One year to go

Time to stop the NME subscription

Tomorrow is my birthday. My 39th Birthday in fact. Which means from tomorrow I have one year until I’m 40. I still feel like I did when I was 18 / 19,  teenage dreams and all that. Only now I have 21 years additional experience.

The arrival of middle age is typically a time for reflection, followed by existential, achievement and self-fulfilment crises – which probably means at the very least the purchase of trainers to go jogging.

I’ve decided to try and do a 3 panel comic every week to describe this process in a suitably comedic fashion. In true Douglas Adams style I am already late on panels 2 and 3 for this first one – but I thought you might like to see where this starts. I’ve decied to go back to proper old-school to actually hone my craft before getting stuck into something bigger – pen and ink nib work on Bristol Board.

A clear sign that things are changing is the NME. I’ve read and collected NME since I was 16, I still have the first copy I brought in 1989 (cover of Peter Hook and a tag line ‘Out Of Order’ – sort of proving nothing really changes). However in the last 12 months I’ve read it less and less – resulting in a large pile of unopened plastic wrappers. Not because I don’t love music anymore, but because there are so many other calls on my time, music has sort of dropped to the bottom of the pile.

The 16 year old me now knows that I am as good as dead.

Slippery auto-complete offers surprising prospect

It’s old hat really to get comedic value out of the iPhone Auto-Complete language mangling – until it happens to you.

I was picking up our office manager Penny today, she is currently sans transport and lives nearby, plus it’s nice to have a natter in the car. On the right is the exchange Penny had with our support helpdesk lead Leigh attempting to explain I was collecting her at 8:20am.

Good lord, it’s just so wrong.

Sleigh bells ring – my ears are blistering

I’ve been running a ‘Christmas songs on Spotify’ playlist competition at work. The rules are simple:

1) 10 songs

2) Must be Christmas related

3) Points deducted for inclusion of Mariah Carey (actually I didn’t tell anyone that, but that’s how it’s going to get scored)

Bells - it's all about the bells (oh and the choir of children if you've got the budget and the production values)

What is great is about the Christmas song genre is that it’s so broad, so diverse and almost every artist at some point has given it a go – generally because it’s a bloody good commercial idea (and crucially, not necessarily the best artistic idea).

Did you know for example that Jimi Hendrix did Christmas songs? Or that the Manic Street Preachers basically admitted they must have nicked and enjoyed their sisters early 80′s copies of Smash Hits by doing a cover of ‘Last Christmas’.

What I’m especially looking forward to in a few days is when my old school friend Michael Jones mails me his annual CD of Xmas songs. It’s always a belter and always has really obscure random madness on it. Wham sung by a computer – check, a generous helping of Reggae from the Trojan Christmas album – check, Old School Hip Hop Xmas songs – check, Philly Soul Christmas songs – check.

A Christmas song playlist can be taken in many directions – you could do the drop dead classics – start with Slade and Wizzard, end with Nat King Cole and go past Shakin Steven’s, Wham, Greg Lake, Mud, Jona Lewie and Kirsty McColl & The Pogues on the way.

OR

You can explore a hatred of Christmas (look no further than Helen Arney and ‘It’s going to be an awkward Christmas, darling‘)

OR

You could go US punk for Christmas.

OR

Go with a proper jangly, boy-girl  C86 indie pop Christmas (the ‘Very Cherry Christmas’ compliations are always a favourite round these parts)

Or

You could look for god awful cover versions featuring sampled dog’s and cats  (I blame the Casio SK 1 for this) or worse an allegedly keyboard playing cat.

OR

Grab your cocktail shaker, consider whether eggnog is a good idea and smoulder with a 60′s lounge feel - with the stylish vocals of Julie London, Dean Martin, Lou Rawls, Peggy Lee and the orchestrations of Billy May and Eddie Dunstedter.

OR

If you live somewhere properly posh, or have a fondness for muzak and prefer your Christmas pop tunes delivered by a string quartet then that’s available too.

