Monthly Archives: March 2003

Hmm. Well, I’m depressed. That’s my excuse for not writing. Read this.

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Jive Talkin’

Typical me: I do a nice design and then don’t actually follow up with any new information.

I was listening to Lalo Schifrin’s ‘voce e eu’ (rather loudly) on my mp3 player in the elevator. The other guy in the elevator asked me ‘Is that the Bee Gees?’

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So, we did quite a fun show on Wednesday with Goldfish and Mudville. It was fun playing on such a big stage. One thing to rethink for next time: it was a mistake to play in front of a projection of Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. Faced with the choice between us and two nice looking people having sex in 1968, you can probably guess what people spent the duration of the show looking at…

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New Look

I hope you dig the new design. Does it look ok on a mac? Seems fine in Mozilla/IE on a PC.

I’ve been busy preparing for the Misty Roses show on Wednesday at Galapagos.

I’m still enjoying my emusic subscription, to the extent that it has probably been 2 weeks since I bought a CD. The service is occasionally down, and I can’t help feeling that their site is deliberately slow and hard to navigate, in order to stop people finding and downloading too much music. However, I managed to find Del-Fi in their list of labels, which is great news. Between Fantasy, Stax, Verve and Del-Fi, that’s a lot of good music.

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Fab Gear

It has been too long. I have been kind of busy. I was over in the UK this weekend for a family get-together, which was fun. NYC feels like the North Pole by comparison.

Anyway, Nancy Sinatra was really not a good show. Sorry Nancy. Don’t get me wrong – she can still sing really well, but her band were very rocky in an eighties way that I found very naff. Most of the crowd didn’t seem to care, but as a big fan of the 60s/70s production on most of her work, the Guns and Roses style licks didn’t sit well with me. The best moment of the night was a montage of Nancy’s film appearances. None of this was helped by the venue, BB King’s Blues Bar, a touristy spot in midtown. Because of where I was sitting (at the edge, on the side), wait staff walked in front of me, obscuring my view, literally 2 or 3 times a minute. I was a little pissed.

I bought an mp3 player. It turned out that for my requirements (a large hard drive, and the ability to record onto it), I had a choice of exactly one item. So, I bought it, along with some nicer headphones (no, I don’t always shop at amazon, but they were pretty good for these items). I’m very pleased with it so far. It’s a geeky, ugly little thing, which connects at high speed to my computer via USB 2.0. I was glad that mine came in black and silver, rather than the bright blue and silver advertised. Ok, it’s still ugly. But, it can operate as an extra hard drive, which is pretty cool (in fact, it’s a bigger hard drive than the one on my computer at home). My only problem with it is that there’s no ‘Record’ button. This means that in order to record (there’s a built in microphone), you have to scroll through some menus. Not very handy for spontaneous moments. But overall it’s pretty good. I was extra-pleased, because Amazon put the price up quite a bit after I ordered it.

To go with my mp3 player, I also bought a 3-month subscription to emusic. Although there was one day when it didn’t work, I’m pretty pleased with it overall. It’s a shame the mp3s aren’t of a higher quality (they’re 128 kbps), but there is a remarkable volume of great Jazz and Soul stuff on there (from verve, fantasy, stax) – the kind of stuff that would cost pretty much full price even if you were able to find it used on CD. So, it’s well worth checking out. As an extra incentive, they also have a huge amount of Ennio Morricone stuff on there.

Not much else is new. Misty Roses played a show at Rififi. We have another at Galapagos on March 12th. I’m thinking of going to see Sigur Ros at Radio City Music Hall. This will mean that I only go to see Icelandic artists there. Aston Villa lost the Birmingham derby in abysmal fashion. Life goes on…

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