clivemurray.com

Today was the day that the long leather coat came out of the cupboard and around my hunched frame for the maligned stroll to the station.

Danny Wallace’s podcast of his radio show on Xfm features an interactive segment where they play through bits of Island of the Lizard King, the Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own-adventure book penned by Ian Livingstone.

I drove roughly 190 miles on Saturday, and played guitar with Panik Attakk for roughly 5 hours.

I haven’t changed the water in the little vase that holds my lucky bamboo (from Ikea) in over a week, whereas it should be done every few days.

My latte is a little too hot for me to drink at the moment.

Last night I started reading Simon Kernick’s “The Business of Dying”, having been very impressed with “Relentless” and “Severed”.

The only time I am ever alone is when driving.

The clocks change near the end of this month, and whenever that happens I sit and watch my radio-controlled clock to see if it resets itself, but it never does. I usually have to take the battery out and put it back in, and only then does it correct itself. I find this disappointing every time I do it, yet I do it every time.

The table-tennis tournament that I’m organising starts this week.

This morning I managed to figure out how to use a variable in PHP to set the application root, thus fixing a problem I was having on a current project at work.

Alex has an impressive beard, but then again he has Hungarian lineage so that is perhaps a genetic thing. I know not. He is American in nationality, himself.

I don’t believe I have ever been hypnotised, but of course I could be wrong.

I don’t have a ten pound note to give back to Phil, which is mildly irritating, as I owe him ten pounds. I have a twenty, but no tens, and when I asked he didn’t have one either.

My Macbook has 7 applications open at the moment, and they are Firefox, Messenger, TextMate, iTunes, Dreamweaver, Finder and svnX. I will add that Dreamweaver is only open so that I can use its multiline search & replace across project functionality.

This post has likely interested absolutely nobody, but it has been somewhat cathartic for me.

Thank you.

–c.

It’s a bit of a rum old time at the moment, innit. Aside from the global financial meltdown, and all the other great big huge problems that the news services are screaming into our startled faces every five minutes, I had holiday bother. Specifically, as previously mentioned, the 14 nights in Crete that we had booked turned out to be with a subsidiary of XL, who spiralled down the drain literally as we were packing our bags.

We scrabbled around for the last of our cash and booked 10 nights in Majorca to at least get some kind of holiday, having ascertained that we would eventually get our money back from the Civil Aviation Authority for the failed holiday.

Jesus, I wish we hadn’t bothered. We’d have had a better time at home, at work, perhaps digging ditched for a week. Aside from the problems of the holiday itself – the people, the food, the weather were all shit – both of us had a cold for most of the time and I went and got an ear infection halfway through, which I still have. I exaggerate not a jot when I tell you that this was the worst pain I have ever known of any kind. The doctor we called out (at a cost of 80 euros) gave me antibiotics and we got some good painkillers which have so far helped a lot, though I am still at the time of writing mostly deaf in my right ear.

Anyway. That’s all by the by. What I really wanted to tell you is something much more exciting, and which will make some of the grey clouds – literal and metaphorical – go away for a bit:

The Krypton Factor is coming back.

–c.

Mixtapes are back, and this is how I feel today.

–c.

Yep, still here. Why no talkee? The usual, been busy with work etc. so just a quick update for youse alls.

• Still haven’t got round to doing another mix of Devil Went Down To Georgia, though I definitely will at some point. I’m 95% happy with it but I want to have a go at popping the vocals forward in the mix a little.
• The covers band is coming together apace, and by gum it has a name. A website will be forthcoming at panikattakk.com some time in the soon courtesy of my new 6-string partner, Mr Dan Ranger. If you are in or around the Eastbourne area later this year and see that name outside a pub, pop in for some splendid rock covers.
• The solo project is also coming right along. My alter ego has even got himself a holding page, though he appears to have done nothing else with it. He has, however, written three superb songs instrumentally – i.e. as far as the needing lyrics stage – and he tells me that even the words are going surprisingly well. He must have sobered up long enough to find a pen. Wonders will never cease.

So that’s how it is with me. Sorry I can’t be more entertaining than that at the moment. Tell you what, go watch some of Ze’s show. That’s always great entertainment. Tell him I sent ya.

