SkinMechanix - Work in Progress

Last night was my last public lecture for the next six months, possibly longer. I’ve decided to reduce this activity to zero because I really do have to knuckle down and get on with some music.

Truthfully, the lack of activity in the studio has been causing much frustration, perhaps more so in the last month than at any other time than in, say, the last ten years, and certainly not since everything went horribly wrong at the Alfa Festival when I essentially put the whole studio into storage for ten months. Giving up on your dreams and ambitions is never easy. Sometimes, you just cannot walk away from your goals. It’s just too difficult.

I’ve been looking forward to this event for some weeks. Secretly, I told myself that this would be the last lecture at the start of the month, following our adventures up at Kielder Castle though it wasn’t until last night that I publicly announced that I wasn’t doing any more talks for at least six months that I finally felt free.

And, yes, there was a real, tangible sense of relief that this experiment was now over, certainly for the time being. I still feel it now and I know, with an unusual degree of certainty, that it really was time to step back and take a breather.

I’ll still do the radio slot, if they’ll have me, and I’ll probably be attending the BUFORA conference in Newcastle in July so I won’t disappear completely, but my focus will shift back towards the music, where I feel happiest, where I feel most comfortable.

I really should have filled this in before now as the experience was worthy of documentation.The session at Radio Newcastle went pear-shaped very quickly and it was only through luck on my part and professionalism on their part that we got through the experience relatively intact.

I was on-air to promote the forthcoming SynthFest event, which is all about synthesisers and DIY music. I decided to take some kit along to give the listeners a demo of what we were all about. I’d recorded a thirty second backing track on my MacBook and had a small, hand-built DIY step sequencer to illustrate the DIY process.

The first problem - the studio staff weren’t fully prepared for the amount of stuff I’d brought with me. We agreed to leave most of it disconnected.

The second problem was the killer though - the Mac Book died two minutes before going on air.

On the point of giving up, I set the  JD800 synth down on a spare table and left the ARP Odyssey propped up against a wall.

With little or no time to relax, the interview began…  and it all went very well indeed. I was able to demo the step sequencer, then give the presenter (Jonathan Miles) a go on the synth, which he seemed to enjoy.

Back home, I reset the Mac Book with the traditional three-fingered salute and it’s worked normally ever since.

The moral of the tale is this : simplicity is it’s own reward. Do not over complicate matters and if a piece of kit isn’t 100% necessary then leave it at home.

Right now, I’m coping with a nasty little bladder infection and therefore not in the best possible frame of mind right now. I have a course of little white pills from the Doctor and they’re working well, and I expect to be my usual charming self in a few days time. Meanwhile, apologies if I am a right arse. It’s not deliberate just a result of my body no fully cooperating with the master plan.

Appearing on Radio Newcastle today at around 1120 am GMT to promote SynthFest and Maker Faire.

Taking some kit along too. :)

I’m no good at politics. Never have been. From a politician’s point of view, I suffer from one fatal character flaw. Call me naive, but I honestly and earnestly believe the best of people as opposed to expecting the worst.

In recent days, I’ve witnessed the workings of two Cabals, independent of each other and yet both behave in exactly the same way.

The thing about Cabals is they are composed almost entirely of individuals who want to be right, and they want to be right more than anything else in the world. And they want the world to know that they’re right too. Even when they’re wrong.

Take group a) for instance. They witter on and bitch endlessly about this and that. In reality, it’s a thinly disguised pissing contest. A self-reinforcing pissing contest too. Do they care about the damage that they do both to people and that person’s reputation? No, they don’t. Are they interested in the genuine facts? No, they are not. Even when those facts are laid out in front of them, they simply look the other way and return to their original mantra.

Does the world at large care a damn about what they say or think? No, it doesn’t. Not one iota. Does this stop them wittering on? No. They do it anyway. Self important, self-deluding pricks. File under mostly harmless.

Now take group b). For years and years they lay dormant, happy to remain ignorant of the world around them, content to allow one virtually autonomous individual to enact all of their business arrangements on their behalf. It doesn’t take a Nobel prize winner to figure out that an autonomous individual working  largely in isolation will occasionally need guidance. A lack of steering invites problems, mistakes and a drift in policy.

More so, because of their apparent hands off approach to management, these lofty isolated and disconnected individuals developed a reputation for being reclusive and difficult to work with. The local papers adopted a position of ‘no smoke without fire’ and so editorials began to appear asking for explanations, digging for dirt.

