It's a prison of sound.

[reddragdiva]

• Steve Kilbey on Grant McLennan. Still no word on the cause of death.

• Microsoft don't throw rocks through your window ... they post them. (courtesy baljemmett)

We all went to compilerbitch's housecooling party last night, including redcountess. (Sorry to teqkiller for the double booking, and happy birthday for last Friday when I got some good birthday pics of you!) We had a lovely time with the fearsomely smart Cambridge geeks and I took a zillion photos on the old S100 (the very first model of Digital Ixus, which does great shots, despite being painfully slooow and incredibly thirsty, and on Liz's my K750i phone. It's even possible the subjects will approve any of their pics and you might get to see them. timeplease beer-geeked at me ... I can see how he could move from computer science to running pubs.

Today we were woken at 3:30pm by a call from someone I'm buying another S100 from. arkady's had yet a third IBM laptop hard drive die on her, and we seek recommendations for brands of 2.5" laptop hard drive that will run 24 hours a day, can put up with hot weather and don't get nicknamed "DeathStar." Servalan is currently running on an Ubuntu Live CD. (And so is currently being called Commissioner Sleer.)

Arkady and I got to housecleaning, her in the kitchen and me in the spare room, playing Watershed by Grant McLennan. A lovely album of solo acoustic guitar songs, dressed up with a grossly inappropriate 1990 disco production. And the trademark clunky McLennan lyric bits. Fabulous. I found the charger for the Ixus 50 — I like the pics from the older range better, but by crikey this one's faster with a better interface.

For those who envied my insanely tiny Casio camera, I just got an EX-S1 with all accessories and software. It's only 1.3MP, but is so bloody tiny. Get in touch if you're interested before I eBay it. And if the_rin could please get in touch about the S110 ...

We are now listening to Primal Scream's unspeakable massacre of "Some Velvet Morning", courtesy tintintin, who actually likes it. This must have been done for a bet. We had to play the Rowland Howard/Lydia Lunch version to clean our brains afterward.

Comments

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I am weirdly fond of the Primals version, for some reason. I really have no idea why, as its so clearly wrong.

We have been listening to Lee Hazelwoods 1965-67 solo albums a lot lately. They are like enormous globs of soft cheese, with so much country cliche and dodgy 70s funky horns. He is the hipster Bacharach. His solo version of 'these boots' is hilarious - he feels compelled to make an aside in every damn verse to remind you that he played on the hit version.

[reddragdiva]

I got a copy of A Town Called Trouble for $2 from an opshop in Perth. It's a good example of what happens when someone shits gold too long and no-one dares edit him.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I thought that was the start of his career? We got the three 65-67 albums together on a recent CD rerelease. They range from quite good if you like that sort of thing (which we obviously do or we wouldn't have bought it) to 'so awful that you can't stop listening'.

I once saw Rowland Howard and Suzy Higgie from the Falling Joys perform Some Velvet Morning live, that was pretty good.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Lee Hazelwood couldn't believe he got away with the lyrics of "Some Velvet Morning".

[reddragdiva]

Hah! Got a reference?

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Not handy. It was in an interview in a British newspaper sometime in the past decade.

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

re: laptop harddrives, I've had good luck with fujitsu- I use my laptop ALL the time, and no problems yet. (knock on wood.) I've had this laptop for three years at least. (And that includes several bouts of dismantling it, probably more than one occurance of it being put down a little harder than the hard drive would like, etc.)

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Primal Scream is a good warning of what happens when you take too much Ecstasy. They started off as one of the less shambolic C86 bands, then the Summer Of Love™ happened and they discovered rave culture, then they seem to have developed a tolerance to E and a permanent comedown, and went Big Dumb Blues-Rock with psychotic lyrics about hate and Nazis ans skulls and Satan and such. Their recent stuff sounds like a clapped-out blues busker who has just discovered his teenage son's Nine Inch Nails CDs.

[reddragdiva]

The change from pop band to disco stars came when they kicked out the guy who then formed Spirea X, didn't it? I loved the Spirea X EP.

