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Blog Archive: October 2023
A Weekend In The 2010sYou find me today in a PARLOUS STATE, for LO! I have just got back from a delightful weekend in the 2010s and it was a) EXHAUSTING b) BRILLIANT.
The trip was brought about due to the wonderful and life-affiriming, though brief, return of Allo Darlin' to the ROCK FRAY. They are one of my all-time favourite bands EVER and as a result myself and Mr S Hewitt got A Little Bit Excited when they announced some dates and bought tickets for not ONE but TWO shows.
The first of these was at Ramsgate Music Hall on Friday afternoon - the evening show had sold out in 0.02 pico seconds so this extra one had been put in, and thus Steve and I met at lunchtime at Stratford International to ZOOM down to see them. We arrived with plenty of time to pop to THE PUB (NB that was its name) where it turned out that approx 95% of everybody there was ALSO going to the gig. We then got a MASSIVE bag of chips each from the next door chippy and waddled down to the venue where the SAYING OOH HELLO began. The first person so OOH HELLOed was Ms J Gilroy but there were MANY more to follow over the course of the weekend, including several people who I don't actually know but thought I did because they looked like the sort of person I might. I mean, they were people at an Allo Darlin' gig, so there was a good chance!
Inside the room was PACKED but also WELL AIR CONDITIONED so it was a very pleasant place for a GRATE gig. The band came on and looked pretty much as I remembered them, which is of course only logical because me and Steve look EXACTLY THE SAME too, obviously. There was some light trepidation for the first couple of songs, but then the muscle memory kicked in and they TOTALLY ROCKED. It was exactly and precisely like they had never been away, with the only exception being everyone looked if anything slightly MORE comfortable being there. It was a FAB set and looking around I did see quite a lot of people having THE FEELINGS, and this very much included ME.
We got some MERCH, said hello to some more people, said "see you tomorrow" to the same group, and then headed to a pub we had been recommended which turned out to be exactly like all pubs had been in 1989, with raised platforms, wooden staircases, and very clearly THE SAME CARPET still. It wasn't nice, but then when we got back to THE OLYMPICS we went for a couple of beers in my local - Mother Kelly's - where we were joined by The Pint In My Glass. That was MUCH nicer!
The next day's gig was in the evening in Islington, so I met Steve in a pub nearby which was chosen for VICINITY more than pleasantness - and had THE WORST PUB TABLE EVER with huge HOLES and LUMPS in it so BEER was liable to go everywhere, and did! - and so we quickly moved ourselves over to Islington Assembly Hall where even MORE saying OOH HELLO took place with all sorts of lovely people from all over the place who I used to see once a year at Indietracks. Cor, there really was an Indietracks VIBE going on, it was ACE. It is a MASSIVE venue which had loads of room for LOADS of lovely people, and to be honest it felt a bit impertinent when BANDS came on and interrupted our conversations. Still, the support bands - Fortitude Valley and Mammoth Penguins - were GRATE so I think they can be excused.
Anyway, then Allo Darlin' came on and it was even better than last night. That big stage really really suited them, with songs more than HUGE enough to get a thousand people singing and dancing along. I loved seeing them in tiny venues over the years, but as with their farewell gig back in 2016 it felt like this is where they should always be playing. If you have the ability to give JOY to that number of people all at once, and also have it still feel like the same COMMUNITY who could cram into a carriage at a steam engine centre, then it's probably a good idea to DO it.
Afterwards we staggered out bleary eyed and follwed Mr S Price round the corner to SOME PUB I can't remember the name of to sit around and be the versions of ourselves we had been 8 years ago i.e. QUITE DRUNK and SHOWING OFF. I for one do not approve of such behaviour hem hem but must admit it was fun. It's been a LONG time since I've had to hurry off for the last tube on a Saturday night tho!
Then the final section of the weekend was a trip to the revived HANGOVER LOUNGE at the Lexington, where I delighted in confusing Mr G Ware by attempting to have a conversation with him that we had very much had the night before. I was too polite to point out that one of us must have been too drunk to remember, but he definitely must have been as it is the only explanation.
