There's no I in Meme
I'm going to do this meme and I don't even care, 'cause caring is for WIMPS.
10 years ago
Alright, ten years ago today then. 2003, yeah?
I was going out with Lucy, and we spent a lot of our time visiting interesting buildings in London, playing Silent Hill games and watching Most Haunted. A lot of my interest in the arcane geography of London is entirely second hand from Lucy, and her enthusiasm for going out and seeing new stuff was really refreshing and exciting.
I had just recently met David Barnett for the first(ish) time and had introduced him to my bandmates in Luxembourg. He broke the ice by wandering across the stage mid gig at the LSE to try and score backstage! Classic David.
As for the 'Bourg, we were doing pretty well at that point - we were just doing the Tourist Information EP I think, 'cause everyone had been going on about us releasing Success Is Never Enough as a single, so we did! I think we sold about twelve copies! Hooray for supply and demand!
Still don't know who made this. Or where they found this picture!
But yeah, we were in quite a purple patch in songwriting terms. It was a nice time, and I do miss the weekly jaunts to Wavelength studios in the gasworks in Fulham.
Not to worry though! After a lengthy bout of effective homelessness after a messy break-up in November the year before (during which Al put me up on his floor like a saint) I had a new home! 63 Fortess Road where I lived with James Bell and Matt Crocker (and later Steve, Olia, Angus, Christina and lovely Kirsi Klen who would end up being my girlfriend a year later) was pure Withnail, as the cliché would have it. Lots of drunkeness and squalor and Dunkirk spirit and at times gruelling, but ultimately a happy memory of a place. Matt sadly died in a car accident some years later, but James lives on; painting, cooking and rocking out overseas!
I went to Corfu too. That was nice. Some men did a song about Dani Behr in a bar and I hated them. The insects were too big as well. the water park was amazing, however, so it all works out.
5 years ago
Is that 2008? I think that's 2008.
I was going out with Seaneen, and we spent a lot of our time watching comedy videos on the computer and going to picnics and the pub and stuff. It was a bit of a rough year for the both of us, but I mainly remember nice stuff now - which is the best way to do it, I reckon. But yeah, we pratted about with wigs and silliness and had the absolute best time we could when we could. I spent a lot of my time in 'Neen's house at the bottom of the Holloway Road, and have lovely memories of exploring the local streets together at night and of just hanging out. It doesn't sound like much, but at its best, it was lovely.
So Luxembourg broke up at the start of the year, following a couple of hopeful but doomed rehearsals. The four remaining founder members sat in a pub and hashed it all out until it was suggested that we just let it go, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went home. It was very sad to stop, but it had become impossible to go on, really. Al and I were oscillating between being a songwriting team and not speaking to one another, Stevey and David S were baffled by all the nonsense and David Barnett was just thoroughly disillusioned with the lot of us. Endless rehearsals of just talking and not playing, and never getting anything done. Horrible. Nobodies fault, either, really - we just all wanted to do different things within the band, which were ultimately incompatible. They remain a lovely bunch, however, and I'd always be up for doing one last gig, to put the ghosts of the actual final couple of gigs to rest.
(as an aside, it took me ages to realise that David's "How I wish the skies would make their minds up" line in Crowd Scene on Last Holiday Before Divorce, worked phonetically as, "How I wish THESE GUYS would make their minds up". The man had a point.)
But yes, I was living with Stef and Hobbes in THE MOST AMAZING FLAT IN THE WORLD on Tollington Park and we were spanking a lot of n00bs on xbox live. Which sounds really lame and lazy, but was actually really, really lovely, and I miss it a great deal. Me and Ed spent a lot of time hanging out too, basically being super funny and amazing. If it ever seemed like we were working at that - totally weren't. It was really nice to have a couple of friends to just hang out with and CB on B, 'cause B totally needed C'ing on a lot of B, yo.
