Procrastination?

In the last few weeks I have discovered this:

The website is called pimptheface.com and I have wasted many hours on this in the name of research.

I have also discovered this (nothing to do with research):

Which in turn led me to discover this (a band that have been going since 2001):

and this:

As a result this was my word count before the holidays:

And this is my word count three weeks into the holidays:

6,500 words are random scenes that I have written for the end of the book and from experience never actually make it into the draft. So, if we have a look at the real word count, it is:

The question I ask you, is what could the reason be? Is it:
a) the nearly four year old's fault (she is going through a particularly truculent period at the moment)?
b) the fact that I didn't plan this draft, other than in my head?
c) that I'm a bit mixed up what with writing bits here, there and everywhere?
d) that maybe I need a break from this as well?

I've considered all four. The only thing I am sure of is that I will attempt to slog on. In the end a rubbish first draft is better than no draft at all.

I'll leave you with this, that you have probably been listening to for YEARS:

Just like a woman

Today is International Women's Day and the Frog asked why isn't there an International Men's Day. So for all you men out there who really need to ask the question. Here's a quote by Joss Whedon created Buffy:

*

Something happened to me. In the past my main characters were boys. I think it was the tomboy in me, but there we go they tended to be boys. And then I gave birth to a girl and now I write girls. I write girls like me. Girls happier in trousers than skirts, in doc martens than high heels, and who use lipsyl rather than lipstick. I try not to make them as clumsy and uncoordinated as me. I think that I'm trying to write girls that my bubba will one day aspire to be (so they have to have some flaws otherwise they won't be realistic), because my bubba doesn't have my role models. When I grew up I lived in an upstairs flat. Three amazing women lived downstairs. It's not just the fact that they all lived to be over a hundred that made them amazing. What made them amazing was that each of them nurtured and developed different aspects of who I am today. The middle one was a bit of a gossip and didn't care that Boy George wore a dress. The oldest taught me to be quiet and listen. The youngest took me to the Puffin Book Club Fair, the Natural History museum and the Science Museum, she encouraged me to travel, chided me for not keeping up my French and was a bit of a tyrant if truth be told. The youngest one is still going at 101 years old and to her and her sisters I dedicate this post. 

This year the theme of International Women's day is: Empower Rural Women - End Hunger and Poverty. 

And remember don't ask why we need International Women's Day, just honour your women any way you can. Oh and do tell me who are your strong women? 

*Thanks Nicky Schmidt for directing me to the Joss Whedon quote. 

Moments in Love

Today I should be going to have my 'submission package' critiqued, by my critique group but because it's THAT day of the year, the bubba and I will be supping on jacket potatoes and beans. It's not just because the Frog is on a business trip this year that I'm a tad moany, it's that actually I'm just not a big fan of Valentine's Day. I've never bought it. As a teenager it was a popularity contest and the one and only time I got an anonymous card, I knew who it was from and my feelings were not reciprocal. To me it is yet another excuse to give money to hallmark and chocolate companies, but is that love? Not in my book.

But you know, that doesn't stop me from being a big soppy romantic. I believe in those special moments.  

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss - Those snuggly moments on the sofa on friday night, as you doze in each other's arms while there is some tosh on TV. 

Art of Noise Moments in love - There's just something about that moment when you take out a record and hold it carefully, ensuring no fingerprints are transferred onto the vinyl. Then you slip it onto the turntable. I had a 12" of Moments in Love and this amazing record player that would clunk and then brrrbuzzclunkchunk to the other side of the record. You could stick it on repeat and listen for hours and hours and hours. 

(I never ever saw the video, but I have to say my teenage fantasies did not include tortoises)

Alain de Botton On Love - I don't agree with all of it, but the part on falling in love is classic. 

Pablo Neruda Twenty love poems and a song of despair - erotic love poetry, not really to be read on the bus. 

