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Friday 28th May

A fitting tribute

You've all doubtlessly seen some variant of the statistic that say that say that due to the exponential growth in the number of Elvis impersonators, something like one-third of the world's population will be an Elvis impersonator by 2010. (In which case, why didn't Arthur C Clarke include any in the novel 2010? He predicted loads of other stuff...) Anyway, I went looking to see if I could actually find any real statistics that gave any indication that this is the case. The best I could find was this slide from a Chronic Disease Centre presentation, but even this isn't backed up with any traceable sources. And the key phrase in all of this is "exponential growth", because, if you stick the numbers into a simple compound interest formula (like what I did) they suggest that there'll only be 100 million Elvis impersonators by 2010, a mere 1.43% of the poulation. All of which is pretty much a side issue to the real point, which is to draw your attention to the godlike genius of Ellyvis. Utter comic brilliance.

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Sunday 16th May

Music, Music, Music.

Hey, lookee here, two updates in a weekend - it's almost like the old days. Make the most of it though, you groovy feckers, as there won't be another update for about a fortnight. Today I shall be mostly talking about music.

One of the more pleasant aspects of regular work is that come payday you can spend some of your hard-earned on whatever you want. And I like to spend my hard-earned on music. Mostly back catalogue stuff (as opposed to "back of the catalogue, triple-X rated" stuff) I'll admit, but I have been known to purchase the odd contemporary release. This month has been no exception, and here, to bore you to tears, are a few potted reviews of what I've bought recently.....

Morrissey - Irish Blood, English Heart. The first single from the great one's imminent album. It pains me to say it but the best thing I can say about this is that it's alright. It's not brilliant, it's not duff, it's just an average Morrissey record. It hasn't got me panting in anticipation of the album - maybe I was expecting too much. Mind you, I've always felt that Morrissey is on dodgy lyrical ground when he strays from the personal to the political. If you missed him performing this on the Jonathon Ross show on Friday night, he'll doubtless be doing it again on 'Later...with Jools Holland' this week. Set your video for that, but don't make a special effort to watch it.

The Streets - A Grand Don't Come for Free The return of MC Pikey, only this time instead of spending three years making a record in his bedroom he's turned out a 'concept' album in about half the time. And it shows. There are some great tracks on here - 'Fit But You Know it', 'Could Well Be In', 'Dry Your Eyes' - but there are also too many tracks that sound the same. That said, he's still way ahead of 99% of British rap/hip-hop acts. Check this out, then buy 'Original Pirate Material' to see what all the fuss is about.

No Names Mentioned - Osiris Dismemberment Plan (demo). Blistering. Finally, Mexborough's finest post-posthardcore-core ensemble have an mp3 up on the web. Head to pure volume.com to download this rough mix. Play it loud and get some friends to mosh along for a flavour of the NNM live experience. Then get your arse down (or up) to lastfriday in July to see them do it twice as loud and twice as full-on. Miss it and miss out.

The Libertines - Up The Bracket As recommendations go, an endorsement from a friend with a long and troubled history of mental illness is probably one you'd treat with caution. Do as I did, throw caution to the wind and treat yourself to the indie guitar stylings of The Libertines. A rare treat amongst the dreck of today's indie popsters. If you want a reference point - think 70's new wave meets 80's indie with 60's pop sensibilities thrown in (The Only Ones meet Cud and the ghost of Gerry And the Pacemakers, for example). Quite fabulous, in a "where have I heard this before?" sort of way.

The Only Ones - Why Don't You Kill Yourself? (The CBS Recordings) Talk of the devil... Rightly famous for 'Another Girl, Another Planet', unfairly unfamous for anything else. Assembled here for the first time are their three albums on CBS plus the first single and assorted other bonus tracks. I've not really had time to listen to this in it's entirety but I'd say that it's probably not the best compilation of their stuff to start with. If you've never heard of them, try to find the 'The Immortal Story' compilation rather than diving straight into this. Otherwise sit back and spot how many of these tunes The Libertines appear to have ripped off....

The Psychedelic Furs - All Of This And Nothing - A compilation of The Furs "greatest hits". Presented in no particular order and including the biggies - 'Pretty In Pink' and 'Love My Way' - and the essentials - 'President Gas', 'Sister Europe', 'Dumb Waiters', 'Imitation of Christ' and 'Heaven'. I was a bit disappointed as I remembered 'President Gas' as being a bit more pumped-up and muscular than it is on this compilation, but apart from that this is excellent.

