FinishMySong Blog

There’s a certain vocal technique that’s become known by everyone as the Mariah Carey school of singing. Various other people who are really big in the music industry employ the technique for nearly all their songs, particularly the slower ballad-type material, including Whitney Houston and Christina Aguilera. But Carey is the undisputed queen of this method : where one long note is required sing 23 little ones.

And each time I hear her doing her stuff it makes me wonder ‘Is this person even able to project one pitch continuously for more than, say, a second or two?’ It really is so frustrating to hear Carey singing the most simple melodies in the an unnecessarily complex but utterly ‘showy’ fashion. For example, she was on Magic TV this afternoon providing the female vocal to Luther Vandross’ lead for a version of the famous Richie & Ross duet, Endless Love. Now, the song doesn’t call for much from the female part except for a few harmonies in thirds apart from the main vocal but still Carey managed to ornament her way through the whole thing, adding grace notes and appoggiaturas at every possible place in the music. And it is just PAINFUL to listen to!! This girl, famed for having one of the widest vocal ranges in pop music, really needs to go back to basics with her singing classes!

Well, as the title of this blog suggests, I'm going to be making a trip to the Midlands of England tomorrow for a couple of days. Indeed, my sister lives in Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire so I'll be heading off there for a couple of days of relaxation and maybe the odd beverage or two.

So, I thought I'd write an entry today on the music scene in her neck of the woods.. the only problem seems to be that there doesn't really appear to be a music scene anywhere near Stoke-on-Trent!!! I even resorted to checking Wikipedia to see if any famous composers or performers were born or lived in Staffordshire, ya' know.. within the last millennium or so, and much to my dismay I find that the only two I know of are Slash (the guitarist from 80's rock band Guns 'n' Roses) and Robbie Williams, ex-member of boy-band Take That and massively over-rated pop singer. Mmmm...

So, what do we say about these two? Well, as I remember, guitar player Saul Hudson (known to his friends as Slash) played lead for both Guns 'n' Roses and for Velvet Revolver, and I believe his playing was also captured on a couple of Michael Jackson's records, including Black and White from the Dangerous album. I don't suppose that resume is so bad for a bloke brought up a spit away from the river Trent, although in a sense he shouldn't even be counted because he was actually born in Hampshire.

That just leaves Robbie Williams: well, to be fair, the guy has brought out one or two pop classics such as Angels and Let Me Entertain You, to say nothing of his contribution to numerous Take That hits back in the early 1990's. Personally, I prefer the ballads that he's brought out over the last few years because I feel that being able to pull these off is where the strengths lie in his voice. But the problem with Robbie is that he seems to think he's much more talented than he actually is. For example, the claim is that the majority of his hits were penned by Robbie's very own hand, with no mention whatsoever for the efforts put in by a clearly very talented team of composers and producers. But, afterall, they're just working in the background for the record label so noone will be interested to know what they had to offer to these recordings! Also, Robbie's crooner image I find nothing if not totally cringeworthy : he did a famous televised recording of rat-pack numbers at the Royal Albert Hall, and released the massive Sinatra hit Something Stupid (the female vocal for this single was contributed by Nicole Kidman) all in a vain attempt to be considered cooler-than-cool. Personally, I can't bear to watch or listen to it. Please, Robbie - you've got the voice for a last-dance floor-filler, so stick to that, pick up you cheque and give us a break from your immense ego!!

Take a look at this link :

http://club.iwvpa.net/caffeycd/funeral_.htm

Now I'm no great poet but I think there's something seriously fishy about Mr Caffrey's efforts here. For a start, as an amateur in this field, it's probably not terribly wise to attempt an 'answer' to one of the most famous poems by one of the most respected poets in the history of English literature, unless you can accept that your efforts are going to look pretty dismal as compared to the original piece.

But, more than that, I think it would have been nice for Caffrey to actually read W. H. Auden's tragically moving piece Funeral Blues before having a go at arguing against its sentiments in verse. Mostly because what Auden is expressing in his poem is the pure, raw emotion of grief - a combination of anger, solitude, love, loss and fear... these things all colliding into one another in a massive, terrible mess that is so awesome one just cannot escape from it's all-consuming grasp, by the minute falling ever further into a state of darkness, loathing and self-indulgence. The third stanza I think sums it up :

I've been working all morning on the website and am pleased to say that I have managed to put the search facility back online - you will see a link to it at the top right hand corner of every page (except on the forum). The new search engine is powered by Google and, as such, is reliant on the indexing that Google's spiders carry out on an hourly, daily, weekly and monthly basis. For this reason, and because the search engine has just this morning been installed, it might take a while for all the pages on FinishMySong.com to appear in the results of any given search. I've just tried a couple of searches and found that, for the moment, only the main, long-established pages on the site are showing up, but I'm sure that over a short period this will be extended to all content on the site.

