Book Review: The Secret History

Yet another in the seemingly endless series of novels chosen by the book club which are heralded, hyped, and lauded and yet for me don't quite live up to expectations. This is the book that took years to write, was written while the author spent time with a hugely intellectual and erudite company, and whose pecuniary success has meant that Donna Tartt has been able to spend the rest of her life (to date) languidly contemplating her literary navel, and polishing her subsequent manuscripts until they meet her own exacting standards of shininess, which results in her dropping them off at the rate of approximately one per decade.

"Haunting, compelling and brilliant," gushes the Times critic on the front cover. I'd give him (or her) one out of three at best. Brilliant it may be, but I found it neither haunting nor compelling.

It's a good enough read, don't get me wrong. In parts it fairly zips along, verging in places almost on the gripping. But then it begins to meander, losing its way in the minutiae of student life and recording the passage of time with infinite care and detail when a simple paragraph starting "The following Spring..." would suffice. One of the club members, with classical Greek learning in her background, suggested that Tartt was attempting to mirror a Greek tragedy (throughout the book and not only in the part where the group attempt to recreate a bacchanal). If true then it's a clever idea, as an intellectual challenge, but slightly pointless in the knowledge that it will bypass 99.9% of your audience. Still, don't let me be accused of supporting dumbing down.

Much of the writing is excellent but in places it loses any pretensions to grandeur and becomes almost clunky. I was left with the impression that Tartt had dashed off a draft in her own style and then spent several years going over the text, overlaying it with clever and artful prose in an effort to - well - polish it as I mentioned above, and that she'd simply missed a bit here and there.

The real downfall of the piece though, is the assembly of unbelievable characters. Dark and moody Henry, stoically battling his demons (or alternatively just being a boring snob); coquettish Camilla who can't quite manage on her own (not very 20th century that is it? But very classical Greek, apparently); charming and well-connected Julian who despite having travelled the world and met just about every famous person you ever heard of, is now content to hide away in an academic backwater teaching a handful of drugged-up ne'er-do-wells and getting up the nose of the college board.

So in the end my impression is that it's a load of old tosh. Readable, well-written (for the most part) tosh, but tosh all the same.

Vinyl: The Red Album

And, while we're at it, the Blue Album.

Artist: The Beatles
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: No

OK, Amazon, you are taking the piss. £15.48 for this? The music on it is almost 50 years old. Two of the artists are dead, and the other two don't really need any more money than they already have. I mean, Paul. Even after his expensive divorce he's still only down to his last 600 million.

So no. No thanks. This music may well have been part of my childhood (it was), formed the audio backdrop to many of my most treasured memories (it did) and maybe I would enjoy hearing most of the tracks again (I would), but most of the 50-year-old music I'm familiar with turns up for free on give-away CDs in Sunday papers.

The fact that the remaining Beatles, or their record company, or the estate of the late Michael Jackson, or whoever the hell owns the rights to these tracks nowadays, is STILL trying to squeeze the last scuffed penny out of the music-buying public all these years later is nothing short of a national scandal.

A fiver maybe. For the pair. But thirty quid? You're 'aving a larrrrf.

Talent Week

One of the... advantages... of working for a large corporate is that occasionally you have the chance to pitch in with one of the corporate initiatives. The one in question today is Impact On Society (IOS), where the company get to feel good about themselves by "giving something back" to the local community.

This year, that takes the shape of contributing to Business in the Community's Talent Week initiative. For several weeks, young people up and down the country have been logging on to a website to create their "talent bricks" - a brick-shaped doodle containing art of their choice, and a statement about what they think is their best talent and what they'd like to do with it when they leave school. Some of us had already spent a day in a local school talking to the kids and helping them with that part and now, in Talent Week itself, a selection of those bricks have been stuck up on a wall in the Arndale Centre, and there's a week-long programme of activities, demonstrations and stalls designed to connect the kids with the world of work.

And I got to spend the day on the Fujitsu stand.

We had a few banners, some information about the skills we use (obviously there's more to the company than just IT - like many companies we need managers, finance people, graphic designers, good communicators, sales and marketing, etc), and a taped-off rectangle of floor where we were going to play games.

