Dec 23, 2009 | Music
from our front window this afternoon
And so the Christmas holidays are upon me with all thoughts of work banished from my mind until 6th January 2010. We woke up this morning to what passes for a decent snowfall in Edinburgh – we don’t usually get too much here although the temperature can plummet impressively from time to time. The city has not ground to a halt and we are not experiencing substantial problems.
Actually, compared to the winters we used to get up in East Kilbride in the nineteen seventies this is but a passing autumnal shower. No doubt I shall receive advice from Canadians of my acquaintance wishing to remind me what snowfall is really all about, although parts of Perthshire were apparently colder than Alaska last night.
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
Anyway, to the business of the day: my top cds of the past decade. Selecting these wasn’t actually all that difficult although ranking them (loosely) was. My criteria were that they had to be new cds released after 1 January 2000 with no re-releases, remasters or “Best Of” compilations included.
My choice is based on those which have “stuck” with me, either because I play them a lot or because, even if they are not frequently played, they have taken me someplace I haven’t forgotten.
So first up, lets mention all those which are right up there but haven’t quite made it to the top ten – let us call all of these ones as being “equal eleventh”. I have ranked them by year of release
- Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea : PJ Harvey (2000)
- Curly’s Airships : Judge Smith (2000)
- Fashionably Late : Linda Thompson (2002)
- Cammell Laird Social Club : Half Man Half Biscuit (2002)
- The Wind : Warren Zevon (2003)
- The Evening of my Best Day : Rickie Lee Jones (2003)
- Between Here and Gone : Mary Chapin Carpenter (2004)
- 50 Minutes Later : Phil Manzanera (2005)
- Back Home in Sulphur Springs : Norman and Nancy Blake (2005)
- Cruel Sister : Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (2005)
- Deadwing : Porcupine Tree (2005)
- Strangers in Another Country : Rosalie Sorrels (2008)
- Black Ice : AC/DC (2008)
Honourable mentions to Garbage, Goldfrapp, John Tams and Eliza Carthy, all of whom produced very solid work in the decade which I enjoy a lot.
My personal top ten cds of the decade will follow in a subsequent post…
Dec 20, 2009 | Uncategorized
It came from somewhere else...
Winter arrives with a soft patter of snowflakes which hit the south of the country first thereby ensuring lots of rolling news coverage of the sensational discovery that it snows in winter.
The weather in the UK mostly comes in from the west off the Atlantic and I knew something was up the other day when the clouds were coming in from the East. Edinburgh, though, as ever missed the bulk of the intial snow with a light covering followed by a hard freeze – our usual pattern. But that’s OK – we know it’s going to happen and we know that usually the main winter weather comes in January and February.
Friday saw an office Christmas lunch and party. I was with my old colleagues in the team I worked with until earlier this year and it was good to see them again. The meal itself was mediocre but the company more than made up for that. I ended up spending longer in the pub afterwards than I had originally intended and I think that was because, not being part of that team any longer, the relationship had changed and was a bit more relaxed (for me at least).
I only have a couple more days to go at work before holidays and this year I feel that I really need them. I haven’t had a real break since we were in Orkney and Shetland in the summer and I really feel in need of one. Traditionally the winter solstice marked the shortest day, after which the light began to return and, without going all pagan on anyone, there is an element of that in christmas holidays this year – some recharging of the batterys and loosening of the tension in the shoulders.
Although there were lots of arguments about when the millenium actually was marked (and remember all that fuss about the bug?) it was ten years ago that we were all getting ready to welcome in the year 2000. Quite aside from wondering where ten years have gone, I have been blogging for most of the decade and kept an occasional journal for myself before that. So I may also, while I’m off, attempt a review of my decade and possibly even try a quick reminiscence of my favoutrite music released during it – the majority of which will never have been so vulgar as to trouble the popular music charts of course, with the exception of Goldfrapp to whom I am listening as I type.
Dec 15, 2009 | Uncategorized
In 1997 I spent a year on a Government Study Fellowship investigating the possibility of moving the registration of titles to land from a paper based system to one which was online. It was a condition of the Fellowship that the research had to be international and in the course of the year I visited Ontario and New Brunswick in Canada, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia (Sydney) and New Zealand (Wellington). It was a tough year but someone had to do it…
Anyway I wrote a report on the subject which got published – it still gets a mention on Amazon here – and established a project to explore automated registration of title to land in Scotland. If you want to read what I wrote then you’ll find it online here (opens a pdf document).
This morning I went along to the formal launch of ARTL (reported briefly here) and listened to some speeches and reflected on something going live with a Ministerial launch which was the result of the work I did more than a decade ago. I left the project in 2000 to seek pastures new and so the hard work of taking it from idea to reality was done by others of course and I can claim no particular proprietary rights in how it has turned out – and nor would I want to. It was, as the title of this post suggests, a distinct blast from the past and as I listened to the assorted dignitaries I permitted myself a wee rub to the ego. A bit like my later work on eProcurement, the most gratifying thing was to reflect on how it had gone from sitting with a blank sheet trying to work out what was going on and how things might be done to seeing a room full of people enthusing about the benefits to them of the reality.
