it. The best & worst bit was the soundtrack: great pop hits mismatched with lovely but badly-placed OST-type stuff.

Vacnacy - I'm such a girl. I couldn't believe it was a 15 - I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through. Hardly a cinematic classic & just as nasty as all the so-called 'torture porn', but it was certainly effective. I'm not sure I 'get' the trend for under-developed deliberately obnoxious leads though - are we meant to WANT them to be tortured?!

CLIPS:

Aufgehoben at Under the Radar - What a great band, which I'd completely missed until now. I've got a CD now too which I haven't checked out yet but expect to love. A different & fresh take on Noise Rock. In fact, type "noise rock" in Youtube & you get a whole bunch of interesting folk that you'll never have heard of.

James Blunt parodies....were everywhere when I started looking. I think Dead Ringers' "Its BLOODY cold" just pipped it for me, but you have to see the video for that to make much sense. "I've been neutered" wasn't bad either...and then he went & trumped us all by turning up on Sesame Street adapting his own theme song into "My TRI-ANGLE!". Maybe he's alright after all!

Camron & Diplomats on BET - Camron & co's dubious morality & tuneage always seems to be massively in favour in The Wire & the like. I'm not sure why, but in trying to find out I came across a standout clip listed as "Dipset Smack DVD", where they hook their easy-going rhymes to a classic soul sample & it all makes sense at last.

The Evolution of Dance - I thought this was quite good, but I mention it mainly because I was absolutely ASTOUNDED at how many times its been played on Youtube (its the most watched video there). HOW many million?! I just hope he's getting some money out of that one way or another.

The French guy with the car horns all over his body...try Youtube?

Grime podcasts & Youtube vids - Loads of em. Laugh at the titchy little MCs training themselves up...

Hope Is Emo - A very funny little series of mock video diaries on iTunes that summed up Emo much better than that much-liked spoof documentary thingy.

Horrors "Sheena Is A Parasite" - Meaty Cunningham clip.

Mrs Cakehead - He made some videos at last. They make as little sense as the songs! Youtube is the place to go once more.

Ovo - Sad to have missed these Italian goons on tour. I had to put up with videos instead.

Jessica Rylan - Ooo, I could watch the Noise Maiden all day!

Upset the Rhythm videos - They didn't wanna put on Crank Sturgeon in London when he came over last year (sulk sulk), but they have some damn fine clips of the people they have given their time to. Gang Gang Dance, Lambsbread & Blue Sabbath Black Fiji were amongst the best.

Weird Al "White & Nerdy" - I think this was last year actually, but I just caught up over the summer. I don't know how he manages to be so consistent! Maybe its the fact that he gets other people to do the music :-)

DISCOVERIES:

Another Day In Paradise - The most 'obvious' Larry Clark film. Not the best, but the one I can best recommend to friends. Not a bad thing. Not a bad package on the DVD either. If you like Clark, you need to see it. If you like Tarantino, you could do worse than checking it out too.

Bad Santa - I kept waiting for this to let up. You get a good look at a real Christmas Grinch here. I mean not even I deal out that much Humbug! It is brilliantly played by Thornton & well worth a watch, particularly if you like the other Zwigoff flicks. He is shaping up to be the best filmmaker of the new millennnium.

Bad Taste - I'm seriously late on this one. I adored Braindead & this isn't quite as good yet somehow is even better by virtue of having come before. I'm very happy that Jacko has managed to achieve worldwide recognition since - lets hope everyone checks out this sicko freakery along the way.

Black Tar Heroin - A documentary I found online about a bunch of Yanks & their problems with skag. It gets special mention because the continual needle use creeped me out & I couldn't watch it all the way through!

Boiling Point - I heard this isn't one of Takeshi's best, but I love how it veers from fairly slow comedy to freaky surreal sequnces. Its what cinema is all about: Private Visions.

Dawn of the Dead - The epitome of slept on (by me, not anyone else!).