And coming in at number one for me Julian Barnes A History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters. The half chapter is called Parenthesis. I once wrote a poem about it. And here are some quotes from Parenthesis to whet your appetite: 

[I love you] We must keep these words in their box behind glass. And when we take them out we must be careful with them.  pg. 277

And so it is with love. We must believe in it, or we're lost...If we don't then we merely surrender to the history of the world and someone else's truth. pg 296 

From the past

Last Sunday I woke to the gurgle of voices in the street. This was unusual on several counts. Although we live in a heavily residential area, it's quite quiet on the street. It was also 8 o'clock in the morning. After shuffling into the front room the Frog informed me that the Brocante I'd mentioned the day before was happening NOW. I stumbled out onto the balcony and indeed, all the little doozers below were feverishly setting up tables and laying out shiny things. 

I hate Brocantes, second hand shops, white elephant stalls, stuff like it. I don't know why. Is it all the old dust that is carted around? Or the smell of age and the thought of my own mortality? Or am I just too much a part of the throw away generation? I don't know, I just hate them. But on the other hand, it was just THERE and like the two poles of a magnet are drawn together, I just had to go; with my camera. 

It's difficult to comprehend the amount of crap there is out there, and the fact that these people think that other people want to buy it, and that there are people out there who will buy it. But then part of its attraction is the hunt for the real crackers. You know the stuff you thought nobody could possibly have anymore. So, come on hands up? Who had one? 

Another thing that existed in the late 70's early 80's were The Specials. Although there are a bunch of albums, and the band went through name changes and various incarnations, the original line up only did two LP's. Their songs form the soundtrack of my youth where you either loved or hated Thatcher, people cared about stuff and pop stars sang about things that mattered. Apart from Terry Hall, I couldn't pick the band out in a crowd, but they form a part of my aural history. And from that  soundtrack I've seen quite a few of them: Elvis Costello, The Buzzcocks, Blondie, Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer, but I haven't seen them all. I read an issue of The Word a couple of years ago that was dedicated to the Madness come back (they never split up) and the The Specials reunion tour and I remember thinking then that there was a band I would love to see. And I did! On Tuesday. All that was missing was a Nutty Pure and a 15p bag of chips. 

And just a final note (if you look down here). Voting for the second challenge at Rach Harrie's blog goes on until the 14th October. You can read my entry here and then please remember to  vote for me here (if you want to that is). And this time I really mean  see you Monday when I shall be getting to know Rosalind Adams who writes in the rain.

The week that was

I went back to work this week; on Thursday. OK, I know it's not a full week, but I'm still blooming cream crackered. I had to sit through meetings, I have a student teacher, I'm working with a new teacher to the school and my classroom has moved to another building.

It was a funny old start to the year though. For a start it just felt different. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's different. Every September for the last ten years I have faced September 1st with a kind of dread and usually a bottle or two of wine. This year I watched the Mentalist.

Then the actual day arrived. I got off the metro and yet again was blown away by turning that corner and seeing the Eiffel Tower stretching up into the blue sky.

I skipped through the park pleased that I was wearing my Birks and that I would feel the grass between my toes. I was hoping that the grass would be wet, but you can't have it all.

I drank two glasses of wine over lunch safe in the knowledge that I was a) going to walk it off and b) work it off as I unpacked all those blooming boxes in my room while listening to the Foo Fighters. Even after getting all hot and sweaty and missing quite possibly the best day of summer because I was indoors I was still not totally pissed off.

Then I came home and it hit me. I was in the kitchen cooking after having done all the other chores that needed doing and I realised: that's it, another ten months before I can be ... and it ended. I opened a can of beer, finished cooking dinner, gave myself a mental kick in the shins and reminded myself that I am a teacher and I am a writer. There.

I'll finish off with this. I'm very bad at listening in meetings. I had to confess multiple times to the new and student teacher that I just wasn't listening, but I listened to this. Not because of the horrible screechy noise or because of the pretty pictures (but that helped a lot), but because Sir Ken Robinson has some very interesting things to say. And yes, of course I find them interesting because I agree with him. But I also find it interesting because I'm lucky enough to be able to do some of the stuff he says.

If you're not at all interested in changing education and the world, I get that. So did I mention my recent Foo Fighters obsession? Or that I saw them at Rock en Seine the other week? No? Oh, well this video is for you guys then.

