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Look Upon My Works Ye Mighty and Despair

Allergy Advice for Morons

Feb 2

Posted by Carps

As an allergy sufferer (peanuts, cats, pine trees, penicillin and work, since you ask) I’ve got wearyingly used to “this product may contain cats” warning on things down the years. The trouble is that everything is now made in one massive factory in Krakow or someplace. There’s just no telling if Marta Jacynzk has wandered from the KP salted nuts production line to flirt with Tomasz Zkyncksji, the handsome operator of the Dairylea packing machine and inadvertently contaminated the latter with nut dust. The little harlot.

Add to that the fact that “where there’s blame there’s a claim”, “no win no fee” and a populace stupid enough to come within a whisker of making Jedward the first global megastars of the new century and you wind up with this – a label I believe to be the single lowest point of humanity’s achievements. So without further preamble, I give you ASDA’s allergy advice on its milk.

miilk allergy

Well fuck me sideways

8 Comments

McDonalds in Ripon is Shite

Jan 28

Posted by Carps

Forgive me my intemperate language, but McDonalds’ systems are designed for morons. When you’re serving food that comes in at under a quid and your staff are a combination of minimum-wagers marking time during half term and people who would otherwise be retired or unemployed, you can’t rely on a willing attitude and customer service innovation arising from the ground up.

Even so, the McDonalds in Ripon must run ads like this during recruitment drives:

McDonalds Advert

Courtesy: The Ripon Horn

We go there once a week and I swear that in 190000 visits, there’s been something missing or wrong in every single one. Today, I ordered a Big Mac… and got a McChicken sandwich. Anthony ordered a plain cheeseburger that took 15 minutes to arrive. 15 minutes! For a burger! In McDonalds!

If there are any would-be Burger King Franchisees in Ripon reading this… please, please, please take the plunge.

[UPDATES: 18:2:2010 - ordered a double cheeseburger, got a single cheeseburger. Antcliffe order fries, got wedges]

13 Comments

Permit me a moment of old-fashionedness

Jan 27

Posted by Carps

If you faced the Leeds Corn Exchange and turned to your right, then at the top of the little row of shops that is known as The Calls, you would see Vinyl Tap. If you went through the door, under the awful signage (yes, it contained a stylised image of… a tap!) you found yourself in a little room maybe 20ft by 20ft square. On each side of the room were racks of vinyl records, arranged alphabetically and by genre.

If that didn’t tickle your fancy, you could always run along to Vinyl Addiction or the store in the weird ‘indoor market’ part of the Merrion Centre – that unloved outpost of 70s modernism. There in particular you would find a treasure trove of well-thumbed records. Prog records, with their beguiling sleeves that spoke of incense and Emerson… that Roxy Music cover with the two chicks on the front where you could see their pubes through the filmy knickers they were wearing… Iron Maiden records with the iconic Eddie crawling from graves and waving a Union Jack… indie records from bands that were often namechecked more than listened to – The Icicle Works… Durutti Column…

For the hardcord dance fan, you could pop along to Eastern Bloc Records – owned by one of the guys from 808 State and a source of pride to Leodensians as it was their only branch outside Manchester. And then there was Crash… Jumbo… stalls on the market where you might fancy riffling through a stack of awfulness in the hope of finding a rare record for a knock-down rate. Any and all of them preferable to the old HMV on Briggate.

I’m not a massive believer in the notion that Things Were So Much Better Then. Far more likely, I suspect, that most of us have fond memories of times when life was easier for us and give credit for that happiness to things that really weren’t that important.

But, our relationship with music has changed massively.

You had to commit to a band back then. I was an early fan of the Charlatans, based purely (I now recognise) on the haircuts which seemed somehow menacing and cool and grown up from where I was sat in my bedroom in suburban Leeds. I’d taped The Only One I Know from the top 40 and fallen in love with the record, but what I really, really wanted was Indian Rope on 12″. This was their debut single, famed for its relative rarity and also for the songs actually on it. But here was the thing… how could you even hear those songs?

The answer was there, on the wall in Vinyl Tap. Wrapped in cellophane, high beyond the reach of thieving hands with a small sticker saying “£40″.

£40!!!

This wasn’t an uncommon thing. Before music became digitised it was a properly manufactured item. Most bands released their debut single before anyone knew who they were. Consequently, the record companies would only press a small number of copies because obviously not many people were likely to buy it. So when a band actually made it into the charts, their early records were suddenly sought after for bragging rights among the cognoscenti. Anyone who actually owned a record like the 12″ of Indian Rope could be guaranteed the somewhat dubious pleasure of hero worship among local boys and a steady stream of bedroom visitors eager to hear the reputedly brilliant B-sides.

I suppose what I’m moaning about is the death of rock snobbery.

