Notting Hill Diary

In a “You couldn’t make it up” moment, the forthcoming 2008 Notting Hill Carnival is scheduled to have a 2012 theme. It seems it is to be called “Welcoming the World” and “has been chosen to reflect the multicultural nature of visitors to the Olympics”.

Now I’m all for a promotional idea to boost the appeal of Carnival, but a) isn’t that what Carnival has always been about anyway and b) given that 2012 is only four years away, couldn’t we just wait till then? I mean it was all very exciting back in, say, the 60’s predicting that by the year 2000 we’d have cars hovering 3 metres above ground (still waiting) and miniature communication video devices (sort of true, but no one really uses them for that), but predicting what the future holds four years hence seems more than a little banal.

So I’m happy to invite comment. Just how much to you think the world will change during the next four years?

When Madonna appeared on Jonathan Ross¹ in one of the best interviews I’ve seen him do, she was trying to prove her credentials as a born again Brit by claming that she liked nothing more than to while away a few pleasant hours in a lovely old English pub². Thinking he was calling her bluff. He asked her what her favourite bitter³ was. “I’m quite partial to a pint of Timothy Taylor” came the reply. Wossy⁴ thought she had just made something up to save face, but the next day a newspaper found out that Timothy Taylor did indeed exist and was made by a small brewery in West Yorkshire. Subsequently a few pubs here in the South East have started to stock it and I’ve found that I have something in common with Mrs Richie, I like the stuff too.

This evening Ray and I must have been having some kind of argument (we can’t remember, the Timmy Taylor has kicked in in between) because she ran off round to the North Pole, one of our locals. The argument (and remember we’re not really sure if there was one) can’t have been that serious because she called 5 minutes later to tell me that the North Pole now sells TT.

Ray is gregarious almost to a fault. When I arrived at the pub she was already entertaining one of the locals, Dave, who in turn was entertaining her with a virtuosic display of cockney rhyming slang⁵. Now strictly speaking, because I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, I’m a cockney, but my parents hammered out any trace of a local dialect when I was young by sending me to elocution lessons. That’s right, I’m a Londoner born and bred, but I cannot do a London accent! Nonetheless I managed to teach him “It’s all gone Pete Tong”⁶.

Dave, it turns out, is a builder/decorator who works with other builders/decorators on rather high end projects some as the National Galery and Very Rich People’s Homes. He explained to us (in ever shortening loops, the more he had to drink) that he’s “not cheap, but we’ll give you the date that we’ll turn up and we’ll be there on that day. We’ll give you a schedule and we’ll stick to it and we’ll give you a quote and that’s the price you’ll pay”. For some reason we believe him, so we explain what it is that we’re trying to do and arrange to have him round to take a look. He did, after all, paint a large mural at the end of a cul-de-sac just near the North Pole.

Notes for non UK readers

¹ Jonathon Ross is a popular TV presenter with his own chat show, known for being hilarious and making his interviewees look good at the same time.
² I can confirm that this is (sort of) true. When she and Guy were living in Holland Park, she apparently used to frequent a pub called the Windsor Castle, notable for two VERY low doorways (one is about 4 feet high). A friend of mine was in there once and noticed her in the corner. When she got up to leave about half the pub got up with her, because they were all her security guards.
³ Bitter is what the rest of the world thinks of as “warm, flat beer”. An acquired taste usually guaranteed to turn the stomachs of non Brits, along with Marmite. Strangely Ray has acquired it since she’s been here.
⁴ Mr Ross makes a feature of the fact that he can’t pronounce his “R”s. A musician friend of mine is terrified of being interviewed by him because he goes out under the name “Ranking Roger”.
⁵ Cockney slang involves finding a (usually 2 or 3 word) phrase whose last word rhymes with the word you actually want to say, then sometimes only saying the first word of the phrase. So “look” becomes “butcher’s hook”, which is usually reduced to “butcher’s”, as in “Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s”.
⁶ Pete Tong is a DJ specialising in dance music and his name, when used in the phrase “It’s all gone Pete Tong”, means “wrong”. It’s very modern slang, probably only about 10 years old, so it might not count.
⁷ (Yes I know there isn’t really a ⁷, this is completely gratuitous). Isn’t it amazing how quickly the singer James Blunt’s name became rhyming slang?

Never being one to indulge in Schadenfreude, I can’t find it within myself laugh at David Cameron’s misfortune at having his bike stolen from outside Tescos on Portobello Road.

Whatever your political leanings you have to admit that DC seems like a nice guy and in any case nobody deserves to lose their bike like that, especially someone who champions the cyclist’s rights to jump red lights and treat one way signs as a suggestion.

Nonetheless I have to ask, who in their right on mind thinks it’s safe to leave your bike anywhere on Portobello Road, however securely locked?