Ssh...

When I was at university I loved Chumbawamba. I absolutely loved them. Each time I saw them live Alice Nutter came on stage dressed as a nun which I found wonderfully irreverent. They were an excellent band to dance to and I still love them even though they were ALWAYS supporting The Levellers.The thing is I never owned any of their early stuff. When I was at uni I had a cassette of Ssh that I played to death.

Now that we can download music it's really easy to rebuild these early record collections, but although I checked I could never get hold of Ssh on iTunes. Then I read about Spotify, 13 million tunes in a cloud somewhere out there. I wondered what the catch was, but eventually I downloaded it and found out for myself*. I looked up Ssh and listened to ALL of it, starting with Ssh down to Stitch That.

But why this wander down the corridors of nostalgia? Well, you see, today I have been waxing lyrical about the trauma of potty training on Twitter plus one comment about tinkering with my WIP. @belledechocolat replied to the one about my WIP and I started going on about potty training, but soon realised that there were other preoccupations in my life, namely the fact that I have reached a hump in WIP. Something is wrong and until I wrote this, I couldn't put my finger on it:

See that makes me wonder who my MC is. I'm beginning to think it's Morgane and not Ella which is pretty crap as I'm almost at the end of the revision! >:/

And in a blinding flash of light I realised that my MC is wrong. So without further ado I give you: Big Mouth Strikes Again by Chumbawamba and can I make it very clear that the parts of this song that I am relating to right now are not the bits about freedom of speech and censorship.



*The catch is that every couple of songs you get an annoying Bruno Mars advert. Who the hell is Bruno Mars anyway?

While I'm away...

While I'm busy painting, packing and peeking quickly at blogs, twitter and Facebook, here is what I'm listening to.

Writing on Wednesday: More procrastination

Look, I'll just cut to the chase OK. The world away from my laptop screen has brutally infringed on my writing space this week. I've looked at the 7 excuses writer's make and I've made them all in the space of three short days. However, I did follow Sunday's advice during one procrastination moment. I made a playlist for my wip. The video I've included is not on the playlist because it's an amazing story all on its own. Make a cup of tea, press play and listen to a tale of vengence and coincidence... 

Writing on Wednesday: A round of applause

As this is the last post of 2010 I thought I would reflect on what I have achieved this year.

1. I finally picked up a pen and wrote something, instead of just thinking about it. 
2. I wrote about 15,000 words of A Fish's Tale.
3. The Trelawney Funerals came back to haunt me. No idea how much I wrote there, it was all in pen, in a notebook I had to wrestle back off the bubba who was enjoying scribbling all over every page.
4. I resurrected the ole blog.
5. I read: The Children's Book by AS Byatt, Saturday by Ian McEwan, The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly, Mortlock by Jon Mayhew, On Love by Alain de Botton, Superior Saturday by Garth Nix, The Bandini Quartet by John Fante, A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbry, Mr. Toppit by Charles Elton, One Day by David Nicholls, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick and The Other Hand by Chris Cleave. There may have been some others, and on the whole I've read really good books this year. As I was writing the list I kept thinking: Oh great read. Oh yeah, I really enjoyed that. Oh, brilliant that. The last few were the duds unfortunately. 
6. I signed up to do NaNoWriMo in October.
7. I spent October planning A Twist in the Tail down to the nth degree (or so I thought).
8. In November I wrote like a demon. 
9. I organised four write-ins and met some chatty writers!
10. I was introduced to the program Scrivener. Although it is bugging like crazy at the mo, in its current Beta 4 version, it's still brilliant. 
11. I wrote 50,000 words and became a NaNo winner.
12. Incidentally that was also the first draft of A Twist in the Tail.
13. The revision is now at just over 5,000 words. I wrote four new chapters for the revision and cut three and a half of them!
14. I got back into the critique group. 
15. I have a name written in a notebook. She sounds like a pretty amazing character, but she's real and I'm not sure what I want to do with her, because I've never done faction before, nor do I know whether I want to do faction.
16. I started scribbling down yet another first chapter for the Sands of Time. There are ideas kicking around there, but this will definitely be a 2011 project. 
17. When I first sat in front of my computer in the summer, terrified at the thought of writing again, I couldn't do it. I could not frame a single good sentence. Not one word came. So I started to write a dancy/play/Japanese type thing. This thing has filled my head for years and years. This music is kind of like my muse, so I will leave you with a little bit of it.

