Man In A Panic

Stalking Lady Sov

So Zach in the office goes to Coachella and falls in love with England's finest rhyme-spitting shorty, Lady Sovereign.

And after 27 cups of warm Heineken and a James, his brain flares like a neural supernova, his mind now open to the logical truth:

• Lady Sov is playing in 'Frisco on June 9th (with The Streets)
• He'll build a website asking Joe Public to donate $10,000 so that he can lure her with the promise of a truly cracking night out...
• To entice traffic, he'll film himself doing Eminem-karaoke dressed as a jelly donut...
• ...and persuade the agency receptionist to wobble about a bit too..
• The media will get hold of it, he'll get his money and then get his girl...if only for a few hours.

Well, I tell you, the mildly cynical among us thought it might not work.

But $692 dollars, 20 thousand visitors, interviews with every San Francisco newspaper and a feature on the front page of Spin magazine later, we're beginning to nibble our hats.

Good luck, Zach!  Although I'm not sure what you see in the filthy little strumpet.

Coachella

So I'm back from Coachella - a two day music festival in the desert near Palm Springs. Think of it as the Californian Glastonbury but with sunburnt shoulders in place of muddy trousers.  Madonna, Daft Punk, Massive Attack, Kanye West and a hundred other bands sweating blood for 80,000 pilgrims.  An intriguing mixture of LA plastic people, goths, frat-boys and famine-tourists.  And it was frickin' hot.  Hot, hot, hot.  My memory has melted it was so hot.

Let's get my completely objective music review out of the way first.

Sunny Oasis:  Daft Punk, The Go Team, that Rabbi rasta bloke for his human beatboxing,  Kanye West doing A-ha, Phoenix

(and yes those brilliant videos are mine)

Head In The Sand:  The Scissor Sisters and the absurdly pompous rock-headliners 'Tool' (who, thank rock, never seem to have made it to Blighty).  Cocks, the lot of them.

Right.  What else? 

Well mostly I remember being very, very hot and very, very thirsty.  That's deserts for you.  But while Mother Nature can be squarely blamed for my pink, throbbing forehead, it was America's infantile drinking laws that had me gasping for a beer.  Oh, and this super hot dancer in her 'Seventies Funk' towelling not-hot-pants...(click the little play button on the bottom and you'll stay on this page)

You see, even in the desert, it seems that a cold beer can bedevil the souls of the under-21s.  So first, you have to stand in line and prove with a driving license that you have the moral strength to deal with fizzy, mildly intoxicating amber fluids.  Then the fun starts.  You CAN buy a beer at Coachella but only in 'designated drinking pens' ...and once you've fought your way through to the bar, you're stuck behind a chicken wire fence until you've finished your 7 dollar cup of warm Heineken.  Music festival a la Guantanamo Bay. 

Inevitably though, with my testicles hotter than the sun's core, I was keen to knock back a lager or twelve.  So I enjoyed most of the acts at an oblique angle, 2.3 miles from the stage.  Grandma Madge was a whirling squeaky dot in the distance. Half an hour late too, the bitch.

We had a lot of fun though - especially because we shunned camping in favour of a big house with a pool.  But the Pilton Pop Festival wins hands down - rain or shine, bring on 2007.

Clap Your Hands Say Yawn

So I went to see Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at the Great American Music Hall.

I like the album but this show fell flat.  A great venue but there was no performance, just a surly trot through the songs and then they were off.  And the lead singer's voice grated live.  As did his hat.

Dad style rant:  this seems to be what young bands do.  Kings Of Leon, The Arctic Monkeys, The Editors... the same onstage sulk.  A gig is a visual medium - if we just wanted to listen, we'd be horizontal with our headphones on.  Smile lads, you're rockstars.

It seems odd to me.  In an age when the live show is more important than ever - a guaranteed money-spinner in the era of pirated downloads - you'd think showmanship would rise to the fore. 

Hot Chip, on the other hand, are hot shit live.  Even seeing them at a record store in the middle of the afternoon was fun.  Lads let loose with synths and loving it.  Chancers, perhaps, and certainly less 'muso' than many bands-of-the-moment, but everyone left with a smile on their face...and tingling ear drums.

Scratchy DJ AM

DJ AM, as you can see, has played his fair share of (s)wanky nights.

Imagine my surprise, then, when he chose to play a high-energy dance re-mix of Jimmy Nail's 'Ain't No Doubt' in SF's trendy 'Prive' discoteque.

The 'LA-style-crowd'* was also treated to 'Sweet Dreams', 'Sweet Child Of Mine' and some deadly Poison.

