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Blog Archive: March 2003

Adult Fun
Album Stuff moves forward AGANE dear readers - this coming Sunday we are having a BAND MEETING to settle on the running order and sort out any tweaks that might need making. Being the MIGHTY New Model Band For The 21st Century that we so obviously are, we are FORGING new ways of doing this i.e. having a BARBECUE whilst we do it! Yeah!

I must confess i am perhaps a little too pleased about this turn of events than might seem proper, as i have always envisaged The Validators as a Band That Barbecues. When i picture us as a group of people (rather than, obviously, a BAND in a STUDIO) it's never in a pub, it's always wearing Dad Shorts and Dad Sandals mooching around in front of a barbecue. I don't know why, as it's something we've never done, but it always seems to suit the more RELAXED, laid back band relationships that's unique (to me anyway) about The Validators. Hooray for us!

posted 31/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Excuses
I was up in Leicester again at the end of last week, although this time it was much less for fun and much more for WORK - back again to help with my Old Work, and GOOD LORD i worked hard. I was in at 8.15AM! IN THE MORNING! I then had a three hour training session, did two hours solid PROGRAMMING, had another 90 minute meeting/training session, then coded STRAIGHT THROUGH until 6.30pm! HOLY MOLEY! I never worked that hard when i actually worked there, and all this was in the middle of a STEAMING hangover to boot. Verily, i didst earn my money that day.

And then on Saturday the Filling In My Sandwich and i went to PETERBOROUGH, in order to visit some parents for Mother's Day. Well done us, fifteen points and a special tick. It was LOVELY actually, and after an Sophisticated Lunch we went to have a look round the Cathedral. It was amazing - I lived in Peterborough for most of the time I was growing up, and like all Peterborians must have been to the Cathedral no more than twice in that whole time. It's incredible though - the building itself is awesome, and the area around it is like falling over and finding yourself in Medieval Times. We spent about half an hour just wandering through the windy little streets that surround the grounds, utterly removed from the NOW that was just over the wall, it was magical. So much so that i was actually starting to feel quite proud of my hometown...

Then we tried to go and look inside ANYTHING at one minute past five, only to find the entire city centre was SHUT. Ah yes, Peterborough!

And yesterday i couldn't update the webpage because the clocks changed. Yeah!

posted 31/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Ron Mueck
I saw some ART last night, oh yes! Went to the National Gallery to see the Ron Mueck Exhibition, and it was BRILLIANT. He does non-life sife sculptures that are completely life like - the pregnant woman one, which they seem to be using for all the advertising, is about 10 feet tall, but looks utterly real, so whilst looking at her you keep expecting her to open her eyes and say "Clear OFF!" The best one was a little bloke sat in a big boat "echoing childbirth", apparently, I just thought he was trying to look round the corner to see who was coming in. Everybody in the room had a big GRIN on their faces, it was SMASHING.

This was a DEFIANT return to my original London Intention to see some ART every week, which I rather let go shortly after the Central Line went down. It made me feel GOOD, especially when i EMERGED into a floodlight Trafalgar Square and found myself thinking "London is GRATE!" And THEN i went to Waterloo station and discovered that there's a Moving Walkway down to the tube station, like in an Airport. It was FANTASTIC.

posted 27/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Fame at Last!
A bit BORED at the moment, and have thus been merrily GOOGLING away to see what thrills are out there, and LO! I discover THIS! It's a proposed list of ZX Spectrum-based ringtones, and HOLA! there's Hey Hey 16K!

I think that's lovely. I absolutely LOVE the fact that Hey Hey 16K caught on with the Retro-Gaming SCENE, and especially the way lyrics from it still sometimes crop up in people's sigs and things. It's funny the way things like this work out with NANO-celebrity. Over the past five or six years of me ROCKING the world in a solo fashion I've got known for a few different songs amongst very different groups of people - the old-fashioned Twee Indie types know "Work's All Right", for instance, whilst "The Fair Play Trophy" seems to be vaguely recalled by some Footie Types. "Bands From London", "Payday", "Easily Impressed" and my version of "Boom Shake The Room" seem to get REMEMBERED from live ACTION too... it's nice really and, just between you and me, i always try and end gigs with a couple of my "hits", just to be sure of things ending OK.