Many local people have complained over the years about how awful Bradford is, particularly with reference to the disastrous city planning that has gone on here over the past 50 years. And it's true that many beautiful old buildings were destroyed in the late 1950's and early 60's to make way for the Lego blocks that are in turn now being knocked down and replaced with fancy shopping centres and the like. Of course, retrospectively we can now see that it would have been more worthwhile to have put the time and money into renovating the old buildings in the first place rather than simply putting up cheaper alternatives such as those that have made up the majority of the architecture on Cheapside and Broadway for the best part of 40 years.

And the private sector seems to be taking this wisdom on board when considering the future of some of Bradford's most historic (and dilapidated) buildings such as the great mills in Saltaire and Manningham. The new way to make money in this industry seems to be to use the character of the shells we have left from Britain's industrial past to create newer, more versatile and more interesting spaces to live and work in the 21st century.

So, this only begs the question 'why can't Bradford council follow suit??' It saddens me to visit the neighbourhood I grew up in, Undercliffe, because it reminds me that those looking after Bradford's schools are making the same mistakes now as did the city planners of the 50's : they are destroying or have destroyed many many Victorian style school buildings, selling this land off for housing and taking up valuable green-belt land to construct new places for our children to spend their days : places that I might add all look alike and will no doubt become the lego blocks of the next few decades.

Part of the reason for this change, of course, was Bradford Education's decision to become a 2-tier system, letting go of the middle schools and instead having only primary and secondary schools in the district. This in itself is a massive shame because I personally found middle school to be a really useful stepping stone between the dependence of being in one classroom with one teacher all day and the chaos that ensues in upper school education. But, more than that, I look to the places I, a 29 year old, went to school and see that only 2 of the 4 schools I attended even exist anymore and one of them has been re-branded and extensively altered for the new system in Bradford.

Perhaps I'm being a little overly-sentimental or melodramatic even, but it does seem like such a pity that these places that had such character and history should be swept away in favour of new buildings that look just like every new low-rise office block in Britain. The first school I went to, Undercliffe First, was not only attended by lots of people I know of my age group but also by my mother and her mother and, for all I know, her mother. Was the temporary cash injection that Education Bradford will have received a couple of years ago for the sale of this site REALLY worth destroying a place that had such historical significance to so many local people?

I think we in the United Kingdom get a bit confused about our national status on account of the country being split up into a number of smaller 'countries' that many people find themselves more able to associate with. I always remember when I was filling out a Student Loans form back in Scarborough, there was a question about my nationality to answer next to which I wrote down "British". Now I'm not sure even whether that's technically correct as Britain is a geographic place rather than being determined by political or national borders (think of the Isle of Man being one of the British Isles), but the opinionated finance woman at UCS who went through my form changed my answer to "English", turning to me with the remark that she prefers that!!

So, where exactly DO we live? Most people who have been brought up in my part of the world would say that their country is England, but then politically we belong to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of course, when they're not calling us "Limeys", the Americans simply refer to us as 'British'. England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland have one common parliament with one Prime Minister and yet, perhaps for historical reasons, we choose to see ourselves as members of 4 different countries (of course, the situation with Northern Ireland is more understandable after 100 years of conflict over that land).

So, then we have a number of national anthems, all of which are used at different types of occasions. Wikipedia has this to say about the matter :

• Wales has its own recognised anthem in Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau;
• Scotland uses either Flower of Scotland or Scotland the Brave, or traditionally Scots Wha Hae; see also National Anthem of Scotland.
• England generally uses God Save the Queen, but has used Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory.
• Northern Ireland generally uses God Save the Queen at events associated with the British tradition, and the Irish national anthem Amhrán na bhFiann at events associated with the Irish tradition. Additionally, Londonderry Air is a popular cross-community anthem.
• At international football matches, England and Northern Ireland both use God Save the Queen, while Scotland uses Flower of Scotland, and Wales uses Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. There has been some debate about replacing God Save the Queen with Jerusalem for England matches.
• At international rugby league matches, England have used Land of Hope and Glory but in their 2005 internationals, changed to God Save The Queen. Scotland uses Flower of Scotland and Wales uses Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. At Great Britain matches, God Save the Queen is played, which recently led to Irish-born Brian Carney bowing his head and not singing along.

So, it's not altogether surprising that the people of our little group of islands get quite confused about their national identity. Not that any of this matters at all, but it does amuse me to see so many people flying the George Cross in support of the English football team over in Germany - just to make matters even more complicated, St George is actually the patron saint of a number of nations, including Israel, and the tune God Save Our Gracious Queen is used by various other countries for their anthem, including Norway!

