Thinking Metal Music

23-Dec-24 : The usual boring end of year review

Right at the start of this year, I promised myself that I would get off my lazy backside and start releasing music again. Predictably, that did not go according to plan. The reason? For once, it's not down to incompetance on my part. No, the truth is rather more down-to-earth. Alas, my age seems to have caught up with me and I reluctantly have to admit that I am no longer the Peter Pan of the Electronic Music Scene. I have to concede that my youth is a long, long way behind me and the minor scrapes and scuffs that one shrugs off in one's early years now take longer and longer to sort themselves out. The list of ailments is quite appalling, frankly. Don't worry.I won't go into any further detail. It really isn't all that interesting. I'm sixty two years old. What did I expect?

However, 2024 was altogether our most successful year for producing new material in more than a decade. I am kinda pleased with that. There were several big wins. I continued to produce videos, a project that I began in late 2023. Some did well. Other did not. I think the public's appetite for CGI movies was fleeting at best. I like some of the ideas encapsulated within those movies. I like the flow, the energy and intention. Alas, the execution? No, I hate those plastic, fake CGI characters. They're so obviously CGI that I just wish I'd had the budget to use real actors instead.

Towards the end of the year, I set my mind on releasing new material through Bandcamp because I feel that Bandcamp is the only honest platform left for releasing music. Don't get me started on Shitify. I won't touch them and I feel aggrieved that they've gotten their grubby little money-grabbing hands on some of my earlier releases.

I really wanted to fix the mental log jam with respect to new releases (of my own making) that sits in my head so I found a project that I could truly loose myself in. The end result was Aurora, my longest release yet. That was very satisfying. I don't mind that it hasn't sold a gazzilion copies. What I do like is that it's out there now and will be out there for some time to come. With luck, more and more people will notice the album as I continue with the projected release programme into the new year.

I put out a couple of test singles in October and November to see if they would raise the profile of the label and... they did. Whilst they didn't generate many sales, they did cause a major bump in the number of people listening to our other releases. That was very pleasing.

I also set about boosting some of my other projects and that effort proved to be spectacularly successful. For instance, one of my writing projects was floundering somewhat with barely a handful of reads but, by finding the right release platform, I was able to generate more than two hundred and fifty thousand reads over a collection of twenty or so short stories. The same applies to my art photography. I found the right platform, Tumblr, and was able to increase the engagement by more than two thousand percent. Finding the right audience is all about finding the right platform.

So, as this year comes to a close, whilst 2024 has been more than a little worrying where matters of health are concerned, it was encouraging when considering the amount of new material that managed to escape into the real world. That's quite thrilling, frankly. My goals for the new year are to continue with the release schedule - I have two new EPs and one LP in the works - and boost the number of live performances, which does seem to be the best way to build a lasting audience these days.

So, from all of us here at Thinking Metal, have a Happy Christmas and a fantastic New Year.

23-Dec-24 : Perdition's Flames Sleeve Notes

I love sleeve notes. Always have. Always will so here are some additional comments on the creative process that went into Perdition's Flames

The request to write the soundtrack for this short film seems to stem from an interview I gave for a final year degree project some time in 2014 although I actually don't remember who I spoke to. All I remember is that the interview took place in the basement of the Glasshouse and whilst I kept a diary from that time, curiously there's no mention of the person's name, which I find odd. I'd normally record that kind of detail for future reference. Anyway, I was approached to write the music for Perdition's Flames partly based on the strength of this interview and partly because the original composer had walked out on the project. I have no idea why.

The film itself had already been edited using a temporary score. This is entirely normal and your job, as the new composer, is to come up with something that closely matches this temp score (even if you've never heard it) because usually the Director is so completed wedded to the feel and texture of the original music that they're blind to other possibilities. What do I mean? Just try watching Gladiator, which is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this habit.

I knocked together a quick score based on a rough cut of the movie and, strangely, they liked it. I added few new semi-improvised pieces to help flesh out certain areas that seemed lacking and... well... that was it. Job done.

Alas, along came COVID and the project just vanished into thin air. Everyone involved graduated and moved on to other projects. Having heard nothing for five years, I figured that I could now release the music without fear of being hit with yet another tiresome cease-and-desist note.

So, here's my breakdown of the tracks in Perdition's Flames

1. Opening titles - This is one of my favourite pieces in that it merges synths and the most gorgeous atmospheric vocals you can find this side of a sample pack. It's moody and thoughtful and, I feel, takes you places. Jules loved it so much we made a short video of our own up at the local nature reserve just because we could.

