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THE ARCADE MONKEYS |
posted by jim on 2/02/06
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It’s official. I’m getting old. I feel more at home in Café Revive with the old ladies and gents in Marks & Sparks than I do with the yoof in Maccy Ds (where does the apostrophe go?). I call it Marks and Sparks. I’m getting old. I dress more like the old M&S dudes as well, as we all queue up for our ‘cuppachinos’ and almond crossonts I feel safe and at home.
I went into Topman today to buy an accessory and the clothes on sale made me feel like I was shopping for my grandchildren. The music playing on Topman FM was the Arctic Monkeys. Or the Arcade Monkeys as I keep calling them, just like my mum when she talks about Roger Williams and Pierre Brosnon. I’m confused by the Monkeys. I feel I should like them but I don’t really. It’s got a lot to do with all the ‘accidental pop stars’ guff on the TV, I don’t believe it. I’m too cynical to believe you can become a chart success by sending a few emails out and posting on a few message boards. I’m suspicious of the implication that they’re signed to a record label run by their mums in a back bedroom. It’s a pretty successful label. As I once wittingly said on the radio, “Domino are pretty big, they’ve got restaurants all over the world.” Worst of all though – aside from the envy and jealousy of the size of their popularity in comparison to mine – worst of all they make me feel so damn old. That’s why I prefer the Arctic Fire… Oh bollocks.
I’ve never really won anything. I’ve got a football medal from school that I didn’t really earn, having spent every match of that particular football tournament sat on the subs bench waiting in vain for one of the other players to break a leg or score an own goal, so that I could be brought on to heroically score the last minute winner and be carried shoulder high around the cheering playground. I have got some silver and gold discs for my Carter album sales, including a gold one for the Carter album that topped the charts –Number 1 in the charts, I suppose that’s winning something. Apart from all that, every pound I spend on the National Lottery is a wasted one. Not for me the opportunity to claim that my life won’t be changed by the three million quid I’ve just won. It won’t be me.
I want some prizes.
I’m not on any shortlists so I’ve made one of my own.
I would like please:
An Ivor Novello for lifetime services to songwriting
A Brit Award for the same thing
The Mercury Music Prize for my next album ‘School’
An NME Award for lifetime achievement
And then I want to be called ‘the godfather of lyrical indie rock’. Or something. In the same way that James Brown is the godfather of funk, Paul Weller is the godfather of mod – the modfather – and Iggy Pop is godfather of punk.
Eddie Argos from Art Brut was influenced by my work, I’ve heard that Preston from Big Broth…sorry, from The Ordinary Boys was a Carter fan. I bet Arctic Monkey Alex Turner has got all my records.
Let’s not wait until I’m dead and buried before I get the plaudits. I’ve already written my acceptance speech, “I’d like to thank…”
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WHERE’S WILLY? |
posted by jim on 24/01/06
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http://www.dewright.demon.co.uk/Bill.jpg
There was a whale in the River Thames. A Bottlenosed whale. It died. They’re conducting an autopsy to find out what killed it, probably all the shit and condoms and broken glass and crisp packets from the Thames. It was important to chop the whale up and find the cause of death and then hold an inquiry to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We don’t want shoals of bottle bugled whales swimming up the beautiful brownie shimmery shitey to die. It’s the tip of an iceberg. Maybe that’s what attracted it here.
In spite of the sad ending to the story it did seem to unite the capital city for a few hours. Perhaps we stopped stealing each others’ mobile phones and pushing each other out of the way at bus queues for a while.
And then it started to bother me how they’d dispose of the body. Burial at sea? Cremation? Would she – a female whale: fucking up all the ‘Free Willy’ headlines – be turned into soap? Buried in a huge grave? What would Hugh Fearningly Whitingstall do?
http://www.cfhf.net/lyrics/images/secret.jpg
And then there are the squirrels. The culling of the grey squirrels in Cumbria because they outnumber the red ones. Whittingstall must be licking his lips.
Jason Reynolds from campaign group Red Alert said, "We are in an unfortunate situation here in the Lakes that we are now at the last stand of the red squirrel and we have to keep England's native red going. It's the last place it remains so the greys are not welcome because it is causing the extinction of the reds."
Jason, Jason, Jason. Haven’t you heard of Charles Darwin? Natural selection? The survival of the fittest? Ethnic cleansing?
This kind of human thinking towards animals has always bothered me. Like one of the arguments against vegetarianism is that if we don’t eat meat then cows and pigs will become extinct. So what. I’m sure the cows don’t care. The pigs don’t give a shit. I imagine they’d all rather take their chances with extinction and the end of their family line, rather than have their relatives’ brains and testicles compressed into making some fat human’s meal a happy one.