I like gigs, and i like writing songs to play at them.

posted 25/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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The RICHES of ROCK
I have had some dealings with the PRS just lately For a while I have idly wondered when I'd be getting the Legendary £50 for the time Steve Lamacq played "Easily Impressed" last January - that song, and most of the others on Milk & Baubles got played all over the place, but it's pretty much guaranteed that only really major plays will ever register with PRS, and the biggest payout of all is for a Radio 1 play - several years ago it cost £50 to join the PRS for life, and so one John Peel or Steve Lamacq would set you up forever, but now they've raised the membership fee and so it is Less Beautiful.

THUS i contacted the PRS to see what had occured. I must admit I've always been a bit sniffy about the PRS, viewing them as Lackeys Of The MAN, but the chap I've been speaking to this past week has been LOVELY, and a PLEASURE to talk to - it turned out that my forms registering "Easily Impressed" never got to them, so the song was drifting in their database unclaimed and unpaid for. The more i thought about this the more convinced i became that it had actually been a worldwide radio SMASH, and that i would be able to RETIRE on the profits, and when i dropped off my forms this morning (one of the ACE things about living in That London is that EVERYTHING is Just Around The Corner) i was mentally preparing my resignation letter, and trying to decide whether to favour Menorca, The Isle Of Wight, or BOTH with my holiday Villa.

Since then i have been informed that my DUES amount to just £60, but still - this means that, if earnings continue at this level per annum, the album will have paid for itself ENTIRELY on radio plays by the time I'm 63! COME ON!

On the way from the PRS into work I took a short cut and saw some Actual Human Faeces in a shop doorway, but even this could to DENT my PLEASURE to be alive and rocking on this fine morning. Hello world, let us ROCK!
posted 24/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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A New Magazine
I bought a new magazine yesterday - Word. It was BLOODY GRATE, i was AMAZED. I spent a VERY happy, if slightly stunned, 90 minutes coming back from Leicester reading it cover to cover, except i didn't GET from cover to cover because it was PACKED with FACT. The people writing it seemed ENTHUSIASTIC about what they were talking about, and actually seemed to KNOW what they were talking about, and it was FUNNY. It's got DAVID QUANTICK writing in it, which would really be MORE than enough, but it also had an interview with Ian Hislop, and lengthy PIECE about how to be a stand up, and thing about The History of Daredevil which (unlike EVERY article EVER about comics in non-comics magazines) was interesting, correct, and did not appear to say "Wham! Pow! Socko!" at any point... oh, and lots of dead good reviews.

The CLINCHER for me was that it not only gave a lengthy review to the new Mull Historical Society (which is slowly creeping up on my SUBCONSCIOUS, tho does not yet enjoy the warm spot by the fire that the first album does), BUT directly quotes Half Man Half Biscuit to make a point. That's me sold then, but LO! They mention the mighty biscuit AGANE in a (dead good) article about GADGETS, and then give them a whole PAGE in the extra mini-magazine. HOLA!

Maybe i'm going on about it a bit, but after so many years DESPAIRING of ever reading a good music magazine again since "Select" went under, i am CHUFFED to bloody BITS to have finally found one - like the STRAPLINE on the cover says, "At last! Something to READ!"

Writers of Word Magazine beware! You will be INUNDATED with copies of "This Is Not A Library"!

posted 22/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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A Good Meeting
Back up to Leicester last night for the AAS Board Meeting, where as usual we ROCKED, even if we were a bit creaky and out of practice. Main THRILL as far as the world beyond us is concerned (for LO! The Main Thrill for US is usually something fearfully dull to do with Distribution) is that we're going to try and do an AAS 5 Year Retrospective CD Album, featuring (hopefully) a track from every one of our releases. It's actually our 5th Birthday next month, but I think we're just going to take our 5th Year Of Operations as the celebrant, and do STUFF e.g. a birthday all-dayer in DERBY (which should be ACE!), and a launch gig in That London for the album, featuring as many of our bands as possible.

