Surprise early release

Annie was at the peak of production prowess and took no time at all to master her last vocal, recorded on Thursday night, and complete the tweaks to those other couple of tracks we had glitches on. So having allowed ourselves an entire weekend to prepare for release, we were ready by lunchtime.

I pointed out that many people would be working Monday anyway and might not be able to listen right away, so in the end we agreed to steal a march on your expectations and release Weird & Wonderful early. At the moment you can only stream it from one of the websites, but we're busy signing up for iTunes and Amazon distribution, so it'll be available for iPods etc as soon as we can make it happen.

Meanwhile, to listen to all 12 tracks on the new album, you can use the Music Player on the Beresford & Wallace website or if you're on Facebook you can try the music player on our Facebook page.

It's a wrap!

With a remarkable lack of ceremony, the last song seemed to take almost no time at all to record and our second album, at least in terms of recording, was put to bed last night. This extract from the Weird & Wonderful cover seems particularly apt!

Not that the ease of recording made for a short evening's work. Oh no. Annie had discovered a couple of minor problems with earlier sessions, which meant going back to two of my previous recordings and re-doing a few harmonies in one case, and a final chorus in another.

On top of that there were decisions to be made. What should the track order be? How many copies of the album are we going for as a first print run? What kind of promo are we going to be doing? What's the best local venue for our first live gig? All in all, there was more talking last night than singing, but it's all good; we're still on track for a Monday (March 1) release. It's easy for me to say that though - it's not me doing all the post-production work!

Because it takes time (two weeks on average) for new material to appear on iTunes, the release date will be for "streaming only" at first. That is, you'll be able to hear the songs on one of our websites, but not download them onto your iPods or PCs for a couple of weeks. And even though we have the much-adored and commented on front cover, we're still working on the artwork for the rest of the CD, so anyone wanting a physical copy will have to hang on a little while longer too.

Book Review: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Catching up with my book reviews, this was the book club choice for February - the one I've just finished reading.

It's the story of a young native American half-breed boy whose mother was an alcoholic, partly because his father had run off as soon as he found out she was pregnant, and whose head was run over by a mail truck when he was only seven. Despite serious injury to his skull the boy survives and the book follows his "adventures" through intensive care, rehab, a school for unwanted native American children with various problems, and a Mormon foster home, until he eventually fetches up in a surprising place that I won't spoil by revealing.

For only the second time in my life (the first time being with John Brunner's Shockwave Rider) I persevered with a book against all reason to find that the last third of the text made up for the hard grind of the first two-thirds. And it was a hard grind. From one perspective the story is unremittingly grim. Schoolboy violence, drugs, murder, parental abuse, societal abuse, Edgar runs the gamut. Yet Udall's narrative retains a light touch with moments of laugh-out-loud humour. Even so, by halfway through I still hadn't developed much in the way of caring about the main character. Things began to pick up a little once he arrived at the Madsen household and from there on the book began to give something back, turning eventually into a story I'm glad I read, even though I'll almost certainly never read it again.

With a couple of notable exceptions the book club denizens agreed, in general, with my feelings, giving the book relatively high scores and fifth place out of the 42 books we've now read. (You can see the latest club league table here, if you're interested)

Vinyl: Gone To Earth

Artist: Barclay James Harvest
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

It's so long since I listened to any BJH that I had to consult Wikipedia to remind myself of the track list on this album, which I was almost certain I must have bought after (or while) seeing them at Nottingham Uni sometime in 1973 or 74. But Wikipedia insists the album wasn't released until '77, so its purchase may have coincided with them playing Manchester in those heady days shortly after I first started work.

To be honest even reading the track list didn't help all that much (SO long ago), but I'd love to hear this again one more time so it'll stay on my want list. Just not at the top.

Book Review: The Other Hand

It occurred to me recently that I'm way behind with my book reviews. In fact the last one I wrote was in August last year, but having looked back at what's happened since, I've not been as lax as first thought. In September we read The Leopard, which was SO dull I didn't get past chapter four. October we were in the Lakes, so I missed out on reading Brave New World, and I never made it past the starting blocks with November's The Go-Between, which brings us neatly to the first book of this year: The Other Hand by Chris Cleave.

Told from two perspectives - the Nigerian refugee girl "Little Bee" and the British magazine editor Sarah whom she meets while Sarah is on holiday with her husband Andrew - this story epitomises the modern novel for me. As in, it totally fails to live up to either the hype on the cover or the effusively gushing reviews that you will find only a short Google away.