I knew most of you lot by now, and it was a bit of a golden era in retrospect, with Ed, Emma, Fran, Rory, Chris, Alex, Jo, Me and Stef all living in Finny P, and everyone else seemingly living just down the road in every direction. So many lovely nights in the Noble and the N19 and the Ewok Village that is the Fallback, and just as many glorious picnics in the park. The lack of geographical distance made the bonds particularly strong, I reckon, and it was a real pleasure to have so many genuine friends so close to home. I loved Stroud Green, I think it might have been my favourite place to live in London so far. I am aware that that is precisely because of the people, though, so it's hard to be objective.
Oh yeah, I did my third actual, but first 'proper' gig with The New Royal Family at Lark in the Park. The NRF wig made its debut, and for the first time in about ten years I didn't feel ashamed of how I looked on stage! Wigs and hats, readers, they're the way for a happy gigging future! What a magic night, WHAT A BAND. God I love The New Royal Family. I don't know about the rest of them, but something about that line-up feels so perfect to me. Somewhere between Jen and Charley's professional brilliance and mine and David's amateur enthusiasm lies magic. But yeah, blowing my own trumpet there, rather. I'll let the video, and the (then genuine) surprise appearance of Edward the Confessor do the talking:
That very gig. Good times.
Oh, and I lost loads of weight. That was good. Nearly three stone all told. I put it on again, twice, but I keep losing it, so fuck you, weight.
1 year ago
Argh! I have a baby! Where did this baby come from?! Argh! Argh!
Anyway, yeah - me and Donna Blackburn made a baby come along and he was all, "My name is Jonah and now I'm one and hanging out". So he's pretty cool, but everyone has heard all about him.
Donna is eternally lovely and still, three years after we met, seems quite keen on me! We go visiting London and the World! mainly Whitstable, though, because it's ace. And yeah, we just have the best times.
I achieved my ultimate ambition this year and became a Minor Indie Celebrity! Keith Top of the Pops allowed me into the fold and I had having a wonderful time playing gigs with literally no stress involved, and with some of my best chums too! What an excellent thing! I also got to go in my first tour van, and was completely overwhelmed by the whole thing - doing Now We Are was my first experience of, "Hi! We're the band! We're brilliant! What can you do for us city?!" and I must say it turned out to be rather addictive. Love those guys.
The NRF made the comeback I'd been super hoping they would too, after a beautiful retirement gig in 2010. I think the status now is that we're there when the World needs us, like Crap Novelty Punk superheroes, or indeed The Doctor, which is pretty fitting, eh? But yeah, we did some gigs and I got to meet The Indelicates and Art Brut and all sorts of other lovely people who have re-affirmed my faith in guitar bands by being amazing on stage, and utterly charming off. Cheers!
I did my first bit of theatre since school too, for Sarah's War of the WALRUSES (she reckons it's Waleses, but what does she know?) which was good fun, if a really tricky discipline after all the years of bands. Essentially, if you make a mistake on stage in a band you can either style it out or play up the "whoops! sorry about that!" thing. If you're the music for a play and you make a mistake, you've basically ruined that bit for everyone. i had to actually concentrate and take things seriously, which doesn't come easy to me, but they were another lovely bunch of people and it was wicked to have my showbiz chum Mel and lovely Sarah to hand to play the idiot too when I needed to relax. And yeah, it did really well and we went to Stratford and stuff and my Mum and Dad came to see me, which was amazing! (My Dad has never seen any of my bands, and my Mum only saw Laverne once in 1997!)
Oh yeah and there was the Olympics and stuff and for two weeks we were all in love with each other, and if you weren't then you were missing out, and then the PA at Blur was AWFUL and ruined the whole thing. Cheers PA.
Yesterday
I did the weekly mailout at work, demoed some tracks for the Sci-Fi soundtrack to the game of a film that doesn't exist that I'm releasing later in the year, and played The Last of Us, which is ace. A good day, apart from the work bit.
a track from the sci-fi album which is not the one i was doing yesterday, but you get the idea.
Today
I'm going to enjoy my lunch and play some more of my game, as Donna is out for the evening. Hopefully Jonah will go to bed peacefully.
