< December 2008

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27th November, 2008

Dollis Hill Tube has a long outside pedestrian tunnel which also serves as a cut-through for those walking between Dollis Hill and Willesden. I use this tunnel on a more or less daily basis, and in the last few months I have often seen small teams of policemen with a portable walk-through metal detector on the Willesden side, presumably looking for knives. If they have ever stopped anyone who was not a young black man I have not seen it.

They were there yesterday. As I passed by one of the policemen asked jokingly if my guitar was a tommy gun, and I told him, 'No, guitar.' Initially I was a bit disappointed with myself for apparently having lost my sense of humour, but today I discovered the Facebook group Stand Up To Form 696 and remembered that now is a really deeply weird time for a member of the Metropolitan Police to make such a joke to a musician.

After all, as the group points out, at least one council has made an explicit link between form 696, which is used to collect personal information about musicians before gigs, and terrorism. What if I had actually made the snappy comeback I only thought of too late and told the copper, 'No, bazooka?'

Probably nothing. As the report in the Independent makes clear, the form is being used to specifically target black and Asian musicians, though no explanation from the Met as to exactly how having the banjo player's home phone number helps anyone police a gig has so far been forthcoming.

Feargal Sharkey, who I have now forgiven, is doing a sterling job of standing up and loudly saying 'What the fuck?' over this, and according to the Independent is not merely planning to take this to a judicial review - form 696 may simply not be legal - but has also rightly complained to the Equality and Human Rights Comission. In the meantime there may not be much that you or I can do about it, but if you are on Facebook you might want to join the group which has been set up to campaign against the nonsense.

In other news, poor Lyle Lovett appears to have been given a raw deal, and I finally got around to releasing that live CD which was recorded back in July. Please feel free to buy a copy from CDBaby if the mp3s sound good to you.

12th November, 2008

I'm not making it up. Since the end of last year the Metropolitan police in London have powers to close down any live music event where they have not been given the personal details including addresses and phone numbers of all performers involved at least two weeks in advance.

The Register has written about it here and Billboard also has an article. Both articles provide details about the evidence given by UK Music CEO Feargal Sharkey to the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport. (It's not up yet as I type but those committee transcripts are archived here.) Incredibly, according to Sharkey, one council cited 'prevention of terrorism' as part of their reasoning.

The form promoters are supposed to use to provide this information is called form 696 and you can view it directly here or via this page on the Met website. As the article on The Register points out, the suggested genres of music listed in form 696 itself include RnB, Garage, and Bashment. Genres of music which, as El Reg puts it, are 'favoured by the black community'.

It's bad enough, stupid enough, pointless enough and draconian enough as it is without the racist element to it. But this is the thing - I've done rather a lot of gigs since the end of last year - both as Fit and the Conniptions and with other outfits - and I've never once been asked to provide my home address to a promoter. Then again, I'm white.

It's not that I'm against having events properly policed if they are large enough that they need to be, including live music events. But if anyone can explain how having the home phone numbers of all the musicians on stage helps the police to do their job I'll be astonished.

9th November, 2008

There are no two ways about it. Icecast is a seriously awesome piece of software, for all that it may have taken me a while to get it running on my home network here at the Dollis Hill Studios.

The problem was this. In the room I use as a studio, next door to my bedroom, lives my main work computer. It has a rather large mp3 collection on the hard drive. In the bedroom lives my laptop, along with my stereo. The laptop has a rather small hard drive anyway and I could not be arsed to copy mp3s over from one to the other manually, especially as the laptop was not actually connected to the internet until some time last week, when the really crappy Alcatel broadband modem I'd been using finally died, may it rest in peace and not trouble anyone ever again, particularly me.

I replaced it with my parents' old (crappy but, with new firmware installed, functional) router and was finally able to get both machines online at once without having to source and invest in new kit. Welcome to 1998 or so, Wayne. I know. And then I sat there, in the bedroom, thinking, 'ok, now both the laptop and the desktop are on the same network, how do I make the laptop play mp3s that live on the desktop?'

I'm sure that there are a million solutions to this problem, but Icecast is what I ended up using. This software is the backbone of a number of - if not most - internet radio stations and while it is itself relatively easy to set up, all it actually does is the streaming bit. Providing music for it to stream requires you to use a second program of your choice. That was the bit that took 48 hours to sort out, really, and I am currently stuck with using icegenerator, which is why I can either have shuffled or alphabetical playlists but nothing else. Soon I will sort out something else though, as I have all kinds of cunning plans for this stuff which will no doubt be limited by lack of bandwidth. Meanwhile, the bit that took the most time to work out was realising that the xmms plugin simply does not work yet with Icecast 2.x, no matter how much I wanted it to.

But enough geekery. I will now go next door and listen to some music.

20th September, 2008

Right. Shut up. I don't care. Whatever. Just shut up.

Now go to Simon Hopper's myspace page and listen to The Ballad Of The Suffolk Five. Now. Do it.

I'm serious. Now.

You will not hear a better (or sadder) song this year, possibly this decade. Thank you, Simon.

18th September, 2008

We now have a new verb - 'to colf' - meaning to exhume a corpse and shit on it. One who does this is a colfer. If you are remotely as angry as I am about the news that writer Eoin Colfer has accepted a commission to write a new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel, you might want to join the Facebook boycott group and invite all your friends. As well as being a bunch of amoral money-grabbing bean-counters with no more sense of integrity than the average hyena, publishers are timorous, creeping, cowardly souls, and if enough people join that group to scare them they might act.

There's been other stuff but nothing of importance.