November 2008 Archives

This month I've been learning to ride a bicycle.

I'll sit back a second while you digest that information.

I know you thought you were reading the blog of a middle-aged- professional on the fringes of the music industry, rather than that of a six-year-old removing his stabilisers but there you have it. I never learned when I was younger and now I have to suffer the ignominy of having strangers gawp at me as I wobble around the parks of Coventry. This in itself is not unusual as strangers seem to stare at me generally and at present I always wobble - hence the bike training.

I'm not quite sure why I never learned in childhood; a combination of disinterest and relative poverty I s'pose with a heavy bias towards the former. I wasn't a sporty child so that may have had some bearing even though I still spent more time outdoors than children today seem to.

I'm now forced into it, being unable to run and finding swimming about as entertaining as daytime TV, I needed another form of cardio exercise. Cycling isn't as easy as it looks though, I'm still having trouble with a few things - steering, speed, braking, gears, perineal discomfort (y'know) and knowing where to put my massive feet on the tiny pedals.

Being British I can bear a grudge with the best of them. I like nothing better than to nurture some perceived grievance and to slowly plot some revenge I will probably never enact. It's a national pastime, probably up there with whinging and moaning, we clearly all love to hold grudges.

This said, even I know where to draw a line. Time is usually a great healer, is there any point in wanting to piss on the grave of a school bully when you haven't seen that oaf in almost 30 years? Similarly one might think that English sports writers could move beyond the shadow of the war whenever we face Germany in any fixture. Guys, it ended 60 years ago and war is not the basis for puns. Not now, not ever.

Naturally we enjoy the schadenfreude (tactical use of Deutsch word, use the link to look it up if you need to) of some enemy or other coming to grief, even when we played no part in it. We also seem to relish the downfall of the famous or fatuous thanks to our build 'em up, knock 'em down mentality. Thus, there is Maradona. One-time king of football, latterly known for his drug problems and carrying enough blubber that he looked like he had two baby elephants wrestling in his tracksuit.

It's a fact that Maradona was one of the most gifted footballers to grace the grass of many a pitch, but you'll rarely read about that in England. Instead, I can guarantee, that accompanying any text about him will be some reference (usually in the headline) about the World Cup Goal he scored against 'us' using his hand. Since he then referred to it 'tactically' (if not tactfully) as the 'hand of God' this will usually, if not always, feature in the article.

I went to see Rancid at the Academy the other night. They were great, in case you were interested. I suspect it's slightly more likely that you've never heard of them, which is a great shame - but it doesn't seem to hold them back. For the uninitiated they're an American punk band formed in San Francisco in 1991 who've released six albums and never really troubled the UK chart much. To quantify this statement I should note that their biggest album hit in this country was in 2003 and reached 29 on the chart.

On that basis and your relative and understandable lack of knowledge of them, you'd probably wonder how they manage to successfully tour the UK, playing 13 nights in Academy-sized (2k) venues. Is this further evidence that the live music industry is thriving while recorded music goes down the pan?

Maybe it is, but more fundamental to their 'success' is probably the fact that they understand their fanbase and they're consistent - they don't deviate and they've never really compromised their art for commercial purposes.

The major sea-change in the music industry over the last five to ten years has been that acts can have a more direct relationship with their fans than ever before. They can communicate with them through websites they own themselves or blogs and e-mails that they write themselves. They have, to an extent, cut out the middle-men and profiteers and subsequently they can more easily turn their art into a direct lower-cost sell, they also receive direct feedback more instantly.

I'm not sure if you've noticed but Cinema classifications have become works of comic genius. We've come a long way since the board of censors just scraped a random ranking on each film without any indication of why it was given; now every film has a little description of why you might (or might not) want to go and see it. More often than not the descriptions are becoming almost as compelling as the films.

I'd like to share a few favourites with you before I reveal the absolute classic of all film rankings. My most recent update from Odeon Cinemas told me that a film I'd never heard of (and rated PG, for all ages essentially) contained 'mild language and sexy dancing'. I was tempted if only to find out what censors think sexy dancing actually looks like - I suspect it was nothing like the image I had conjured up in my filthy mind.