Alasdair Watson

Go here and listen to the words and music. Then go here and order THE HIGHBURY WORKING and ANGEL PASSAGE. They will make your head better.

Via various places:

I am 48% punk – “The intelligent punk. Tuff and Smart. You may be able to maintain a train of thought long enough… What the fuck was I talking about?”

I am 11% goth – “You wanna be a GOTH. But you are not. Smoking cloves and too much eyeliner a goth does not make. Go home and take your Cure CD’s with you.”

Last night my brother had dug out some old photos of me, and I swear to god that at a casual glance, you’d think they could have been taken yesterday. I’ve gained weight (and even then, I’m doing a passable job of shedding that, recently), but other than that, no difference. I don’t know how I feel about that. Especially as everyone else in the photos looks massively different.

Eternally young, that’s me…

The Onion has an interview with Alan Moore, talking about the FROM HELL film, comics, and magic. Toward the end of the interview, he says:

“With magic, I worship a second-century Roman snake god who, on the best evidence that I can dredge up from that period, was some kind of elaborate glove-puppet that was being controlled by a second-century snake-oil salesman, basically a complete fraud, huckster, and showman. I don’t want anybody else to start worshipping this god. I find something a bit unnatural in the idea of being bound together in spiritual ideas with people. I’m sure that, in our natural state, we all believe something entirely different. I don’t necessarily want anybody to believe the same things I believe, which is one of the reasons why I’ve adopted such a patently mad sort of deity.”

This is interesting to me because it sets down something I’ve been trying to put into words for the last year or so. My beliefs are just that. Mine. I don’t tell other people about them in any detail – I stop at “I practice chaos magic” if I say anything at all. The idea of someone else believing the same things as me would just be ludicrous. The “gods” I give acknowledgement to are ridiculous and mad things, by my choice. I don’t want to be able to take my own beliefs seriously. It would defeat the point. So I don’t explain them to others.

Just back from a night out with Mark, celebrating the fact that his band have been signed. Spent most of the evening chatting with his girlfriend and her sister, who are both 18. 6 years younger than me, and by god, they make me feel old, and if I’m honest, also a certain amount of patronising amusement. Is this how my friends who are six years (or more) older than me react to me, I wonder, or is it just because they’re 18?

“Gave me books to bind my reason

Wrote freedom off with rules

Gave me fears for every season

Taught me ignorance in schools.” – Tansads – “Turn on, Tune Up, Drop Out, Be Late”

See what I mean? Perfect pop. And I’ll never have watch them get old and crap.

I went to see Ghost World last night. It’s an adaption of Dan Clowes graphic novel of the same name. Despite my best intentions, I’ve never actually gotten around to reading the original, but I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Some of the folk I went with were a bit less satisfied with it – the usual complaint of having prefered the original, which is fair enough. I’m going to give the origional a look over the weekend, just so’s I can see if I have a different reaction to them.

Oh, and while I’m thinking of it, Anna asked me to dig out the link to one of Reggie Rigby’s old Fool Brittania columns that came up in conversation. Here it is – the story of how he had to confiscate a copy of Bazooka Jules. Enjoy.

My current reading on the bus is a book called THIS IS POP: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A FAILED ROCK STAR, written by Ed Jones. THIS IS POP is a perfect companion piece to my Bill Drummond and Julian Cope books. They’re the men that made it on their own terms. Ed Jones did not make it. Ed Jones was the bassist for my favourite band ever, the Tansads. The Tansads are notable for having been supported in their day by bands like by The Verve, Cast, Kula Shaker and Dodgy, and yet despite being better than any of those bands, never getting the kind of acclaim and recognition they deserved. They got unlucky. They were marketed in all the wrong ways, and fucked about by their record company in a wholly rotten manner. They vanished without trace, like so many others.

And this is why I love them – because they never got a chance to keep going, never got a chance to go downhill. The music is perfectly preserved indie-pop-rock, with a hint of Levellers-esque crust (which is probably what killed them – to crusty for the normal people, not crusty enough for the crusties). It’s bouncy, happy and fun, and will remain so despite the fact that they never got anywhere.

Complaint from a client “Please explain the 100 pound charge for fixing errors in our HTML mail”. Answer : “You were unwilling to do it yourself and it fell on a technical department desk.” It’s occasionally amusing dealing with staff from other companies who have no idea how time is charged out at design/internet marketing agencies. Without giving away anything I’m not allowed to: when I first started doing this sort of work, getting on for four years ago, as a junior dogsbody, my time was worth 80 quid an hour. I have a lot more skills now that I did then…

Surrender Control. Interesting, if slightly mad idea. It’s reminded me of a conversation with Hugh about a LARP that made use of SMS/e-mail – designate one, maybe two nights of the week as game nights, when people might get SMS’s, phone calls etc. related to the game (and e-mails/web-basde contact at any time, I guess). Actually, it’s one of the few role-playing related ideas to really grab me in the last while – I’d love to run a nasty, paranoid LARP using properly modern tools. Hugh was talking about the possibility of being able to run something genuinely country-wide with this sort of thing, but I’m not sure I’d want to go that far. If I could get twenty players and two more refs in the London area for it, then I’d probably do it. You could do so much to engender paranoia with this – players that hardly ever see one another, meeting in bars in response to text messages from an unknown source. Is someone else watching them? Does anyone know what’s really going on? Just who is that guy who always seems to be leaving the bar as they arrive? How did someone else know that they would be out that night, in order to leave that message on their answerphone?

God, yes.