New Year's Resolution

I got a fair way through writing a long and thoughtful New Year-related diatribe about the confusing challenge of remoulding one's life after university, but it ran out of steam and I also realised there are beers, musical instruments and lovely people downstairs, rendering the continued use of the internet tonight something of a sad waste, so all I will post tonight, for the record, is this:

My New Year's resolution is to do more sit-ups and press-ups each day than I managed the day before. These might sound like the shallow, vain actions of a man obsessed with his appearance, but anyone who has ever seen my hair or my clothes will know otherwise. It is simply because, although it is winter here, I'm off to Australia soon during what I assume will be roughly their summer, and I'd like not to be laughed at when I go to the beach. Luckily, I will be accompanied by the whitest man I have ever met, but it would be nice to have to rely on distraction techniques.

Time to go - Happy New Year, everybody.

Merry Generic Winter-Based Period Of Festivity, Everyone

Have you ever watched QI? I have, and it's hard not to trust Stephen Fry when he tells you something - he just has that sort of voice. So when Stephen revealed that "Winterval" was not, in fact, a rather silly, politically correct new word for Christmas, but a useful term specifically invented to describe a three-month period encompassing several religious festivals including Christmas, I believed him. After some brief and admittedly Wikipedia-based research, I have come to the conclusion that I was right to believe him - he was correct. If I had been on Birmingham City Council and had been instructed to put together a campaign to attract shoppers of all faiths to the city centre from October onwards, I think I'd try to find a less date- and faith-specific word than "Christmas" for the posters.
Strange, then, that Dr Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, seems to be basing his Christmas message this year around the evils of the word "Winterval". Does he not watch QI? The sad thing is, he seems to be making some half-decent points, or at least attempting to participate in an interesting debate, but when his initial angle is "how crap is it that the word "Winterval" is being used to describe Christmas?", which it isn't, then it's hard to take him seriously.
I'm also a little aggrieved at BBC News for failing to point out the factual flaw in his statement. He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from chapels. OK, yes, he did say that, but when a large percentage of the readership are the sort of people who are predisposed to believe this sort of thing, isn't there a duty to point out that he is wrong? I might have written: He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses being removed from chapels, although it should be noted that no council has actually called Christmas "Winterval" - the Archbishop made that one up. Less journalistic, perhaps, but less misleading, and notice I have actually improved the grammar from the original article by adding the word "being" (between "crosses" and "removed" - can I have a job, please, BBC?).
You know, while Wikipedia may have its faults, there is something reassuring about the way it works. If someone makes a contentious statement, a helpful if anally retentive single male will add a note saying "citation needed". If, after a while, no citation is forthcoming, the contentious statement is assumed to be bollocks and is removed. If, however, a suitable citation is supplied, the statement can be said to be a lot less contentious, and it stays. Gradually, in this way, some semblance of the truth about a given topic emerges through a multitude of fact-checkable statements. I often get frustrated that public speaking is not subject to the same process. Yes, uploading a speech as a Wikipedia article weeks in advance to allow its content to be verified would be time-consuming, inefficient and impractical, but it would at least be funny. OK, perhaps Archbishop Barry would only be made to drop the "Winterval" element of his rant, but imagine what would be left of a politician's speech...
Hello, I'm David Cameron[valid statement - see passport and birth certificate]. Thanks for listening.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

What with all this heartless consumerism and corporate brainwashing, it's easy to forget what this time of year is really about, so please join me in closing your eyes for a few moments and remembering just what tomorrow, December 25th, really signifies - the fact that it will be six months exactly until I get to see Radiohead live at Victoria Park.

Eh?

