Tuesday was May morning, and drizzle notwithstanding I stood in the shadow of Oxford's mightly Clarendon building and danced in the summer with Andy Letcher's band of rogue misfits:


Enough of the past - what of the future? Next week is practically seething with FaceOmeter-shaped events! Here they are:

Wed 9th - Open Mic - Bright Idea 8 billion
Those of you who haven't been to my weekly Open Mic at the Railroad Café in East London yet, it's always a blast, generally intimate and pressure-free, and a great way to experiment with new material or just have a jam (or watch others doing the same). We welcome all kinds of unamplified performance and the cake is excellent! This week we're having a special shindig to celebrate our 8 billionth night! At £2 in, you'd be foolish to miss it - I'll probably be playing a song or two as well as hosting the bloody thing...

Fri 11th - Storytelling - Railroad Café
Also at the Railroad, this is the sequel to an event which I did last year with Jamie "The Magic Lantern" Doe. This time we have expert storyteller Chris King in the feature spot, and Jamie and I will be performing some prose of our own too (I should be writing mine right now instead of doing this). This is a risky new experiment and I'm very nervous about it, but the last one went pretty well and novelty is exciting! Do come and see it if you're in the zone. (Facebook event to follow, but the show will run from roughly 9pm)

Sun 13th - Music - Old Queen's Head
I'm opening an all-dayer at this charming venue in the vicinity of Angel. There's FREE ENTRY on this one, plus an entrancing array of other artistes including Mademoiselle Mademoiselle and In Golden Tears! Okay, I admit I've never heard of either, but I bet they're good because I know the promoter and she's one of those rare promoters who knows what they're talking about. Come and enjoy the fun! I'm on at about 2:00pm and the action runs to midnight.

Illness has beset me in recent months but hopefully these different shows mark the start of some kind of creative comeback. If you're in the London area, I hope you can make it to something! To incentivise you, here's a picture of Koch "Cockque" Murphy, a new resident of my house (long story):

A lengthy session deleting all the spam comments from this blog (there are certain shoe manufacturers who seem mega-keen to attract the attention of the FaceOmeter fanbase) has made me realise how ill-maintained the thing is. It's partly that, as I recently heard A. S. Byatt exclaim on Start the Week, there's an increasing tendency to let everything trickle out on Facebook and Twitter (FaceOmeter is on both - are you following?), resulting in fewer 'event posts' on the blog. If Byatt is right (I think she'd hate even the blog) then the record we've been working on over Easter won't be out for another few years - and though it's only going to be six tracks long this isn't an absurd prediction; I think we originally wanted the thing out in 2009.


Nevertheless, we continue the slow crawl towards victory, and, as I'm constantly saying on this thing, the journey will probably be worth it. We have three of the six tracks entirely recorded now, with the fourth lacking only a bassline. I can confirm to the eager hordes of fans champing at this blog like crack-addled terriers that 'Five Figs Down' and 'The Ballad of Old Bob' will both feature on this record, Vibe, Drill, and "It". And I can confirm that Dean McCarthy, master of the Spooky EP, is making a sublime comeback as engineer and general all-round good guy. We'll need a few more sessions to finish the thing, but there's every chance it'll be out this year, especially if I go on Twitter and Facebook less.

Over Easter, the Dapper Swindler and I swanned around Dean's hyper-expensive recording studio making stupid noises, tugging his hair, and yelling homoerotic innuendos at his family members. I broke his shower and threw up in his toilet a couple of times, and the Dapper Swindler genuinely intended to get him a bottle of wine, but left abruptly when it was revealed that the boots he wanted to buy from his favourite shop on Turl Street were too expensive. Together, the Swindler and I compelled both Dean and his wife Liz to participate in several of the most brain-numbing crosswords I've ever battled, until it was 2am and everyone had headaches. We enjoyed several great meals together - including a delicious Easter roast courtesy of Liz, a curry the size of Mars, a hamper of grade-A cheeses, and a brilliant visit to the new café in the Heyford Hill Sainsbury's (I love supermarket cafés, of which perhaps more anon). We played Wii Golf into the small hours, watched Game of Thrones, made several highly enjoyable journies to the Isis tavern, discussed the nuances of the British Higher Education system, battled on FIFA, and ate a dangerous quantity of chocolate and wine gums. We also, when there was nothing else for it, recorded a whole bunch of horn players for our song as well as numerous other small flourishes, did a pile of editing work, and sketched out the remaining bits of the record.

Good Easter. Hope yours was too!

Firsdt up a reminder about the upcoming gig in west London in a couple of weeks.

