Movin' On

I'm becoming addicted to Spotify. I'm becoming addicted to iPlayer. What the hell did I do to entertain myself before the explosion in digital technology? How the hell did I entertain myself in the days before the online home computer? Could I live without it now? Well at a pinch yes but it would be a bloody boring and narrow existence. I can use my PC to watch films and TV shows, listen to the radio, listen to music, record music, capture and edit video, edit and print still photographs, write, keep in touch with people all over the globe.....the list goes on.

It really does beggar belief just how quickly the advances in technology have been dropping into the inbox since the heady days of the Sinclair ZX81, Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and the Atari ST. But even then, looking back at the leap from the rubber key-padded ZX to the 128Mb of RAM and built in midi ports of the ST, the advances were just as phenomenal. As the hardware improved so did the software. The games got better and especially in the music world, the Atari ST took off with many musicians using this machine and software such as Notator and Creator to create with. It became a familiar fixture in the studio and helped produce albums from the likes of Fatboy Slim, Mike Oldfield and Jean Michel Jarre.

In the 1940s the president of IBM was of the opinion that there was a world market for five computers. At this moment in time I have a PC, and netbook, an old laptop and a mobile phone running Windows mobile with access to the Web. I'm not alone either. The Western world is awash with the things and Western culture is being shaped by them.

I wonder where we'll be in the next ten years?

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We're off to see a band tonight – The Ukranians at a local Ukrainian club with an Ukrainian friend of ours. Should make a pleasant change and it should be pretty much analogue all the way I guess. Unless they have a drum machine or something, but I can't see that going down well with the audience. They're fierce about their traditions and don't take kindly to anyone taking liberties with them.

Mind you, I will be taking liberties with the Ukranian beer. Obolon is a great drink and, at 5.2% you don't need that much of it to feel in the party mood. So, should be a good night and tomorrow, well I just might have a thick head. It's a hard life but someone's got to do it.

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This post was brought to you by Spotify which played the following tracks as a wrote it:-

The Flaming Lips – Do You Realize??
The Beta Band – Dry the Rain
Stephen Stills – Colorado
Racing Cars – They Shoot Horses Don't They
Kings of Convenience – Know-How (feat. Feist)
Jesse Malin – Broken Radio
Groundhogs – Mistreated
Prefab Sprout – Electric Guitars
Steely Dan – Bodhisattva
Skin – Simmer Down
Coldplay – Viva la Vida
Super Furry Animals – (Drawing) Rings Around the World
Johny Borrell – Carrickfergus
Steely Dan – Any Major Dude Will Tell You
Jake Thackray – On Again! On Again!
Rancid – Fall Back Down
Ryuchi Sakamoto – Etude
Okkervil River – For Real
Stevie Wonder – For Once in My Life
Grace Jones – Bullshit
Weather Report – Birdland
Joni Mitchell – God Must Be A Boogie Man
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bootleg
Sly & The Family Stone – Dance to the Music
The Human League – Seconds
Crosby, Stills & Nash – Marrakesh Express
Jethro Tull – Mother Goose
Blur – Tender
Nirvana – Come as You Are
Half Man Half Biscuit – David Wainwright's Feet
Radiohead – High and Dry
Coldplay – Viva la Vida
The Killers – Human
Robbie Robertson – Somewhere Down the Crazy River
Tom Waits – Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis
U2 – Bullet the Blue Sky
Hugh Masekela – Polician
Thomas Dolby – Dissidents
Groove Armada – At The River
Alice Cooper – Elected
Scritti Politti – Wood Beez
The Orb – Little Fluffy Clouds
The Decemberists – Eli, the Barrow Boy
Seth Lakeman – Solomon Browne
Leonard Cohen – Dance Me to the End of Love (Live)
Free – Oh I Wept
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Forest Fire
Leonard Cohen – Democracy
Kate Bush – Them Heavy People

Places in my Past

Somewhere on the internet I came across some photographs of the seige of Stalingrad with 'windows' that allowed you to peek through from today to the past. Hard to explain really and I've been unable to find the link since but I thought I'd try it with some pics from my local area.


The Crown and Cushion in 2007 and late 19th century.


The Co-operative Industrial Society Grocery store and opticians. Now a carpet shop.

Into The Mystic.....