Anyway, if England beat Ecuador in the football World Cup today (as I write this, it's half time and the score is 0-0), you might want to join in with the singing at the beginning of their next game. See below for the lyrics of our English national anthem (seriously cringe-worthy, if you ask me) and click on the flag to listen to an absolutely brilliant recording of the piece as sung by a choir in a magnificent arrangement with orchestral accompaniment - you'll need Real Player to hear it. Out of interest, every time I listen to the piece the thought crosses my mind that it is the bass part that really drives the music forward and ultimately it is this reason why the piece 'works' in such a stirring fashion.

Sometimes watching episodes of the American adult cartoon, South Park, really does make me cringe... they couldn't get closer to the bone if they performed a live amputation, and this is exactly what makes the programme so different and, ultimately, so popular.

As much as we like to believe that we live in a free society where open and honest discussion is encouraged, the truth is that most programmes on our British television and radio are to a greater or lesser extent censored by a common sense of decency, as judged by those who broadcast this stuff. Even our current affairs programming tends to edge toward the 'politically correct' ideal when it comes to the way events are covered and discussions are conducted. Of course, the extreme nationalism of many American television channels is even more clearly an example of the way the public's ability to watch 'real' life on their so-called free media is totally distorted by those with a certain US-centred agenda who are in charge of what goes out.



And then there is South Park, created in the very heart of the American MidWest - an area of Colorado that Trey Parker and Matt Stone describe as 'painfully normal' and well-known as a breeding ground for far-right, redneck culture. Yet, this programme is one of the most openly offensive bits of television that I know of, directly targeting groups and individuals who the creators feel like having a poke at. One particularly remarkable example of this was in season 8 when a new neighbour comes to town called "Mr Jefferson" who is blatantly a figure who is representative of the media's portrayal of Michael Jackson. One scene shows Mr Jefferson in bed with the four main child characters and when he's caught in this position by one of the adult characters his high-pitched voice exclaims "You're all so ignorant!", as a direct reference to Michael Jackson's use of language in his interview with Martin Bashir. How the producers of South Park get away with this kind of thing on the American mainland is quite beyond me, but it does please me that this level of freedom of speech is possible in this day and age, even if it does offend certain people. I think other groups should look to the South Park phenomenon as an example of what free-speech is really about, particularly the theatre production companies that recently crumbled under pressure from religious types who want to silence views that don't show them in a good light. The Christian church even wanted to close down the lighthearted musical Jerry Springer on the grounds that one of the characters in the play describes Jesus Christ as being "a bit gay" : surely the doctrine of several thousand years of theological thought can stand a little fun-poking, can't it??

Oh, as a matter of interest, when I was in Colorado in 2001, myself and my buddies went to visit the real South Park - a small mountain town a couple of hours away from Denver. And it seriously was JUST like the way it is portrayed on the television programme : a very cold, dusty little town with nothing much there but a few shops and an elementary school. Interestingly, there was a cafe there called "South Perk" that was presumably named as a reference to the other big American sitcom, Friends.

This lunchtime's national news had an amusing story to finish off with : in Warwickshire some pretentious artsy type early this morning pulled off a truly huge piece of visual art by flying a number of balloons over Stratford-upon-Avon that broadcast music down to the town below.

The idea of this stunt was allegedly to survey the residents of the houses that they passed over to see if the music (inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) had any impact on the imagery of those people's dreams as they woke up to go to work etc. But, frankly, with the ropey nature of the way the experiment was conducted and in the manner in which data will later be gathered, the whole event seems a lot less like a practical experiment into the effects of music on dream sequence than it was an excuse for the composer, Dan Jones, to get on television and promote his own work!!

In an interview with the BBC, Jones had this to say :

"This is music released from the confines of gravity."

The beginning of next month will see the opening of this year's Great Yorkshire Show, located just outside Harrogate in North Yorkshire. If you are able to get time off during the week it's certainly worth a visit - last year I went with a friend from uni and we had an absolute ball.




Apart from there being lots of impressive looking animals to gawp at, there are stalls, bars, music, kids' entertainment and lots more going on. Last year, amongst other things, I saw possibly the largest cow I am ever likely to see in my life (the small of its back was higher than the top of my head) and bought some great (and very cheap) foods and crafts. The beer tent sells local Yorkshire ales aswell so, hasten to add, there are one or two pictures of me lying sparked out on the grass kicking around!

The show takes places from Tues 11th to Thurs 13th July inclusive - for further details, go to their website : www.greatyorkshireshow.org

It seems almost impossible these days to flick through the television channels at any time of day or night without coming across some programming related to clairvoyance or spirituality, from the Crossing Over show with John Edward, through Ghost Hunters and Dead Famous, hosted by Gail Porter, right to the Psychic Channel - an entire station dedicated to live tarot readings and conversation about to clairvoyance and clairaudience.