And even though he’s now a weird, be-wigged, incarcerated, actress murdering loon, back in the 1960′s Phil Spector delivered what is still arguably the best overall single christmas album with ‘A Christmas Gift For You, From Phil Spector.’  The title alone hints at the rampant ego-mania that would eventually consume him. However, it’s Christmas – put that to one side (just like a recently discharged weapon) and revel in the pop-tastic brilliance of it.

So what makes a good Christmas playlist ?

A good playlist should (too my ears at least) have a mixture of styles, it should be un-afraid to mix the known with the unknown. Like Christmas day itself it should conceal some surprises but equally it should (mostly) stick to a reasonably expected pattern. There should always be at least a couple of Christmas classics – but possibly as covers or less well-known styles. You don’t want it to sound like the Christmas muzak in a shopping mall or rely too heavily on the over-played and over-familiar. Most of all, it should make you smile and want to put it on again. I’ll even let you put Mariah Carey in it if you really want to – after all it’s the season for generosity.

To help you tiptoe through this mince-pie strewn mine-field you can explore some of the playlists the team and I have produced so far >>

D247 Happy Winterval 2011 – Paul Smith (By Me)

D247MikeH-Christmas (By Mike Hlaford)

KennyMas MMXI (By Kennhy Milliner)

Eclectic Xmas (By Jamie Bartlett)

D247 – Pauls Christmas B-Sides (By Me)

D247 Merry $*(%!” Xmas  (By Andrew Garner – which featuers only one song but it’s a corker)

It’s even possible to enjoy Christmas through the soundtracks of films commonly associatated with Christmas (It’s a Wonderful life, Wizard of Oz, Singin In The Rain, Nightmare Before Christmas, The Muppet Christmas Carol etc):

Christmas At The Movies  (By, errrr Me)

It also amuses me to think that the Ronnettes backing melodies of ‘Ding a linga lling long ding’ in sleigh ride is REALLY not a million miles from Ministry’s ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod‘.

All that, and not a single mention of Bing either.

How to recover your sanity

If this has all got too much for you – as it often does this time of year. There’s always the Festive 50 to look forward too. Since the death of John Peel this has been picked up by the brilliant folks that run Dandelion Radio. They start playing the Festive 50 as soon as the click stikes midnight on Christmas Day – and I for one will be tucked up in bed listening via their iPhone app, I’ll have had an overdose of Frosty The Snowman by then and need an antidote.

My Bookshelf, my dead-tree, real proper book-shelf

Taking inspiration from Wood Green Bookshop. I’m going to celebrate one of my bookshelves (and then cheat by including my bedside table too).

If anyone fancies joining in and doing the same – do it! What could be nicer than sharing what you’ve found, what you like. A bookshelf conveys your interests and passions and it celebrates real, proper, tangible, smelly, floppy paper based books.

When you’ve got the photo(s) and some words – blog it, and tweet it. I’m adopting the tag of #MyBooks when I refer to this little endevour.

I LOVE looking at other people’s book shelves, I guess I’m just nosey – so here’s mine.

There is one long bookshelf in our Kitchen / Family room – and this is the current collection of books on it. We used to have a house that had lot’s of room for books, now we have a few shelves and I keep lot’s in storage boxes in various places (boooooo).

I’ve also included a pic of the books that I take off the shelf and put on my bed-side – in the folorn hope that one day I’ll go to bed early.

Descriptions to follow over the weekend – but wanted to get the images up for now.

Starting from left to right

1) Royal Horticultural Society books

Brought on a special offer from ‘The Book People’ because sometimes I do try and do useful things to make the garden pretty.

3) X’Ed Out – Charles Burns

First volume of Charles Burns latest graphic novel serialisation. Fabulously weird and featuring a great TinTin homage. Remember reading it on train after picking up in Gosh comics and feeling a bit self conscious as it has some illustrated nudity. I’ve loved Charles Burns after picking up Black Hole in Gosh about a year ago – first time I saw @hayleycampbelly if I recall, I was soaking wet and made some quip about Gene Kelly making it look easy. I also recorded the sound of the shop for the British Libary sound archive.

3) Thrill Power Overload – Bishop.