2. Blizzards at sunset - another favourite piece as I tried to explore the use of guitars more extensively than I had in the past. Truth be told, I am a rubbish guitar player. I lack the patience and the manual dexterity to play the instrument well so I used the Opacity sample library for the guitar riffs and swells. If I could have played this for real then this is what it would have sounded like.

3. Do not go outside - pure mood and atmosphere. I wanted something that would genuinely invoke a sense of dread in the viewer, something that really would make them look over their shoulder, maybe check that the front door really is on the latch. And, by the way, who left the back door open on a night like this?

4. Maisy finds a piano - I lifted this one from our piano album. Originally entitled As the moment flies, there's an obvious nod to the likes of Ludovico Einaudi. That said, I hated the original introduction because it was to brash and too in-ya-face. Bombastic even. I added the slower introduction to take some of the energy out of the original.

5. You expected transparency? This was another piece centered around the Opacity guitar library. I like it because it's so very different from everything else I've ever done.

6. The Gentle Art of Seduction - The mood and feel of this piece is very definitely in the ambient piano of Harold Budd / Brian Eno camp. It's quite an old piece, too. Probably around a decade as of this release.

7. Nick Storm, Private Eye - the original piece had a very different feel. Jenny gave me an orchestral arrangement of her piece, Storm, to see if I could do anything with it and... Some of the orchestral textures remain but they're largely swamped by the metal guitars and the chiming synths. The feel is very deliberately mid 80's TV Cop Show. Think of Stewart Copeland's work on The Equaliser if you're looking for influences... BTW, Nick Storm was an invented name for a character in a daft TV series that the actors were watching just as the fun kicks off...

8. Last night on Vera - A late addition because I needed to flesh out the action in one particular set piece. It's based on a riff I thought I heard in an episode of ITV's Vera, of which I am a major fan. (I'm actually in the last episode...)

9. It really is too late... This piece had an unusual starting point, Christian Henson's Squeaky Gate Challenge. Participants were invited to record a squeaky gate and then add their own soundtrack around the sample. Suitably inspired, I took a walk up to our local nature reserve where I knew there were one or two truly spectacular squeaky gates, and recorded a few of the better examples. Yes, that drew some odd expressions from a few of the wardens who just happened to be passing. I think it works rather too well here...

10. Waiting for the Rapture - a semi-improvised piece intended to build the atmosphere whilst the rather messy business of the Rapture unfolds. It's just synths and an arpeggiator. And blood. Lots and lots of fake blood.

11. Say Goodbye - another out-take from what would have been the piano album, suitably modified and rounded out to make a rather pleasing end to the proceedings. I don't think many of the characters were left alive at this point in the film and, if they were, their status in this world or the next was ambiguous at best.

12. End Titles - Dance Macabre - A jolly pop ditty strongly influenced by the closing titles in nearly every late 80's movies I can think of... except there are no wailing saxophones. Truth be told, i really didn't like the original version. The lead seemed lazy and irrelevant. Come the remix, I pushed the tiresome lead to the back and boosted the sequences. I like this version, particularly the new melody that came out of nowhere. I guess it was there all along. Just hidden in a shoddy mix.

The artwork used for the album cover is not actually taken from the film. It's just an image I put together in Leonardo as a reference.

So, that's my take on those pieces. As I said elsewhere, it was a genuine pleasure to revisit and rework these pieces. I hope you get a buzz out of them, too. What happened at the end of the film? Other than the rather obvious fact that all of the characters met a rather grizzly end, I don't actually know. Several endings were filmed but whether they were used or another (possibly more upbeat) ending was added is unknown.

08-Aug-24 : Journey into Punk

To punk, or not to punk, that is the question…

I saw my first Punk Rocker one Saturday morning in September of 1977.

My father and I were about our usual business, which is to say that we were notionally doing the normal Saturday shop in Eldon Square, Newcastle. I was my usual depressed self, standing off to one side in a scruffy hand-me-down anorak, wondering why all of the gorgeous, fit, athletic teenage girls wouldn’t look at me. On the other hand, my Dad was busy chatting up the girls in H. R. Orange, as was his habit. I always wondered why these ladies seemed interested in a balding, over-the-hill, pot-bellied old knacker. Still do, frankly. Anyway, this morning, like any other Saturday morning, was fairly typical of the studied blandness that was Britain in the Jubilee-obsessed mid-70’s.

And then something truly wonderful happened.

A strutting peacock loomed into view at the top of the Green Market escalators, an apparition that became a truly singular, utterly jaw-dropping, world-defining moment in my life to that point.

Picture this.

