helen-louise's journal

So, here I am posting from my hotel room, "fresh" after two nights of seeing Freezepop. Actually, I am so tired that I want to fall over and be dead for a while, but my body clock isn't cooperating with sleep right now. Bah!

The first night (New Year's Eve) was a rather odd gig, seeing as it consisted of a club night with Freezepop kinda playing in the middle. They went on stage at 11pm and played up until midnight, then it degenerated as lots of people got on the stage with them to dance. Equipment was in danger of being smashed - I saw beer get poured over some cables by mistake. Seeing as I've never had any tolerance for drunk people and Ryan & Dawn were tired, we buggered off pretty quickly.

Yesterday was a much more "traditional" gig - four bands each playing a set. The first "band" was a single person playing electronic music - I can't say it did anything for me, but that's because it was just too ambient. It was a reasonable way to start the night, anyway. Then there was Plushgun, who I already knew to be awesome but had never seen before. Then the New Collisions, who supported Freezepop at their 10th Anniversary Show. And then finally Freezepop, playing for about an hour and a half.

So, given that I am Kasson Crooker's number one fan, what did I think of the new 4-member lineup without him? Well... it works. Really well. Neither Seth nor Ashley are Kasson, nor do they somehow combine their powers to become Kasson, but they are both lovely people and talented musicians, and fill out the band nicely. So Freezepop's not the same band it used to be. Doesn't mean it's not still my favourite band :D

Speaking of Kasson, he was there last night, beautiful as ever. He got on stage for the encore and did Photographic (Depeche Mode cover), Shark Attack and Less Talk More Rokk with them. dino got on stage for Shark Attack and Less Talk More Rokk, and he is now the most chuffed small plushie green dinosaur you could ever imagine!

Richard took a load of photos, but they are probably terrible since Freezepop were playing in the dark for some reason. He's going to look at them in Photoshop later and see which of them can be rescued.

I should write a "music review" of 2010. It seems I actually saw a reasonable number of bands last year. Yay!

Boris Johnson vs 2 anonymous DJs - Is Fatboy Slim a DJ?


Features an extremely surreal video by Aardman Animations, including brightly coloured flashing things, a rotating owl, a headbanging red guy, bears with their claws out, and your actual Boris Johnson waffling over the top. About Terry Wogan, and bass guitars, and do DJs still do that weird scratchy thing that Malcolm McLaren did?

The purpose of this oddity is to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support, which is definitely a worthy charity.

Enjoy the surreality, and perhaps donate a few quid in return?

Yesterday we went to see nitoda and met her cat, who has unbelievably long whiskers. As a result, I am now amused by the thought of what humans would look like if we had whiskers as wide as our shoulders. wuzzie is quite whiskery already, but that would indeed be a handlebar moustache in excess of any human currently alive!

Also, I should have posted this link yesterday. It's a collaboration between Liz Enthusiasm of Freezepop and "a local Japanese audio guy" for Loft, a big department store chain over there.

we "collaborated" on the lyrics, which basically meant constructing a loose narrative around a list of halloween characters that they provided us with (as much as i wish i could take credit for "bad smell candle" or "gecko", apparently the japanese ad agency thought they were pretty spooky characters). the result is a masterpiece of engrish.

Halloween All Stars: 2009 Loft Halloween.

I think the song is really catchy :)

It was my mum's birthday last weekend (well, I suppose the weekend before last now - 15th), so we went out with her in central London. First we went to Grant & Cutler, the foreign language bookshop, to buy her some German books. We discovered several weird new language-learning techniques, including a course you can do on your iPod, and a course that encourages you to learn German phrases by setting them all to music and singing along. Personally, it seems that my language-learning ability died after school, as I didn't get anywhere with German or Italian at university... but I have a ridiculously good memory for the lyrics of songs. So we bought her the CD and I'm curious to know how she gets on with it.

Then we went CD shopping. We went into Sister Ray, which has historically been the kind of shop that concentrates on electronic, industrial and gothic music - they sell other stuff, but only to pay the rent. If it's weird, on an indie label, and ideally in a language that your average British person would not understand, they'd have it. Even now, they are indie hip enough to still sell paper fanzines, which have more-or-less died out since the internet became a thing that everyone has. I, however, did not get obscure music. I bought albums of classic rock, most of which are hopelessly unfashionable:

Def Leppard - Hysteria Deluxe Edition. Somewhere, I have a tape (paid-for) of Hysteria that I've had since the late 80s. I found it again recently going through boxes and was all excited because I've been wanting to listen to it. But could I find it the other day when I was desperate to hear it? No.

