Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • A rock type band from Glasgow*

    Regular readers will know that I used to be in a band, and that I’ve been meaning to upload all the old stuff for ages. I’ve finally got round to it, and (most) of the Kasino stuff is now on Bandcamp. If you’re not aware of my occasionally shameful past, Kasino were a Glaswegian rock band from the late 1990s until 2004, and we had some good songs.

    (There are a few gaps, incidentally, so if anybody out there has old Kasino / pre-Kasino stuff on CD/good quality MP3 that isn’t on bandcamp, please drop me a line: I’m gary@ this website address.)

    It’s been a really odd experience listening to it all: lots of good memories, of course, but also a lot of frustration: if we’d just done this, if I’d just said no to that, if we’d only tried that. As I wrote a few months ago:

    No matter how talented the musicians you’re working with, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really talented people, if your songs aren’t finished and the recordings are rushed then you’re not going to produce something you’re really proud of.

    That doesn’t apply to all the songs – there’s plenty of stuff, especially the more recent stuff, that still gives me chills – but it applies to enough that I can’t really enjoy the nostalgia as much as I’d like to. The really old, late 90s stuff is particularly hard for me to listen to because I made the mistake of adopting the singing voice my then-bandmates wanted, which was a sore-throat growl. I wish I’d known back then what I do now about singing and how to express yourself without going WAAAARGH GRAARGH GRAAAAGH on the loud bits.

    Coming back to the songs years later is interesting, especially the really old songs: I can think of quite a few songs that could have been killers but were mucked up for whatever reason. It can be quite interesting to approach an old song with more experienced ears: for example, David and I have rebooted two Kasino songs in our new musical incarnation, DMGM. We’ve redone Fall from Grace and You Don’t Have To Be Alone as more electronic songs, and they work much better in that genre. (I know I’ve been talking about new stuff for ages, but I’m in the final, nitpicking stage of mixing and mastering the songs now. They’ll be online by the end of this month, hopefully sooner.)

    I haven’t uploaded the old songs because I expect to make money, wow the planet or even get any attention; I’ve uploaded them because they’re like old photographs: they’re snapshots of good times, high times and hard times.

    * That’s a very old in-joke: friends of ours, Mercury Tilt Switch, were once reviewed as “a rock type band from Dundee”.

  • How to make everybody on the internet behave

    This week’s news that a Twitter abuser suddenly saw the light when it was suggested that his tweets be sent to his mum reminded me of this, a column I wrote for .net back in 2008.

    Britain may not have an empire any more, but we still rule the world of bad driving. Sure, the Italians are maniacs, the Americans are too busy eating to watch the road and the Germans seem determined to drive faster than the speed of light, but when it comes to sheer arrogant, ignorant, arsey and downright dangerous driving nobody can touch us.

    I’m guilty of it too. Give me five minutes in a city centre and I’m shouting the c-word at cyclists, the b-word at bus drivers, the p-word at pedestrians and every expletive ever invented at Audi drivers. Only the last one is really justified.

    What these various offenders have in common is that they can’t hear me or see me – and that gives me a licence to be utterly unpleasant, just like everyone else on the roads. It’s why people block box junctions, or cut you up, or drive at 200mph through primary school playgrounds. They’re not bad people; they’re just not sharing the world with the rest of us. Brits are particularly bad for it, because we’re so buttoned-up the rest of the time.

    There’s a proper scientific term for this: disinhibition. In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt explains that while we’re forced to interact with others on the roads we don’t – can’t – communicate with them, so we become overgrown toddlers, interested only in ourselves and reduced to eye-popping, throat-shredding, nappy-filling fury at the slightest frustration. Interestingly, Vanderbilt reports that people in open-topped cars tend to be nicer and more patient, not because they’re happier, or because they’re getting lots of Vitamin D but because they’re less insulated than other drivers, less able to pretend that the world isn’t there.