Election 1 & 2 - Stealing from the Godfather is OK if you are kickstarting a whole new generation of East Asian filmmaking.

Flying Nun documentary - On Youtube in several parts. I'd always known about Flying Nun but it was refreshing to see so much good stuff having been handled by them over the years, with Dead C, Straitjacket Fits & The Gordons/Bailter Space amongst the best of it.

Grizzly Man - Is this for real?! What a dumbass Yoghurt-Weaver.

Happiness - I feel punch-drunk...Philip Seymour Hoffman in effect.

In Living Color & Mad TV pastiches.

Inside Man - I'm almost sad to find Spike Lee doing his very best filmmaking when he finally lets go of the racial stuff.

Lemon Popsicle - I'm not quite sure how this gets the joke reviews that it does: its a killer. Maybe people didn't watch it til the end.

Little Miss Sunshine - Bit of an eye-popper from the enormo-scale comedian.

The London Nobody Knows - Not popular with everyone, but I saw it as a freaky bit of psychogeography that mashed up sixties avant music with the most interesting remnants of a London that would never be again. Well worth checking out.

Love Liza - Philip Seymour Hoffman is great & this is a hell of a wacky (but touching) vehicle for him. I bet Jim O'Rourke loved getting the job on the soundtrack. Real human stuff - check it out.

The Man Without A Past - Kaurismaki can do no wrong. I want to see them all. Make Finland part of the Security Council. Nobels to Finland. Just let them take over the world, dammit...

Demetri Martin - Not the very funniest comedian I've seen in recent years, but easily one of the most original.

Morvern Callar - A bit compromised by its own agenda, but a beautiful film, sprinkled with an incredibly good soundtrack & some stunning imagery.

Silent stuff & very early talkies - I watched a bunch of this stuff on Youtube this year. If you don't know your past, do the history & check this stuff out, cos its certainly way better than most guff on your TVs these days. "The Great Train Robbery" (one of the very earliest narrative films) was astutely written up by someone else as having more plot & interest in its ten or fifteen minutes than most modern full-length efforts. Harold Lloyd had underpants made of steel. As for "M"...well, you need to see it. Maybe it should be shipped out to News of the World correspondents.

Suicide - Dream, baby, dream.

Trailers - Theres bundles of em on Youtube. Type in "exploitation trailer" or summat & waste a few hours!

Blackpool skate vid - I dunno what this is called, but Baz from WPBN/MPI made it. I've seen it in Blackpool's Blue Room pub & appreciate the fact that I can go "ooh look, its the prom that they're doing their little jumps on"!

---

I added TV into the equation this time because I finally bought a full-size telly this year & have spent much of my saving-up time lying around in front of it, avoiding other jobs. This is precisely why I resisted a telly on & off for so long, but hey ho. In fact, I went the whole hog & got the almost-mandatory Freeview box too. Satellite packages are too much & littered with utter irrelevance. I always enjoy checking the ever-proliferating music channel section on my parents' telly, but I couldn't imagine ever buying into it. Freeview, on the other hand, does seem like a bit of a bargain. You suddenly realise what happened to all the decent telly a few years ago. Why has Channel 4 now fallen so low? Why is the BBC wall-to-wall lifestyle programmes? Because they've got all these new channels to hide all the worthy stuff on. Those cretins who lambasted BBC4 at the outset can get stuffed, because I could happily watch BBC4 all night every night. Its almost like the old days when I could snuggle up in bed with my black & white telly & actually EDUCATE myself late at night (& see some racy movies too of course!). Where did all these punk documentaries suddenly pop up from? A series on British comic books? A whole NIGHT dedicated to Abigail's Party? Bring on the herbal tea dahlink and never let a single soap opera darken my screen again. Aside from the high-falutin' stuff, I have drifted around the channels catching up on stuff I never saw at the time, starting with the earthy draw of endless programmes on people with bizarre bodily problems & drifting towards the reasonable quality of newcomer channel Dave's seemingly endless BBC comedy reruns (I'm almost ashamed to admit that late UK editions & US editions of Whose Line? are a current fave). I probably watched some new flagship programmes too this year (the one about The Falling Man from 9/11 and Balderdash & Piffle come to mind) but the very fact that I watched so much that I've forgotten it all explains why I hope to watch a bit less next year! My most embarassing secret treats? "Dragon's Den" comes to mind. Also "The Secret Millionaire" series on Channel 4 - I found myself blubbing like a girl at the end of every single one!

