Image by posteverything.co.uk

This week brought the apparent news that the people behind the Bowery, a key focal point of Edinburgh’s revitalised scene, are being told they can no longer use the venue. The above poster represents just one of the many great gigs I've been to there, and there's been very many others that I wasn't able to go to but would have loved to. The standard of gigs there has been incredible in the year they've been going. In fact, now I think of it, I even played a couple of songs there at the Song By Toad Christmas Party last year (ok apart from that).

Anyway, Toad seems to have managed to engage the people behind the decision in some kind of dialogue over at his blog, so head over there to keep abreast of developments (ok, I admit it, that was just an excuse to use the word "abreast"). It doesn't actually seem to be THE END as much as there are some changes afoot, as one of the gals behind the venue Jane Flett has said on Facebook:

"The landlords aren't taking over in some cynical money grabbing coup, don't worry! There are changes afoot in the building because this is what is needed to keep it alive and sustainable as an independent arts space, but hopefully The Bowery will remain involved and doing the boozy musicy things we do."

So that's good news then. I think... what they need is support though, and there's a 1st birthday bash happening this weekend with a great line up so why not head along if you've not been before.

Twenty Tracks

 Meantime, rather ironically, The Bowery have a new Ten Tracks compilation with a lot of great music for a single squid. They are totally into the same antifolk/New York vibe (if you hadn't guessed by the name) as I have been for quite some time, and which people like Withered Hand also strongly resonate with. In fact, his label SL Records have also got a Ten Tracks bundle.

So here's the link - but remember though to save a pound coin in your piggy bank for the I Hear a New World compilation coming soon, which also happens to include a lovely Withered Hand track, and many more besides.

Vote for Song, By Toad & Under The Radar

Both Song, By Toad and The Scotsman's Under The Radar, two blogs which I have mentioned many times around here, have been nominated for some kind of industry awards thingamajig arranged by an industry thingamajig known only as 'Record of The Day'.

So go and log in to the site to vote presumably you have to log in to stop Matthew Toad and the UtR crew sitting hitting refresh and voting themselves 100 million times ;) Anyway, their success is great for everyone who's involved in Scottish music so make sure you support them.

 Aside: There are a bunch of other categories too, including best music magazine etc – and I noted that The Skinny Magazine are strangely absent, even from the free magazine category, which seems a bit strange given the amount of music the mag covers, including some pretty high profile bands/artists. The Skinny are also totally ignored by The Scottish Magazine Awards, which again strikes me as strange. Any conspiracy theories?

If you expected Daniel Johnston to be eternally lo-fi and perpetually at risk of unravelling musically, with records that are little more than snippets of a damaged soul captured on tape cassette in his mum's basement, then this album may come as a shock to you.

It's full band and full throttle, with Beck and Air producer Jason Falkner bringing Johnston's ideas closer to the way he always heard his songs in his own head (and any musician can tell you how wide the disparity can be between what you actually create and what you intended to create).  DJ himself is in brilliant voice and sounds like he's revelling in playing with the band. It took me quite a while to get used to the sheer professionalism of the album myself in fact, but I'm really loving it now because the more I listen to it, the more the whole feel of the album is utterly and completely uplifting.

Stand out tracks on the first few listens are the old school jam of Fake Records of Rock n Roll and canine tribute Queenie the Doggie (a song title and subject only someone as perma-innocent as Johnston seems to be could sing with a straight face), as well as the Sesame Street on crack cocaine keyboard riff of 'Without You' which is a bit musically trite but has grown on me.

Where he excels of course is as a unique songwriter, and at this stage he's pretty much a genre to himself. You either hate him, love him, or find the fetishisation of his mental health issues by some fans difficult to stomach. But it's difficult to deny the unblemished honesty of his lyrics and genuineness of his vocal delivery.

 Daniel Johnston - High Horse

 Buy it at Amazon

Daniel Johnston is playing Edinburgh tomorrow (Wednesday 4th November). Here's what I wrote about his Glasgow gig last year (warning: it all gets a bit emotional) and here are the photos:

 

It's November. Howdahelldiddathappen?

I've been unwell and off work for several days which means I'm missing the Gothenburg Address play at the Electric Circus tonight. Whatdahelliswrongwidme?

I've managed to weakly click on the share button for a couple of things though, go see over at my google reader shared items or below if you are visiting the site. They include Shakira being amazing in the bedroom via Portiswasp, the above robot being grumpy and mildly annoying like me, fruit bat fellatio (I kid you not) and Just Another iPhone Blog, who I write for from time to time being featured on Lifehacker.

