An Italian production of A View from the Bridge was hurriedly rescripted when an audience member complained about the on-stage smoking.
After a 15-minute suspension, the performance resumed with a modified script and a non-smoking protagonist.
Pity they didn’t add another scene where the entire cast descends on a single audience member with baseball bats.
I haven’t mentioned Sony for about three hours – time for another post!
Kidding aside, copy-protected discs are a real problem: essentially, you’re being mis-sold a product that claims to be one thing but is actually something rather different.
We tend to think of CDs as shiny discs containing music, but Compact Disc actually means something. It’s a global standard, and when you buy a Compact Disc you can expect it to work in any player that supports the standard. In other words, if you buy a CD, you should expect it to work in your car, in a top-of-the-range hi-fi, in a cheap CD player from Asda, in a CD drive on a computer, and so on.
Many copy-protected discs are sold as CDs, but they don’t meet the Compact Disc standard. If a DRM system must be installed before the disc works on your computer, it isn’t a Compact Disc. If there’s deliberate corruption in an attempt to fool computer drives, which can also prevent cheaper players from playing the disc, it isn’t a CD. Manufacturers are wise to this, and if you look at many copy-protected discs you’ll see that the Compact Disc logo is absent. That means they admit it isn’t a Compact Disc, but they’re happy to pretend that it is one so you’ll buy it.
I very much doubt that manufacturers are going to stop making such discs, but if retailers continue to sell non-CDs as if they were real CDs then the consumer is ultimately being screwed. You shouldn’t have to pore through websites or Amazon comments to find out if the CD you’re buying is actually a non-CD, but you do.
The answer’s obvious: mandate a system of clear labelling so consumers know exactly what they’re getting. You should know exactly what you’re getting before you buy a product – and it isn’t exactly difficult. We’ve already got such schemes, including:
CD – Compact Disc Digital Audio. The CD we know and love.
CD-R – a recordable Compact Disc.
CD-RW – the same, but if you use it as a data disc you can re-record again and again.
SA-CD – Super Audio CD. Sony’s ultra-high-fidelity “next-generation” CD.
DVD-Audio – The DVD rival to SACD.
Such labelling is used everywhere, and as a result consumers can spend their money, confident that they’re buying the appropriate format for their needs. So why not introduce a new one? It doesn’t need to be a complex name, just something descriptive such as “Copy Restricted Audio Product”. That way, you know exactly what you’re paying for and the acronym removes any ambiguity.
More reasons why I’m not a pop star…
This is a post about being a teenage rock wannabe, and follows on from “We Need To Talk About Kevin”.
Our bass player, Chris, was Robbie Williams ten years early. By far the best-looking member of our band, he had natural charisma, fashion sense and dancing ability. He wanted to be a rock star, but wasn’t too bothered about the “rock” bit: from time to time he toyed with the idea of joining a boy band, but unfortunately our bit of the world tends to produce lumpen, ruddy-faced blokes who look like potatoes so there wasn’t a Take That to accommodate Chris’s Robbie.
Chris knew the importance of image, and before long he and Kevin started to talk about on-stage clothes. David the drummer paid a bit of attention, but I didn’t really understand the point. I’ve always been a “I will wear this to cover my nakedness” kind of person, Ricky Tomlinson to Chris’s David Beckham.
We were booked to play in Irvine, in an upstairs venue called Bay 63 (there’s a European Union Directive that states all venues must have terrible names). Chris and Kevin were late, because they’d been up in Glasgow looking for stage clothes. Kevin had bought a really horrible ruffled white shirt (which, surprise surprise, looked very like one Bono wore), and Chris had bought shoes.
Let me tell you about Chris’s shoes.
These were no ordinary shoes.
These were suede shoes.
Blue suede shoes.
He was delighted, and with good reason: they were possibly the ugliest, bluest shoes that had ever been created, a blue so blue that the word “blue” isn’t enough. Imagine something bluer than the bluest thing ever created, then add a bit more blue. He asked me what I thought. “Hmmm,” I said. “They’re very blue.”