I'm told he was going out with Nicole Ritchie until very recently, so maybe he's not been practising in his bedroom much.  Personally, I wouldn't let him DJ a game of infant school musical chairs (at a special school for deaf-and-spakky-infants, obviously)

*SF girls hate 'LA-style' girls because they don't wear Birkenstocks and shave their armpits.  Glamourpusses v Hairypusses, I suspect.

Welcome To Frat-rock

So Damien Marley at the SF Warfield wasn't as irie as I'd hoped.

The warm up act warmed me up all right, a trio of hyperactive rappers in romper suits shouting out The Hip Hop Dictionary - "A hip, a hop, a hipperty hipperty hip hop...hip hop like you don't stop!' they suggested, struggling to stay upright in their enormous sneakers.  And even when coerced to 'wave my hands in the air like I just don't care', there was no shutting this bunch of tits up.

It wasn't Damien's fault that I left early.  He was chugging along nicely but the crowd was unbearable.   I like reggae - most people do - but when buying the tickets, I forgot that the genre has been co-opted by every student subculture the world over.

The night as a whole wasn't awful, it was dreadful.  Full of dreads.  Mostly attached to 17 year old white Californian surfers who think Haile Selassie is code for being spangled - 'Dude, I'm HIGHLY selassie...WOAH!'.  These dudes dig reggae, dude.  Dude, they dig it because they can whoop dude-aciously, drag on rasta cigarettes and do weird up-and-down dude dancing.  And sing along to dude Damien's Dad's songs, like 'War' and 'Exodus'.  Or, at least, mumble along with a puzzled expression when the lyric is...

And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
that hold our brothers in Angola,
In Mozambique,
South Africa
Sub-human bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed -
Well, everywhere is war -
Me say war.

.....before bouncing up and down and punching the air when the chorus (and words they understand) skanks back in.

I was surprised that Damien played so much of his Dad's stuff. I was also surprised that his threads were so preppy, all blazer and expensive jeans (with a supersized topping of dreadlocks).  It was like watching a genetic tribute band - he did it really well but it was bizarre all the same.  And I might have been slightly 'woah-duded' by the cloud of ganja smoke inside, but I swear I spotted Bunny Wailer bopping up and down at the side of the stage.

Best of all was Damien's decision to find his own Bez whose talent (pictured above) extended to stalking the stage looking wild-eyed and waving the Ethiopian flag.  I'm not being flippant - he was compelling to watch.

Rastafarianism perplexes me, especially after talking to a few Ethiopians about it .  Apparently, the first time Haile Selassie went to Jamaica in the 1960s, 200,000 Rastas (who believed he was God incarnate) turned up to greet him and he refused to get off the plane.  Some God.  They could have picked P.Diddy.  But maybe Haile heard some 'WHOOPING' and a 'HIPPIDY HIPPIDY HIP HOP!' and decided he wanted to go home.  Don't blame him.

Dolby Stereo

On a whim, I went to see 80s-Electronics-Wizard Thomas Dolby last night.

He comes on stage wired up like a Dalek and performs cell-phone ring tones for an hour.

Quote of the night: 'I will now do a medley of my hit'.

I'm inspired though - I've bought a keyboard and become a GarageBand junkie, staring bleary eyed at beats and blips in the early hours.  I almost made myself dance last night.

Lyrically Speaking

With an Ipod semi-permanently glued to my head, I've been taking more notice of lyrics lately.  Here's some current favourites...

"Met a woman in a bar,
Told her I was hard to get to know,
And near impossible to forget,
She said I had an ego on me
The size of Texas
Well I'm new here,
And I forget,
Does that mean big or small?"
I'm New Here by Smog

"My Baby said she wanted some action
I said, Baby, I can't give you that
I'm a simple man
My Baby said she wanted adventure
I said, Baby, the outside world's not safe
We should just sit down"
Baby Said by Hot Chip

"I dressed up like a woman
Under these clothes for you
And you've left it till now before you tell me
That's not what you wanted me to go through"
The Perfect Gentleman by Broken Family Band

Hmmm - lyrics are better set to music, eh?  Otherwise it's just bad poetry. 

So here's the plan.

I'm going to write an opening line...and then you readers have to make a suggestion for the next line...etc....and then when we've got a song, my mate is going to set it to a variety of musical styles - the Bluegrass Mix, the Noodly Rock 12", the Ragga Rewind - and then we'll upload the best one on a filesharing system, viral the hell out of it online and become very very rich and famous.

So....a ONE, a TWO, a ONE TWO THREE FOUR...

"Sundays are a bit shite in San Francisco when you're all alone....."
"I once met a girl with a ping pong bat...."

(Er...anyone got a good opening line?!)