The television channels that broadcast this stuff do acknowledge their responsibility by stating at the beginning of each show that the programme in question is for entertainment only and that differing opinions exist as to the true nature of clairvoyance and clairaudience, but I still get the impression that this is legal jargon spouted to avoid truly acknowledging the potency of programming of this nature. For example, from the very start of the 6th Sense show (with Colin Fry) everything about the way the programme is presented is designed to lull the viewers into an almost hypnotic state - a state that makes them vulnerable to suggestion. The music is calming and soft with a floating melody on solo flute over some light strings, the visual imagery is basic and rhythmically slow-paced and then Fry speaks throughout the show with a tone not only of total confidence but also with a contrived sense of remarkable serenity.

And, yet, I find myself getting sucked in like all the other punters this is designed to draw closer. Perhaps it's just the inevitable human need to deny our own mortality that makes us want to believe what these people are saying is true - a repression more deeply engrained than any other. However you choose to explain it, though, watching the likes of Fry and Edward speaking to grieving families and allegedly passing on messages from loved ones who have passed away is intensely moving. I hold my hands up and state that I WANT to believe that what I'm seeing is a genuine communication between these television presenters and people who are, as Edwards puts it, in the spirit world. But in the cold light of day, I'm afraid that these psychics' methods seem all too similar to those who practise hypnotism and 'magic'. But entertainers like Derren Brown explain how their methods fool people into believing something that is both fantastic and ultimately not real whereas the Edwards and Frys of this world will not accept that they are doing anything of the sort, let alone deal with the ethical questions surrounding making money from the most emotionally vulnerable sections of society.

All this doesn't stop me from being curious, though, because as an intelligent, open-minded individual I want to analyse the world around me and come to conclusions about its nature based on the empirical data to hand. Equally, I have lost people in the past who are very dear to me and so I'm naturally inquisitive about what happened to them, where they are now and what lies ahead for all of us. The truth is, I want to have something to hope for the future and I want to believe that my loved ones are watching over me. But, of course, it is this very hope that the psychic arena preys so heavily upon.

In my quest for more information and with a view to dismissing clairvoyance once and for all as what Penn & Teller describe as 'Bullshit', I decided that I'd contact a psychic for a personal reading. Surely, afterall, if there is any truth in it then I will soon find out - have a word beforehand at my family grave about the things I need my loved ones to bring up in the reading in order to validate the experience and then be satisfied one way or another once the reading is done. So, I called up a local clairvoyant in Bradford who was initially pleased to hear from me and to explain that half an hour of her time would be £20 but that that would not really be enough time for the spirits to join her - for this an hour would be required and, even then, she can't guarantee that anything will happen. She then got talking candidly about her abilities to see into the future and to contact those who have passed away and about how many of her clients were people with problems they needed to get resolved. She talked so much so that I felt able to say to her that I could understand why people are sceptical about these practises, what with it tending to attract people who have emotional needs to fulfil through this approach (I was actually referring to myself). And then strangely this woman's tone changed as she went on the defensive about how she sees no need to 'prove' her abilities and that she isn't willing to be "tested". That wasn't really what I meant, of course, but hasten to add I didn't book a session.

John Edward's website is a good indication of what these people are about aswell : there's certainly a lot more cross-sales promotion going on than actual informative content. Perhaps I should have stuck with my initial understanding of clairvoyance in the first place : these people often think that they're genuinely gifted in all matters spiritual and some of them do seem to have a unique ability to gather information about their clients through gestures, vocal tones and the like, but when all is said and done noone has ever successfully proven that any truly clairvoyant ability exists, let alone that an afterlife (as portrayed in the mainstream religions) is anything but a manifestation of humanity's inability to accept its own mortality.

The following statement has been published on the Arctic Monkey's official website :

We are sad to tell everyone that Andy is no longer with the band.

Nick O’Malley, who stood in for Andy while he was absent from the recent tour of North America, shall carry on playing bass for the remaining shows this summer.

We have been mates with Andy for a long time and have been through some amazing things together that no one can take away. We all wish Andy the very best.

So, despite their massive popularity and an upcoming tour of North America, the bass player for the band has decided to quit for good. At the end of last month the band announced that Andy Nicholson was suffering from health problems so perhaps his decision to quit the band is somehow related to that?




The Arctic Monkeys are perhaps the single reason why the MySpace website's popularity exploded over the past 12 months or so. As opposed to most other successful bands, their following grew as a result of posting their music and other muses onto this webspace provided free of charge. And their MySpace is still live : you can see it here.

The site-wide search engine on the FinishMySong website has had to be removed for technical reasons. We hope to reinstate it at some point in the near future but in the meantime we apologise for any inconvenience caused.

This weekend I took a trip down to London with a friend I graduated with back in 2001. We were heading to Twickenham to catch up with the Farewell I Tour given by the legendary American soft-rock band, The Eagles. And marvelous it was too...