When their lynch pin suffered a personal tragedy - the death of her husband of many, many years - group b) suddenly found themselves faced with a mountain of problems. Having utterly failed to manage and direct their business for years, they suddenly found that they didn’t really know what was going on.

And so they turned on their lynch pin, an individual who had served them for many, many years and who was both liked and trusted by those who knew her. Rather than a  slow, gentle transition between management systems, they were utterly determined to be right, and, in short, their lynch pin was fired. She and she alone was blamed for their shortcomings. There was no re-numeration package. Not even a farewell gift. Her employment was terminated. Goodbye.

Yes, I thought it was shameful too.

Since then, yes, they’ve done a good job at resurrecting their business. They’re more in control than they were. They’ve installed new IT equipment and are generally more open in their dealings with the general public. They’ve won a large number of battles, some public, many private. Good for them, you might think.

But now they’ve become a little too big, a little too confident. They’re at the stage when they’re bullying those around them and possibly exceeding their already slender remit. They’re using their magazine to criticize anyone who doesn’t tow the party line, actively naming and shaming those who don’t meet their standards.

There’s currently a general feeling that they’ve over-stepped their mark, become bossy. They’re stifling discussion too, and now they’re picking fights with people and organisations who may, in the long run, get the upper hand again. Expect the worst. A slighted politician has a habit of repaying old debts in kind.

To date, I’ve been fairly close to the action, certainly close enough to see for myself what’s going on, and, right now, at this very instant, I have an uncanny sense that it might just be a good idea to put a little distance between us, to step back a little before I get sucked in to a fight that I want no part of.

Much the same applies to group a). Placing too much emphasis on the meanderings of a collection of largely irrelevant individuals is guaranteed to skew your take on business. It could even push you into making bad moves. Again, I feel the urge to push them away, forget ‘em. If they really mattered then…

So maybe I’m better at politics than I thought. :)

This morning’s partial eclipse of the sun, visible over most of Europe, coincided with the BBC’s StarGazing Live event. I’ve been doing odds and sods for BBC Radio Newcastle for about a year - usually talking about events in the sky or trying to plug our late, much lamented astronomical society, Luna - and the idea of an event on Sunderland Sea Front came up at the back end of last year via Hannah Bayman, Look North’s Weather Girl.

Hannah took the idea to her managers and, this morning, a number of us found ourselves installed on Cliff Park near Seaburn to watch the eclipse, except that the weather had other ideas - a solid wall of cloud between us and the mysteries of space. 

Live TV doesn’t depend on the weather and so the planned interviews went ahead as scheduled. Graham Darke, Chairman of Sunderland Astronomical Society, went first, shortly followed by fellow SAS committee member, Paul Meade. I was last up, fumbled my words and kept talking when I wasn’t supposed to. Two or three takes and Hannah gave up. I was a lost cause. Or so I thought. 

Jules’ texted me at dinnertime to let me know that we’d both been on national TV, she gazing wishfully into space, looking for inspiration, me in a ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ soundbite. This broadcast went out on BBC News 24 every hour for the rest of the day. 

Later on, Look North featured more of my interview, skilfully edited to remove my obvious fluffs. 

I was glad that I wore the full length Parker jacket, buttoned up right to the neck. It hid the fact that my face and neck are still swollen from my recent surgery though, vain bugger that I am, my nose looks almost normal. I was a bit concerned that it would put people off their tea - ‘Mum, there’s a nose talking on the telly… Can I switch it off?’

Meanwhile, the dog is busting for a leak and so I don the same scruffy Parker jacket and escort said pooch up the road. The neighbours are loitering across the road and, straight away, the comments start. “He’s a star…”

Just two questions remain. Was that my fifteen minutes? Can I have another go?

One thought also comes to mind. Was that small earthquake detected in the region of Red House Farm the sound of a foot going through a TV screen? I do hope so. :)

Bad news when you can’t find a decent image of your album out there on the net, even on the bloody pirate sites. What happened to all those reviews of The Fabulous Neutrinos? Wasn’t it “… probably the finest commercial electronic music album of all time”?

Dismayed.

How long does it take for a piece of work to become irrelevant?

New Year’s Eve and we’re driving to the super market. The roads are surprisingly clear and the snow and ice that’s been part of our lives for the last month has finally given way to an amorphous grey sludge that sticks to the underside of the car, huge chunks bouncing around inside the wheel arches and off the brake pipes.  It’s not something that I enjoy. Not at all.