Fashion chat over, we lumped our gear up the stairs to the venue and set up where the soundman told us to. As ever, I was stage right; Kevin was in the middle; Chris was up by the smoke machine, stage left. We soundchecked, worried about whether the waxed floors would make it hard for the drumkit to stay in place, decided they wouldn’t, headed off for something to eat and wandered back to Bay 63 just before we were due to play.
The venue was transformed. When we’d been there earlier it was a big room with shiny floors and a patina of nicotine, but by the time we’d shoved some hamburgers down our necks it had become Rock Heaven. There was smoke – boy, was there smoke. There was a crowd, many of whom were pierced in various interesting ways. And there were lights. Boy, were there lights.
I think they’re called sweeper spots: very bright, very focused beams of almost laser-like light that sweeps around a room. The combination of the sweepers and the smoke gave an eerie, strobe-like quality, the belching white smoke pierced by searchlights as if Martian war machines were searching for the power of Rock. We were delighted.
Time to play. I stomped on my magic guitar pedals, David did the count-in, we kicked off with something rocky. The sound was great. The lights were better. When I looked up from my guitar (something I couldn’t do too often due to my – ahem – limited playing ability) I saw a sea of bouncing people, strobe-lit by the sweeping spotlights. This could be the best gig ever, I thought.
Something whooshed behind me, making a noise.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”
I couldn’t turn around because I was trying not to screw up a guitar riff. The something whooshed again, this time in the other direction.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”
I managed to turn slightly, and saw a visibly terrified Chris looming out of the smoke like a runaway train, trying his damnedest to stay upright, looking for all the world like a movie monster on a skateboard. Music moves people, and it was moving Chris from left to right and back again at breakneck speed.
You’ve heard of the Duck Walk, Chuck Berry’s legendary guitar-playing strut? It turns out that Chris had accidentally invented his own version: the FuuuuuuuuuckWalk. He’d decided to move from his usual static position in order to rock out, but unfortunately the combination of virgin leather soles, a freshly waxed floor and the water spilling from the smoke machine turned him into a human toboggan. Shooting from side to side, swearing as he went, Chris was – yes! – on the Sole Train.
Chris’s shoes never appeared on stage again.
The Inquirer weighs in on the Sony copy-protection disaster, and argues that dumb ideas such as the XCP system create, rather than deter, piracy.
We figure, maybe naively, that forking out that extra bit of cash for a real CD instead of some cheapo knock-off at a car boot sale, entitles us to a certain level of quality and protection. Not so.
…If Sony, and the others, insist on sabotaging our systems and crippling music’s portability then they can expect to see more piracy in the future, not less.
I went to see Defending The Caveman in Glasgow last night, courtesy of a promoter who gets this whole blogging thing. It was… OK. Not great, not terrible. OK.
The show starts with a chorus of girls chanting that men are “arseholes”, and over the next 90-odd minutes John Glyde attempts to defend the male gender. We’re not arseholes; we’re just different. Men are hunters, women are gatherers, and the difficulties we have in understanding one another are simply because we’re wired differently. Cue lots of stuff about men do this, women do that.
Glyde does a good job, but he’s hamstrung by venue problems (terrible acoustics, a mic that seems to die after about ten minutes and doesn’t get resurrected until after the interval, a bunch of idiots – of both genders – chatting loudly near the bar) and script problems. The first ten to fifteen minutes are really tedious, and the central conceit – John’s been booted out by his wife because he’s an arsehole; he feels aggrieved because he’s not an arsehole, just a prisoner of his caveman programming – is pretty flimsy.
The big problem with Defending The Caveman, though, is that it’s not that funny or insightful. Compress the gags into a 3,000 word magazine article and you’d have an amusing if largely predictable bit of “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” people-watching, but over 90 minutes the material feels stretched.
