Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Top 5, First Letter, Music Meme, in the key of W
Posted on in Memes, Music.- Reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
- List (and upload, if you feel like it) five songs that start with that letter.
- Post them to your journal with these instructions.
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ggreig gave me the letter “W”, well he gave me “Z” first but with only eight Z-tracks in my iTunes that would have been somewhat limited so we mutually agreed to go with the second choice.
- Weekend Without Makeup – The Long Blondes
- What Do I Get? – Buzzcocks
- We Almost Got It Together – Tanita Tikaram
- We’re Going To Be Friends – The White Stripes
- When I Grow Up – Garbage
Argh! That was hard. I had a long list of about 25 and a short list of ten but getting it down to five took all evening.
A Weekend in London
Posted on in Music, My Life, The World, TV.A Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, so the weather was extremely mixed.
On Friday a bunch of us from work went to the new-ish oriental buffet, Tuli on Tooley Street. It’s underneath the railway arches and has made great use of the space – it’s light and airy and feels modern. The food was decidedly average – exactly what you’d expect from an all-you-can-eat chinese buffet – and didn’t really seem to live up to the image that they were trying to present. Maybe the teppanyaki or sushi options would be more interesting if we ever went back as a smaller group and/or in the evening.
Saturday was the Crystal Palace Overground Festival and Lettice and I braved the drizzle to take a look. Spread out round all three sides of the triangle were stalls selling exactly what you’d expect from the good people of Crystal Palace – cupcakes, handmade greetings cards and antiques. There was also music and kids’ activities going on. With the events spread out both geographically and temporally, coupled with the poor weather, it all seemed a bit difficult to get into the spirit of things. Maybe if it’s sunny next year we’ll make the slightly longer trip up from Croydon.
And then round to miss_newham‘s for the annual Eurovision party. Alcohol, scorecards, yelling at the telly, and some truly dreadful music. I seemed to be the only person who liked the Albanian entry; the winner of our voting was Greece, which matched the winner of the UK phone vote so we must have been in tune with the national psyche. Not sure why the UK bothers entering – everyone hates us and we always enter rubbish songs. Ben Dalby’s Doctor Can would have been a better entry and some sexy nurses would surely have garnered a few votes. 
There’s a new art gallery in West Norwood – The Portico Gallery is very close to us and full of a wide variety of pieces in varied styles and media. I’m rubbish at writing about art (“and everything else,” yells the audience) so there’s not much more to say except that that’s where we were on Sunday afternoon.
And today? Nothing much at all. 
Any other Tuesday…
Posted on in Music, My Life, TV, Work, WWW.Today I …
- Had my photo used in a (gay) mockup of a what our Valentine’s Day homepage could look like.
- Had lots of fun combining Ajax, JSON, RSS, JSP and jQuery in various combinations.
- Moved the breadcrumb trail from just inside the main content area to just before it … in many, many templates.
- Wondered whether any of the ARIA landmark roles was suitable for a block that contained a breadcrumb trail, a print button and an RSS feed button.
contentinfoor nothing seem to be the options. - Told my boss that I needed to refactor all the JavasScript (that I had written in the first place) on the whole site.
- Wasn’t ill enough to go home to bed, maybe tomorrow. (Damn this really quite good immune system!)
- Boggled at the photos of Ben Dalby in a straight jacket!
- Spent most of Survivors thinking about the benefits of CGI vs something actually decent looking when it came to collapsing buildings.
Very Good Musical Thing
Posted on in Music, WWW.Reasons to love the joined-up-interweb: musicians you love telling you about new musicians they love, with YouTube vids embedded, etc.
Tanita Tikaram recommends Marina and the Diamonds‘ I am Not a Robot
Something New
Posted on in Music, My Life, WWW.I spent this afternoon giving TanitaTikaram.net, one of my oldest websites, a makeover from this to this.
I decided to use WordPress and to lightly modify an existing theme rather than create my own. I still have a lot of content to migrate but so far the results are looking good. What do you think?
Desert Island Discs
Posted on in Dinosaurs, Music, My Life, Work.At work, we’ve been doing Desert Island Discs and this week is my turn. I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.
I win. No seriously, I win this game because I have had a theme tune written for me. Well, technically it was written for my blog, oh okay, it was inspired by the name of my blog. What? This isn’t a contest and I can’t win? Oh. Sorry.
According to my mother my first musical experience was dancing (or being danced, as I was baby at the time) round the room to T Rex. Was I too young to be influenced by this? Or did it somehow generate an interest in dinosaurs rather than glam rock? Lucky escape.
Adam and the Ants – Stand and Deliver
I was torn between a classic Ants track or something from his later albums. In the end memories of Saturday morning’s spent watching this video on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop won the day (but if you’ve only heard his old material check out the 1995 album “Wonderful”).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4
Drill Queen – Born Depressed
Justin is an information architect with whom I worked on several projects; he also played guitar for Drill Queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrq6zp2_M8
Traveling Wilburys – Tweeter and the Monkey Man
Just about the only bits of vinyl from my dad’s music collection that I copied to tape, and one of the few bands that Lettice and I both love. It looks like the record label have been at YouTube so we’re lucky to find this animation:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cb4t_tweeter-and-the-monkey-man_creation
Moxy Früvous - My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors
Moxy Früvous were a cool, funny, somewhat cheesey Canadian band who I was introduced to via two friends at university. If you saw the groaning bookshelves in our flat you’d know why this song always makes me smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0
Cerys Matthews – Oxygen
I can’t sing. I really can’t sing. Neither can my brother, though as churchgoer he makes up with gusto for what he lacks in aptitude. Clearly we got our singing genes from the English or Swedish parts of our family not the Welsh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqaPHTlhdg
Pulp – Mis-shapes
The end of the summer of 1995. On the news it’s Blur vs Oasis. But, before Blair, there was a much better third way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rxAeF1wmQ
Aziza Mustafa Zadeh – Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers – Tin Soldiers
Hands up who wanted (or even expected) to hear some Azerbaijani Jazz today? Well, you’re out of luck as I can’t find it anywhere on the web. So have some classic punk instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5V26oXHUI
Tanita Tikaram – And I Think Of You
The reason I’m here. Sort of. I created my first home page in 1995 (personal home pages, remember them? Like Facebook profiles but you had to do all the work yourself) and wanted to do a bit more. So looking around the nascent web for the various artists I liked I spotted that Tanita didn’t have any fan pages dedicated to her. The resulting site helped to get me my first job at a web design agency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9bphQpCLNA
Book
Assuming I’m going to be here for a while then I want something fairly long. An old favourite or something I’ve never gotten around to? I think I’ll go for the latter and take Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography to remind myself of home.
Luxury Item
A brewing kit. Let’s see which of the fruit on the island makes the best booze.
Very True Music: All of the above
Quiz like it’s 1997
Posted on in Books, Films, Games, Music, My Life, Science, Sport, The World, TV.So I found this file, last modified 10 June 1997, on a set of back ups and it’s a pub quiz that I ran in Balliol bar. In fact considering the date I suspect that this is the night that pink_weasel first clapped eyes on me and thought “nice guy, shame about the jumper”.
People on facebook and twitter said that they wanted to see the quiz, so here goes.
Read the rest of this very true thing…
Welcome to blogging, Tanita Tikaram
Posted on in Music.
I rarely update my oldest web site these days. But to end the year, I get to add a couple of new links to TanitaTikaram.net. Tanita has started blogging and has an official MySpace page.
Chinese Friends
Posted on in Music, The World.
‘Chinese Friends’ – Ben Dalby