A delightful parade of people wandered in and it was a gorgeous couple of hours rolling around in the loveliness of the Indietracks-related community. I staggered off to get my train home with a heart full of joy from a weekend well spent, as well as a feeling of incomprehension that I used to manage to do this EVERY weekend and also on days in between. It was KNACKERING, but also GRATE!
posted 30/10/2023 by MJ Hibbett
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Illuminations
After the let down of "The Mysteries" it was perhaps FOOLHARDY of me to leap straight into reading "Illuminations" by Alan Moore, as I was potentially letting myself in for even MORE disappointment. I mean, I really like Bill Watterson but I flipping LOVE Alan Moore, as his influence on me has been SO GRATE that I even wrote a SONG about him - and indeed went so far as to PLAY that song into his very face. Also, while this book was a similar change of usual format, from comics to books in this case, I did at least have some experience of Alan Moore's non-comics writing. Having said that I hadn't been super keen on it - "Jerusalenm" still sits on my book shelf, GLOWERING at me, unread!
It was thus with some trepidation that I commenced reading, expecting a DIFFICULT and LENGTHY read that I would almost definitely never get to the end of it. SPOILERS: that is not how it worked out. The first story, "Hypothetical Lizard" was SORT OF what I expected - quite long, quite serious, very descriptive and with lots of rude bits - but after that it was A DELIGHT. For LO! the thing that I had forgotten about Alan Moore, and that MOST people always seem to forget, is that he is REALLY REALLY FUNNY. Nearly all of the remaining stories were often HILARIOUS, but also EXCITING and FUN and INTERESTING and basically all of those things that we all fell in love with about 10,000,000 years ago when his name started popping up in Future Shocks and Time Twisters in 2000AD. It was GRATE!
A lot of the stories ARE pretty much Future Shocks and/or Time Twisters too (yes yes I know that they are all Short Stories and, as he says in the Acknowledgements, these were invented by Edgar Allen Poe but HEY 2000AD was where I first fell upon them so there), with that LOVELY feeling where you GET what is going on JUST before the end. For instance the last story, "And, at the Last, Just to Be Done with Silence" goes from A Bit Confusing, through to Intriguing and then, JUST before the last bit, into full on "OH I SEE!" and "Maybe I will read that all over again now?"
Most thrillingly of all, that last story ALSO has a character from Peterborough in it, which is something that almost NEVER happens. There's quite a lot of East Midlands in the whole book actually, notably in "Location, Location, Location" where the last judgement happens in BEDFORD. There's also a surprising amount of understanding of The Modern World, which is another of those things what one doesn't expect from Alan Moore. I always imagine him sitting in a LOFTY BASEMENT (he is Alan Moore, he can have a lofty basement if he wants) FULMINATING against modernity, but there are LOADS of references to Life As What It Is Currently Lived, with witty and clever points to make about them.
There are several of these in "What We Can Know About Thunderman", which is the most talked about story in the whole book because it is a) the longest by far and b) a very very funny and EXCORIATING semi-fictionalisted history of American superhero comic books. Quite apart from everything else, it was amazing reading it to realise that not only had Alan Moore clearly WATCHED "Lois And Clark" but had actually Quite Liked It, although doesn't seem to have been so keen on "Riverdale".
I can understand why Long Term Comics Professionals found "Thunderman" to be A Bit Mean, but it is clearly meant to be over the top - the suggestion about what happened to the Apollo astronauts is not, I think, meant to be taken seriously, and I don't know that he's REALLY suggesting that the CIA were quite so involved in The Marvel Age. It also talks a lot about the joy and wonder of comics when you're a kid, demonstrates a VAST understanding about how it all works, and then becomes PROFOUNDLY MOVING at the end in a manner which reminded me a LOT of the similarly lovely ending to the ABC Universe.
The only story that I didn't like AT ALL was "American Light: An Appreciation" which I must admit I gave up on as without an in-depth knowledge of The Beat Scene it was entirely impenetrable, and also written IN Beat Poetry, to which I am CLINICALLY ALLERGIC. That one reminded my of "Cinema Purgatorio", in that I'm sure it's good if you know what it's on about, but I didn't really mind skipping one chapter when the rest of the book had stuff like Whispering Pete's, Bosman Brains, and very very spooky seasides in it.