    And of course, disinhibition is a key part of being online. Our computers are our cars, ensuring that people don’t know us, can’t see us, can’t make us immediately answerable for our actions. They remove the respect for authority that prevents us shouting “Oi! Specky!” at Stephen Hawking and they erase the empathy that stops us going mental in Morrison’s when the person in front attempts to pay with string. That can be a good thing, because it encourages people to open up and express themselves in ways they might not in the real world, but of course when someone is in a negative frame of mind (or young – the bits of our brains that handle inhibitions aren’t mature until after adolescence, which is why we do so much dumb stuff as teenagers) then it turns them into online Audi drivers.

    So is there anything we can do to make the internet, well, nicer? According to Vanderbilt, rules and safety systems just make drivers worse; it turns out that the best way to make car owners more responsible would be to mount a dagger in the steering wheel, its blade pointing directly at the driver. Perhaps we need an IT equivalent, like a remotely operated boxing glove mounted on a giant spring – or better still, a system where every abusive email, blog comment or forum post is copied to your mum.

  • Spotify: go big or go home

    Nice piece by Bob Lefsetz on the whole Spotify thing:

    The truth is, if you’re a superstar, there’s still plenty of money in music. And superstars are the future, because no one’s got time for any less. Just like there’s one iTunes Store, one Amazon and one Google, we don’t need a plethora of me-too acts, we just need excellence.

    It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course, but what it boils down to is this: the money in music isn’t where it used to be. For bands who don’t already have a following, streaming services are marketing channels, not cash generators.

  • How to make money from music

    An excellent piece by Eamonn Forde in The Guardian: if you can’t make money from streaming, how can you make money from music? The answer: get played a lot on Radio 2 or play a private gig for someone rich.

  • “Wasting my young years” is a great song

    Radio Scotland’s been giving this quite a lot of airplay recently, and quite right too: it’s lovely.

  • Another solution to the quiet iPhone 5 problem

    I’ve mentioned a few times that the iPhone 5 is much quieter than the iPhone 4/4S on some headphones, such as my Atomic Floyd Superdarts, and I suggested using the Denon Audio app to boost the volume. It’s better, but it isn’t perfect: if you’re trying to address a lack of low-end thump, as I am, it runs out of puff long before you’re happy.

    There’s a more elegant solution, but it’ll cost you £20: the FIIO E6 headphone amp. It’s good for ten hours between charges, it’s the size of a large postage stamp and it’s bloody brilliant.

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    If you’ve moved to the iPhone 5 and feel your headphones now lack oomph, this’ll solve your problems. I’m really impressed by it.

     

  • Ooh! I’m being pirated!

    JasonW informs me that Coffin Dodgers is actually being pirated (as opposed to being listed on sites that don’t actually have it). It’s here if you’re interested, although the download links try to get you to sign up for things you don’t need and install things you don’t want.

    The book is also available legally on Amazon, of course. Only 99p!

  • Worried about kids making in-app purchases? Change this setting

    Unscrupulous app developers are in the news again today, with parents suffering “bill shock” when the kids buy expensive in-game items without the parents’ permission. There’s a setting in iOS that makes such things possible even if you don’t share your password with your kids, and it’s a good idea to change it.

    It’s in Settings > General > Restrictions > Allowed Content (I’m assuming you’ve already used Restrictions to set some parental controls; if not, you need to click Enable Restrictions in here). By default In-App Purchases are enabled, and where it says Require Password, the default is 15 minutes. What that means is that if you enter your password to download a free app, the password is then stored for fifteen minutes – and during that period apps can sell expensive in-app purchases without asking for the password. Some kid-targeted apps are well aware of that.

    The simplest thing to do is to disable in-app purchases altogether, but if you don’t want to do that then you really ought to change the Require Password setting.

  • Thom Yorke, Ingenue unplugged

    This is just lovely. One of AMOK’s stand-out tracks stripped down to a single voice and piano.

    (From ITV’s Jonathan Ross show, May 2013)

  • Ten things technology is rendering redundant

    A fun wee thing I did for Techradar: ten digital-age dodos.