Inside Nokia Music

So Mark Linkous has joined the long list of musicians I love who have committed suicide. Over the weekend it appears that the man who was Sparklehorse took an overdose with the express intention of ending his own life.

Now, Linkous never became a household name, even amongst ardent music fans – and even after suffering a potentially career-enhancing, near-fatal overdose back in 1996 – but Sparklehorse became a cherished part of my music collection over the years. Linkous’ strange, delicate voice and sparse, fragile arrangements were the first thing I reached for when I wanted to wallow in, or be lifted out, of my own misery. Nobody wrote sad songs steeped in Americana quite like him, and nobody seemed willfully experimental enough to pepper his albums with odd, harsh noise or bizarrely evocative lyrical imagery (his frequent mentions of horses and teeth bordered on the obsessive) like him.

Songs like “Homecoming Queen” and “Saturday” from the debut Sparklehorse album “vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot” are masterclasses in quiet, restrained, and deeply sad beauty.

But the song I’ll remember him most for is “Sea of Teeth” from the album “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The first time I heard it, it opened up something inside of me that I can’t really explain. It’s quite simply one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard.

If you’ve never heard any Sparklehorse, now is as good a time as any to start listening, and this is as good a song as any to start with.

R.I.P.

I don’t know how anything works.
There, I said it.
Technology is something I use every hour of every day – I would frankly be lost in a sea of utter pointlessness if it didn’t exist – but I really don’t know how any of it actually works.
I mean, OK, I understand the vague overall concepts of binary, electricity, light and sound, but getting me to explain how stuff like computers, phones, mp3 players and televisions work using those concepts would be like asking a bluebottle to explain the finer points of Euclidean geometry. The very best it could do would be to vomit on a piece of rotting meat, then suck up the resulting, semi-digested, viscous fluid through its proboscis, which you’d have to agree, probably isn’t the most full and accurate of explanations.
The thing is, I don’t think the vast majority of us are meant to know how these things work. Our brains don’t operate that way. Just look at the way people act on planes. It’s easier and much less distressing just to switch off the part of your brain that whispers in a panicked voice, “Heavy. This thing’s really heavy. How the hell is it staying in the air?” and just enjoy the pretty, pretty clouds. Look, that one’s shaped like dumb ignorance. Beautiful.
The thing is, the way I feel about technology is, I reckon, the way the vast majority of people feel about music. It’s everywhere. It’s essential to our lives. We love it, and our existence would be infinitely less interesting if it didn’t exist. But we don’t know how it works. And thinking about the mechanics of it leaves us cold.
Read the rest of this entry »

Right, you lot. You’ll be glad to know that this is the final blog posting. I’ve got to find some way to condense all these posts into a manageable 600 words for Venue magazine now. Yeesh.

Have:

Friday 4th February

Last night was one of the quietest gigs we’ve done so far. The actual place was lovely, but there was a big gig in a club just 200 metres or so down the road, so it was pretty empty. Still, they had a piano, so I got to vary my set a little. Thomas also asked me to play piano on his song “Razorblades”, which I did. Was worried that I was doing too much over what should have been a beautiful, sparse, looped song, but Thomas reassured me that it was all good. I seem to be flitting between arrogant over-confidence and crippling under-confidence at the moment. Welcome to my brain.

I don’t know how Tom managed it, but he sounded great last night, despite the hole in his mouth.

I sell one CD, which I’m OK with, given the paucity of the crowd, then get in the car for the long drive back to Hamburg.

Today, we woke up, had a delicious breakfast at Thomas’s studio, then wandered around town while Thomas got his face filled in at the dentist. We go into a cowboy boot shop – Geoff’s been thinking about getting a pair for ages apparently. The guy in the shop is a German, but is dressed like an American. Well, he’s dressed like the idea of an American, anyway. But he does speak very good English. He shows us lots of boots that are WAY out of Geoff’s price range. Then Eddy picks up a pair of beautifully crafted, but frankly hideous boots. He taps the soles and says, almost to himself, “is that a wooden sole?”. The salesman instantly bursts out laughing. He mercilessly mocks Eddy for the next five minutes: “Oh, ahahahaaa! Is it wood?! A wooden-soled boot! HAHAHAHahahaha!”. Apparently it’s HILARIOUS to him. And it soon becomes pretty hilarious to me and Geoff too. All of a sudden, I can’t stop laughing. The shop owner thinks I’m laughing at Eddy with him, so it just encourages him. “Wood! Haha. He’s gone quiet now hasn’t he? Hahahahaha. Wood!”. My face hurts from laughing so much. I find it odd that something so niche could be so funny to him. It’s the equivalent of me getting all hysterical at someone thinking my Boss Rc-20 loop machine was a Boss Rc-50 loop machine. “Ahahahha! He thought it was the Rc-50! Hahaha! But it has no midi functionality! Hahahah. He’s an idiot.”