Desert Island Discs

I've been listening to a lot of Internet radio here (mostly because the telly is unbearable) and recently caught Radio 4's long-lingering 'Desert Island Discs'.

It's so dated, it's absurd.  It lingers like a living coma, one of those programmes whose very longevity ensures it's longevity. 

Aside from the long dead conceit of choosing '8 favourite records' ('favourite 30 gigabytes' would be more appropriate and even then you'd get bored immediately in this Ipod-music-murdering-age), I simply don't believe the guest's music choices are honest.

Try it yourself right now.  Your 8 favourite records ever.  For a millisecond, you picture yourself twirling by a palm tree to Modjo's 'Lady' before your brain over-rides your loins.....first the classics...The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Johnny Cash....then something to make you look clever.....Rachmaninov, Roxy Music, Miles Davis...throw in something to reprise your teenage years....The Stone Roses or Primal Scream.....a Cold2 or Uplay anthem to remember ex-girlfriends by....some non-Bob Marley reggae to seem more worldly than you are..... and you're done. 

BULLSHIT!  My Ipod tells me that my current favourite track is a remix of Le Tigre's 'Deceptacon', but I wouldn't want my future spawn imagining Gramps krumping, saucer-eyed and squealing 'I wanna disco, you wanna see me diiiiiiiissscccccooooooo'.

Even more unlikely are the book choices at the end.  Yeah, like FECK you want the complete works of Dickens.  You’ll be wanting a bumper book of jokes while your head fries and you scrabble around eating bugs for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I've got a better idea than Desert Island Discs.  It's called Desert Island DJ Twat.  Here's the set-up:

You're stranded on a desert island, thirsting for music.  Miraculously you meet DJ Man Friday, a native islander and the unlikely owner of some decks and a big box of 12"s.  'Thank the Lord!' you exclaim 'Some tunes to lift my sandy spirits!'.....but he then proceeds to play the 8 records that irritate you more than anything in the world....that have you whittling coconut shells into weapons with which to slice off your ears...that make you crave the whine of a million malaria-ridden mosquitos...

Namely:

1.  Movin On Up - M People
2.  Size Of A Cow - Wonderstuff
3.  Loveshack - The B-52s
4.  Living The Viva Loca - Ricky Martin
5.  Dancing In The Moonlight - Toploader
6.  If You Tolerate This - Manic Street Preachers
7.  Sex Machine - James Brown
8.  Fun Lovin Criminals - The Fun Lovin Criminals

Damn, there's a whole tsunami of musical misery - but the RULE is that it has to be stuff that DJ Man Friday would assume you'd like....so no novelty records, or Simon Cowell atrocities, or Dido, or Jamie Cullum or monstrously embarassing AudioBully 'remixes' of Nancy Sinatra.

Yes folks, this is an INTERACTIVE section of the blog!  What would DJ Man Friday kill your soul with?

Magic Numbers

I, along with AT LEAST a few others, saw The Magic Number's first American gig at Popscene last night.  Very good they were too – sunshiny pop to brighten up a wet, foggy evening.  Much better than the strumming misery of Calexico/Iron & Wine last week.  And they clearly like a burger which is important here.

Popscene hosts lots of 'British Indie' acts - it's a club as well as a live venue and it was fun to bob along to The Stone Roses, The Smiths and Saint Etienne.  Lacking a tattoo on my forehead saying 'I'M FROM LONDON', I tried to emit a knowing and embracing smile to these New World Anglophiles.  A few more pints of freezing cold Bass and I'd have been initiating sing-alongs and giving instruction for the shoe-gazing shuffle.

Isn't patriotism a strange beast? Chuck and Camilla's presence here hasn't stirred my Marmite at all, but I was nearly toppled with nationalistic fervour when I saw a local in a 'Just Say No' Zammo t-shirt.  That really is class.

Word On The Streets

Of growing concern is my habit of bursting into song in San Francisco .  If not gasping helplessly for breath every time I reach the top of a hill, I inhale the sweet view and belt one out.

It's not the singing per se that's a worry, more my choice of material.  Can you imagine the loathing that an impromptu tourist performance of 'London Calling' would attract in Hoxton?  Well nine times out of ten, I'm halfway through...

"I'm goooooooing to Saaaaaaaaaaaan Fraaaaaancisco"

....before I feel the withering stares.

It's a difficult position to recover from but i've found that you can just about segue into 'Summertime' (from Porgy & Bess') if the timing's right.

Not only am I the Voice On The Street in SF, I'm also the Word On The Streets.

Yes that's right - Mike Skinner and co are very popular here and, obviously, our parallel lives mean that I can act as translator/interpreter and social commentator.

Dry your eyes, mate, there's plenty of fish in the sea.