Track of the Day

This is a quickie to plug a new up and coming folk singer/songwriter. You may note after a while that this is not my usual style of writing as I have the proud Mum looking over my shoulder telling me what to write. Anyway, I've known Dylan since he was twelve (bloody hell that makes me feel old). He blew balloons at one of those mile stone moments in my life (still he wasn't to blame). Anyway tomorrow he is the 'Track of the Day' in the Up and Coming Folk Artist on Gargage Band. If you like what you hear, then go visit him on his MySpace page too.

Jane has just asked me why I haven't typed in the addresses. These link things are all new to her...

STOP PRESS!!!!
Not only is Dylan featured Track of the Day tomorrow (Friday), but he's apparently BEST MALE FOLK VOCALIST OF THE WEEK! Cooee hey. Do you think he'll remember me when he's rich and famous? I guess he'll have to, because Jane will still be sending me texts telling me all his good news. Still it's kind of sweet that Jane is such a 'proud mummy'.

Substance

I’ve been planning this post for a while now; ever since I first read the guardian review where Peter Hook, Joy Division and New Order bassist was quoted as saying:

‘it felt like someone had ripped out my heart’

He’s talking about Anton Corbijn’s film ‘Control’. I knew as soon as I read the review that I would have to go and see the film. It tells the story of Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis who committed suicide on the eve of their US Tour in 1980. I don’t think I’m giving away the ending by telling you, because to be honest I can’t think of anyone who would go and see the film unless they liked Joy Division. I know, I tried and I watched my friend’s faces fall one after the other as I gave them a briefer synopsis and asked them if they wanted to go, but a surprise text from a fellow fan prevented me from going on my own.

I read an interview with Corbijn the week the film was released. Corbijn was big into the Manchester scene in the late 70’s and when photographing Joy Division he had no idea what they were saying because his English was poor and they had strong accents. If you’ve seen black and white moody shots of Ian Curtis, they are probably Corbijn’s shots.

‘Control’ is based on Deborah Curtis’s (Ian’s widow) book called ‘Touching from a Distance’ and I also noticed as the credit’s rolled that she was heavily involved in the production of the film.

And then there’s me, part of the audience, but first let’s go back to my thirteen or fourteen year old self. All I have for music is this tinny tape deck and big bro has the 70 watt speakers and after years of heavy metal and punk, finally something good is pounding through the walls. In the end the reason Joy Division still speaks to so many teenagers is that Curtis’s lyrics captured that feeling of ‘otherness’ so perfectly. When I finally got my own stereo with no records to play on it, it was big bro’s Joy Division records that I sneaked out of his room to listen to (along with Dad’s top notch headphones so that I could hear Hooky’s baselines crystal clear).

So here I am half a lifetime away and I know the music and I know what happened, but somehow I expected more. The score of Control is fantastic, the photography is beautiful, but I left with this feeling that it was a film for fans. There wasn’t enough substance on the screen for an outsider to understand anything more. There were lines and moments that were brutally painful, but that was because of the experience that I had walked into the cinema with. Corbijn’s characters were like moving stills. That didn’t make the story any less harrowing or take away the feeling of shock at the end, but I just wondered. I wondered if we hadn’t been fans would it have been a different film.

A great deal of nothing much

So it’s been a nothing much kind of week, no earth shattering revelations or get my blood boiling moments. I went back to work and moved into the new building. Going through boxes of stuff was kind of good though, I found all kinds of things I had forgotten about including a poem and story.

Scarlett asked me if I was going to put my book up on the blog. I know that quite a lot of fellow bloggers have done this, but I’m veering away from this, I don’t find the critiquing that helpful and when I trawl through publisher’s sites there always seems to be a wee rule saying ‘never published before, including the web’. I think I need to hold onto that dream of the multi-million penny publishing deal first. I can be optimistic can’t I?

