Aurist on Tom Ravenscroft show!

Massive props to BBC 6 Music's Tom Ravenscroft for being, as far as we know, the first person to play anything from Aurist's Not Here on the radio. "Dekindling" was aired as the fifth track in his show from Friday, May 20, alongside the likes of Jehst, Danger Mouse, James Pants and Eno & Byrne. Tom says it's "charming", and a listener agrees, adding that the experience is "like filtering gin gently over amplified rocks". We like to think so!

i don't know how Tom feels about comparisons to his dad, which surely get thrown around all the time, but i hope he wouldn't me saying he definitely has the same spirit in him.

Bonus round: later on in the show there's also a new track from Crewdson, who you may remember produced a couple of tracks on the first 30KB record ("Care Less" and "Crewd Sons (Ghost in the Machine)"), as well as being an ace solo electronic producer in his own right. i am looking forward to a day soon when all radio playlists comprise cool people i've worked with.

Check out the show in question on iPlayer (3 days remaining) or, if you're tardy or a podcast fan, stream/download here or download here.

"Fisting for Compliments", 24th February 2005

Another old rediscovered Fisting for Compliments shows: 3 of 6 (third season 1 FM broadcast).

Of note during this episode: The disaster show! Anyone involved with any sort of broadcasting must necessarily have a disaster show, and this was ours. Of the two CDs we prepared to play, one completely failed to work (along with the studio telephone; and one of the mics started to go towards the end as well), meaning half the show had to be replaced with "improv filler", basically consisting of us playing discs from previous shows and whatever else we had in our bags at the time. Furthermore, Lach appears to entirely forget we're due to do a show, meaning the playlist choices are overwhelmingly mine. Nic Endo becomes maybe the hardest thing broadcast to the greater Glasgow area all year. i clangingly misidentify Pat Metheny as a woman (sorry Pat!)

Also on this day: Nothing much of any interest, really.

Fisting for Compliments 24/02/2005
87.7 FM or http://www.subcity.org

The Wildhearts – "Junkenstein"

Cursive – "Art Is Hard" (truncated by eye-opening noise)
My Robot Friend – "I Am the Robot"

*** THE IRON FIST ***
Nic Endo – "White Heat"

Jon Poole – "Flower Punk"
Young Marble Giants – "Eating Noddemix"

Deerhoof – "Holy Night Fever"
The Source feat. Candi Staton – "You Got the Love (Now Voyager radio edit)"

Steve Reich – "Europe: During the War (movement 2)" (from Different Trains)

Estradasphere – "Mekapses Yitonisa"
Giddy Motors – "Hit Car"

Converge – "Last Light"

Rocket from the Crypt – "Used"

Red: My picks
Blue: Lach's picks

[LISTEN/DOWNLOAD]

Previously: [10th February]|[24th February]

"Fisting for Compliments", 17th February 2005

The second in a series of six episodes of my old radio show Fisting for Compliments, and indeed the second time we transmitted to a large part of the Glasgow area on a real-life FM frequency.

Of note during this episode: more weird preamble from "Family Affair"'s odd competition feature; our improv cover of "Hey Joe"; a clean version of "Fuck the Border" by Propagandhi which, on reflection, kind of removes the point a little; the radio debut of Desert Island Dicks; me attempting to read the entire playlist phonetically backwards and misidentifying Jersey's WFMU as a New York station; a tantalising glimpse of Hyper Kinako; more broken equipment and on-air bickering and rubbish singing and unprofessionalism.

Also on this day: President George W. Bush names John Negroponte as the first national intelligence director; British Nuclear Fuels appear to lose enough plutonium to make seven nuclear bombs; the deaths of Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy and Argentinian footballer Omar Sívori.

Fisting for Compliments 17/02/2005

87.7 FM or http://www.subcity.org

Zombina and the Skeletones – "Leave My Brain Alone"
Propagandhi – "Fuck the Border" (bowdlerised)

The Temple City Kazoo Orchestra – "Kazooed on Klassics"
Desert Island Dicks – "Bitches Brew"

Mission of Burma – "Secrets"
Liars – "There's Always Room on the Broom"

Pico – "Chard"
Ani DiFranco – "Fuel"

Jefferson Airplane – "Volunteers"
Beck – "Steve Threw Up"
TV on the Radio – "Satellite"

Bingo Gazingo – "Every Day I Leave Ten Dollars on the Table"
Twin Zero – "Monolith Parts 1 & 2"

Butthole Surfers – "Something"

Red: My picks
Blue: Lach's picks
Purple: Mutual pick
Green: Can't remember who chose this one

[LISTEN/DOWNLOAD]
Previously: [10th February]

"Fisting for Compliments", 10th February 2005

The first Fisting for Compliments show from the batch of six i recently found on my hard drive. This is from the first season so the shows are one hour (and as usual, we lose time at the beginning because the show before us, Family Affair, lovely as they were, were always over-running into ours.) The luscious "Curlylocks" by Baby Fox, closing the show, is also harshly truncated.

