Dominion Magazine Profile

Apparently I'm interesting (interesting, not important I hasten to add) enough to be the feature profile in the online version of Dominion Magazine.

I'm in a category called 'Movers & Shakers' which will feature many of the top goth DJ's on the planet, right now it's my turn.

You can read it here:

http://truecultheavymetal.com/index.php/dominion/2011/02/14/cruel-britannia

Playmobil Stop Motion: Joy Division - Transmission

Simply genius.

I couldn't give a Flying Lizard.

Here's three things about the seminal cover track 'Money' by The Flying Lizards you might not know.

(1) The single version of 'Money' is a convenient 2 minutes and 32 seconds in length, whereas the album version is a whopping 5 minutes and 52 seconds long.

(2) The latter end 3 minutes and 20 seconds of the album version is not only longer than the single edit by nearly a minute, but reduces into a mish mash of out-of-tune dub basslines & general monkeying about with the echo effects, and not in a cool 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' kind of way either.

(3) I'm still going to be quite annoyed about the 3 minutes and 20 seconds of my life that I'll never get back when I go to bed tonight.

The rest of the album was shit too.

A New Mix:Disturbia.

This week I put the finishing touches to a new mix born out of a need to create, experiment and the knowledge that it's been some time since I last made one.

"Cruel Britannia's Disturbia" is a combination of the more sinister leanings of a previous mix "Uneasy Listening Vol.1", random segues of noise & dialogue and the often ingeniously haphazard styles of music the late John Peel would air on his shows.

All the tracks in 'Disturbia' are of electronica, industrial and alternative (back when it was deemed 'properly' alternative music) genres, interweaved with oddments of noises & sounds from Brass Eye, Jeremy Kyle shows, ang god only knows what else. It's definitely not just another 'goth mix', it was never intended to be.

Whether it makes the grade of 'listenable' is purely a personal thing-it was certainly a bit disturbing when I played the whole mix back to myself (hence the name 'Disturbia'). At times it comes across almost like an amateur take on one of  P.Emerson William's Necrofuturist Transmission shows but with with a decidedly British sense of humour throughout.

Listen out for it on Nightbreed Radio in February. You'll either love it or hate it, but either way you couldn't ignore it.

RIP Mick Karn; 1958-2011

From Mick Karn's official homepage:

"Mick finally lost his battle with cancer and passed away peacefully at 4.30pm today, 4th January 2011 at home in Chelsea, London. He was surrounded by his family and friends and will be deeply missed by all."

Japan was one of my primary favourite bands during the 80's, and the almost snake-like sounds Karn's fretless bass made were so unique that almost nobody could imitate him. He was one of the main artists responsible for me wanting to play bass. RIP MIck.

Bye Bye, Myspace.

So...the much maligned and even more talked-about apparent 'Myspace update'.

It's been a bit like watching a family pet turn from a spritely, mischievous puppy into a elderly crippled, half-blind old hound which can do little more than sleep in front of the fireplace, passing wind occasionally just to remind you of its existence.

Finally it seems, after several unsuccessful attempts to navigate the new layout and fix what they'd done to my profile (which initially took bloody ages to put together), I face the unsavoury task of taking it out for it's last walk in the woods with a cocked shotgun over my arm at the end of the year.

At one point it was THE place to go to to explore new music, and back in 2006-2007 or whatever, I happily signed up, customised a page for myself and literally watched the new & upcoming acts roll in before my eyes, eager to communicate and spread word of their existence.

Nowadays it seems that the only bulletins & announcements that bands post on Myspace are to advise their followers to go and find them on Facebook.

It's not without a certain degree of hesitance that I'm to cancel my account on Myspace at the end of the year; I met a lot, and I mean a LOT of great people through it and it was almost certainly the main reason for the majority of my DJ bookings. But right now, I seem to talk to a lot more people who've cancelled their Myspace account than those who still possess them. These are the people I still clung onto my account for in the first place, so if they're not still battling the sluggish, bandwidth-hungry, non-musician friendly, graphics-intensive advertisement board that was once King of the Social Networks, why should I?

It'll be a clean account deletion-the worst thing I could do is simply abandon it to be a perpetually out of date board of information where only half the graphics I'd painstakingly designed show due to the new layout. It just looks awful; awful to the point where any attempt to fix it wouldn't be enough to rescue it. I did try; it just decided to throw errors up at me whenever I chose style templates for the bloody thing. Nice work...

So there you go. A new year, a new 'back to basics' approach to self-promotion. Just me, my website & Twitter.

Oh, and this blog & podcast of course. But definitely NO FACEBOOK, okay? Most of you know my views on that bloody thing already.

Interview with Jim Hawkins & Gavin Baddeley from May 2010

I came across this footage while digging around in the back of the World Goth Day closet this morning.

It's a recording of an interview I had with Jim Hawkins on his morning show on Radio Shropshire from May 2010 about the Goth scene, which also included renowned occult author Gavin Baddeley on the telephone.

Typically, I sounded like a clueless idiot answering the simplest of questions; clearly it wasn't a good day for my brain and tongue to be in cahoots with each other. However, it's not a bad recording and should be shared rather than lost.