He was six foot four in his huge brown Doc Martin ‘Bova’ Boots, probably the twenty four hole lace-up ‘Aero’-type. His stick thin legs were clad in scruffy black jeans that had been ripped and then crudely sewn together at the knees. A length of bondage rope dangled between his thighs like a faux p*nis. He wore a bullet belt around his waist and was sporting a t-shirt adorned with a picture of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II except Her Maj was wearing a neat collection of safety pins and an Anarchy logo. The leather jacket came next, bedecked as it was with a myriad of safety pins, studs, chains and various badges, too many to count, he looked as if it had been dragged the entire length of the Coast Road behind a stolen Suzuki 250cc. The wraparound shades added another layer of mystique, as did the small collection of ear studs that would set off metal detectors in Top Shop. The safety pin through his cheek was a nice detail but not quite the finishing touch.

... because then came his crowning glory - a two foot tall, purple spiked Mohican that somehow defied gravity.

How do you do that? Soap and water? Hair spray? Superglue?

His girlfriend was similarly adorned, equally magnificent though strangely unable to compete with this alternate vision of masculinity.

I was transfixed. I’d never seen anything like this in my life.

And they were glorious.

Utterly glorious.

My father was less impressed. Indeed, he was instantly moved to a form of primal, instinctive violence. These were aliens in our midst. They did not belong. He expressed a desire to punch them both out, on the spot, firstly for disrespecting the Monarch and secondly for disrupting his world view. I’m sure he wasn’t alone in this opinion. Plenty of others in that drab suburb would have done the same, if they’d had the bollocks, which they didn’t.

My father said that he would show them a thing or two. He’d been a soldier. He’d fought for Queen and Country, and this unholy vision represented an assault on his traditional British values of loyalty and servitude. I can see his point but, equally, we were entering a modern, pluralistic world, where we have to tolerate and accept all manner of people who are not the same as us, and even then I knew that such a vision was just a show, a display, a parade, and therefore intended to entertain and enrage the general public of 70’s Britain in equal measure. Violence was therefore unnecessary. Enjoy the theatre, the Pantomime. Take it home, maybe think about what you’d witnessed.

After all, this was the era of Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, Dennis Healy and Jim Callaghan. The Three Day week. British Leyland. British Rail. This was the world of the Post War underclass, a generation that could never understand how they’d won the war against Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito but who had somehow been denied the spoils that went with such an amazing victory. They were poor. They were grey. They were the beige-generation. Taupe was the colour of the future.

And then the parade was over. These two apparitions wandered aimlessly into the Grainger Market and were suddenly gone forever. I never saw them again. Maybe they morphed into something else en route to Carnaby Street.

I couldn’t wait to tell my Mother when we eventually got back at home, once Dad had calmed down. Mother was outraged. Such things shouldn’t be allowed. Why hadn’t they been arrested? Why hadn’t someone given them both a good hiding? Bring back National Service. Bring back hanging! Five years hard labour in a quarry would convince these two work-shy layabouts that their Punk lifestyle had no future in this green and pleasant (and beige) land.

The fiftieth anniversary of Punk Rock is almost upon us and, as might be expected, I’ve been musing on the subject. Nearly fifty years on from that momentous encounter in Eldon Square, I still find myself astonished that simply adopting an alternative style of dress could provoke such outrage, even in a knucklehead like my Dad, who could knucklehead for England.

My Father was a staunch Conservative with a large C and an attitude towards progressive, alternate lifestyles that was somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. You could laugh - and so could I, I suppose - but just try cohabiting with the living embodiment of Alf Garnett. I dare you. Plenty of us did back then. The future was not ours. The future, the gleaming spires, the endless horizons seemed distant and hopelessly out of reach. As a new generation, Generation X, we were surrounded on all sides by what felt like a silent, creeping mediocrity, a kind of numbing certainty that the future, your future, was just a factory job, a terraced house, two point four and a mortgage.

This event pushed a button and a light went on inside my head. There was an escape route, a hole in the fence, so to speak. Stalag 14 was not your only future. You could make a run for the wire, climb and jump, and then drop and roll on the other side. And maybe, just maybe, the Guards would be looking the other way, perhaps distracted by someone else’s circus, and you’d escape.

What was on the other side? Only one way to find out.

Explore.

And so we did.

We all knew that countless teenagers had walked a similar path. But what had become of those wayward souls? Alas, the Yellow Brick Road towards independence and maturity is and forever will be littered with the carcasses of those who yielded to temptation, the security of the regular nine to five, Saturday night in front of the TV with The Sweeney, a pizza and four cans of Carlsberg Special, and maybe two weeks in the Algarve with Ronny and Mildred. What more could you want? What more did you deserve?

This was not the way of the true explorer. They knew that. So did you.