In summmary, I thought it was bloody brilliant, and am now SURPRISED that this fact SURPRISED me. Maybe I should go and finally give "Jerusalem" a try now?
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The Mysteries
Over the past few years I have been EXCITED and INTRIGUED by the news that Bill Watterson (i.e. him what made Calvin & Hobbes) was working on something NEW. Like most sensible people I flipping LOVE Calvin & Hobbes and, though I fully respected and saluted his reasons for packing it in (he thought he'd reached the end and didn't want to keep flogging it so that it became less good) I was saddened by the fact that he seemed to have basically RETIRED and wasn't bringing out anything else.
Thus I was EXCITED when news came that the project had an actual NAME - "The Mysteries" - and I was further THRILLED recently when I saw the below video, stating that it was coming out IMMINENTLY.
The video's all about how Bill Watterson and his co-creator John Kascht collaborated on the project, and I found it INTERESTING. The general thrust seemed to be that the pair of them had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how to collaborate, or even what collaborating meant, and were utterly terrible at doing it, as both their styles and their working methods were completely at odds. This was presented as an Interesting Artistic Problem, although to be honest part of me thought "No, you are just really bad at collaborating with other people and maybe should not be doing it at all", but it seemed that at the end, after YEARS of not getting anywhere, something different had come out of it. Also, there wasn't really much clue what the thing they were creating actually WAS. Was it a book of photographs? An animation? Or what?
I was keen to find out so I went online to ORDER a copy and was surprised to find it was Reasonably Priced - maybe it's because I've been buying Academic Books lately, but I was expecting it to be an Art Object or something that cost 50 quid, rather than a normal price for a normal book. A few days later it arrived and it turned out to be Just A Book - and quite a cheaply produced one at that. The binding wasn't great, the sticker on the cover was skewiff, and it had a smell that was more Mass Production Factory A Long Way Away than the lovely Book Smell I was expecting.
I sat down to read it and within about five minutes I had finished reading it. It turns out that the book is a (VERY) short story about a fairytale land where the people basically kill off nature and then die, accompanied by some very nice images that, as far as I can tell, are photographs of models they produced during the lengthy collaboration period. It feels like a 1970s children's book, possibly issued as a cash-in adaptation for a TV show where there's a basic story on the left hand side of each double page and a single drawing on the right hand side. All it needs is for the pages to be thicker, like the thick cardboard pages you get in books for toddlers.
To say I was dissapointed would be... well, ACCURATE. It felt like an awfully long time to wait for something that you could have read at least twice in the time it takes to watch the video about how they made it. Even then it would have been OK if the story had some flipping DEPTH to it ("People are not necessarily inclined to pursue long-term interests" is basically the whole thing) or indeed some HUMOUR or INSIGHT or anything that was GRATE about Bill Watterson to start with. I'm all in favour of people trying something new, but when that something new is, to be honest, so flimsy and a bit dull, then maybe not so much.
I feel bad complaining about it, but maybe that's because I feel I OUGHT to like it because it's black and white and hardbacked and therefore ADULT. On the plus side it did lead me to finally dive into a new work in a new format by ANOTHER immense literary hero of the past century (i.e. ALAN MOORE) which I shall probably bang on about when I've got to the end, but I would have preferred it if THIS had been good too. It doesn't need to have been as (SPOILERS) really brillaint as "Illuminations" is, but it would have been nice if it had been a bit closer!
posted 25/10/2023 by MJ Hibbett
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Guys and Dolls
Last week myself and The Razzle In My Dazzle went to The Bridge Theatre to see 'Guys And Dolls'. Executive Summary: it was AMAZING.
Having got the tickets a while ago I think it's fair to say neither of us were hugely in the mood for a night out, but that feeling changed pretty much as soon as we walked into the building. The Bridge Theatre is NEW - it opened in 2017 (i.e. approx 100 years after most of the West End theatres) and feels like the architects had gone "All right, what's AWFUL about most old theatres, and how can we fix it?"