They should give me my own wildlife programme on BBC2, I can be the next Bill Oddie.
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THE MUSICIAN’S FEAR OF THE MUSIC SHOP RETURNS |
posted by jim on 13/01/06
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http://newsfeed.tcm.ie/images/people/JadeBigBroPA.jpg
So, here’s what happened. When I was rehearsing for the School Orchestra gig, my guitar started making farting sounds. I swapped guitar leads and the flatulent sounds stayed. I diagnosed a broken pick-up. For the Islington gig I taped an emergency pick-up to my guitar, which I’d take back to the shop after Christmas. It was still under its 12-month guarantee and I was also entitled to a free ‘set up’, which for the non musos is like getting your car serviced (of course for the yes musos, it’s nothing like that at all).
I’ve talked here before about my phobia of music shops and the people who work there and how I got over this somewhat when I successfully bought my new guitar last year. Anyway, I went back to the shop yesterday and after being ignored by the six people behind the counter for five minutes I was ‘served’ by a grumpy bloke who reluctantly took my details and then reluctantly tried to find the phone number of the guitar’s manufacturer for the next 30 minutes, until he got bored and handed me over to somebody else. This new assistant took my details again because the grumpy geezer hadn’t saved them on the computer.
To cut what’s a pretty boring story that I wish I hadn’t started short: after one hour in the music shop, with my details taken twice, the guitar maker’s phone number finally found and telephoned, all to the accompaniment of some kid playing Coldplay songs on a piano keyboard, we found the battery. There’s a fucking battery? I had a flat battery in my guitar. I felt stupid. I felt like someone who’d put petrol in his diesel car, like the man who took his fax machine back to the shop because every time he fed a fax message into the machine it came back out the other end, I felt like Jade Goody. To add a little insult to my injury it was then pointed out via the shop assistant’s guitar twiddling, diddling, harmonics and showing off – playing the guitar so much better than I ever would – it was pointed out to me that it didn’t need a free set up either. And so I left the music shop with my guitar between my legs. As I climbed the stairs I swear I could hear all the many, many staff pissing themselves laughing at the nob jockey who’d just been in the shop, they’d dine out on the story for years. I’d never go into a music shop ever again. My only consolation was that I was a sort of pop star and they all worked in a shop.
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WHEN IS AN ORDINARY BOY A CELEBRITY? |
posted by jim on 7/01/06
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http://dox.media2.org/barista/archives/galloway_616.jpg
By the end of 2005 I’d recorded my next album, mastered it, designed the sleeve and given it all to the record label. I’d finished writing what I’ve been calling my new book and I’d posted that to a literary agent. My next tour was booked and the tickets were on sale. And now I find myself waiting for something to happen. Waiting for everyone else to do their bit. To manufacture my album and offer me a fabulous book deal, sell my gig tickets. It’s all out of my hands now. I’m getting impatient. I’m probably bored. Maybe I should just give in and make the most of my free time: Read more books, learn a new language, take piano lessons. I’ve got three whole series of Seinfeld to watch, along with all the commentaries, interviews and other extra stuff. There’s the first series of Peep Show as well and then of course I could just sit on my arse and try to get a better score on the Bop-it game that my manager bought me for Christmas, I’m the crap one at Bop-it in my house, I think it’s a ladies’ game. http://mimish.org/pg_friends/bopit_tim.jpg
But instead of any of that, I’m browsing the world wide web, finding nothing, listening to radio talk shows talk about the same thing for hours on end. I’m wasting time being dumfounded by an MP in the Big Brother house and I’m worrying endlessly about whether anyone will show up at my March live dates or buy my new record if it ever gets made. And is my ‘book’ actually just 80,000 shit words, poorly and naively strung together by somebody whose ambition is bigger than his talent?
I want to spend 2006 making acceptance speeches. I want to win the Mercury Music Prize, or better still, be nominated and then make a big song and dance about how I’m not going to show up. I want my ‘lifetime achievement to song writing’ Ivor Novello. Presented to me by Rod Stewart in a wanky but swanky West End hotel.