Shameless self-promotion: Here's my latest post for them: Newsy.com brings bite-size nuggets of news to the iPhone

Tumblr image viewer

This is an interview from November's issue of The Skinny Magazine which can also be found on their website here. It was loosely timed to coincide with the release of a wee bundle I've put together for www.tentracks.co.uk which will be available in late November - more info on that will be coming soon. The artwork was specially commissioned from Eleanor Meredith :)

To mark the 50th issue of The Skinny, music columnists Milo McLaughlin and Sean Michaels got on the blower (well, Skype) for a transatlantic chinwag about the Scottish music scene and how it's all changed since the magazine began in 2005.

The Easy Gramophone was a monthly column written by Sean Michaels which ran in The Skinny from 2006 to early 2008. As the title suggests it was intended as a companion to his hugely popular mp3 blog Said The Gramophone - deemed one of Time Magazine's 25 best blogs this year.

For each column Sean handpicked a selection of tracks he loved which were available free to download somewhere on the net. In line with The Skinny's eclectic, cutting-edge music coverage, these were songs from a dizzying array of styles, based on their quality rather than any fixed genre - and he was one of the first people in the UK to write about bands such as Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Beirut and Final Fantasy. When Michaels returned to his home city of Montreal, he passed on the baton to me, and the column morphed into I Hear a New World, with an accompanying podcast of 'original and innovative songs from Scotland and beyond'. This included such cult heroes as Bonnie Prince Billy, Jeffrey Lewis, James Yorkston and Herman Dune as well as established and underground local acts such as Errors, eagleowl, King Creosote, The Pictish Trail, The Phantom Band, and The Japanese War Effort.

Now that he has the perspective of time and distance, I ask Sean how he feels about the Scottish music scene and how he sees his development since those formative issues of The Skinny. From where he's standing, the east coast has seen the biggest change. "The thing that I sorrowfully tell people when they ask about music in Scotland is that between the time I arrived to when I left, I didn't discover a single great Edinburgh band that I hadn't heard before I arrived. It gives me great pleasure and envy that after I left things have really come out of the woodwork, and it feels like it's reached some kind of velocity."

Despite his physical distance, Michaels continues to scour the web in search of great Scottish acts, having featured some of the new breed of Edinburgh artists such as Withered Hand and Meursault on his blog, even before many local commentators had caught on to their undoubted charms. However, whilst he believes that it's important to be supportive of Scottish artists, it can also be counterproductive to lavish blanket praise based on geography alone.

Some have suggested that this is at risk of happening with the recent explosion of predominantly positive coverage in the local blogosphere, but Sean is optimistic about the internal barometer of the genuine Scottish music fan. "Scots are great musicians, it's a great place for music, and they also don't put up with crap. In the case of bands like Uncle John & Whitelock people were responding to something that was very good, and that's the crucial element.”

The ethos Michaels has brought to both the Said the Gramophone blog and the Easy Gramophone column is perfectly simple - to celebrate the magical synchronicity that leads an artist or band to come up with that one, amazing, addictive, essential tune. "Your column led on from mine, where you're highlighting great songs. And that's what I've done with Said The Gramophone all this time - I think you can be enthusiastic much more honestly when you don't need to say 'this band is clearly the greatest band ever' or 'this album is a masterpiece'. Our small aspiration is to everyday give you three minutes that are wonderful."

With the prodigious Sufjan Stevens recently questioning what the point of a song actually is, I ask Michaels if he too ever gets tired of the hunt for the next hidden gem. "Sometimes you have to sit down at your computer, take off your ears, and knock them against the desk and ask 'how are you feeling today?'" Nothing hones that internal barometer better than a bit of perspective. "Sometimes you feel like hearing that hot new CD that came in the post or that new mp3 you downloaded from that cutting edge blog, and sometimes you're like, 'okay, time to throw on the Neil Young; time to throw on the Bach.' Reminding yourself and other people about great old songs is a really nice thing to do - I mean it's what we do with friends, right?”

Sean Michaels writes for The Guardian, blogs at www.saidthegramophone.com and is currently starting work on his second novel.

The I Hear a New World channel - featuring tracks from Withered Hand, Gummi Bako, Meursault and Ambulances - is launched on Ten Tracks in November - in the meantime check out the podcasts.