Land the plane
A bunch of blindfolded passersby (the aeroplanes), instructed using only the words Forward, Back, Left, Right and Stop, by a smaller bunch of passersby (the air traffic controllers) in an effort to get them from one side of the rectangle to the other while avoiding the groups of cones (representing storms, pylons, etc) that we distributed around the play area once the blindfolds were on.

Clearly this game is all about communication skills, and realising that some people will interpret instructions differently from how you intended them. And... it's a lot of fun.

Rafting game
Small group (say 3-7) of people, same number of floor tiles, move from one side of the rectangle to the other stepping only on the floor tiles. The tiles can have a maximum of two feet and one hand on them at any one time. Any more and the tile is removed (it has "sunk"). Any tile left unoccupied for more than 5 seconds is removed (it has "floated away").

Again this is about communication, but also about teamwork and problem solving. The only way x people can stand on x-1 tiles (so that the one at the back can be passed to the person at the front) is by sharing tiles and/or standing on one leg, so you're going to end up hanging on to a total stranger. And... it's a lot of fun.

Lego building
Two boxes containing the same assortment (number and colour) of Lego bricks (well, Duplo if we're being entirely accurate). Only one box has instructions to build a tower. Three players. Player A builds the tower using the instructions. Player B watches, and relays the method to Player C (who cannot see Player A) so that s/he can build the same tower from the bricks in the second box. There is only one right way of building it, proven by being able to lift it up at the end when holding only the top layer of bricks.

This might have been a lot of fun, but no-one wanted to play it (although we did have a go between ourselves at lunch time).

So, you know, this isn't the kind of thing we do for a day job, and that was obvious from the design of our stand. BitC had done their bit by including something like "be Top Gun, learn how to land a plane" on the section of their banners devoted to Monday, but whoever designed our stand had somehow forgotten to include this important piece of information. There was absolutely nothing on any of our banners or posters that talked about landing a plane. We had "skills" and a list of customers, and the company logo. And a rectangle made of red and blue plastic tape. And... er... that's it.

If it hadn't been for the good offices of the compère, (the excellent Terence from BBC Your Game), I don't think we'd have had a single player all day. As it was, we handed out almost 100 raffle tickets during the day (play a game, get a ticket, win a laptop bag), and we got to see several demos by local cheerleaders, Olly the ball kid (Youngest Freestyle football World Champion - see him on YouTube - who knew keepy-uppy could be a life choice?) and a couple of boxing coaches who teach non-contact boxing as a keep fit regime. And we drank a lot of Starbucks.

Did we feel good about ourselves at the end of the day. You bet. Although my legs were aching a bit. And I could have done without the strange conversation with the gentleman who claimed to be "Amber Level."

There's a storm brewing

So the entry to Storm the Charts closed on Tuesday night, but Wes (the organiser) had a late flurry of entries - something of the order of 200 I believe - which obviously need to be processed before voting can start.

It was always going to be a bit of a tall order starting the voting the day after entries closed, but procrastination must be playing a huge part in this. Acts leaving it until the very last minute before submitting their details. It's undoubtedly also true that it's taken a while for news of the competition to get around, and maybe some of the latecomers were busy recording their best, new material so that they can stream it as required by the rules of entry.

As an arch procrastinator I can hardly complain at the latecomers, and their lateness doesn't affect me directly. It's not me who has to trawl through a pile of emails linking all the streaming sites and making sure the playlists are up-to-date. Wes is doing a stonking job. Can't wait to start voting though. I've been keeping up with the listening and there's some ace acts in that journal, which is now over 400 long.

For Beresford & Wallace, things are progressing nicely. As you'll have seen below the album is now available to buy online. Other retailers will come on stream soon, and we've applied for registration with the PPL Repertoire to make sure our tracks are eligible for the UK charts. It doesn't take long to organise this, and we still have more than two full months before the Storm. Plenty of time to get all our ducks in a row.

I don't listen to the words

Spent last Saturday evening with mates, being royally entertained with wine, beer, chilli and excellent conversation as always.