Hüsker Dü - Candy Apple Grey. Many years ago, bethdeth, who I knew from the Wildhearts Mailing List, gave me a tape of this. It wasn't the greatest quality, like many taped copies of other tapes. My indie-kid credentials have been seriously dented all these years because I never got round to buying any Hüsker Dü albums. Shocking!

Journey - Greatest Hits. I blame Rock Band. Really, I do. Songs of extreme earworm that are right in my vocal range (how did those AOR guys sing so high?).

Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine. Because neither Richard nor I already owned it and it is the best NIN album.

Poison - The Best of Poison: 20 Years of Rock. Again, blame Guitar Hero/Rock Band. I've always had a secret fondness for hair metal and Poison in particular, but I hadn't realised how many good songs they had until being forced to listen to them as part of a game.

Soul Asylum - Black Gold: The Best Of. The Soul Asylum album Grave Dancers Union is in my non-existent Top 20 Albums Of All Time list, and I love all the Soul Asylum/Dave Pirner tracks on Kevin Smith movie soundtracks... yet I've never got round to buying any more of their stuff. I suck.

Velvet Revolver - Libertad. The Last.fm recommendations on our Sonos system keep suggesting we should listen to Velvet Revolver, and so far we've liked all the tracks.

I was almost cringing taking my little collection up to the counter to pay. Surely these CDs would mark me as hopelessly non-indie with no street cred whatsoever? and I was mentally preparing for an argument where I pointed out all the weird and interesting stuff in our collection at home. (Hey, my favourite band Freezepop spent something like 8 years not only on an indie label, but on an indie label owned by two of the people in the band!). And indeed, the young tattooed & pierced guy with strange spiky hair behind the counter said "Oh cool, you have a really good collection here - we were actually going to put that Journey CD on next". I just accepted that comment, and paid my £50.

Halfway down the road, it hit me. He wasn't being sarcastic. Apparently I'm old enough now for the stuff I liked as a kid to be considered retro. I don't honestly know how this makes me feel.

Richard is not only listening to Dream Theater, but also singing along in falsetto.

For context, Richard doesn't sing.

Mother's Day in the UK falls somewhat earlier than the international version. Ours is technically called Mothering Sunday and is the fourth Sunday in Lent. I'm always surprised this doesn't apply everywhere, particularly in Catholic countries, but I suppose it's something we made up. Like Boxing Day.

You already know that my mother is Not Like Other Senior Citizens. Her favourite band is Rammstein and she is into all heavy metal and industrial music, especially German industrial. So the ideal way for us to spend Mothers' Day was to take her to see a film about a heavy metal band.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil is about the Canadian metal band of the same name who spent the early 80s opening for big names like Anthrax and Bon Jovi, yet somehow faded into obscurity. But Lips and Robb had made a pledge when they were 14 that they were going to keep rocking forever, and so there they were at the age of 50, with absolutely awful day jobs (e.g. delivering school dinners!!) because they needed to be free for their music. The film is about them, and their families, and still trying to live the dream despite a huge amount of bad luck and bad circumstances.

It really is a fantastic film. It's like Spinal Tap but in real life – hilariously funny in parts, while other bits will have you with tears in your eyes. Newspaper reviews here all gave it 5 stars, and said “If you're passionate about ANY kind of music, go and see this”. To me it's a movie about obsessed men, and heaven knows I live with one of those :)

Happy birthday stellarwind! Don't try to tell me it was in December, I've only just got your present ready. Me singing the Portal song. About 3 MB. Not entirely in tune.

More voice recorder silliness: A previous recording gets interrupted by my phone ringing, causing me to completely lose the tune. Save the file and skip ahead to about 1 min 15 sec (1.4 MB). And I bemoan Noun Disease, with the extra irony of an unintentional word displacement near the end (354 kB).

This will be especially fun for anyone who's never heard my voice. Maybe.

