ALL THE CHAT ABOUT TOMORROW..
..is now in the "Upcoming Event" section, enjoy! x ps there's also some ropey snaps of July's Pin Ups Festival 2010 in the gallery now too.
Posted on 26 Aug 2010 by admin
GLASGOW, THE BIG INDIE PLAYGROUND
In the liner notes of Belle& Sebastian’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress album, Stuart Murdoch memorably wrote: ''Glaswegians are nuts to want to leave this town [in July], when the city is reaching its most sublime point, where the sandstone and the vegetation combine to create one big indie playground.'' .

I’m not a big fan of the legions of pale Belle & Sebastian imitators that have followed in Mr Murdoch’s wake, but I like the guy himself, and his image of Glasgow as a Big Indie Playground made me smile. I wasn’t sure if he meant the buildings, or all the indie folk running about playing in the venues and the pubs, but either way I remember being pleased to see Abigail Wild referencing the phrase in a Herald interview in 2003.

I hope Pin Ups on Friday was a good Indie Playground. Certainly there were quite a few impressive top-ranking Glasgow indie characters in attendance (Adam Plimpton! Marty Plimpton! Lloyd Peenko! James Juno! Scott Paterson! Graeme Ronald! Halina Podcart! Duncan Superfly! Michael Popup! Clarky X1! Errr Federico from Big Brother! It would have been a Glasgow Indie Eye Spy bonanza if the game still existed - though I doubt Federico was listed), and a lot of daft and amusing things went on (photos and possibly videos to be published shortly). I think there was a pretty excellent atmosphere in the Flying Duck, and I’d like to say a big thank you to everybody who made it along (including our wonderful stallholders).

The weather was decent on Saturday and I found myself walking from Sauchiehall Street to Byres Rd for a few refreshments, after which I headed to Sleazys for the first time since the start of 2010. On paper I suppose Nice n Sleazys would be feted as Glasgow’s Indie Playground to end them all, but I was a bit underwhelmed on Saturday, and remembered why I hadn’t missed hanging about it this year. Absolutely nothing has changed!

White Russians? Check. Bob from Franz Ferdinand? Check. Twilight Sad chaps? Check. Errors? Check. The most entertaining part of the evening came not from one of these “Checks”, but a “Cheque”. A guy sitting beside me produced a crumpled cheque signed by yours truly. I was completely bamboozled, and thought for a second that Sleazys had started giving their £2 White Russians a bit of sneaky dig. It turned out, totally randomly, that the man holding the cheque was Ryan from Glasgow record label and shop Halleluwah Hits, who had DJ’d at Pin Ups in May! he still hadn't cashed his payment cheque! I didn’t recognise him because I hadn’t been at May’s Pin Ups. Funny scenes.

What else have I been up to since I last wrote? I saw the Klaxons at King Tuts. I was amazed how up for it loads of folk were, given that many had clearly rolled straight into the gig from T in the Park. Well done you crazy kids. The chat is that the Klaxons’ record company rejected their first stab at a 2nd album. If that’s true then the company did the band a favour, as I think the songs debuted sounded pretty strong. I also attended the Mitchell Museum “secret” album launch, which was intimate and pleasant! The Peters Port Memorial Service is a great debut album which is deservedly getting rave reviews. I am really pleased, after years of watching (in my opinion) slightly substandard Glasgow bands get hyperbolic hype from local media, that lots of people are finally getting behind a quality act that might actually prosper outwith Glasgow’s Indie Playground!

That’s all for now. Better get back on with planning August and September’s Pin Ups. If you’re in a band or a DJ, why not get in touch? Remember though, we can’t give you a clue about what we have planned for September, not for all the buried treasure and eyepatches and parrots in the world…

John D.x

ps as a wee advert for the Pin Ups Festival I did a Q & A about Pin Ups with Peenko, discussing the origins of the night, the highs and the hilarity etc. I think it’s a decent read, so why not check it out?
Posted on 05 Aug 2010 by admin
THE ILL EFFCTS OF ONLINE CHERRY PICKING?
Good afternoon campers! If you are “freshly” back from T in the Park then I hope you enjoyed yourself. We DJ’d at T in the Park in 2009 and I was hoping we would be invited back again this year, but nothing materialised. I had weekend tickets – partly with the aim of making sure I could get a decent number of pals in if we were DJing (above and beyond any guestlist) – so I ended up punting them and headed instead to Birmingham for a good friend’s 30th birthday barbeque. ( I know Geoff Ellis occasionally reads and replies to “open letters” from bloggers so no doubt he will be providing me with a personal explanation as to why poor old Pin Ups didn’t get the nod.)