Have I just experienced the next great leap forwards in the way we access and listen to music? Whilst thumbing through the latest edition of The Word skimming the eulogies to John Martyn I came across a reference to Spotify. My interest piqued I signed up and sixty seconds later I am listening to whatever I can find that I fancy listening to. I can make up playlists for myself and even share them with like-minded acquaintances who can add their own suggestions. The free service is great with small adverts rearing their ugly heads every fifteen minutes to half an hour or so. Even then it appears that most of them are public service announcements. At the moment I'm listening to Springsteen's Seeger Sessions album (and a fine thing it is too) for free. Furthermore I can listen to it again and again – for free. Now apart from the fact that I haven't got any 'product' in my hands, no CD or LP cover, no CD, LP, cassette, mini disc or whatever, essentially I 'own' the music. The only thing I can't do with it is download it to play in the car or whatever. Mind you I could feed the output into my mini disc recorder and grab it in real time but that would smack too much of taping the Top Twenty when I was a kid.

I guess I could set up my mobile to use it as I get free unlimited Internet access on it, but I've never really adapted to listening to music through headphones whilst working and I probably won't be in the near future. It does make we wonder what the future holds for HMV on the high street though never mind the independents – if there are any left.

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It's amazing what a good PR person can do for a reputation in steep decline and no one can deny that Jade Goody's was in a steeper decline than most in the immediate aftermath of the Shilpa Shetty Celebrity Big Brother controversy. We saw the reality of shallow, ill-educated, sleb-obsessed wannabes resorting to type and the nation didn't like it. We even had questions in the House and the show's sponsors pulled the plug.

Goody knew she had killed the Golden Goose and a frantic rearguard action consisting of tearful, snotty interviews in which she apologised again and again and insisted she wasn't a 'racialist' time and time again was soon being broadcast every time you turned the TV or radio on. At the time it didn't seem to be doing the trick until Max Clifford stepped up to the plate. From then on the remorseless return of Jade Goody was on track. Would it be nasty to suggest that the cancer was turned into an opportunity to re-entrench the Goody brand even more and, who knows maybe attract new, pitying supporters? Would it? It's not much of an opportunity now though is it? Not now it's terminal. Still, at least Ms Goody has the nation on her side again.

Unhappily though that is not the end of the Goody media frenzy. We are now to be spectators at her very public death. Not only that, the tabloids are full of photographs of 'brave' Jade, her vacuous boyfriend and her horrific mother. The fact that she only has months to live was headline news on BBC Radio Five on Saturday morning. God knows what Lord Reith's doing in his grave but I'll wager he won't be giving the thumbs up.

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I was directed to a blog written by Boo Hewerdine in which he talks about a game he likes to play when he's on the road. You take a group's name (or an artist I suppose) and you drop one vowel from the name to make a new – better and funnier – name. The examples he comes up with are Chin Crisis, White Tripes, Tin Turner, Codplay, Airport Convention, Little Fat, The Lying Burrito Brothers, Take Hat and the truly exquisite Grateful Dad!

C'mon, can you improve on that?


Towards Manchester


Scout Moor


Trees and snow


Scout Moor triple exposure.

That's all folks!

First of the Gang to Die....

Way back in August I referred to a phenomenon from the nineteenth century known a 'scuttling'. A purely Mancunian word to describe a particularly Mancunian approach to juvenile gang warfare. It's not that gang warfare didn't exist in other industrial cities, it's just that the Mancunian approach concentrated on violence without the petty theft that often accompanied it in other areas. Oh, and the fact that it was called 'scuttling' and the perpetrators were called 'scuttlers' was uniquely Mancunian also.

As a result of that post and a fairly long quotation from an online paper on the subject, I received a comment from the author of the paper – Andrew Davies, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool and one time resident of Salford. In an Obama-like internet call to arms Andrew thanked me for the post and informed that his book – The Gangs of Manchester (The Story of the Scuttlers) had just been published. I bought it. I read it. I enthused about it. I became a bit of a bore about it (probably) . And now I've got other people reading it and hopefully embracing the history that's all around them.