I had a look through the short story website today; it’s a pretty good database of current competitions. Through it I found a couple of sites that seemed interesting. Well there’s one that I thought was a little dubious if truth be told. The concept behind StoryWar seems to be that depending on the number of views and votes your story gets you get into this Top 50 chart. The other site was Lightningbug for beginning writers or those with a bit of a block. It has prompts and several other resources on it. There’s a page on it about what kind of writer you are, obviously you can fall into more than one category, it’s not a quiz though so don’t expect earth shattering questions.

I also had a look at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators this week. Again this is something I’m not too sure about. They have a pretty healthy ‘chapter’ going in Paris, but I’m always a bit loathe to part with my wonga, so if anyone can let me know about this group I’d be happy to hear.

Apart from that the Rugby World Cup started. My initial reaction to his was: Oh great the metro is packed. I don’t get rugby at all; big men, funny shaped ball, fairly violent. My other observation about rugby is that posh boys play it. See sweeping generalisations and no idea about it whatsoever. We started looking at the opening ceremony on the TV after the jets had swooped by scaring the bejesus out of us. It all seemed very odd, the guys seemed to be straight off the set of Alice in Wonderland in stripy long shorts and primary coloured tops with spiky shoulders and a black pattern on the front. I like that congenial atmosphere that watching sport engenders, but I remember watching the six nations a couple of years ago. There were a whole bunch of us and Ireland needed to win by a lot to come first. I understood that, but Claire and I felt like we had wondered onto this alien planet where we no longer comprehended the language or behaviour. No, it’s just not football is it.

Right, I now have to listen to a demo and give constructive criticism about it. Jane is one proud mother and is convinced that her son, the Big D will one day be the next Folk/pop sensation. He’s pretty good from the thirty seconds or so that I heard before turning it off because I couldn’t hear a damn thing through Jane’s running commentary! Personally I’m always impressed if someone can play bar chords because that’s something I never mastered, but even with my mastery of six or so chords I can tell that this boy has talent. Still that’s not quite the sort of constructive criticism he wants though.

Festival From Yesteryear

There’s something about Music Festivals that I just can’t explain. The sound is generally not as good as in a venue, the groups don’t get to do a full set and the toilets are nasty, but I love them all the same. I love that mixed up smell of sweaty people and grass, I love the way the music thumps through the ground each beat bouncing you a little closer to the stage, I just do.

Now call me a big fat wossy but I’ve done the whole camping thing, communal showers, hole in the ground crappers and frankly it’s all part of the experience, but I can remember it very well so do I have to do it now? No, because with Rock en Seine I can get the metro home at the end of the evening. It also means that I didn’t feel like I had to do the whole three days either. Eh yeah, the festival is actually still on, but the line up was rubbish today and having seen Bjurghk bouncing around in fluorescent yellow before, I felt reasonably justified in skipping today.

So who did I see? Well, this year the festival was like this huge blast from the past. I made Lise run around like a blue arsed fly so that I could get to the Scene de la Cascade for 3pm and then as I waited impatiently I noticed on the new programme that Dinosaur Jr were actually on at 4.20! They were very loud and finished with Freak Scene and me singing at the top of my voice: ‘So don’t let me fuck up will you, cos I when I need a friend it’s still... YOU!’ That’s quite a sweet line really. The change in times caused a little bit of a clash with Mogwai, but I quite liked them, although when the cameras scanned the serious head banging crowd it did kind of make me laugh. We decided that they are a kind of band you listen to very loudly when you are in a bad mood. After a healthy tea of ... chip butty we were drawn to Emilie Simon doing a cover of a Stooges song. She’s a French chick with a penchant for white dresses and with a drummer who played a big bowl of water and her piano. It was all a bit strange, but I rather liked it. We left before the end to catch the rock ‘n’ roll boys from Sweden. Pelle Almqvist of The Hives is rather bonkers, jumping over the speakers climbing up the set and expecting adoration from the crowd. They put on an energetic show that you can really bop along to, if you’re not wetting yourself laughing. Almqvist did all his banter in a faux French accent, stringing words together that made no sense – well I found it funny. Last up that night were Arcade Fire. I think they are a ten piece band, at least that’s how many I counted, although everybody seems to play a few instruments, horns, violins, cellos, accordions, organs, various types of drums. If you don’t know what their music is like, it’s kind of hard to describe, it’s a big sound, kind of tortured and there is always something mad going on onstage. They work brilliantly live because you are never going to be able to get sound that big out your home speakers. They finished with Neighbourhood # 1 and the crowd were still singing ‘Woo ooo ooh’ long after they had left the stage and we tootled off home completely covered in mud on the metro. There’s something quite satisfying about leaving a trail of dried mud through all the chicest ‘burbs of Paris.