I should also mention The IT Crowd. I thought it looked hopeful when they trailed the first series (I'm one of the many millions who knows that IT department well from at least one period in my career). Then I saw an unfunny segment of one & gave up to the conventional wisdom that it wasn't very good. For some reason, no-one told me Chris Morris & half of the Nathan Barley cast were in it. The second series came around & I found myself watching the first AND second series one after the other. The first episode of the second series is rightly seen as the peak, but its pretty much all worth seeing. They could do with a better catchphrase or two, but its sterling stuff - a very modern sitcom.

The Internet must really be drawing me in these days, as I seem to have been drifting in & out of the same embarassing book about celebrity murders all damn year! In the meantime, I've skimmed the usual slew of non-fiction coffe-table books & mags & read practically none of the fiction that I've continued to stockpile. I'm looking forward to tackling Pete McKenna's long-awaited follow-up to "Nightshift" now I've finally tracked a copy down though. Datewise, most of these are hardly new - I can't imagine being enslaved to book release dates. What was missing this year was new interesting music books. Theres a few I'm umming and ahhing about (that new old skool hip hop one, the latest Simon Reynolds & Pete Frame ones...), but nothing thats leapt out at me. We need that revolution!

Critchlow "Blackpool's Golden Mile" - A mightily expensive self-published limited edition, but I was well pleased that I came across it. The book I was waiting to see written.

Stott "Layton Village" - Blackpool local history anality.

Stuart Diggle "Two Job Salvo" - I finally got round to getting a copy of Stuart's accounts of his non-league footy days out of him, edited it to make it a bit snappier & encouraged him to add some stuff on to bring it up to date. Now its time to get it published...

Jeremy Deller "Folk Archive" - Fascinating state of the union collection of UK folk art.

Lexicon Devil - see elsewhere on this blog.

Toilets of the World

Killing For Culture - Semi-academic study of snuff films from years ago.

Crumb Family Comics

Bussocks, Gimbles & Tuttles: How To Insult People In Lancashire Dialect (North West Sound Archive)

Mags: I seem to be a nearly-monthly Record Collector reader these days (gotta keep up with that daft download enthusiast who insists on writing to the letters page every month!). Aside from all the freebies (led as ever by Vice & also represented by Manchester's enthusiastic little PlayPauseStop zine at the mo), the others I'm always looking out for right now are The Wire and Raw Vision, neither of which entice me in as much as I'd like them to. The Observer Music Monthly is a nice fluffy read too.

I didn't mention art last year. It probably only occurs to me now because I've just recently been to a Dr Steg exhibition. I have a big soft spot for art, particularly since I was librarian at a couple of art colleges a few years back. I love Outsider Art in particular, and what is generally termed 'low-brow art' - music-related poster art, folk art etc - as well as the usual selection of old masters etc. I'm not so keyed in at the mo, but I'm still adding to my very own flat-filling gallery & ever-rotating screensaver selections: if you make stuff, send me some of it!

It was an honour to finally meet Dr Steg this year, as he has been a favourite of mine for about 13 years & has very generously sent me reams of his work for my flat. His stuff is so edgy & diverse. He is a truly creative individual, sparking off new drawings all the time - a veritable whirlygig. The very small exhibition at Thornton Marsh Mill was long overdue & I hope to see more by him next year.

I managed to make it to the Open exhibition at Blackpool's Grundy this year, where Steg also had a piece. A showcase for anyone who wants to contribute, it was just the mish-mash one would expect, but featured a number of people I feel I'd like to know more about, as well as a couple of long-term faves such as Glenn Wood and Boz Philips. The Rembrandt prints a few months before weren't bad either!

