Robert Pollard's bizarre Phantom Tollbooth experiment. "2002: ROBERT POLLARD of GUIDED BY VOICES laments to Off Records how he wished he had sang for Phantom Tollbooth, one of his favorite bands." So they erased their vocals so he could sing completely new stuff over the backing tracks (via largehearted boy).
After the film Phantom Tollbooth was first seen on UK television, c. 1974, it became the subject of furious and fevered discussion in the playground, the "water cooler moment" of its day. It was our psychedelic happening baby and it freaked us out!
I heard someone use the phrase "water cooler TV" recently and wanted to laugh, so I did.

Seeing Jack White on Conan O'Brien (now I have 500 channels) - he could double for Michael Jackson.

News just in (35 years too late): Cream had very bad hair. Thin, wispy, crinkly. Split ends galore. They probably didn't have conditioner back then.

Lucinda Williams makes for a great interview in Word mag (print not online), reducing Mark Ellen to middle-aged fanboy. But he should know better than to write a lengthy preamble about the landscape he sees on the flight to LA. "The arctic waste is peppered with steel-blue lakes and the odd patch of forest". Oh really. I've got a laptop and I'm gonna use it.

Roddy Lumsden's Vitamin Q - 'a temple of trivia and lists'. Including A pack of 52 kings
"1 King of surf guitar - Dick Dale
2 King of ragtime - Scott Joplin" etc.
And "Five unlikely bands who had hit singles with songs about the conflict in Northern Ireland."

"All you really need to know about the origins of rock 'n' roll is that it started with slavery."

"Hello, and welcome to my homepage. My name is Ulrich Haarbürste and I like to write stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped up in cling-film."

'You are completely wrapped in cling-film,' I say.
'You win the bet,' says Roy, muffled. 'Now unwrap me.'
'Not for several hours.'
'Ah.'

I would like to abuse my posi6ion (yes posi6ion) of power by having a hissy fit about Real Player in general. Everything about it infuriates me and reduces me to swearing at my computer LIKE THAT'S GOING TO HELP!! It just fucking sucks. To be childish about it.
Other applications that BUG me - SoundJam and QuickTime. Also, Windows Media Player - it works ok, I just don't like it one little bit.

Miss
1 A group name I like even though I don't know who they are and I never heard them: Matrose Schonfeldt und die Schwimmwesten.
2 The hummiest tune (with extravagant hand signals) is the theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sounds so familiar. I could look it up.
3 MTV Cribs makes me come over all communistic. The sprawling acreage of their kitchens, the neurotic accumulations of cars. I don't know who the hell they are for one thing and if I find out, it only rings the dimmest of bells.
4 I was fairly indifferent to that ( ) Sigur Ros album but a track came on today as I was whizzing, possibly even whistling, past a graveyard (W. London somewhere) at 50 mph and it chimed.
5 Lots of tunes were on today. It's pleasantly miles from cool that the one I loved most was Theme from Dirty Harry by the James Taylor Quartet. What groovy fun I had! I once did my falling asleep while standing up trick watching them at a festival (not for the first or last time).
6 As I get older and older I like music with no words, or words I can't remotely understand, more and more. Hence all the german post-rock avant jazz electronica crap I subject myself to.
7 What in the fiery pits of hell is Meatloaf doing with a song on TOTP. Has history taught us nothing, are we doomed to make the same mistakes forever, resulting in an endless cycle of misery and mental distress.

