Cast your mind back to 1992 - Boutros Boutros-Ghali has just become Secretary-General of the United Nations, Windows 3.1 has just been released and the Manic Streets Preachers haven't started their determined spiral into bloated, pompous crapitude.

In fact, they have just released this rather catchy cover of the M*A*S*H theme song "Suicide is Painless"

Manic Street Preachers - Suicide Is Painless

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So, in order to scratch the itch I dug through the giant pile o' stuff and dug out the Nightmares on Wax album. And lo, it's as chilled as my feverish brain remembered. Bizarrely I also dug out a copy of Paula Abdul's "Forever my Girl", a second copy of the Sneaker Pimp's seminal "Becoming X" and an unopened, still shrink wrapped copy of "Miss Kittin and the Hacker".

Oh, and the CD with the best. case. EVAR

Album

So, in celebration and keeping in the downbeat tone of this cold, grey, San Francisco morning

Nightmares On Wax - Les Nuits

a resampling of Quincy Jone's "Summer In The City" it is, to completely rip off someone elsewhere on the web,

"a cinematic stab at trip-hop with a mix of retro soul strings, canons, and live instrumentation (bass, keys, guitar, organs, and vocals [by Sara Winton] are live). You can almost see the warm bodies, smell the smoke rising, and feel the listless sensuality in this song. It feels epic in scope yet tight as a clenched fist."

which just about sums it up.

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I started working 10 years ago today. Or, at least, this Monday of the month 10 years ago.

It all started with a football match and probably some beer and ended up with me and a friend named Gareth walking up Liverpool Road to an interview at something called a "new media" company. Which sounded terribly Wired.

This was back when Wired was still very, very cool. Especially if, like me, you were arse deep in a course at Imperial College - the UK equivalent of MIT but with, if it's possible, even fewer women. Staring down the barrel of a job in investment banking, IT consulting or something in the vague but yet horrific-on-a-Lovecraftian-scale world of Java B2B I was rapidly starting to fear that the jig was up and that I was sometime soon I was going to be exposed as a consumate slacker.

Walking in front of us was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - poised, ethereal and, I swear to god, glowing. I was completely smitten.

She turned out to be Fiona Brice and she was the office manager for the rather generically named New Media Com.

Remember that all interviews I had up until this point were in typical corporate offices - bad carpet, ceiling tiles, harsh overhead lights and cubicles as far as the eye could see - stuffed with stressed looking people in bad suits.

Therefore the New Media Com offices came as a bit of a shock.

The floor was polished hard wood and all the light came from a floor to ceiling patio windows with organicly shaped window panes. Since then it's been turned into a rather hip dance studio 

Liverpool Road office

And the people! Young. Good looking. Not a single one of them wearing a Iron Maiden tshirt over old school trousers, their pasty white faces framed by oversized glasses and lank, greasy hair. Oh how I longed to be like them!

And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"

Massive Attack - Teardrop

Again, remember every other place I'd interviewed until then (one of which had made it very clear to me that even listenting to music via headphones was banned) and then imagine being in this amazing space with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen (and who was offering us coffee like we were actual real people rather than rather dodgy chancers on the blag), hip young people with an air of quiet confidence and this achingly, achingly beautiful song.

Rather suprisingly they hired the both of us as employees number 9 and 10. It soon transpired that they were blagging it as much as we were. No-one new anything about new-media back in 1998 - you made it up as you went along and if it worked then you pretended that you'd known it would all along and if it failed you came up with an excuse on the fly and lied until you almost believed it yourself.

During the boom I hired everyone I knew and Profero, as it was soon renamed (the name being chosen, literally, by thumbing through my old Latin GCSE dictionary until we found a word we liked) started doing much actual, real, important campaigns such as Sky Digital and CNN. I tried my hand at everything - there's an old joke that goes "Can you play the piano?", "I don't know, I've never tried" and I was 20 years old and some combination of fear of being found out and youthful arrogance meant that I'd give anything a go - build a website for Miss World including a voting script in a weekend? No problem - the team came in on Monday morning to find me asleep on my keyboard. Client wants a promotional screen saver? Of course. I've never written one before but how hard can it be?

I worked there for over 2 years, juggling college work and usually 3 days in the office a week. Profero survived the bust that afflicted many of the bigger, trendier agencies out there and now has 12 offices from London to Madrid to Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and, as of this year, New York. The last friend I hired (who came in to do 2 days of HTML work 9 years ago and forgot to leave) finally quit - albeit to work for one of the original 9 employees. Gareth's doing clever things with television in Australia and I'm here in San Francisco with a CV that once caused someone to remark that it reminded them that "... career was a verb as well as a noun".