Stan Batcow from the Hobs contributed to Open too, and topped off my year nicely last week by surprising me with an early Christmas present in the form of a brilliant giraffe-shaped junk sculpture doorstop! My girlfriend Su loves giraffes, so its all part of the buttering up process :-)

Staying with giraffes, I nearly fell off my chair when I realised that Laura Ford's 1998 sculpture of the same species of beast had landed in Preston as part of an exhibition of art about animals at the Harris, giving me a reason to finally get over there & check out the Carleton Elk at the same time. Two spine-tinglers in one.

At the more expensive end of the art world, I was sad to see that Blackpool council missed out on the rediscovered Lowry painting. It seemed suddenly all so obvious when someone pointed out that the disputed scene was clearly the Pleasure Beach. I see the point being made by the nice girls from our school who would rather the millions be spent on minibuses to help them escape Corned Beef Island, but I must admit that I thought the council's decision to bid for the piece was one of their better ideas this year. A real slice of Blackpool history from a master painter.

I spent some time this year discovering that you can get a lot of Mike Diana's stuff online these days (not the actual comicbooks - you have to pay through the nose for them). I always thought he was treated horrendously in the States for his artwork, which is certainly in poor taste but brilliantly rendered & entirely his own business in my opinion. Check the story out if you've not heard of him.

I finally got round to scoping out Larry Clark's Tulsa stuff too. The old perv.

Zooming in from stage left inna Dr Steg stylee, special mentions go out to Gareth from Barbarians, Golden Labs & Kapreles for their comic work...

...and I have to mention Wasted World, Blackpool's own music scene comic strip. Its always fun picking the faces out & going "Oh yeah, thats So-&-So".

I use the above title because whilst the web expands at approximately fifty times the speed of the universe, I seemed to concentrate on less & less websites this year as the big boys tightened up their acts still further.

The Big Seven for me were Hotmail, Facebook, Myspace, Amazon, eBay, Youtube & Blackpoolbands. Facebook went exactly the way one might expect, expanding to fill nearly all my time for a few months early in the year & then tailing off after it reached critical mass & lost its novelty. It took a while to realise that it was worthwhile & quite different to Myspace (I think I joined sometime last year but didn't use it for months on end to start with). You can't really knock a site that allows you to reconnect to dozens of people you'd completely lost touch with. The attraction to all those people over & above Myspace seems to be that its a more personal thing. Its not about showing off (unless you want it to be!), its just a place to find out what yr mates are up to & download some photos of them.

Myspace got less use from me this year as a consequence, but it remains the quickest place to hear bands for the first time (despite the dreadful wait for many of the pages to load, probably including this one). As you can see, I started to get into the blog as well. The 'friends' on here are more like 'contacts' I guess, but I like the fact that one way or another, having ditched umpteen timewasters along the way, I've connected to 700 interesting people & projects at their behest or my own...and lots & lots of them are completely new to me.

Probably my biggest pastime of all on the web this year was Amazon Recommendations. I've barely bought anything from Amazon this year, now that eBay is in full swing, but I had the recommendations pointed out to me, became nerdily fascinated by the whole process of Amazon trying to automatically guess what I want to buy & spent much of the rest of the year ticking things off, rating some of them, discarding others & being more & more intrigued by what appears to be my taste. The recommendations were actually somehow more interesting when they only had what I had bought directly from them to go on. As you give them more information, it first expands to recommend just about everything ever released. As you react to that, you start to get a sturdier list, ranging from the blindingly obvious to the very obscure, which is regularly attacked by swathes of new entries by anyone who you give high ratings to other works by. I quite like the fact that some of it is so obvious: at the moment I think my top recommendations are Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Shaun of the Dead & some singles by the White Stripes. None of them would be my real next choices, but it wouldn't take a genius to work out that I'd probably like all of them, all of which Amazon are probably keen to shift yet more copies of. I've never read the classic Heller book, I still haven't seen the well-liked zombie spoof & I can take as much of the White Stripes as you throw at me. The Internet, it speaka di truth!

