alan_lake

How come you live in Harrogate, yet you seem to know a bit about things?

2006-04-29T17:00:12Z

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Brief encounters

2006-03-20T22:01:41Z

This is horrible. I used to be able to spill out a fantastic brief on just about anything but I've now got brief fear. It's taken days to finesse, when it usually should take a matter of hours. Doubly frustrating that ten years ago, I could shit a top level campaign over four days when now "fragmentation" means that it's bolt-on bollocks of precious little consequence. Right now, my shoulder blades are flaring up and the past four hours have flown past with so little to show for it.
I am Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glenn Ross, albeit half his age today.

It's all meme meme meme..

2006-02-23T22:26:45Z

About a week ago, I stumbled on this
http://www.channel101.com/shows/show.php?show_id=152

It's a fantastically silly, yet acutely knowing show called Yacht Rock, which dramatises the golden age of US smooth rock, until the triple evils of sampling, CDs and Miami Vice torpedoed its raison d'etre. Hall and Oates, the Doobie Brothers and Loggins and Messina are treated as deities to a degree that once watching all episodes, you'll want to sport a crocodile man-bag, drive a sand metallic x-reg BMW 323i and
wear Timberlands with gonad-crunching tennis shorts, topped with a cheesecloth YSL shirt.

My yacht rock capsule ensemble currently comprises of a seersucker striped YSL jacket, Dior jersey polo shirt, frayed jeans, sockless Sebagos and a black Citroen CX Pallas with factory fitted rear roller blinds to keep the sun out. Although I rather covert a Ferrari Mondial in Blu Chiaro with red leather seats, with a Mitchell Gyrodeck waiting at home...

So I dropped a line to http://www.Rockingvicar.com and they stuck a link on their blog on Sunday. Within a matter of days, Danny Baker had constructed an entire two hour show around the genre.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/london/aod.shtml?london/dannybaker_wed#

Anyway, I now consider myself the John the Baptist of British Yacht Rock appreciation, so when the Sunday Times Style scream on about it around Easter to the moneyed provinces, just remember who started it all.

The show jumps the shark by the time they did Jethro Tull, though. But before that, it's a hoot, if only for the immortal phrase "California Vagina Sailors"

Oh the heresy..

2005-12-06T22:33:06Z

Compare and contrast Yesterday's Hero by the Bay City Rollers with The Card Cheat by The Clash. I'd hoped that such a discovery would never be made, but alas, my iconoclastic streak welled up and I had to let it out into the public domain.
Other blimies in my music box was just how much Suede ripped off the almost forgotten Be Bop Deluxe. Modern Music (reprise)? Don't deny you've ever heard of it, Brett.

Hands free

2005-11-13T16:27:19Z

Friday was not helped by the threat of the Trading Standards people bearing down on me. The problem? A BT DECT phone for which I write the content was picked up by them. Thanks to a man with no arms in Blackburn saving up his disadvantaged pennies for one and discovering that where there is a headphone illustrated on the box, but it actually comes with an earpiece, he was not happy. And it was his silver wedding present to himself, this was a double kicker. His contention was that if he had a headset, it would stay on his head under all conditions, while an earpiece was liable to fall out, and he'd have no way of picking it up.
Usually I'd be laughing myself stupid over this story, but all I feel is deep dismay and guilt, the latter being needless. Over to BT; they can get the slapped wrists.

Where's Johnny?

2005-11-08T20:32:19Z

I was called today by someone trying to get in touch with John Cooper Clarke. The best bet is to send a postcard to whichever place he's gigging during the next week or so and he'll pick it up there. Now, he's a quite lovely chap, frankly, a national treasure and Johnny Clarke is, however, a tad eccentric, doesn't hold with mobiles and relies on payphones when out and about - oh and he also a drink problem. Given his size (a height:weight ratio of a stone:foot and even without the hair he's a good 5'11") it takes two pints to get him blotto. And so it was that he was on a train, wanted to be elsewhere in mind, if not in body, blew a fiver on grog and woke up to find that his bag containing 30 odd years of notebooks had been nicked. Most stoically, he just sat down and wrote them out again. Rather like Carlyle, who rewrote the entire manuscript of "The French Revolution" (1837) after a friend's maid accidentally burned it. But Carlyle never appeared in a Sugar Puffs ad.