Warts and all history of 2000AD. Christmas present from my dad who first brought me a copy of 2000AD in 1981 – from which I’ve never really recovered.

4) Factory Records – Complete Graphical Album

I’ve always loved Factory sleeve designs and Peter Savilles work (not that he was the only designer). A sumptuous catalogue of every FACing sleeve.

I brought a copy of ‘True Faith’ on 12″ vinyl from the Virgin megastore in Birmingham in 1987 – the design of a leaf set against a bright blue background was strikingly simple, elegant and totally curated. It was followed quickly by a copy of ‘Substance’ – which is a record sleeve that started to give me an appreciation for typography. It also contained imagery that Peter Saville said he imagined as ‘art for the lobby of IBM in 2000′. Having worked in IBM in 2000 I can confirm there was nothing that interesting in the lobby of even the Southbank office.

This is a book that mixes several passions of mine – design, music, typography, Manchester and history.

For a while I lived in walking distance of the Factory offices on Princess Street. I drank in the pub over the road (the Lass O’Gowrie). This book reminds me of all that, of all the music and even being amazed at the wobbly suited, face slapping part of the True Faith video. It also reminds me that in a pop quiz I can spot the intro to True Faith from the single opening drum sound.

5) Bridget Riley – Tate
Patterns, 60s iconic black and white optical illusions and mathematically precise layouts with interference patterns. Waves of colour and repeating structure. Giving way to not quite uniform grids of circles. What’s not to love about Bridget Riley – Present from my wife after a trip to Tate modern.

6) The Best Of Smash Hits – The 80′s
Despite what I may claim – I am still fundamentally a pop kid at heart . I blame my sister for subscribing to Smash Hits – which I would always read and secretly loved. Brought this as a Christmas present for Adele *yes, that old trick*.

7) The Shock Of The New – Robert Hughes

8) Watchmen

8a) Big Numbers

It’s so thin in the photo, you’ll miss it. This is the comic that stopped me buying comics. It was so good, it really grabbed me – and it only published 2 issues before the beautifully complex and interwoven narrative about a soap opera of very real people, fractals, chaos theory, Northampton and shopping malls took is toll on Alan Moore and the artist Bill Siekewicz. Detonating an H-Bomb of financial and family chaos for both of the creators to such a degree that both of them, only now (nearly 20 years on) feel able to talk about it.

The first page showed the train-time table from Northampton to Birmingham. It included the nearest stations to the 16 year old me – Marston Green, Tile Cross. These are the stations I’d use if going into Birmingham to go to Nostalgia and Comics. It seemed approporiate and made the story that much more real and personal.

I stood next to Alan Moore in Gosh Comics back in October this year, probably for a good 15 minutes. I really wanted to ask him if he’d ever pick up Big Numbers again – but cursed with politeness I didn’t. I think I know the answer so it would have been a silly thing to ask, I was content to let him browse and mind his own business. I’m sure it’s one of the damn annoyances of being a legend is having people keep telling you.