Weird.

When Thomas comes out of the dentist, he looks like he’s in agony. There’s only a few days left of the tour now. I hope he can hold out for it. It would be really weird if he couldn’t play, even for one night. . .

He seems to be OK for driving though, so we head over to Bremerhaven. We’ve got a gig in a cinema tonight, apparently.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, it’s been ages since my last one. Bite me. I’m on tour. You’re lucky I haven’t just got some willing, nubile groupie to write this.

God, I can’t pull that off at all, can I?

Tuesday 18th January

When I was about 9 years old, I made a remote control car. I used to dismantle electrical goods just to see what was inside. I had no intention of putting them back together or fixing some imagined problem. . .I just wanted to make low grade, and ultimately pretty shabby, toys out of them. To this end, I broke open two Walkmans (which I got in serious trouble for – my Mum rarely shared my radical ideas for product enhancement), took out their tiny motors and attached wheels to each one. Then I mounted them on a piece of balsa wood and ran tiny wires out of them – one to each hand, where I held an AA battery in each clammy, youthful paw. The resulting “car” would go forward when I touched the bare wires onto both batteries, and off to the side when I touched the wires to only one battery. It was great, and had only two major drawbacks. The wires were short, so I was often to be found running around the house after my bit of wood, bumping into furniture and generally making a nuisance of myself. They were also – as I mentioned – bare wires, which meant that every time I wanted the ‘car’ to move, I would burn my thumbs quite badly. 

Still, that piece of electrified balsa wood was at least 20% more ergonomically designed, and at least 50% safer than the flying coffin I am writing this in. 

There are 18 people on board this flight to Bremen, Germany. 18 businessmen. The sort of people who refer to each other only by their surnames and say things like “This is Hardacre from the Bristol office. People who upset him don’t stay alive for long”. I honestly, genuinely heard a man say this tonight. What with the turbulence, the single, seemingly overwhelmed steward, the businessmen and the tiny plane, I’ve been contemplating death over Europe quite a bit over the last couple of hours. 

The conclusion I’ve come to is this: if this plane should plunge into the ocean, at least I’ll die doing what I love. Hurtling towards the ground in a big metal tube, surrounded by dicks.

First gig tomorrow. Amsterdam. Let’s hope I make it.

Wednesday 19th January

Well, I made it. Got picked up at the airport by the guy who’s putting on this tour. He’s a man called Heiko, and without him, I (and the other musicians on this tour) would be lost. He’s booked the gigs and told us how to get there and what to expect. There are two other acts on the same circuit as me – a band called Outroads from Sheffield and a solo act called Astrid’s Farm from Hamburg. It looks like we’ll all get along, I think. 

Well, they didn’t seem instantly disgusted by my sarcasm and potty-mouth, anyway. That’s a good start.

Thomas (Astrid’s Farm) has a beaten up old Volvo, so we’ll be using that to get from gig to gig. First stop is Amsterdam.

I always thought it was just tourists that smoked themselves senseless in Amsterdam, and that regular Dutch folks kind of looked down on that sort of thing. Not so, apparently. The owner of the cafe/bar/bike rental shop that we are playing in tonight appears to be half-baked at 3.30pm, even managing to set fire to a tea-towel during our soundcheck. 

As it happens, the turn-out is pretty low tonight, which is no bad thing, as the three acts have a chance to suss each other out before the three week tour starts properly. I immediately get nervous. The other two acts are purely acoustic. Astrid’s Farm is a guy with a beautifully clear voice and a song-writing style that leans towards Paul McCartney. Outroads normally play as a six- or seven-piece, but for this tour they’re stripped down to two – a gravelly-voiced guitarist/singer named Geoff and a slide guitarist/harmonica player named Eddy. It’s a simple set-up, and they’re really very good. I, on the other hand, have an electric guitar, a synth, two midi-controllers, a laptop, three loopers and a sackful of cables. So. . .how is this going to work?