Banbury is a town in the South East or possibly the Midlands. It is situated at the northern tip of Oxfordshire, near the border with Northamptonshire. In no way could the town of Banbury be construed as being in, or even in the vicinity of, Wales. That last sentence may seem extraneous, but then you probably haven't been to Banbury recently and seen this advert on a phone box:


For those who can't (or can't be arsed) to make out the text on my blurry camera-phone image, this is an advert for the Welsh consumer advice centre. Were this an isolated incident, I could perhaps believe that there had been an error at the phone box advert distribution centre, and somewhere in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch there would be a teleffon booth extolling the virtues of Banbury's vibrant shopping centre, but does this look like an isolated incident to you?
No, it doesn't. Two adverts in Banbury town centre, and I can't rule out the possibility of others. I can only assume, therefore, that there has been a concerted effort by the advertising department of the Welsh consumer advice centre to reach the people of Banbury.
Why?! I am genuinely interested in this. Do the Welsh exit the valleys each year and travel en masse to Banbury for their Christmas shopping, only to later be disappointed by the shoddy English craftsmanship of the presents, and hence are in need of a sympathetic, Wales-based organisation to deal with such complaints? Or is it the other way around? Do Banbury folk take a trip to Cardiff in search of better deals and more variety, only to get their fingers burnt by knock-off electrical goods, and need a Welsh person at which to shout over the phone? If it's the latter, it seems odd that the Welsh have bothered to set up such a service, let alone advertise it so widely, but then I'm confused by the whole situation so I won't rule anything out just yet. Answers on a postcard.

Why?

I appreciate we are entering a new era of television, in which everything will soon be available on demand in super-duper high-definition bells-and-whistles whatever, but let's make something clear: in Hook Norton, that era has not yet arrived, and I'd appreciate it if, in future, the people in charge of television could understand this and act accordingly. The Mighty Boosh is one of my favourite television programs, in part because of the lavish way they approach the visual and musical aspects of the medium. When I'm watching the advance preview over the internet in cacky Real Player streaming quality, I can't help but feel I'm missing some of the point of the show. When I switch to the only alternative and watch the flickering black screen, complete with helpful "bad signal" error message, that constitutes BBC3 in rural Oxfordshire, with intermittent frozen images of Howard and Vince in bizarre tableaux doing something that looks like it might be very funny if they were actually, like, moving, I can't help but feel pretty pissed off. Perhaps Mr BBC feels we country folk wouldn't get the advanced, urban-flavoured irony of The Boosh? Perhaps he feels that repeating it later in the week on a channel I can actually receive would be wasting the valuable licence fees of hard-working city-dwellers? I guess this is how it feels if you disagree with the hunting ban, that knowledge that you're part of the rural minority who are bullied by the clueless smog-breathers, only with a less pronounced sense of being a total dickhead who tortures animals for fun. Hmmm, that was pretty unrelated, sorry. And yet somehow I've arrived at the end of my point.

Forgot To Write A Title For This One At First

Tonight, I am in a mildly tetchy mood. All things considered, life is good, and yet I have twisted my ankle and it hurts. Unfortunately, I can't expect any sympathy because I always come home from football on a Tuesday moaning about some minor injury, usually a knee, and the boy-who-cried-wolf thing has kicked in just at the point where I can't really walk properly. To add to this source of annoyance, the DVD of 'Seven' arrived at my house this morning from Tesco DVD Rental, and I decided to watch it after football, ankle on ice, expecting to love it. Except...many things stopped me loving it.

1. Radiohead's funny parody of the movie spoilt the ending - I won't link to it or give you any more details, just in case I spoil it for you, but it's on YouTube if you want to see it.
2. The film wasn't that good anyway - considering Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt are both great, you'd expect a bit more chemistry.
3. I have a normal telly, so why would I want to watch the whole film in widescreen with most of the viewable area unused? Movies on TV seem capable of getting around this problem, so why can't DVD players? Well, my cheap one, anyway.
4. I've said it before and I'll say it again - DVD's get scratched, so why use them as a format? The closing voice-over, which may have been a great ending to the film, was rendered incomprehensible by the shitness of the DVD. I'm tempted to cancel my subscription to this Tesco DVD thing, based on the fact that it's a flawed system - if you're renting a DVD, you don't take care of it, and depending how unlucky you are and how many you rent, some are going to be unwatchable.

