2014

A new year. In August I'll have been working as a doctor for 10 years. I started medical school 14 years ago. Time flies.  Ten years as a doctor and I'm still a trainee. 

In the past year I've finished a doctoral degree and been appointed to an academic training job at a decent University. I've been to a couple of excellent music festivals run by ATP and I've seen some great club gigs in Glasgow. I've been a bit lax about writing in the blog sadly. I've read a few good books, I've listened to a few good records and I've read some decent comics.  I've spent time with my family which is important.

I've met a few of my heroes. Most of them didn't disappoint me. 

I've discovered Netflix. I've managed to get the Internet in my flat. I've been lucky enough to afford an iPad and a MacBook.  I'm a lucky bastard and I live in a world that my grandfather could not have imagined.  I was looking at my grandparents wedding photograph today, from London in the 1930s. They lived through two world wars and saw stuff I can't imagine. The progression of time is quite a thing really.

I watched a film that had an emotional impact on me last month. Blackfish. It was a documentary about killer whales in captivity. It's heartbreaking, see it if you can. Whales are amazing. I'm reading a book about whales at the moment. Apparently the first footage of sperm whales underwater was only shot in 1984 nearly two decades after we walked on the moon. Man has a lot to learn and needs to respect the planet.

Enough rambling bullshit. I hope anyone who takes the time to read this blog has a great year.

sometimes it's nice to meet your heroes - End of an Era 2, the final ATP holiday camp festival and Mike Watt

The ATP festival concept was brilliant but sadly it has now run it's course.  This weekend I attended the ATP chalet festival at Camber Sands in Rye.  For work and financial reasons I never made it to the early festivals but I always looked at the line-ups with awe.  A good friend of mine plays in Mogwai and actually curated the first ATP festival but the first one I made it to was curated by Jeff Mangum in 2012.  I loved that experience and went back to the Deerhunter event this summer.

I was sad to hear that the festivals were ending.  I am not privy to the reasons for this but running a big festival has to be difficult in harsh financial climates.  Pontins certainly did not roll out the red carpet for guests this time, requiring us to bring our own linen.

The line-up for this festival was brilliant and contained many personal favourites. Slint, Shellac, Loop, Girls Against Boys, Michael Rother, Mike Watt and of course Mogwai.  Attendance was required despite my fears about the notoriously unpredictable late November weather.  In the end I made it to Camber Sands without any snow having made a stop at the British Museum on the way.

Pontins is not scenic and reminds me of my home town of East Kilbride.  I guess it provides an appropriate back drop for alternative rock but I wouldn't want to spend an actual holiday here.

On the first night I saw Thought Forms, a band I was unfamiliar with.  They made some cool Sonic Youth-y noises and jumped about.  I liked what I heard so I bought up their back catalogue.  I'll look out for them in the future.

Thought Forms

After Thought Forms I caught Om and the Fuck Buttons set.  Om were intense with a great Sabbath/stoner rock sound.  I have a few records by Sleep, the band that Om developed from and they were just as good.  After that the Fuck Buttons hit the stage.  They made some great noises.  I don't have any of their records but I enjoyed seeing them.  Finishing off Friday night was a one-two whammy of Shellac and Slint. 

I saw Shellac in Glasgow last weekend and this was the 5th time that I have seen them since 1994.  I bought the first Shellac singles as they came out back in 1993 and they have always been one of my favourite bands.  They played a great set although they were oddly quiet (dodgy PA).  They even played 'wingwalker'.

Shellac wearing their evening suits

Slint too had a quiet PA but it was great to see them again.  They played most of Spiderland as well as a track from Tweez and a track from their EP.  I had hoped that we might have seen more of the mythical Slint documentary film but there was no joy.  After the concert I ended up in the Mogwai party chalet and in a drunken haze I met David Pajo.  He seems like a nice guy, even when confronted with an intoxicated Scottish Danzig fan.

The next morning was a bit of a red wine haze.  I woke up early and went to Camber Sands beach to contemplate infinity.  Camber is probably fairly nice in the summer but it's a really small town.  I wouldn't want to live there.  The locals were nice but the holiday camp is certainly grim.  This time we brought food with us so we didn't have to buy overpriced rubbish in the Nisa store or toxic waste from the onsite food outlets.