Parts of it are funny, especially the many references to Sarah's young son in his Batman persona, but much of it is dull, or contrived, or hints at possible interesting diversions which are never followed up (an example being the colourful characters who share Little Bee's time in the immigrants' detention centre, but then disappear without trace once she sets off to find Sarah and Andrew).

Sarah is one of the most self-absorbed characters I've ever read, to the point of being a cipher. Everything around her - son, husband, lover, job, house, holiday - is there for the sole purpose of providing her with entertainment and diversion. As you might imagine this rapidly becomes tedious beyond belief, and descends into farce when her lover's job (which he constantly and unbelievably recklessly verges on throwing away) proves to be nothing but a plot device designed to allow Sarah to accompany Little Bee back to Nigeria when she is inevitably deported.

The cover blurb insists that it doesn't want to reveal too much about the book in case it spoils the "truly special story." To my mind, that would be "special" in a way that might make you turn away in discomfited embarrassment, if you know what I mean. It seems most of the book club agreed with me too, since their votes but The Other Hand firmly in 39th place (out of 42 read).

Let there be light...

I mentioned recently that we've been living in the shadows for a while. On the landing, at least.

A couple of years ago I installed a security light switch. A clever little beast with a built-in timer and a photocell which provided a wealth of options on when it would turn on, and off, and how many times, and on what days. Versatile enough to make even the most observant tea-leaf believe there really was someone in the house on those all-too-rare occasions when we go away.

Shame then that those clever electronics weren't also resilient electronics. Call me picky, but I'd have thought a light switch should be able to withstand something as simple as a blown light bulb. I'm not talking massive electrical storm, direct lightning strike, or rat-inspired short-circuit. Sooner or later, your light bulb is going to turn up its toes. A light switch whose electronics are fritzed by such a common occurrence shouldn't, to my mind, be allowed on the market. But there you have it. First dead light bulb... one dead light switch.

In my normal procrastinatory fashion it's taken me several months to shift my ass into gear but today I finally coughed up the £1.48 for a replacement switch - and fitted it! Not another electronic one, mind. No, that would have set me back at least ten times as much, and probably gone pop again the next time the bulb blew, so it's back to the relative simplicity of a standard two-way for us. Let's hope there are no burglars watching.

Only one to go!

We recorded the penultimate track to Weird & Wonderful last night. The last-but-one to be recorded that is, not necessarily the last-but-one on the album - we still haven't finalised the order of tracks.

This whole thing has been a learning experience. Sometimes it's Annie learning a new production trick, or - as I mentioned last time - realising that it would make sense to write the music in a key we can sing, rather than having all the work of transposing it into the right key post-hoc.

Last night, the lesson was for me. Because quite a number (*checks* - six) of lines in this song, my last, begin with "It's." It sounded great in my head when I was writing it - the perfect way to describe all those little things that add up to a great relationship, which is what the song's about. But you try singing it. "It's" is not the easiest word in the world to articulate clearly when you're also trying to hit the opening note of a line, and follow it up immediately with two more words when you only have half a beat in which to sing them.

So my lesson was, in the same way as there are notes that are harder to reach, there are words that are harder to sing. When I'm writing, I'd damn' well better sing it out loud, not just in my head.

Games Night

The various revelries of the neighbourhood have been reported many times on here - mulled wine night; the summer street barbecue; the safari nights. Last night saw the first of what (with any luck) will become another regular feature of social life on The Road: games night.

What better way to banish the winter blues on a cold, wet, February Monday than to gather in a large, plushly-carpeted, warm living room with a dozen or so neighbours and their assorted offspring, and sit around sipping wine, nibbling nibbles and laughing and joking as we play a selection of board games?

And what an impressive selection it was! All provided in-house. We chose Articulate! to begin, followed by a round of Boggle and then, after a break for some concentrated nibbling, finished off with a game of Balderdash which proved, if proof were needed, how good we all are at the gentle art of bullshitting.

A great night, which for me was extended by an hour when my hosts invited me (Nikki having called time early on account of having to work the next day) to stay behind for "one more drink" after everyone else had left. So on top of the laughs and the excellent craic, I was treated to more fine wine and fine conversation to round the evening off perfectly. I love it round here!

Creeping death

Woke up this morning to an unusually dark bedroom. The clock was off. Bedside light? Nope.

