Ive been thinking recently, well, its occurred to me over the years, but recently it has been put into context while reading the17 by bill Drummond, that I have no musical heritage.

 

Everyone I know grew up listening to the music their parents did, be it Queen, Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, whatever it may be, but until I was 13, music did not exist to me bar something that was played as background music in shops or at parties. It held no interest to me whatsoever. What should be my influences, my own musical heritage, is just a void until I found music of my own accord.

 

Since that moment, I have been a muso, I have dedicated my life to hearing what the world has to offer in its 100+ years of recorded sound. I have journeyed through rock music, country, blues, into the darkest depths of experimental sound and non-music, screaming sound scapes of distortion, feedback, unstructured slabs of sound no normal person would even consider listening to. And I’m still doing it.

 

It makes me wonder if I did have some sort of influences, would they have changed how I see music, would a rich tapestry of music pre-13 have changed my views when I first heard the music that fired up this engine? Nearly all my friends who have, do not have the same drive, they have a passion for the odd genre but not for music as a whole.

 

This isn’t to say my parents did not listen to music, my dad has one of the largest music collections of anyone I know, in fact he has more music than anyone I know outright. Thousands of twelves, all catalogued in his scrappy handwritten book he carries around with him at all times. Thousands of tapes, hundreds of compact discs. But while I was growing up, I never really heard much of them and I don’t think my mum even owns a CD or a record anymore, she certainly does not buy music these days. But none of that seeped through into my childhood, not one record. All I remember from growing up in the 80s is hearing the odd pop song on radios or P.A’s.

 

I’ve always been one to do things properly, and appreciate the extremes of any given genre, while also being able to appreciate the sedate, a good pop hook and the like. My record collection runs from acts like Ulrich Schnauss, who’s earlier output can be likened to hearing a stream flow over rocks, (actually I think the Japanese ambient noise artist Aube once did an album made from the sounds of water) to the kind of Scranz Techno that would actually flip you out if it was played in a club at any volume, or the misogynistic slabs of hatred Leech puts out under the Navicon Torture Technologies moniker. One of the few other people I know who has such a ridiculously broad appreciation of music is one of the other members of the cognitive label who I met discussing obscure alt.country acts on a hard dance message board. Go figure.

 

However, he does have a musical heritage, so maybe my theory has just been blown out of the water.

today i found a huge bumblebee on my kitchen floor, it was nearly 2 inches from head to tail, or furry abdomen seeing as they don't have tails. it must have fallen in when i was putting out some washing.

i took a picture of said fuzzy intruder then scooped it onto my mobile phone's screen and carried it into the yard and popped it onto a flowerpot so it wouldn't get damaged. it then mooched about a bit and flew off to do whatever it is giant bumblebee's do. i can imagine it just pottering about buzzing hither and thither, a happy fellow, before going home to its hive somewhere to make more honey.

see this is the difference between wasps and bee's. if that were a wasp, it wouldn't have plopped onto my kitchen floor all innocent and confused, it would have screamed into my kitchen at 100mph intent on causing as much harm, fear and confusion it possibly could. i'd more than likely be in casualty or dead on the kitchen floor, ciabatta in hand had i been stung by a wasp of comparable size.

i think, wasps are so angry, because they cant make honey. theyre completely useless, they only exist to feed the odd hardy bird, hang around bins, annoy people and kill the odd fictinal child in the movies. what else do they do eh? nothing, and this is why theyre so pissed off all the time!

as you can imagine i was understandably terrified when i came face to face with wasps of such a size recrently in greece. abour 3 times bigger than your average wasp, were they hornets? i have no idea. they were fucking huge though, needlessly big infact. and they seemed to enjoy swooping about the grapes outside my girlfirnds room, and dive bombing any unwanted visitors.

wasps then, theyre just unnecessary arent they? 

its always a bit of a paradox, the end of leeds festival. you crawl home half dead, not knowing what the fuck the past 4 days were about, covered in mud/dust/filth but you still want to go right back for round two. thats the worst bit of the leeds experience, that slightly empty feeling you get, when you know summers over, thats leeds over with for another year, but fucking hell getting there was a journey.