As my comrade pointed out, not many bands can be up for nearly three hours (with a 10 min break in the middle) and play one sing-a-long hit after another. The audience was, admittedly, closer to the middle-age bracket than either of us are, but we still knew the vast majority of the songs the band played, and knew them well enough to join in!



What was most striking, though, was that after 35 years of playing some of these songs, The Eagles still manage to make them sound fresh and alive. This is partly because the performance they gave was so incredibly polished : listening to their opening number Take it Easy, you could quite honestly have thought that the PA system was broadcasting the version this band recorded back in the 70's, if it weren't for the evidence of the eye. Equally, their rendition of the classic Hotel California was supremely executed with those great harmonies The Eagles do so well, guitar solos pulled off to perfection with flawless pitch bends and glissandos, along with lyrics that make the spine tingle as much today as when they were written. A truly fantastic atmosphere was conjured and sustained throughout the concert.



To be fair, though, The Eagles did have some help : they were supported by another great country / rock outfit, The Dixie Chicks. These three outstanding musicians wowed the crowd with an array of wonderfully performed songs about love and heartbreak, travel and home. I'd never really heard much of their music before but I'll certainly be going out to get some of their CD's now - they again managed to pull off some technically difficult solos (on banjo & violin this time) and very close 3-part harmonies in a totally squeaky-clean fashion... really polished to perfection. I believe they have a single out at the moment called Not Ready to Make Nice and it's one of those tunes that I haven't been able to get out of my head since I heard it for the first time on Saturday!!



And, as if all this wasn't enough, I think there were one or two lessons to be learned from watching these bands do their stuff: in The First Few I tend to play piano but have a few songs on acoustic guitar and two on bass. And these instrument swaps have been something that the band has struggled with over the years.. it just seemed easier and less fussy somehow for us all to stay on a single instrument throughout any given show. But, there were The Dixie Chicks swapping instruments literally for every new song from beginning to the end of the performance. Admittedly, they did have roadies to do the work for them (and a large group of musicians playing behind them) but the principle still stands that there's no reason for everyone to stick to one instrument as long as the venue allows for your space and input requirements. Equally, The Eagles passed certain tasks around the band, including the lead vocals - I believe every member of the band got to sing at least one song as the main vocalist at some point in the set and, once again, this is something that we in The First Few have been trying to avoid. I'll certainly be taking these points back to the band.

The Eagles Farewell I Tour continues with a few more dates in the UK in the coming days, including appearing in Machester very soon. It's well worth a look.

Last week I did a post about pet-hates when it comes to popular song lyrics, some of which didn't make much sense and others that just spouted rubbish, such as the Natasha Beddingfield lyric I cited there. As an extension to that blog, I wanted to say something about lyrics written by people who have English as a second language, where the sentiments of the song get across fine but there's something in the way that they're expressed that just doesn't quite work when heard by a native English speaker.

There are many good examples of this in the lyrical content of Shakira's chart hits over the past couple of years, not least one of her most recent ones, Don't Bother :




Another more obvious example is in the song that came after Don't Bother, Hips Don't Lie - a collaboration with Wyclef Jean. Here the main hook of the song is "I'm on tonight / you know my hips don't lie and I'm starting to feel you, boy.." Now, I'm not sure whether the same slang is used in the United States of America but in British English the phrase "I'm on" suggests that the speaker is telling us that she's menstruating, which I presume is not the sentiment that Shakira hoped to convey in this lyric!! This case could just be a dialect issue, but you'd think that someone would have thought about this before releasing the song for mass consumption.

Ah well, I actually like both songs very much and think personally that Shakira has a great voice along with a wonderfully fiery attitude. But these little slip-ups do kinda bug me when I hear them!

Well, whilst most people across the country sat poised at their television sets or with the lads down the pub watching England's progress in the World Cup, I spend this evening at the theatre watching the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof.

And, to be honest, I don't think I altogether got the raw end of the deal. You see, I know this show well : back in 1998 I spent a week performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with an amateur group from the Bradford based theatre school, Stage 84. I played piano for all the rehearsals leading up to the outing in Edinburgh and in the band throughout that week and the following week's run at Bingley Art Centre, just a few miles up the road from Bradford.

So, it was funny getting reacquainted with a show that I got to know back-to-front just 8 years ago and have barely heard at all since (perhaps apart from a memorable rendition of If I Were a Rich Man by one of my uni friends after a few too many beers!!) And this production by LIDOS wasn't bad at all - there were some really good performances, not least by the lead who played Tevye, a father of 5 girls whose struggle between modernity and the comfort of his traditional heritage is centre stage throughout the play. If I'm honest, the orchestral accompaniment was often understated, though, and this led to the rhythmic drive of some of the faster numbers falling apart. But, it's only a slight criticism for an amateur production that I found really very entertaining - I'd forgotten many of the very witty lines written into the script aswell!

Altogether a great evening at a wonderful little venue hidden away behind Leeds' Centenary Square.


