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
And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"
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".
This not improving my mood
We must burn all copies of this before it infects others.
OH GOD, it's spreading. We're too late! Oh the humanity!
I honestly cannot decide which of these is worse - all involved must be killed. It is a moral imperative.
via Billy and this BBC News article about the worst cover songs ever.
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
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
Did you realise that this song is written from the perspective of a night light plugged into the wall of a child's room? (And that there's a poster of a lighthouse on the opposite wall - "My primitive ancestry, Which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free"?)
Today is panning out to be made of EPIC TECHNOLOGY FAIL
- I still don't have the Internets at home.
- Lightning seems to have stopped working for no good reason.
- I can't log into the work HR web site for some reason.
- My MP3 player went from 2 battery bars to blinky, wah-wah-wah-no-mo-music-fo-you during the walk to work.
- Also fwd and back seem to pick random tracks rather than the one I've just listened to or the one that was there before I hit back, realised it'd picked some random tune and decided to go back to the one that had just started.
- Every traffic light turned red just as I walked up to it. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
- My phone has decided that receiving calls and text messages in a timely fashion is an optional extra[*] and that frankly I should be lucky that it doesn't just give me an electric shock at random intervals.
- Test failures, test failures and all the boards did shrink
Also, since the universe tends towards maximal irony - the external HD I was backing up on my shiny new Robot Minion failed midway through said backup and has taken to making plaintive emo mewlings of the "O tempora, o mores! I feel death's frigid hand 'pon my shoulder! The light! She is so bright! Life is pain &cetera &cetera ..." unhealthy clicking type. It is currently sitting, double bagged, in the naughty freezer thinking about what it's done. Woe betide I come home to find that it's painted its room black or something.
That plus insomnia plus the early warning signs of an imminent immune system collapse has made for grumpy Simon. In musical terms this feels like a good fit
On the other hand someone had TPd one of the street lamps at the corner of Beale and Harrison and a single, 20ft long ribbon was undulating gently in the breeze.
Set against the cornflower blue of the sky it was quite indescribably lovely.
[*] In the same manner as those DVDs that put "menus" in the special features list.
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.
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)
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.
Let's you and me try a little experiment.
Take the last 3 digits of your phone number. Add 200.
Now tell me when in history, approximately, you think Attila the Hun was getting his rampage on.
...
Now chances are that your Puny Earth Brain has instructed you to pick a date close to that number I asked you to work out when in fact the answer is approximately 450 AD.
It is because of irrational stuff like this that we are all doomed.
...
Also, it's possible that waking up inexplicably at 5.30am and then reading books on Behavioural Economics is Bad For Me™.
Rather like the schizophrenic style jumping of Faith No More, Primal Scream have managed to constantly keep reinventing themselves whilst still managing to keep a kind of core consistency.
Britain seems to have a talent for producing these chameleonic bands with shifting styles - the most obvious being Radiohead whose progression from "Pablo Honey" and "Creep" through "The Bends" and "Street Spirit" to "OK Computer" and "Kid A" and beyond has shown a gradual but definite progression.
But none have been quite so experimental as Primal Scream.
It's kind of hard to condense the whole of Primal Scream into a somewhat incoherently rambling Blog post - starting off with a Jangle Pop sound they first really came to prominence when DJ Andy Weatherall introduced them to the Manchester rave scene and then created the track "Loaded" for them by taking a quote from the Peter Fonda counterculture movie "The Wild Angels", pairing it with snippet of lead vocalist Bobby Gillespie singing a line from "Terraplane Blues" by Robert Johnson and then layering the whole thing over a Edie Brickell Drum sample.
But then they switched musical styles again. "Movin on Up" on "Screamadelica" had been a gospel tinged anthem with more than a few shades of The Rolling Stones
but the next album took that direction much further.
At this point known almost as much for their herculean drug intake as for their music (rumour has it they introduced a major actress turned pop star to the delights narcotic prompting her to shed her good girl pop star image for a raunchier dance direction) and the heroin addictions of most of the band members was stymieing the production of new material.
So, as an attempt to clean them up they relocated to Alabama with producer Tom Dowd. Given that the resulting album "Give Out but Don't Give Up" was mixed by Black Crowes producer George Drakoulias and funkmeister extraordinaire George Clinton it's not a huge surprise that it has more than a few overtones of the Crowes' "Shake Your Money Maker".
Never is this more evident than in debut single "Rocks"
Now I'll admit I loved Rocks - I was going through a bit of a Black Crowes phase anyway and was also re-rediscovering my Dad's old Stones records. I've also got an incredibly cinematic memory of it playing whilst flying a Gazelle at low level round Salisbury Plain but that's not really an experience I can readily ask you to recreate. However whilst it was a huge commercial success the critics' reviews were mixed with indie bible NME going as far as to call them "dance traitors".
Unsurprisingly the general pissing and moaning was a touch premature. With "Vanishing Point" - the gorgeous, swirling, cinematic, challenging "alternative soundtrack" to the cult 1971 film of the same way, the band changed direction again and then 2 years later released the astounding and overtly political "XTRMNTR". As a mark of how much the music had changed go listen to the previous three tracks again and then listen to "Swastika Eyes"
Despite, or perhaps because of, being largely drug free at the time the album, their last of the 90s (and hence where I'm going to stop), was a frantic, angry record as harsh edged as their first album had been poppy - their discography therefore tracking the rise and fall of optimism and youth mood in the UK during the 90s.
As an added bonus some rather legendary performances from the infamous British TV program "The Word"
More cooking. And a slightly better camera setting ...
The mash is flavoured with English mustard and chives.
Note once again my inability to plate properly. Asymmetric positioning may work for avant garde nouveau cuisine but not so much for simple fish'n'mash.
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