4 days of non-stop booze, minimal food, (tho i did actually eat this year) and some of the best bands on the planet. my heart goes out to gallows once again this year, for headlining the lockup stage and stealing the show another year running. despite thrice being on on the same day, no one rocks harder than frank's lot. circle pits, sing alongs, x box 360 challenges, amplifiers torn down (and launched into the crowd) and members of god knows how many other bands joining in on stage. could you ask for more? the perfect end to leeds festival.

we saw some god bands this year, and no one jibbed out, unlike last year! not even me! we got the winning combination of wrong bow, cyborg and fosters ( actually asked for wrong bow and cyborg at the bar, the girl there didnt look that amused), the right mix of people, me n smiffys secret bogs (god roll on sunday night? you knows it!), it all just worked like a dream. despite the rain and the mud, which im still trying to get out of my new atticus combats.

i cant wait for next year now, and i think some of us are planning one or two continental festivals too. those post-festival blues aren't so bad though, im flying to greece to see the missus this time next week ;-)

im sure courtney love has a big bag of words, and she picks out ones at random and makes them into songs. thus;

valentine, burned, angel, stars, love, water, drown, flame, drugs, hollywood.

a hole album is the lyrical equivalent of a sailor jerry tattoo. and so, pretty much, is a courtney love solo album, albeit with the kind of cutting, sardonic wit only life in  los angeles can breed.

that said, i love hole, and courtney, despite, even becasue of the inherrant flaws. celebrity skin has for the past ten years been one of the most played albums in my collection, and it will continue to be for a long time yet. I know die hard hole fans will roll their eyes and scofff, but to me it sums up what hole were about.

that polished decadence, perfectly crafted pop songs over that 3 chord crunch of guitar while courtneys shredded l.a. drawl paints its pictures over the top. its the sound of  a band on the edge, rotting (another courtneyism) from the inside, a band during meltdown and it shows. this album is a metaphor for what los angeles itself is, the glitz, the glamour, the drugs, the porn, the starlets (and another), the ruined noses and tear streaked faces as urban decay mascara bleeds into addiction blackened eye sockets of another failed actress with no money left to get home. 

they achieved all this with celebrity skin, something the rawness of live through this didnt have, its perfect in its imperfection, the run-on chorus of boys on the radio, the heart wrenching northern light, the bleak grey malibu emptyness of petals. i hate the term "rock" but celebrity skin is a sterling example of what a rock album should be, an as such deserves a place in every music fans collection.

im not sure when i first read neuromancer, it was sometime in the early 00's, quite a late start for someone who has been obsessed with cyberpunk for most of their life. at one point me and a group of other like minded individuals were virtually living neromancer, high tech low lives tapping away in the anaemic glow of the monitor screen, wishing the future-tech we were researching was more than just a glimmer in the minds eye of a nipponese scientist.

but i digress. neuromancer, and the sprawl trilogy its part of, always brings about a feeling of comfort, taking ones mind off real life to live, temporarily, in one mans hyper-real vision of what today was supposed to be like. its nice to sit back, re-read it and remember how i felt the first time i read it, being utterly enthralled and wondering why on earth it had eluded me for so long. for someone who grew up on japanese monster movies from the age i could talk, anime like voltron and robotech as a child and on to films like akira, ghost in the shell, bladerunner, dominion tank police and beyond as teenager and adult, i should have picked up on it earlier. fittingly however, it was exposure to the internet that brought neuromancer, and the rest of the cyberpunk classics to me, once i was plugged into cyberspace, a term gibson himself coined with the novel neuromancer, the flood gates were opened. each time i read it, im in a very different time of my life, and so i understand it in different ways, and it all adds up to the gesalt of the idea of what the book, and the trilogy itself means to me. it has personal links, technological links, it reminds me of music, films, watching the first trials of biothermic camo in korea. one of my current alias' is from an oblique description of a documentary on the tessier-ashpools from the trilogy.