More exciting YET, the all-dayer should feature Goodie Bags of FREE STUFF for all who attend, which will most likely be a really good way of getting rid of the huge piles of unsold stock! Also, the Birthday CD will feature DVD Extra features in the shape of a label chronology, as written by ME. We did have the idea of writing a BOOK all about Our Story, and I wrote four or five chapters for it, but it turned out to be completely unusable. Several cnuts and fcukwits have threatened us with legal action over the years just for Speaking The TRUTH as we (or, more usually, I) saw it but no action's ever been taken... however, if those chapters ever saw the light of day in first draft form i would not be surprised to find us up before the BEAK. So! Expect a pre-watershed version of THAT to make up the backbone, and do feel free to ask me IN PUB for the FULL story...

The only other non-ADMIN thing to note about my visit back to the East Midlands was how ODD it suddenly was to suddenly keep seeing people i knew - within ten minutes of being back I bumped into two people I knew, and as the evening went on the pub filled with more and more of them. I'm back AGANE next week (back for another day at Old Work) and am going to do my best to get to the Pump & Tap, where this event may well be repeated.

posted 21/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Record Company Business
I'm off to Leicester again for the evening tonight. AT LAST we're having an AAS Board Meeting, after several months without, so hopefully tomorrow I will have EXCITING news of diverse events...

posted 20/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Clean Girl
More rollickin' roustabout good times in the Song Blog, prompted by that country & western compilation (which "Good Cooking" was originally set to go on) getting going again, and me wandering what other spare C&W type songs i might have lying around.


posted 20/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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*My League
When i say "out of my league", it would perhaps be more accurate to say "Not in my qualifying group", as there really aren't many people in it at ALL, it's largely full of teams you've never heard of or who shouldn't really be there at all, and there's one very very obvious winner.
posted 20/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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The Peterborough All-Saints Wide Game Team (group B)
I've just put this song into the mighty Song Blog. One of the ideas of the Song Blog is that i can put new songs there (and go "look! Look! Look what i made!"), but the other thought behind it is that when i can put the correct lyrics to old songs there too.

Keen eyed observers might notice that for lots of songs seen on these webpages, the words you read aren't always quite the same as the ones you hear on the records. This is because i almost always typed up the songs within a week or two of writing them, and often months or years before they were recorded, and in the intervening time they got fiddled about with in Live Performance and that. THUS you'll see that the Song Database Version has quite a few bits that vary from the versio on "A Church Hall Of Sound (revisited)", and also that there's no mention in the "notes" that go with it about when it was recorded. And, as the song database is running at my old place of work, and thus is likely to be DISCOVERED at some point, I thought I'd take the opportunity to gently update the lyrics, and leave any new THORT here.


posted 19/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Sympathy For Tony
Poor old Tony Blair eh? JUST when you're about to think that maybe he might possibly have a point, in falls George Bush like the halfwit yokel brother in the back seat of an 80's convoy movie, to say "Yup! We gonna blow them ALL up! That's right!"

I am convinced of two things - firstly, that if the camera panned sideways during that twat's "speech" you'd see Poor Old Tony Blair with his hand on his forehead, shaking his head in comical despair while behind him that baldy guy who used to translate for Gorbachev is blowing that duck horn thing to make a "wah wah waaaaahrrrr" noise, and secondly that George Bush always has his flies hanging open. Don't ask me how i know these things, i just do.

posted 18/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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People Who Will Be Severely Censured When A Grateful Nation Hands Me The Reins Of Power: 5
People who stand in doorways. Specifically, large groups of people standing around YAKKING in the entrance to a large building who are completely unaware that it IS an entrance to a large building and loads of people are actually tyring to actually get actually in, actually actually.

