beatworm.co.uk

Three bands in one evening set, Bristol Carling Academy. Headliners NYPC on the rise currently, they do kind-of-dance music with guitars and sort-of-rapping. They may even be associated with that new-rave movement that’s been sweeping the nation. I’m afraid I’m too old to conclusively comment about that. A song of theirs, the one about ice-creams was in an advert once. The fact that I can remember the song from an advert appearance, but have no memory about the visual components or the brand or product, ought to be the sort of thing to give pause to people commissioning expensive television branding campaigns. For bands awaiting a breakthrough and wanting to be noticed though, it seems like a grand idea. Wikipedia tells me it was a campaign for Intel Core Duo processors . I quite like those.

In person the band sounds much like the record. A little too much perhaps, in that there’s not much differentiation between their songs. And for an act that’s mostly rythmic, and drawing on dance styles, to my ears they could have done with more going on with the drumming, which seemed a bit weak. An enjoyable set though, and the crowd, although slim by Academy standards responded well to it. I applaud the fact that one of their members looks a lot like Howard Moon . I’ll probably pick up the album at some point.

Immediately preceding them were the Ting Tings ; a two-piece, inverse White Stripes, with a robustly proficient male drummer, and an enthusiastic, but rudimentary, female guitarist, along with a fair amount of sequenced help. I’m sure I’ve seen them once before, at some multi-band event, but I can’t really place it. It seems like it ought to have been British Sea Power, alongside Morton Valence , but the more I think about it, the more I’m sure that it wasn’t. They were pretty good fun, high energy, got the crowds dancing, and a short set ensured they couldn’t outstay their welcome.

Starting off the evening, the first support act, and the actual reason I was there: Black Affair , the latest incarnation of Steve ( Beta Band, King Biscuit Time ) Mason, and the first time I’ve had a chance to catch up with this latest material. Performed as a two piece, just him and a bass player, it’s funky, electro-pop, lots of squelchy keyboards and sequenced drums , with those unmistakable vocal melodies still anchoring everything with a nice sprinkling of familiarity. I enjoyed the short set hugely, and so did some of ‘the kids’ who were enthusiastically dancing away. Mind you, as they continued to bop with vigour through every successive band set, I did wonder if perhaps they’d been eating some of those special dancing sweets.

Later on, Mr. Mason and bass playing friend then came out and watched the NYPC from the back of the hall. Embarassingly enough this meant they were standing immediately behind us . I couldn’t really avoid a brief chat and a handshake as we were leaving. I somehow managed to avoid gushing too much, and extracted the pleasant news that some singles are on the way, and there’s an album complete awaiting a subsequent release date. It’s good to have him back.

If you’re a fan of A.C. Newman (and if you aren’t, are you really sure? - perhaps you ought to check again, maybe there is something wrong with your ears?) it might excite you to know that I stumbled upon, via his pert wikipedia entry, this streamable four track CBC radio session from 2005, still available online, with an accompanying magazine-like feature. I expect this appearance was a promotional gig, punting his truly excellent solo LP, “The Slow Wonder” . Buy that now, and then come back when you’re a fanboy, and suddenly very very interested in things like solo radio sessions.

Of particular interest in this session, there’s a rather differently arranged version of ‘Failsafe’, a song which wasn’t included on the solo CD, and has recently popped up, reinvented, with new a Johnny Marr How-Soon-Is-Now alike chugging swampy tremolo backbone, and a sweeter female lead, on the super-excellent new New Pornographers album, “Challengers” .

While I was stationed up in Crewe over the summer, there was a fire on the local business park that was serious enough to make the national news .

It was only few hundred yards away from the office in which I was working, close enough in fact, for us to be asked to vacate the premises in the second wave of safety evacuations that occurred. I grabbed some camera phone snaps on the way. For which I was told off by a passing policewoman, tin foil hat fans.

The whole town was fairly closed down for the rest of the afternoon. Despite the swarms of emergency services vehicles, the fire was not extinguished and carried on into the evening. Afterwards, it emerged that this was due to the fire services concentrating their efforts on a gas depot nearby, keeping it’s stored reserve of oxygen and combustible gas cooled, and isolated.

It was all successfully contained, and life was back to normal the next morning. Nobody was hurt, at which point the media lost interest. I was impressed with how effectively the various supporting services mobilised, co-ordinated and went to work, keeping everybody safe, routing around the disturbance, and guiding everything gently back to normality.

Something extraordinary happened during a routine walk last week. The walk itself was hardly unusual, aside from the unseasonably fine weather. The route was a well-rehearsed number from our small repertoire of standards; out along Fishponds road up to Eastville park, follow the river to the park’s end, then reverse your way back for the return.

It was early in the evening as we set out, and before we had reached the end of our street I realised that I’d left my mobile phone and wallet back on my desk. Although I don’t like to leave without either, I reasoned that I didn’t particularly need them on this day, and I didn’t feel like nipping back. We had the house to ourselves that evening, nobody else would be home until late. Shopping opportunities are fairly limited in Eastville park, so we could probably get by on the couple of coins I had in my pocket.