The Fall - Totally Wired/Bend Sinister/The Frenz Experiment/458489 A Sides As far as I'm concerned, you can never have too many records by The Fall, so I took advantage of the fact that none of these were more than six quid to bolster my Fall collection. Totally Wired is a Rough Trade compilation which bears an uncanny resemblance to a couple of tapes that my mate Charlie assembled for me back in the 80s. Bend Sinister and Frenz Experiment are two proper albums from the mid-80s. And 458489 is a singles compilation. I normally wouldn't have bothered with it but it features 'Oh Brother', which is one of my all-time favourite Fall tracks of, er, all-time.

Er and that's about it. I was going to write about the Eurovision Song Contest, but I'm running short of time and, let's face it, it was as shite as it always is. At least this year the UK entry got some points. I was amused that Turkey's blatant attempt at not winning, by fielding a ska-punk band, briefly looked in danger of backfiring. The one thing that did annoy me though was that the percussion was far too loud on most tracks and the vocals far too low in the mix. Sometimes, when the artists wandered off-key, that was a blessing, but mostly it was annoying. However, as a final thought from the post-song entertainment, I think that the Turks did get one thing right - their national dance involves scantily-clad women shaking their bits. What have we English got? Morris dancers. Where's me passport?

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Saturday 15th May

It's a curse

Here's a tip for you, readers - if you ever have to make a journey by rail and you happen to see me getting on the same train, just get off again and wait for the next one. I know that I don't seem to have the best of luck with public transport but lately things seem to have escalated. It's getting to the point where I'm seriously starting to think about learning to drive...

Twice in the last three weeks I've caught the 18.17 from Warrington Central to Sheffield and on both occasions my journey has been marred by feckwittery of the highest order. On the first time the train was delayed outside Manchester for twenty minutes by a freight tran reversing into a goods yard. And then, as if being stuck in the vestibule of a packed train was not enough, when we got to Manchester yet more people got on, including one daft woman with a collapsible pushchair, which she unloaded but didn't bother collapsing before leaving it in the vestibule with me and half a dozen other people. Not only was I having to stand all the way to Sheffield but I could barely move because of this fecking pushchair! Thanks a lot, you dopey cow. Just to top things off, we arrived in Sheffield 15 minutes late to find that all the information screens were down and there were no staff around to ask either. Nice one. Compared to this journey, last night's journey which I spent sat on a tip-down seat outside the toilet and featured a 25 minute delay at Manchester Picadilly, caused by a bout of train rage when the guard refused to let a chap bring his bike on board (on the not unreasonable grounds that there was no room for it) and said chap refused to leave the train until the police were called, seemed not too bad, but I still managed to miss my connection at Sheffield, which was irritating to say the least.

Mind you, given that my journey to see Kev a fortnight ago took twice as long as it should have after the train was held up by a broken-down freight train on the track in front of us at Barnetby station, arriving at my destination a mere twenty minutes late seems almost like being on time. This time a journey of just over one hour took well over two with most of the time spent sitting on the train literally twenty yards from Barnetby station. If I'd been planning to get a connection there and missed it, I'd have been furious. As it was, I was trying to get to Grimsby and managed to arrive a mere hour late. Thanks a lot.

To be fair, on the few occasions that I've had to travel by train to work, the trains have all run on time in the mornings. However, this has to be counter-balanced by the fact that the return trains from Warrington Bank Quay to Crewe always seemed to be running late. The high (or possibly, low) point being the night the 18.44 was announced as running 30 mins late and the station announcer advised that passengers to Crewe should catch the 18.53, despite the fact that this too was flagged up as running 30 mins late..... OK, my train's late, but I can catch this even later one instead. I don't think so.

Right, having got that off my chest I think that in future I'll only write about my train journeys when they go well. So, you won't have to put up with any more train-related nonsense for a good few months, I should imagine...

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Monday 3rd May

Parting the cat's fur

For those of you that may have noticed that my site has fallen off the web for the last few days - good for you. Bad for me though, as whilst I was away Virgin.net closed my account. Well, they actually closed it on Saturday, and if I hadn't had 947 e-mails waiting for me to wade through on Friday night I might have been able to do something about it. Unfortunately, Mailwasher kept crashing under the sheer weight of processing that many e-mails and by the time I'd managed to delete enough spam to make it function, it was past midnight and my account was disabled. I did spot a couple of warning e-mails from Virgin in amongst the spam but was unable to download them in time to do anything about them. Bollocks. So, driven by this, I finally got round to doing what I should have done a long time ago and actually paid for some webspace. Hopefully, everything works OK and you can continue to enjoy your fatfakir experience, but I did this in a hurry so it might not be perfect. (And if you happen to have my virgin.net e-mail address, you'll have to change to use my hotmail address for now until I sort something else. Unless, of course, you're one of the people who sends me spam, in which case you can feck right off!)

