Sex Pistols
November 11th, 2007 at 13:04

“I am the anti-Christ. I am an anarchist!”

“…Except during the week when I’m actually a supply chain distribution manager for the third largest retailer of industrial printing solutions in the country, obviously.”

That’s right, on Friday Night, I went all the way down to Brixton Academy to see the Sex Pistols live, in one of the few gigs they’ve played since I’ve been alive. I went with my dad – he was the real fan. He didn’t just like them before they were cool – he liked them before he was uncool.

Its weird being at a gig where a majority of the men were bald – and not out of choice.

They were pretty good – I think they played every song they’ve ever done. Which isn’t that many. They also played a cover of… something that escapes me now, but I recognised it. They opened with Pretty Vacant, finished on God Save the Queen (complete with massive logo’d backdrop), before coming back for an encore, playing EMI and Anarchy in the UK. Then, oddly, coming back for a second encore and playing the only song they had left: Bodies.

The slightly disconcerting thing was how they’d completely sold out. Its not so much that they’ve obviously reformed for the money, or that they were playing at a corporate venue operated by a big multinational company, it was just that the t-shirts were on sale for twenty pounds and in the foyer area, there were X-Box 360s set up with Guitar Hero on them.

Their political direction was… interesting… too. They came on stage to the old-timey song “there will always be an England” and the amplifiers had England flags painted on to them. I didn’t think punk was supposed to be nationalistic – but then, I guess I didn’t think it was pro-life until I heard Bodies.

At another point John Lydon gave some insightful political commentary: “Who voted for that cunt Blair?”, he asked. In a crowd of 5000 people, there were a lot of liars, as no one put their hands up or cheered.

It was a surprisingly good gig though – the spectacle of bald middle managers forming a pit behind me, and some even flaunting the smoking ban was quite, er, something, to say the least.

The venue was pretty good too – there was a sloping floor so you got a good view pretty much wherever you stood. Its just a shame its in the middle of quite a rough area of London (we walked past Jean Charles de Menezies old house, and through the tube station he was shot at, excitingly).

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1000 Days, 3281 Happy Memories
November 7th, 2007 at 21:42

If you’re a long time reader – and I mean long time – you might recall that in a bid to give myself an obsessive compulsive disorder, I’ve been tracking the amount of Coke (or more accurately, cola products and derivatives) I’ve been drinking. Not because I’m weird, you understand, but because I liked the idea of generating graphs to show something unnecessary – and the trouble is, once you start logging something, you don’t want to stop as you’ll be breaking the habit. Like chain smoking.

The reason this all began, some two and a half years ago now, was because I went to the dentist and he said I was fucking my teeth up (that’s an Orthodontic term) with the amount of Coke I’ve been consuming. I started the logs on the basis that I’d cut down and then take the graphs to him and say “look how excellent I’ve been”. If you look at the graphs, you’ll understand why I haven’t been back since.

I see it as a great scientific pursuit. After all, all of the great scientists have at one time or another experimented on themselves – I’m hoping that my tracking of my coke intake will allow me to better Marie Curie, who experimented on herself by giving herself radiation poisoning and promptly dying.

So yeah, I’ll just repeat what I’ve been doing, as I guess this revelation could come as something of a shock to the casual observer: I’ve been writing down every day how much Coke I’ve been drinking. And Monday was, somewhat incredibly, day one thousand.

But what does this mean?

What conclusions can I draw from the statistics I’ve generated? Er, not a lot really. In fact, I cannot think of a more pointless and unnecessary thing to log. But lets have a look at the numbers anyway.

In the last 1000 days, I have consumed 3281 Cokes. That averages 3.281 a day. If you break it down by brand of Coke consumed, which I’ve only been logging for a mere 674 days (since January 1st 2006 – it was a New Year’s Resolution) – 54% have been pure-bred Coca-Cola, 7% Diet Coke (a horrifying thought), 13% Coke Zero (yet I still haven’t turned into one of the wankers from the advert), 20% Pepsi (presumably due to my brand loyalty to Scream pubs) and 10% Pepsi Max. This gives Coke an over all James O’Malley-specific market share of 68% to Pepsi’s 31%. Which compared to eleven months ago is something of a fall for Pepsi.

Turning to the graphs now (click the tabs at the bottom on the link) to look at the trends, the Cokes per day average (cpd) is still consistently rising slightly from the all time low back from when I was still in sixth form – although it appears that I’m pushing my threshold for coping with Coke at 3cpd, as things seem to be levelling out slightly.