This really is a dull post tonight - sorry. It's also not going to get any better, because I was only moaning about the DVD because it vaguely leads into what I actually want to moan about - technology, and how it doesn't actually work. Things like computers, MP3 players, mobile phones and DVD players are all made by companies who are under pressure to get the latest features "working" as soon as possible. The upshot of this is that very little of it works to a standard that would have been acceptable back in the day (I'm guessing this - I'm not that old so I don't think I was alive back in the day, whenever it was). Things that don't really work properly:

1. Infra-red mice. The pointers shoot off all over the place on a whim, like a real mouse making a break for freedom.
2. DVD players. They skip.
3. Digital TV. The audio sync is crap, the colours are blotchy in random places and the signal sucks in my village.
4. Ipods. I don't have one, but everyone seems to tell me they break.
5. Nintendo Wii. The stupid wiggly stick is unreliable.
6. Mobile phones. Unreliable.
7. Windows Vista. Why can't it just automatically work with all my old soundcards and things? Why do I have to wait almost a year for new drivers? A year in which I can't use my soundcard?
8. Energy-saving lightbulbs. Granted, if you want to save the planet they're better than sitting in the dark, so I'll look the other way, but in case the people who make them are reading this, their colour is depressing.
9. MP3 download sites. They charge a lot of money for tracks that have lower audio quality than was achievable in the sixties.
   

Perhaps I should refocus this rant on the positives - here is my list of approved technology that works well and can be sold to the general public: LED's, USB memory sticks, mobile phone batteries, videos, audio cassettes, kettles, electric guitars, and Windows XP. This list is not definitive but it's a good start. I fear the pain in my foot may be distracting me from writing about interesting things.

One Month

Today is, or tomorrow will be, depending on when I finish writing this, the 18th of December. Not only does this mark one week until Christmas, and hence the point at which I should start thinking about buying presents, but it will also be one month exactly until I leave my job. I was going to call this a one-month anniversary, but anniversaries tends to celebrate events that have already happened - you don't get minus-one-year wedding anniversaries. Because of this, I have decided to invent the word "annireversary", a celebration of an upcoming event. Tomorrow shall be the one-month annireversary of the end of my very brief career in insurance. Hmmm, that doesn't sound right. I'm no expert on these things, but I'm guessing the "anni" bit of "anniversary" means year, in which case I can't really have a one month anniversary (let alone annireversary). I guess I could have one-twelfth of a year's annireversary, but then the 365 days of a year don't go into twelve too easily, so I'd have to celebrate it at some odd and specific time of day. Perhaps the solution is to shut up about the whole thing, although I stand by my new word - what better way to talk about upcoming World Cups or Olympic Games? Come to think of it, if "Olympic Games" is a phrase describing one summer's worth of Olympic activity, what is the plural? "Olympic Gameses"? Yes, now is definitely the time to stop talking about this.
I started this post, which I am happy to announce is now fairly long and rambling, thus allowing it to sit comfortably alongside its brothers, with the intention of talking about the fact that I am leaving my job in a month. I could actually do with another couple of weeks' wages before I go travelling, but as far as I can recall, I started working at this place in August, and five months is definitely long enough - I set my target quitting date a while ago and to move it back now would be cruel on me. While I was talking to a nice bloke this morning who works part-time at the company, I revealed that I was actually not an 18-year-old gap year student, but a grizzled 23-year-old with a Master's degree in physics. The mouth-agape reaction of "so why are you here?", and the fact that this is not the first such reaction, made me glad I'm nearly done. I'm very glad I've been brought up to be stingy (only just learnt how to spell that!), because it would have been very easy to spend the lion's share of the money I've earned, especially given my penchant for guitars and related paraphernalia. Oh man, there's some good synonyms for "stingy" - I am parsimonious with my earnings. I am miserly. I should use thesauruses more often. However, even with all this talk of saving money and being sensible, I am sorely tempted by a wind-up MP3 player. Tell me that isn't cool.