Tomorrow
More of the same. I think I'll rework one of the sci-fi tracks into a final version. Should get a move on, really.
1 year from now
I'd love to be back on tour. I'd love to have done all the tours in between. I have completely fallen for Tourin'.
With a bit of luck, the following albums will have been released:
The New Royal Family - Greatest Hits
Rob Britton - Skirmish*
Rob Britton - All Magic Is A Dead Shark
Rob Britton - Capital
Electric Fuck Machine - Glammed Out
Laverne - Bacardi Lies reworked
You heard it here first! Failing that, Livin' The Dream ought to be out, or on its way out, so it's all good.
5 years from now
I hope Jonah will be in a nice school and will not be being bullied and will not be depressed like I was. I just hope he'll be ok.
Donna and I will have made some money from interior design or card making or MILLION SELLING EFM ALBUMS or something and will be able to have moved to a bigger house for us and little dude. Maybe we'll have a cat.
I really, REALLY hope my loan is finally paid off, that's for sure.
Maybe those albums'll come out this year...
10 years from now
As before, really, maybe now we have two cats.
I hope I'm still able to play in bands and record stuff - I think they days of it being a young persons game are gone, anyway. Home recording ought to be even easier by then, so I'll have no excuse. Plus, a teenager doesn't require putting to bed, so I should actually have a little free time every now and again!
I'm quite excited about seeing where computer games are going, so I hope Donna tolerates my continued obsession with such things, and I hope Jonah and I are friends and able to share stuff like films and such. Maybe he'll even be in a band?! He can do whatever he wants, as long as he remains a megadude.
While I'm out on a limb, hopefully someone has managed to do something good with Ghostbusters and Aliens in the interim! Doubtless I'll still be asking Marc if he's seen Prometheus, either way.
And yeah, I hope I'm still friends with you lot, and I hope you're all still around, 'cause you're lovely. I'll have to dedicate the albums to you when I'm just done fine tuning them.
x
*It probably won't be called Skirmish come the time, Johnny and Jodie, don't worry!
10 years ago
Alright, ten years ago today then. 2003, yeah?
I was going out with Lucy, and we spent a lot of our time visiting interesting buildings in London, playing Silent Hill games and watching Most Haunted. A lot of my interest in the arcane geography of London is entirely second hand from Lucy, and her enthusiasm for going out and seeing new stuff was really refreshing and exciting.
I had just recently met David Barnett for the first(ish) time and had introduced him to my bandmates in Luxembourg. He broke the ice by wandering across the stage mid gig at the LSE to try and score backstage! Classic David.
As for the 'Bourg, we were doing pretty well at that point - we were just doing the Tourist Information EP I think, 'cause everyone had been going on about us releasing Success Is Never Enough as a single, so we did! I think we sold about twelve copies! Hooray for supply and demand!
Click to viewStill don't know who made this. Or where they found this picture!
But yeah, we were in quite a purple patch in songwriting terms. It was a nice time, and I do miss the weekly jaunts to Wavelength studios in the gasworks in Fulham.
Not to worry though! After a lengthy bout of effective homelessness after a messy break-up in November the year before (during which Al put me up on his floor like a saint) I had a new home! 63 Fortess Road where I lived with James Bell and Matt Crocker (and later Steve, Olia, Angus, Christina and lovely Kirsi Klen who would end up being my girlfriend a year later) was pure Withnail, as the cliché would have it. Lots of drunkeness and squalor and Dunkirk spirit and at times gruelling, but ultimately a happy memory of a place. Matt sadly died in a car accident some years later, but James lives on; painting, cooking and rocking out overseas!
I went to Corfu too. That was nice. Some men did a song about Dani Behr in a bar and I hated them. The insects were too big as well. the water park was amazing, however, so it all works out.
5 years ago
Is that 2008? I think that's 2008.