The dog was having one of those spells when he feels that everything has to be inspected with great care. Every so often this mood catches him and he needs to patiently smell and catalogue things we pass in far greater than usual detail before we can continue. I’m not really sure of the cause of this. It sometimes seems to be precipitated by a change in the weather. A sudden cold snap is certain to bring it about, for example. This evening was not cold at all, although it was unusually humid. So we proceed, at a very leisurely pace, him dawdling with his forensic investigations, me idly speculating about the effects different atmospheres might have upon his primary perception.

One of the more successful methods I’ve managed to install for regaining his attention, is an ordinary whistle. Over time, via the usual methods of reward and repetition, I’ve taught him to associate a particular sequence, three short pipes on a whistle, with a food reward. It works well enough to use as an effective recall signal. One of the advantages conferred by a whistle is it’s neutral tone; dogs are great readers of context and tone-of-voice can convey a lot of subtext about the caller’s intent. Not so the mechanical whistle.

So I keep a selection of whistles bound to my keyring, and on evenings like this, where I am likely to keep striding ahead of the hardworking nasal detective, they can see a lot of action. Even so, we maintained our slower than average pace, we had no reason to hurry.

My fetish for luggage had led me to recently acquire a small Crumpler shoulder-bag, discounted in a shop-sale. I love Crumpler gear. Despite a tendency towards the garish and zany, I think it’s well thought out and robustly constructed. I suppose this bag is intended to be a roomy camera case, but I’ve put it to use as a carry-all for the dog-walking equipment. Recently I had realised there was enough room to stow a tennis ball alongside the rest of the usual baggage, and so when we reached the quiet meadow at the far end of our route we amused each other by throwing a ball around and chasing it for ten minutes.

The dog seemed to have exhausted his investigative enquiries, for on the return route he stayed close to my heel. It was only when we approached the start of the riverside path that he chose to wander into the bushy borders, causing me to reach for the whistle, and realise that I no longer seemed to have it in my possesion. Not only the whistle, I’d managed to lose my entire keyring.

It was one of those moments of precise clarity that can be germinated by a stab of sudden near-panic. All the doors and windows at home were locked, and nobody would be home until perhaps midnight. No telephone, and it’s been years since I bothered to memorize any phone numbers. No money either. I was mentally chasing through my limited options.

The best bet would be finding my keys. A large, silver bunch, assuming I’d dropped them shortly after digging out the whistle, I might be able to find them still close to where they fell. Luckily, I’d not strayed from the path, and the park was quiet, I ought to be able to retrace my steps quite thoroughly without rushing to get there before somebody else spotted them.

And so we proceeded, this time with our roles reversed; myself intent, studying the floor and poking into vegetation, him following, curious about my peculiar, unfathomable ways.

As we lucklessly progressed, I did my best to not dwell upon the negative outcome. Slowly we headed toward the end of our searchable area. We’d spent a while arsing about in the meadow, the wilder grass there was eight or more inches long. If the keyring had dislodged as we capered, nothing short of a fingertip search would turn anything up. The keys would lie there, probably undisturbed until the field received it’s annual trim, probably next spring. There is a path bisecting the unruly meadow. If I was lucky, they’d have fallen on or near this, and there would be a chance of spotting them

It was not to be. I made a couple of half-hearted sweeps across the grass, roughly in the areas I imagined we’d been running through, maybe an hour previously. I scanned for reflections, or hints of depression that might indicate a dropped weight. It was a hopeless task. Gathering my thoughts, I tried to come up with a scheme to keep myself and an unfed dog occupied and outdoors for the next seven or eight hours. I couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t rain.

And then a desperate idea seized me. I looked at the dog, sitting close by, extremely taken by my unusual behaviour. He seemed to be expressing curiosity as to my motive. I dug into my pockets and retrieved the keys to my other house and showed them to him up close. “Find the keys!”

He stuck his nose on the floor and zig-zagged aimlessly across the grass for a couple of minutes, before coming to a halt about twenty yards away. As I went over to collect him, I could see that he was wagging his tail, and staring at the floor.

It wasn’t until I was standing right next to him that I could precisely tell that his nose was directly indicating my lost keyring, where it lay hidden beneath the long grass. I was amazed. For his trouble, I emptied out the entire stash of biscuits from my bag, making a small pile.

“Best dog in the world”, I say.

Last night, in Pizza Express, the first words spoken to me, after we were seated.

“Do you like Spacemen 3 ?”

It took me around twenty seconds of careful thought to remember that I was wearing a glow-in-the dark Spiritualized® T-shirt. I was initially concerned that I’d walked into a Derren Brown skit.

I did manage to fix up slightly better net connectivity from my hideaway in Crewe, as I wrote months earlier .

I never managed to publish that particular note, as I managed to induce a rather persistent state of collapse within the fragile collection of ramshackle perl and shell scripts I use as a publishing system for this site. I’m not sure, but I think it all stemmed from hastily upgrading perl in place, optimistically ignoring umpteen other components that were reliant upon it. The server I use to host this authoring system is rather long of tooth.

It all threatened to take rather more time to patch up than I had to spare, but now I’m back home I’ve had the opportunity to carefully piece things back together. Careful observers may have been able to spot me hanging out in a few of the usual spots, and participating in the latest craze that’s been driving the kids wild. However, it’s more comfortable here, so I think I’ll be moving back in.

I think some spring-cleaning and a spot of re-decoration might be in order.