You did, didn’t you?

But the whole Punk ethos worked on so many levels. In short, I’d found a button that I could push and guarantee an instant reaction. My parents would, predictably, go down the route endorsed by the majority. They were aspirational. They cared what the Jones’ next door thought. They were not Bohemian.

“Mum,” I said with a wry smile. “I want to be a Punk. I want a Mohican.”
“You can’t David…” replied my mother, her mouth curling at the edges.
“Why?”
“Because you’re only fifteen…”

And I was, and not a very mature fifteen either. Actually, I was a bit of a dick but you’d already guessed that, right?

Punk really took hold in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, 1977. The scene seemed to come out of nowhere. Some say it came from London. Many are keen to give credit to the Americans because they had Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and the Toy Dolls but whilst I’d heard of Alice and Lou, the Toy Dolls were, and still are, a mystery. From my point of view, Punk came about because the Nation was collectively numb - Terry and June, The Generation Game, Top of the Pops were so bland, so safe and so hopelessly vanilla that trying to dodge the Punk-shaped bullet was simply too much trouble. Punk was a function, an essential and inevitable byproduct of so much collective disinterest.

In my mind, Punk was all about being heard. Your opinions mattered. Your ideas mattered. You didn’t have to come from a posh boy’s club to be heard. You didn’t need a Roedean education to have a voice. You didn’t need a degree in music to make a noise. Your noise was just as valid as anybody else’s noise. The only opinion that mattered was your own. You decided if your opinion was good or bad. There were no influencers to tell you what to think. Critics didn’t matter even when they thought they did. We just laughed at them and thought “Is that the best you’ve got? Really?”

Punk was about expressing yourself, either through the fashion, the music, the politics, the spoken world or just about any sphere that could be warped and twisted and moulded into something new, something different. Punk could be an idea or a goal or an ambition that ran counter to the official narrative. You did because you could, not because you should.

Punk wasn’t just about loud guitars and lyrics screamed until your lungs hurt. You could make a noise with an electronic circuit that was just as valid as the next noise. What mattered was your integrity. What mattered was your soul, your intent.

But then, ultimately, that’s why Punk fell part. Because those who found themselves at the heart of the movement lacked integrity. They lacked a soul and a core set of values. They started to chase money above all else because money buys you into the aristocracy, which they so obviously despised and yet were so eager to join. Money buys you fast cars and drugs. Drugs a’plenty. Sid and Nancy were the future of Punk, which is to say, it had no future. The Pistols even said the same. You did listen, didn’t you?

The party was fun... until it wasn’t. Punk gave us a centre and an ideal to focus upon, a flaming beacon to gather around, an artistic tentpole for our generation. We could rebel. We could be heard. The economy might have been in tatters and the firemen might have been on strike but we were thriving. We had youth and energy, vitality and enthusiasm on our side. The establishment was old and grey and lost. And just as the old, grey and irrelevant establishment lost ground and slipped into our collective cultural memory, so did Punk.

All movements fade. Every empire eventually crumbles. It happens. Get over it. Punk lost its lustre, lost its appeal. In time, it was no longer new, no longer the promise of a better world. The flag that once flew against a tartan sky soon slipped away, the light than shone so brightly through the Jubilee summer of 1977 became tarnished by commercial greed and a desire to conform. And, we, the Public, moved on.

I enjoyed a lot of parties. I saw a lot of bands, some good, some bad, some worse than bad. And Punk was infinitely better than Disco and a world apart from the easy-listening vibes of Conway Twitty, Frankie Laine and Jim Reeves, the music of my mother’s generation.

I found solace in what came next, New Wave although I’ve still to discover what Old Wave is or was or even could have been. Loud guitars and the ever-present four piece formula gave way to the sound of the synthesiser, and the future. Synth pop duos with a keyboard and a drum machine, or a reel-to-reel if your Mum could afford the repayments, were the next big thing.

If Punk was all about doing it yourself, about learning a few chords and making up songs on the fly then New Wave was that movement’s true legacy. You didn’t even need to learn chord shapes on a fretboard. One finger and a keyboard was all it took to write a symphony though most settled for the three minute single. You could experiment with a new world of tones and keys and sounds that were uniquely yours, and like Punk, it didn’t matter if it was good or not, and it mostly wasn’t, but then it was yours. You created it. You played it. You owned it. Which is just how it should be.

In that sense, Punk still lives on in the form of bedroom musicians who don’t read music, wouldn’t know the difference between a crotchet and a quaver, who measure tempo buy how fast you can click your fingers. Does that matter? No, it doesn’t and it never will.

Punk will always be with us. Until it isn’t.