 

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It's the kind of cold, overcast day here that Mark Twain wrote about and which, for someone already in an oddly bad mood, seems to be pregnant with brooding menace - which isn't really helping.

What's also not helping is the continuing stupidity of my Government. For those not playing along at home they appear to be dancing merrily down the political yellow brick road to Fascism City - stopping briefly along the way for misc. songs,  dancing and the introduction of Orwellian laws against thought crimes. At best, and this would be a remarkably charitable interpretation, it's a is a misguided populist attempt to appear "strong". Otherwise it's a entirely more worrying scheme to continue the rebranding of Labour from "New" Labour and it's much vaunted doublespeak slogan of a "Third Way" to a more Godwin's Law invoking other Third slogan.

But, hey, just because local councils have already been using Anti-terrorism legislation such as warrantless wiretaps and email sniffing to surveil people whose dogs crap in public that doesn't mean we need to worry to about more far reaching laws about detention, censorship and thought crimes. Not to mention CCTV, ID cards, stop and search policies, the DNA database ...

*sigh*

So, brooding menace and political dissent then

Tricky - Black Steel

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It's a cold overcast day in SF - just the sort of weather I wanted to show off to the guests who arrived on Friday. Still, there's always MUSIC TO CHEER US UP

[ CUE elaborate dance routine. ENTER gayly coloured CLOWNS and ACROBATS also DOGS in AMUSING HATS ]

or, lacking that, watch this

They Might Be Giants - Birdhouse in your Soul

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French hip-hop is sorely underrated in the US which, to paraphrase Messrs Le Sac and Pip, seems to forget that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be.

So let me educate you.

Le Dernier Coup - Karim Le Roi et Freeman

Which was used to great effect in the final chase scene from the French film Taxi (note: that's not the cinematic abortion 'starring' Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah)

Taxi chase scene

and if you dig the style then people to read up on include the band IAM and rapper MC Solaar.

French hip-hop is, I'd argue, more socially and politically fervent - most rappers are of Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian descent and the racism and oppression that they and the other post World War II immigrant families encountered.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly good article on it here which is well worth a read.

And by pointing you at that I've prevented myself from writing yet another sprawling, incoherent treatise shat from my brain like so much half baked verbal diarrhoea.  So that's ok then.

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In most places in Europe this next track made number 1 or, at least, in the top 5 yet peaked at 21 in the US. I'd like to make an interesting and stimulating point about that but I honestly can't think of one. Something about the US rave scene lagging about 10 years behind the European one maybe? Meh.

Robert Miles - Children

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You know, I almost forgot today was monday. Again.

I was convinced that for part of this video Gaz wore an Ushanka

An Ushanka, yesterday

which would have neatly segued into mentioning Friday night's work related tomfoolery but that story's kind of redundant now which sort of leaves me at a narratorial dead end.

"Shut up" you might be saying, about now, "Shut up, shutup, SHUT UP, FOR THE LOVE OF $GOD BE QUIET. Why do I even read this stuff? What video? Why the hell are you prattling on about Russian head gear? Why must you always prattle on incessantly like some sort of verbally fecund half-wit?" you might add, sagely, before sobbing wildly to yourself whilst beating me with the nearest cudgelesque object to hand.

I was referring to this video.

Alright - Supergrass

Named after a slang term coined in the 70s by the British press to describe underworld informants who testified against their former accomplices in high-profile trials at the time which just goes to show the obscurity of some British slang. A grass is East End slang for someone who informs to the police, possibly from rhyming slang of "A grass in the park" which rhymes with nark which comes from copper's nark, also meaning an informer. Copper came about because of the old English verb to cop meaning to grab (hence cop an eyeful or cop a feel - English policemen were also nicknamed Bobbies in reference to Sir Robert Peel who advocated the creation of the Metropolitan Police Force in 1828). Nark probably comes from the Indo-European/Romany work nak meaning nose.

Is it any wonder we're kind of a strange country?

Oh dear, I appear to have digressed again.

The video for Alright was shot in the Welsh town of Portmeirion - the somewhat odd Italianate resort village in Gwynned constructed by Sir Clough William-Ellis between 1925 and 1975 which is most famous for being The Village in surreal, counterculture 60s spy drama The Prisoner - a program with a plot so convoluted it makes Lost look like a waterproofed child's book named  "Kevin and Mary sit very still on a patch of grass for 5 uneventful pages". I have no idea why they shot the video there but it does explain the references to the Big White Balloon and the Penny Farthing.

Apparently, on seeing the video, Steven Spielberg attempted to get the band to star in a Monkees style zany-band-at-large comedy series.

I still haven't decided if this means that Spielberg really gets it or really doesn't.