Now personally I believe that you should be able to leave your cycle unlocked and leaning up against a wall anywhere you damn please without fear of it disappearing, but then I’m somewhat of a naive idealist in that way. As apparently is Mr Cameron. According to reports, he’d “secured” it to nothing more substantial than a bollard, over which the lock was easily lifted.

If I’m in the market tomorrow I’ll try to find the offending bollard. Meanwhile here’s a picture of the scene of the crime.

Update: Mr Cameron’s bike has been found, minus a wheel, by the Sunday Mirror, apparently with the help of Ernest Theopole, “Local community elder”. Oddly enough the one time I had my bike stolen, not a single national paper came to my aid.

Almost 50 years on since the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the 1958 Remembered Festival aims to remind people of the area how far we have come since those days of racism and deprivation.

Now home to as many as forty (and counting) different nationalities, the festival is a 10 month long celebration that both commemorates the riots and celebrates today’s positive community relations.

A series of events over 7 nights from Friday July 25 to Thursday July 31 are taking place at the Inn on the Green, featuring bands, speakers and other entertainment.

Inn on the Green, 3-5 Thorpe Close, under the Westway near Ladbroke Grove Station

An upshot of bumping into Gaz last week was that he told us the theme for Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues sound system at Carnival is Jules Vernes’ (apostrophe usage - discuss) Around the World in 80 Days and as luck would have it we were planning on pushing the boundaries of our Dickensian thing to include Jules Verne as well. I mentioned this to Gaz, who said we should play on his stage because we’ll fit in perfectly. Well - apart from the fact that we don’t play ska.

In other news, we’re off to play in Moscow in October. More details later, but more to the point, the story of the kitchen renovation will continue soon. Probably.

We set out with the best of intentions
Last Friday we were both very tired so we decided to stay in, having already had a couple of unscheduled late ones that week.

We went to Sainsburys to pick up a couple of ingredients for dinner. That was mistake number one. Sainsburys Ladbroke Grove is West London’s Rock & Roll supermarket on account of the number of musicians who live
around Notting Hill. Now some of the more successful musicians make a play of only buying organic produce from the we-saw-you-coming “Traditional” butchers and grocers in Holland Park, but between you and me you can spot nearly all of them at some time or other pushing a shopping cart around Sainsburys.

Gaz Mayall is a real gent

One man who is very successful, but not at all embarrassed to be seen in Sainsburys is Gaz Mayal. Gaz runs the longest running club night in London, Gaz’s Rockin Blues, and is also leader of the brilliant Trojans ska band. We ran into him in the vegetable aisle. Gaz is one of those people familiar to people living in the Notting Hill area, but I only got to know him better when Ray & I look a random trip to Tregaron, a small village in Wales, to
see the Trojans place in a hotel bar last December.

No we are NOT going to the Paradise bar tonight!
As it happens I wanted to talk to him anyway because they do a couple of Russian songs in their set and I thought it would be good if they had a balalaika, one of which I’ve recently acquired. He was up for the idea (I thought he would be because he gets all sorts of people to join in. My favourite so far being a bagpipe player.). He asked what we were
doing that evening and we explained that despite having been invited to go to the Paradise on Kensal Rise where a few bands were playing and he was DJing, we were having a quiet night in.

You’re a dangerous man Gaz Mayall!But only because he’s so disarmingly charming in the first place.

He asked if we ‘d pop back to his place “on the way home”because he had “a few bottles of mead”. I think it might be first time anyone’s asked me that. Once there, we ended up staying for dinner (Gaz is an excellent cook) and by the time we finished it was time for him to DJ so were - er - accompanied him. Suffice to say I got bed about 4am and Ray
came home some time later.

or: Confessions of an embarrassed former slightly-less-than-white SEOer

I’ve just installed the DoFollow plugin to get rid of those pesky nofollow attributes that WordPress adds to your blog by default.

Why? Well because the nofollow atribute contributes close to nothing to the fight against blogspam once you have decent antispam plugins in place such as the beautifully named Akismet and does everything to deter genuine comment. You see, if you have something valid to say about an article I post on my blog, good or bad, I believe you should be allowed a little link love in return if that’s what you want.

Why doesn’t the nofollow attribute help in the fight against blogspam? Well I’ll come clean. Much to my embarrassment, a few years back I was tempted by a combination of flattery and promises of a huge payday-oneday into a situation where my coding skills were momentarily used by the forces of evil. A seemingly charming and straightforward couple of naredowells hooked me in on a promise of a bright new future, but soon had me scraping the seedy underbelly of the Internet by writing hastily concocted perl scripts that used a whole heap of LWP modules to peak and poke the soft nether regions of poorly secured websites.

Their argument that we were actually helping out sysadmins by pointing out their systems’ insecurities sounded to me like a gunman explaining to his helpless victim that he was merely pointing out how poorly constructed human flesh was. Did I mention how sorry I am at this few months of madness that I both endured and, by implication, endorsed?