08-Aug-24 : The Buffoon

At some point in our supposed ‘careers’, all musicians, no matter their ability their perceived ‘success’, get around to asking those time-honoured questions:

“How did I get here?”
“Did I make the right choices?”
“Wouldn’t I have earned more money spreading Mastic Asphalt?”

These are familiar themes we all tend to revisit over the years, usually whenever a bank statement arrives through the post, and the stories that are oft repeated on the radio or in the Sunday newspapers are mostly marvellous and deeply inspirational - a chance meeting of minds, a Saturday morning epiphany in a music store, an unexpected gift. They all tell a tale.

I’ve spoken of my own origins on a few occasions. I fell in love with the mysterious, mystical tones of Star Trek at a very early age. The same was true of Doctor Who, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and numerous other space operas. They all worked their magic.

However, it was Gerry Anderson’s Space:1999 that primed the charge for what was to come. The themes and motifs, the atmospheres, moods and textures, brought to life on the stages at Pinewood Studios, pushed a button in my head and, well, here we are. I’ve often cited Kraftwerk’s appearance on the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World science programme at around the same time as the actual catalyst but, in reality, Ralf and Florian (and Karl and Wolfgang) merely pulled the trigger, so to speak. The charge was already in place.

The afore-mentioned are all highly positive influences. That goes without saying. The flip side of this particular coin is that we will all eventually admit that there were certainly many more less than positive influences that motivated each of us, individually and collectively, and propelled us along a slightly different path. For instance, I am not even remotely into Ballroom Dancing or Jazz-Dance, probably because my mother was active in those spheres in her youth and the young burgeoning ‘me’ wanted nothing to do with the music of that bygone era. Similarly, I never been drawn to Tibetan Throat Singing, partly because I value my larynx and partly because it reminds me of my father puking his guts up every morning as a consequence of smoking sixty Embassy Regal a day.

However, there’s one figure in this story that I’d forgotten until very recently. Why haven’t I mentioned this experience in the past? Perhaps I’d simply blanked the whole episode from my mind. Maybe it was too awful to fully process, too painful to acknowledge except in the silence of an overcast Monday morning or in the soulless gap between waking and dreaming. One event, one person changed and shaped my musical adventure like no other.

The name of that person is Alistair *.

I’ve been advised not to mention this person’s full name for fairly obvious reasons. His full name isn’t important but his influence most certainly is. If you want to know his full name then I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure it out for yourself. He’s still active on the folk scene in the North East of England and has a web site. Do the spade-work. It’s not hard.

The year was 1972 and I was a ten year old pupil at Wingrove Junior School in Newcastle. One fine, sunny morning - it was probably a Tuesday morning because, from experience, Tuesdays rarely end well - we were led into the main hall for a ‘special event’. I had long suspected that ‘special events’ such as this were little more than a thinly veiled excuse for most of the staff to slope off down to the local Boozer but such special events got us out of maths and were, occasionally, of interest. One such special event is worthy of mention - The Green Cross Code Man aka Champion Bodybuilder Dave Prowse, came to tell us all about Road Safety. You might recognise that name. Yeah, a few years later Dave Prowse became Darth Vader. Yes, I met Darth Vader. The Darth Vader. Lord Darth Vader of Vaderham. And you couldn’t want to meet a nicer bloke, too. He was warm and friendly, keen too talk, and utterly bloody huge. Dave Prowse was the biggest man I had ever seen in my little life. Why Dave wasn’t given a knighthood for all of the lives he saved with his road safety campaigns remains a mystery. (He was given an MBE in the New Years Honours 2000)

Anyway, back to the story.

The school hall was full to overflowing when the main act took to the makeshift stage. Mr. Parkin, our deputy head master, (who certainly thought he was the main act) told that this would be a performance to remember. It would inspire and encourage us to take an interest in ‘Folk Music’.

Okay, so ‘Folk Music’. The music of the indigenous people of this fair isle. The sounds and tones, language and poetry of our land, our culture, our true musical heritage, and not some fake imported crap from one of our former colonies. I’m quoting one of my music teachers here.

Sounds good? Actually, it sounded fine. On paper.

In reality, it was anything but - even if it did get me out of a maths lesson…

I don’t remember any of the music. I don’t remember any of the songs. All I remember was…

This idiot.

This prancing buffoon.

This cut-price Court Jester and his on-stage antics…

The dancing. The twirling. The twisting and turning and… the constant gurning at the audience.

I recently told a friend about this experience and, in an instant, she replicated the same idiotic circular gesture with her arms, like a Freemason proffering their favourite handshake at a dinner party, because… She’d witnessed the exact same performance in her youth.