Spring has sprung here in south east London, but it's still been a bit of a depressing week - incompetant landlords and illness have added to the psychological fallout from the stolen or reliquished means of transport which I lost in February. Work is slow and difficult. But I was cheered greatly by a recent interlude with Sam "Sam Taplin" Taplin, who came bearing a fart soundboard and left behind him a living room floor invisible under the completed crosswords and Saturday fashion supplements.

I'm also excited to have a ticket for the Jeff Mangum concern at the Union Chapel this Tuesday. Mangum, of course, is a great influence on me as well as somebody who almost never performs live. I'm genuinely not sure what to expect - it could quite easily be either the Gig Of My Life or the biggest let-down so far! But I'll keep you posted.

The Swindler and I have finessed quite a few ideas in the direction of our upcoming recording session, and we're also working on a video edit of the Shrove material which will turn out (one day) to be extremely excellent! More updates as we get them.

The Dapper Swindler and I call February 'the Swindling Month' - it's probably coincidence, or confirmation bias, but seldom does a February slip past without something really bad happening to one or both of us. This, of course, against the general background of unpleasant wintriness which strikes the keynote for that bleakest of times.

This Feb was no exception. I lost all seven of my wheels - not only was the Peug forced into retirement (see earlier post) but my bike got nicked from a pleasant residential street in south London a few days later, at about 2pm on a sunny day. A predicatable series of work mishaps and TfL swindles added to the mood, and FaceOmeter productivity has fallen to match. This is the classic stuff of February, and the trick, each year, is to come out running. That's why there's a gig coming up at Ginglik in West London later this month; it's why we've got another recording session booked in with Dean McCarthy in Littlemore over Easter weekend (our last two Easters have also been in Oxford, and gloriously so); it's why the Dapper Swindler is on his way here even now, to help me stick a stew on and then sit with guitars and do a bit of writing for once.

Things are down, but not out. Stay with us.

Dear FaceOmeter Friends and Fans,

As some of you will know, every year on Shrove we make a little video celebrating pancakes, friends, and fellowship. Last year, it was a dramatic time travel blockbuster. The two years before that were gameshows - parodies of Countdown and Ready, Steady, Cook - and the year before that was my incisive guide to the definitive batter.

This year, we have big plans for Shrove and we need your help!

We're making a silent movie, because the success of The Artist has taught us what's popular, and we are nothing if not commerical leeches. Like all good silent spy thrillers, our film will close with a heart-racing dance number on the eurostar concourse of King's Cross St. Pancras. What we need is a flashmob of people who are willing to turn up, learn a very basic dance, and perform a couple of takes of it on camera.

You don't need to be good at dancing, and we anticipate needing less than half an hour of your time. In exchange you get the warm feeling of being in one of our stupid films, which will probably be watched well over 100 times*!

If you would like to be involved, please meet us on the Eurostar concourse of St. Pancras station at 10:30pm this Tuesday evening (21st). Dress is optional, but putting on 1930s silent movie gear never hurt anybody. This will be stupid and fun, like all our endeavours, and we hope you can be a part of it. Basically, the video will be a perfect fusion of these two images:


Look forward to seeing you!

Regards,

FaceOmeter, The Dapper Swindler, Triple Rosie, and the rest of Team FaceOmeter

PS. Bring a small frying pan if you have one!

*this is not a guarantee

Apologies to FaceOmeter fans for leaving this blog un-updated for so long - I've been preoccupied with other aspects of my life such as the Chronological Discworld Project, the day job, and (you'll be pleased to hear) devising some new FaceOmeter material and having a splendid time with the likes of Taplin and Jones!

I'll tell you about all that in an upcoming post, but today's entry is stimulated by darker stuff - the demise of the Peug. Long-term followers and friends will know that to Max and I, the Peug was more than just a car - more, even, than the freedom to get to all the adventures we've had over recent years, most of which would have been impossible without it. The Peug was also a loyal companion, bastion of both practicality and sentiment. It taught me to live in the present, and was a constant reminder of what's important in life. It was also the manifest power to help out my friends sometimes; and it was my last relic of my grandfather, who gave it to me a few years before his death. It developed fatal engine trouble over the last month or so, and we retired it last monday after just under eighteen years of service, six of them with me.

As you might imagine, I'm going to write a little more about the Peug in other formats over the coming months. There will certainly be a song, there is already a poem (no, you can't see it yet), and I have another plan coming up for next month, for which stay tuned. All I'm going to do with this blog post is mention the day I actually took it to be scrapped.

It was about two minutes before my last drive in the Peug, which was to be the short hop from my house here in Greenwich to a nearby garage who had agreed to deal with the scrapping for me. I'd just finished removing all the camping equipment, tools and accessories from the car, which stood empty for the first time in years as a result. I even emptied the glove box, and took out my grandmother's travel sweets tin, which hadn't left the car since 2006 and which has provided many a friend, old and new, with a sugar boost. Max had come over to pay his respects, and had just departed. There seemed nothing else to do.