Yesterday started with The Fratellis, the only song I know is Chelsea Daggers which they finished with. They were alright, but I kind of got the impression that every song sounded like something else I had heard before and they were a bit grumpy. Jarvis Cocker on the other hand started off with this fantastic speech in broken French of how we were in Parc St. Cloud, but it should be called Parc sans cloud (yes the sun finally came out yesterday) as he leapt from speaker to speaker in what can only be called an extremely ungainly fashion. Each song was punctuated with his vague thoughts – god only knows what the French understood- and then he finished with Paris Nord. At first we thought it was his terrible French accent again as he was pronouncing the d in Nord, but no, it was Black Sabbath’s PARANOID! After a quick tea of ... chips, I then rushed everyone off to see the band that I had been too young to see the first time round: The Jesus and Mary Chain. Apart from the wrinkles and a wee bit of weight gain on William Reid’s side they sounded EXACTLY the same as always! We finished the night off bopping away to some crap dance music in this lounge bar until someone pointed out the time to me... Goddamn, I had to leave to get the last metro.

Apologies for out of focus photos, but it's just to give you a wee gist of things: Dinosaur Jr. The Hives (he never bloody kept still, but I kind of like the spectral element of it) and Jarvis.

Treats

Every now and again I treat myself to The Word Magazine. I like it because there’s a good blend of music interviews, reviews, films and a bit on books. Basically it’s the NME (New Musical Express) for people my age; it’s even written by people who were writing the NME when I was staring at my flares and listening to The Stone Roses. Who’d have thought we’d have grown up and started listening to Folk and Country Music and would be saying things like: ‘All guitar indie pop sounds the same nowadays’?

I suppose the thing I like most about The Word is that it comes with a free CD. The CD reminds me of one of those C90 tapes you used to mix lovingly for your friends, except here they package it into a nifty little cover and charge you an arm and a leg for it. The CD tends to cover new or upcoming bands, plus a bit of what they think you should be listening to. There’s usually a couple of tracks that stand out on the CD; for instance I discovered The Decemberists a couple of years ago, now they really stood out.

The CD tends to start off with a corker. This month I found myself putting down my sudoku puzzle and listening ever so carefully to the lyrics, they were brilliant. Even the bizarre background of synth sounds couldn’t stop me listening to the utter dreariness that Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld recounted. The Day Before You Came while still familiar is sufficiently different to actually grab attention, ‘But who did the original?’ I asked myself. I almost fell off the sofa when I read Abba! Being a child of the 70’s I had difficulty putting Dancing Queen with this song. Still it’s kind of nice to hear a cover that makes you re-appreciate the original.

Which kind of leads on to the next track. Yet again, there I was on the sofa (bad writing day) with this tune that sounded like something else but I couldn’t work out what, going through my head. I can’t remember which came first? The fact that I realised that The Felice Brothers sounded so like Bob Dylan, or that I knew what I was going to write. Anyway, despite their obvious influence, I quite like Roll on Arte.

The last one I’ll mention from the CD is The Broken Family Band’s Don’t Change your Mind. It’s got a catchy little chorus you find yourself singing along to moments after you’ve listened to it, but ... some of the lyrics are a little bit silly, I find myself arguing with them as I’m washing up. Why? Why can’t she sleep naked if she wants to? If she has to get up she’ll put clothes on.