I give eBay a sweep once a week at the mo, looking for interesting dirt cheap picture discs, 10" records & all manner of other collector fetish gunk. My girlfriend sez I get a 'present' every day through the post from my good friends eBay. Most of em don't cost more than 2 or 3 quid: can't argue with that. The very best bit of eBay, I've realised, is the ability to save searches. I get emails every week telling me about some of the 100 items I'm looking out for. Every so often, I manage to secure something I'd been looking for for ten or fifteen years. When I first added the searches on, I was getting stuff I never thought I'd ever see at a rate of one or two a week. The Internet - brilliant!

I still can't seem to get registered to post on the 'new' Blackpoolbands board, but reading the gig adverts forum remains the best way to scope out gigs in town. Still essential to all Blackpool soldiers!

ELSEWHERE...

BBC News

Bebo - I'm registered at Bebo but barely use it because it creeps me out. I hear its the favoured social networking site in some countries but here its only favoured by children. I've glimpsed some of the ones at school using it & I can't quite believe how much stuff about themselves they put on there (photos especially). Its all freely available to anyone who has a password. The Dark Side of the Net!

Popsike clears up all the saddo details of eBay auctions of yore. A sorta barometer for record collectors.

Google Video - They always seem rather slow to load, but there is stuff on there that isn't on Youtube, so its worth checking it out.

Wikipedia - The warnings about goofy mistakes are fair, but on the whole its damn reliable and already some obscene number of times bigger than the largest ever print encyclopedia. Not sure how it fairs on more academic subjects (which I don't use it quite so much on) but its very very good on music biogs etc.

MARIO - Astonishing site that is part of Lancashire council's bigger operation. Allows you to overlay various historic maps with aerial photos & modern maps. Absurdly good for historian blokes.

Faces of Meth - A pretty stark warning about the dangers of the Nazi Crank!

Flickr - I couldn't imagine searching for anything on it or putting stuff on there myself, but Caz Fisher certainly does...

Images of England - Find all your local listed buildings!

IMDB - I haven't got a password for the special adult-only bit that someone told me about though!!

Yell

After attending another example in a long line, I thought a mini-rant was in order...

Ye Blackpoolers out there...why does no-one much ever stay at gigs for the bands from out of town?! I've lived here nearly five years now, & it has the bizarrest set-up for gigs of the many places in the UK that I've lived in or visited.

Maybe I should explain how gigs generally work to innocent Blackpudlians. The gig starts at anywhere between 7 & 9.30 & goes on til 11, or MAYBE 12. The local bands come on first & warm people up for the out-of-towners, who everyone is excited to see. People cheer, clap & buy things off the out-of-towners, shake hands with them & get reciprocal gigs in the places the out-of-towners come from. The local bands gradually become bigger & get to play to people other than their friends, who live in other places. They even make new friends. All these friends get on together & the world is a better place. Repeat again & again until we all die happy.

Blackpool? No-one comes out til at least 10. The gig is in a club where the drinks cost the same as they do in London. The bands start at 11.30 at the earliest & go on until 2 or 3am. Only a handful go to the gig because everyone else is either tired after the pub & has gone home, is doing the sensible thing at that hour & dancing in another club or has WORK IN THE MORNING, you dolts! Anyone remaining hangs on to see their friends play & then goes home or to another club, completely ignoring the nice people from out of town who came to meet some new people a bit like them & play music to them. They don't sell any stuff, play to a half-empty room & go home swearing never to play in Blackpool again. No-one gets any reciprocal gigs because the local bands are content to have got a better reaction in their own town than the out-of-towners, ignore the out-of-town band & decamp to another club where they can pick up 13 year old 'bad to be a bad uncle' types. The local bands gradually die on the vine because they can't work out why they haven't obtained any fans from outside Blackpool. Their musicians soldier on in bemusement, becoming Creme Brule types with drawers full of CDRs from the time were in a regional battle of the bands heat, rocked out in front of their thronged crescent of mates & then all left before everyone else played. Repeat again & again until the Blackpool music scene goes back to how it was before...boring. I can't wait...