Haim Topol playing Tevye in the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof


Fiddler on the Roof is showing for another two nights, until Saturday 15th June at The Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds City Centre.

It's been a funny week for me so far - for some time I've been dissatisfied with the way my website was presented so I've spent what has seemed like 5 days solid working on improvements. A bit worrying really: the other night I got in bed to go to sleep and had so many ideas swimming round my head about it that I actually got back up, switched my computer back on and kept working on amendments to it for another hour before I could relax enough to drift off!!

But I think the things are pretty much in shape now. Today I've reorganised the front page so that the structure of the website is clearer and so that it's easier for first-time-visitors to find things. This was partly prompted by a friend's suggestion that the old front page wasn't really working and partly because I think it's easy for other bits of the site to get lost if they're just sitting in a menu somewhere that might not even get looked at by a visitor. Anyway, with any luck, everyone who comes to the site will find it more user-friendly and benefit from the newest sections like the forum.

So, hopefully, tomorrow I'll be able to get concentrating on music again : it is, after all, the reason why all this technology was put in place in the first instance.

Maybe I’m just a party-pooper but I am really starting to think that it’s time FIFA dispensed with the tradition of playing each team’s national anthem at the beginning of the World Cup games. As far as England is concerned, it doesn’t make any sense in any case : the dubiously titled God Save Our Gracious Queen is the national anthem for the United Kingdom rather than for England itself. Having said that, if we will insist on having 4 separate teams for one country we can expect these confusing consequences! I guess it’s just lucky that none of the other three got through to the main tournament.

And today’s performance has been very funny – the match that is currently playing between South Korea and Togo started with the organisers playing the South Korean anthem twice. Only toward the second playing did someone notice the cock-up… there was an almost audible ‘zip’ as the needle was pulled away from the record and some poor German official was charged with finding the right recording for Togo’s anthem. Hasten to add, the players on the Togo side didn’t look too chuffed with the situation, as if they haven’t had enough problems already with their entry into the World Cup competition!!

You may have noticed from the menu items in the header and footer of the FinishMySong website that I've been doing a lot of work on it over this weekend. For a start, I've reorganised the filing structure so that it's more user friendly and changed most of the pages to PHP files so that I can more easily modify sections of the site.

As part of the expansion, today I launched the brand new FMS Forum - designed as a place where musicians can discuss issues of the day as well as promote their gigs, services and advertise music gear free of charge. Obviously, it being only a couple of hours old, the forum is currently entirely empty but it is linked from every other page on the finishmysong site and I will be getting this particular part of the site listed on search engines shortly, so I suppose it's only a matter of time before people take advantage of the free promotion space. Click on the screenshot below for a sneak preview and do let me know if you think there's anything obvious I've missed or need to change... I'm getting cabin fever staring at my computer screen half the day!!!

I'm no great football fan but I've got to admit to having gotten already captivated by World Cup fever... I've watched four of the games so far - probably more football matches than I would usually watch in the average year!!

I'm not going to comment on the matches or England's progress because, frankly, what I know about sport could be written on the back of a postage stamp.. twice. But I was interested to find out that, even before the competition got started, there was controversy over the theme music that the BBC has chosen to use for it's television coverage of the matches :

The piece, originally by G. F. Handel but arranged by Carl Davis, is part of a work that celebrates the life of the Duke of Cumberland, who led government forces to victory against the Jacobites at Culloden. So, to say that some people in Scotland aren't too happy having to hear this melody each time they turn on Match of the Day is something of an understatement : read The Scotsman's article on this subject by clicking here. If for some reason you've been living in a cave for the past few days and the programme has eluded you, you can listen to the piece by clicking here.


Personally, I don't know what all the fuss is about - they presumably chose a piece by Handel because the composer is German born but spent much of his life in England. And, in any case, in my eyes no world cup tv theme will ever be as good as the one ITV used during Mexico 86 : Aztec Gold by Silsoe. You can listen to this tune by clicking on the mascot of that tournament, 'Pique', below :

Two sections of my website are additionally published as RSS feeds for your content managed applications / homepages. These are the FinishMySong Blog and the Pictures & Poetry Section. Details of the feed URLs are below, along with a Google button that automatically allows you add add these feeds to your Google Homepage or Taskbar :

FinishMySong Blog
http://www.finishmysong.com/blog/atom.xml


FMS Pictures & Poetry
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During a trip to Bradford city centre today I stopped in at a friend's workplace, the Tourist Information Centre in Centenary Square. They're running an exhibition there at the moment that's trying to give out the message to tourists that Bradford has so much to offer it can't all be taken in in a single day, encouraging them to spend more of their time and money in the region.