Last night (Sunday) I went to Sheffield to see Disarm supporting Johnny Truant. On what initially promised to be a long night, there were three other bands on before Disarm hit the stage. First up were Divide, who I thought were heavy enough but not fast enough. However, they do have a couple of excellent songs - the penultimate one they played, in particular, was a belter. Next up were Bring Me The Horizon, who upped the pace, got the crowd moving and put on a good show. If I was being harsh, I'd say they lacked a bit of variety and the singer needs to extend his range a bit but I can't say I didn't enjoy them. So, two down, three to go. Nausea were next. And despite the fact I only saw them a little over twelve hours ago, I'm struggling to remember anything about their set. I don't think I'd recognise a single one of their tunes if they came up and slapped me with a wet fish. Ah well, can't have been that good then. Finally Disarm took the stage. Excellent, probably one the finest performances of theirs I've seen - they sounded pretty tight, the new song (Awake in China?) sounded pretty good and a good time was had by all. I'm looking forward to their new EP. Last up, were the "big boys" Johnny Truant. I have to congratulate them - they managed to take all the elements of an exciting musical sound and turn them into something tedious. Monster riffage - check. Supercharged drums - check. Screamo vocals - check. Occasional guitar-wankery - check. Any sort of decent tunes - che... oh, wait, no. I'll admit that I thought their singer was a bit of a twat (frankly, I don't give a toss if it's taken you 11 hours to get here or 11 seconds, just get on with it) but even so they were dull. Dull. Dull. I might be biased but I'd say Disarm ruled last night. Good work fellahs.

Disappointing URLs No.32: Beaver Furniture, sadly not home to an interesting collection of adornments for the female genitalia but makers of traditional English Oak furniture. Shame.

What else have I been up to? Well, let's see - I went to see my mate Kev on Saturday. We spent the afternoon in Cleethorpes getting very, very drunk, although with our usual comic timing we managed to arrive at the Cleethorpes Beer Festival about twenty minutes after it closed for the afternoon. Given the sales job Kev was giving it (he'd been the previous evening) I didn't miss much anyway. Not that I'd have remembered much about it anyway.

A fortnight ago I went to Birmingham to catch up with some old colleagues from JBA. It was a decent night out in the Garden House, only marred by the fact that we'd not managed to get hold of everybody that should have been invited and that some of those invited never turned up (Mrs B!). A good time was had by all, I think. After the night out I spent the next day or so catching up with my sister, Crow, and her family, who I haven't seen for about a year or so. They've sold their house and moved into a swanky apartment. And my brother-in-law has decided he's got too many guitars so he gave me a very nice Norman B20 12-string acoustic with a case. Cheers, Peter! I'll be back in Brum in a couple of weeks to babysit for Crow and Peter while they take part in the Moonwalk so I'll be looking to blag some more stuff (only kidding!).

What else? I've been to see Crewe play a couple of times. I saw them against Rotherham in a dire game which was notable only for the fact that it was the first time in about five years that I'd seen Crewe get a point at home. Admittedly I've only been to a handful of games at Gresty Road in the last five years but you'd think I might have picked a game or two that Crewe would win. I also saw Crewe against Crystal Palace, which was another disappointing defeat - conceded two sloppy goals, got back in the game and gave away a soft third one almost immediately. I took my nephew/godson, William, to this game. He got a free ticket as a member of the Junior Alex and I only had to pay a tenner. It was William's first experience of live football and he enjoyed it, apart from the result. The weather was fantastic and the atmosphere was good. And on the way back William was given a quid by a drunk Man Utd fan at the bus stop, so he had a great day. Of course, if he's to become a regular Crewe fan then I reckon seeing them lose on his first visit is the sort of character-forming experience he needed.

Whilst I'm still in Nantwich (the house search begins in earnest this week) I've mad a couple of frays in to Shoot The Moon Records, which is the record shop I mentioned below. So far, I've picked up a couple of Blancmange LPs, a Robyn Hitchcock LP I'd never heard of, and a couple of MC Tunes singles. Now all I need is a record player to play them on. D'Oh! I can report though that if there are any gaps in your collections of records by Man or The Enid, then Shoot The Moon is the place to be. didn't find any YaHoWah 13 though.

Er, and that's about all the news that's fit to print at the moment. Oh, congrats to my mate Lisa who announced her engagement a while back. If you feel the need to validate your forthcoming nuptials with any sort of pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo, the Reverend Jim's rates are very reasonable, although the inflatable church isn't. And more congrats to my brother, Mark, who has moved into a new house in Leeds. For a simple blessing, I think you'll find I'm the cheapest....

Right, that's it. I'm off again for another few weeks so don't hold your breath waiting for another update. Hopefully it won't take as long this time and I'll have somewhere to live so the updates will be back to their usual tedious frequency. Cheers!

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