The beach itself is beautiful.  I took a few photos before my hangover really kicked in.  I was able to watch the Dismemberment Plan play a set that drew heavily from 'emergency & I' but after that I had to lie down for a bit to prepare myself for the evenings festivities.  After my much needed beauty sleep I caught a bit of 23 Skidoo and the Pop Group.  Neither band really set my world on fire but it was nice to see 'we are all prostitutes' played live.

Comets on Fire were a different thing altogether.  They took to the smaller downstairs stage and tore the place apart.  I've been listening to a couple of their albums which are enjoyable enough.  The recordings did not prepare me for the rock fury of the band on stage.  Blending Mudhoney, the Stooges and Sabbath they sent an electric shock through the crowd.  Rocktastic.

Comets on Fire

I had been listening to Loop stuff in an attempt to prepare myself for this concert.  I sort of missed Loop as a teenager spending more time listening to Spacemen 3.  In recent months I have taken a bit of a crash course in their stuff but it didn't really click until I saw them live.  They managed to make an immense noise with the hitherto 'polite' upstairs PA system.  Their repetitive drones drove the crowd mad and a plague of crowd surfing spread though the room.  To ice the cake they encored with 'mother sky' by Can.  I was grinning from ear to ear.  Once more I retired to the Mogwai party chalet where I had a close encounter with some rather nice 15 year old Glenlivet.  I stumbled back to my chalet at around 3am with a smile on my face.

My hangover was a bit worse on Sunday.  I managed to reconstitute myself in time for the Michael Rother set at 3:30pm.  It was pretty good but I preferred the Neu heavy set that I caught in Primavera a few years before.  My recovery was complete in time for the Mike Watt set.  He was playing ll Sogno Del Marinaio, a sort of opera about sailors.  It was nice, instrumental passages with intermittent vocal flourishes. He finished his set with a cover of Funhouse by the Stooges (i think).  Watt is a great hero of mine but I'll return to this topic in due course.

Mike Watt

After Watt came Girls Against Boys.  I've been listening to Girls against Boys for many, many years. I saw them 2 or 3 times in the mid nineties but I haven't seen them for a long long time.  I was rather excited to see them again and I wasn't disappointed.  The sound was slightly ropey during the first song but they managed to shine anyway.  They kicked off with 'tucked in' before playing an action packed set.  The strength of the Girls Against Boys back catalogue was highlighted by the fact that they managed to play a great show despite missing out classics like 'I don't got a place' and 'sexy sam'.  The new songs that they played held their own against the old material.  It's a shame that GVSB never had the success they deserved.

Girls Against Boys

The next big discovery of the weekend was Goat.  Goat are a Swedish band that wear masks and play intoxicating rhythms.  They make you want to dance.  I suspect them to be the Knife in disguise but I am told that this is not the case.

Goat going bongo crazy

Finally the last ever ATP festival was closed by one of the best bands on earth. Mogwai.  I cannot write an objective word about mogwai, especially when they got me drunk all weekend and gave me a stage access pass for their set.  However, I will honestly say that they played a brilliant set.  The new material is amazing (especially 'remurdered' and 'blues hour').  I remember first hearing them play Helicon 1 about 18 years ago in a very small room and seeing them playing it again in a very big room in front of some very excited fans was great.  Mogwai curated the first ATP festival and it was fitting that they closed the last one.

Mogwai playing mexican grand prix

After they finished the DJ played 'Teenage Riot' by Sonic Youth and it was all over.  The crowd went mad.  I was able to nip on stage and take some photos of the departing crowd.  Somehow I had found the 'make everything look drunk' button on my camera.  I ended up in the surprise party for Barry Hogan at 2:30am.  I shouldn't really have been there (although I was again abducted by the 'gwai) but it was nice to hear his words on a series of events that have meant a lot to people with good taste.  I don't know what he'll do next but I'm sure it'll be good.

As a coda to an amazing festival I had an amazing experience on the train from Rye to Ashford.  I met Mike Watt on the platform and I spent about 30 minutes talking to him.  SST punk was a big thing for me and I remember first hearing the Minutemen after buying the Post-Mersh volume 3 CD from Tower Records one boxing day (maybe 1991?).  Watt is one of the nicest men alive and when he heard my accent he asked me if I knew Dep from Monorail Records.  When I told him that Dep had advised me on Minutemen records over the years he smiled.  I think he regards Dep as a sort of missionary.