The sliding average, meanwhile, which is made up of three day averages shows the slow upwards trend to be continuing. What is interesting (I mean, in the loosest possible sense of the word – but you must be slightly captivated to have read this far in) is the massive spikes in Coke intake which have occurred every September on record. The analyst within me would put this down to it being “really warm at that time of year”.

Cumulatively, the trend is predictably upwards. I haven’t been sick in the last three years – in fact, I think the last time I was sick I was about twelve years old – so there’s not been any negative Coke to note. If I were a betting man, I’d say the cumulative Coke intake will probably increase constantly.

But… but… what does it all mean?

Nothing. It means nothing. Which I guess is a bit unfortunate. I reckon I’d make a damn good economist though if I could harness my power of graphs for good, instead of neutral.

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More tedious “I hate students” stuff.
November 7th, 2007 at 20:30

Far be it from me to complain about the activities of the corrupt student union elite at my university, but thanks to the magic of Facebook, I’ve stumbled upon a terrible idea – and I fully intend to describe it here and exaggerate my outrage.

They’ve invented “Flash Shopping!” – a derivative of the media’s favourite buzzword in 2003: Flash Mobbing. Here’s a paste of their explanation of what it is:

“Flash Shopping involves gathering quietly close to a pre-determined shop at a pre-determined time. A bell (or other cue of suchlike) will sound and everyone will enter the shop, pick up one item and proceed together to checkout en mass! Another bell (or suchlike) will sound and everyone must look at their watch, tut, drop said item (without damaging it!) and walk out!”

So, a flash-mob basically. The thing that bothers me about this is that it seems so unbelievably cruel.

Sure, it sounds fun – flash mobbing is. The fun is in doing something silly, like having a pillow fight or whatever. No-one gets hurt or pissed off. Unfortunately, this “flash shopping” idea, which at the time of writing, 52 people have signed up to, seems to have a more sinister motive:

“Hopefully this will involve hundreds of people! You watch the shopkeepers eyes light up as they think all their Christmas’s have come at once only to find everyone just takes off!”

Yeah, great idea! Why not target a struggling independent store that’s worried it can’t compete with brand name rivals? Give them some false hope? Better still, needlessly mess with the stock without buying anything! Yeah, that’ll be hilarious!

This all just seems completely not in the spirit of what flashmobbing was intended.

And what makes this more bewildering is that it has been dreamt up as a feature for a radio show. How the hell does that work? “This is what 50 morons needlessly bothering someone trying to do their job sounds like”?

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The Tories are a bit racist after all.
November 4th, 2007 at 19:43

There’s no better way to start your Sunday morning than to wake up to find the Tories being beaten up by the press. I mean, short of waking up to find the creationists have admitted defeat and have all signed up to a document promising not to spout their bullshit any longer.

I wonder what possessed Nigel Hastilow, a Conservative candidate and judging by his photo on the BBC news website, possibly the smuggest man alive, to claim that “Enoch Powell was right”.

Maybe it is because I easily confuse Powell and Oswald Mosley, maybe its because he’s come out in support of a man who was considered a horrendous, evil racist forty years ago, when racism was generally considered to be excellent, but I’m shocked and surprised that someone would be willing to say they agree with Powell.

I’m not terribly shocked that Tories think like this, mind, as they’ve always been at least a bit racist.

My favourite bit of this whole controversy though is reading what the various important Tories have been saying. They have to strike a careful balance between distancing themselves from the remarks of a crackpot, and not isolating themselves from the, er, crackpot grass-roots of the Tory party.

One of his constituency party people tried to defend him by saying “He’s basically just raising issues that have been raised with him when he has been canvassing the area”. Unfortunately though, Hastilow did use the phrase “He was right” – which I guess is like if I wanted to highlight how some people think the holocaust didn’t happen by posting in the first person “I am a holocaust denier”. (I also vigorously deny allegations of using shock-analogies to make a facetious point.)

David Davies, a man so boring that his parents didn’t want to have to remember two different names, apparently said the comments were “very unwise” and that candidates have to exercise “great caution in the language they use about immigration” (maybe immigrants could be “evacuated”, eh?), and Caroline Spelman, whoever she is, has apparently said that he must “explain himself”.

In other words “you can racist if you like, that’s cool – just don’t tell anyone until we’re in power, okay?”