I had to leave the house. Before I went mad or my acne from all the seasonal chocolates and pickled onions suffocated me. I took a bus to Croydon to do some bank duties and have a coffee in Marks & Spencer’s with all the old ladies. The bus fares have gone up, from £1.20 to £1.50. Surely that’s an unreasonable leap. What about £1.30 and £1.40 for God’s sake? I suppose I’ll have to get an oyster card, there’s little choice in the matter. What about casual travellers? Those without credit cards and the Internet? People who live at the bottom of a hill, far from a sweet shop, or with better things to do with their time than buy bus passes or understand the complicated oyster card system. I wish I was a teenager so I could jump on the bus through the back exit doors, without any need to pay, scratch my name on the window and then hop off at the next stop a couple of hundred of feet later.
Michael Barrymore’s crying in the Big Brother house, you can hardly blame him.
I’m currently reading Deadkidsongs by Toby Litt, bought for me by Fruitbat and his girlfriend for Christmas.
I’m listening to the Bright Eyes live album and watching Three Men In A Boat.
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TEAM JIM BOB'S END OF YEAR LISTS |
posted by jim on 21/12/05
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I thought I might do this all in lower case like I’m phone texting, which is something that I have yet to have tried. So that’s what I did, but my Microsoft Word wouldn’t let me do such a thing and while I was looking down at the keyboard that I was tapping away on, Microsoft Word automatically changed every lower case i into a capital one and every new sentence now began all capitalised and grammatically correct. Anyway, I’ve never been much of a mobile phone enthusiast, in particular I hate the person who thought it would be a great idea to fit the latest phones with speakers and then people can listen to shit music on the bus and watch GMTV – the first TV programme to go live on your mobile – on the train. Now I can’t think straight or read my book on the bus because someone’s watching Fiona Phillips giving dumb blondes a bad name and playing Fiddy Cent on their poxy telephones at a too loud and too tinny volume and tone.
Anyway again, played a brief set in Brixton at the Offline Christmas party. I’m a sucker for a well organised event with my stage time set in a big piece of stone. So I didn’t like going onstage about an hour and a half late and then for some reason I managed to lose my voice during my short twenty five minutes of singing. So I went to Ireland at the craic (do you see what I did there) of the next dawn to support the reformed Sultans Of Ping with the fear. Terrified I wouldn’t make it through the two Irish gigs. And do you know what? I did. There were a lot of squeaks and silent notes but with the help of the audience I made it to the end of my two Irish sets. In time to watch the Sultans and get drunk. They were utterly superb by the way. A good end to an interesting and ambitious year. Happy Christmas everybody, thanks for all the support, see you on the other side.
Here are the results from the Team Jim Bob jury:
TEAM JIM BOB’S TOP STUFF OF 2005
JIM BOB
Top 5 Albums Of The Year
1. Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning/Digital Ash In A Digital Urn
2. Arcade Fire - Funeral
3. Babyshambles - Down In Albion
4. Chris T-T - 9 Red Songs
5. Rufus Wainwright – Want Two
Top 5 Gigs Of The Year
1. Bright Eyes – Somerset House
2. Jimmy Webb – Hammersmith Lyric
3. Sultans Of Ping - Dublin Village
4. Beck – Hammersmith Apollo
5. League Of Gentlemen Are Behind You – Croydon Fairfield Halls
TV Programmes Of The Year
1. Peep Show
2. Still Game
3. QI
4. Arrested Development
5. Casanova
Films Of The Year
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
Goodbye Lenin – DVD
Book Of The Year
In The Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami
MARCUS T OLLINGTON (Jim’s manager)
Top 5 Albums Of The Year
1. Arcade Fire - Funeral
2. Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning
3. British Sea Power - Open Season
4. Chris T-T - 9 Red Songs
5. Tennant/Lowe - Battleship Potemkin
Top 5 Gigs Of The Year
1. Jim Bob's Christmas Concert - Islington Academy
2. Arcade Fire @ Reading Festival
3. Sultans Of Ping/ Jim Bob - Dublin Village
4. British Sea Power - The Forum
5. A-ha - Brighton Centre
Special Mention - Kylie @ Earls Court
TV Programmes Of The Year
1. Doctor Who
2. Peep Show
3. Lost
4. Without A Trace
5. The X-Factor
Film Of The Year
The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe
Book Of The Year
The Miracle Life Of Edgar Mint - Brady Udall
NEIL MR SPOONS WITHEROW (jim Bob’s uber roadie)
Top Albums
9 Red Songs - Chris TT
Employment - Kaiser Cheifs
Fine Art of Surfacing - Boomtown Rats (re-issue)
Top Gigs
Sultans/Jim in Dublin Dec
IDou/JSSW at Water Rats London
Cat Empire - Sheps Bush London July
Pixies - Ally Pally Aug
Top TV
Doctor Who
West Wing Series 6
Coast
Film and Book of the Year
Only saw Revenge of the Sith at cinema and that was shocking.