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I actually forgot that yesterday was Monday. I can't decide if that's tragic or not. sigh

I have a soft spot for Mark Romanek videos - especially the sublime "Hurt" for Johnny Cash, "99 Problems" for Jay-Z (although for the last I couldn't really tell you quite why) and the fantastically creepy "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails. No body seems to do lurking menace quite as well as him. Two of his videos - "Closer" and "Bedtime Story" for Madonna - are in the permanent collection at MOMA in New York (although I have to admit I don't really like either the track or the video of Madonna one).

One thing about his work - it ages incredibly well.

Criminal - Fiona Apple

It kind of blows my mind that that video is 11 years old - if you showed it to me blind you'd have no problems convincing me that it's was a completely contemporary promo.

And like the rest of Romanek's work it's achingly stylish - hell, I hate 70s retro chic and yet watching this I find that suddenly it looks appealing.

And Ms Apple - worryingly thin yes (the New Yorker described her as "looking like an underfed Calvin Klein model") but somehow a seamless blend of coquettish innocence and wanton knowing. It's not often that you see a someone who manages to project remorse and relish at the same time.

Tell a lie  -  dogs do it when you catch them eating something they shouldn't but it's not quite the same, is it?

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Once, in art class at school, I tried to bluff past my suckiness at the aesthetic by claiming I was creating modern, abstract peices whereby my teacher primly told me that you have to be good before you can break the rules. I think I probably responded that I was TIRED of these philistines not appreciating my work and that their insistence in wallowing in their own moribund, bourgeois notions of the same tired art clichés was bringing on a attack of the vapours.

I spent a lot of time in detention at school. A lot. Those who know me are, at this very moment, failing to feign surprise.

Anyway ...

If you are not a fan of the Warp records oeuvre then most of the output by bands like Autechre can sound like so much white noise. Don't believe me? Check out this video for "Grantz Graf"- it sounds like a skipping record. I'm being serious.

And yet it's strangely mesmerising.

Now I'm not nearly hip enough to be one of the people who really gets Autechre but I do kind of appreciate it. I even, through an series of events, have a copy of Gescom on mini-disc.

I also have a soft spot for Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson, another Warp artist,  who is also an accomplished 'classical' musician who fuses jazz with more abstract breaks and fast cut-ups. It's more accessible than Autechre but still pretty challenging stuff  -yet the jazz heritage clearly shines through. Like jazz itself it takes the rules and creatively breaks them.

Like my teacher was trying to point out - if you know the rules well enough then you can take risks with them, skirt the boundaries. There are obvious echoes to this in the world of molecular gastronomy which, by going back to fundamentals axioms, Principia Mathematica style, has produced results from the sublime to the shocking.

In music, squatting menacingly on both ends of that spectrum is the malevolent grin of Richard D. James.

Richard D James

It's funny - some people strive to be cool, to be known. They blow huge amounts of money, the go to all the hip parties, they make the right friends. They try. But some people are just naturally cool and some people are cool because they don't want to be.

And some people end up with a mythos.

There are stories about Richard James. That he owns a tank and a Russian submarine (true, apparently). That he owns the silver structure in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout (false). That he was once woken up by a courier from a record label wanting a remix he'd promised so he ran upstairs and grabbed a random DAT tape and the record company didn't notice the difference. That at 11 he created sound from a ZX81(which has no sound hardware) by using it to retune the video signal and cause different pitched hums from the cathode ray tube in the TV it was connected to.

Some of these stories he starts, some of them are started about him. Some of them are true. Some of them aren't.

Who cares? This is man who encodes image in tracks so that they're only visible using a spectogram viewer. A man who produces practically unlistenable glitches, squelches and bleeps and yet also manages to get to number 16 in the charts.

With songs like these.

Readers of a nervous disposition should probably just go watch a Norah Jones video.

Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy

of which James said

'Come to Daddy' came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed, and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.

The video for Windowlicker fits in 44 uses of the word "fuck" in under four minutes, averaging out at about 1 every 3 seconds. Both it and Come to Daddy were directed by Chris Cunningham who got his start doing the puppets for Spitting Image and later, the sculpture and animatronics for Alien³ and followed up Come to Daddy with the rather more mainstream Frozen video for Madonna.

To put it another way, it's Not Safe for Work. You've been warned.  It's also 10 minutes long but worth every second.

Aphex Twin - Windowlicker

 
If you're not the kind of anal retentive like me who actually counted all the windows on the limo - there are 38.

And the French sample half way through is James' then French girlfriend and roughly translates as "I like to shag my dog" albeit in mildly obscure slang.

...

I like to think of myself as sort of an educational service. Not a very good one mind you, but a service none the less.

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