clivemurray.com

Emergency first: I need to borrow a 4×12 guitar speaker cab this weekend, to collect on Saturday or Sunday and return Tuesday night. Can anyone who reads this help? It’s worth twenty sterling to you if you can. Mail me on “stuff” @ this domain.

Now the reason for this: my band are playing two gigs this weekend! Here are some details:

Sunday 27th May
Bar Monsta, Camden
on stage just after 9pm (headlining)
entry is £6

Monday 28th May (Bank Holiday)
The Fountain, St. Leonards, Sussex
on stage around 4pm for 2 hours!
entry is free

Hope to see you at one or both!
–c.

So I haven’t done the WordPress upgrade yet. Yesterday I noticed that the theme I use had a newer version out, so I upgraded that instead. This will account for any slight differences noticeable from yesterday.

I’m hoping to get the actual WordPress upgrade done today some time, though this is subject to having spare time around work stuff, so it may or may not happen.

As you were.
–c.

I’m going to upgrade my WordPress installation sometime soon, possibly today. This might mean things break horrifically.

Hopefully not, of course, but well… we’ll see.

–c.

Do you know what’s good?

Peep Show is good, that’s what’s good. I borrowed a couple of my mate’s DVDs of it, and watched series 1, and it’s really really good.

Now you know what’s good.
–c.

In the UK we’re immensely fortunate to have i) the BBC, ii) Sir David Attenborough (the second greatest living Englishman), and iii) some of the best wildlife documentary teams in the world. Some of the footage I have seen (and I’m sure we all have) over the years has been by turns heartwarming, awe-inspiring, downright creepy, occasionally bloodthirsty, but always always interesting.

See here, then, a recently captured piece of footage that is flying round the internet right now depicting a set-to between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and a pair of opportunistic crocodiles. It does fall slightly into the bloodthirsty category, but then again, that is nature. What we have here is some South African safari guides showing some camcorder-toting American tourists around a safari park, and what you hear is their own commentary live as it happens.

Battle at Kruger Park

–c.

This is a long one – Muse to Eddie Izzard via James Bond, Trotsky and The Silver Surfer.

Check it:

• Muse links to
• Matthew Bellamy, which links to
• Illuminati, which links to
• David Icke, which links to
• Marvel Comics, which links to
• Stan Lee, which links to
• Silver Surfer, which links to
• Warren Ellis, which links to
• Desolation Jones, which links to
• James Bond, which links to
• James Bond music, which links to
• Chris Cornell, which links to
• Tom Morello, which links to
• Hammer and sickle, which links to
• Trotsky, which links to
• Vladivostok, which links to
• Arsenic, which links to
• The Bradford Sweet Poisoning, which links to
• Arndale Centre, which links to
• Eastbourne, which links to
• Eddie Izzard.

Clickety click.
–c.

If you are going to leave your mobile phone on your desk, put the fucker on silent.

If you are not going to put your phone on silent, then take it fucking with you.

It really is that simple.
–c.

For almost as long as I’ve had a website, I’ve had little randomised quotes that I like from songs popping up in various places. In the previous incarnation of clivemurray.com they were up in the header, in this version they’re over there in the sidebar. Look! Over there!

Well one of these is from a Wildhearts song called “29x The Pain”, and it goes “Where you hiding, Richey James?”. I was introduced to the Wildhearts by an old flatmate, Dave The Goth. He lent me his Wildhearts’ Greatest Hits album, which I um… still have. Anyway, I grew to love most of the songs on there, and “29x The Pain” was one of the best.

Some time after I had entered that lyric into the list of quotes (there are 113 at the moment) I heard the song on the radio and listened out for that particular line – most of the song consists of namechecks to Ginger’s influences, so it can be hard to pick a particular one out – but even though I was concentrating on each line as it went by, I couldn’t find the Richey James reference.

I thought no more of it for some time, deciding that I must have just been distracted at the critical… ooh look, a bee!

But then this exact event happened again, and I became mildly freaked out. I went home and listened to my version of the song and sure enough, there it was. I wasn’t imagining it. And until today I have simply assumed that on both occasions I must have lost concentration at the crucial moment.

Happy was I, then, to discover just now that there are two recordings of the song, and the line in question is only in one of them.

Phew.
–c.