During the course of the evening I happened to mention to Ritchie that I'd been listening to a couple of albums by one of his current favourite bands that he'd burnt for me last time we'd seen him, and that while I liked the music I thought their lyrics veered just the wrong side of pompous for me, being quite overblown and flowery. Trying too hard to be meaningful, if you know what I mean. His response?

"Oh, I don't listen to the words. I'm only interested in the music."

To my further astonishment, almost immediately, Ian agreed.

As someone who not only has had an abiding interest in the words to songs from a very early age (I still vividly remember singing "24 Hours from Tulsa" on my way to school, aged 8, and by that time I already had several years of lyric learning under my belt) but also now writes lyrics himself, I found this more than passing strange. Actually a more accurate term would be incomprehensible. It had literally never occurred to me before that anyone could listen to a song and not be interested in the words. Instrumental pieces, sure. Orchestral pieces, naturally. But the defining part of a song, for me, has always been the lyrics.

Just goes to show how even people you think you know really well can still surprise you.

Weird & Wonderful available to buy

We've just received confirmation from our digital distribution partner cdbaby that our album is available for download. How exciting is that? You have to go direct to them at the moment, but iTunes, Amazon, and other digital retailers will have it available in a few weeks.

Anyone in the UK reading this and wanting to download it PLEASE wait until we know whether or not we're going to be selected as one of the 40 acts taking part in Storm the Charts. If we make the final 40 we'll need as many downloads as possible in June.

But if you're outside the UK and you'd like to buy it, be our guest! :o)

Malcolm X's brother

Is alive and well and living in the Slough area.

At least that's the conclusion I came to after noticing another personalised plate this morning on my journey to our (extremely salubrious and well-appointed) offices in Slough. Naturally I expect to see more such plates whenever I travel Darn Sarf, as they are so much posher (not to mention richer) than us up here in Flat Cap and Whippet Land, but even so it's still a pleasant experience when I happen across one as well done as RU55 ELX. It adorned a black, sporty-looking number, and was spaced out to spell RUSSEL X. So nice one, Russell.

By contrast I suffered a dearth of personalised plates on the journey home, but my addled brain (I'd spent six hours in a meeting examining the 3,500 option settings for Microsoft Office 2007. It was a wonder I was still awake at all) did spot AR51 LMA, which I interpreted as "ARSEY LLAMA" - entirely appropriate I thought, given llamas' reputation for being, well, arsey.

Spooky Facebook is watching

Arriving at my puter this morning, cup of steaming Java in hand, I was intrigued by one of the suggested names at the top right-hand corner of my Facebook homepage.

Facebook users will be familiar with this part of the page, where seemingly random but occasionally appropriate people are suggested as friends. It's usually people who are already friends with your other friends, or belong to similar groups, which normally accounts for the random ones (Facebook can choose any of the thousands of people who give "Manchester" as their location, of which I only know a few dozen at most).

But this was different. A guy with a name so unusual that I have only ever met one other person with the same name, and that was the bloke who used to run the karaoke and other entertainment evenings and daily poolside events at our favourite Greek island resort on Rhodes. I never knew his last name. He was universally known by his adopted first name. The unusual one. So I followed the guy's link to see if I could find out more about who it was.

And...

It IS the bloke who used to run the karaoke at our favourite Greek island resort on Rhodes!!

How spooky is that? We haven't even been there since 2005, and as far as I can tell there is no connection that Facebook could possibly have known about to come up with him as a suggested friend. He only has two other friends so clearly hasn't been on it long. Just weird.

Good verses evil

I just received one of those endless advertising emails from Amazon, attempting to persuade me to buy another game for my PS3. I bought a game, once, so naturally their marketing droids assume I'm going to be interested in any game they care to throw my way.

I noticed this one was billed as the ultimate fight of "good verses evil."

That'll be good versus evil then, you illiterate morons.

Ears burning

I've been neglecting this blog for the last fortnight or so (hence the flurry of updates this morning), but I have an excuse. It is, of course, Storm the Charts, which I admit has been occupying most of my (non-work) attention while I apply, wait to be listed, listen to all the other acts' music (over 300 acts signed up now, and the Facebook group tipped over the 17,000 member mark earlier this morning), and email all my friends - yes, actually. All of them.