As part of the exhibition, there is a small cinema screen that has four videos available to view about Bradford and the surrounding area: it's history and culture. I've got to admit that, even as a born and bred Bradfordian, I was blown away by most of what I saw - it was really the first time I've watched anything on the screen that's shown this city, nestled in the 'grim' North of England, in a properly positive light. It reminded me of how important Bradford once was - truly a city on the global map, producing goods of all kinds for a worldwide market. The films also touched on the many groups of people from different geographic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds that this region has welcomed over it's history, and it attempted to explain, albeit briefly, the reasons for the ever changing population here.

Living in Bradford, I get used to hearing people speaking about the place as a run-down, dirty and dangerous city that's not worth shopping in, let alone visiting for any other recreational reason. I think the films currently showing at the Tourist Information Centre, though, would perhaps convince some of the population who hold this view that Bradford is actually a truly magnificent city with a wealth of history and a bright, positive and wonderfully multi-cultural future, if only we Bradfordians will embrace it and see it through.

One of the most pleasing aspect of the films was Joolz Denby's contribution : a poem simply titled Bradford. It is certainly worth a read so I am going to republish it here (if you want to find out more about Joolz or read more of her work you can visit her website by clicking here) :


The wind blows hard today, across the city
lying crouched in its deep-sided valley.
The air is laced with the smell of clean stone
and the dusty purple heather that drapes
across the far horizon like a dropped scarf.
If I stop and listen I can almost hear,
faintly, like the faded thread of a song from an older age,
the cries of foxes that dance
in the moorland coverts and the blurred whirring
of kestrels riding the soaring thermals.

I walk over the crest of the hill and start down into Town,
past the intricate raggle of little shops that
embroider the road side and spill their
treasures onto to the pavements.
All the world is here, laid out in patchworks
of drenched and brilliant colour;
dazzling pyramids of oranges from Morocco
like clotted sun, topiary broccoli, dark
green flounced cabbages and rich spinach,
feathery plumes of coriander and
gleaming scarlet apples bursting with temptation.
We want for nothing - watermelon, tender papaya,
smooth, languorous mangoes and luminous persimmons;
sometimes there are figs, their smart suede skins
the colour of bruises hiding gritty red flesh
so sweet, it tastes like the perfumed breath of angels.
I eat them with good Greek bread,
baked by serious Ukrainian men, craftsmen,
and I smile, thinking, in this town, we can eat like
princes for a pauper’s fee.

I fill my bag with fruit and wander on,
window-shopping, my eye caught by the fabric shops
that burst with rolls and bolts of lace, and lamé
metallic and dangerous as deep water,
with satin, crepe and polyester
crusted with sequins, bullion and tiny mirrors,
foil stamped, hologrammed and photo-printed,
fabric patterned in every possible way;
striped and checked, hazy with impossible flowers,
stark with calligraphic motifs repeating and repeating
unknown phrases in an unknown tongue.

Brilliant as some dead caliph’s treasure
the windows blaze with textile gems;
sapphire and emerald; ruby, heavy turquoise
and white that glimmers with the blue sheen of
Chomolungma’s distant snows.
One window is all pinks; from summer’s dusky rose
through bubblegum, Shocking to a
shell pink so faint it’s hardly breathing.
And best of all, so beautiful it makes me sigh,
a half unrolled length of pure, gleaming
silk that fades from blood red to the pink
of a desert sunset and back again.

But I walk on, down into the valley and the
secret stone puzzle that’s the City.
Above me far overhead, wind-driven clouds unfurl
like great tattered banners, whipping through the blue
like flying prayers; they twist and roil like a time-lapse film,
cinematic, impossible and always with us in
this place so dominated by vast, untameable skies.

Stark against the huge backdrop of the clouds stand
the monumental sandstone buildings,
the Wool Barons proud and unflinching legacy,
palaces of trade that couldn’t be built now,
will never be built again by modern hands
no longer trained to patience and the skills
that turned the primeval bones of earth into carvings
as dense and intricate as nature herself.

Glancing up I see faces, plants and creatures made from stone
decorating every cornice, edge and buttress;
petrified sailing ships in full rig and portraits of
adamantine queens in medallions set on the
slab-sides of crumbling, forgotten towers.
Camels stride past pyramids cut out of stone by
men who would never see such things for themselves.
In the hundred niches that pock the great cliff of city hall
blind saints and craggy kings gaze into nothing
bound by masonry ropes and sandstone swags of ivy.
On other walls, griffins perch on acanthus twists
and arabesques, curlicues and cutwork
so deep you can stick your fingers in it
foam, twine and snake up spires that
reach greedily for the golden light that daily
turns their crushed crystals to living amber
for a few brief moments of glory . . .