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I have been listening intently for the past couple of days to an album called Trespasser by Chris Wood. I had known of him tangentially through The Imagined Village and his work with Andy Cutting. I am enjoying the album a lot although it demands some listening on occasion. Although it is very English in its conception and execution it has, oddly enough, given me some pointers towards some worries I have been having with the very French Brassens.
At Welling last month I took from my encounter with Goun and appreciation for the ways in which Brassens’ songs can be presented in a very different way from the originals without them being damaged and that was playing in my mind when trying to work out what I am going to do with La Princesse et le Croque-Note which is an awkward song to interpret. However I had worries about that song and presenting it to an English speaking audience. What I have taken from Chris Woods is his uncompromising insistence in letting a song speak for itself and not getting between it and the listener to mediate its meaning.
This doesn’t in itself make the translation/adaptation of the song any easier but it does remind me that my responsibility is not to make the song easier for the listener but to make the best English version of the song that I can and let the intelligence of the listener work out what it is about.
Dec 13, 2009 | Bah! Humbug, Music
It’s that time of year again.
I have an ambivalent relationship with Christmas. I dislike the intense pressure to buy and the fact that it begins earlier every year. I dislike the way that every year the shop keepers are moaning about lack of business but then come January the reveal to their surprise that actually they did quite well. I dislike the false bonhomie and jollity and the endless crap music playing over shop speakers and, worst of all, childrens’ choirs singing carols.
Having said that I like the idea of Christmas and I like the traditions of Christmas when they’re kept simple.
I went into town this afternoon with the intention of scouting around for presents. For the most part it was a grizzly couple of hours although the chap in the photo seemed to be doing quite well with tips by the simple expedient of standing on his head in a bucket in the middle of the street.
I took refuge in the German market at the foot of The Mound and had a warming mug of gluhwein which had an extra kick of spirits in it. For all my attachment to mumbling “bah! humbug!” it was quite nice to sip the hot drink on a chilly afternoon and just enjoy the hubbub of people around, including many who were obviously visitors to the City.
I liked the fact that visitors were clearly enjoying themselves here: sometimes we residents are too hard on ourselves and see only the things which for one reason or another displease us. It is nice to try and see Edinburgh through the eyes of our guests.
I treated myself while I was out to a newly released DVD of Christy Moore and Declan Sinnott Live at the Barrowlands, Glasgow. I watched it tonight – and what a cracker it is. I haven’t been to see Christy Moore for a number of years yet. He always was an intense and powerful performer but this is in a different league, and Sinnott is fabulous.
Dec 9, 2009 | Music
At work I am currently trying to structure some data and write a report around the evidence that the data provides. I have been trying to do this for a while and it has proven to be time consuming although I’m pretty sure I have cracked it structurally, which has been my biggest problem. Doing this in a busy office has been tricky because of the distractions which are all around – principally the constant noise and hubbub which is enough continuously to interfere with concentration. I have countered this on a couple of occasions by working at home to try and get things written but this isn’t really a sustainable option and so I often simply close my door at work and put on my MP3 player.
This too can be tricky as not all music is conducive to working. Material which requires concentration or invites close listening to lyrics is not really on because these are simply more sources of distraction. Conversely, if the music is too quiet and reflective then, if played while trying to make sense of a 1700 line spreadsheet, it can act as a potent soporific. Generally, then, I go for material which is so familiar that I can zone it out. Sometimes I find things, though, which I had forgotten that I had on the player and this happened today when I listened to the second album released by The Buggles under their own name – “Adventures in Modern Recording”.
I have always liked The Buggles and have all three of their albums. The first, The Age of Plastic, is a modern classic. Although Video Killed The Radio Star has become something of an overplayed cliche, it got to be played so often because it is so good and I can remember when it first appeared out of nowhere on the radio way back when I was still staying at Coates Hall in Edinburgh when I was first a student. I bought the album then on a pre-recorded cassette which I still have although it was replaced by cd some years later. The second Buggles album – although I am being mischievous here – is otherwise known as Drama by Yes. This is an album which I largely ignored for a quarter of a century but which I now quite like, even if it is relatively short. The two tracks from Drama which Yes have been playing on the current tour – Machine Messiah and Tempus Fugit – have stood the test of time pretty well. The odd one is Adventures in Modern Recording which I didn’t especially like for a long time on the basis of one or two listenings. I have to say, though, that listening to it this afternoon I really rather enjoyed it as background and I shall have to listen to it properly soon.
In a complete change of tone, the Buggles were followed by another album which I have had for more years than I care to recall (on vinyl) – Alan Stivell A l’Olympia. Somehow it seems to be that recordings which stayed closest to a musical tradition or which were, in their time, the most oddball and leftfield, seem to have stood the passage of years better than much which was hailed at the time as “classic”. A l’Olympia has problems through headphones – the un-necessarily intrusive audience noise is one, the often peculiar separation of instruments through the channels being another, usually when it sounds very like a studio overdub has been pasted onto the live master. I know it so well, though, that I don’t really mind.
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