Thursday 20th January

Gig last night was OK, but not great. Think I need to rethink my approach to this tour before it starts properly. Resolve only to play the big electronica set when it’s appropriate. Need to come up with acoustic versions of some songs pretty cocking quickly. After the gig, as none of us particularly wanted to get wasted, we decided to head down to the red light district to see if we could make some quick money busking. Now. . .I’ve never busked. The idea scares me, frankly. Don’t particularly want to be that close to the people I’m playing to. . .what if they really don’t like it? Anyway, I was persuaded by Geoff and Eddy. They’ve done it before and are up for doing as much playing here as possible, which is a good attitude, so I think I’ll adopt it too. 

Turns out that busking is great fun. And a bit of a money-maker. We made more money in 40 minutes of busking to pot-heads than we did from the gig. We’ll be doing this again, I hope.

We were joined today by a lovely girl from Estonia called Katri. . .she’ll be documenting the tour for a blog, taking photos and filming us and generally capturing all of our disgusting habits for posterity. We should have lots of footage from this. Looking forward to making all my friends sit down and watch it interminably.

Today is a two gig day, both of which are in a beautiful Dutch city called Groningen. The one in a record shop in the daytime goes by pretty uneventfully. I try a couple of acoustic versions and a couple of semi-acoustic ones using two loop pedals. They seem to go down OK, so I’ll keep that in mind. Tonight’s show is in a club called Platformtheater. . .

Friday 21st January

Wake up late. Really late. We’ve got a gig in Germany tonight and we need to go back to the club and pick up our stuff. Dry mouth. Very dry mouth. Last night turned into a big party. We all played well I think. I did a full electronica set that seemed to go well. One small downer: after my normal set, they asked for another song (an ‘encore’, I believe it’s called). . .I wasn’t prepared, and did an ill-advised, just-guitar version of my song “Target”. Shouldn’t have, I don’t think. It wasn’t very good. Should have left them wanting more. Must remember that too. We all had a few tequilas after the show, then the owner asked for more music, so Outroads did another short set and I joined them onstage for a few. Sang the chorus of one of their songs – “Gravey” – with them. Brilliant fun. Sold a few CDs too. Then we sat up drinking until the small hours together. We all seem to get on really well. This tour’s shaping up nicely. 

In Schwanewede tonight. No idea where that is. I have no sense of direction, and I’m not about to start growing one now. Luckily, Eddy doesn’t seem to have one either, so I don’t feel so bad. Thomas and Geoff, on the other hand, seem to be able to find their way around without our help, so it’s fine. It also appears that Eddy and I share a love of bad puns and jokes that don’t really work. I think we’re going to start annoying the others soon. . .

Saturday 22nd January

Sweet. Baby. Jesus. I feel rough. I haven’t got out of bed all day and now it’s time to go to Hamburg for another gig. It’s 4.30pm. I feel like death. This tour is going to kill me. Last night was amazing. It was the first one that Heiko has been to, so he was quite keen to see how we were getting on (and whether he’d made a massive mistake booking us!). It was a strange venue. . .I think we’ll be playing a lot of strange venues on this tour. It seemed to be a high-class eating establishment, not too far from the flat that we’re staying in in Bremen. They’d put us in a beautiful room, and Heiko had made it look lovely with lights and decorations. I did a purely acoustic set this time, with lots of looping. I also managed to persuade Thomas to play guitar with me on one song (with no real rehearsal) and Eddy to play harmonica on another. They both did brilliantly, raising both songs to something much better than I could do on my own. Thomas and I both joined Outroads for “Gravey” again. We’re mixing and matching so much now that, by the end of the tour, we’re probably just going to be one big band.

Last night we all played the best gigs of the tour so far, and made a fair bit of money through CD sales and the hat that always seems to get passed around at gigs over here, so we decided to celebrate by getting a few beers and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label. That was a mistake. I feel awful now. We stayed up til 4am drinking. Do not drink a quarter bottle of Johnnie Walker after a couple of beers and two big glasses of red wine. I cannot stress this enough. You will hurt inside. Tonight we play in Hamburg and I can barely move my head. Not sure about this. Not sure about this at all.