To deaden the noise, I put a CD into the player - Greatest Air Guitar Hits 2 - and press ‘Go’. Queen’s “We Will Rock You” bursts forth though we both quickly tire of the noise. It seems cliched, hackneyed, done-to-death. We skip to the next track and, alas, it’s the same. At any other time, we might have paused to listen but we both agree that we’ve heard this too many times in recent months to be impressed, to want dwell any longer. 

Back in February, we played a couple of pub gigs - The Three Tuns in Gateshead to be specific. There were four bands on that night and, whilst they were all mighty fine bands, we were the only group who played original material. Indeed, when band number four took to the stage, the began covering tracks that had already been played by the previous two bands. That’s when I knew it was time to leave.

Covers bands are nothing new. They deliver what an audience wants - entertainment, nothing more, and usually at a fraction of the price of seeing the real thing. I mean, who wants to pay £100 or £150 to see The Stones play live in a stadium with another 50000 screaming fans when you can see a cover act playing identical material for next to bugger all at your local pub?

The problem of course is that modern digital technology enables a covers band to reproduce an exact replica of an original work without having to cart around thirty odd guitars, amps, cabs etc etc etc. My little Zoom Pod contains something like twenty amp simulations and fifty effects units, all perfectly modelled down to the last detail within it’s little DSP brain. It only weighs about half a pound too, so I don’t get a hernia picking it up. You can’t say the same for a Marshall Stack or a Vox AC30.

When you’re exactly re-creating a piece of music, so that the punters can’t tell the difference between you and the Real McCoy, there’s no room for your own personal interpretation, no space for your own voice. The work no longer belongs to the original author and it doesn’t really belong to you.

Is that why so many of these covers bands sound so utterly gutless and soulless? 

I spent this morning working out my lecture schedule and project list for the first part of 2011.  I was fairly determined that I would spend more time working on music this year but, already, the lecture schedule is looking stupid. I’ve already started to back out of certain commitments.

In December 2010, I signed up to the government’s STEM Ambassador Programme. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and it’s intended to address the serious shortfall in the number of experienced Science teachers at work in the UK’s education sector. In short, we don’t have enough Physics teachers anymore.

This trend away from the core scientific disciplines began in the early 80’s when Mrs. Thatcher insisted that there was no tangible benefit to be gained from pure scientific research, and that there was no real future in manufacturing industry either. Indeed, she maintained that the UK’s future would be better served by ‘invisible earnings’ such as banking and insurance, and service industries like call centres and tourism. The ‘Thatcher vision’ of Britain in the year 2010 was that the UK would be a great place for Bankers to launder money and for wealthy tourists to visit when the weather was sunny. That worked out great, didn’t it?

With STEM, I go into schools and tell kids all about the joys of a career in the sciences. It isn’t as hard as you might imagine. Kids do still have a tremendous interest in science and, in particular, astronomy. It’s only later, when they get into their teens, that the interest seems to wain.

My STEM Ambassador status more or less formalises what I’ve been doing for the past two years anyway, except that I don’t get paid for it. Sort of. Some schools are happy to pay expenses, some are not. In reality, it’s not about the money. It’s about getting the message across.

If we don’t embrace science then we won’t have a manufacturing industry to fall back on the next time the banking sector decides to screw the country to the floor. 

Forty one years ago, when I was eight ears old, I got into a fight. I started calling some older (and bigger) boys a bunch of names, and they didn’t like that. One of their number got the jump on me and, smack, I took one right in the kisser. A big fat fist the size of a cantaloupe right in the face. My friends, who had, until then, stood at my back, ran and left me to fend for myself. Several kicks later, I managed to get away from the gang of boys (The Little Lamp Agro Boys!) and limped home alone, nursing my wounded face and my wounded pride along the way. I told my mother that I’d walked into a lamp post, an excuse she found plausible given I was famous/infamous for my clumsiness. A couple of days later, by way of the Mom’s network, my Mum discovered the real reason why I was sporting a large and impressive black eye. And she wasn’t pleased. Actually, she was royally pissed, as was my father. After that episode, I was, essentially, grounded for the next ten years.

Skip forward seven years to secondary school, Rutherford Comprehensive School to be specific. My nose is now bent quite badly out of shape and my father suspects that it will get worse as I grow older. Father was an ex-army man and, in his younger days, had been a boxer for his regiment. He was therefore no stranger to sports-related injuries. Indeed, for most of his army career he was known as ‘Camel Nose’, which was actually a fairly accurate description of his proboscis. Following one particularly energetic bout, he was left with a seriously smashed beak, which required the immediate attention of the camp’s Doctor. Short on equipment and facilities, the MO’s solution was, with hindsight, quite ingenious really. With the aid of two suitably burly medical orderly’s, he proceeded to jam my father’s busted conk in the hinges of his office door…  and then slowly began to close the door. ‘This might hurt a bit’ he told my father. No kidding. This treatment fixed the immediate problem but my father’s nose was smashed almost certainly beyond repair.

