Today I have mainly been enjoying the mp3s from What The Funk? They give me the recording horn.

Yeah, I know I’m being capricious. I spotted that the old flex theme had lots of validation errors, so I thought I’d quickly plug in something that validated properly, and chose the Twilight theme. Revel in its pinkness! Of course, while the new theme’s HTML validates, the CSS doesn’t. Ho hum. I shall be hacking this theme to make it a bit more personal at some point soon anyway, so maybe I’ll have a go at fixing it.

Kyla and I went to see the England vs Samoa match at Twickenham yesterday. Not a great match, I’d say England spent most of the first half being rubbish and were only saved by Samoa being rubbisher. Nice to see that England have at least been practicing their line outs, which looked positively slick, then I realised that they were using the same pattern repeatedly, and felt less impressed. The second half was more encouraging, with the backs actually moving forward more often than their usual sideways. Frankly I know feck all about rugby though, so can’t comment any further. I do know my fighting though, and frankly it looks like Lewis Moody is not someone you’d want to take a few punches from! Exactly what he thought the ref’s reaction was going to be I have no idea though, the instant he threw the first punch he was going to get a red card.
We followed the rugby with our usual happy hour at B@1 in Richmond (who do a fantastic baileys/creme de menthe/vanilla icecream/chocolate chip cookie cocktail they call an Irish Disco Biscuit; bit girly but well worth it), then sloped off into town for a friend’s 30th birthday party. It was fun and all, but frankly after three nights out I now strongly feel the call of the sofa.

Friday night was our second gig, this time with our regular saxophonist Katie. There seemed to be many compounded factors as to why this gig didn’t really kick off:

• I’d had a couple of bottles of Grolsch beforehand, and they left me feeling weirdly disconnected from the rest of the band. Well, it was either the beer or the fact that I had been out until 12.30 dancing to Little Alien the night before
• The sound was really tricky, we had two very experienced guys working hard on the set up, but try as they might the options seemed to be either foldback but with feedback, or no feedback but odd foldback
• The floor of the hall had a badminton court marked out on it. SCHOOL DISCO!

Still, I had a couple of moments I was really happy with, a firery solo in Turtle Walk where I remembered all the “minorising the dominant” shit I’ve been learning, plus ripping off the solo from the album version of Sneakin’ in the Back. Worryingly I’ll be able to show y’all just how accurately I’ve remembered these moments as good ones, because we’ve got a recording of the gig. It’s not on my machine this time, our lovely sound man brought an ADAT machine, so I guess he’s going to mix it.

Played a good gig with the Alex Harris Band last night, at Cellar Bar 8 in Cambridge. Yes, it’s Cambridge’s only strip joint. Nice. Actually it isn’t that seedy, with a laminate wood floor, white walls and big mirrors; frankly it was nicer than many of the dedicated band venues around town. It was a four band line up consisting of us, ProVirus, Many Things Untold and Little Alien. Provirus started the night and were ok, but hampered by muffled vocals; the chap who was going to do the sound for them failed to turn up, so they just set up and hoped for the best. We were on second, and fortunately for us a mate of drummer Phil’s came along who had done sound engineering in the past, so he kept an eye on the levels for us and even changed a string on Alex’s guitar after the now inevitable breakage. Generally everything went well, the one stand out annoyance for me was the fact that I was rushing in Crystal Day. It’s only 3/4 time, it’s not tricky, but I kept getting excited and arriving at my 1 when Phil was still on his 0.9. I even realised I was doing it, but just couldn’t stop doing it! More practice required. Many Things Untold were on next, and from the look of them it must have been waaay past their bedtime. However, it’s fair to say that they rocked in a big, big way. As a friend once put it, they kicked up a ruckus for all you motherfuckers. They were also the band that had me most grateful for my ER20s. As Alex said, “I had no idea such little kids could have so much rage in them.” Finishing off were Little Alien, who play a kind of poppy punk. Good fun stuff, and Kyla and I jumped around the bar like loons, much to the amusement of Many Things Untold, who’d also stuck around for the last band.
That might be my last gig for The Alex Harris Band, because although the guys haven’t found a replacement player yet, there aren’t any more gigs booked at the moment. But who knows, maybe there’s time to sneak another one in before my departure!

Nice Guardian article about the recent increase in horror movies. The comment about horror “simply the preserve of pasty-looking young men” stirred the memory of the time myself and a friend went to see a Hellraiser triple bill put on by Cheltenham’s Odeon to “celebrate” the release of Hellraiser III. I couldn’t really resist as at that point I was a hopeless Clive Barker fan boy (Weaveworld is probably my most-read novel, back in the days when I had the time to read books more than once). It’s fairly safe to say that Matt and I were the only non-goths in the audience. Every other person watching was a monochrome of whitened skin and black clothing. I felt positively tanned. And because we arrived fairly late, we ended up sat right at the front on the far right hand side. In the two half-hour intervals we had to stare down and to the left to try and even up the crick in our necks. Ah, happy days.

Music thing is some sort of music/synth geek heaven. It’s all worth looking around, though the post about the World’s Fastest Drummer tournament particularly raised my eyebrow. Make $$$$ fast and get h0t chix by hitting a small pad repeatedly and at high speed. I hear this is replacing grade 8 for drummers.

