NEAT NEAT NEAT
- Steve Lamacq
- 29 Jan 09, 05:35 PM
I turned it off and turned it on again. I booted and rebooted and trawled the internet on my lethargic laptop looking for solutions, but still the damned Blue Screen wouldn't go away.
No amount of pleading and threatening and hitting it with a tree branch à la Basil Fawlty worked either. Mulrenan The Computer (named after my old English teacher, who I suspect Microsoft modelled their grammar checker on) was dead. It was an ex-PC.
So that was Sunday morning. Still gingerly recovering from Man Cold. And now a nervous tech wreck. Disconsolately I picked up a pile of demos from the floor, found The Neat's CD (see last post) and in the last act of a desperate man slung it into the player, prepared for yet more misery.
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'BOW SELECTOR
- Steve Lamacq
- 23 Jan 09, 03:46 PM
Elbow fans! I'm sure you may have heard about this already - what with the radio ads going off like car alarms all over the place - but if not, Saturday week (January 31) brings a special Elbow set recorded last weekend at London's Abbey Road studios.
Having been at the recording, it's not hard to see why they've been dubbed 'the people's band'. They look like a darts team. But at the same time they're suave enough on stage to be wine tasters. There is a little bit of the "all things to all men" about them. They are gregarious but humble.
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COOL HAND LUKE
- Steve Lamacq
- 14 Jan 09, 11:30 AM
Luke Haines sits on the settee in the 6 Music Hub looking like a cross between Errol Flynn and an Art Gallery director. Thank God he's lost none of his anti-rock posture!
Haines, former frontman with 90s starlets The Auteurs, is a man with stories to tell. But little did we know how well he could tell them until his book turned up over Christmas.
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FLAMING TIPS
- Steve Lamacq
- 5 Jan 09, 02:30 PM
I've been at the old records again. Like your Grandad at Christmas who's been "at the whiskey" he has stashed in his shed, I crept into the loft to admire the new speakers I got for Christmas and stayed there until the only thing I had left to listen to was an old Kasabian 12 inch I'd never got round to throwing out - and all because I've been hiding from writing the Tips For 2009 piece.
I get very grumpy about these things now (even, I hate to admit it, the BBC Sound Of poll makes me want to stuff cotton wool in my ears and sleep for a fortnight). But this year it's particularly irksome because, actually, no-one really has a clue what's going to happen in music in 2009.
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