Today, you can dial up almost any song – regardless of obscurity – and for a cost between 0-99p (depending on your piratical bent) start listening straight away. Is it freer… more egalitarian… open…? Of course. But there’s something lost from the quality of the experience. That electric rush of finally finding a record you knew by reputation alone… the weighing up of cost against possible disappointment… the should you/shouldn’t you moment when you picked it up and looked at that £12 price tag, knowing that you could go buy 4 or 5 other singles for the same price. Carrying it home on the bus, wondering whether it would have been worth the money. Finally arriving home and putting it on the record deck with trembling hands.

These were the records we loved fiercely. It went so much beyond the song and the music itself in a way that is difficult to define.

It was an era that was already dying when I was  a lad. CDs were already gaining in popularity and while they were still physical objects they had a kind of impermanence about them. The last band I committed to in the sense of tracking down vinyl was Suede. Somewhere I’ve still got the first half dozen singles on 12″ – mostly bought on the day of release. History hasn’t been too kind to Suede as they were operating at the same time as Nirvana were laying waste to everything and just prior to Britpop. But even now, I can still remember the delight of seeing the cover art for the first time…

2 Comments

Conference speaking and carving chickens

Jan 25

Posted by Carps

From Wikimedia. Mine look nicer than this. And less blurry.

The first time I roasted a chicken, I was mortified when it came to the carving. Everything was rubbery and congealed and covered in unpleasant skin, fat and bone. I could barely get any meat at all from the bird despite increasingly frantic sawing. I rubbed my eyes and looked back again at the instructions… how had I gone  so wrong?

Eventually, I flipped the thing over and realised that I’d been trying to carve it upside down. I was young and not long out of home… how would I know? Epic fail.

I bring this up to make the point that whenever you do something new, there’s no magical way to know you’re doing it right. Today I roast any kind of fowl to perfection without hardly thinking about it (and know which way up it is supposed to be) merely through practice and a better understanding of which end of a chicken is its arse.

Anyway, I mentioned this a few weeks ago when I first found out I’d been accepted, but in case you don’t know I’ll be speaking at Think Visibility in Leeds in March. This is waaaaaay new territory for me! I’m used to standing on stage in front of strangers and singing, playing the guitar (not all that well) and generally making a fool of myself. But normally you can measure the audience in multiples of 3. These are people that have, at most, stumped up maybe £4 to see you. They’re most probably drunk and there are other people on the stage to distract their attention. If you’re terrible, they just won’t clap and will go buy some crisps instead.

For this gig, I’m going to be standing in front of quite a lot of people, who’ve paid good money to hopefully learn something from me. I’ll have to remember my lines… have a structure… enunciate things properly… have a point… sustain an argument… use PowerPoint on an industrial scale. All of this is entirely alien to me and I’ll have to do it all in front of total strangers, some of whom will be better informed than me no doubt.

You will, of course, forgive me for shitting myself slightly at the prospect.

5 Comments

Is the web really free?

Jan 19

Posted by Carps

My friends over at Swankymaison.com have found themselves in a quandary that is increasingly commonplace now that the internet has developed into a serious business channel. The Wild West days are well and truly over and the lawyers are busily making hay.

They carry a line of household goods from independent traders and manufacturers – the kind of stuff you don’t find on the high street. Now personally I would rather eat my own legs than admit to an interest in crockery, but the kids are mad for this stuff and the internet is a great way for small traders to reach massive new audiences so it’s all good, non? Well not according to Not On The High Street (hereinafter: NOTHS). Now this company was one of the first in the market to use this model of becoming a centralised distribution channel for a big number of small independents. You can read them wax lyrical about their values on their site…

“Once in a while, we’d hit upon a really special little business. One that had that certain notonthehighstreet-style about it, hidden away somewhere at an urban market, or a country fair, or in a tiny village lane. We’d meet the owner, passionate about their products, buy up half of them for our homes and families, then want the whole world to know about them. The thing is, there’s often no room for them on the high street; big retailers don’t stock small brands… yet they’re utterly, utterly fabulous”

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Only now that NOTHS are an established brand in themselves, they’re following the same route as the high street retailer they decry by using their power to close off other routes to market. Swankymaison is a pretty innocuous little start up – it’s hardly going to burn NOTHS to the ground to have someone else operating in their space. And it certainly wouldn’t harm the traders themselves to have another route to market…

Actually, I can understand why NOTHS are doing what they’re doing. At the end of the day, they are a business and exclusivity contracts are part of legal wall they can leverage in order to maintain their market share. But at the same time, I do feel a bit uneasy that they are marketing themselves as an ally of the small trader and a hello-trees-hello-sky bunch of hippies when really they’re cornering the market in a way that is fundamentally no different to that practised by the high street they claim to define themselves against.

