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.
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.
Last free song of 2014: this one’s called Three Fingered Salute. It’s on Soundcloud too if you prefer to listen there.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
I’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.
A fantastic piece by Richard Cobbett on what’s great about VR and what isn’t quite ready for prime time. I am *really* excited about this tech.
In an experience like the Museum of Games, you get to see many famous game characters rendered at their actual size – to really appreciate the scale of something like a Left 4 Dead Boomer and why it would be so terrifying to meet one in the flesh, or to stare up, up and further up at a Transformer rendered at a scale that no monitor can do justice to. It sounds like bullshit, but it’s true – VR adds a sense of meaning to things, from turning a series of empty corridors into a place, to making its inhabitants feel solid.
It’s almost a year since we released Good Times, High Times and Hard Times, so it’s about time we put out some new music. Here’s the first one, a wee independence anthem that doesn’t so much veer close to Big Country territory as barrel through it on a motorbike fuelled by Irn-Bru.
As ever, if you like it we’d appreciate it if you could share it – and if you’d like to use it for something, please get in touch.