While I wait for Geoff’s response, I might as well get on with my post! The Birmingham BBQ/party was exceedingly good fun, and following various adventures with “e-coli burgers”, and Singstar, a rowdy dining room/living room disco emerged and ran from 2am until pesky neighbours intervened at 4.30am-ish. The tunes for the impromptu dancefloor came from my souped-up IPod Nano. I bought the IPod mainly for use at Pin Ups and it’s rammed with loads of party tunes spanning the decades. (If I were a boy-racer it would be a Ford Capri with some illegal fuel injection “under the hood”.) This makes for faintly irritating listening if you are, say, on the train to work at 8am, but for a party it’s dynamite! Marvin Gaye, The Cure, Kate Bush, Jay-Z, boom boom boom!

I suppose the contents of the IPod represent the fact that I’ve been obsessed with music for the best part of 20 years. I have come to wonder over the last while if I’m a bit of a dying breed. I don’t think I am, but en route to Birmingham I read Gordon Legge’s 'The Shoe', brought to my attention by Alistair Braidwood at “Dear Scotland” (warning – there are spoliers!), and it was quite thought-provoking. The Shoe is a terrific book, set in the mid-80s (1986?) in an unspecified town somewhere between Glasgow and Edinburgh (Falkirk perhaps?), and concerning a group of young men in their early 20s who are crazy about music. The characters discuss their favourite artists and songs with wonderful intensity, breadth of knowledge and - best of all - conviction in their personal judgement (back in the 80s there was no hedging your bets until the Pitchfork review came online). In the 1986 setting the dialogue rings true. I am not sure, however, if the dialogue would seem as believable if the book were to be set in the present day.

I don’t think people are quite so earnest about music anymore, but that could be due to a whole lot of factors than just a lack of enthusiasm or feeling. In the present day we have irony, "postmodernism", and a lot of things are “liked” with a knowing wink. Furthermore, the way that music is obtained and discussed has changed so much since 1986 that it’s arguably impossible to make a fair comparison.

Personally I don’t buy anything like as many physical records (CDs, vinyl etc) as I used to. Nowadays I tend to trawl blogs (my personal favourites are listed here), read reviews, and download a selection of recommended tracks once I’ve had a good listen to them on Spotify. Tellingly, I have realised while writing this blog that I have never downloaded from ITunes an album in its’ entirety – I always “cherry pick”. I expect this is a pretty common approach. The obvious result of what I would term “online cherry picking” is the closure of record shops. Virgin (on Union Street), Echo and John Smith’s (both on Byres Road), and the huge Missing (on Wellington Street) are all places in Glasgow which took up far too much of my time in the late 90s/early noughties, but are now closed. (If these names ring a bell, on Optimo’s message board there is an enjoyable thread about the unfortunate demise of 23rd Precinct, and other Glasgow record shops of days gone by.)

Besides record shop closures, I’d argue that a more subtle result of “online cherry picking” is that the listener can be left with a snapshot of an artist’s career (shorn of chronology), and unless a deliberate effort is made to investigate further, then the experience can be a bit unsatisfying and similar to just listening to loads of Greatest Hits EP’s (if such a thing existed). I could write further about “the death of the album”, digital theft, and so on, but these things have been written about by better writers many times already.

As for discussing music - although I might indulge in the odd bit of internet bickering about an act or a song, these spats are carried out with somebody who might well be living in another continent, and are ultimately pale imitations of the epic U2 v REM/New Order v Smiths/Blur v Oasis (or Suede) muso-geddons that I’d have with my friends 10 years ago. Unfortunately a lot of my friends are too busy nowadays with Terrifying Real Life to waste an afternoon debating whether “Lemon” is a comedy song or the greatest tune that Talking Heads never wrote.

Nevertheless, I’d like to think there are still teenagers or young twentysomethings out there today knocking (metaphorical) spots off each other about present big issues.

Here’s a nice new one to get you going. “We knew all along that MIA was ‘a pretentious, truffle fries-eating phony spouting radical politics at odds with her extremely comfortable lifestyle’, but the tunes are usually good, so you can shove your damning review up your ass, Pitchfork.” Agree or disagree??

John D.x
Posted on 12 Jul 2010 by admin
BOBBY BARGAIN!
Pictures of June's Bobby Bargain £3 entry-if-you-gave-us-a-shout-before-it Pin Ups are now in the gallery! I'm aware there hasn't been much blog chat lately, but I'm happy to say that the "Abra Cadavre" fanzine article has been a smash hit, and I don't think we've had so much positive feedback about a fanzine piece ever! Cheers! If you haven't read it there's no time like the present..
Posted on 30 Jun 2010 by admin
PICTURES FROM MAY..
taken by that talented man James "Butcher" Cassidy are now in the gallery, enjoy! There's possibly more dancefloor-orientated ones to come too..
Posted on 07 Jun 2010 by admin

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