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Crinkly Bottom, Crackly Vinyl

If you’ve read my other blog (Because Midway Still Aren’t Coming Back…) you’ll know I bloody love flexi disks; those weird promo records that were popular until they were killed off by CDs and mp3s, so you can imagine how excited I was to discover a flexi disk called “Noel Edmonds asks the questions about Barclays Bank” amongst a load of old 7″s I inherited recently.

Well, I say excited. I was certainly interested to find out what seering and insightful questions the tidy-bearded one could ask of a major bank in, well, I don’t even know what year. According to Discogs, the Lyntone label produced flexi disks from before 1964 to possibly after 1982; and this recording LYN2931 seems to drop in somewhere between David Bowie (sometime in the early 70s possibly) and The Karibs (1974).

So, what does household name Noel have to say? I’ve no idea unfortunately. My magic machine that copies these things just can’t get a decent copy. You can hear Noel in his smuggest voice talking about something and there’s mention of a restaurant, but that’s it. I was hoping for some sort of awful rant that I could use to blackmail him, but no, it’s just a bit of plastic.

I might just stick it in the post to him for his collection. Does he still live at Crinkley Bottom?

In this 21^st century ‘Web2.0 social networking’ twattery world in which we live, the next big thing is only ever just around the corner. For a while it looked like Myspace would rule the roost; then everyone over 13 realised it was just a migraine-inducing way for young boys pretending to be girls to talk dirty with other young boys pretending to be girls and moved onto Facebook.

Facebook was site du jour for a while and claims to have over 200 million active users. But, and it’s a big BUT; many people soon got sick of the enforced changes that made the site a pain to use, the constant barrage of advertising and the general “fuck you” attitude of the people who run it and lo! they leaveth for Twitter.

Facebook hate this. Not least because they have to have constant flow of people through the site so that they can sell page view advertising. So they hit upon a great idea to get people logging in. Somewhere, deep in the code is a tricky little algorithm that randomly disconnects a small percentage of people from the site. Just a tiny amount remember, just 0.0001%.

But, as they happily point out, the average user has 120 friends on the site. And most of these are within a text, tweet, shout across the office, messageboard post or phone call away from being asked “is Facebook down for you as well?”. The friend innocently pops over to check, they log in happily, spend 5 minutes checking their Scrabble game and being advertised at.

Thus Facebook keep their page impressions up…

An odd side effect of writing my blog about old indie music - Because Midway Still Aren’t Coming Back - is that record promoters and pimpers email me and send me music to listen to in the vain hope of getting it featured on the blog. This is probably unlikely to happen for two reasons: one, none of it is a vinyl copy of a song from 1991 in the indie/C86/twee/Sarah Records genre and two, most of it is shit.

However, in an attempt to get the feel of writing about someone’s music that’s not a classic bit of twee, I thought I’d stick down a few notes about a CD I went out (well, emailed and paypalled) and bought with my own hard-earned cash. And it’s the one pictured above. It’s called “Regardez, Ecoutez et Repetez” and it’s from MJ Hibbett and the Validators, a band I’m a huge fan of.

MJ Hibbett is the man who brought us (in conjunction with Rob Manuel from B3ta) Hey Hey 16k, a lovely tribute to the old fashioned computers we had as kids, he’s also the only other person that’s featured on ‘Because Midway Still…’ thanks to Do the Indie Kid, a marvellous tale that we can all relate to.

Anyway, “Regardez…” is a proper album that that feature Indie Kid and 12 other lovely tracks. From the story of a chap who used to be in a famous indie band and is suddenly thrust back on stage in Japan (another of the side effects of ‘Because Midway Still…’ is having a long list of bands that never made it in the UK, but were big in Japan; which, along with having a lady singer, is pretty much the indiest thing you can do) and the lovely loves songs like “It only works because you’re here” - which will speak to anyone who’s ever been silently in love with a work colleague. Each of the songs is a snippet of life in the Half Man Half Biscuit mould, and each one is as good as the last.

I’m no NME reviewer, I’ll leave that to the professionals, but if you’ve got a tenner to spend on a cracking CD from a cracking band who know their way about pop, you can, and should, buy it from the band’s website, and avail yourself of the other offerings. I have, they’re great. The album is full of singalong numbers, helped by the fantastic innovation of it coming with a little booklet with all the words and chords in! Bloody ‘Girls Aloud’ wouldn’t be that kind to us.

Amongst a certain proportion of English (possibly British) people the term “a shedload” is used to describe a lot of something; “mate, you’ve had a shedload”, “I’ve got a shedload of cash out of the machine”, that sort of thing. Next time you’re in the pub, listen out for it.

Anyway, this confused me for ages until I found out where the term came from. It turns out that the phrase “a shedload of money” came about because a British Standard Shed can hold £1 million in old one pound notes. This in turn became generically used to describe a whole lot of something.

So there you go, amaze your friends, stimulate conversation, bore your colleagues.

A shed, yesterday

So, for reasons that are beyond explanation I’ve been to the Cambridge Folk Festival for the past few years. this year on an impulse (and under the influence) I bought a ukulele; they’re the new rock and roll instrument of choice, or so my chum Andy says…

I’ve been tinkering with it on and off for the past few months when the good lady wife is out trying to get the hang of the thing. And she’s out tonight. So, I’ve tuned it thanks to these chaps and this fantastic site and started to get my head around the chords - I can just about remember four. Unfortunately I’ve broken the top knuckle of my left index finger twice so the chord changes knack a bit, but I’m getting there.

I can only hope to be able to do this!

That’s got an AC Royal

Brum brum!