I go to the Wool Exchange, that Temple to
the trade that made the city famous;
high up under the canopy of its arching,
ribbed roof that vaults to a ridge
like a mediaeval galleon upturned,
and beached on a city street,
painted wooden archangels crowned in antique gold pray
with knotted, steepled hands.
Once they were mute witnesses to the swirl and play of money
on the trading floor beneath them,
now the city seraphim watch ordinary people
buying books and drinking coffee;
but they don’t mind - they stretch their stiff, gilded wings
over everyone, young and old, and we’re all in their charge.

And I sit down for a minute, amongst the books
and think of the town, stretching out and away
from here; dark and bright, beautiful and ugly,
the high-sided wind-scoured canyons of the deserted mills
telling their silent stories of what has been and what will be;
the deaths, the births, the fighting and the love,
all the humanity of it, gathered from every place in the world,
and all of us, everything, under the infinite night-sky now,
a silver twist of crescent moon fragile as a girl’s first earring
visible even over the streetlights sodium glare,
and I think - this is where we live, in this stone maze,
in this northern city, under the terrible stars, and we belong.

- Copyright for this poem is owned by Joolz Denby, 2002

You may have noticed that the blog posting has been a bit intermittent over the last couple of days. To be fair, it's not been for lack of trying. The good people at Blogger, a Google owned company offering free blogging software that I use to submit these entries to my page, have been having a lot of problems with their system.

Yesterday, I could barely get the site to display their entry page, let alone log on and publish anything to my website. Running a quick search on Google, I notice that I am not the only one to be experiencing these difficulties... half of North America seemed to be going off on one about how appalling the service is, considering that it's run by the same people who provide arguably the world's fastest and most reliable search engine.

So, I might be on the lookout to replace Blogger with something else if this continues. There is blogging software available that you can download to the server of your hosting company that is apparently just as good and as flexible but this requires the use of a MySQL database, and I have plans for the 1 available one that I have on my package!! There's also the minor problem of getting all the current blogs over... ah well, I suppose I'll see how Blogger performs for now!

I've been listening again to the famous John Lennon interview that the ex-Beatle gave to his friend and colleague, Jann S. Wenner, back in 1970, and in which he famously described himself as a "genius". Certainly, this part of the interview is often cited as evidence of Lennon's arrogance and unashamed self-adoration and it was the section of the over 3 hours of tape that seemed to be quoted endlessly when just a few months ago the BBC released a full recording and transcription of the interview.

Personally, I get a sense of something else entirely when I listen to John's thick scouse accent being transmitted from 35 years in the past. He comes across to me as childishly honest - truthful even to the point where he says things that he surely knew would make him sound like an arrogant, artistic and musical snob. I liken it to the way a very young child behaves when confronted with a difficult question : whatever is available to that child's mind and perceived as relevant comes pouring right out, without any real sense of self-consciousness or doubt. Just a statement of the facts as they're thought and felt.

John's tone is often melodic - his voice pitches in huge sweeps up and down as he tries to explain to Wenner why and how it is that he feels and thinks whatever he's saying. He doesn't sound to be trying to convince as much as simply trying to explain and allow Wenner and, ultimately, we the listener (technically, the reader, as this was an interview for a magazine article) to understand where it is he's coming from, even if we don't really agree with many of the sentiments.




A couple of quotes from the interview :

"Because we were famous, we were supposed to have people.. sort of epileptics.. ya' know, whatever they are, in our dressing room all the time, ya' know. Cause we were supposed to be sort of GOOD, ya' know.."

" I always knew Dylan was New York and I always sort of wished I'd been there for the experience that Bob got, ya' know, from living round here."

"Manoeuvring is what it is. Let's not be coy about it : it's a deliberate and thought-out manoeuvre of how to get a situation how we want it. That's what life's about, isn't it? ..Is it not?!"


--


If you have iTunes and / or an iPod you can listen to the full John Lennon & Yoko Ono interview, conducted by Jann S. Wenner in 1970. In the 'Advanced' menu, choose 'Subscribe to PodCast...' and copy and paste this url into the text box :

http://podcast.rbn.com/rstone/rstone/rss/JohnLennon-TheRollingStoneInterview.xml

Last night I met up with a friend from my last job who's been off travelling in Asia for months. She was laughing saying that she is surprised I'm not dead yet with the amount I stress out about this and that! And, to be fair, she is right in a way : I'm not an out-and-out stress-head, but I do let little things get on my nerves more than I should!!



But, I think we all hear certain songs and get cross cause the lyrics don't make sense or are just plain wrong. Well, here's a few of the ones that niggle at me every time I hear them :


Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
Dreams by Fleetwood Mac


And I'll be happy for you
If you can be happy for me
Circles and triangles
And now we're hanging out with your new girlfriend
Cool by Gwen Stefani


Read some Byron, Shelley and Keats
Recited it over a hip-hop beat
I'm having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines
....
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
There's no other way
To better say
I love you, I love you...
These Words by Natasha Beddingfield


It's like rain on your wedding day
It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice you just didn't take
...
Isn't it ironic, don't