Friday, March 21, 2008

Dead Rabbi On A Stick Day

It's Good Friday, and what's good about it is that I slept for nine and a half hours last night. Went to bed with a classic stress headache, woke up with the end of one, but felt good about being on strike.

Yes, I'm on strike. At the end of yesterday's Rise and Shine we walked out in sympathy with our ASLEF brothers and sisters. I think it was the realisation of a militant tendency in myself which I have been encouraging over the past few months, knowing that it is the path to my own particular brand of enlightenment.

I'm sure that once the management meet our demands we'll be back to finish off the final week of the show - it's been a blast. But it is nice to have a three day weekend in praise of the dead rabbi, Jesus, and his unfortunate death by torture 2,000 years ago.

Now listen to the song we wrote yesterday, co-written and sung by the indomitable Danny "Peruvian Socialist Chocolate Hat" Brittain and his left wing army of reds.




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Thursday, February 28, 2008

Water on the Moon



Songwriting is having a dramatic effect on my psychology but that's probably because of the lack of sleep. Today I woke at 5.30am, half an hour before the alarm.

Check out the song and the article which inspired it.

When I've had some sleep, I might even come back and explain why I'm attempting this madness - aside from the reasons aforegiven.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

My BuskAid Birthday

Kicked off our breakfast show, Rise and Shine, and I'm on a slightly exhausted high but I'm pleased with our first effort which is here.

"Doctor, doctor, gimme little pill
Need a fix for me to chill
Medicine for my mental ill
Get depressed about the bill..."


It was really a lot of fun writing with Dan Brittain aka Tiventi Benson. Check back later for the produced version.

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Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Six Hundred and Seventy

Here it is, the post I said I would never write. Funk knows I intended to completely stop, and I sort of did, for over a month.

Stopping gave me the excuse to take stock and go back over my past work, also to assess the impact that writing Blog of Funk had not just on myself, the personal journey, but also the almighty blogosphere. I admit I had become disconsolate and saw no point in continuing to write. So, I just checked in with my bad self, so to speak, and sorted quite a a few things out while I was at it.

I remember that once I gave up music. I stopped writing music entirely. In fact, it was just this time that coincided with my discovery of what was then called multi-media, which soon became internet media, back in the days of Web 1.0 when pages were grey and text was black and links were blue (not followed) or purple (followed). Netscape was the browser of choice. We delighted in the misuse of the BLINK tag. Tables were revolutionary when they arrived, much like Mr Chippendale.

During this time, I consciously wrote and recorded no songs. This, bear in mind, after a period of 14 years in which I did practically nothing but record, write, rehearse, gig, and pursue like countless other dreamers before me a life of funk stardom, which was to be, eventually, just not when and how I expected it to be. Out of sync with the times, my dreams fizzled and popped, and I found myself in 1994 sitting in front of a Mac, pointing, clicking, dragging, dropping, and learning the basic HTML which propelled me into a new world of design and the internet. Within six months, I had a business, within eight months, I was on national television, part of the brave new world of technology.

Six years later, when circumstances completely unrelated to the dot com doom which devasted the online world at the end of the 1990s stopped me in my tracks, I found myself going over my past work, much as I have just done. To my surprise, I found myself listening to the songs I thought I had not written. There they were, neat, orderly, as always, decently produced sketches, surprisingly emotional; and I could not honestly remember much about writing them.

I guess I had not valued them enough to play them to anyone, or bother to professionally publish them, even though I had enough faith in my writing and singing ability to record them. As far as I was concerned, I was not making music, ergo, they didn't exist. Except, they did exist, because I still have them.

I guess the music was making itself, and that, I think, is the way forward.

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