There's nothing quite like having a killer attack uterus and a gallstone trying to emerge at the same time to make you feel ambushed by your own internal organs. Yesterday involved 165 mg of dihydrocodeine (equivalent to 330 mg of codeine, supposedly), which according to Wikipedia, should have been enough to make me away with the fairies. Me being me, it just made me slightly dizzy. The day also involved nowhere near enough sleep followed by several hours of lying in bed curled around my belly followed by vomiting followed by finally getting some sleep. I don't like pain.

But I dragged myself out of bed to go to the Wildhearts' 15th Anniversary of "Earth Vs the Wildhearts" show, which was awesome. I've always liked Shepherds' Bush Empire as a venue - something about the incongruity of being in such an old theatre to see a rock band. It also has plenty of seats with a good view of the stage, so you don't feel like you're missing out if you do have to sit down for most of the show. The band were on top form - Ginger was being nice to the audience (!), while he & CJ seem to be actual friends again these days. And the concept of playing the whole of Earth Vs in order would have been great, if they'd managed it... somehow, they skipped from "Miles Away Girl" to "News of the World" and "Drinking About Life" and had to come back to "My Baby Is a Headfuck" and "Suckerpunch". Oops. Then there was a break, for people to smoke or buy beer or go to the toilet - how civilised! followed by all of the B-sides from the Earth Vs era. I was surprised how many of the fellow 30-something fans knew all the words to the songs on Earth Vs but didn't know any of the B-sides. Personally, I was delighted to have "Girlfriend Clothes" and "Two-Way Idiot Mirror" in a setlist. And so civilised - to be able to see a band and breathe all the way through. It was being filmed for a DVD. Guess I'll be buying that, then :)

And then I went home and made & ate tomato rice and slept for 12 hours, interrupted only by the need to take pills throughout the night. Today, the uterus is less evil but the gallstone is still making itself felt. Think I'll be on the special ultra-low-fat-with-painkillers gallstone diet for a while :/

The past few nights have been ROKK NIGHT in this household. This started when I decided the only way to get through a massive pile of paperwork was to play music at high volume at the same time. For some reason, I had a terrible urge to listen to Queen (I blame seeing a tub of Ben & Jerry's Bohemian Raspberry ice cream in Waitrose). However, this led to a Discovery which is so shocking that it might cause some of you to de-friend me. Ready? ( !!! )

So in an attempt to recreate the Queen experience, I started playing all of the CDs I have which are called things like "The No. 1 Best Rock Album In The World Ever", each of which had one Queen song on. When Richard got back from work, we acquired an ARRR copy of Greatest Hits I. And I'm now looking online, because I'm pretty sure a box set got released containing all of their albums plus the two Greatest Hits.

Also missing from our lives: Alice Cooper. Absolutely shocking considering that my best friend when I was a teenager was John, who called himself Alice and drew Alice Cooper panda eyes on the back of all his letters.

Edit: Crown Jewels: A 25th Anniversary Celebration CD by Queen - US $109.15 , or UK £119.49. That's MORE THAN DOUBLE THE PRICE :X

I JUST NOW realised that the song "thought balloon" on the new Freezepop album sounds like "untitled song (about a girl of course)" by Trousershock BC! Which is my favourite Trousershock BC song ever, and always was!

Except... Trousershock BC were a small band local to the hometown where I grew up, and there are no more than 200 tapes with that song on in existence. So there is no way on earth that Freezepop, from Boston, USA, could have written a song in 2007 based on a song by TBC from Yateley in Surrey, written in 1992.

The only person that will be in common between TBC & Freezepop will be me (or possibly, inquis). I *was* Trousershock BC's fan club. I don't mean that I was *in* the fan club, or even that I *ran* the fan club - I *was* the fan club! TBC were a *tiny* band that played at a handful of local venues near where I lived. I used to sell tapes for them before & after their shows because I was small and girlie and could persuade people to part with cash (the princely sum of £2). They never even had a record company. They almost got signed to Food Records (who released stuff by e.g. Jesus Jones) but it fell through because Graham the singer was too ugly. Food signed Sensitizer instead, who made one album then disappeared into obscurity.

More likely, the two songs were both inspired by the same original song - but WHAT song?

* baratron hyperventilates

The funny thing is I've been thinking about Trousershock BC a lot lately. I've had a plan for a couple of months now to go through the boxes of stuff I inherited from my parents & look for their demo tapes so I can, er, somehow rig up a device to rip them to MP3. This has pushed that into "really urgent".