Didn't read anything particularly outstanding either.
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AFTER SCHOOL |
posted by jim on 11/12/05
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I woke up on the Thursday feeling like I’d been run over by a bus, the last Routemaster perhaps. That 159 from Streatham to Oxford Street. http://www.aidan.co.uk/md/Lon159OldBusV4801.jpg
The one on the telly with the jolly clippie in the uniform with the whistle and the smile.
http://media.bestprices.com/content/vhs/70/148674.jpg
Not the usual 159 with the old misery guts who can’t be arsed to walk the four feet or so down the bus to look at my travelcard and rings the bell when the old lady with the heavy shopping has almost got her arthritic foot on the platform. Anyway, I woke with a neck ache from all the headbanging that took place the night before during the greatest ever performance of ‘Angelstrike!’. There was the back pain from carrying those heavy amplifiers and that piano and then my legs – my poor old man’s legs which throbbed from walking up and down those many flights of stairs from the dressing room to the stage of the Islington Academy.
What a gig. What a truly wonderful gig that was. It seemed like a good idea at the time: to form a 12-piece band and perform a dozen songs that nobody had ever heard before. And it was. A bloody good idea. I had these dreams that we’d be booed off, or of a bored audience checking their watches for Five to Sheriff Fatman. But no, it was all a dream. Everyone seemed to love it. It’s mad to leave it at that of course. All the stress of putting together such a large band for an hour or so onstage is insane. I expect the Jim Bob School Orchestra will perform again before too long.
http://indaviess.freeservers.com/Orch.jpg
I don’t want to blow my own trumpet – Lindsay played trumpet by the way – but I thought the gig was so good that I’m a bit miffed that nobody would be there to review it and that they aren’t sitting around on comfy but stiff chairs talking about it on the Late Review on BBC2. We aren’t performing a couple of numbers on Jools Holland’s Hootananny. It probably won’t be endlessly played on the radio. All this should happen. All this stuff on the TV about bullying in schools should have ‘Back To School’ playing in the background, they could’ve taken ‘The Revenge Of The School Bullied’ from the ‘Angelstrike!’ album as a hint of what was to come. Instead, it’ll be Keane and Coldplay for the sad bits and Arctic Monkeys for the exciting violent happy slapper re-enactments.
As I type this James Blunt is about to appear on his own BBC special. There is so little justice in the world.
The Jim Bob School Orchestra were and are: Chris T-T, Jon Clayton, Simon Henry, Kate Grimaldi, Holly Morrison, Damo Waters, Arran J Lovechild, Jason Powerdrill, Richy Crockford, Lindsey Lowe and Vicky Johnson.
Peep Show is brilliant.
http://www.richard-pryor.com/rpryor.jpg
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I Hope Gwyneth Wasn't Listening |
posted by jim on 30/11/05
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Friday 25th November – Roundtable BBC 6Music
I always feel a bit dirty after I’ve reviewed records.
I used to love ranting about how much I couldn’t stand other bands, but then I mellowed and started to feel that being negative about everybody all the time was a bit…negative. Not good for my karma. So when I go on a review show these days, I always intend to be entertaining and hopefully funny and plug my new DVD http://www.carterusm.co.uk/shop.htm
and my next gig http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=uk&query=detail&event=132308
So I can only apologise to the bands I cheaply took the piss out of on the BBC, there’s enough bitchiness in the media without me joining in. I may write to them all to say sorry, I didn’t mean it, I was trying to be amusing and plug my stuff
http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=uk&query=detail&event=132308
I went to see the League Of Gentlemen’s panto at Fairfield Halls in Croydon and again I felt a bit guilty, having so strongly criticised the venue in my book
http://www.jim-bob.co.uk/book.shtml
I should be barred from the place. Anyway, I got in and the show was brilliant. Juvenile, lots of pooh and sex gags, great festive fun, even if some Scrooge at the Evening Standard tells us it was rubbish.
I’m reading the Contortionist’s Handbook, recommended by somebody on the Carter message board, it’s very good.
Listening to the Babyshambles album a hell of a lot, it’s very good. Comments like this usually provoke a few responses of ‘junkie scumbag’ and that sort of thing, but at the risk of getting all bitchy again, if dirty is Babyshambles and clean is Coldplay, then give me the junkie scumbag.