I mean, for PITY'S sake! The trouble is that, working in Academia, i come into contact with this sort of person A LOT, as generally the Realising That People Want To Get Through The Door GENE doesn't seem to bloody kick in until the age of 22 or something. Yesterday, for instance, i Popped Into The Bank At Lunchtime (i am an ADULT, this is the sort of thing i am WONT to do), only to find a huge unruly MOB of people, MILLING around the bank. YOUTHS were sat READING BOOKS in the entrance way - what on earth was THAT all about? Christ! We can TELL that you're a student, there's no need to prove the point by whipping a Penguin Classic out, and anyway, it's a LOVELY day, why can't you go and read in a park or something? But anyway, yeah, there was a MILLING THRONG filling up the queue, most of whom, it turned out, weren't even queuing! Maybe, once, long ago, that was the original intent, but the gormless NURS spotted someone they knew and, with no THOUGHT for the needs of fellow citizens, i.e. ME, just stopped where they were and started BLATHERING on about "I was so drunk? So i threw up? And couldn't get in for lectures?" ETC ETC ET BLOODY C!

The MOST annoying bit is when you do say "Er... excuse me", or eventually GIVE UP and SLIDE past, these gets will HARRUMPH and MOAN, saying "What? Hur? Fascists? Get out of the way?" and then go back to claiming to a) be "mad" b) have done no work c) have spent all their loan? In the first week?

Anyway, I HARRUMPHED myself, STRIDING back to work afterwards, only stopping to get a SARNIE, where i discovered it's not just The Kids who do this, for LO! standing, in the near-middle of the shop, taking up almost all of the room and blocking BOTH to doorway AND the drinks cabinet, were a bunch of bloody college lecturers. They were banging on about someone making them DO something or other, but generally just GETTING IN THE WAY. I mean, for GOODNESS SAKE! Did i just miss that bit of the induction or something? Do people get SPAN in a JOE 90 CHAIR that makes them unable to notice doors or something?

Bah! Humbug!

posted 18/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Talking of Pubs...
Talking of pubs, as the below indeed is (as one of the larger themes of The Album is The Pub), i am happy to report that i may have found my NEW LOCAL. HOLA!

One of the culture shocks of my recent big move was the fact that i was no longer within easy walking distance of The Pump & Tap, the pub in Leicester which has been my de facto local for about fourteen years. There were gaps in my affiliation, and I didn't always go there every week, even if i could have done, but for almost my entire time in Leicester the Pump & Tap was the place i popped in to meet people on the way into town, or dropped into on the way back from somewhere, or nipped to for a quick one for lasties, or just spent many many many nights slouching in slagging off other people in bands. It was never really my main pub - the Durham Ox, the Magazine, and the Angel were the places where people knew my name and what i drank - but it was always the MISTRESS, and when i went back to Leicester for the weekend it was the obvious place to go.

So recently, when i was arranging to meet some people in Scenic Leytonstone, it was a bit weird to NOT have an Obvious Place To Go, and i found myself FLOUNDERING, even - gird yourself - suggesting going into a Weatherspoons pub! I know! So, imagine my pleasure when, after QUALITY TIME spent walking across Wansted Flats, the Light Of My Life suggested we just pop into the pub for a swift one (thus illustrating one of the MANY reasons i love here), and the pub we popped into turned out to be LOVELY. There was BEER available that was nice! There was a MIXTURE of people, young and old, groovy and not, just lurking about! The music was AUDIBLE, but not HORRIBLE! There were pictures of Old Leytonstone on the walls! There was a pub quiz on Mondays!