Anyway, if you’re prepared to spend 6 quid on a egg cosy (wtf?), then put one in the eye of the corporate jackasses at NOTHS and buy one from Swanky Maison instead.

4 Comments

The Malt Shovel Drighlington: Superset Live! 8th Jan 2010

Jan 18

Posted by Carps

Ah… pub gigs. The bread and butter of any workaday band who has given up on loftier callings. “Pub rock” is the kind of withering epithet flung at any band that is loud and kind of blues-y, but it also speaks to the wheels-within-wheels snobbery in the local music scene.

Basically, you have “proper music venues” and you have pubs that put on bands. Weirdly, proper music venues are actually the kinds of places where bands are ground into the dust. These are the places with a 3 quid entry fee, a robbing bastard ‘promoter’ and a resident sound guy. I’ve touched on this before – such places are fine when you’re young and can pull in a few dozen of your mates at almost any time. When they get older and their interest wanes, that’s when you discover some kind of truth about how much you actually want to play music rather than chase notions of stardom.

I know quite a lot of people who are barely 30 who are letting their guitars and amps gather dust in a corner somewhere because they got sick of it. As the rewards for playing ‘proper music venues’ are pretty scant, it gets pretty to lose heart with your fellow musicians and, worse, music in general.

You turn up somewhere, play in front of nobody and get no money. Who’s to blame? Maybe the guitarist didn’t bother telling his friends on Facebook… maybe the set’s wrong… maybe this, maybe that. Those are the kind of nitpicky rocks on which friendships are broken. I look back at good little bands we used to play alongside and I bet maybe 2% of them are still going – and probably 100% of the failures were down to trying to play proper music venues and somehow ‘make it’.

It’s also accompanied by a constant low-grade resentment of bands that do make it – that tiny, tiny fraction of pretty unremarkable bands who have a break of fortune and find themselves with a 6 year, 3 album career and a support slot on tour with the Kaiser Chiefs this one time. At the back of the mind of bands, who don’t get that kind of break, it fosters a self-affirming set of beliefs that all those bands are shit… that the public are mere sheep… that record companies are evil… that it’s all so commercialised that there’s no room for art. Sound familiar? If so, it’s because you’ve spent time with someone whose band never quite made it out of the local gig circuit.

There’s truth in these observations, but you only really feel it when you’ve got the could’ve-been-me syndrome. I know, trust me, I suffered for years. If I ever get around to carrying on with the History of the Band, I’ll tell you how we came this close all those years ago and why I’ve never forgiven Embrace and the Stereophonics for taking chances that should have been ours.

Now look at any pub band. They’re still playing at 40 and 50 and enjoying the shit out of it. Free from the responsibility of an imagined future on the cover of the NME, they just play whatever the hell they like. They play pubs which have an entertainment budget, so hand over a bit of cash at the end of the night, regardless of whether the band bullied and cajoled a few friends to make the journey to Batley on a wet Thursday night. If you can’t see any nobility in that, then your misanthropy has overrun your optimism.

Anyway, this was a proper pub gig. The snows were falling heavily enough to make it touch and go as to whether we’d even get there. But inside, the welcome was warm and we played a fairly decent set. £150 in pocket too. That money’s going straight on monitors (basically speakers facing the other way to let the band hear what’s going on) because I could hear about 1 note in 6 that I was singing. Before we got to do an encore, there was a town-wide power cut and an outbreak of fun and freedom as people fell over equipment in the dark and went outside to hear the silence, see the dark and throw snowballs at each other

But we’re starting to book a few of these gigs in now… nothing fancy, just pubs. We get to play our music and some songs that we all like in front of people who generally stay to listen and we get some money thrown in for our troubles. I guess that makes us a pub rock band.

Set list – Covers

  1. Substitute – The Who
  2. Honky Tonk Woman – The Rolling Stones
  3. Shakin’ All Over - Johnny Kidd and the Pirates
  4. Come Together – The Beatles
  5. She Said, She Said – The Beatles
  6. Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
  7. Queen Bitch – David Bowie
  8. Can’t Explain – The Who
  9. Suedehead – Morrissey
  10. Be Bop A Lula – Gene Vincent
  11. All Your Love – John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
  12. Waterfall - The Stone Roses
  13. Walk on the Wild Side (kind of!)  - apologies to Lou Reed

Set list – Originals

  1. Until Tomorrow
  2. Bottles of Pills
  3. Everything I Want
  4. In The End
  5. Blind (Or a Tory)
  6. I Was Confused
  7. You Got it in You
  8. Sorrow for #1
  9. Unamerican
  10. Mississippi Fishcake Blues
  11. I Still Don’t Understand
  12. Here Come the Mandarins
  13. (I Want you to) Be My Sunshine
  14. No Flies on Me
4 Comments