Anyway, the lesson learned was that the heartlessness of these people was nothing compared to the heartlessness of the spambots that they commissioned. Spambots could give two hoots whether your blog uses the nofollow tag or not. They’re still going to spam you on the offchance that you don’t because it costs close to nothing to do so. The only real defence is actual spam protection in place such as Akismet, which so far, for me, has been 100% accurate.

So feel free to comment on anything I write. If it looks like spam my various antispam plugins will spot them and not even bother me and if it doesn’t, I’ll be the judge (and a fairly liberal one at that).

And please allow this good (very much former) poacher turned game keeper to apologise once again. In my mitigation I’m pretty sure that the coercive slime that tempted me into the arena of dodgy SEO were so incompetent that my efforts fell on infertile ground.

I certainly hope so.

Actually “The Music Industry As We Know It” arguably died the best part of a decade back. The opportunities for vast wealth out of all proportion to the work input may now be limited, but my feeling is that the whole process has become more democratic. It is now not feasible for studios to charge the vast rates of the 80s because we can all (yes, that includes you, even if you have not a musical bone in your body) make a reasonable sounding recording on our home computers and we can all get our music heard over the Internet.

Finally, by being so slow off the mark by burying their heads in the sand, Record companies have allowed the genie of downloads to emerge from the bottle and no amount of bleating by them will put him back in any more than toothpaste can be squeezed back into a tube.

The words “King Canute” spring to mind.

Here’s my take on how it used to be:

1. Band records demos of songs they’ve spent their life writing and creates a buzz
2. Record company throws money at them
3. Band records hideously overproduced versions of demos with major producer in stupidly expensive studios
4. Record company/management etc sends them on tour for months (and record is a hit or not. Funnily enough it’s not relevant to the plot here).
5. By now band has bought lots of expensive equipment without which their life has previously seemed incomplete and record company tells them it’s time to write and record their second album. Despite having recorded the basics of their first one in a leaky shed or a bedroom, now they know they’ve hit the big time and settle down to write the whole album from scratch in a “proper” studio costing £1,500 a day. Of course what they come up with has ten times the polish and none of he guts of the first album, not that they recognise this till the record is released several months later. To compound their problems, since writing their first album all they’ve spent their lives doing is recording and touring, so guess what the subject matter of the second album is?
6. Despite massive promotion, sales of second album disappoint, so band resolves to go “back to basics”, which means writing and recording an album in a style they claim always to have loved. Unaccountably that usually means blues or country or somesuch.
7. Band is never heard from again. One member becomes an A&R man for the record company to which they were signed (and thus the cycle of abuse continues). After a period of poverty, (n-1) members of the former band sue the nth member claiming songwriting credits. Approximately 2 decades later, band “reforms” with 2 or more original members and tours to audiences who should know better by their age, playing tired old songs to rapturous applause. The gigs are roaring successes apart from an ill judged 15 or 20 minutes which are preceded by the dreaded words “We’re going to play a few songs from our new album now”.

… long live music

Over the weekend Stephen Webster agreed to manage Rotten hill Gang. Yesterday Gary and I had a brief meeting with him and told him that the reason we wanted him as our manager was precisely that he isn’t in the music industry. The music industry as we know it, unless you happen to be Radiohead, is pretty much dead and everyone’s scrabbling around looking for new ways to make a living out of this thing called music. We were briefly involved with a major manager within the industry. It didn’t lead anywhere, but as Stephen said, “Band signs to mainstream music manager” isn’t news. “Band to be managed by rock ‘n’ roll jeweller” is.

A few years back when P2P first became the new way to get your music, Davo (our one time roadie and full time Good Guy¹) asked me what I thought of Napster². I replied that while I was an obvious nett loser on the deal (to wit - I’ll sell less records), I thought it was for the best on balance, because it meant that bands might actually have to learn to put on a performance again and that the few decades during which musicians could amass a quantity of money completely out of proportion to any work that they’d put in would be seen as a blip on the musical map.

The true answer to the question, of course, lies somewhere between that and the status quo (sic). Artists continue to benefit from sales, but to a lesser degree and I maintain that the need to play live again to earn your keep has been beneficial overall³.

¹Davo still crews a bit as far as I know, largely for Manic Street Preachers and The Verve, but he is a brilliant musician in his own right with his band Johnny Boy. Here he is at the last Carbon Casino playing with James Dean Bradfield (and Pete Wiley as I recall, out of shot).

²Personally I download from P2P type networks either to check that the record I’m about to buy is the one I think it is, or because I can’t be bothered to trawl through all my vinyl.

³I met a Russian pop star once who told me that it’s always been the case that in Russia they made no money on records, but only released them to draw people to gigs.