The first notable aspect of this was that you walked into a large open foyer with a MASSIVE bar all along one side, staffed by LOADS of Delightful Young People, which meant that you could get a drink almost immediately and then weren't shuffling around in aisles and tiny areas before the show started. It also meant we could mill around and bump into none other than Mr T Ellis-Jones, who I hadn't seen for YEARS. This was a harbinger of a GRATE night to follow!
We had tickets for the standing area, which meant we had to check our coats and bags into the cloakroom. I had thought that this would be a massive FAFF but it turned out to be brilliantly organised and super speedy. We then went down into the main theatre where we found ourselves in a big open area with lighted lines on the floor. It was IMMMERSIVE THEATRE so I expected this to involve the cast walking between us into different areas but there was MUCH more to it than that, for LO! the lighted areas ROSE UP in multiple configurations, forming stages and streets and islands and ALL SORTS so we could get right up close and walk around to different bits to get a better view if needed. It was FANTASTIC, not least because you could always see what was happening and were also INCREDIBLY close to the action.
And COR what action it was! 'Guys And Dolls' is a BRILLIANT show with a METRIC TONNE of GIGANTIC HITS and they did them all fantastically. It was also surprisingly MOVING, especially when you could get really close to Actual Actors doing Actual Acting and also THE SINGING. In the interval I wandered around humming 'I'll Know' to myself with GLEE and pretty much everyone else in the audience was BUZZING too. In fact by the end we were GRINNING so much that our faces LITERALLY HURT, and ended up DANCING with the cast after The Bowing - bowing which featured the stage management crew getting a round of applause and deservedly so, as they had spent the whole night politely but firmly shuffling people around to get out of the way of rising stage areas.
It felt like a wonderful, glorious experience that we didn't want to end - which is extremely rare for me, as I'm usually looking at my watch after 40 minutes of pretty much ANYTHING - but when it DID end we were herded out easily and calmly, popping to the merch stand for MERCH, getting our bags etc and then out into the night within minutes. It was fantastic and highly recommended, and we're now pondering if and when we can do it again!
posted 23/10/2023 by MJ Hibbett
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Thanks To Lamacq
Today is the day that Mr Steve Lamacq celebrates his 30th Anniversary in BBC Broadcasting and also comes to the end of his "drive-time" radio show on 6music. In the lead-up to this there has been a LOT of talk about all the amazing bands he's discovered over the years who have gone on to be COLOSSAL and, while this is all well and good, I think there is a vast and vital part of his legacy that hasn't been covered half as much i.e. all the amazing bands he's discovered over the years who did NOT go on to be colossal.
I speak as ONE WHO KNOWS for LO! that would very much include me and The Validators!
Steve first played us in about 2003 when This Is Not A Library came out. I will never ever forget the afternoon when he rang me up at work to let me know he was going to play one of our songs as IT WAS STEVE LABLOODYMACQ ON THE PHONE!!!
He was on the Sunday show at that point and I ended up becoming a vaguely regular GUEST, popping in several times over the next year or two. The first time I went in I sat nervously in the corner of the tiny studio, started playing a song, and then FORGOT THE WORDS so had to stop and ask if he knew what they were. We were live on the radio at the time, but he was very nice about it! Afterwards we went to the pub and a few of the Assistants asked me how Steve had found out about me. This seemed like a weird question - obviously I'd just sent him a CD and he'd listened to it, wasn't that how EVERYBODY chose the music for their shows?
It turned out that this was VERY MUCH NOT how everybody else chose, or chooses, music for their shows, and I think that's the key thing that has made him such a LEGEND over the years. Basically, if you sent something to Steve Lamacq (by post, by email, or indeed by THRUSTING CASSETTES at him in the pub back in the previous century) he would almost certainly give it a listen and, if he liked it, PLAY it. This is TOTALLY different to how most national radio people have ever worked, who rarely even GET a choice of what to play and, if they do, tend to hedge their bets and go with what's IN. There ARE still other people - WONDERFUL people - who play stuff just because they like it, many of whom I know and think are GRATE - but Steve Lamacq is one of the very few who made it all the way up to having a national station and STILL did it.