So I know I'm responsible for a good couple of dozen members of the group (I saw them sign up after the emails went out) and may even have introduced a few people to the whole idea of Facebook. Not sure that's such a good thing ;o)

It is now indisputable that if every member of the group downloads the same track in the target week, that track will enter the top ten. How cool is that? Of course we're still hoping to do a lot better than that. Not everyone will be able to afford the £40 it would cost them to download ALL 40 tracks, but we should be able to do better than 1.

We're up!

After a trepidatious few days between me sending off the "for your consideration" email, and said email rising to the top of Wes's (probably absolutely overflowing) inbox, Beresford & Wallace finally made an appearance on the Storm the Charts Livejournal list of artists. At number 215.

That just means we're the 215th to apply. It's not a rank.

You can see the whole list here: http://stormthecharts.livejournal.com/

I plan to listen to every track posted. I'm not naive enough to expect everyone will do the same - I guess most bands will only be in it to promote their own work - but if only a small fraction of the thousands of group members plays Spin Doctor we'll have reached many more ears than we ever expected.

That photo

We reconvened the photo shoot yesterday evening, with Nikki behind the camera this time to save the lawn, and this - after a bit of work with the GIMP - is the result as it will appear on the inside front cover of the album.

The sepia tint, soft focus and background colour are all chosen to match the livery of the album's existing cover art (front and back). The airbrushing of the bags under our eyes was entirely Annie's idea and I should make it clear that I abhor doctored photos in all their guises (*cough*). I mean, who do I think I am? A flippin' rock star or something? I'll be on the cover of Heat magazine next, and talking about my liposuction.

I don't think.

Storm force

Storm the Charts - we're on again, thanks to Wes and the gang changing the rules to mean we don't have to be downloadable by the application deadline (March 23), only the download deadline (June 5).

Still no guarantee of being chosen, of course, but hey - at least we're in the game. And the boost to our online profile can't hurt either. At the time of writing the Facebook group has 12,000+ members and there are 130 bands/artists registered. You've got to believe that a fair proportion of the group members - who all get to vote on which songs make the shortlist for the top 40 attempt - will listen to as many tracks as they can before they make up their minds - and at least some of them might like the music even if we don't make the shortlist.

Mystery solved

Even after all these years dealing with Microsoft technologies, there are still wrinkles to learn. And more often than not, you can read "bug" where I've written "wrinkle."

A few days ago, shortly after the release of Weird and Wonderful, I changed my standard email sig to include a line directing people to the Beresford & Wallace website. As you'd expect, this worked fine when composing a new email message, but from time to time I decide to include my sig in a reply, and the first time I did this I noticed the extra line was missing.

Huh?

I checked the new sig. Yep, all fine. So where was this copy of the old version coming from? I thought maybe Outlook had cached it somewhere, so I restarted it. Made no difference. I rebooted the whole PC. Nope. So I resorted to a search of my whole disk for "Signatures."

Lo and behold, the default Signature folder had three copies of my standard sig, only one of which had the new date on it (and the new addition in it). I noticed the new one was an RTF file and of the unchanged ones, one was an HTML file and the other a text file. I had no recollection of creating these, but it was clearly no coincidence that the "problem" only occurred when replying to an email, and the two format options for replies are... HTML or text.

With a small light flickering into life in my head, I deleted the rogue files, returned to Outlook, fired up an email reply and inserted a signature. Whaddaya know... Outlook creates the other versions for you. How handy is that? Well... not very handy at all actually, seein' as it's not intelligent enough to spot when the original sig changes, and copy those changes over for you too.

Like I said. A bug.

DIY photo shoot

After a brief discussion about what should appear on the inside front cover of the album, Annie and I deployed our stunning originality to come up with the idea of: a photo of us.

I know. Don't.

After an extended period of dull weather, the sun shone on us yesterday - literally - so we decided to snatch a few moments at lunchtime and take said photo. Only there was just the two of us around. Time to deploy the tripod. Naturally this meant I had to plod up and down the garden, lining up the photo, hurrying back to be in it, trekking back again to check the result, adjusting the angle, trying another pose. I won't need to bother with the first lawn cutting of the season: I've worn it all out.