–c.

I mentioned recently that I was going to be branching out into vocal tracks, and this is definitely very much the aim. It’s pretty daunting though, seeing as I’ve never done lead vocals before*, so I thought a bit about how I got started with instrumental stuff, and that goes back to my 4-track days.

Ah, bless the Fostex X-26. What a machine! On it I started out by learning and then recording cover versions of Joe Satriani tracks, and it was though doing this that I learned not just how to play some cool tunes, but how best to go about everything from starting to write an instrumental right down to getting it on tape and mixing it. Latterly this has translated well to digital recording and that’s where I find myself nowadays, but with no experience of doing things vocally. It followed that I should perhaps start by doing a cover song or two.

I tried doing a Nickelback tune to start with, but quickly found that I couldn’t reach the high notes. So I ended up doing something that’s pretty easy to sing, although I’ll be honest, I did manage to pick something with some tricksy guitar parts. Anyway, I’ve just lobbed together an MP3 of the first cut of it, and here it is.

The Devil Went Down To Georgia. [MP3, 192kbps, 5314Kb]

The mix is well off in places and things go up and down seemingly at random due to my eccentric approach to punching in and out, but I think you can see where I’m going with it. Hopefully I can find time in the next week or two to get a proper consistent mix done.

Anyway, let me know what you think! (Unless you’re Charlie Daniels… I think he might not be my bestest friend for what I did to his poor song…)

–c.

* A few years ago I did record a version of “The Old Apartment” by Barenaked Ladies, but it was pretty rubbish. I was even using Antares Autotune to cram my wavering voice into the right key.

I’ve been down lately, due to my lack of a band. Little Monkeys/Crashstars has finally collapsed properly – the last gasp re-union Beach Concert was obviously not to be, and I’m fucking done with it now. The one thing I’ll say about that – and this is a direct appeal to Jon E. Crash himself – is that we still have a half finished amazing sounding album, and one day we need to finish that. Not this year or next, fair enough, but it must be done one day. That is all.

And the covers band has stalled before it even left the rehearsal room due to lack of being bothered from another quarter, and meh. Whatever. And I am getting fucking sick of this fucking attitude across the board.

So. What am I going to do about it? Bitch and moan? Nothing? Call everyone fuckers and complain about my lot?

Fuck that noise. I am going to take the positives from all this and do something new. Something on my fucking own, that no-one can fuck up for me.

The one positive thing that came out of the JackBarrel covers attempt was that I discovered I can sing lead vocals. Not amazingly, and I’m totally inexperienced at it, but I can do it. So I hereby announce that my next recording project is going to be an album or EP of original vocal rock songs written, played and sung by me.

It will be called “If You Want It Done Right” (or similar) because ultimately I have come to realise that this is the only way anything will get done: I have to fucking do it myself.

So. Bollocks to everyone else (Jon, you’re mainly excused from that as the recent collapses weren’t your fault), I’m going solo. It will probably be under my glam stagename Tommi Starr, and it certainly won’t see light of day until at the very earliest middle of next year, but there it is.

So what do you think about that?
–TS

I’m not normally a betting type of person, aside from paying my four quid a week Idiot Tax, and I’m usually very disinterested in sport, particularly Foots and Balls, or whatever it’s called.

But last night I did find myself a little drawn into the Russia v Sweden game and was quite inspired by the performance of the Russkies. So this morning I took a little flutter and bunged down an optimistic Lady on them to win the whole thing! (And another on Spain, who seem to be doing rather well.)

What ho!
–c.

I know for an iron-clad fact that time-travel will never be invented in my lifetime, or at least that I will never have access to it. A fact. All conjecture aside about the possibility of it, I know this 100%.

Why? Would I have gone back and killed Hitler? Or Bush? Or Guy Ritchie? No.

I’d have gone back to 2001 and told myself that regardless of hard drive space, encoding my MP3 library at 128kbps was a BAD idea.

I mean, DAMN. I’ve re-encoded the really important albums like AfD and Back In Black, but here I am listening to Aerosmith’s Pump and it’s just treble. THIS SHOULD NOT BE.

–c.