ComEnts

But FabChannel have got the whole Pirates gig from the Paradiso available to stream from their site. It's really good.

Labels: Pete and the Pirates

After 2 years of not recording at all, it could be that Joey Ultra get 2 lots of recording done in 2 months! Urk!

Exciting? Yeah.

Hopefully we'll do some live recording first in August followed by proper studio recording in October.

Labels: Joey Ultra

So, it's been a busy weekend for me. My band Joey Ultra played at the best venue in the world on Friday, the Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading. It's a tiny little venue run as a charity by hippies and is absolutely brilliant. We played well again, I think we're getting better every time we play. We don't really know what's going on with the band at the moment. Bass player Sam is having a baby in 6 months or so and won't really have any time for band stuff for a while. So we need to work out what is going to happen. Hopefully we'll carry on in some capacity probably after a bit of a break. Also need to work out recording

Saturday night we went to Twickenham to watch Iron Maiden. It was a brilliant gig. Twickenham is a really good stadium venue, really good transport links, well organised, easy to get drinks etc. I was very impressed. Maiden were brilliant, as always. I think everyone in a band should watch them at least once, even if they hate the music just to see how entertaining they make their shows. It's fairly incredible that after 25 years the band is bigger than ever.

I surprisingly saw my brother on Sunday. He'd been meant to be playing Zoo8 but it seems to have been a complete and utter disaster. Quite a lot of bands cancelled in the end and it seems the organization was utterly shambolic. Comments from people who went are almost universally scathing.

Labels: Iron Maiden, Joey Ultra, Zoo8

Someone has stolen Kurt Cobain's ashes from Courtney Love. Now she's threatening to kill herself unless whoever stole them gave them back. That's just going to encourage them to keep them isn't it?

Joey Ultra have a new song, as always when we write a new song it's the BEST EVAH! You can probably hear it at Bar Four on the 11th June.

Six Nation State are driving down the Thames in a barge and pulling up at Reading on Thursday night. They'll be playing the Oakford in the Evening. I suggest going to see that.

It'd been nearly two months without a rehearsal, everyone hadn't been sleeping well because of our lovely hot weather and was a bit knackered but yesterday's Joey Ultra rehearsal went surprisingly well. We could remember and play all the old songs, although Data Entry was a struggle with my shoulder not being quite fixed, and they sounded great. Plus we got most of a new song that PaulC had written sorted out, and it's potentially the best one we've ever done. Very exciting. And we have a couple of gigs in the next two months to look forward to/work towards too.

My aim for the next few weeks is to get writing some songs myself. I struggle to write for Joey Ultra because everything I play tends to go just a bit too metal. We'll see. There is a slight problem at home, because I tend to like to just have guitars lying around that I can pick up whenever I feel like to play on, and my girlfriend likes to have everything (like guitars) nicely tidied away. So at the moment I rarely if ever pick up a guitar outside rehearsals. We're working on a plan to fix that.

Labels: Joey Ultra

I broke my collar bone last month playing football, so for once I have a good reason for having no updates! Ha!

We had a couple of weeks off from Joey Ultra duties after our last gig and then I broke my shoulder the day before we were due to restart rehearsing so it's been a frustrating couple of months with no band action. We've got our first rehearsal back on Monday, so we'll see if I can actually play. It's possibly my shoulder will stand up to the strain but very possible it won't. Sadly we also had to turn down a gig on 17th of May due to the stupid shoulder but I think we've got 2 in the pipeline, both in Reading of course! 11th June and 4th July. Independence day! I'll let you know more closer to the time.



Breakages didn't stop me from going to Holland to follow the Pirates on tour though. I went off to Rotterdam, The Hague and Amsterdam to see them play and it was great. Every night was in a great venue and busy, 2 of them sold out. It'd be so good if Reading had a venue as good as either Rotown or the small room at Paard van Troje (Trojan horse) where they played. Quite a few of the fans knew all the words to all the songs, even though the album isn't out in Holland yet, and loads of people knew all the singles. I was really surprised at how great the crowds were.



Kevin says in a comment below that Coments is 4 years old! That means I must have made nearly 50 posts talking rubbish about whatever band I was in at the time, the Pirates, and other tenuous musical chat. I can't believe you lot still read them but thanks for sticking with us if you do.

I found this latest blog post on pampelmoose very interesting. Short story is in the title of this blog, but EMI have hired a guy who worked at Google to try and sort out how they can make money out of music online. I can't really add much more to what Dave Allen says on that link. I especially liked these questions:

"Maybe he can find a way to compare that activity to the way labels have used another free format for their customers to hear their music - FM Radio. And also he might discuss how much money EMI loses by making music videos then giving them away for free to MTV."

Yeah, good points. Personally I think it's a very good idea for EMI, or any record company, to employ someone who really understands how making money on the internet works to try and help them move their business model along, but I'm not sure how much success he'll have changing such deeply entrenched ideas. Could be a very interesting story to watch.