Thread

This blog almost has a plot. First a post about my accent, then a follow-up to relate it to the present, followed by a seemingly unrelated ramble about my vaguely forthcoming solo album but which now comes together with the previous two entries by virtue of this post, the one you are reading right now, even if this one does consist mainly of this first and rather pointless paragraph, along with what I intend to be a rather brief second and final paragraph.
This one. Oh yes, the point. You would think that someone who had recently written at reasonable length about how he disliked his accent would refrain from writing a track that consisted of two fairly lengthy verses of spoken word. You would think that, and you would be wrong. My excuse is that it sounded good in my head, but as my detention-happy schoolteachers would point out, my excuses are rarely worth considering. There I was last night, sat at this very computer with a ten-second drum-and-synth loop playing over and over in my headphones for perhaps an hour, typing lyrics into Notepad (old-skool), apparently imagining my voice had miraculously changed while I had been silent. Lyrics finished, I fired up the hi-fi and attempted a run-through, quietly but out loud. Ah - still painfully middle class. Didn't see that coming. Moron.

Solo

When I would write or play something a bit too avant garde (i.e. shit) with my band, the standard joke was that it was "one for the Bradshaw solo album". After more than four years of concentrating on producing stuff for the band, and given that it's hard to do much with a band that's spread across four different and non-adjacent counties, I've decided it's time to see what happens if I don't listen to anyone else - I'm making a solo album.
So far, it's not radio-friendly. The first track consists mostly of me strumming the nastiest-sounding chord I could find on a distorted bass guitar, augmented by a frantic drum machine and some deeply silly guitar work. I guess you could describe it as a funk-flavoured one-note-samba on crack. I haven't written the lyrics yet but the vocals are expected to be shouty, melodramatic, distorted and deliberately tuneless (the second of two vocal styles in my repertoire, the first being "accidentally tuneless").
I've also started on what is anticipated to be track three, the obligatory, ambitious, mildly epic six-minuter that eases the listener into the album proper after the two opening bangers. So far it's just swell guitar and a beat - I've reached the "orchestral breakdown" but can't be arsed to write it. The interesting thing about this album so far is that, if I keep going at this pace (which I won't, but anyway), I'll have easily finished the whole thing within three weeks. Don't watch this space.

Re: Accent

After my pretty thorough if subjective analysis of my accent the other day, I casually asked a friend recently whether she thought my voice was posh. The reply, "not really, it's just...normal", rather suggests that I sometimes spend too much time thinking about things.