THE WORLD FIREWORKS CHAMPIONSHIPS

If any of you Blackpudlians get heckled by folk for where you come from, tell em that there can't be many places that you can take a short stroll to the front & get five weekends in a row of world-class pyrotechnics displays for free. Surely one of the most psychedelic of the 'normal' world's psychedelic adventures, its only made even more comical & strange when they actually do a pretty good job of timing them to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' & 'Dancing Queen'!

The only downside is having to deal with even more grockles than usual. Ah well, goes with the territory, I guess...

It must have been hard for the Blackpool Evening Gazette to resist injected some grim humour into yesterday's story about the dead junky found on Christmas Day who had changed his name to Mr Wellsorted by deed poll. Ye gods, if there was ever a perfectly inappropriate name change, there we have it. I salute his spirit & sense of hunour, though...

The Society For Cutting Up Musical Fans...How I learned To Stop Worrying & Love The Rocky Horror Show (But Not the Audience)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show held a special place in my heart during my mid-teens. I caught it on stage in Leeds only once, about eleven years ago, so as it stumbled into Blackpool's Grand Theatre in a blaze of red and black, I thought it was time to catch up again.

I think my parents spent a long period of time presuming I was gay, beginning roughly when I asked if I could video a late night showing of the musical & began something of a love affair with it. A long-standing lack of girlfriends & my prominent photo of Quentin Crisp had nothing to do with it, of course. I think I managed to keep my dressing up from them. As so many thousands before and since, I leapt upon a wave of desperate abandon & twice paraded myself in female schoolfriends' undergarments - at a party and (perhaps more daringly and mast-colours-nailingly), at a charity day at my secondary school. Oh, you pretty thing. It was fun at the time, and not the last time I donned the odd silky bit of female dress. They feel nice, after all! The Rocky Horror Show served a wonderful purpose as a doorway to the land of transgression. The film positively drips with sleaze (the great "Sweet Transvestite"), raunch ("Planet Shmanet Janet") and shadowy talk about freedom of..the whole damn thing). It also benefits from a belter of a soundtrack, one of the best of the ever-popular fifties revival shows. In fact, I was something of a fringe Luvvie in general. I liked the tunes as much as I liked Skullflower...excepting all that Toad-Webber bilge!

On reaching university & moving away from my rural idyll, I suddenly realised that everyone with any taste groans uncontrollably at the mention of the show. Transgression? Hardly. Its all so staged, after all. And the audience? They dress up like the characters, in the desperate throes of their own mid-life crises. Being into it at school might be alright, but adults should know better than to be duped by this schlock. Well, I never really went for that. I know what people mean, but its the fans rather than the show who are a bit of a drag. As for the staged nature of it, well, its a musical, innit. No-one complains about Grease or West Side Story on the same grounds, unless they just don't like musicals per se. Anyway, I was long out of the dressing-up bit by the time I went to see the play in Leeds. It was just all so predictable. The show was a riot, but the red and black brought on the kinda feelings John Lydon always expressed about the photocopied punks with their sticky-up hair & zips. If this was revolution through individuality, why did they all look the same? I'd kinda forgotten about the audience participation until tonight. Some of that is funny enough, shouting funny alternatives to the extremely well-known lines. Its a pantomime after all, in some sense. In the previous decade, though, it seems to have reached some kinda inane fever pitch, with self-obsessed onanists slowing the whole show down with their insistent narcissism. The 'joining in' has gone so far that the theatre is covered in posters pleading with people not to throw things, bring in water pistols (!), invade the stage or wave cigarette lighters. Release the Pavlov's Dogs of Dionysus.