Watt spoke about his need to constantly tour.  He sees life on the road as being like that of a sailor, like his father who was in the navy and served in Vietnam.  Watt told me that he saw little of his father growing up and that he feels he only got to know him in his thirties by which point he was dying of cancer.  Watt himself said that he had decided not to have children as he felt family life was incompatible with life on the road.

He suffers from arthritis and needs to have a knee operation next year.  He'll need to to take 6 months off from touring to do that.  He says that this will be difficult as he doesn't know what to do when he isn't touring.

He told me a bit about how he recorded some of his records, how they got free studio time to record one song but managed to record all of the first side of 'buzz or howl under the influence of heat' by pretending it was one song.  He told me that he originally wanted to use images from the magazine Scientific American for the cover (indeed the title came from Scientific American) but the photo cost too much so Joe Baiza drew a sketch of him and D Boon instead.

Watt is an inspirational musician and his life and words have meant a lot to me over the years.  After I finished talking to him, changing trains at Ashford International I listened to all 175 minutemen tracks on my iPod back to back.  They took me most of the way back to Glasgow.  I thought about the life of Mike Watt and how he has given so much to me.  I don't think he's a rich man but he is a good man.  Like most American musicians he won't have free health care and nobody buys records now so musicians have to tour to make money.  If anyone reads this think about buying a mike watt record (fIREHOSE/minutemen/anything) or go to a mike watt gig.  He's a good bloke.

With the ATP concept, Barry Hogan did a good thing and has given me some amazing experiences.  I hope he does something new, similar and brilliant again.  Maybe even in Scotland?

A thought...

Bloody hell, I've been writing and publishing this blog now for more than 8 years.

My activity has been intermittent but it is a sustained body of work.  I accept that most of it is shite and that few people read it but I've stuck with it for a long time.  I've now published 664 posts.  Wow.

Fantagraphics Kickstarter Project

Fantagraphics are one of the best comic book publishers in the world.  They publish intelligent books by intelligent people.  They make comic books that are art.  Their books are often beautiful.

The first Fantagraphics comic that I remember buying was Hate number 1 by Pete Bagge.  I actually bought it from Bagge himself at the Glasgow Comic Convention in 1989 (or around then).  He signed it for me.  I was really too young for the comic at the time.  I must have been 12 or 13 but I became a massive fan.

Fantagraphics also publish Robert Crumb, Love & Rockets, Castle Waiting, The Comics Journal, beautiful reprint collections of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, English language translations of the works of Tardi, collections of Pogo by Walt Kelly.  All amazing comic art that fights for space on my cramped book shelves.  They don't really publish potboiler superhero rubbish.  I am glad that they exist and I hope they continue to exist.

So, I've pledged for a couple of things on their Kickstarter and I hope that some other people do the same.  They have had a bad year in 2013 with the death of Kim Thompson, Fantagraphics co-founder, and the subsequent disruption of their publishing schedule.  They are raising money to stay independent and stay afloat.  I'm happy to give them cash directly instead of buying from Amazon.  I see it as a donation to an art gallery or a museum. It's just that I get to have this art at home with me.

Anyway, check it out.

Autobiography - Morrissey

I made myself finish the Morrissey Autobiography today.  I think much of it is an elaborate practical joke.  It's written in a stream of consciousness splurge that does not appear to have been edited in any way.  He has a very breathless voice and he seems to recount every negative encounter that he has ever had.  He has a special amount of anger reserved for an ex-band member and a Judge who labelled him as 'devious, truculent and unreliable'.

He also spends a lot of time with dying birds.  I suspect that the dying birds sections are elaborate parodies.

I would have liked some chapters.  It is nice to hear that Morrissey has had sex with a few people.

I like the records more than the book.

Scotland in November

On holiday in the west coast of Scotland. It's raining a fair bit but still some decent views.

Lou Reed - A loss

Lou Reed meant something to me.  He was a big musical touchstone.  I think I own about 5000 albums, I've seen more gigs than I remember, I've played in crappy bands and I've written hundreds of shitty teenage songs.  Most of the shitty teenage songs I wrote were Lou Reed knock offs.

I can't remember exactly how I got into Lou.  For me, Walk on the Wildside was a big childhood song.  I didn't get the the murky subculture lyrics but I loved the sliding baseline and the 'doo da doo' backing vocals.  I can't remember if I heard the banana album first or the cassette of the Jane's Addiction live album with 'rock n roll' on it or if it was a knock off live CD of a New York concert on Christmas day in 1972.  It was one of those things and all of those things and I connected with every fucking one of them.