Since that first gig I popped into his Sunday show quite a few times, notably doing weekly re-writes of The Fair Play Trophy (again) for Euro 2004 and then writing and performing Good Luck In Your New Job for when he went over to DRIVETIME. He kept on supporting us over the years since then too, booking us for a live session at Maida Vale as an act of VENGEANCE against Radio One when they ended The Evening Session, phoning in LIVE to a show during the Edinburgh run of My Exciting Life In ROCK and even providing a free VOICEOVER for Regardez, Ecoutez et Repetez.
He's since played something from NEARLY all of our albums on his various shows - he wasn't so keen on Dinosaur Planet but I can FORGIVE that terrible error - and has booked me and us for various thing over the years too. I am thus EXTREMELY grateful!
But the thing is, he's done this with LOADS of other bands over the years too, irrespective of their potential for COLOSSALNESS, and ALL because he's just KEEN on hearing STUFF. I give the examples above not to show off - well, all right, a BIT to show off - but to illustrate that he's the sort of person who'll stick with something he likes even when it is MANIFESTLY CLEAR that it is not and never will be COOL and therefore will not make him look good in any way, and that he's been doing this every week for YEARS. If you listen back to his show you'll hear a lot of the bands he's known for, certainly, and lots of acts who sound like The Next Big Thing, but in pretty much every single show you'll also hear as much of the OTHER stuff - the loonies, the oddballs, and (IN MY CASE) the unacknowledged genii - as he can get in. It didn't make HIM look cool but it definitely did make US look cool, if only for an afternoon!
And it is for this that I, and I'm sure many others of my ilk, will SALUTE him. He has done us a GRATE service over the years, and I'm sure he will continue to do so for ever onward. I, for one, would not like to try and stop him!
posted 20/10/2023 by MJ Hibbett
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Ruth From Po!
Earlier this week I heard the awful news that Ruth from Po! had passed away. I knew she'd been ill for a while and that things had recently got worse, but it was still a horrible shock to find that she'd gone. I didn't know her particularly well or anything, but she'd been a huge influence on my life (as she had been on MANY) and was a complete hero several times over, so I just wanted to say a bit about how much she'd meant to me over the years.
The first time I ever met Ruth was about 100,0000,0000 years ago in Leicester when I accidentally bumbled upstairs in The Mag one night to find Po! doing a gig. In fact it was this gig here in this video!
Here in the future it's entirely normal to find video footage of a gig you went to, but seeing this from 30+ years ago did my head in, although not as much as actually BEING there did, for LO! it totally and completely blew my tiny mind. I had vaguely heard this sort of music on the radio late at night or in other people's record collections, but actually BEING there in this tiny room above my favourite pub was ASTONISHING. As the video shows, they also sounded AMAZING and I couldn't believe that this was just some PEOPLE doing a gig as if it was a normal thing to do, while playing HIT after HIT after HIT. It remains one of the best gigs I've ever been too, partly because of the shock of it all but mostly because it was so GRATE.
Afterwards I shuffled round to the side of the stage to buy a copy of their album 'Little Stones' off the bass player - this was the legendary Mr Gary Gilchrist who I have since spent MANY hours in pubs with, but who has to me ALWAYS been "Gary from Po!" and thus a figure of AWE. The album was just as brilliant as I hoped - their version of "All I Really Want To Do" is still my favourite - and the very idea that you could release a record YOURSELF, without having to ask for permission, was a REVELATION. Really, that was the beginning of me realising that if you wanted to play gigs or put our records or any of that you COULD. It wouldn't necessarily be as AMAZING as that particular record but, apart from getting hold of some CA$H, there wasn't anything else to stop you.
After that I kept an eye out for future gigs, but they hardly ever seemed to happen. I bought subsequent albums, which were GRATE, and was astonished to find out that Ruth had been part of the Alan Jenkins Diaspora (that's not one of his band names, but it very easily could be). I delved into the Leicester Music Scene and made all sorts of LIFELONG PALS, and a huge part of me doing all that was the inspiration of that one gig.