We took five in all, and as far as either of us could tell from the small screen on my camera, two of them were OK. It was only when they were displayed full-size on our PCs that the truth became apparent. The sunshine, lovely as it was, had caused severe squinting. As in, our eyes appeared to have gone into hiding. Sunken into the depths of our brains.

Another photo shoot will be required, on a marginally less effulgent day. David Bailey never has this problem.

Making do with instant

Major and ongoing disturbance to sleep patterns has its advantages. For a long time now, one or other of us has been waking up between 5 and 5.30 - occasionally even earlier - and not being able to get back to sleep. Not having to leave until 7.30 to take Nikki to work, such an early rise time translates into a 2-hour morning stint at the puter and - the real bonus - enough time to enjoy a pot of real coffee.

The downside is flaking out in front of the TV by 8.30, the consequent early bedtime, and an inevitable early wake-up again. It's a vicious circle, I tell you!

But guess what? Something even more vicious? The one day in - what? 20? 30? - that we do manage to stay asleep until the alarm kicks in at 6.30, means there's only time for one cup of (instant) coffee. And when you've been used to savouring two mugs of delicious Java fresh from the cafetière, that really bites.

Strangely quiet in the studio

After the rush (both temporal and emotional) we went through getting Weird and Wonderful out into the public domain, this week has been strangely anticlimactic.

I've likened it to an exciting train ride - a magical mystery trip if you like.

The train barrels into the station... and there's no-one there to meet you. You step down, the train pulls out with a blast of its whistle, and you're left standing on the platform. Suddenly there's no noise, or movement, or excitement. Just silence, emptiness, and a still, small feeling of expectation.

This could be the start of something. Or it could be another deserted whistle stop cafe in the long journey of life. Either way, I think it'll be a while before we can tell the difference.

Storm warning

Recently we found out about the opportunity of a lifetime... which, ironically, we may be JUST too late for.

Storm the Charts is a campaign designed to repeat the success of last Christmas's campaign to get Rage in the Machine to the number 1 chart spot in preference to Simon Cowell's "traditional" X Factor winner, who in recent years has been a shoo-in for the Christmas #1 on account of the cynical and exploitative timing of the show.

Only this time, instead of just the number one, the campaign is trying to take over the entire top 40.

And this time, instead of the profits STILL making their way to Sony BMG (who ironically own the rights to the Rage in the Machine single and therefore still made money on the back of the Christmas campaign), they're choosing unsigned indie bands who have never charted.

Bands, in fact, like Beresford & Wallace.

How cool would that have been? Mere weeks after releasing the album, to have Spin Doctor charting, and downloaded by thousands of people who only a short time ago had never heard of us?

Unfortunately, there is an application deadline for bands wishing to take part of March 23. And in order to apply, our music would have to be already available from iTunes. Even though iTunes is the quickest online retailer at processing new music, they still quote 1-3 weeks as the lead time to load up new stuff, so even if we could get it to them today we'd still only have a slim chance of meeting the deadline, and that's without taking account of the delays introduced by our chosen digital distribution partner.

No, sadly, we're gonna have to take a back seat this time round and miss out on the fun. BUT - if the campaign is successful and captures the UK music-buying public's imagination in the way the organisers hope it will, then there'll almost certainly be another go later. You can bet we'll *definitely* be there next time round.

Official release day

Today was the day we were supposed to be releasing Weird and Wonderful, and in some ways jumping the gun and opening up the sound streams on Saturday was a bit premature. With most people expecting to have to wait until today, and spending a lot less time at their computers over the weekend, early feedback was almost entirely absent. Both Annie and I found this incredibly frustrating - a side-effect, I expect, of being SO close to it for SO long. It took on a kind of immense, special meaning for us which (obviously) isn't reflected in everyone else's lives. To anyone who isn't us, or very close family, it's "just another album."

The good news is that once the comments started to flow, they were all favourable. But then, I guess if anyone didn't like it they just wouldn't bother to say anything ;o)