It doesn’t help that we’re dealing with familiar territory, either – it’s the territory of most stand-up, which handles this kind of material in a much funnier way. For example, when I got home I was channel-flicking and ended up watching Ardal O’Hanlon doing his thing on one of the comedy channels. When he talked about his relationship with his wife he crammed more laughs into three minutes than Caveman managed in an hour and a half.
This may turn into a series. Then again, it may not.
I met Squander Two through music: we were both in bands that kicked around Glasgow, so when he stayed at my house the other week we shared war stories about the dubious joys of playing music in public. The topic shifted to bands we’d been in as teenagers, and in particular a band I’d been in called Western Dream. After yet another tale of pomposity, stupidity and utter incompetence, Squander Two said: “You really ought to blog about this.” So here goes.
Western Dream were rubbish – even worse than the name suggests – but of course we didn’t believe that at the time. We were mighty warriors of rock, snake-hipped sex monsters with zero self-awareness, precious little playing ability, lots of spots and a singer called Kevin (he’s not called that now, so I don’t feel bad naming him). Kevin was a lyrical genius whose take on Margaret Thatcher, if played on the radio, would have changed British society overnight:
She’s cold as ice
She’s as welcome as lice
We all liked U2, but Kevin really liked U2. In fact, he liked U2 so much that he tried to be Bono. He adopted Bono’s on-stage drawl and even dressed like him – cowboy boots, black jeans, ruffled shirt… think Live Aid Bono and you get the idea. It was a pretty good facsimile, but Kevin differed from Bono in one key respect: Bono could sing.
Don’t get me wrong, Kevin could sing too – and when he was good, he was very good indeed. Unfortunately his relationship with the tune was rather rocky, and the slightest distraction would send his voice wildly off-key, never to return. As a result, rehearsals were essential: Kevin needed to rehearse songs until his body sang them on autopilot, because if he didn’t then he’d lose the key and howl like a recently bereaved walrus.
I can’t stress this enough: when he had the key, Kevin was a fantastic singer. When he lost the key, he created the worst noise imaginable, a sound that could smash glass, peel paint and make Shaun Ryder sound like Pavarotti. You know those old hand-cranked air raid sirens? Imagine one of them being forcibly inserted into a cat’s arse while Mariah Carey does a vocal warm-up inside a dustbin that’s being beaten with baseball bats.
We were booked to play Hot Gossip (yes, really) in Ardrossan, a pretty rough pub in a pretty rough bit of a pretty rough town. Two of the audience were in traction: one of them, I discovered later on, had escaped from a mental hospital. It was that kind of place. Still, we were going to get £130 for playing there. Sure, it was danger money but hey! We would win over the hostile crowd with our sheer rock power!
Just before the gig, Kevin spotted a rather attractive and relatively un-pierced girl at the bar. He caught her eye, got a smile, and swaggered over. The rock band frontman in full effect. After a brief chat, the conversation turned to music.
K: So what bands do you like?
Girl: All kinds of stuff. U2′s probably my favourite.
I can’t be sure, but I reckon that at this point Kevin’s voice magically transformed from deepest Ayrshire to begorrah-I’m-a-little-leprechaun as he did a little jig and waved a shillelagh.
K: Cool. We do a few U2 songs, you know. What’s your favourite?
Girl: Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I love that song.
K: Well baby, I’ll sing that song for you tonight.
I don’t think he actually said that last bit, but I’m sure he wanted to. Possibly with a Colgate tooth-flare and a sexy wink. It doesn’t really matter, though: Whatever the actual words were, Kevin promised to play Still Haven’t Found… and came over to tell us.
Me: I don’t think that’s a good idea.
K: Why not? You know how to play it.
Me: That’s not the point. We haven’t rehearsed it.
K: Come on, it’s easy!
Me: We’ll fuck it up.
K: No we won’t.
I wasn’t happy, but the rest of the band wanted to do it. Grudgingly I agreed, so we decided to do the song the way U2 was currently doing it live: one guitar and one vocal, then the rest of the band would kick in after the first chorus.