The Shamen were much worse. I got a promo tape (cheap bastards) of their first album, Drop, on which they were doing pseudo-psychedelic '60s because that's where they thought the money for drugs for music for money was. Then came E and "Move Any Mountain".

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

My Virgin Encyclopedia of Indie and New Wave says that he left in 1988, which would have been after Sonic Flower Groove and before Screamadelica. I don't know where the self-titled album falls in that continuum.

I vaguely remember the Shamen, and specifically remember hearing something of theirs and deciding that they're not sufficiently interesting to investigate further. And then there were the Soup Dragons (another C86 jangle-pop group who jumped on the baggy/rave/Balearic bandwagon), with that Rolling Stones cover that still gets trotted out for mobile phone ads and such.

You wouldn't have any Spirea X MP3s, would you?

[reddragdiva]

The Shamen were a major band of ecstasy-riddled rubbish. "Move Any Mountain" (I think it's actually called something else), "Ebeneezer Goode", um, other songs that sound identical ...

You know, I always thought C86 was lame shite after the C81 era.

I fear I do not have the Spirea X MP3 goodness. I have the record somewhere awaiting customs clearance ...

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, at least in the sense that C81 was a lot more polished and approachable. It included bands like Aztec Camera who went on to top the charts. By the time of C86, NME was run by socialist student types who didn't want anything that sounded remotely commercially viable. (Now, of course, NME is run by the Carling marketing department, hence today's answers to C8* are highly marketable rubbish like NME Britpack.)

The C86 tape, IMHO, is not a very good example of the "C86" movement as it became known. The more recently compiled Sounds of Leamington Spa CDs offer a better selection, though it's mostly from around 1988 or so.

[gths.livejournal.com]

The one thing that interested me about the C86 (or whatever) was McCarthy for reasons that have to do with the shaking head guy playing guitar.

I quite liked Primal Screams' Accelerator, (obviously a long time after they went disco-blues) but I guess the angry stopped being so spontaneous and by Evil Heat they basically got too contemplative about what they thought they were doing at the time, thus the MBV-krautrock-electroclash trainwreck.

[reddragdiva]

Yes. Something the indie obsessives frequently fail to grasp is that bands like the Triffids and the Go-Betweens were not out to be the best indie band. At all. They wanted to be famous.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Though if they really wanted to be famous, wouldn't they have hired stylists, done their market research and written/recorded songs calculated to appeal to the broadest target demographic?

[reddragdiva]

Nah. They thought they could be famous doing what they did, y'see.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

That sounds like an unreasonably high opinion of the taste and intelligence of the average consumer. Could there ever be enough people who would prefer the subtleties of The Go-Betweens to whatever streamlined, instantly gratifying junk culture is manufactured in Los Angeles with hundreds of times the budget, to make them properly famous in the mainstream?

[reddragdiva]

Grant was big on unsubtlety, and they had several not-quite-hits in the '80s.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

There are some discs made by Hitachi which are rated to run 24-hours-a-day instead of the typical about-13-hours-a-day. Check the specs very carefully of all their 2.5" drives to find them. The 24-hour ones are made for blade and other small servers.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Lovely shots from Dreadnought! Let me know, next time you're all going: that looks like a very stylish night out.

Meanwhile, I must see that camera... I like small shiny things. Oh yes. What's the low-light performance like?

[reddragdiva]

Probably awful - it's a Casio ;-) First of the Exilim Slim line. Ridiculously stealth, makes your EX-S100 look fat.

[reddragdiva]

Oh, and it's an EX-S2, not an EX-S1 — 2MP true, not 1.3MP. So it's pretty much the same as the Casio stealth cameras I was using so long. And still makes your S100 look fat.

[gths.livejournal.com]

Grant McLennan died of a heart attack the night after a party, apparently.

At least he didn't go out like Paul Hester.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Do I get copies of pictures of me then? *excitedbounces*

[reddragdiva]

Of course! What I'll probably do is put 'em up as a passworded album for the approval or disapproval of the victims in the next few days. Gemma has already been amazed that I got good pics of her ;-)