I’ve been making music and then playing it to varyingly attentive audiences for a few years now. During that time, I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the world, playing on the same bills as some of my all-time heroes, and unlucky enough to play in Newport to a single drunk woman who fell over halfway through my set, then walked out.
All in all, being a musician has been a mixed bag so far. But one thing has always remained constant. Touring has always been fun.
Maybe it’s because I get to divest myself of all normal responsibilities for a couple of weeks. Or maybe it’s because I get to live like my childhood dreams managed to find their way through the grind of real life and actually come true. Whatever it is, touring has provided me with some of my most memorable musical moments.
I remember clearly the time I gave myself concussion onstage during my very first festival gig abroad, for example. I hit myself in the head with a brand new Fender Telecaster, then had to go to bed early and confused. That’s one to tell the grandkids.

I also once spent quite a bit of time searching for (and utterly failing to find) Bjork backstage at The Electric Picnic.
True story, that.
True, incredibly dull, story.

Then there was the time I nearly got shot in America.
Yeah, that’s right. Shot.
Probably.
Here’s what happened:
I was in Hollywood to do a live session on a radio station. Which I’m aware makes me sound both unexpectedly professional and like a massive, bragging tool. Well, I can’t help that. I’m trying to set the scene here, OK? I’m using all the storytelling skills at my (admittedly limited) disposal, so go with it.
Anyway, I was there for a few days, so I thought I’d take a look around Hollywood, and see what it has to offer. Turns out, it actually has surprisingly little to offer unless the infantile rantings of L. Ron Hubbard play an unhealthily large role in your life.
I was wandering back to my hotel room one evening when five or six police cars suddenly screeched to a stop just in front of me and a dozen or so policemen bundled out, all armed to the teeth.
Various weapons were brandished, including two honest-to-goodness shotguns, held by the smuggest-looking people I’ve ever seen outside of Lynx commercials.

Now. . .I’ve seen a lot of films in my time. I’m pretty sure that everytime this sort of thing happens in a film, at least one of the policemen (usually the chubbiest, friendliest, and unarmediest one) spends a bit of time ferrying the general public to safety whilst the others pump their shotguns, cock their hammers, and do a number of other things that sound suspiciously like euphemisms for being gay.
Not so in real life, apparently.
They all just lined up either side of the door that I was approaching. The door to Hollywood High School, as it happens.
I was already clearly in the line of fire if a crazed, coked-up schoolkid burst through the doors waving his father’s Uzi around with reckless, deadly abandon. And by now, I was pretty sure that was exactly what was going to happen at any second.
So, put yourself in my shoes for a second. You’re English, and as a result, you have had literally ZERO experience of guns so far in your life. Suddenly, you’re faced with about 10 of the bastard things. What would you do?
Here are your options:
1) Run like a shreiking, effeminate maniac. This incurs the scorn and ridicule of the gathered crowds who all seem to be calmly filming the stuff of your nightmares with mobile phones from across the street. On the plus side, you might not die.
2) Walk slowly and casually onwards like you see this sort of thing every day, thereby remaining cool in the eyes of the people you’ll never meet again, but possibly getting a bullet through a part of your body that really works better without any holes in it.

I tried, unsuccesfully, to combine the two. I casually, yet quickly, crouch-walked to safety like a petrified duck, thereby remaining a potential target for longer than necessary whilst simultaneously retaining not a shred of dignity.
Here’s what I learned that day. . .
Guns are terrifying, and can often lead to socially awkward situations in front of strangers.

Now, you may be wondering why I’ve just told you all this. Well, it’s because, in a week’s time, I’m going on tour in Germany and The Netherlands, and I’ll be sporadically blogging about it here, as well as on my myspace (www.myspace.com/cajita).
Hopefully, I’ll have some interesting tales to tell. Maybe I’ll actually get shot this time, and have a story that reaches some kind of conclusion, rather than just petering out uneventfully.

Who knows?

John Lennon once sang “So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”. Well, finally we have an answer that’s marginally more dignified than “Drank too much, got irritated with my own family and was sick on the dog”.  Rage Against The Machine has been pushed into the coveted Christmas number one slot in a beautifully orchestrated act of rebellion that is both ridiculously silly and peculiarly British.