i think the seeds were there to begin with, or the open neuro-receptors, from an early age, wheras to some people books like this are a good yarn, to me they're much more and the vision of that dystopian future all links in with my obsession for cities, books like perdido street station and more recently, slow chocolate autopsy, that neon lit decay seen in pooled water on the shinjuku sidewalk, yakuza, hi tech low lives, city scapes and the painfully new sandwitched together with the archaically old, the reflection of city lights receeding in the panes of mirror shades.

how naive can i possibly be? quite a lot in the grand scene of things, after my recent revelations it seems.

there's a new establishment opened where bar med used to be in manchesters city center called the direktors club. it has a cool logo, a black background with a spiky, almost occult looking font spelling out the clubs name, maybe what you'd expect to find on the door to the hellfire club in the eighteenth century. there are shiny brass plates outside, it looks like a pretty high class establishment all told.

after seeing the logo and the outside, i was of the opinion that inside it would be a members only bar, with leather chairs, green table lamps, rugs over hard wood floors and expensive brandys served in large round glasses. somehwere you could go and sit, and read a book, or a magazine, a little spot of the olde worlde in the metropolis that is modern day manchester.

much to my horror, i found out on saturday that it was a strip bar, nothing more, nothing less. how could i possibly have thought otherwise i can't imagine, given its location on the outskirts of the sugarcoated filth of the village, i did though, i really did!

shame really, i'd have actually tried to get a membership if it was how i'd have imagined it t be.

this is a reason me and ria are going to start playing the lottery. if we won, she could open that cafe she's been thinking about, and i can open up a club that harks back to the seventeen fifties..

whether anyone would go i dont know, i can imagine the pipecleaner limbed scenesters hovering about like black vultures, with copies of beaudelaire, keats and shelly in their blazer pockets to be honest, the odd touring band? who knows. I'd have fun with the decor though, yes indeed.

these past few days i've done some quite constructive things. and despite being a little hungover today, something i didnt really want to be, i feel pretty pleased with myself.

i bought a huge cd tower on thursday evening, 2 meters in height no less, from.. IKEA. that place is like a rabbit warren, its like some huge experiment in retail. you enter the building on the 1st floor, climb to the third, then slowly decent into home design hell, untill you're in the basement, expecting to see lucifer chained up there after being cast down from heaven when he ballsed up the war all those years ago.

its not hellish in the fire and brimstone way, its even worse, the whole store is like some garden of eden gone retail, every item is the apple, and there are snakes on every corner. i went in for a book case and nearly came out with a cuddly bat for my gf, and two stuffed panda's for gaz and madeline, not to mention all the scented candles i was seconds away from buying. a test of strong willpower indeed!

having passed that particular trial, i thought it was over, but no. the box weighed a tonne, understandably, and it was unweidly. so unweidly infact that after the 10 minute walk to the taxi rank in ashton, i found it wouldnt go in. so i had to carry the damn thing about a mile and a half up a hill to get it to my parents house. i still bear the bruises on my hips from that journey.

once it was home, i built the thing and screwed it to the wall, job done. its now housing my indie and emo cds. i'll need another one if i buy anymore cd's.

furniture building aside, yesterday i cooked a meal, i say cooked, not took out of the freezer and heated up, actually bought prepeared and cooked a full meal for 3. and so far no one's been sick! it was pretty boody nice to be fair, home made egg fried rice, cajun chicken and friend halumi. and it all came together at the same time suprisingly. like a giant mixer, the gas hobs the cullinary eq's,  the grill a bright red upfader. rice needed a bit of work, the way the packed told me to cook it was, on hignsight, bollocks, so i winged it anyway. next time i'll steam it from the start, because thats what touya does in cardcaptor sakura. next attempts, chicken teriyaki.