9) Making Comics

10) ART of the 20th Century

11) Manchester – Looking for the light through the pouring rain – Kevin Cummins

12) Gene Kelly – Sheridan Morely & Ruth Leon

13) Leiths – Baking Bible – Susan Spaull & Fiona Burrell

14) Leiths – Vegetarian Bible – Polly Tyrer

15) Barbara Hepworth – Penelope Carris

16) Terry Frost – Chris Stephens

17) The Peel Sessions

18) Wild Swim – Katie Rew

19) Information Is Beautiful – David McCandles

20) Time Out – Seaside

21) Total Immersion – Terry Laughlin

22) The Hummingbird Bakery – Cake Days

23) Logicomix

24) Carl Sagan – Kaye Davidson

25) Stephen Fry – The Fry Chronicles

26) Andrew Marr – A History Of Modern Britain

27) Trouble Man – The Life & Death Of MArvin Gaye

28) Bass Culture – Lloyd Bradley

29) Rip It Up And Start Again – Simon Reynolds

30) An REM Companion – It Crawled From The South – Marcus Gray

31) Miss Dahls Voluptuous Delights – Sophie Dahl

32) Alfons Mucha -

33) Seeing Stars – Simon Armitage

34) Zoom! – Simon Armitage

35) Touching From A Distance – Deborah Curtis

36) British Wildlife -

37) Dad Stuff

38) Moonin Summer Madness – Tove Jansson

39) Moomin In Midwinter – Tove Jansson

40) Religion & Science – Bertrand Russell

41) The Man Who Changed Everything

42) Northern Lights

43) The Wasp Factory

44) Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson

45) Eats Shoots & Leaves – Lynne Truss

46) Clockwork – Philip Pullman

47) The Man Who Invented The Twentieth Century

48) The Origin Of Species – Charles Darwin

49) Pocket Birds

50) Design – Taschen

51) This Is Uncool

52) Fear Of Music

53) Fermat’s Last Theorem – Simon Singh

54) Broca’s Brain – Carl Sagan

Books piled on top

1) The Cement Garden

2) Cosmos – Carl Sagan

3) Everything Is It’s Own Reward – Paul Madonna

Still Keeping It Peel – a bit more obscure

I’ve been back in the garage – this time to dig out some slightly more obscure vinyl that I was inspired to buy after listening to John Peel. I stacked up quite a pile but settled on this five for now (missing out on some Max Romeo, Lightning Hopkins, Autechre, Kenicke, Mambo Taxi, Sebadoh, Ten Benson all of which I’ll get round to recording).

Shut Up And Dance – The Green Man

Seem to remember this had some trouble with sample clearance as the orchestral part is by Riyachi Sakomoto from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (please correct me if I’m wrong ). This finished abruptly before the end.

Gunshot – Killing Season (Remix)

British Rap from the mid 90′s – with some nice fast rapping and wordplay and just enough nod’s to 80′s hip-hop and a feel for sounds like Senser to make this a real curiousity item…

Arcwelder – Cranberry Sauce

Always liked the stop start sound of the guitar work on this.

The Voodoo Queens – Supermodel Superficial

Some great shouty feminist pop

Ty Gwydr – Taith (Trip To The End Of The Universe)

This has to be one of my favourite ‘heard it once’ on Peel tracks ever – enough for me to trawl round most of Birmingham’s record shops looking for a copy and trying to pronouce the Welsh title. For the very helpful people in Plastic Factory to say “oh you’ll want the rack of Ankst records, we can’t pronounce any of the titles either.”

First of all – an obligatory mistake, playing the Ty Gwydr track at the wrong speed.

And then at the right speed

Keeping It Peel

My way of Keeping It Peel – I’ve been slowly recording significant vinyl records in my life onto YouTube. A lot of these I first heard on a Peel radio program (note: this isn’t a strict list). Somehow it seems appropriate to celebrate the life of John Peel with vinyl.

I started listening to Peel around 1987 when I was 14.  He would be on about 8:30 in the evening on Radio 1 and it fitted in with me doing howework. I keep listening all through my school and university years, even when the world of work arrived I’d be at least an occassional listener and ALWAYS recorded the Festive50.

Peel was a lifeline, an anchor, a reassuringly normal voice on the radio – but a very remarkable one too, his passion for music was phenomenal his breadth of taste WAS the point.

….. err…. this one ends abrubtly.

It was about surprise, the uncovering of something new and heart-stopping, something challenging, something precious, something that you *GOT* and it differentiated you from most other people because you shared that passion.

They day I heard John had died I was building a fence. I was building a fence with my brother in law who is the only person I know who has a personal connection to John Peel, he used to babysit for the Ravencroft family in the late 80′s / early 90′s (or more specifically his girlfriend did and he was along for the ride). He told me that he’d talked with John about the Cure (an enourmous love of his) and got away with calling him a fat bastard. Digging holes seemed appropriate that afternoon.

In the days that followed I found myself very upset, oddly upset – doing things like having to pull off motorways to have a cry on the way to work. I made my own tribute t-shirt and started to collate old recordings, whilst searching for show recordings on file-sharing networks and BitTorrent.