Some recent observations:
McCoy Tyner is my new jazz discovery. I fear the jazz but can't give it up completely. I've tried it a few times, mostly with very bad results, but I'm always willing to give it another sniff. Like many drugs, I don't know how it works or where it comes from or if it's good for me but I can feel it doing new and exciting things to my mind.
PJ Harvey's 'middle' albums are actually pretty dull. Stories... which I initially dismissed as overly polished and absurdly posturing just gets better and better.
Seeing her on the Late Show I think, doing Sheela-na-gig in 1992-ish was one of the great Music Performances on Telly moments for me. I feel a list coming on, but I shall resist.
Hot Hot Heat is actually bleuuugh, apart from the addictive Bandages (which I thought was the Datsuns! I am an idiot.)
The Datsuns are bloody awful. If I want AC/DC, and I don't, I know where to go.
The Jesus and Mary Chain haven't aged very well, I mused, after downloading 200Mb of their tunes, all of which I have on vinyl anyway.
Man Mountain by Blue States is great 'headphones at work music', which makes me the enemy of everything I would stand for if I had a manifesto and the energy to be angry at the sort of people who listen to soothing headphones at work music. The Sybarite and Cinematic Orchestra albums is good for that too.
Labradford and Pan American (and 'bands like that') are fantastic because you can listen to them 100 times and never remember anything probably because they alter your brain patterns so you think you're asleep and when the music stops and you wake up its like a dream that you can't remember so then you hear them again you have no recollection of the last time. That is my theory which I just made up.
Junior Senior is fun. I hope they have more tunes.
I think the Postal Service are rather good. What kind of a review is that! I hope no-one's paying you for this! Of course they're not! Carry on. With less exclamation marks.
Bizarre sight: Football 'pundit' Andy Gray dressed up as Kate Bush doing Wuthering Heights. Great tune it occured to me, 25 years too late. I cannot bear Kate Bush for utterly personal wrong reasons. But I don't pretend to be fair.
There is now Too Much talk about the White Stripes. They've become the latest bone for every fuckface on earth to have an opinion about. "I have a theory" by Ann Elk... Perspective: Busted (83%) trashed the White Stripes (5%) on the Saturday Show vote. The more exposure an act gets the more interviews you'll read or hear, the more words they'll say, and the more opportunities you'll find to feel disappointed, to nitpick, to get sick and tired of looking at their clothes, their hair. I'd prefer not to have to hear Elephant three times a day at work whether I want to or not. I can always put my headphones on and listen to Blue States. Or if I'm feeling like a drooling old perve, as I was yesterday, Fragile by Yes. That got me hot and horny I can tell you.
See, if say Archer Prewitt who I love at the moment (even though I just realised he sounds like Mick Hucknall) was a big star we'd probably be sneering at his pronouncements and laughing at his trousers. Fortunately, I don't know anything about him. I just listen to his music with my ears and that's the beginning and end of it.
I am looking forward to the Eurovision Song Contest. Last year was great. I drank a splendid bottle of port and boldly predicted Malta would win. I think they came second. I am a good predictor - the other week I picked the Grand National winner after a mere 30 seconds perusal of the form. Never falls over, good stamina... that's got to stand a chance! No I didn't put any money on it.
Actually, Simply Red's not so bad if you divorce the image from the actual sounds. Some of them. One or two of them. Stars. That Fairground one. Quite pretty.
No?
Ok, I'm gone.

Then I saw this Dead Leaves (live on Top of the Pops) (27.4Mb) again and ... and...

I played some music today. Even dead people remember to drink water. I didn't want it to have anything to do with me, just occupy some dimension. The last thing I wanted was for it to say anything to me about my life.
Function - fill the void with approximation of colour and shape; energy and propulsion. Effect: delayed.

Some places I've been
-- mp3s of the most recent Peel session.
-- The Fall Multimedia Project - download TV appearances.
-- StarTime Intl.MP3s - Walkmen, Brendan Benson, and Salako doing a song about Hull.
-- Punk Rocker's mp3s - old and new punk, old and new rockabilly.
-- The Brainwashed brain - weekly digest. Reviews and samples.
-- The Star Spangles story told by Richard Meltzer.
-- Mark Prindle on Trans Am and some other stuff.
-- Following lots of links and grabbing some great tunes from and (via) the excellent Fluxblog and largehearted boy.

Stop the war! I say stop that war RIGHT NOW!
Thank you. Now who will liberate me from the brutal dictatorship of my own diseased mind-uh.
Inappropriate metaphor! Shame on me.
Right. What has been going on in my last two invisible weeks? Most of my tapes digital and analogue have been erased but these following echoes remain, lingering like a remnant of a dream fading by the minute as the day awakens and the sunlight pollutes your fuzzy marshmallow post-sleepy mind. These echoes are subject to Music Content filtering.

