clivemurray.com

It happened again…

[14:14]  <earthman> my guitar teacher added me on facebook
[14:15]  <nick> you have a teacher?
[14:15]  <earthman> nick: I did when I was 15
[14:15]  <nick> I thought you just burst out of a granite cocoon, guitar in hand?
[14:15]  <earthman> LOLZ

–c.
PS. The guitar teacher in question is Mick Hutchinson, who is still awesome. He taught me for 18 months when I first started in December 1988, and without him I would not be the player I am now.

…quite. No posts (real ones) since April. I know.

Are you married? Do you know how much preparation goes into a church wedding with full reception afterwards? It’s a lot. And following that there was the honeymoon, and now of course I am back at work and life is returning gradually to normal, and I suddenly don’t have to spend every waking second thinking about the wedding.

So I’m using it to work on music for my second album. Yes, that’s right, a second Clive Murray album is slowly forming in the 1s and 0s of my hard drive. I don’t know exactly when it will be complete, or exactly how I am going to go about turning it into a real object for people to enjoy, but it will definitely happen at some stage, so stay (loosely) tuned.

I am aware that I only got halfway through my countdown of my top 100 albums of 2000-2009, and this will be resumed shortly.

And finally, through a chance occurrence on Twitter, this afternoon I played Dave Gorman at table-tennis. I won 21-17, and he is a thoroughly nice chap, as you might expect if you know his work or listen to his radio show. Thanks for that Dave, if you fancy a rematch at darts, I’m happy to accept that challenge, though I appreciate you’re busy and I won’t hold my breath.

Cheers all, and thanks for waiting,
–c.

Yes I know.

I’m a bit busy what with getting married and all that.

Yes, married. 36 hours from now, in fact.

Yes. Really.

–c.

This shit has gone on far too long enough by half.

Please can it be arranged that I spend the majority of my days playing guitar, writing music and drinking coffee? I mean… really?

Thanks, much appreciated,
Clive.

This exchange happened this morning on the #ukmg IRC channel:

[10:32] <earthman> I love my mondeo
[10:32] <earthman> mind you, it’s the V6
[10:32] <nick> you have a car?
[10:32] <earthman> aye
[10:32] <nick> I thought you went everywhere in a huge black chariot, pulled by dragons?

I wish!
–c.

Some time back, perhaps December or so, I happened across a link to NME magazine’s top 100 albums of the decade, spanning release dates from January 2000 to December 2009. Unsurprisingly if you know me, I found little to cheer about in this list. My taste in music is not what you would call particularly NME-friendly. But seeing it made me start to think about what my top 100 albums would be from that period. The earlier years were when hard rock started to re-emerge from it’s dormant post-grunge state, and though unbeknownst to me at the time, the mid-00s bore a whole new genre – one that has since captured my imagination in a way that no genre has before – Folk Metal.

I don’t claim to have a wide musical taste. No, really. It’s about 60% hard rock, 25% metal (folk and otherwise), 5% acoustic, 5% ambient/chillout, and 5% classical, according to a recent poll I just took of myself.

So I have spent the last 6 weeks or so compiling my own list. And you know what? I’m going to post it, 10 at a time, with very tiny reviews. Why? It’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to.

Only 6 albums appear on both my list and NME’s, and those are:

• Muse – Black Holes and Revelations
• Green Day – American Idiot
• Muse – Absolution
• The Coral – The Coral
• Queens of the Stone Age – Songs for the Deaf
• Radiohead – In Rainbows

But where do they appear? And what do I think of them? And what will be in the top 10? Well the answers to all these questions and less are on their way soon for whoever gives a monkey’s.

–c.

Well, Rocktober was intended to try and get me blogging again, but it just turned into a chore by the end of it. I hope some of you enjoyed it and maybe even checked out some new music. But what it’s pointed out to me is that perhaps I just don’t need a blog any more.

I’ve been doing this since 1997 or so. Since before the word “blog” was coined – it was an “online journal” then. But now I have less free time, more to do offline, and more forms of entertainment jostling for my attention. Also Twitter has moved in and taken up at least a small part of that need to self-publish, even if it is just announcing what I had for lunch or what so-and-so said in the pub.

I’ve been compiling my top 100 albums of the 2000s ready for another post, or series of posts, and have come to the conclusion that there’s really very little point. I’ll probably still post it – I bothered to compile it after all – but after that I may well wrap this whole thing up. My archive goes back to 2003 here at cm.com, purely because before that I was doing it manually, and from that point on I was using a blog engine which let me move my archive from place to place. I hope it’s been enjoyable to some, perhaps even occasionally informative or amusing.

But I think it may be time to hang up the keyboard officially.

Yell if this displeases you – I do still read the comments – but unless life changes wildly in the coming months I can’t see me feeling like updating this thing very much more.

One thing I can say – my top 100 albums of the 00s will feature a lot less Jack White than NME’s chart.

–c.

Yeah yeah, I know. No embloggenising for ages, and even when there was some I was just trying to flog a car. That’s not the kind of service you’ve come to expect, and for this I’m sorry.

Usual caveat – busy busy busy, and all that. A few quick bullets on life in general at the moment:

• BAND: The covers band Thunderhead has its first gig this Friday, at The Fountain in Hastings. This will be the first time I’ve played live in two and a half years, and it’s going to be a blast. On stage at 9:30pm, get there if you can.
• OTHER MUSIC: Work on the second solo album will recommence very soon, since all spare time has been consumed recently with rehearsing for Thunderhead.There is also a brand new originals rock music project waiting in the wings featuring myself and fellow ex-Little Monkey, Jon, which will blow the bloody doors off when it happens. Keep ‘em peeled, as Shaw Taylor used to say.
• CAR: The Honda Civic mentioned below is sold. After all that it went to a guy I work with.
• WORK: It’s all still ticking over here at Profero. Busy busy busy, which is a good thing in these troubled times.
• WEDDING: Still on course for 21/6/2010, though we probably should have done more for it by now. Still, since it’s on a Monday, we reckon we’ll be OK with things like reception venues. Again, we’ll soon have free weekends, so that kind of thing will get sorted out shortly.

And that’s about it really. Trevor the cat is fine, Saffron is well and keeping busy, and life continues on its merry way. There is one more piece of big news I’m hoping comes together shortly, but that must remain under my ample headgear for now, I fear.

Yourself?

–c.