As the sun streamed through the windows, illuminating the smoke of the old bloke's rolly next to us, i felt myself RELAX into the sort of place i BELONG. A pub, in the sunshine, on a day off with the woman i love, could anything be better? It was a happy Hibbett who returned home that day I can tell you, his MIGHTY BRANE silently, cunningly, working out ways in which he could be there again, as soon as possible...


posted 17/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Back In The Jug Agane
I'm back at work - wahey. Thus, am feeling in need of some ROCK - it was a GRATE week off, not necessarily due to the travel to Foreign Climes, largely due to a) arseing around and b) spening QUALITY TIME with my BIRD. Yes. Now it's over all is back to WORK and sitting around waiting for the crazy world of ROCK to start re-occurring.

But - AHA! Some of that IS re-occurring, for LO! i have another gig! It's on Saturday 18th April i.e. Easter Saturday, and again is at the Betsy Trotwood, so should be lovely. I am PLEASED about this, and I am sure on the night i will be full of GLEE as it's the night after seeing MACCA! ZANG!

ALSO on the ROCK front i can report that i bought some headphones over the weekend, that i might listen to the newly ordered ALBUM as loud as liked without bothering anyone and also, more to the point, without anyone realising that i was spending quite so many hours listening to the sound of my own voice hem hem. Anyway, the news it that it's sounding GRATE, am VERY pleased, and am now quivering in anticipation of what the other Validators will think when they hear it - will they think "Ah! Conceptual! Nice!" or will it rather be "Hmm - all these songs appear to be about that same thing i.e. the pub -is that right?"

Only time, my friends, will tell, only time.

posted 17/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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RE-JIG
Doing The Running Order has got to be one of the MOST FUN bits of the "gruelling" recording process - it's been YEARS since I've been able to do it, and MAN have I been enjoying it. After a HEAVY session of... er... lying on the floor, listening to the album, just before we went away, I have REJIGGED the running order, and now it's sounding Pretty Darn Good. OK, again, I know it won't make any difference at all to anyone who hasn't heard it, but still, here it is:

Part One:
  1. Things'll Be Different When I'm In Charge
  2. The Symbol Of Our Nation
  3. (insert title here)
  4. Falling For Trust
  5. Last Orders
  6. Holdalls Is The New Name For Midland Mainline Lost Property
  7. The Girl Who...
  8. Fat Was A Feminist Issue
  9. Good Cooking

Part Two:
  1. The Back Of The Sofa
  2. Make The World Go Blind
  3. Nothing In Common, Except, Maybe...
  4. Post-Subsonic Bass
  5. You Will Be Hearing From My Solicitor
  6. Everything's Turning Out All Right (everything)
  7. BBC2 (A New Hope)
  8. Easily Impressed
  9. One Last Party

And the next thing will be the COVER DESIGN! Oh BABY!

posted 14/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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Back From Barcelona
Morning all - I'm back back in the UK, TANNED and feeling GOOD after my very sophisticated MINI-BREAK in Barcelona. Here are the GOOD and the LESS GOOD things there:

GOOD THINGS:

  • LOVELY Weather
  • Gaudi Cathedral
  • other cathedral
  • Cloisters with GEESE in the above
  • Fab Harbour
  • Rickety Scary Ski Lift up the mountain
  • Far Out Radio Antennae

    LESS GOOD THINGS:

  • Almost everybody was REALLY BLOODY ARSEY
  • Lots of spitting
  • LOTS of dog shit everywhere
  • Smelt of piss

    All in all, it was NICE to have a Sophisticate Mini-Break and get a TAN, but maybe we should have gone and got pissed up in a big crowd of people to get the FULL EFFECT or something? Nice to be back home though - now, let us bring the ROCK!
    posted 14/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    BARCELONA!
    We're off on holiday! ZANG!

    posted 9/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    I Said "Thematic"
    Another milestone FLASHES by this evening, as I've just got the whole darn album onto one single CD, for the first time EVER. I am EXCITED! ALSO, while i was at it, I worked out a whole new running order. Last time i did it just thinking what might sound nice together, and trying to avoid having songs about the same thing next to each other - there are a LOT of songs about the same thing! However, this time i have EMBRACED the THEMATIC nature of the WORK, and put it into two sections, as follows:

    Part One:
    1. Things'll Be Different When I'm In Charge
    2. The Symbol Of Our Nation
    3. (insert title here)
    4. Falling For Trust
    5. Last Orders
    6. The Girl Who...
    7. Holdalls Is The New Name For Midland Mainline Lost Property
    8. Good Cooking
    9. Fat Was A Feminist Issue

    Part Two:
    1. The Back Of The Sofa
    2. Make The World Go Blind
    3. Nothing In Common, Except, Maybe...
    4. You Will Be Hearing From My Solicitor
    5. BBC2 (A New Hope)
    6. Post-Subsonic Bass
    7. Everything's Turning Out All Right (everything)
    8. Easily Impressed
    9. One Last Party

    I know it won't mean much if you haven't heard any of the songs, and I haven't listened to it myself yet, but it's GRATE to be at this particular stage in the proceedings, trying to work out what goes where, and how. Next step - THE COVER!

    posted 9/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    Consummatum Est!
    It's mixed. Some 31 months after we started, the album is now pretty much DONE - HOORAH!

    For LO! last night i was back up in Leicester for the (hopefully) Final Mixing Session. Tim popped in (hello Tim!) for the first half, Tom came by for the second, and Mr Whitaker was there for most of it, checking on Progress for The Record Company. Sort of. And with the three of us sitting behind The Mighty Reverb we got it DONE. Most excitingly, my initial PLAN to put a GTR SOLO on the start of "Things'll Be Different" got 1980-fied with the KORG 707 instead, and it came out sounding Pretty Darn GOOD. After that we SWEPT through "Nothing In Common" and "(insert title here)" to wind things up just around midnight. I left with a CD in my hand and a gawping great "Golly!" in my mind. We'd done it!

    Well, OK, we're not there yet - I'm off next week (largely going to BARCELONA! HOLA!) so I'm going to try and get a new CD copy of THE LOT out to everyone. When that's done it's time for a BAND MEETING to sort out running order and any remaining niggles, then it's HO! for Chez Reverb again for the MASTERING SESSION. Or, more likely SESSIONS - there's 18 songs! It's over an hour long! Oh My!

    But! This is what we call a MILESTONE kids - it's done! It's finished! And it sounds BLOODY GRATE!

    posted 7/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    Feeling GOOD
    Aaah! What a delightful London morning it is, the sun is out, and all is well with the world (except, obviously, for the useless cnuts running London Underground). Why so cheery you ask? The answer is simple: I done a GIG!

    Things got off to a DAFT start when i looked at my A to Z and thought "Hey! Farringdon is Quite Near, i'll walk there!", not realising that the scale on a London A to Z is NOT the same as on the Leicester ones, and what appeared to be a 10 minute stroll turned into a thirty minute TREK. Still, I got there in time for my soundcheck to find, of course, the headline band STILL doing theirs. Ah! Life In ROCK! How little you change! There were white adult males wearing blue dreadlocks, their "manager" applauded every song done during said soundcheck, and BONGOES were in evidence. No more need be said.

    So anyway, i eventually did my regimented five minute check, went for some (horrid) chips and a (OK) samosa, got MORE NERVOUS as some of my lot turned up, and then PLAYED. It was ACE! I really enjoyed it - it's been SO long since i've done a gig, it was nice to know i could still manage it. TWO songs got Live Debuts - "Things'll Be Different" and "The Lesson Of The Smiths" with the latter ESPECIALLY seeming to go down quite well. I was also GRATIFIED that everyone did the "Pump It Up Mark!" bit in "Boom Shake The Room", and i even did a Sort Of Encore at the end too. RESULT!

    So all was lovely, and afterwards i got to talk to the entire audience, many of whom i was related to, and DRINK BEER quite a bit too. This morning i AROSE at about 6am thinking a) "I feel GRATE!" b) "Why are so many things in the way that i keep falling over them?" and c) "WAHEY!"