Given that this came on top of a gradually increasing failure of the house electrics (power and light to the attic room first, and then a blown bulb causing the death of the electronics in the security switch on the landing), I lay in bed for several minutes imagining vermin burrowing through the walls, or the total discontinuation of power to the entire house by a prospective burglar. Don't ask me how - my mind gets up to all sorts at three in the morning.

A quick trip to the loo proved that the study still had power - all the computers happily glowing their sickly blue across the carpet - and the alarm panel was still powered up, so I offered a mental shrug to the world and went back to sleep.

Didn't take long this morning to discover the problem lay with a duff bedroom power socket. The one we'd moved in to find with a short length of Sellotape holding the switch in a semi-on-semi-off state. A bit of fiddling soon revealed the socket only received power when the switch was held in this unnatural position and even small movements in either direction caused it to let out an alarming fizzing noise. I moved the extension lead to the other socket of the pair and made a mental note that there would be another socket to replace when the refurbishment timetable eventually rolls around to the master bedroom.

Vinyl: The Best of Bread

Artist: Bread
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

I haven't heard this album for years, although I do have a couple of its tracks - Make It With You and Guitar Man - on other compilations. Wikipedia suggests Guitar Man - along with other tracks I definitely remember listening to like Aubrey and Daughter - appeared on Volume 2, so maybe it's that one I need to replace. Great easy listening stuff from the 70s :o)

Stolen shamelessly from one of the people - OK, OK the MAIN person - I get these things from...

If you're on my friends list, I want to know 34 things about you. I don't care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet or long and detailed, all is good.

2. Answer here in a comment, and/or repost the questionnaire on your own journal (if you have one/want to)

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship?

02) What was your dream growing up?
03) What talent do you wish you had?
04) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
05) Favourite vegetable?
06) What was the last book you read?
07) What zodiac sign are you?
08) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.
09) Worst Habit?
10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
11) What is your favourite sport?
12) Do you have a Pessimistic or Optimistic attitude?
13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
16) Do you have any pets?
17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
18) What was your first impression of me?
19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
22) What colour eyes do you have?
23) Ever been arrested?
24) Bottle or can soda (pop)?
25) If you won £10,000 today, what would you do with it?
26) What's your favourite place to hang out at?
27) Do you believe in ghosts?
28) Favourite thing to do in your spare time?
29) Do you swear a lot?
30) Biggest pet peeve?
31) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
32) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
33) Favourite and least favourite food?
34) Do you believe in God?

Vinyl: Beach Boys 20 Golden Greats

Artist: Beach Boys
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: No

This must be firmly in the category of albums "everyone" owned. I picked up "The Beach Boys - Best of" when I hijacked Paul's iPod and I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure I've got the track list covered. If not then their music is so ubiquitous I probably have it spread over several compilation albums of driving music, summer music, etc, that I've collected from Sunday papers over the years. No, this is definitely one that I won't be replacing. I like the Beach Boys, at the right time, but I'm no Fan Boy.

PS

Received an email from an old colleague this morning in which he'd added a PS.

It started me thinking about what an anachronism this is now. Post-script. In the days before WYSIWYG editors when text was always serial and if you remembered something after the fact you had to add it to the end. Why would you do that now? Why not just stick it inline, where it would have been if you'd thought of it at the time?

Two possibilities sprang to mind. Maybe adding it in at the right place would disturb the sense of the sentence, and you don't have time (or you're too lazy) to frig around with it. Far simpler to just jot the thought down whole, at the end, in a PS.

Or maybe you already sent the email, and you want to make it clear that what you send after it should have been part of it in the first place. Maybe we need another standard subject prefix of "PS:" to go along with "Re:" and "Fw:"

So from a point where I thought PS belonged in the age of Basildon Bond and sealing wax, I've now convinced myself that it'll be around for a fair few years yet.

Weird & Wonderful artwork

As the excitement mounts in the run-up to the release of our second album, one of the MOST exciting parts is the arrival of the cover art, which Natalie volunteered to do. My only involvement was to add the lettering to the final version - and in the very early stages to help develop the idea - and then to (try and) sit back and not nag too much, what with this being her finals year an' all, to get it finished.

And here it is. I love it. It's exactly what I wanted. No, it's *better* than I wanted, because Nat has added her own artistic flair, invention and imagination to the remit and come up with something that exactly captures the essence of "Weird and Wonderful".

Our first album was produced in something like a cottage industry, with me burning CDs and printing off the covers and the infill. It had a definite homespun feel to it, and we posted off physical copies to all our family and mates. Now, only a handful of the original copies remain, and being burnt onto CD-R has meant that some of those copies no longer play. We decided we needed a better, more professional approach this time round.