At this exact moment, a red balloon, of the sort released into the air at kids' parties, floated down from the sky. It had been up long enough to lose quite a bit of helium, and had evidently slowly returned to the earth. It bounced off the road, brushed lightly against the Peug's bonnet, strafed the pavement on the other side, and then rose back up over the top of my house and was lost to sight.

It would be entirely reasonable for you not to believe me, so I photographed it.


Nothing is nicer than a healing coincidence. Leaving the Peug was extremely difficult - but here, as in every other detail of its long life, there is a story. I find that extremely comforting.

Whilst I think it's just about possible that more people read Wikipedia than this blog, I did want to add my voice to the screaming about SOPA - not as an internet user, although I am naturally very concerned about what SOPA could do to everyone's web if passed, but as an indie musician who makes all of the small amount of money I make from my work via the internet.

There's lots out there to read and understand, but I'd like to make two quick points. The first is that despite Google's decision to protest this only on its American site, this is a law which, if passed, will have deep consequences for artists living and working outside the US too. SOPA is a big, clear reminder that the internet is American, so this isn't just about homogenizing (!) something whose heterodoxy is its strongest attribute, it's also about bringing an international space further under the legislative grasp of one particular country. As you can tell from my cod-American singing voice (and the list of those who inspire it), America already wields a disproportionate influence over my music - it's worth remembering that this influence extends to the paraphernalia as well, and that it can get worse.

I reckon more or less anything which un-diversifies the internet is bad for it, and, by the way, I think that should give us pause on wikipedia, google, and some of the other big sites protesting SOPA as well as SOPA itself. But as a musician, the other thing I wanted to say was that this is not just a digital issue. To my mind, it also speaks to the latest developments in copyright law, which has always had a rather fraught relationship with art. Copyright was started with the aim of protecting artists (international copyright law is only around a century old), but too often has turned out to serve the interests of companies which make their money by exploiting artists and audiences equally. I recommend David Shields's excellent book Reality Hunger, which profoundly emphasises the fact that art has always been about copying other artists. The more I read about copyright, the more it strikes me, in its current form, as part of the problem rather than part of the solution - antithetical not only to internet plurality but to artistic agency. The internet gives us a chance to devise and adopt a system which is fairer to everyone; SOPA is an attempt to impose the 80s model of the record industry onto it. For more on this, I recommend MC Lars's manifesto on the subject.

I find all this fascinating - in my capacity as co-convenor of a popular fiction seminar at King's College London, I'm running a seminar on it next month, with a real copyright lawyer as guest speaker. I'm also constantly running up against the issue in all other aspects of my life, whether as a scholar, musician, or wikipedia user.

There have been so many 'world events' this year that it feels almost indulgent to spend any time on personal reminiscence. But this blog is nothing if not self-indulgent, and it's not like anybody except me reads it, so let's have a go: 2011 was my first year without moving house in a while, although I did put the tent up a few times. I made a tea monster, saw a chinese lantern on a beach, flew over the tennyson monument, spent several days talking in a cod scottish accent, had an encounter with a seagull some miles from the coast, got (mildly) into crosswords, avoided imaginary serial killers whilst doing nocturnal drinks runs in a reconditioned victorian lunatic asylum, had a nap in the front row of a gig, wrote my name with a sparkler, strolled a strange quayside, lay on a huge tyre swing, cried in the theatre, stood outside waterloo station covered in fake snow, and slept in an apparently-abandoned university campus in the middle of nowhere. I cleaned decaying meat out of a thawed freezer, wrote an encyclopedia entry, took the bus to the jubilee line, played a bugle on the roof of a sea fort, sunbathed in a prom queue, drove the faithful Peug around deserted, magical 4am London, shouted into a microphone outside the Birmingham House of Sport, sat through a poker game, stargazed on garlic-infused grass, covered the walls of a lecture theatre with terrible graffiti, reluctantly gatecrashed a 1930s cocktail party, stood within about ten feet of Damon Albarn, saw a creeper-covered watermill ruin loom out of the woods ahead of me, drank a weird energy drink which turned me into a roman soldier, had a cat for a week, and met a badminton champion. I had my first first-class train ride (which I didn't pay for), and my last young person's rail discount (which I did). The Peug lost both headlights and two tyres, and came bouncing right back. I swam in Port Meadow, in the English Channel, and off the coast of Kent. I dressed as a caterpillar, watched Elvis from a sofabed, and I got the Triumph back.

Modest, but not entirely insignificant. Everyone else just got engaged or married or had kids or something, so I figure I'm way ahead! I have a number of lifestyle goals for the new year, but in terms of material ambitions, let's see how we do with these:
1) Finish my thesis
2) Release at least one more record, probably Vibe, Drill, and "It"
3) Be able to write a longer post than this one in a year's time.