We have an odd and often genuinely funny way of showing our contempt for things that irk us in this country. Remember when David Blaine tried to prove that he was a powerful warlock, connected to all the mystical spiritual forces of the universe, by climbing inside a perspex box in London and staying there for slightly longer than you might expect? Well, except for a few credulous idiots, Britain’s response to Blaine’s cheap stunt was utterly heartwarming, especially to a gnarled old misanthrope like me. They bought burgers and fries by the armful, and hurled them at the starving, doe-eyed, drawling buffoon until he decided to give up and go away. It was twisted and funny in equal measure, and it made me proud to be live in this country – a country where a one-sided food-fight is seen as a valid protest.

Well, this Christmas, the British public has once more done something that’s made me feel pride and a burbling sense of contentment. When I first heard about the plot to make RATM Christmas number one, I was embarrassed and ashamed to be honest. I thought it was a futile, toothless gesture – the equivalent of giving a murderer a witheringly disapproving look and hoping he’ll go away and really think about what he’s done. But I was wrong. It took off in a way I really didn’t expect, with thousands of disillusioned people spending their hard-earned money to register their disappointment in what has become an annual banality-fest. What’s more, they did it in a way that was actually genuinely amusing. No matter what people say, swearing is funny. Sure, it can be cheap and pathetic, too – there’s nothing worse than a poor comedy that uses uninventive cursing in order to shock a laugh out of a placid audience. But when it’s done right, it’s gold. All you need to do is listen to Shelagh Fogarty’s reaction when the inevitable happened and Zack de la Rocha “forgot” to censor himself on Radio Five Live to see the inherent comedy genius in the campaign. Her panicked “GET RID OF IT!” is laugh-out-loud funny, and worth the price of a download alone.

There are those who say that, since both the X-Factor winner Joe McElderry and Rage Against The Machine are signed to the same major record label, this was a futile and pathetic gesture which achieved nothing in the long run save making a few fat executives a little bit fatter. But the people who say that have missed the point entirely. This isn’t an anti-capitalist protest. Nor is it an attempt to register contempt with the actual winner of X-Factor – a point that seems to have escaped Cheryl Cole when she accused the public of “bullying” him with a “mean campaign”. This is a pure form of democracy, where people who have been silently enraged by the endless parade of anodyne music they’ve been force-fed over the past few years have suddenly seen a way to register their disgust by buying a song that would never normally get any airplay in any country.

You’re right, it’s not revolutionary. It won’t have a long-lasting effect on the charts. It won’t usher in a new age in the music industry.

But it has shown Simon Cowell that there’s more than one type of person that buys records in the UK. And apparently some of us aren’t as fond of him as he might think we are.

So, Merry Christmas, Simon Cowell.

Many people hate you, some are indifferent to you, but literally hundreds of thousands of us will pay money to wipe that smug little grin off your face.

If that’s not the spirit of Christmas, I don’t know what is.

Merry Christmas, you lot.

People are idiots. If you don’t believe me, here’s a random selection of the things people have made: War, women’s lifestyle magazines and the film Pearl Harbour. See? Idiots. Need further proof? Pol Pot was a person. And so was Hitler.

Probably.

People habitually spoil everything around them, and then bemoan the lack of unspoiled things in their immediate vicinity.  I wouldn’t normally care, but sometimes, they crawl into my head and spoil music for me. And that’s unacceptable.

So here’s part two of my top three songs that have been ruined for me by other people.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brains. They’re great, aren’t they? Heavy little grey globs of consciousness that make us everything we are. Without them, we’d be no better than plants, or bits of string, or Jeremy Kyle. Yep, whichever way you look at it, brains are brilliant.

So why, then, does mine turn on me at every given opportunity? It’s not like I treat it badly. I give it books to read and films to watch and music to listen to, but every so often it’ll cough up the remnant of a long-forgotten memory or make an unbreakable association that will forever ruin something I used to love. This is especially true of music. In the same way that I know I will never be able to fully enjoy vodka again after the night in 1997 when I drank most of a bottle of Smirnoff, then vomited across the entire length of the Clifton suspension bridge from a moving car, I also know that there are some pieces of music that I will never be able fully enjoy again. Although, unlike the vodka incident, I don’t think it’s entirely my fault. And I can’t really blame the musicians either. It’s someone else’s fault entirely.

Read the rest of this entry »