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JACK REGAN'S JACKET |
posted by jim on 17/11/05
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When I was in Devon I visited a few charity shops with my girlfriend. This is something I used to do in London but don’t bother anymore as some of the shops have got a bit up themselves and think they’re Knightsbridge boutiques. Selling you moth ball stinking tat at over inflated prices, refusing to let you buy things cheaper as the charity’s Internet department have looked the item up on eBay and that’s what it costs there.
In Devon there were still things on the racks worth buying, not all snapped up by dealers and ponces. I bought myself a jacket http://johnthaw.topcities.com/images/Thaw/Sweeney-80.jpg
that has been commented on as being: a) a Sweeney jacket and b) a paedophile’s coat. I also bought a book by Douglas Coupland called ‘Life After God’, which is superb. It has a lot of drawings in it and just a few words on each page. Reading it on the train I was aware that anyone looking might have presumed I was reading a children’s book. A sort of Harry Potter-children’s-book-in-adult-cover in reverse situation.
That ‘Girls and Boys’ or was it ‘Boys and Girls’? pop music sex and gender bending programme on BBC2 was entertaining. Up until we reached the nineteen nineties and the present day. I should have guessed really, will I never learn? Another documentary where the early nineteen nineties didn’t exist, jumping a few years from The Stone Roses straight to Oasis. A couple of references to under achieving bands – which always means Carter by the way – and how we were all saved by Suede’s androgyny and artiness.
And then of course, after a decent kissing of Oasis’ arse it descended – as all British music docs must – into the Robbie Williams show. The entire premise for the programme was thrown out of the window to play us some Williams and for the usual: ‘what a great performer’, ‘the obviously talented one in Take That’, ‘Robbie cures cancer’ etc, etc.
Went to see the Frank & Walters, who were brilliant.
My DVDs arrived http://www.carterusm.co.uk/shop.htm
Watched the Take That doc, which bizarrely enough didn’t descend into a Robbie Williams – or ‘Bob’ as Gary Barlow likes to call him – hagiography. Jason Orange was a bit strange though.
http://www.deanesmay.com/files/deanesmay-orange.jpg
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PASTIES |
posted by jim on 6/11/05
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http://www.apwn69.dsl.pipex.com/2005/01/16/023.jpg
It was nice to get away from London. To go somewhere quiet, where my best chance of getting myself shot would be if I strayed onto a farmer’s land and he thought I was trying to worry his sheep. I wanted to look up and see stars in a clear night sky. To not be woken up early in the morning by the shouts of the neighbours.
This was my working holiday in Devon, in the ironically named Ringmore (there was no phone signal), I was going away to finish a version of my new ‘book’, a version that I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to send to a few publishers. In spite of all the distractions – the sea, the cliffs, the starry skies, the relations, the sheep, the pubs and the pasties, the wind and the rain – I managed to get a fair bit done and should print and post a copy to a few people soon.
Do you remember that TV gardens programme with those two old gay dudes, it was called, I think, ‘The Curious Gardeners’. Anyway, the place where I stayed was owned by a couple whose garden had featured on that prog as well as on ‘Gardener’s World’, an amazing garden with sculptures made out of wine bottles and lots of crazy stuff, reminded me of Barcelona, apart from the weather.
On the way to Devon, passing Stonehenge is always the point when I feel like we’re getting somewhere, a halfway point and time to stop for an overpriced, tepid and freshly cooked yesterday vegetarian breakfast at a Little Chef. I’m no hippy but I like the ‘Henge and was alarmed to see that some kind of large business park is being built nearby, I expect it’ll be a bunch of fast food restaurants and a cinema, maybe a TK Maxx, the alarming aspect is that it’s called Solstice Park. Like I said, I’m no hippy but isn’t that a bit tasteless and insensitive?
Saw the family, avoided Halloween by going to a Halloween party with them. Found 6 different vegetarian pies in a small Devon Co-Op, bought a jacket in a charity shop, that’s both old man chic and also a bit James Dean, which I like to think sums me up. Had Dean not died I think he would have turned out just like me. Came home for fireworks, expect them to still be going off till Christmas.
Did you hear me on Radio 2 with Andrew Collins? I thought it went really well. I passed Alex from Blur on the way in. I used to know him slightly and he triple took me as we passed. I think he knew he knew me from somewhere but couldn’t work out where. I suspect he’s sat at home even now, going: a film? Is he in politics? Newsreader? Playing Botticelli with himself. Who was that enigmatic looking and handsome young man I saw at the BBC?
Which reminds me, on that ‘where in the world…PC World’ advert, is that Danny from Mega City 4? He’s also in an advert for car insurance or something. Answers on a postcard.
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