Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • The final Fred show

    Tomorrow morning, BBC Radio Scotland will broadcast the last ever MacAulay & Co programme after nearly eighteen years on air. I’m going to miss it, and the people who make it.

    I was a listener long before I became a contributor. In 1997 and 1998 I had a real job, and when I was late for work – which I often was, sometimes deliberately because I didn’t want to switch off something particularly funny – I’d listen to the show, laugh like a drain and think: it must be a right laugh to be on a show like that.

    I’m not quite sure when I became a contributor – 2003 sounds about right – but I can honestly say that it’s been one of the best things in my life for a very long time. Without exception the people working on the programme – not just the voices you hear on the radio but the people who put the whole thing together and make it work more or less smoothly – are among the nicest, funniest, most talented people I’ve ever worked with, and it’s been a real joy to be part of the team. I’ve met pop stars and actors, comedians and authors, done some very silly things on air and been part of all kinds of tomfoolery, and the crazy buggers paid me to do it.

    Fred’s moving on to bigger and brighter things and I’m sure the team will shine elsewhere too. As for me, I’m sure I’ll keep turning up here and there but I doubt I’ll ever be part of something quite like the Fred show ever again.

    If you’ve ever listened to the show and thought “it must be a right laugh to be on that show,” man, it was. It really, really was.

  • “The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality”

    This Ted talk by Andrew Solomon is very good.

    I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They’re not very effective.They’re extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They’re a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science.

    …So now people say, “You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?” And I don’t. But I don’t feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don’t feel sad about my answering machine, and I don’t feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity.

    It’s timely in a week where the Office of National Statistics reports the highest male suicide rates since 2001 (and a rise in all suicides); while women are more likely to suffer from depression, men are more likely to die from it.

    Matt Haig, writing in the Guardian about his own depression:

    Suicide is now – in places including the UK and US – a leading cause of death, accounting for more than one in 100 fatalities. According to figures from the World Health Organisation, it kills more people than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. As people who kill themselves are, more often than not, depressives, depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.

    …So what should we do? Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you “admit to”, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience. It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you. And something that can often be eased by talking. Words. Comfort. Support. It took me more than a decade to be able to talk openly, properly, to everyone, about my experience. I soon discovered the act of talking is in itself a therapy. Where talk exists, so does hope.

  • From Scotland with love

    I went to see the live version of this the other night:

    It’s a collection of archive footage from Scotland with a soundtrack by King Creosote. The album’s fantastic and the film’s great too, but live it took on another dimension entirely. One of those shows where the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. I think everybody who went vowed to buy the DVD for everybody they know.

  • All the small things: a little writing app that makes a big difference

    UL-iMac-overlay-01
    In the old days, writing for magazines was easy: you’d write a piece, send it as a Word doc or a text file, and that was it. Now, though, everything’s online and in a CMS. Creating content for that is often a pain in the backside, especially if you use apps designed for print rather than pixels.

    Hurrah, then, for Ulysses. It’s a genuinely great app that’s already saving me stacks of time – not just in terms of creating copy I don’t then need to tweak, but in terms of the massive time savings that come from the way it does things. At £31.99 it’ll pay for itself in no time.

    Here’s the obligatory video.

    If you need to write words of any kind, it’s a great app. There’s a free demo too.

  • Switch me off and on again

    Last free song of 2014: this one’s called Three Fingered Salute. It’s on Soundcloud too if you prefer to listen there.

  • Dad dancing

    Time for a new song, I think. This one harks back to one of my musical loves, the KLF, and it’s about men who don’t realise it’s time they grew up. You know the type, the exuberant dancer who doesn’t realise he’s invisible at best and laughable at worst.

    As ever, this one’s a free download. If you like it we’d appreciate it if you could share it.

  • In my head there’s nothing but music

    Today’s post title is from erratic musical genius Babybird.

    I was late to music – playing it, at least. I was told at eleven that I’d never be musical* (which is a pretty shitty thing to be told by a music teacher, isn’t it?) and I didn’t play my first note on a guitar until I was fourteen. That note was the bass line from Eddy Cochran’s C’Mon Everybody, a song I still love.

    I was in bands from about 16 to my mid-thirties, with varying degrees of success: we did some decent gigs but, as I’ve written before, stage fright meant that the live side of things didn’t really do it for me. Unfortunately the bit I really did like, writing and recording, never quite lived up to what I hoped it would be. I’ve never been in a band that had the budget, the time or the expertise to really get things right in recording studios. That’s a real shame, because some of the songs I’ve been involved in over the years have been pretty damn good – which is why I don’t have a problem digging out some of my favourite ones and trying to get them right many years later.

    It’s the best part of a decade since I played a gig, and I don’t really miss it – but I did spend a year or two where I wasn’t making music or writing songs, and with hindsight that was a pretty low period. Music’s a crucial part of who I am.

    I started doing music seriously again about two years ago, when my brother and musical sparring partner David and I put together DMGM and ended up releasing Good Times, High Times and Hard Times. Thanks to the internet I know exactly how few people give a shit, but that’s not why we do it: we do it because we enjoy making noise. Music is its own reward.

    And now there’s a whole bunch more coming.

    As with the last album, the stuff we’re doing is all over the place stylistically. There’s NIN stomping and the odd outbreak of disco, some really squelchy electro-pop and some nods to various musical inspirations such as Faith No More, Talk Talk and The Human League. And I genuinely think it’s the best stuff I’ve been involved in: I’ve finally lost my fear of looking like an arse, so the music’s more honest and ambitious than ever before. It’s a pity that I’m doing it at the point in my life when the fewest number of people are likely to care: as much as Bono talks bollocks most of the time, he’s bang on when he talks about the fear that songs you’ve poured years of your life into won’t be heard.

    Anyway. Here’s a new song. It’s called All Messed Up and you can have it for free.

    This is the first thing we’ve put out since Hope And Faith jinxed the Scottish independence referendum, and it’s going to be joined by others really soon. If you like it you can download it for nothing from our bandcamp page, and if you do please ignore the pay what you want option: the plan is to keep adding tracks as and when we finish them, so it’s unlikely we’ll hit the limit on free downloads. All we ask is that if you like it, please tell someone else about it.

    As ever, if you’d like to use our music for anything just drop me a line.

    * Some say I’ve spent the 30-odd years since proving that particular point.

  • Unintended consequences

    Inevitable, but unintended: the same remote wipe tech that protects your data from thieves is being used by criminals to outwit the police. BBC News:

    Asked whether the police felt that the issue had damaged their investigation, the spokeswoman said: “We don’t know because we don’t know what was on the phone.”

  • Really good things about the iPhone 6

    Brilliant.

    on the bottom bit of the telephone there is a little rounded shaped button that hides a secret hidden fingerprint scanner that you can use to scan your wifes fingerprints while she is sleeping at night time to make sure that she is not wanted for any crimes.

  • The Night The Rich Men Burned

    kill-the-good-one-first-978144726437801I’m a big fan of Malcolm Mackay, whose Glasgow Trilogy – The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye and The Sudden Arrival of Violence – had me gripped through three successive novels. The Night The Rich Men Burned is his fourth novel, and it’s as good as the Trilogy. I devoured it in a single session last night.

    Great cover, too.