A very sincere Happy New Year to all readers. I really hope I can offer you some decent FaceOmeter goodies in the coming twelvemonth, and that you'll be here with me to enjoy.

December 27th is our annual day of totally irredeemable, tackle to the wind movie madness. As some of you know, every other year it's the complete extended Lord of the Rings. In the off years, we strive to come up with other challenges... AND WHAT COULD BE MORE CHALLENGING THAN SITTING THROUGH HOURS OF LATE NINETIES ACTION FILMS STARRING NICOLAS CAGE okay, I admit that there are more challenging things out there, but it's a day off.

Film 1: Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)
Actually, it takes a full 118min for this film to go, but on the way we get lots of cars (I've never really understood that), some women who like men who like cars (that one is also hazy), and a bit with a car jumping over lots of other cars in slow motion (which I totally get). As a bonus, there's the pleasurable experience of a British character who isn't posh or a cockney! But he is the baddie, so it's still only half points. This film was a caprice, an aside, a handful of haribo, a mere limbering-up for the more serious Cage action which was to follow.
Best line: "They call him The Carpenter"

Film 2: The Rock (1996)
Ed Harris (+1), assisted by lots of disgruntled marines (+1), takes over Alcatraz island (+2). The only person who can disarm his rockets, which are now pointing at San Fransisco, is chemical weapons expert Nick Cage (+4). But how to get on to the island? ONLY WITH THE HELP OF FORMER PRISON INMATE SEAN CONNERY (+400bn). Directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and with a score by Hans Zimmer, this is truly a monster.
Best Exchange: "Hey man, you just fucked up your Ferrari" "It's not mine"

Film 3: Face/Off (1997)
Maybe it's the third-movie slump, maybe it's the rising nausea cause by the acres of snacks we'd been conveyor-belting inside ourselves, or maybe it's the fact that John Woo is the worst mainstream director ever to have lived, but this film just didn't stand up with the others. We were promised arch-nemeses John Travolta (goodie) and Nick Cage (baddie) swapping bodies for no good reason in order that they could have speedboat chases, threaten each other's families, and run through loads ofdoves in slow motion while shit blew up. What actually happened, though, was that arch-nemeses John Travolta (goodie) and Nick Cage (baddie) swapped bodies for no good reason in order that they could have speedboat chases, threaten each other's families, and run through loads ofdoves in slow motion while shit blew up. A disappointment.
Best Line: "I'd like to take his face.............. off". This was such an easy choice I'm adding a new award category for this film, THUS:
Least interrogated psychological problem: Why does Travolta's character keep doing that thing where he runs his hands slowly over the faces of people he likes? That's really, really, really weird. Especially when his daughter does it at the end to the new brother which the family unquestioningly adopts with no warning or consultation EVERYONE IN THIS FILM NEEDS REALLY EXTREME THERAPY

Film 4: Con Air (1997)
The atmosphere was turgid after the final speedboat chase of Face/Off, but fortunately some respite was in store. Con Air is a film in which John Malkovitch and Nick Cage play two people who dislike each other. BUT ON A PLANE, where disliking is always so much more intense! To accompany them, we have: (a) Steve Buschemi as a creepy serial killer who escapes at the end and that's portrayed as a good thing even though he killed like thirty people apparently, (b) John Cusack, who isn't actually on the plane but he and Cage get on adjacent motorbikes in sync so that's fine, (c) Colm "Chief Fucking O'Brien" Meaney as your traditional 'character who doesn't understand that you need to just let Nick Cage and John Cusack do everything if you're in a film with them', and most importantly, (d) Nick Cage's SOUTHERN ACCENT - certain to sway ladies of any nationality. AM I RIGHT LADIES?

While the deafening silence following that last question reverberates around the room a bit, let me sign off by saying that although I cleaned my teeth for several hours to get all the bits of chocolate and popcorn out afterwards, no cleaning process will prove adequate for detarnishing my soul, which will be stained forever with memories of this dreadful day. It was fantastic. See you all next year!!!

Oh, I almost forgot:
Best Line: "Make a move and the bunny gets it"

More of Nick Cage's classic moments!

I've decided to share this poem I wrote! Occasionally I get an idea that doesn't work as a song, and these are slowly accumulating into a collection of angsty poetry. I did this one at the recent Christmas Catweazle, and nobody firebombed me afterwards, so I have to assume that it's alright!

It's called 'The Gladstone Link', and you can read it here [PDF].

I'm sitting on a whole bunch of these which I'll maybe refine into a collection of some kind in about a decade. Exciting, isn't it?

FaceOmeter notice: in the interests of pretentiousness balance, the next blog post on this site will be a digest of Nick Cage movies.