That was 1948. Skip forward to 1975. Medicine and rhinoplasty have moved on.

At the tender age of 14, I had my first nose job. I don’t remember much except that I puked a great deal and it hurt. A lot. However, the procedure (a basic septoplasty) was not a success, firstly because the surgeon under-estimated the damage to the cartilage and, secondly, due to the efforts of one of  my school mates, one Sukhdev Bogan. Bogan took a particularly sadistic delight in pulling, tweaking and punching my fragile nose at every available opportunity. On one occasion, Bogan grabbed my nose and turned it a full 90 degrees to the left. He thought that this was enormously amusing, as did his friends. For me, the result was a very loud, very angry scream of agony as the still-fragile septum detached itself from the bone. This was immediately followed by a pool of blood which puddled at my feet outside of our form room. Bogan, sensing that he was not going to get away with this assault, ran for his life and later denied any part in the action, claiming that he’d been somewhere else entirely. My form teacher was unconvinced, and Bogan found himself on Detention. Again.

I didn’t dare tell my father what had happened. He’d paid for my operation out of his own pocket and it had cost him a big fat wad of cash. I knew what his reaction would be if he found out that Bogan, a borderline sociopath, had wasted all that cash.

(If you’re wondering what happened to Bogan then that’s another story entirely. The last I heard of him, he’d been sentenced to five years in a French prison for passing dud cheques.)

Skip forward in time another thirty five years. It’s Winter 2009 and, thus far, I’ve endured an unknown number of injuries to my nose. Thankfully, few have come from any kind of pugilism, and the vast majority stem from playful head-butts received from various dogs over the years. My septum, that lump of cartilage that separates the two halves of your nose, is now badly bent out of shape with the result is that my nose whistles when it gets cold, and not necessarily in tune either. I can hardly breath through my right nostril and my left is big enough to jam your fist in. Both nostrils block easily, especially so if I get a head cold. The only way to clear a persistent and difficult blockage is manually.  It’s not nice and it’s not pretty.

Last winter, I went through hell. A head cold combined with a small but painful injury to the septum itself meant that breathing was agony and sleeping impossible for about a month. I resolved to have something done about my busted nose and, as soon as the spring arrived, I went to see my GP. He referred me to a consultant at the Freemen Hospital in Newcastle, who then agreed that there was a problem and that the could help. He also offered to reduce the size of my nose so that it was more in proportion with the rest of my face, and also to remove the obvious break in the bridge which gave it the characteristic hook. 

The surgery took place three weeks ago. I spent the first two weeks with a plaster bandage covering about a third of my face. That remained in place until I had a bad reaction from the bandages and it had to come off. Since then, I’ve been sporting a plastic shield which protects the delicate bridge/septum join, which I’ve been told will remain fragile for the next six months. Absolutely no contact sports until summer 2011. Fine by me.

My new nose isn’t comfortable yet and is still very, very sensitive to physical contact, especially if I snag it when changing clothes, but it is healing. The plastic shield will come off on Wednesday though I’ll still need to be wary of any injury for another five months.

That said, my new nose looks good and doesn’t dominate my face the way it used to. I can also breath again, after a fashion. It isn’t perfect yet because the tissue is still swollen from the operation and so periods of good air flow don’t last long. However, they do promise a slightly easier future.

One of the joys is that my ears are also clear for the first time in many months. The delicate tubes that link the ear, nose and throat have been fixed. Balance has been restored and they’re comfortable again.

This has led to some interesting observations. I can now hear mixes properly again, and some of my own recent efforts do indicate that my hearing has been failing, or at least out of balance for the last year.

Hence, I’m now back in the studio teaching my ears to mix properly. It’s about getting my ears used to the sound of the studio and how good it can sound when everything is working properly. The good news is that this involves a lot of listening to CDs, including lots of artists that I’ve not heard in many, many moons. I’m importing most of these into iTunes at the highest possible resolution, with the output going to the main mixing desk via a 24-bit USB converter. There have been a few surprises along the way, a few discoveries - parts that I’ve not heard before, mixes that seem more alive than in previous incarnations.  

A very pleasurable experience, actually.