They're taking my world to bits...slowly but surely....

So, the beginning of the end of the VCR last week [although the decision by Dixons - and Dixons specifically - to stop selling new units I consider to be a simple marketing move and nothing more; I might well rant about all that some time soon] and this week TOTP is (basically) given the boot...in the sense that the new BBC2 Sunday TOTP will only really be related by name to the TV show I've been watching for, ooh, about 32 years or so...

So, well done there Andi Peters, you managed to turn that one round big time.

And while I was just looking around the BBC News site for links to the above, I noticed this article about the lessening quality that people are experiencing with MP3 players etc. Yet another subject I've got a whole rant essay of stuff to get off my chest one day.

Oh well, in other news I got one of those new(ish) Namco Classics II plug-into-your-TV game things. Top fun. I actually own all the real physical PCBs for all of the games it contains - in fact I have a whole Pole Position machine. Just as a back-up, you understand...

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 8:06:53 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Remix Mag article now online...

I know it's a while ago since we did it, but as it's not on sale anymore the interview Norman and I did for the US Remix magazine is now up online should anyone wish to read it. Initially it looked like a shortened edit to me, but it might well be the whole text....

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 3:35:28 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Cough. Sneeze. Splutter.

Oh, it's cold and wheezing season. I've got mine!

Feeling somewhat under the weather, it has to be said. Oh well, I'm normally nursing a streaming cold sometime around Christmas anyway, perhaps this is just getting it all out of the way early.

It's Fatboy Slim at Brixton tomorrow night, I'm just not sure yet whether I'll be well enough to go, I mean I'm hardly at death's door but 5 hours in a smokey hot atmosphere might not be the best idea right now. We'll see.

The guy they measured to be able to define the dimensions of 'man-sized' tissues must have been very small indeed. I wonder how much better the sales of such are in the last couple of months of the year?

Gosh, Lemsip gets dull after a while. I like blackcurrant drinks generally, but it seems to be coming out of my pores at the moment. Ewwwwww, nice image eh?

"Wonderful Night" is coming out on Monday - that has come around so quickly. I wonder if anyone will notice though....hmmm....

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 11:51:49 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

So we won't be going to see Ben Folds next Friday and then again the following Thursday, as he's just cancelled all of the UK dates this year due to illness.

Grrrrrrrr (again)

I've had these tickets over 6 months now. Hey ho. And so it all starts over again, as the new dates in June have been announced....so gotta get the money back on these tickets, wait for the new ones to go on sale again, go get them, hope to get good seats again, then wait and wait and wait....

Maybe I'll wait for the DVD.

[Then again, it says here that the tickets I have will be valid for the new dates. Hmmm, that's not what I've read elsewhere...]

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 2:04:39 PM  trackback []  comment(s) []  

Lots of little bits of news...or something...

So, let's see....

I really like the new Tom Vek single "If You Want". It's an unexpected mix of 80s type stuff, with a bit of Beck thrown in, and some slightly dodgy bass playing (and that's not a criticism really, it's about as good as I can play the bass)....but it really works as a mantra type thing. It could almost be the direction "dance music" (whatever that is) should be going right now. It may not strike many that hear this track that it's "dance music" at all but - how can I put this? - let's say that the Talking Heads influence I can hear in it reminds me that in the early 80s this sort of stuff WAS dance music, you know music people danced to....you can definitely tap your foot to it (and dance to it, but seeing as I can't actually dance I refer that judgement to others)

I'm also rather into the new single entitled "Helicopter" by Bloc Party. I mention it the paragraph after Tom Vek because I saw both videos one after the other on The Amp music channel on Sky the other night, and liked them both so much I had to write the artists down somewhere, so I would remember to go and look them up later. Getting your stuff on music TV does work, it seems. I'm proof of the concept, haha. I mean I hadn't heard of either of them until that very moment, but now I'm buying both records and writing about them here and everything. Both tracks are available on the UK iTunes should you want to go and have a listen or something....It turns out that Tom Vek and Bloc Party actually toured together, which is a bit spooky. Probably.