Mid-gig, Kevin announced that we were going to do a song “for a friend of mine”. I stomped on my delay pedal and started the riff. Kevin moved forward. He started to sing.
I have climbed highest mountains…
It was beautiful.
I have run through the fields…
It was like alchemy: take a bunch of ordinary, rather cloddish blokes, add a decent song and the result is something stunning. If you closed your eyes you wouldn’t hear a duff bunch of teenage wannabes; you’d hear one of the world’s biggest bands at the peak of their powers.
Only to be with you…
Kevin’s new friend was pretty impressed. So were we.
Into the chorus.
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
The audience is singing along. Even the fella in traction. The girl is melting. Kevin’s not going home alone tonight.
The chorus ends, David the drummer clicks the sticks for a count-in, Chris the bassist slides down to the first note. Click-click-click-der-der-der – yeah!
We are kicking. Swiss-watch timing, perfect playing, the crowd’s totally into it. Kevin’s got his foot up on the monitor, Live Aid Bono in full effect. Into the second verse.
Oh fuck.
Waaaaaaaaaagh belEEEEEEEEEEEEVE inna KEEENGDUM CU-U-UUUUM!
Kevin’s lost the key. He doesn’t know he’s lost the key. He’s wiggling his arse in front of the crowd, yelping. They’re pissing themselves laughing. We’re pissing ourselves laughing. Traction man’s going to end up in casualty if he laughs any harder.
aaanallda KULLAAAAAS BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED eeento WUNNNN!
David’s playing the drums with tears in his eyes. My gut hurts. Chris is hunched over, howling.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEENTO WUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
There’s around 70 people in the room, and every single one of them is absolutely killing themselves laughing.
Except one.
He’s spinning now, oblivious to the effect he’s having. Occasionally he’ll stare right into the U2 girl’s eyes, at which point she does a very impressive job of looking awe-struck. The second he looks away, of course, she’s banging on the bar with her fists. The same happens with the rest of the crowd: when Kevin looks at them, they quickly put on their serious faces. When his eyes move on, they’re laughing even harder than before. The only one who doesn’t notice is Kevin. He’s deafened by the speakers, blinded by ego, honking like a startled goose.
burra stEEEEEEEEEEEEL HAVVA FAAAAAAAAHND WARRAMLOOOOOKINFAAAAAAAAAA!
The song ends. The audience gives a huge ironic cheer. Kevin turns around, beaming, and sees us.
David’s face-down on the snare drum, weeping.
Chris is sat next to his bass amp, giggling like a loon.
My cheeks are streaked with tears.
Kevin beams. “What’s next?”"
At least, I think that’s what this spam image is suggesting.
It’s the news every Scot’s been waiting for: the line-up for Glasgow’s official Hogmanay celebrations. And the big attractions are…. Deacon Blue and Hue & Cry.
And people wonder why Glaswegians get drunk at New Year.
I’m going to see a show in Glasgow called Defending The Caveman on Sunday night (assuming the tickets arrive in time). I’d never heard of it until a few days ago, when the promoter sent me a very straightforward email: you’ve got a blog, do you fancy coming along for free? That was it: no “…on the condition you write about it”, just “we’re inviting bloggers. Fancy it?”
Of course, there’s no need to ask a blogger to write about something: that’s what bloggers do. But I think it’s a very smart idea, because by giving away a pair of spare tickets the promoter’s getting some valuable word of mouth coverage. My wife’s friends and colleagues are now aware of the show, and if she likes it she’ll tell them all about it. If I like it, I’ll blog about it. And so on. The result: the promoter gets rid of a couple of tickets that were going spare anyway, and if the process is repeated with enough bloggers then you’ve got a nice wee marketing campaign that didn’t cost a penny.
If the Ford Motor Company is reading this, the same tactics would work with the latest Aston Martin.
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