Some other stuff I've written for The Skinny recently:

• Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard @ Cabaret Voltaire, 31 Aug
• Retreat! @ Bristo Hall, 16 Aug
• Withered Hand - You're Not Alone
• Meursault - Nothing Broke EP

It's been a bit quiet on the music reviewing front round here recently, I admit it. For a blogger who reliably sticks to music and does it very well, I thoroughly recommend Ed Jupp's 17 Seconds. He's doing a series of reviews of classic albums at the moment entitled 33 and 1/3 and I particularly enjoyed a post he wrote about the Queen Is Dead, which still stands as one of my favourite ever albums. And The Fall also get a mention later on in the series, which can never be a bad thing.

Like Matthew Toad who introduced me to 17 Seconds in the first place, Jupp also has a record label to whom he's signed Aberfeldy who you might know  - at times they are a bit too twee for me (because I'm a miserable, grumpy bastard) but I enjoyed their song Vegetarian Restaurant about one of the main veggie eateries in Edinburgh. He's recently signed one of their members up in their other guise as a solo artist: www.myspace.com/chrisbradleymusic

Aberfeldy - Vegetarian Restuarant

Also recently signed is an act that appears to be inspired by the likes of Erasure and other 80s synth pop bands - always a good thing surely? I especially like the cover of Galaxie 500's Tugboat which you can hear at: www.myspace.com/xliontamer

And as you can see from the poster on the right, there's a 17 Seconds night on at the 13th Note in Glasgow tomorrow night (Friday), also featuring The Dirty Cuts and Escape Act.

Read part 1, part 2, part 3

A Novel Idea

In my final year of college I also started writing lyrics and other random stuff in a bit of a creative outpouring, due perhaps to the fact that I'd kept my creativity bottled up for so long (or drowned it in a sea of booze might be more accurate) and increasing desperation about what was going to happen when the student safety net was pulled away from beneath my feet. I also made some attempt to record some music to go along with these lyrics,  though without any of the skill required for such an enterprise. Also my personal life was in a complete and utter mess at the time due to my own stupidity, but that's another story.

After full-time education ended, unemployment was inevitable. I had the same attitude as Morrissey towards work "I was looking for a job then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now.." However I suddenly found myself in a serious relationship so had a reason to make a bit of an effort.

 In the meantime I decided it would be a good time to write a novel. I spent my days wandering round second-hand bookshops and going to the library, and fixated on Hunter S Thompson. I would see his partner in crime Ralph Steadman's illustrations everywhere I went - perhaps taunting me about my own childlike drawing skills, though I took it as encouragement to continue on my quest to be a writer.

The novel was to be called the Three Drink Rule, about a borderline alcoholic ex-student who is talked into making a pledge to never have more than three alcoholic drinks - but when he inevitably gives in to temptation, bizarre things happen.. it never quite materialised, though I was to revisit it from time to time, and still think about trying to rewrite it now and again.

STRUGGLING TO PAY THE BILLS AND STAY CREATIVE

After about three months on the breadline I applied for a couple of retail jobs - one in a health food store and one in HMV's "flagship" music store on Princes St, which had been closed for refurbishment. I got turned down for the health food job and ended up wowing the manager of HMV with my enthusiasm for the Oasis album Definitely Maybe (yeah, I know..  I was young and naïve) though the way he ignored me once i was in the job suggested he later regretted the decision.

After I'd accepted the HMV job, the health food store manager came back and said the job was mine after all, if I wanted it - it was too late though. I wonder how different my life would have turned out if I'd been given that job first, given the people who I met at HMV were to lead to me joining my first band and continuing my heavy drinking habits..

 * Note: For more info on this and the various soul-sucking jobs that followed, my recording of the song Columbo & Coffee and my adventures as part of an unpopular comedy band, you'll have to read my in-depth tale about it called 'I Was a Swivel Chair' which I'll be republishing on this blog soon.

During the Edinburgh Festival that year I managed to get some 'work' writing for the Evening News. I covered a variety of comedy, theatre and music but I was also working full-time.

Just to give you an idea how old I am, this was in the days before everyone had a laptop and email and free broadband in cafes etc so I had to run up to the fringe office on the Royal Mile on my lunch to arrange tickets for the events, and then after the event I had to go home, write the review and then call it in so that it could be published the next day.

My friend Dougie's mum was one of the people at the Evening News who took these phone calls and transcribed the copy - I was quite embarrassed when I had to read her my review of 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago..'