I used to run a John Peel dedicated station on Live365 (about 6 years ago) and I still own the Domain ‘johnpeelarchive.co.uk’ which I always feel has been a largely squandered opportunity where I managed to do absolutely nothing.

My idea following John’s death was to collect together tapes and recordings of shows and distribute from there. Fortunately lot’s of other people have had that idea and BitTorrent has been very useful to those who wanted a complete set of the Festive50 for example. Then I had kids…… and now there seems like no time available to do anything useful.

So in a small way this is my tribute to a man who turned me on to so much brilliant music, but even more improtantly taught me to continue to seek it out – to stay hungry for it, to stay curious.

Cheer’s John.

This one starts quietly …..

Vintage 50′s style

Part of the ‘look’ of Catastrophe Noir is intended to hark back to a seemingly more innocent 1950′s – the Americanisation of Cornwall will have exacerbated the combination of vintage, sea-side and nostaliga which is a plot element that also means I get to practice drawing 50′s pinup’s. I’ve started seriously exploring using an IPad for the artwork rather than Manga Studio, here’s some of the results so far:

Catherine black character test - it's all rock and roll and 50's motor's in the Americanised Penzance

I need to specifically mention and thank Vivien of Holloway as a source of the dresses and model shot’s these were based on!

Oh the horror - oh the glamour!

 

Ah yes, the YouTube video

A few weeks back I did a short Pecha Kucha session on Visual Storytelling at Digital Surrey. The evening was recorded for posterity and it’s well worth checking out the 7 other speakers – from Tim Ireland (@bloggerheads) explaining his SEO mischief making through to @Dr_Black discussing her role in the saving Bletchley Park campaign and some terrific material on Social business, Twitter sentiment analysis, video gaming and live digital storytelling.

I throughly enjoyed the session and have many people to thank who’s material I re-used / borrowed etc (which is acknowledged in the sneak peak slide deck posted on this blog a little while ago).

After the event I met someone (I am so bad with names, please forgive me) who worked with Pete Frame (legendary 2000AD and comics letterer and author of the Rock family trees) on Zig Zag – which was the UK’s first Rock magazine – which was just fabulous serendipity.

I also got to chat to Tim Ireland and discovered a mutual love of many things plus he put me on to the museum of hoaxes and Dick Tuck who was a perpetual thorn in Nixon’s side.

Catastrophe Noir is running a bit slowly at the moment – distinct absence of free time, ho hum – maybe it’ll take about 4 years. On the up-side I did find fairies in the garden last week.

Doing a 'Cottingley'

Visual storytelling renaissance man – in 6 minutes 40

On the evening of Wednesday 20th April I’ll be presenting in Guildford at the April Digital Surrey first birthday event – I would say come along but all the tickets have already gone and there’s a wait list, if you want to try though you can add yourself here www.digitalsurrey.co.uk .

I’m presenting a session on ‘Visual Storytelling’ in a Pecha Kucha format – 20 slides, each slide auto-forwards after 20 seconds.

My plan is to present comics and graphic novels (“What’s a graphic novel, it’s a comic you need a bookmark for”) as currently experiencing a creative and technological renaissance. That’s a renaissance in content, quality, imagination, diversity, distribution and production. Visual storytelling is a cross-over multi-disciplinary skill set that has utility and value in broader design and communication (web design, wireframes, check-out storyboards, video game design, advertising, films).

My brief history takes an arc showing examples of the use and utility of visual storytelling across the ages and with increasing sophistication. Along the way I cover issues of intellectual property, brain drain, extinction events, technological opportunities, disruptive technologies and the associated challenges of a digital divide. It’ll include some recommendations on further reading, use of graphic novels to both engage reluctant readers and delight the already highly literate. How visual stories can help explain the underlying design principles of current generation web browsers and scare you about the scale of the global financial crisis.