I
I had waves of atavistic joy washing over me as I lay abed (pointless archaism) and feasted on those midweek BBC 2 highlights of the Old Grey Whistle Test from the Seventies the decade that fashion forgot (do you remember the clothes we used to wear hur hur, and the sweets and that). A few of them items I recalled from a previous life - esp Otway and Barrett clowning about doing Cheryl's Going Home, Otway impaling his crotch on an amp and Wild Willy's funny little tiny little guitar coming unplugged all the time. I don't know if it's a blind sweeping ooze of nostalgia de la boue (half remembered phrase, no idea what it means) but I loved virtually everything that was on. Dire Straits were thrilling doing Sultans of Swing! Yes I did say that! He looked very good, very anti-showbiz, like a bowlheaded polytechnic student. And man, those cats coiuld play!
The Adverts were disappointingly weedy doing Bored Teenagers. They couldn't play their instruments ha ha! Neither could the Rezillos but they jumped around and were splendid. Days when bands invented their own look - and adopted absurd nom de plumes - and had the guts to carry off their self-created absurdity with aplomb. Innocenter days. Ahhhh.
The Buzzcocks gave me a perky little frisson with the entirely appropriate Sixteen Again, always my fave song of theirs.
Tom Waits came across like a frightful old ham, standing up and growling through Small Change (Got Rained On by His Own 38 - what?). Fair enough if his approach was to inhabit some sort of beatnik-bum-poet persona but it was excruciating to watch. And I think he's great!
Let's fine tune that - I think his records are great. The records are The Thing for me, I don't ultimately care if someone can 'do it' live, or if they mean it, or what their opinions are, or how they behave in their personal lives.
Cheap Trick did their 'hit' ( in UK terms) which was gorgeous classic! power pop! harmonies!, I spotted another band recently who have a two pretty boys plus two dorks line-up but I forget who at the moment.
And the Tubes did their big hit, which remains a towering masterwork in my mind. How come they only had two and a half good songs? My mum and dad are so bleedin' rich! And that great flowing little guitar break! Big heels and more than a suggestion of depravity. Perhaps their look was too absurd and insufficiently menacing for your real punks to respond to. Then they went 'new wave' and I, for one, lost interest. But good god, White Punks on Dope!
The Dictators who weren't really much cop, did Search and Destroy which was fantastic!!
Siouxsie and the Banshees were very tedious. They couldn't play their instruments but they couldn't not play them in an interesting way. The codification of goth lurked in their every gesture. It was ghastly, and I went to the toilet.
Also tedious was Eric Clapton who could play but by 1976 or whenever it was had forgotten how to do so in an interesting way and he dragged out I Shot the Sheriff for far too long. He dereggaefied it and stripped the lyrics of all meaning. A bit like he did with the blues! Except... you know...
George Benson played his guitar for ages too but I liked that one. It was pretty and delivered a spring day on holiday driving to Scotland or somewhere with Radio Two on in the car and being 14 kind of vibe.
Talking Heads (Psycho Killer of course) were slinky and mesmerising, and I've seen that clip loads of times.
The Runaways were superb! Yes they were like the Donnas! Get over it! Yes four raunchy tuff girls with guitars and what I feel even ickier typing as attitood! Oh come on! I don't know what they sang, Schooldays was it. I jigged around in bed - my harem of wives weren't too happy with that I can tell you!

II
What do songs mean? I rarely concern myself with such matters. I don't know what the hell people are singing half the time. However, sometimes a line, a lyric, gets through and I come up with a meaning. Like in Mull Historical Society's song 5 More Minutes. To my grubby little mind this is all about losing your hard-on due to an unspecified psychological problem and asking your partner for five minutes grace in which to compose yourself before trying to finish the job. But maybe that's just me. The MHS's lovely Animal Cannabus was in a film I just saw Ripley's Game (John Malkovich being a charmingsophisticate-cum-coldbloodedkillingmachine in Italy). When that happens of course, I slip effortlessly into uber-geek mode and feel the urge to inform the whole theatre that the song playing on the radio in the kitchen in that scene that you probably didn't even hear was by Mull Historical Society. And did you hear the Saint Etienne one in the party scene? I did, because I am a raging nitwit.

It also occurred to me that Brendan Benson's Let Me Roll It is about self-pleasuring. Do you know, I love the godalmighty retro living hell out of that song. It crunches, it swoops, it soars and it might even be rude! Once again, he comes up with an unpromising title - see last year's Folk Singer - and delivers one of the greatest songs I'll hear all year. And never mind if the year in question is 1975. Ahem.

IV
Now, I can't stand classical music, I only have so much time in my life to listen to SOUND and I think if I just make several hundred years of music genius illegal in my life, that will help me. I am nothing if not in favour of a ruthless autocracy featuring random outbreaks of barbarianism - in my musical world. However, sometimes I come over so vigorously hoi polloi that a tune like Faure's Pavane, if featured as the title music of the BBC's coverage of World Cup 1998, will grab me in the breast and tug at my nipple in a rather delightful way. Not quite as delightful as if you were to ram your tongue in my ear, that would really do the trick. Anyway, only in those circumstances would I permit myself to love a piece of classical music, and so thereafter I would definitely like it if I heard a version by Brazilian Octopus from their joyful little (28 mins) 1969 self-titled album.
You might say it sounds like supermarket music, or Carry On incidental music, or that it should be featured in the computer game The Sims, but that's fine by me.