The references to FM and the question of whether people on the South side own radios seems to indicate that this is one of the four weeks of each year we were unleashed across Glasgow on a real-life FM frequency (edit: the end of the show confirms this.)

Also of note in this episode: the male newsreader's hilarious intonation of the phrase "outpost of tyranny" and his self-disgusted sigh after fluffing the line "a new police bill"; Child Pornography getting played because the inclusion of their name in a list of bands on our promotional poster got all the posters taken down; a brief argument over which Crimea song is more epic; subtle Simpsons reference; not-quite-successful Day Today reference; an abortive semi-improv feature we should have done more often; pseudo-mania; some proper inane rambling and saying "er" way too much from me.

Also on this day: North Korea publicly announces for the first time that it has nuclear weapons, which it claims to need as defence against an increasingly hostile United States; Arthur Miller dies from heart failure, aged 89.

Fisting for Compliments 10/02/2005

87.7 FM or http://www.subcity.org

Polysics – "New Wave Jacket"
Outkast – "B.O.B."
Child Pornography – "0% APR"
Weirdo/Begeirdo – "Past Present"
The Crimea – "Baby Boom"
Brainiac – "70kg Man"

*** THE IRON FIST ***
Wolf Eyes – "1" (from ''Slicer'')
Goatsnake – "Who Are You"

Scientist – "Plague of Zombies"
Mathematicians – "Not A Theme"
KRS-One – "Mortal Thought"
Baby Fox - "Curlylocks" (rudely cut)

Red: My picks

Blue: Lach's picks

[LISTEN/DOWNLOAD]

Why i didn't win a radio award.

Back in 2005–6, i co-presented a radio show on Glasgow Uni's Sub City station with Lachlann Rattray (aka half of Gay Against You¹, aka art wizard Cliff Lipp). Our show was called Fisting for Compliments, except for the first week we were on air while the radio station was still debating whether to let us use the name Fisting for Compliments, when we temporarily used the name 2 Guys from Kabul.

We played just about anything we could think of. There was a definite emphasis on dysfunctional indie spazz, but we found room for hip-hop, jazz, punk & metal, more straight-ahead indie-rock, noise, dance, Bananarama, country, spoken word, plunderphonics... pretty much anything we wanted or loved. We were really into the freeform ethos. Between songs we would mostly deploy non-sequiturs, wordplay and eyebrow-raising in-jokes, rave enthusiastically about the music we were playing, mock the limitations of the radio station's equipment, mock the people who emailed into our show to complain, mock the foibles of university current affairs, mock people in the news, and read out stuff we'd found interesting on the internet. Along the way, we also got to interview Andy Falkous from McLusky, and Tim Smith and Kavus Torabi from our all-time heroes Cardiacs, who were immensely nice.

The first series shows were an hour long and went out incongruously on a Thursday morning. The second series expanded to a full two hours and went out on Saturday night (since i'd moved away from Glasgow by that point, and had to drive 250 miles up there each week). Generally we would pick half the show's music each, and play alternate selections by each of us, or occasionally blocks of two records each. We had a variety of special features: "The Iron Fist" (fairly frequent), a two-record block of the week's most offensively harsh or noisy records, "The Pleasing Sandwich" (less frequent), a series of very short tracks played in quick succession and themed around popular sandwich fillings, and the very sporadic "Black Sabbath Songs Sound Better When Played By Somebody Else". Anyway, we started off pretty amateurishly and got better at it as we went along.