Groan.

Yes, that hideous, ever-present rictus grin. I still see it in my nightmares. It’s the kind of image that lingers at the edge of consciousness, barely out of sight, like some freakish chimera from a Clive Barker comic or a Stephen King novella.

In an instant, this frolicking Pixie of a man truly, utterly, fatally killed my interest in Folk Music. Folk Music, and all things folk, became an outdated and irrelevant idea. It belonged in the past, ideally buried twenty feet under a Barrow in the Outer Hebrides. Folk Music became tired, stale, and certainly out of place amid the gleaming spires and skyscraper palaces that beckoned as the twenty first Century came screaming into view.

To this day, as sad as it may seem, Folk Music was, and forever will be, “Old Man’s Music”.

And I wanted nothing to do with Old Man’s Music.

I want to make this clear. I don’t hate Folk Music and I don’t hate the people who love and cherish Folk Music. If it’s your thing then cool. Enjoy it. That said, as soon as I hear it, and I hear it quite a bit today, I just tune out. It’s noise. Old noise. Old Man’s noise. Hessian underpants, a love of the colour beige, and yodelling belong in the same group. They exist at another level of consciousness.

In another reality, I might have enjoyed Folk Music. I might have enjoyed learning it and playing it. But I don’t. End of story.

The point of this missive is this…

As a tutor, as a lecturer, as a former STEM ambassador, we go into schools and clubs, and history societies and, generally speaking, our talks and ideas generate a lot of positive vibes. The majority do seem to walk away inspired. That said, I am uncomfortably aware that certain elements of the audience will leave the hall feeling utterly unimpressed and thoroughly demotivated. Why? Because some do. It’s in their nature.

Can you see how powerful and formative such experiences can be? Especially in one so young? Can you see how one single silly performance can flick a switch… in the wrong direction?

I came away from that performance in a bewildered and confused state of mind. My teachers told me that Folk Music was wonderful, life affirming and culturally enriching. But I wanted nothing to do with this antiquated and downright tired style of music. I wanted to walk in the other direction completely, if there was another direction but, truth be told, I didn’t know enough about music to know that there were other directions. Not then, anyway. I didn’t want to be a musician, of that I am truly certain.

My disdain for the officialdom of music certainly stems from this experience although my silent loathing of every music teacher I have ever met was only truly cemented in place by one man, Mr. Peter Gaskill of Rutherford Comprehensive School, who described my musical skills and abilities on my second year end of term report with just one word : “Poor”. My critics these days would certainly agree with him.

* You can sue me if you want, Peter, if you’re still alive under all of that mouldering corduroy and badly harmonised counterpoint, but I have the evidence. I still have my old school report. Somewhere.

Poor Pete. He was another tired, old long hair, a relic that predated the summer of love, the Beatles, JFK et al. I’m sure he loved music. I’m sure he could play any number of instruments but he certainly wasn’t interested in what I was doing in my own corner of the musical playground. By then, I’d discovered that I didn’t need to blow on a reed or pluck a string or run a bow across a length of Dead Cat’s intestine. My music was born of the Electric Age. I could produce sounds at the flick of a switch using little more than a loose collection of transistors and resistors, capacitors and inductors. I could listen to music from the other side of the world simply by tuning a shabby, second hand short wave radio towards the far end of the dial. Electronic Music was new and exciting. Electronic music was about exploring the future. Even then, aged just thirteen, I was an electronic musician.

You know the rest. It’s a familiar story told over and over again by countless other electronic musicians. However, the point of this tale is not my love of technology or the fact that I can read a circuit diagram and write a line or two of computer code better than I can read a musical score. The message I want to convey is a message for all music teachers out there, trying in earnest to make a difference. And not just music teachers. The same lesson applies to every other form of teaching.

And the message is this. Sometimes, just sometimes, your enthusiasm for a subject blinds you to other possibilities. Your blinkered prejudice veils the other worlds hovering on the periphery. Your on-stage antics, as fun and as exciting and as energetic as they might seem, turn off more would-be musicians than you perhaps realise. And you should care about that.

So, put away the Accordion. Hide the out-of-tune fiddle. Dump the kazoo.

And please, for the good of all mankind, just burn the ukulele.

Burn it. Now. With fire.

You know it makes sense.

07-Jul-24 : Vera

Many years ago, one of my oldest friends, Steve Clark, told me that he’d been working as a Supporting Artist (aka an Extra) on a historical film at Bamburgh Castle up the North East Coast. Steve suggested that I should give acting a try on the basis that it was good fun and the pay wasn’t bad. I signed up to an agency straight away but, sadly, nothing ever happened so I put the idea on the back burner and promised myself I’d get around to it properly one small day but not today.