I wanted to be Lou Reed.  I didn't want to be a bisexual transvestite junkie but I did want to sing intelligent songs with great words in my own fucking voice.  I did try that a bit but I wasn't very good at it so I went into medicine as my fall back plan.

Lou and the Velvet Underground influenced most of the music that ever mattered to me.  Spacemen 3, David Bowie, Jane's Addiction, the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, the Happy Mondays, Nirvana, Nick Cave, Fugazi. The list goes on and on and on.  He brought grit to the modern rock song.  He let a pop song become a documentary on the fucking grime of life.  He sang about shit things in a matter of fact way that didn't really glamorise them.  I realise that he was a bit of a dick at times but he made some great great music.

I was lucky enough to see Reed play at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in September 2000 just before I went to medical school.  He played a 3 hour set.  It was pretty special.

He was 71, he had a liver transplant earlier this year, he took lots of drugs in a crazy way.  He should have been dead some time ago. He hung out with Andy Warhol and he was one of the direct roots of punk.  He was listened to by political dissidents in Poland and by the Mary Chain in East Kilbride.  He made grim music for grim people in grim places but some of it was brilliant and some of it was life affirming.  I would argue that he made popular music into art.

I'm sorry he's gone but I'm glad he was here.

RIP

Netflix

I've finally fully entered the internet era.  I've set up broad band internet in my flat and I've got a fancy new TV that lets me stream Netflix.  Netflix is a great service.

I was sucked in by Breaking Bad.  I'd caught the first series on the UK channel 5 a few years back and more recently got up to date on DVD.  I was desperate to see how the series would end so I decided to go for Netflix.  Now I think I'm addicted.

Netflix has thousands of hours of TV shows and films instantly available.  Breaking Bad is the crown jewels but it also has South Park, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, Portlandia, It's always sunny in Philadelphia.  The list goes on.  Netflix also has a big pile of films that I want to see, the sort of things that I would pick up in Asda for £3.  Usually I would watch these films once and then put them in a pile.  Now I will hopefully save money and space.

I've found some good documentaries too.  I'd been wanting to see the Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet documentary for some time and I was pleasantly surprised to find it here.

I strongly urge anyone who likes good cinema to check this service out.

Jason Becker: Not Dead Yat

I must admit that I'd never heard of Jason Becker but I must have bought some guitar magazines with his face in them at some point in the early nineties.  Becker played a style of guitar that I am not really a fan of but he was a talented young guitarist.  He had signed up with David Lee Roth when disaster struck.  At the age of 20 Jason Becker was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.  Somehow he is still alive.

I'm a neurologist.  I've met a lot of people with motor neurone disease.  It's a terrible disease, one of the worst diseases I know of.  Very few people live for a long period of time.  Through luck, excellent family support and good resources Jason Becker is still alive and still making music.

Through a mixture of family photographs, super 8 cinefilms, concert footage and interviews we hear Jason's life story.  He should have been Stevie Vai or Van Halen but his body betrayed him and now he communicates with his eyes. Based on the film he has shown amazing resilience and focus.  Most people couldn't do that.  The only other person that I can think of who has survived so long with a motor neurone disease is Steven Hawking.

This film is worth seeing.  It interests me as a doctor and as a music fan. I'm not a fan of 'shred' guitar but it's great to see one man keeping on despite the odds.

another year older

I'm 36 now, closer to 40 than 30.  It sneaks up on you, age.  In the past year I have completed a doctoral degree which is a big step.  I'm continuing my clinical career which is as interesting and challenging (and at times soul destroying) as ever.  It's all good.

I have a week off just now.  I've used it to try and sort out my life a bit.  I've just restructured my finances in a more sensible way and I've bought myself a fancy new TV and a fancy new computer (a MacBook Pro).  I lead a privileged life.

I'm not doing anything exciting with my holiday.  I'm reading some books and trying to sort out bits and pieces in my flat.  All first world problems.  I have no major concerns just now. I realise that I'm writing this on the 12th anniversary of something bad and 15 years after a friend died in a stupid accident.  I'm luckier than most of the planet.

At the moment I hope we avoid another crazy war in the middle east and I hope that everyone is happy.    Starry eyed optimism, hippy sentiments.  Thanks again for reading.