    This may change as the day progresses, but for now - HOORAY! HOORAY for ROCK!

    posted 6/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    THE NERVES
    It's been a funny afternoon - i went swimming and TOOK IT OUT quite strongly on the water, then got changed GRUMBLING. I got ANNOYED with traffic coming back to the office. I booked me and The Sand On My Beach three nights in BARCELONA and, apart from being STUNNED by having done so, fell into MORE Grumbly Mood about the fact that i haven't INSTANTLY had confirmation AND tickets.

    So, basically, i've been in a bit of a Pissy Mood all afternoon, and this was PUZZLING me - why should i be so? Life, with the possible exception of Lack Of Central Line, is Pretty Darn Good at the moment - I'm living in a NICE house with the woman i love, a lot, I've got a smashing job that's paying me £4 a month more than i can spend (bank statement came last night!), and to top it all, tonight i've got a GIG!

    Oh yeah... that would explain it then. It's THE NERVES!

    I ALWAYS forget about this bit, even though it happens almost every time i get a gig. Sometimes it starts an hour or so before, sometimes during the day or even the day before, and on one dreadful occasion it started a WEEK before, but whenever it comes it is HORRID. Honestly, don't come near me when I'm like this - i am NOT a happy person and liable to a) SNAP! GRR! or b) whimper in a corner. I mean, i know I'll be all right, I'm pretty sure there'll be a few people there, and from past experience I know that even the WORST it can go (i.e. breaking strings + being generally ignored except for Nasty Heckling + forgetting words + Being Far Too Drunk) is hardly the worst thing that has or will ever happened to me, but still i gets THE FEAR.

    The nice thing is, however, that when this wears off (usually about 5 seconds into the first song) i feel GRATE. The "downside" (sort of) is that AFTER the gig i have an RAGING THIRST and a very very low BEER threshold, right at the point when i am most likely to recieve FREE BEER... it's tough, but somehow i struggle on.

    posted 5/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    If It's Good Enough For Sir Paul
    I've just typed up the (much revised) Big List Of Songs that I'm pretty sure I can play from start to finish without going wrong, or, at least, without going wrong in such a way that anybody will necessarily notice. Thus, if I were to perform THE LOT, i would be doing 27 songs - 7 from "Say It With Words", 10 from various singles, 5 covers and 5 so far unreleased. In alphabetical order:

    Back For Good
    Bands From London
    Billy Jones Is Dead
    Boom Shake The Room
    Born With The Century
    Clubbing In The Week
    Easily Impressed
    Everything's Turning Out All Right
    Fly Me To The Moon
    Fucking Hippy
    Good Cooking
    Graffiti On The Cenotraph
    Hey Hey 16k
    I Can See Clearly Now
    I Come From The Fens
    If You're Too Turned On
    (insert title here)
    It's My Party
    Payday Is The Best Day
    The Lesson Of The Smiths
    The Perfect Love Song
    The Peterborough All Saints Wide Game Team (Group B)
    The Saturday Lunchtime Wrestlers
    Things'll Be Different
    We'll See What We Can Do
    Where Do All The Women Go To?
    Work's All Right

    That's a LOT!


    posted 4/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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    ROCK ACTION
    Plenty of activity on the ROCK front just lately, update as follows:
  • Another new song in the Song Blog.
  • Possibly maybe (perhaps) FINAL mixing session BOOKED for this Thursday.
  • New BIT worked out for "Things'll Be Different" intro, i.e. Final BIT needed for completion.
  • Almost fully prepared to debut New! Song! At GIG on Wednesday.
  • ANOTHER new song on the way, this time about shouting at the telly, and DEMANDING politicians be brought to book when THEY turn out to be wrong and I turned out to be CORRECT.

    Let's ROCK!

    posted 3/3/2003 by MJ Hibbett
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