Skip forward to May 2024. ITV announced that the next series of their long running TV Detective show, Vera, would be their last. The series is filmed in and around the North East of England and it’s a show I like a lot, so I got back in touch with the agency, ne14.tv, and asked if there were any openings. Turns out that there were and I soon found myself invited along to a fitting session, which felt a little like a job interview, and I guess it was. Did the applicant turn up on time? Did they take direction? Were they easy to get on with? The pseudo-interview went well and, a couple of days later, I was invited to the first of two shoots over at Chopwell Woods in Gateshead, a gorgeous location I know fairly well.

Day One began at 0730 hours. Costume and make up came first although we didn’t proceed to the set until around 1200 hours because the weather was just awful. I can’t and won’t say too much about what we did because those details are protected but the first scene went pretty well although it was incredibly cold. I was clad fromhead to foot in a kind of Monk’s habit (plus I was wearing a stout pair of heavy thermals) so I didn’t really feel the cold whereas many of my co-stars were wearing considerably less and, Lord, they were very cold.

After a short break for dinner, we were back on set at around 1400 hours. Two more scenes followed, both of which involved Vera herself, namely actress Brenda Blethyn, who was lovely.

We wrapped at around 1700 hours and, because this was the last episode in the last series, there were a few tears and a lot of hugs between cast and crew, some of whom had been with the show since its inception fourteen years ago, and who wouldn’t see each other again. Fun but sad in so many ways.

Friday and Day Two was altogether more challenging. I arrived on site at around 0100 hours for an 0500 hours start because I didn’t want to leave such a long drive until the last minute. Plus I couldn’t sleep anyway. Parked up in the Supporting Artist’s Car Park, I took advantage of the clear skies to take some rather nice pictures of a patch of Noctilucent Clouds that had developed as I travelled north.

Turning up on set was a little daunting in that I didn't know anybody but I was pleased to find my friend Jo Bath, who is an old hand at this kind of work, so I had one familiar face in amongst the melange of bright young things and seasoned pros.

Make up and costume were finished by 0730 and we were on set by around... I don’t remember when. What happened was (and still is) a bit of a blur, frankly. We filmed half a dozen or so scenes over the next nine hours with occasional breaks for tea and dinner, but the whole day was pretty gruelling, frankly.

My final scene came at the end of the drama, right after the baddie had been carted off to face their just rewards. That’s when I found myself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and in a scene with Vera herself, and right in front of the camera too. Better still, I was without my mask for the first time so... Yeah... Luck and timing is everything.

We wrapped at around 1730 hours and, well, that was it. Back to costume to get changed into my normal clothes and then home.

I've had an interest in the art of making films for as long as I can remember so this was a brilliant way to spend two days. I learned so much about the craft of film making, that attention to detail is everything, that practice and rehearsals make all the difference, that making a mistake is okay so long as you don’t do it too often. Professionalism is everything.

Will I do it again? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt and I thoroughly recommend that you do, too. Once you see life from the other side of the camera lens then watching a film is never the same again.

And, strangely, neither are you.

28-May-24 : Working at... Work!

A lack of entries here does not suggest a lack of effort. Ion's new album is roughly 80% finished. It's a bit rough in places and a few tracks need remixing but it's getting there. The format will see the return of longer, more sequenced pieces that are more in keeping with Future Forever than Synchronicity.

I've released a series of videos wrapped around these works. Public reaction has been largely indifferent, which is sad but these are work-in-progress pieces to be used as waymarkers. I figure that fans who like the new material will keep coming back for more whilst more casual listeners will just breeze on through looking for their next fix.

Gigs - I've started gigging again. I have another planned outing in early June - a second fifteen minute slot for EMOM, which are just brilliant at getting your attention back on live work.

I took a listen to the demo tracks from SkinMechanix abandoned album Interference and... Wow... that was a major epiphany! I gave up on that one because I was being worked to death by my then employer who had a policy of saying "Hey! That worked well! Let's do another three series just like that...". Creative burnout ensued. The moral of this tale is that sometimes, you just have to stop working long enough to start living again, maybe kick back and watch the little Fluffy Clouds go by. Hey, where have I heard that before?

Guess where?

Time flies, eh? It's been thirty years since I started work on the album that would become The Infection of Time. Up to that point, I'd really just been dabbling with the idea of a formal release. Prior to that, a few demo tapes were kicking around amongst my friends but... I wonder where they went? The Great Landfill in the Sky, I suspect.