We were still pretty surprised when station management told us we'd been nominated for a national Student Radio Award. Who, us? Surely we took the piss and alienated people too much, and played way too unfriendly music? Apparently not. We were nominated in the category of "Best Entertainment Programme", which we thought was pretty strange, since we'd always considered ourselves a specialist music show. The radio station said no, our eclecticism meant we couldn't be considered specialist in any type of music. We argued that the eclecticism was the speciality. i still think that (a) we were completely right about this point; and (b) we would probably have had a better chance of actually getting an award if we'd been in the "Best Specialist Programming" category. Needless to say, we didn't win, of course. Then again, i recently rediscovered the following sound file, a short showreel we had to submit to the Student Radio Award judging panel to give a flavour of our show, and listening to it again, you can maybe kind of see their point.²

Nonetheless, these shows were one of the most fun things i've ever done in my life. Along with this showreel, i also found six complete Fisting for Compliments shows, which i'll be posting up here in the coming weeks. i've also got a lot of MiniDiscs³ from the period (onto which every show was recorded live), so with any luck, i'll be able to get hold of an MD player and some kind of digital nutcracker device which i can use to extract even more shows from those.

mp3: Fisting for Compliments – "The Best of... Chat"

¹ The other half of the same group, Joe, would sit in from time to time, too.
² Not sure what my Chris Morris bite at the end is all about – whether it was conscious or unconscious, or indeed, what purpose it was meant to serve. Doesn't really work at all in any way i can see. Weird. Oh well.
³ The nineties Betamax.

Letter to Radio 4's "Feedback"

Prompted by reams of humourless twats having a go at David Mitchell for a joke on Radio 4's Unbelievable Truth. i'm not a Mitchell fanboy or anything, but the people calling into this programme were a real excruciating band of humourless muppets (iPlayer).

From: Tom

Just want to put my voice forward to counter the storm of type-first/think-later auto-offendees submitting their knee-jerk faux-offence at the Anne Frank joke made by D Mitchell on The Unbelievable Truth. It was funny, sympathetic and not particularly offensive at all.

Your complainers seem to be prime members of the recently-developed "offencerati" class - those who sit around *waiting* for someone to 'offend' them so they can go crying to mummy - or audience feedback shows - as soon as they encounter something that doesn't square with their little eggshell worldview. More Mitchell, more Unbelievable Truth, more bold writing, and less capitulation to professional whiners, please.

Thanks.
tom.

Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour archive

Just stumbled on this site, which hosts an archive of each show of the three series of Bob Dylan's marvellous Theme Time Radio Hour show on XM Radio, 100 episodes in total.

Now apparently finished, the show would find our drawling host programming an hour of songs on the week's topic de semaine, accompanied by Dylan's own reflections and recollections — "he's liable to quote a poem, give tips on hanging drywall, pass along a recipe", observes Linton Weeks of the Washington Post — as well as gems of trivia about the frequently obscure artists he featured.

Here's four of my favourites from TTRH. It's unlikely i'd have heard a couple of these at all if not for the show. These tracks are from just two shows: drinking (season 1, programme 3) and dogs (season 1, programme 16), which is a pretty good indicator that just about every show has at least one absolute gem of a record you won't know and which you will subsequently treasure.

Lonnie the Cat, a former singer in Ike Turner's group, offers what might be recorded history's least convincing ever claim to sobriety; Calypso King Mighty Sparrow tenderly eulogises canine pioneer Laika (not the band) and her often-overlooked role in Soviet space dominance; Rufus Thomas, half of whose songs seem to be about dogs anyway, issues an ultimatum Stax-style to his non-pet-friendly lover; and Johnny Tyler & His Riders of the Rio Grande use the 2-and-a-half minutes of drunken reprobate anthem "It Ain't Far to the Bar" to throw everything they can think of at the wall and sees what sticks.

Links to downloads of the full Dylan shows as mp3 files, as well as individual-track versions of same, are available down the left-hand side of the site.

mp3: Lonnie the Cat — "I Ain't Drunk"
mp3: Mighty Sparrow — "Russian Satellite"
mp3: Rufus Thomas — "Stop Kickin' My Dog Around"
mp3: Johnny Tyler & His Riders of the Rio Grande — "It Ain't Far to the Bar"

redemption. And fina/ redemption. And fina/ redemption. And fina/ redemption. And fina/ redemption. And fina/ redemption. And fina/ redemption. And fi

This is a video clip someone¹ took of a glitch on a Christian radio station in Indiana (WQKO 91.9), where a fragment of what sounds like an advertisement or sermon (though it could really have been anything) gets stuck on loop for just over half an hour.

By turns, it's strange, magnificent, hilarious, and unexpectedly musical.

i can't get enough of this sort of thing. In the increasingly tight control of the digital age, it's a little reassuring to think the ghost in the machine can still bide his time, waiting for the opportunity to prevail.

¹ Actually it was graphic designer Dustin Hostetler. A lot of his designs are pretty cool.

Notes on Ross and Brand.

i wrote this piece at the time of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs fiasco. Not sure why i didn't publish it then, but i just re-read it and still agree with what i thought then, so i thought i'd share, for posterity. Anything in dark red below (save for a couple of minor edits) dates from the time in question.