 This ridiculous ritual soon led to burn-out, and worse, I wasn't getting paid for the pleasure, mainly due to my own deeply embedded reluctance to ask for money. Then I saw an opportunity to take part in a music video course with Roman "don't mention my dad" Coppola as part of the International Film Festival, and applied.

Coppola was a really nice and surprisingly humble bloke and had made quite a few music vids including helping Spike Jonze out on Fatboy Slim's Praise You and Mansun's Tax Loss video (see his Reel). He guided us through the process of making a music promo from idea to final product.

We had to pitch an idea to someone at Skint Records  - he didn't think much of mine, and we ended up going with another guy on the course's idea which was to have a guy in a pink panther suit walk backwards around Edinburgh. After it was filmed we reversed and sped up the footage so it looked like everyone else was going backwards and the panther was strolling about leisurely. It turned out not bad and was apparently shown on MTV and BBC2 - but I couldn't find it on the web when I looked.

So it was a great course, but had meant I gave up prematurely on being a full-time professional arts journalist. I did go back and write for the Evening News again a year later, and managed to get paid, but that fizzled out as I spent more and more time doing Swivel Chair stuff - including a string of "groundbreaking" music videos...

I don't think I realised what an opportunity I had at the time to get paid writing work, something which on the whole still eludes me now. Clearly there are limiting beliefs at work in this old gaseous brain of mine...

 Next: The Final Part. Probably.

Above picture by James Christopher via my Tumblr 

So, as promised, more random links. Was very chuffed this week to get a mention in this splendid article by Glasgow Podcart which also bigs up a bunch other blogs I enjoy, many of which I've mentioned here at some point. I think each of the blogs mentioned bring their own unique style and content to the table, and Halina who wrote the piece is a very passionate and generous soul who has been very supportive of me even when I've gone off on incredibly geeky and obscure tangents, so cheers Halina!

Random Links From Google Reader

Monday 25th October marks 'least productive' day of year
go.theregister.com

Geocities closes tomorrow. Last chance to save your rubbish old website
thenextweb.com

My Latest Novel, Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh – 24th October 2009
thesteinbergprinciple.wordpress.com

How To Get Past The Blank Page By Creating Urgency
problogger.net
Blogging for masochists

Ever wonder how much electricity it takes to run the Internet?
thenextweb.com

Spike Jonze Explains Why Kanye Pulled ‘Fairytale’ Video
therapup.uproxx.com

Historian slams 'absolutely crazy' UK time zone
go.theregister.com

How The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts)
techcrunch.com

How to Write a Novel in 30 Days
writetodone.com

AppsFire Launches App Star Awards To Find The Next Great iPhone App
techcrunch.com

An Interview with Dan Pink
lateralaction.com

Random Links Direct From Twitter

This is all that remains of my first ever webshite, for my band Swivel Chair: index http://bit.ly/2Hu6bh #geocitiesgraveyard

RT @seaninsound: RIP John Peel who passed away 5years ago today. Here are a bunch of Peel playlists @spotify http://bit.ly/3d5QjU

Quality remix of Yeah Yeah Yeahs Heads Will Roll via @FridayMixtape http://bit.ly/3uMnr7

RT @mybitofsky: RT @eagleowlattack EP now sold out - the digital download version is now available from http://eagleowl.bandcamp.com/

RT @jonathanfields: RT @CaliLewis: Did you guys see this about the 27" iMac? http://bit.ly/4kskFv

A massive thank you to everyone who voted in my poll yesterday and today. The replies were very interesting, and I will definitely be taking what you've said into account. 

Having said that, the results were so diverse that it suggests that people don't come here for only one topic - and I really appreciate the additional comments people added saying they like the variety of subject matter - so to some extent I guess I'll keep on experimenting, and talking about what interests me, in the hope it will interest you also. 

A majority of respondents wanted updates three times a week, closely followed by those demanding daily updates. But others said they preferred quality over quantity. I will be aiming for 2 -3 posts a week from now on, and maybe the odd extra shorter post like this one to keep the ball rolling.

One thing seems clear - people like the 'Products of a Gaseous Brain' title - a big surprise! However I was very disappointed in the poor showing for the iPhone. What is wrong with you people??

Check out the results below (click here to view page if you're reading this via RSS or email)

I'm a bit confused, in case you hadn't already noticed - and I need to know what you want from this blog, please fill out the below form (RSS and email subscribers can click here) and let me know what you'd like to see here, I will be forever grateful and hopefully you'll get some more info and content you're actually interested in!