One big difference that's occurred over the last five years is that iTunes, the iTunes Store, and digital music in general has entered the public consciousness in a way that had really only just got started back in 2005. So for Weird and Wonderful we're going for a digital release, with streaming media on our websites for a casual listen, and paid downloads for those who want a personal copy. Anyone needing to get their hands on a physical disk will still be able to order one, through a collaboration with a site called CDBaby - more details on that once the album is released. At the moment, we still have two songs to record and one or two other small tasks before we can put the album to bed. Little things like deciding on the order of tracks.

Coffee and Cake

Neighbour's birthday today and in response to their e-card we received a sunny "we've got coffee and cake - see you later?" email which sounded like a good way to pass an hour or so on a cold winter's Sunday.

We arrived to an impromptu gathering of select members of the street, all enjoying coffee from a continuously-replenished cafetiere and cake from a pair of groaning plates, one holding wonderfully moist carrot and walnut and the other a mouth-watering concoction involving apple and baked custard.

Yum! No wonder we love living round here! Sadly, this time next year the guys will probably be settling in to their new home in Portugal, so this spur-of-the-moment mini party could be the last of its kind.

Tenth song in the can

Tonight's song - the penultimate one on Annie's sing list - is a pleasant little ditty about the girlfriend of an axe murderer whose head is so messed up she doesn't really know whether he's killed her, or she's killed him.

You begin to see why I picked "Weird & Wonderful" as the title of our second album.

Anyway the interesting thing about this number, for us, is that it's one of the ones that highlighted a slight problem with the way we write songs. Annie gets an idea - it might be a bass line, or a beat, or a melody - and she builds on it until she has a complete tune, which will probably have many of the elements of the final version in terms of the instruments used, etc, and it has a definite melody line, but often will still need some work to polish it into the final version.

At this point she hands it over to me and I give it a listen. Many listens actually - over and over again - which is why I need to be alone for this part, or at least wearing headphones! Eventually the song begins to speak to me, telling me the story it wants the waiting world to hear. All I do is write the words down. Simple really.

But at that stage, we haven't decided who's going to sing it. And there's the rub. Because not only has the tune not been written with one of us in mind, up to now it's not actually been written with either of us in mind. And just occasionally, this has meant that neither of us can sing it. I mean, I'm an OK singer, and Annie has some professional training from her years at drama school, but there's only so far up or down you can make your voice go.

For our first album... well, we were *so excited* to be recording music we just knuckled down and got on with it. And struggled in places. Listening back to that album now, one or two of my tracks are at the limit of my range and sound a bit painful. Definitely wanted to avoid that this time round, and there have been a few tracks in danger of the same problem. This one being the case in point.

Usually, she can solve the problem with a bit of clever transposition. This time round, after half an hour of trying to hit the high notes in the middle eight it became obvious that wasn't going to be enough. But hey, when you're an accomplished musician, that's no problem. After five or ten minutes at the keyboard Annie had rewritten the offending four lines and we were off and recording again.

We're hoping this kind of emergency measure won't be required in the future. With neat biro marks on her keyboard denoting our upper and lower ranges from now on she'll be writing nothing but notes we can reach. The songs might be about murder, but at least they won't sound like they've been murdered.

Not your usual traveller

I thought "travellers" (i.e. gypsies) always drove around in beat-up vans or army surplus jeeps towing ancient caravans. Not so the owner of today's cool number plate: GYP 5Y. This adorned a very modern 4x4 travelling in to the city centre this morning.

Another month, another picket

The concentrated striking (three working days out of the last five) may be having the desired effect, as we heard over the weekend that ACAS will be getting involved this week. That's definite progress, and not before time - the financial implications of more strike days this month were beginning to give me worry lines.

With the extreme cold weather nothing but a bad memory, it was actually quite pleasant to be stood out on the picket this morning, especially since we enjoyed another glorious sunrise and a brief honking of support from a flock of passing geese. As always though, the highlight of the morning was the breakfast at the Art College. This has become such a popular event it wouldn't surprise me if several people continue to patronise their restaurant in preference to the breakfasts offered in our own canteen.

If the loss of pay is the downside to all this, the upside is very definitely getting home before 11am and having the whole of the rest of the day to please myself. I admit to being sorely tempted to carry on doodling, but I resisted and settled down to a bit of web work instead.