Accent

I've always been quite aware of my accent. Where I live, in rural Oxfordshire, there appear to be two main accents: the fairly posh, middle class accent of the families who moved here because it's a nice place, and the only-subtly-different-from-the-broad-stereotype "farmer accent" of the families who actually come from here. At primary school, I always knew I was at the posh end of the scale, even if I didn't understand the reasons behind it, and I didn't like it. The boys I used to play football with tended to have the other accent, and over time I changed mine to fit in with them, partly consciously and probably partly not. I felt good about this, and liked the way I could greet someone with "orroyt" ("alright") instead of "hello" and not feel silly about it.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to just throw off my posh roots entirely. There were certain situations, such as talking to similarly middle-class relatives, when I instinctively slipped back into The Queen's English, meaning I now had two distinct accents. For some years, this was a satisfactory compromise, only running into problems when I had to speak in the presence of groups of people who weren't all expecting the same accent, leading to a weird posh-rural hybrid.
A new set of problems arose when my voice broke. Since it broke after pretty much every one of my friends', I had been compensating by trying to talk lower in my unbroken voice, but I think what must have happened is that I forgot to stop doing this when my voice actually broke, because to this day my voice has this stupid, artificially low tone that sounds like I'm trying to do an impression of someone with a lower voice. I think that if I hadn't been so bothered about people taking the piss, I might now have a charming, pleasant, soft English lilt, but I don't: I talk in an annoying, posh, rumbling squeak with random farmer words and the odd bit of street language thrown in. Then again, no-one likes their voice when they hear it on tape, do they?
Of course, as a singer (ha!) with an interest in sound engineering, hearing my voice on tape is an occupational hazard, and opens up a whole new can of worms. The label on this particular can of worms reads "you may have the ability to talk like Hugh Grant, Jethro or an odd mixture of the two, but not one of those three choices results in a singing voice that anyone will want to hear". I also only ever get through half a can of "you can't bloody sing" worms before getting a bit queasy and putting them in the fridge for another day. Of course, the standard thing for bad English singers to do is to put on an American accent, but Bad English Singer isn't a niche I'm really interested in; Alternative Indie Icon is really what I'm aiming for, which narrows my options down considerably. Do I put on a Cockney accent? It worked for Mike Skinner (aka The Streets), who is actually a brummy, but I'm not sure I could pull it off. Maybe something northern? Oasis, Stone Roses, Arctic Monkeys - none of them have to cover up their accent because being northern is cool, but a posh lad singing like a Yorkshireman or a Scouser sounds more like a recipe for bad comedy than good music.
So what am I left with? Well, it wouldn't be a post on this blog if I didn't mention Radiohead. They all grew up just a few miles from me and went to public school, so how does Thom Yorke manage to sound so cool when he sings? Perhaps it's the mumbliness, if that's a word, or his anger, his conviction, but something in his style of singing stops you from thinking "what is this posh twat moaning about?". OK, maybe some people do think that, but that's another story. I guess what I'm trying to say, if only because I'm fumbling around for a conclusion to this post, is that sometimes I have a good reason for trying to copy Radiohead when making music - they're a bunch of rural Oxfordshire musicians who figured out how to be cool.

I'm Sorry, I Won't Shut Up About Them

Radiohead. Yes, I'm still on about them. My full, double-vinyl, double-CD, beautifully, presented seventh Radiohead album arrived today, and I've been listening almost non-stop to the second CD (which wasn't available as a download like the main album). I was slightly worried that this second CD would just be the shite bits that were left out of the main album, but instead this is a brilliant, cohesive, standalone, well thought-out mini-album with at least three tracks that were clearly put on this CD because they belonged there stylistically rather than because they weren't good enough for the main album. I'd go so far as to say that CD2 is better than CD1, although why compare them when you can play them back-to-back? I'll do that when the time is right.
At least three quarters of my band are meeting up this weekend for a second shot at recording music on a canal boat. OK, so it didn't work before and this time around we have a day less to get things done, no material pre-recorded and a chronic shortage of heat and daylight, but we also have the experience of how not to go about this stuff, not to mention a fully battery-operated recording set-up. With only two acoustic guitars and some maracas, I doubt we'll reach the sonic brilliance of CD2's "Down Is The New Up" (menacing, apocalyptic strings and creepy piano) or "Bangers + Mash" (funk-rock gone wonderfully, manically wrong), but who knows, maybe we'll move a step closer to next year's much-anticipated second Ekkeko album which, for reference, currently looks something like this:
1.Stuck
2.For Disco Use Only
3.Waits
4.Ascend/Transcend
5.Nefyn Bay
6.Holmes' Song
These titles won't mean anything to anyone except myself, but I doubt it will look anything like that in a year anyway so it doesn't matter. Now it's bedtime.

I'd Like To Thank The Academy

So here it is, in all its shitly-encoded glory: my band's first foray into film fabrication (I was going to say film-making but the alliteration got the better of me). It's best watched in a cinema context, but until 21st Century Fox finalise the distribution deal this'll have to do.