I was going out with Seaneen, and we spent a lot of our time watching comedy videos on the computer and going to picnics and the pub and stuff. It was a bit of a rough year for the both of us, but I mainly remember nice stuff now - which is the best way to do it, I reckon. But yeah, we pratted about with wigs and silliness and had the absolute best time we could when we could. I spent a lot of my time in 'Neen's house at the bottom of the Holloway Road, and have lovely memories of exploring the local streets together at night and of just hanging out. It doesn't sound like much, but at its best, it was lovely.
So Luxembourg broke up at the start of the year, following a couple of hopeful but doomed rehearsals. The four remaining founder members sat in a pub and hashed it all out until it was suggested that we just let it go, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went home. It was very sad to stop, but it had become impossible to go on, really. Al and I were oscillating between being a songwriting team and not speaking to one another, Stevey and David S were baffled by all the nonsense and David Barnett was just thoroughly disillusioned with the lot of us. Endless rehearsals of just talking and not playing, and never getting anything done. Horrible. Nobodies fault, either, really - we just all wanted to do different things within the band, which were ultimately incompatible. They remain a lovely bunch, however, and I'd always be up for doing one last gig, to put the ghosts of the actual final couple of gigs to rest.
(as an aside, it took me ages to realise that David's "How I wish the skies would make their minds up" line in Crowd Scene on Last Holiday Before Divorce, worked phonetically as, "How I wish THESE GUYS would make their minds up". The man had a point.)
But yes, I was living with Stef and Hobbes in THE MOST AMAZING FLAT IN THE WORLD on Tollington Park and we were spanking a lot of n00bs on xbox live. Which sounds really lame and lazy, but was actually really, really lovely, and I miss it a great deal. Me and Ed spent a lot of time hanging out too, basically being super funny and amazing. If it ever seemed like we were working at that - totally weren't. It was really nice to have a couple of friends to just hang out with and CB on B, 'cause B totally needed C'ing on a lot of B, yo.
I knew most of you lot by now, and it was a bit of a golden era in retrospect, with Ed, Emma, Fran, Rory, Chris, Alex, Jo, Me and Stef all living in Finny P, and everyone else seemingly living just down the road in every direction. So many lovely nights in the Noble and the N19 and the Ewok Village that is the Fallback, and just as many glorious picnics in the park. The lack of geographical distance made the bonds particularly strong, I reckon, and it was a real pleasure to have so many genuine friends so close to home. I loved Stroud Green, I think it might have been my favourite place to live in London so far. I am aware that that is precisely because of the people, though, so it's hard to be objective.
Oh yeah, I did my third actual, but first 'proper' gig with The New Royal Family at Lark in the Park. The NRF wig made its debut, and for the first time in about ten years I didn't feel ashamed of how I looked on stage! Wigs and hats, readers, they're the way for a happy gigging future! What a magic night, WHAT A BAND. God I love The New Royal Family. I don't know about the rest of them, but something about that line-up feels so perfect to me. Somewhere between Jen and Charley's professional brilliance and mine and David's amateur enthusiasm lies magic. But yeah, blowing my own trumpet there, rather. I'll let the video, and the (then genuine) surprise appearance of Edward the Confessor do the talking:
That very gig. Good times.
Oh, and I lost loads of weight. That was good. Nearly three stone all told. I put it on again, twice, but I keep losing it, so fuck you, weight.
1 year ago
Argh! I have a baby! Where did this baby come from?! Argh! Argh!
Anyway, yeah - me and Donna Blackburn made a baby come along and he was all, "My name is Jonah and now I'm one and hanging out". So he's pretty cool, but everyone has heard all about him.
Donna is eternally lovely and still, three years after we met, seems quite keen on me! We go visiting London and the World! mainly Whitstable, though, because it's ace. And yeah, we just have the best times.
I achieved my ultimate ambition this year and became a Minor Indie Celebrity! Keith Top of the Pops allowed me into the fold and I had having a wonderful time playing gigs with literally no stress involved, and with some of my best chums too! What an excellent thing! I also got to go in my first tour van, and was completely overwhelmed by the whole thing - doing Now We Are was my first experience of, "Hi! We're the band! We're brilliant! What can you do for us city?!" and I must say it turned out to be rather addictive. Love those guys.