IV
About once every couple of years I get an itch that someone is looking at me, and the itch develops into a scratch and then I am convinced that everyone is giving me the evil eye. As we know once is happenstance twice is coincidence and thrice is Enemy Action (James Bond, cheers), so what is it when at least 20 people stare at you for no good reason. That's a seven nation army all looking at me like I'm a circus freak! I checked when I got home and my fly wasn't undone, my hair wasn't matted with spunk. I thought it might be leakage - and I don't mean from my anus! I mean from my headphones which I take care not to inflict on fellow passengers, but then I got the extended glance from a few pedestrians so that wasn't it.
"Embarrassed to be alive
Sit with my life open wide
Your stare is forcing my face open"
Dinosaur Jr, The Leper
It's like they can see right into the rotten core of me and they don't like what they see. If looks could kill and so on. Fuck 'em, is all very well. But I'm not the sort of person to offer witty repartee such as "What choo lookin' at?" I would like to wear a 'FUCK YOU" t-shirt which would at least be preferable to the guy I saw - at least 35 - wearing a "Skateboarding is not a crime' t-shirt.
My boss, without whom my life would be almost bearable, loves the Seven Nation Army. This hasn't quite ruined it for me yet but then again I like the White Stripes (lots of like but it's not love, I mean they're not MINE exclusively). There's a slice of, admittedly tasty, ham about them that blocks the path of true love for me. I've been wondering if I can ever feel that silly pop crush ever again, and if that wouldn't be a blessing. I last had it bad for Life Without Buildings.
That will never happen again.

MC Pikey
I know this was new last July but even I haven't got time to read everything, to download every mp3 on the web ever, although God knows I try, but here is MC Pikey, much better than MC Pitman who I considered to be menacing and largely unamusing. From a Norf Lahndun perspective, however, the mention of the number 10 bus does date MC Pikey, as this route has been replaced in the Holloway area to which the song refers, by the 390, with no discernable improvement in the service. Of course, if you're over 30 and still taking the bus, you're a social failure as Mrs Thatcher once pointed out in that blunt but astute manner for which she became so well-loved.

Best spam mail subject lines of the day:
"Free Weight Loss, in a bottle."
"Oh no, I lost my panties again - Finger me please?"

Yes I'm bored. Bored bored bored. Of course, "only boring people get bored", as the Queen Mother once remarked. Wise words ma'am.

My new favourite song part 3562
Who wouldn't want to hear a song called Leper in a Tumbledryer by a mysterious character called Ashfordaisyak, who leaves cassettes in toilets and on trains for people to find. It's a catchy reggae-synth tune sung in a strong southern English accent (maybe he’s from Ashford in Kent?). There are references to eczema and powwidge (he has a mild speech impediment), which can only be a good thing.
It's on the 365 Days project - go get it.

Start somewhere, anywhere
Random confession: I have never had any idea how to blow bubble gum if indeed ‘blow’ is the correct term, and now I fear, in a very Prufrockian sense, it is too late.
I can’t listen to music today, too wound up to be soothed or excited out of it. (And to hell with intrigued.) An oppressive layer of low pressure has descended and scattered showers are expected throughout the day. Thus: under the weather.
I have started a new book (reading one I mean, not writing one, ha ha, what are the chances of that!), aware that I’ve only finished one in the last five or six I’ve begun. Blame intolerance, impatience, lack of concentration. It used to be a matter of honour, if not compulsion, to finish everything I started.
Music requires negligible powers of concentration and investment of time, obviously. I’m quite happy to listen to any number of mildly diverting new records. I could just list them. I could just listen to them. I keep looking at the desktop clock. I keep glancing out of the window waiting for something to happen. It won’t.
I stumbled upon an instore appearance by Mis-teeq last night. Not as part of the audience proper but from a magazine-browsing upstairs vantage point. I ended up getting the NERD album In Search Of… and Bob Dylan’s Live 1966, in a two for £20 deal.
I’ve held off buying that Dylan album for five years now because some dipshit I used to work with bought it at the time and loudly proclaimed her love for him to anyone who came near her, and how revolutionary this record was, and how none of today’s acts could compare to him. Middle-aged hipster rhetoric. Part of me agreed with her but I didn’t want to associate myself with her in any way because of some perceived slight on her part that upset my equilibrium and I am nothing if not hypersensitive and slow to forgive. Not admirable qualities.
I hope I can listen to it without her pastry-munching ghost poisoning it (naturally I have had the bootleg version for some time anyway because that’s just the sort of person I am, but now I have the same object as she had). Dylan fans are enough to put you off him for life.
We’re all part of this. We try to distance ourselves by small gestures. I am an individual, can’t you see. I am. I’m not like you.
cf. J Rotten in Great Pop Things cartoon "Go awaaaay! I don’t like any of you maaan!"