Anyway you can listen to snippets of the CD here and if you like anything well in the UK it’s £4.50 and if you can get it anywhere else then DON’T it’s a rip off at that price, unless of course you buy it for yourself as a holiday treat.

Lastly, have you heard of Oscar the Grim Reapurr (Daily Mail headline)? Yesterday I read a short article in the Guardian, today he’s globally famous. Well, just in case you haven’t heard he lives in a hospice (you see I didn’t even pay attention to which country) for very ill old people, and when he pootles into their room and sits on the end of the bed the nursing staff throw themselves into a frenzy of calling relatives and arranging chairs and sure enough a wee while later, the old person is no more. Scientists are not sure how Oscar does it, but he’s predicted 25 deaths so far.

Send Away the Tigers and Bring on the Manics

Every now and then I have the urge to get some new music, but today was different. I wasn’t content to buy yet another indie band’s catalogue of pop songs or rock folk ballads and after getting through the whole ‘Just for you’ selection I was still unsatisfied. I wanted something special, something that I could rave about and just because I knew I hadn’t done this for a while I typed in ‘Manic Street Preachers’.

I could have apologised then to my neighbours for the jumping up and down, but maybe I’ll save that for tomorrow when I’ve listened to Send Away the Tigers about ten times. I’m on my second play through now! And well, it sounds ... exactly like the Manic Street Preachers!

They are a band who have always been on my radar from the days that Richey James appeared on the front cover of the NME with the words ‘4 Real’ carved into his arm, but it was with the release of Everything must Go that I really began to pay attention. It was the first album without James and confirmed Nicky Wire as the real strength of this group. Design for life got to number 2 and the CD was rarely off my player.

A couple of years later I found myself in Madrid where the live music scene was dire (OK it was dire if you wanted anything other than Latino music) and then all of a sudden in the space of two weeks Massive Attack and the Manics were playing. I get this feeling that Massive played first. It was a great venue near Retiro Park where pretty much everywhere you stood you could see; always good for a bit of a short arse like me. I was well into Massive at the time. We had a shitty cassette of Mezzanine that we listened to in the car and then one day we finally splashed out and bought the CD and from then on you could regularly hear me waking up the neighbourhood on a Saturday morning blasting out the beginning of Angel. I had this whole image in my head of doing an installation that would have ‘Angel’ as a soundtrack with this massive mechanical Angel that would be gradually lowered and then all you would see were constellations and then as the lights went up the thing would unfold its wings and be blindingly bright. So what I’m getting at is that although I really liked the Manics I wasn’t as excited by This is my Truth Tell me Yours, I had no expectations for this gig other than I would enjoy it because live music is my drug of choice; that was until the lights went up and they started playing. Compared to the earlier albums, Everything must Go and This is my Truth were slick and well produced. But when they began playing all that was stripped away and what you were left with was an energetic guitar rock band. The crowd erupted and that tingle went up my spine to the tips of my toes that kept my head bopping and my shoulders grooving and my feet shuffling for the whole hour and a half. The crowd went nuts when they played Motorcycle Emptiness and La Tristessa Durera, but real ecstasy was achieved when the first chords of Motown Junk filled the club.

When Know Your Enemy was released in 2001, I was now in Paris. What the Manics achieved in that club in Madrid they achieved on this album. It was back to pure guitar rock and Wire’s ability to blend good tunes with politicized lyrics was extraordinary. I was sure they would play Paris, I looked all the time, I looked, I waited, they didn’t.

In 2002 Forever Delayed was released with that classic cover of Suicide is Painless, but it was a Greatest Hits album after all and there were no gigs.

So today I’ve already checked the ticket site and the official website. They are almost at the end of their UK tour and I don’t see a European one. And if they do come I think they should play the Bataclan, because it’s gritty and fairly small and they will bring the house down. And most definitely not La Cigale, because I don’t know what it is with that club, it’s jinxed, bands always cancel there. Well, actually they can play anywhere, just... please... come.