The NRF made the comeback I'd been super hoping they would too, after a beautiful retirement gig in 2010. I think the status now is that we're there when the World needs us, like Crap Novelty Punk superheroes, or indeed The Doctor, which is pretty fitting, eh? But yeah, we did some gigs and I got to meet The Indelicates and Art Brut and all sorts of other lovely people who have re-affirmed my faith in guitar bands by being amazing on stage, and utterly charming off. Cheers!
I did my first bit of theatre since school too, for Sarah's War of the WALRUSES (she reckons it's Waleses, but what does she know?) which was good fun, if a really tricky discipline after all the years of bands. Essentially, if you make a mistake on stage in a band you can either style it out or play up the "whoops! sorry about that!" thing. If you're the music for a play and you make a mistake, you've basically ruined that bit for everyone. i had to actually concentrate and take things seriously, which doesn't come easy to me, but they were another lovely bunch of people and it was wicked to have my showbiz chum Mel and lovely Sarah to hand to play the idiot too when I needed to relax. And yeah, it did really well and we went to Stratford and stuff and my Mum and Dad came to see me, which was amazing! (My Dad has never seen any of my bands, and my Mum only saw Laverne once in 1997!)
Oh yeah and there was the Olympics and stuff and for two weeks we were all in love with each other, and if you weren't then you were missing out, and then the PA at Blur was AWFUL and ruined the whole thing. Cheers PA.
Yesterday
I did the weekly mailout at work, demoed some tracks for the Sci-Fi soundtrack to the game of a film that doesn't exist that I'm releasing later in the year, and played The Last of Us, which is ace. A good day, apart from the work bit.
a track from the sci-fi album which is not the one i was doing yesterday, but you get the idea.
Today
I'm going to enjoy my lunch and play some more of my game, as Donna is out for the evening. Hopefully Jonah will go to bed peacefully.
Tomorrow
More of the same. I think I'll rework one of the sci-fi tracks into a final version. Should get a move on, really.
1 year from now
I'd love to be back on tour. I'd love to have done all the tours in between. I have completely fallen for Tourin'.
With a bit of luck, the following albums will have been released:
The New Royal Family - Greatest Hits
Rob Britton - Skirmish*
Rob Britton - All Magic Is A Dead Shark
Rob Britton - Capital
Electric Fuck Machine - Glammed Out
Laverne - Bacardi Lies reworked
You heard it here first! Failing that, Livin' The Dream ought to be out, or on its way out, so it's all good.
5 years from now
I hope Jonah will be in a nice school and will not be being bullied and will not be depressed like I was. I just hope he'll be ok.
Donna and I will have made some money from interior design or card making or MILLION SELLING EFM ALBUMS or something and will be able to have moved to a bigger house for us and little dude. Maybe we'll have a cat.
I really, REALLY hope my loan is finally paid off, that's for sure.
Maybe those albums'll come out this year...
10 years from now
As before, really, maybe now we have two cats.
I hope I'm still able to play in bands and record stuff - I think they days of it being a young persons game are gone, anyway. Home recording ought to be even easier by then, so I'll have no excuse. Plus, a teenager doesn't require putting to bed, so I should actually have a little free time every now and again!
I'm quite excited about seeing where computer games are going, so I hope Donna tolerates my continued obsession with such things, and I hope Jonah and I are friends and able to share stuff like films and such. Maybe he'll even be in a band?! He can do whatever he wants, as long as he remains a megadude.
While I'm out on a limb, hopefully someone has managed to do something good with Ghostbusters and Aliens in the interim! Doubtless I'll still be asking Marc if he's seen Prometheus, either way.
And yeah, I hope I'm still friends with you lot, and I hope you're all still around, 'cause you're lovely. I'll have to dedicate the albums to you when I'm just done fine tuning them.
x
*It probably won't be called Skirmish come the time, Johnny and Jodie, don't worry!