Many many years later in 2016 I heard that Ruth was out and about doing gigs again, so found an email address and asked if she fancied coming to play at Totally Acoustic. To my amazement she was completely up for it and came down to play ANOTHER of my all-time favourite gigs EVER. As the blog says, I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that RUTH FROM PO! was actually THERE in the same room as me, playing all those amazing songs that I'd loved so much. I must admit I had A Bit Of An Old Cry!
You can hear some of them on the podcast of that night, and some more from when Po! came to play the next year and then again in 2020. All of those shows were incredibly emotional for me, and I had a REALLY hard time picking which songs to keep in!
Not long after that Ruth was an inspiration all over AGAIN when she started up the Unglamorous Music project. Seen from afar this was a BRILLIANT idea where she basically got together women who'd THOUGHT about joining bands but had never got round to it and then got them to FORM bands. This resulted in a sudden explosion of GRATE BANDS and, even more importantly, a sudden explosion of JOY. It got covered in all sorts of media outlets because it is clearly a fantastic idea that brought happiness to many many people, and it was a source of GLEE at my end to realise that this was the person who'd already inspired so many of us so much just getting on and doing it AGAIN in the same way. As before she showed that if you wanted to be in a band you did not have to ask for anyone's permission, and that is pretty much as PUNK as it gets.
I don't really know how to end this to be honest - all I really wanted to do was to express how much Ruth had meant to me over the many years, and how brilliant it was to have known her, if only a little bit. I know she wasn't just Ruth from Po! but that was the person I knew, and I'm very very glad I staggered upstairs in the pub to see her all those years ago. Thanks Ruth!
posted 18/10/2023 by MJ Hibbett
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Impending Doom
These days it feels like this blog is turning into one of those webpages from the early 2000s which had a hits counter, an "under construction" GIF and a front page blog saying "Sorry I've not updated in a while, but that's all going to change soon!"
Anyway, sorry I've not updated in a while, but that's all going to change soon! (being in the second paragraph makes it FINE) The reason for the lack of news updates is the same as ever i.e. there hasn't been that much news to share. GIGS continue to occur but not very often, and though I do sometimes have vague tingles of NEW SONGS it will be a good long while until a studio is approached. Actually, by the time that's necessary we probably won't even have to bother with anything like that, I'll just be able to ring up a ROBOT and say "the songs are all metaphors involving something to do with jobs with lots of rhymes in it that only work in a Peterborough accent, and the music sounds like The Validatos, you know, THEM" and leave it to SKYNET to generate an album.
HOWEVER, though ROCK is in short supply there ARE a couple of other things coming up that are ACTUALLY QUITE EXCITING. The one I am free to speak of at the moment is to do with my forthcoming BOOK, "Data And Doctor Doom", what is coming out early next year. I know that it is coming out early next year because last week I was chatting to someone who casually mentioned that they had seen it in THE CATALOGUE. I had no idea about any of that so went and looked and LO! There it was, just hanging around nonchalantly on the Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels page as if it wasn't a big deal. It's even got its own page with release dates, ISBN and ISSNs, which makes it seem TERRIFYINGLY REAL.
On top of all of that, the main listings page even has a tiny image of the COVER. I reckon that means it's OK for me to do my own slightly bigger COVER REVEAL, so here it is!
It looks PROPER, I think. The main image is one what I done myself, and which I spent several very happy hours doodling on, rather nicely re-sized and cropped by the designers to look fairly respectable. I am, to say the least HAPPY with it! You can also find it listed on Amazon - it's nearly A HUNDRED QUID on there but then again you do get free delivery if you're with Prime!
As stated, the actual genuine real-life BOOK will be out early next year (it says 10 January 2024 on the Palgrave listing, but that's more of a guide than a genuine diary date) and I will be shouting about it A LOT around then. I'm also thinking of some Publicity Activity too, some of which would be GOOD FUN, but for now I'm planning to just enjoy the fact that there is an ISBN with my name on it!
posted 9/10/2023 by MJ Hibbett
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An Artists Against Success Presentation