ComEnts

Ah.. Friday; gotta love it. Especially if the weather is actually being quite charming like it is today. Had a great rehearsal with White Sunday last night, even though Dan Dan the Drumming Man is still off on tour - and rehearsals sans percussive are usually as much fun as DIY dentistry. Jimmy G has come up with another blinding tune, and I can’t wait to get stuck into May's gig schedule. James actually introduced the song to me by saying "Hope you're in a Led Zeppelin kind of mood" - which gave me a mini Y99er flashback for a second - but the tune turned out to be more like our usual fare of groovy Brit-rock, and didn’t even have a solo in! Well, there may be some fills and trills here and there, but not what your average scientifically-orientated music fan would class as Shreddus Magnus or even the sub-genus Tabidus Oris. Still getting some lovely sounds out of James' 72 Tele as well, it's a bugger to play but it makes some lovely electronic reproductions of magnetic field oscillations.

Speaking of Y99er, saw a fantastic shot of Camilla and a lupine companion in the Times Style Supplement - she volunteers at a wolf sanctuary, possibly a good training ground for someone looking for a career in music! (Reptile houses and leech farms prolly better!). There was a little blurb at the end about Y99er, etc. but mostly it was a very cool shot of Cams with a wolf on a leash. I keep reading reviews of the single, it's a mixed bag so far: they all say Henry has a good voice, etc. Wonder how long I should leave it to gather royalties before I bother making enquiries? Meh - I'll leave it until the album comes out, might be worth a few pennies to me - I'm reminded of Neil's last words to me on the subject - "Hopefully it'll be enough to sort you out with your own house." Hope is springing eternal! Andros also gave me a quality bit of management schpiel about how I was "gonna be a millionaire" too, which made me smile, but was taken with a pinch of salt. Still, stranger things have happened - if they make it huge in China and sell 2 billion CD's, well.. Rocket cars and solid gold houses here we come! I think it's instantly and automatically detrimental to the music-making process when you start thinking in terms of how much cash you could make, so I've always had an overblown fantasy attitude to it, if you start thinking "Hey! If I write a song in this style, or do this, or try and be that - then I could buy a Porsche with the publishing rights!" then you're not really making music, you’re just whoreing out your song writing skills. Bands always write their best stuff when they are skint and hungry and angry at the world. It's getting the first bit of cash that separates the men from the boys, proper artists will maintain integrity, etc. whilst the r n'b artists just sing about how much cash they have, how cool they are, etc. I know it's different from a Black perspective, but it shouldn’t be - it just is.

Following Alex Rebus' comment insinuating that perhaps my own love of sport may not find many receptive readers on what is primarily a musical blog, I'm not going to mention anything until the Lions Tests from now on.

Have a good weekend y'all - I'm playing the Madjeski Stadium on Sat night, have a potential dep guitarist coming down to check us out, see if he wants in, etc. so I'll be trying real hard on our jazz material, and will hopefully be clean and sober for the whole night. Bah! Boring..