I recently found my old studio notebook from that time and it makes interesting reading. Most of the tracks have names with Space-y or Sci-fi themes, which sounded so cool at the time but I was subsequently advised would spell the early death of a project because such themes had been so heavily overused. Hell, thirty years on and they're still heavily overused! Anyway, I'm glad I changed a lot of the names. Astral became Infection..., Nebula became Lovesong etc. Only Tranquility Bass kept its original title and I dearly wish I had changed that one very early on because a change of name would have avoided a lot of legal crap in the years to come.

Should we celebrate The Infection of Time? Yes, I think we should. A few years ago, I said I would be very happy if I never had to play Lovesong ever again and I've stuck to that but... maybe one last time? I've asked Jules C if she would consider coming out of retirement and whilst she's not given a definitive Yes, equally she's not said an outright No!. I've made it clear that it would be just the two of us again for the bulk of the performance. That said, I'd love to get Steve Summers back on board for Network of the Heart.

We'll see. Infection wasn't released until October 1995 so we still have a nine months before we have to make a decision. Could be fun.

03-Jan-24 : A staggering discovery

Last month, CD Baby celebrated something of an anniversary - 25 years of helping musicians reach a wider audience.

Hurrah. Wonderful. Good for them.

And, by way of a Thank you for our continued support, they sent us a small payment for a small number of lost licenses that they had discovered in the course of one of their tidying up operations. In other words, someone used our music and CD Baby were not able to collect a royalty payment. I don't know how that happened. I don't know who was responsible. I'm guessing that someone inside YouTube dropped a ball...

I went through the usual statements and... Err... what? How many? CD Baby had miraculously discovered around fifty four thousand unpaid usages. Read that back slowly. Fifty four thousand. Wow. That's a lot of dropped balls, there...

How much did we earn for those fifty four thousand unpaid usages? Just seven dollars. Yeah, seven dollars.

Do you get the impression that there's something wrong with the streaming model?

11-Dec-23 : Electronic Music Open Mike Night at The Ship Isis

I'd been offered at slot at the Electronic Music Open Mike Night at The Ship Isis pub in Sunderland last week but decided against appearing. Nothing wrong with the group or the venue. I just decided that the music I'd planned on playing wasn't ready for a public performance. It wasn't good enough.

Nearly everything I've done for the last eight years has been written in-the-box using softsynths and plug-in effects, and whilst this approach does serve up a huge sonic banquet, a performance featuring just a guy and a laptop isn't (for me, at least) all that exciting. It's a personal thing, I guess. I like to see real musicians playing real instruments delivering a real performance.

Instead, I went along with my camera, took some pictures and just listened.

And there's always next month... But first, I need to work out a set with some proper kit...

10-Dec-23 : Psychosis Series

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that I've started releasing music again. The Psychosis series are a set of on-going experiments available on Youtube and intended to get my creative juices flowing again after an extended period away from both live performance and actual releases.

Whilst many of these pieces are a bit basic and definitely very minimal, they represent various compositions as Work-in-Progress items. They are NOT the definitive article. That said, I still kinda like them.

Psychosis 1 did well with around 200 plays, probably because it sounds a little like Vangelis on an off-day. Psychosis 2 did less well but Psychosis 3 keeps on growing. I'm optimistic that as the quality of the compositions improve then the audience will grow. My goal at this point isn't a huge audience. I'm just trying to find a new set of tools, a new workflow.

07-Aug-23 : Open Music Night at Independent

Thursday night - I took punt and went along to the Electronic Music Open Night at Independent in Sunderland. Umpteen acts, largely unknowns with one notable exception - Ian Boddy.

This was glorious. No flash. No pomp. No introductions. The whole set-up was anything but polished but... this was fun. This is the way music ought to be. Hear something new. Hear something fresh. Instead of the listening to the same old, same old, take a chance. Maybe something will start the creative clock ticking. Maybe the experience will get you back into the studio. It’s an approach I tried a couple of months ago with Organic in Whitley Bay and that ended up re-igniting the whole Uranium Saints project, which had stalled badly.

I stuck around to the end and, even though the last act was very difficult to get into, I shared his pain when nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed to work in his favour. I did smile when the poor guy just lay down on the floor and waited until his penultimate piece had played out. I've flopped (utterly) on stage a few times in the past so... yeah. I know how it feels to die in front of a crowd. At least this guy didn't go scream at the sound guy.

So, it’s an Open Music Night. Turn up. Set up. Play. Anyone can join in.

Sixty four million dollar question - will I?

Come along and find out.

I won’t be posting any more updates on the subject until after the performance and neither will the set be uploaded later. This will be a once-only performance. All the information you need will be available here. Nowhere else.