To do this I’ve adapted (*erm, borrowed, I’ll return it un-damaged I promise) work by Bryan Talbot, Scott McCloud, Alan Moore and a host of others. It’s a lot to cram into 6 minutes 40 seconds …. and here’s a sneak preview of the slides (PDF Format and a bit hefty 24Mb, lots’ of images) >>

Visual Storytelling for Digital Surrey PK Night

Slide one starts with terrorist, anarchist, anti-hero V from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta – introducing himself by way of the rolling-stones shortly before dispatching a repellant priest with an ironic death by un-transubstantiated communion wafer. I on the other hand will be reassuring the audience I’m not a member of anonymous. This is also the only slide with words on it…

Go find your local comic shop

This is a work in progress and only the first 20 slides will be used on the night, the others are a bonus for those interested further.

The quick and the dead

It’s a good job I’m not a cowboy, I’m not the quickest at the draw and it’s been proven to me this week.

So what’s left me lying in the dust, wounded and remorseful?

For  while I’ve kept my eye on the ‘Illustrated 69 Love Songs’ blog / project which is being lovingly curated by Julia Scheele (previously art assistant for Jamie McKelvie on ‘Phonogram : The Singles Club’ and sometimes staff member at Gosh comics).

The idea’s simple, yet brilliant – inviting artists and illustrators to submit their interpretation / comic / illustration of each of the songs from the Magnetic Field’s opus ’69 Love Songs’.

I’d noticed last week that some previously ‘taken’ songs had become re-available. Previously committed art work not forthcoming new collaborators were being sought.

http://howfuckingromantic.wordpress.com/

I’d previously fancied having a crack at ‘Busby Berkley Dreams’ as it’s my favourite track from that album. Well it’s my favourite track if I’m feeling like I need depressing through a plaintive piano and sporadically soaring vocal describing a long-lost romance gone sour distilled through a melancholy view of 1930′s hollywood glitz, a love of geometry *AND* whirling stages.

Being both a newbie and an amateur in this area (read that as ‘no decent portfolio and not my career’). I thought I’d draft something up, fiddle with it and see if I could come up with A) a halfway decent idea and B) a halfway decent illustration. If I could do both then I was going to drop Julia a line, cough, smile, apologise and ask if I could have a go.

I spent a few evening’s getting back into using Manga Studio and the Wacom pad. Sketched some idea’s on paper and started in earnest.

Over one evening I managed to draw something in the region of 40 ladies in swimming costumes perched on a tier of rotating stages as a possible cover for ‘True Romance’ magazine.  I was reasonably pleased with the result and decided to press on.

Later that evening I went back to the site to get Julie’s email address for the ‘do you mind if I have go’ email, only to find I’d missed the boat.

Not only had I missed the boat but the person sailing away in it was a bloody brilliant illustrator – Nidhi Chanani (http://storybird.com/nidhi-chanani/).

Turn’s out that all round comic superhero, theorist and general top bloke Scott McCloud had posted about the Illustrated 69 Love Song’s over the weekend and the ‘How Fucking Romantic’ blog had gone bonkers with new hits and new collaborators.

Important lesson for me here – have faith in your own ability and step forward sooner. There’s only two types of people in this game – the quick and the dead.

Which is how I come to end up, metaphorically at least, in the dust, licking my wounds and being thankful we were only armed with spud guns.

On the up side I’ve concluded that it’s the sort of gig that actually would most benefit a professional illustrator, after all their career relies on exposure and reaching new audiences. One day mine might, but right now I’m strictly amateur and practically able to do only a handful of hours a week around my other commitments. So I’m actually really pleased for Nidhi and I can’t wait to see the results (so I’m now following her on Twitter).

I’ve also decided to keep going with my version. Turn’s out it’s been a really useful exercise for me in layout planning, pacing of dialogue, style and practice with tools I’m not yet fully conversant with. Helpful along the way of producing Catastrophe Noir – something smaller and easier to deliver, to show people and say – does this work, where am I going wrong?

So, what did I come up with?

My concept for the song is to use a 1930′s black and white film strip to provide the comic panels that partially narrate the lyrics. Keeping each page with a central image of the ‘True Romance’ magazine referenced in the song – which itself features a Busby Berkley film illustration and text on the cover that narrates other parts of the Lyrics. Here’s where I’ve gotten so far:

Busby Berkley Dreams