I've had a lovely relaxing week doing not-that-much with The Girlfriend - as we don't live in the same town it's unusual thing to see each other on a weekday! We had a fun afternoon at London Zoo on Saturday. I'm a sucker for a cuddly furry animal, as is Katy, although the confined space many of them have to live in still causes me a few problems now and again....seeing a massive tiger through a 2 inch glass window will always be an awesome thing, although I sometimes think having such easy access that feeling rather dilutes the experience somewhat, but I won't get into all that right here or now...

We popped into BBC TV Centre to watch the recording of the Jonathon Ross show last Monday night (it was recorded on a Monday, although it's usually done on a Thursday night and so has topical jokes in it, none of those this time). It was fun to be there (and it was really nice to see Lateef again. Hello! [i know he reads this rubbish you see]) but it did remind me just how boring TV can be when you're actually there when it's being done. Peter Kaye had us in stitches though - what a very funny man he is. If only the whole 2+ hours of stuff that was recorded could be broadcast instead of the hour or so show that actually goes out. As ever the "edited out" bits were perhaps the best bits of the whole evening. Pierce Brosnan and Gwen Stefani seemed rather dull to be honest. The edited interviews that were broadcast were quite kind to them, I thought....

There seems to have been a mostly positive reaction to Normans/Lateefs/Jonny Qualitys performance on that show, which is good to see. I mean, it is a real shift from what many people will expect to see of FBS, it will take some getting some getting used to for lots of people, no doubt. They're doing it all again on the Conan O'Brien show in the US tonight (US time, i.e. Tuesday night)...

Not that much to report really work wise, I guess. I'll be putting together the final CD masters for the "Wonderful Night" single over the next couple of days. The vinyl side of it is already done and cut and approved. The video seems to be played quite often on channels such as The Box etc in the UK, which is good.

Norman is off to the US, as the Fatboy Slim website has listings for. Some crazy and very interesting venues have been set up for this trip, all sounds like lots of fun.

As shown by lots of hits in my referrer logs people do now know that "The Joker" will be the next FBS single in Europe. I don't have exact dates for that, and to be honest that sort of stuff often turns up online before I get to hear about it. I know what the tracklisting is, as I mastered and created the CDs for it, and I'll post that up after I've checked that it's OK to release that information (as ever, I don't want to tread on any marketing toes on this blog, of course I know about a lot of stuff before it's made public so I'm in a good position to tell people stuff, but I do have to be careful)

As I alluded to elsewhere, I had a go a mixing a couple of tracks for The Free French. To mis-quote an Adam Ant lyric "you may not know them now, but you will". It was all a bit of an experience for myself and Rhodri, the man who basically is The Free French. We came to the obvious conclusion (i.e. we'd both thought of it before anything actually happened) that my style of mixing the tracks was hard to fit in with the style of the other tracks on the album that had already been done. So, for now, what's happened is the track I thought needed the most looking at a second time - and so did a new mix of - became a blue print for Rhodri to do a second mix of it himself. Which is actually quite a good thing, I think. I heard the track in a somewhat different way to him - attitude wise - and with Rhodri being so close to the track (he writes them, performs them, records them and produces them) it's no surprise that it might be hard for him/anyone to be able to hear it in any way other than the way it "came into being", so to speak. My take on it seemed to work in the sense that it's more useful to actually have a new mix of something rather than me saying stuff, via email, like "I think you should do this, and then that, and make that louder, and lose that bit". OK, I'm not describing all this very well at all - it's a hard thing to put into words!

Imagine if you're a professional plumber. If you want to install a new bathroom in your house, you're most likely to do it yourself, are you not? If for some reason you get someone else to do it instead (whether you know their quality of work or not) your instinct will still be to inspect every joint and fitting and path the pipes take etc - you can't help it - and if there's something done in a way you wouldn't have done yourself, it would be hard not to mention it, never mind go "well, that's the way he does things, so it's OK....". As it turned out, the new mix that Rhodri has done is a big improvement on the original version I heard, but it still fits into the rest of the album as it stands, because it's all mixed by the same person....

We're hoping to collaborate fully on something in the future, which sounds like lots of funs to me. I really do think The Free French will get somewhere.

Posted By Simon Thornton @ 12:20:53 AM  trackback []  comment(s) []