I refer pointedly to the fans as one whole, because literally half the audience must be decked out like Christmas trees tonight. The shame of all this is that the rush of the fans to identify with their on-stage heroes obscures the whole point they seem they are trying to appreciate. There ain't no power in standing up for your lust rights in basque and garters when you wouldn't dare step out in them under any other circumstances. The real definition of the show's yearning plea for new experiences and understanding of a complex world is the work of people like Fakir Musafar and Bob Flanagan. Fakir Musafar was forced by circumstances to hide his very real transgressions from a world not ready for it, and when his decades of body modification and involvement in rites of passage came to light, it kickstarted the whole movement that found its final watering-down in Tasmanian Devil tattoos & manky nose studs. "Give yourself over to absolute pleasure/Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh": I'm sure they didn't just mean "Put some tights & lippy on, boys". Its a call to arms, innit. Not a call to copy to the letter.

So I decided tonight that I'd be as contrary as possible, and did my own dressing-up for the show, in my favourite button-up green suit, braces and DMs. I looked kinda dapper, if I do say so myself. I'm long past the part of my life where I wanted to show off to my friends in a little floaty number, but I still feel the lyrics somewhere down inside and have taken a bit of the philosophy on into adulthood, without any need to pretend to camp homosexuality.

The show itself was somehow slightly more low-rent in feel than the production I saw a decade ago, but they had some nice staging devices and some good actors and musicians. Christopher Biggins was somehow wholly appropriate as the narrator, dealing with all the dull (and admittedly occassionally quite funny) quips in the way an old hand does. I didn't recognise anyone else on the stage, but there was some hot singing and dancing. I think I'd be right in thinking that the Eddie actor also played Dr Scott. I really missed

Meat Loaf's performance on Eddie's song ("Whatever Happened To Saturday Night"). He is not my favourite singer, but he has a hell of a voice and the guy tonight seems to be straining a bit, but he seems more at home and in his own range as the professor.

For all the 'oh please' aspects of the show, it was like meeting an old friend, and in some ways I felt like I got more out of it than ever before. As on so many occasions with this sort of thing, the sneakiest, funniest little lines seemed to pass the majority by in their deperation to get to the bit where they can leap up and do the Time Warp. Said song's murdering by Damien was my first introduction to the show, as a wee ned, and appreciated at the time, but its lustre has worn off in the way of all the most popular songs in our over-broadcast world. It is testament to the cast that they manage to enliven its corpse once more. My view is obscured in the traditional way by confused attempts to "jump to the left" by some council employees.

My own favourite numbers are many - only "Once In A While" is a bit on the weak side. They range from the very first seconds of the show ("Science Fiction Double Feature") to the moving final act, in which even the most persistent interruptors manage to shut up as society's guardians off libertarian murderer and sodomiser Frank N Furter and bring all our dreams of playing in meat to a confused and depressing end, wherein we all go back to our normal lives. Perhaps the fans are on the money after all. "Rose Tint My World"'s hymn to freaky moulin rougery gives way to "I'm Going Home" and there might be the trace of a tear in my eye. Somewhere between the end of an affair, giving oneself up to one's heritage and an animal's resigned but hopeful reaction to imminent death, the second half of the song is in some ways the crowning glory of theshow. Yet the last word goes to "Super Heroes", and Biggins' impressively masterful reading of the summing-up of the whole glum affair: "And crawling on the planets face/Some insects called the human race/Lost in time/And lost in space/And meaning". The missing link between The Third Man and The Wicker Man. And what all the red and black is struggling towards rather ineffectually.

After umpteen bows, the cast graciously treat us to a reprise of the Time Warp. I move from behind the ladies that do lunge for a better view, and fall into the snares of some black widows who want me to throw myself into abandon & dance. Most insistently. I politely decline & positively leap over the back of the seat as the last note clangs in. I'm on my bike & home in a jiff. What a grump. Probably the only one in the theatre in fact. Does that mean I got the individualist bit?