The thing I like about the guitar (particularly the electric guitar) is that it can be played in so many different ways. Here’s a fantastic video of a piece called Walk On Water, a lot of which is played using two-handed tapping. And here’s the same technique used for evil.

Today marks the end of mine and Kyla’s Month Off The Booze. Frankly, it’s been dull.
“Let’s go out for a meal! No, wait, a nice meal without wine? What are you going to drink, elderflower presse?”
“Let’s meet up with some friends down the pub! No, wait, I’ve drunk so much diet coke my teeth have either rotted or turned brown, and I’m getting pissed off with the price of soft drinks.”
That said, we did go out for a meal, and I did drink elderflower presse. Kyla had water. The waiter thought our order was the other way around. Grrr. We also ended up having curry out one night, and we had a lassi each, which is quite nice, though I was left with the feeling that I was drinking a half pint of natural yoghurt with my meal. Though as I like my currys so hot that the table cloth is liable to catch fire if I spill any, it turned out to be quite handy.
The big benefit of this extended period of abstinence is that my sleep patterns are massively improved. On week days I awoke refreshed and ready to kick the day’s arse, and on weekends I was sleeping for about ten hours without disturbance. I still have bags under my eyes though, so I think that’s more of an effect of getting old than booze-exacerbated tiredness. The other, slightly weirder, benefit is that my sweat stopped smelling. No longer was my gym bag best stored in some sort of biological hazard containment unit. I’m not claiming it was all lavendar and pine forests in there, but it was much more tolerable.
I doubt we’d have made it through the month without each other, as at many points one or other of us was 90% on for giving up. So it’s been an interesting test of our will-power, but now I’m off for a beer. No, wait, I’ve a Casa rehearsal tonight. Arse badgers!

If you head over to the Acuphuncture listenables page, you’ll currently find a couple of mp3s from last Friday’s gig. Share and enjoy.

Did you hear the one about the vegetarian tee-totallers who go into the country pub? OK, the reaction wasn’t quite the Slaughtered Lamb from American Werewolf In London, but we did get some funny looks. Yes, Kyla and I did some exercise on a weekend. Crazy. We’d been meaning to go for a fairly long bike ride since I bought Kyla a new bike for her birthday, and as the weather has been unusually good recently we thought we’d do a quick loop of the fens. The route took in Cherry Hinton, Fulbourn, Great and Little Wilbraham, Bottisham, up to the Quy road then back towards Cambridge, stopping at The White Swan in Quy for Lunch (you can see most of the places on this map here.) That’s about twenty miles, and we’d done nearly all of that by the time we reached the pub. Thus I can’t really guarantee that my opinion that it was one of the best Sunday roasts I’ve had in a long time is unbiassed, because frankly I was ravenous. It certainly tasted pretty damn good. Kyla had the standard fare for a vegetarian in a pub that can’t be arsed with vegetarians, i.e. a roast with no meat or gravy. And, as is also standard in such places, they still charged her full price for the pleasure of it.
Kyla’s always badgering me into doing the London to Cambridge cycle ride, so maybe I should make an effort and actually get some entry forms. (Kyla herself has done it a couple of times before.) Slightly more hardcore would be the Oxford to Cambridge bike ride, which I believe Neil was trying to sucker Derek into doing. As Neil has recently competed in a stage of the Tour de France, I think I’ll be giving that one a miss.

The first Acuphuncture gig happened last Friday. We had a dep saxophonist in the form of George Crowley, who’s a talented player, and held his own despite having only rehearsed with us once. Personally, nearly all the tunes went well. I was really focussing on relaxing my shoulders, as increased tension seems to preceed any timing mistakes I make, and it really paid off. During the week I’d been bricking it over the one bass part I had to play, for Herbie Hancock’s Chameleon. The funny thing about this song is that there isn’t much stress on the two, so the drum beat looks like this:
1...2...3...4...
HH x---x---x---x---
SD ---x--------x---
BD x-----x--xx-----
HF --x---x---x---x-
I can drum this fairly well (though I cheat and play the hi-hat foot (HF) part as a normal hi-hat stroke). I tend to use one limb as a time keeper, so the syncopated snare preceeding the 2 sits quite happily inbetween two hi-hat notes, locking it into the groove. However, the bass part goes
3...4...1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ------------------------------6---------
D -----------6--8------------8------------
A ------------------3-4-5-6---------------
E --3-4-5-6-------------------------3-4-5-
That’s a whole 2 16th’s worth of time for my brain to distract me with thoughts of, Why are the audience just sat there staring at us, or I’m hungry, let’s eat!. Despite my worries I managed to get into the song quite quickly and with no wobbles that I spotted. So I was feeling quite happy, just grooving along, when I had a sudden rabbit in the headlights moment when I remembered that I had to come back in after a two bar drum fill. Of course when I reached that part I tensed up, then inevitably fucked up. Still, you’ve got to make mistakes in order to know what to practice.
There’s a recording of the gig, so I’ll link to some mp3s once I’ve made them. I thought I’d get clever and use my Roland hard disc recorder rather than just my minidisc player, in order to avoid the compression of the MD’s ATRAC format. Of course the Roland doesn’t have an automatic gain limiter, and I’d set the gain on the input a smidgen too high, so the recording is slightly crunchy. Typical!