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Against Me! / NOFX
November 4th, 2007 at 02:47

I’ve been to two excellent gigs in the last week in the worst city in the world, Birmingham. It has been an experience akin to finding two expensive diamonds nestling deep within a cow pat (below the surface, so you’d have to scrape away some of the pat to get to them, getting shit under your fingernails in the process) – and the cow pat is surrounded by some difficult to navigate motorways.

Gig #1 – Against Me!

On Wednesday night, I saw Against Me! at Birmingham Academy. That previous sentence looks grammatically incorrect to those not in the know, because Against Me!, perhaps rather confusingly, have an exclamation mark in their name. They do a sort of folk/punk thing, and they do it very well indeed. They played lots of songs from their excellent new album, and were generally pretty excellent. According to the internet though, the singer has apparently been charged with battery, for smashing someone against a table, so we made a point of not looking him in the eye, in case he thought we were looking at him funny.

The support bands were a mixed bag too. Steriogram were excellent, and as it later turned out, quite famous in their own right. They do rapcore, and did the song on some sort of iPod advert. At one point during the set, the singer (rapper?) jumped into the audience, and carried on rapping whilst being walked around on the back of an audience member. Excellent.

The other support band though, seemed to insist on trying to make the audience hate them. Future of the Left, broke almost all of the rules of being the support band. Throughout the set they encouraged people to move forward and to dance – despite their songs including lyrics like “Tories, Tories, Thanks for the Tories!” and “Violence Solves Everything!” – not messages that are easy to get behind, to say the least. Worst of all though, at the end of their set, the singer sarcastically said “You’ve been a great audience! You get a C+, and that’s being generous!”, not just breaking rule three, but crushing it into dust.. “Fuck you, then”, is what all of the audience were thinking.

But Against Me! were ace.

Gig #2 – NOFX

Yesterday evening I saw NOFX in the main hall at the Academy. It was literally amazing. NOFX are one of my favourite bands (#2 on my last.fm), so it was incredible to finally see them live. As they began their first song, a pit seemed to form around me, and I involuntarily became a part of it. I lasted three songs in the midst of it, before realising that I was probably going to die of dehydration if I carried on – so forced my way to the bar (harder than you’d think in a sell-out 3000 capacity gig that is very densely packed) to get some water.

Rehydrated, I then faced the tricky task of getting back to somewhere with a decent view. I tried to muscle my way forward, pushing through groups of people by forcing my arms in between to push them apart and clear a space, breaking up many couples and groups of friends in the process. I didn’t want to be stuck at the back with all of the “friends who didn’t really want to go” – if there’s one band that I’d want to be near the front for, its Bad Religion… if there were two, it’d also be NOFX.

So I continued to force my way to the front, occasionally getting stuck behind an impenetrable wall of people. This seemed to annoy one bloke, who was really far too old to be at a gig like this anyway, who said to me “if you’re going in, move forward!” and then shouted “fuck off!” a number of times. “Lovely”, I thought.

As luck would have it, it was about at this point that the band decided to play their notably slower song Eat the Meek. So whilst everyone was swaying and waving their arms side to side in the air, I managed to slip through the pit area relatively unscathed, and managed to find a spot right at the front, slightly to the left (in front of guitarist/trumpeter El Hefe). It was here I remained for the rest of the excellent gig.

Aside from the music, the on-stage banter was hilarious. NOFX are notable for the humour, and there were some excellent comments like, “I love this country – you can’t hate immigrants as that’s not PC, but you hate every other city for no reason whatsoever!”, when they experienced booing after mentioning London. It got perhaps a little near the knuckle, when vocalist/bassist Fat Mike was, for some reason, taking the piss out of the Scottish. “Is there anyone from Scotland here tonight?” – the bloke next to me started waving and shouting – “are you here with the Make a Wish foundation?”, replied Mike, before doing a funny voice.

They did some of their best songs – Bob, Murder the Government, Leaving Jesusland, and so on. One of the best songs was actually a cover of Rancid’s ‘Radio’, which they play slower than Rancid do. They finished with “The Brews”.

The support were pretty good too. TAT played, who I previously saw supporting the Gimmies, and The Loved Ones were both good. The Loved Ones was particularly funny, as for some reason, a large number of people in the audience decided to throw their plastic cups at the singer. He taunted the audience for being a crap shot, so they just threw more. It was genuinely hard to tell whether he was pissed off or was enjoying.

Bloody hell though, NOFX were good.

Next Weekend: Capdown and the Sex Pistols.

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