i feel like i've done something this weekend, and i cant wait to cook again, get some practice in so i can cook ria some top stuff when i go to greece again in september. and even more stuff when she gets home the following month.
 

one of my best mates at work left yesterday, to go live with his better half in london. i didn't think i'd be as gutted as i am that mikes gone. slowly but surely the clique is being whittled down, and i'm questioning if work will be quite as fun from now on in. mike the scenesters gone, jamie's going in september, the group of ridiculous fools that we were is now a handful, we cant even be called a group anymore really, there's only me dave and laurence once jamies left.

i sincerely wish mike luck down there, he'll be fine, i know, but its always suprising how you can forge such strong friendships with people you're forced together with in the workplace. we wont be getting nailed on greengoblin this friday, we will do again though, its not like he's left the country or anything. in the meantime me dave and laurence will have to hold the fort.

i'm wondering if my awful hair cut is karma too, after my comment on the people at work on tuesday. did my off the cuff blog post pique the interest of the fates and in some unlucky dice roll of the heavens, someone rolled snake eyes & i got myself a ridiculous hair do? food for thought.

i'm currently looking at booking a holiday somehwere cold for my birthday to take my better half, she'll have been in greece all summer in the hellish heat, so somewhere cold and christmassy in november would be great. somewhere with snow, lights and where we can wear bobble hats and scarves and drink some of that warm foreign punchy stuff. i have an idea, i wont be letting her in on the destination untill she's home though.

see this is the problem when you're a speckoid, every time you go to the hair dressers, you're playing a folical based version of russian roulette. its a lottery, once those glasses are off and the sissors are going, god only knows what you'll look like when the glasses are back on.

today i got my hair cut, by some bloke who had done it previously and done an alright job once id got home and restyled it myself. today was different. oh yes.

when i said can you shave the back with clippers thin the top and sides out and blend the back into the sides, he must have misheard me and assumed i'd said "you there, make me look like a chubby spotty geek, you know, the kind who plays d&d and wears iron maiden t shirts without even a hint of irony". so thats what he did. my fringe is now... about 3 inches shorter, the sides are nonexistant, and the back is... well the backs shaved like i wanted in the first place. i look like one of those kids who're trying so painfully hard to be scene, but they just dont quite have a cool enough hair cut.

as you may have guessed, im really annoyed because i look like a prize twat. i'm hoping some dark dye will add a little life to it, and am currently sat typing with post-colurant conditioner dripping down my newly shaved neck. the only plus side to this barber shop massacre is the dead ends have gone, along with 90% of the rest of my fucking hair cut.

i know there are worse things, and im a bit old to be having a tantrum about my hair, but you must know the anguish of having your hair ruined, and if you dont, i'd suggest you go and ask your stylist to make you look like a twat, just say "hey, cut it all off, make me look like i play d&d" and you'll soon be aquainted.

so in conclusion, point a, dont have shit eyes, and point b, if you do have shit eyes, for christs sake put some fucking contacts in before you get your hair cut.

today i got stared at by an old lady in the lift at work. im not sure if it was the long hair, the facial piercings, my height, or the hoodie stroke cap combo that triggered it, but fuck me, it was a look of pure disgust.

which, on the face of it, is totally unwarranted. there are really overweight people at my work, there are ugly people, there are people with no dress sense, there are people who think looking like the tango man is attractive for gods sake. to look at me with such loathing was a little out of order. im quite sure if i looked at her in such a way she wouldn't be that impressed, im sure she'd feel a bit upset, or possibly just a bit menaced.

i think i might look at her with an evil glint in my eye next time i see her, stand up even straighter and tower over her, or maybe just turn my ipod up REALLY LOUDLY while listening to some unsavoury brand of metal.

im not sure WHY she's riled me, but she has, and that fact in itself is bloody annoying.