Archive for March, 2001

Although Sven-Goran Eriksson has made a very promising start to his task of assisting the English football team escape its current sporting nadir, things could have been very, very different. The story takes place five summer’s ago, England have booked a date with glorious failure on the Wembley turf during Euro ’96, and team coach Terry Venables has announced his pending departure – something to do with dodgy business practice and an impending fraud investigation, I seem to remember. Candidates to replace “El Tel” seem thin on the ground and, having enjoyed a very moderate level of football sucess, I decide to do the right thing for my country… and put myself forward. Much hilarity ensues.

Well, I thought it was funny at the time…

I thought I’d talk about myself today, just for a change. Although I’ve generally worked in musical environments, I’ve never made any claims to be a musician. However, I have been in two bands. The first was an avant-garde collective called Phantom Engineer, which was a temporary project led by former Telstar Ponies frontman David Keenan. I played a couple of gigs with the band, improvised afffairs where I bashed around various guages of metal chain in a wok. A Wire review soon (and correctly) pointed out that I “didn’t have a clue” what I was doing, and shortly afterwards the band re-located to Scotland and never called me again. Before they disappeared completey I was able to contribute to their only album, on which I can be heard striking a seven-iron against a sheet of corrugated iron.

My other outfit is now in it’s third decade, and goes under the rather cumbersome moniker of Bobby Gillespie’s Hair. We’ve generally played only once per year during our dozen years of existance, including a headline slot at last year’s Bowlie Weekender. Mogwai had seen us play at a wedding, and booked us for the event, neglecting to sort out a stage time. In the end we were hurried on stage at 1am after Sonic Youth had finished to perform in front of a generally bemused and comprehensively abusive crowd, having been drinking solidly for twelve hours. Needless to say, it was a triumph.

Tomorrow: When I applied for the England football team manager’s job.

Shockwave animation spectacular (via Dave. Again).

You learn something new every day, and today I learnt this: Open a Word document, and type in the following (without the speechmarks) “= rand (200,99)”, then press Enter and wait 3 seconds… spooky, eh? This is what’s apparently known as an Easter Egg, of which there are many.