• Cruelty isn't humour. "Hurrr hurrr hurrr he fucked your granddaughter" is not a punchline.

• Jonathan Ross is paid as much as 1,000 journalists (and isn't shy of "hilarious" reminders of same). To me, he doesn't match the value of one-fifth of a journalist. I am always amazed that people don't treat him with the same C-list contempt deservedly afforded to his equally mediocre brother Paul.

• Brand is not a stupid man, although he is guilty of consistently underselling and dumbing himself down to pander to fashionable modern anti-intelligence sentiments. This is worse.

• Noel Gallagher apparently says "it's really them and us now". Well, good. It literally fills me to the brim with pride to know that Noel Gallagher identifies me with a group he considers to be "them". Newsflash: fuck you, you third-rate Rick Parfitt impersonator, it was *always* them and us. Where "us" represented "non-cunts" and "them" represented... well, you.

• "But she *did* shag him!" Oh, so that makes it all OK then, yeh? This is by far the most worrying aspect of this whole story to me: this insane reaction that, because it's *true* that Georgina Baillie *did* have consensual sex with Russell Brand, that means she's somehow fair game. You and i have probably had sexual relations with some people too. Does that mean we want it on our grandparents' answerphones? No.

• I've noticed a lot of people say that complaining about something like this means the complainers must be "square", "fuddy-duddy", obsessed with unimportant trivia, a humourless killjoy, etc. So what does that make complaining about people complaining about it?

• Another reason it's unfashionable to complain is because "...[t]he call was actually pretty funny!" Ahh, so humorous value is now the determiner of what is appropriate for broadcast, yeh? So if i find paedophilia funny, that makes it family entertainment, then? No. Majority belief in an opinion doesn't stop it from being bollocks, as a brief glance at the Top 40 will demonstrate.

• "Yeh they made the call, but why should they get in trouble for it? After all it was pre-recorded, maybe we should be firing the people who allowed it to air!"

Right, so you want to absolve the people who wilfully and cynically overstepped the mark to make themselves look cool and edgy on the radio, but fire the production staff (whose wages are paid directly by Brand) charged with trying to keep the enormous egos of same in check and keep their output transmittable at all?

Yeh, that seems fair. After all, those bastard producers actually let it go ahead without pressing the "STOP" button. All poor innocent Wussell and Wossy did was come up the idea of doing prank calls to a unsuspecting celebrity in the first place (box-fresh, guys!), add the genius idea that the prank calls should be obscene, record the obscene prank calls and then schedule the obscene prank calls for broadcast on a show that bears one of their names. Clearly they are blame-free in comparison with the malevolent producers.

• Ross has pulled out of the Comedy Awards. Why was he even involved in the first place? He's a chat-show host.

• Remember when Radio 2 used be seen as the "dad music" station? (Well, it still is, technically, but now they also play vapid modern pop and adopt Estuary accents to fit in as well). If this sort of thing is standard practice at R2 now, i hate to think what Radio 1's target audience is like these days. Presumably pre-schoolers and people who failed the Jeremy Kyle audition for being too inarticulate.

• "Support Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand!" groups on Facebook. Why? They don't need your support. They are famous multi-millionaires who are even now reaping all the publicity from this incident to further their careers. On his salary, Jonathan Toss has had bigger shits than three months' pay suspension. Russell Bland barely even works for the BBC anyway, so his "falling on his sword" (put down the Dictionary of Overdramatic Victorian English, you utter fool) amounts to nothing more than (a) a continuation of his big fat pay-cheques from Sky and C4; and (b) probably a rake of new offers from the kind of misguided people currently considering him to be rebellious and hard-done-by rather than a gasbag who got his comeuppance for being a bit of a bullying wanker on a publicly-funded media channel.

In other words, the poor diddumses will get over it.


JAY SHERMAN (disgusted): How do you sleep at night?
MCBAIN (smug): On top of a big pile of money, with many beautiful women.



• In effect, Ross and Brand are basically The Crap Version of Ashton Kutcher.

Talk about the punishment fitting the crime.

The only thing left to note is that in the run-up to an epochal change of leadership in the US, with wars in the Middle East grinding unstoppably on and the global economy haemorrhaging to death around our ears, it would have been nice if we hadn't had to take a week's break to focus exclusively on coverage of "two squawking men shouting at an actor" (as Radio 4's The Now Show excellently put it).

A point made ad infinitum at the time, of course. Not that anyone listened.