The places referred to in the book are part of my very DNA. My entire childhood was peppered with the names of faraway places like Ancoats, Miles Platting, Harpurhey, Collyhurst, New Cross, Gorton, Ardwick.....and not one of these places more than four or five miles away from my home in what seemed (at the time) like the countryside of Failsworth/Woodhouses. But they were all, even in the late Fifties and Sixties talked about as though the very Devil himself lurked within. Teddy Boys, Tinkers and Bogey Men were all to be found from Newton Heath onwards as you headed towards Manchester and woe-betide any poor unfortunate who dared cross the edge of Failsworth into the badlands.

The book opens with a trip back to the the night of Sunday, August 3rd 1890 as a gang of youths from Harpurhey march towards Manchester, armed with the Scuttler's stock-in-trade weaponry of knives and heavy-buckled belts to meet the most notorious gang in Manchester – The Bengal Tigers. As it happens the Harpurhey crew (posse?) were victorious that night though four of them were sentenced, two to five years' penal servitude, one for twelve months and one for six months.

A fifth – John Ford – had an alibi and was acquitted. John Ford. The name jumped out at me from page three. John Ford. Harpurhey, John Ford. My maternal grandad was called John Ford. He was originally from Harpurhey. His family had been there for years . His family had a habit (or maybe a tradition) of naming their first born sons John. Just like I did when I first became a dad. Now the John Ford referred to couldn't have been my grandad as he was born in 1910 or thereabouts but it is possible, just possible that the acquittee is some relation. I'll be rootling around Ancestry dot com over the coming weeks.

Apart from the frisson of excitement at the name though, there is much working class and proto-underclass history in these pages. The squalor of the living conditions, the mindless repetitive work, when available, the draw of the pub, the lack of education, the lack of constructive leisure activities, the lack of aspiration.

Fascinating. Get it bought and read and stop believing the Daily Mail when it keeps telling you that youthful gang violence, stabblings and murder are a unique product of the modern world , the likes of which we have never seen before.

In the Bleak Midwinter....

I've treated myself to one of these. An Acer Aspire Netbook. £150 for a 120Gb hard disk, 512Mb RAM and a Linux OS. Out of the box and onto my wireless network within minutes. It comes with a media player, OpenOffice for MS compatible word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics etc., photo editor/viewer, games and...well pretty much all you need for surfing on the go. I got it from ASDA a one week deal apparently, they normally retail at £230ish. So a good deal.

It will be ideal on holiday. I can use it to backup my photographs or even dump them into some online storage. I use Carbonite at the moment so that is an option. I've been wary of losing pics ever since I realised that all my snaps of Peter Green from about five years ago had disappeared along with quite a few others, probably the victim of a disk crash or, more likely an accidental loss due to a reload of an OS. I've been a lot more careful since but even so, when I'm holiday I'm always conscious of the fact that the only copy of my photographs is on the camera.

We're off to Barcelona in March and the hotel has free wi-fi so this little bundle of fun should keep me entertained when the sightseeing, eating and drinking is over.

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Looks like the Artic weather is on its way, the snow flakes are beginning to float by my window. (16:15 Sunday 1st Feb). The forecast for next week is snow and ice brrrr. I'm just glad that the car I've got now has a decent heater so the journey to work (which will presumably take longer because of the snow) should at least be comfortable.

Later

Just back from the pub and the streets have a good 2 inches that appears to be freezing. We were hoping to be snowed in in the pub but there you go.

The day after.

I woke up this morning to a good 3 to 4 inches. Off to work with no problem until I found myself behind three buses all on the same route, all with the same route number. Result? Well congestion, and lots of it. It took ages before the vast queue of traffic could, bit by bit, overtake it. What got me was that two of them were from the same bus company – competing with each other to pick up the non-existent passengers.

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All day I sat looking out of the window at swirling snow. At times it looked like we were in some huge snow globe. Most of the time the flakes appeared to be heading upwards. I feared that driving home could be a problem but with this being the soft, southern side of Manchester, none of it stuck. It wasn't until I got back to the frozen north that the roads became perilous.

It's now 9-o-clock on Monday evening and it's been snowing for a good five hours. Tomorrow will be fun.


Scouthead


Dovestones


Hilton Hotel (Beetham Tower) Central Manchester


Manchester Beer Festival. Random stranger.


Hilton Hotel (Beetham Tower) Central Manchester.

That's all folks!