I’m very proud to announce a selection of my ‘Empties’ photos are being used in a new collaborative book from the Dark Mountain group, edited by Paul Kinsgnorth and Dougald Hine. Dark Mountain Issue 2 is at the printers and will be available this month, so watch this space.

My punk/folk rising star friend Frank Turner just released his fourth album England Keep My Bones. It’s a great record but more importantly, I sang on it. Buy it from iTunes HERE.

To mark the occasion, journalist Brad Barrett has re-published his 2008 joint interview with me and Frank from 2008, where he got us to question each-other. Read it on his blog HERE.

Finally, a T-T live show suitable for your Grandma and your kids: renowned underground punk/folk singer-songwriter Chris T-T (“genius, a modern-day Blake” – SUNDAY TIMES, “genius” – HUW STEPHENS, RADIO 1, “genius songwriting” – THE GUARDIAN, “The best English folk singer for 50 years” – FRANK TURNER, “Chris T-T’s an idiot!” – JACK OSBORNE) performs brand new musical versions of A.A. Milne’s classic 1920s poems…

LISTEN FREE AND BUY DISOBEDIENCE ON BANDCAMP

I’m very proud to announce a selection of my ‘Empties’ photos are being used in a new collaborative book from the Dark Mountain group, edited by Paul Kinsgnorth and Dougald Hine. Dark Mountain Issue 2 is at the printers and will be available this month, so watch this space.

Beyonce has apparently had a pile of trouble with her new ballad ‘1+1’, which is possibly being shelved after an exceptionally poor reaction on American Idol or some such. It also got a mauling on Nihal’s Radio 1 review show; unexpected since she’s usually impregnable and over again, the critics were left with the painful “I love Beyonce but…” gambit.

But just one simple lyric change would rescue the whole song. Seriously, if you know anyone who works with Ms Knowles, tell her this, urgently: they need to alter the chorus line of “Make love to me”, repeated over and over, for something non-sexual and oriented back towards the longing of the verse lyrics.

My pick would immediately be “Make time for me” sung to the same melody, with the same passion, which, although it seems pretty cheesy / mainstream on first listen, is actually very unusual – and I can’t remember ever being used in that way for a slow hit ballad.

Thing is, it’s a song about assuaging loneliness, so when the “make love to me” chorus kicks in, it undermines the sentiment and makes the listener put the song into a different box – while at the same time we have no choice but to feel a bit taken aback by the shift from supportive need to sexual need. I reckon this – and only this – is why the song is struggling.

Nothing else needs to change. The arrangement, verses and production are great; unconventional and brilliant. People keep saying ‘Prince-like’. But it needs the clean, powerful uplift of a non-sex chorus. Then it becomes like Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, a piece for universal emotional steadying, instead of bonking your way out of trouble.

I’m right – and if they listen to me they’ll smash it.

After looking at such a tiny detail of the Ultrasound song in the last entry, I need to mention stand-up comedian Stewart Lee‘s ferociously brilliant new book How I Escaped My Certain Fate as a great resource if you’re into developing any kind of self-absorbed analysis of your own work-in-performance.

(I did have a powerful personal reaction to the book as well, but prefer to blog it here, not on Blognostic, to focus on its value as a resource. But I did LOVE it; it punched me in the face with recognition over and over again, on different levels.)

It is partly a memoir of Lee’s abandoning of live performance after near stardom in the 1990s, his confidence shattered, then his unexpected success with Jerry Springer: The Opera, leading to a tentative, more thoughtful return to stand-up in 2004. The book features three full transcriptions of key live shows since that return, which have been annotated in intricate, lengthy detail. The shows are transcribed from specific live performances (the sets used for DVDs I think, since they were taped) rather than using some kind of generic ‘perfect’/’idealised’ script.

Lee makes a jawdropping success of writing down his insightful analysis of his own creative performance process, of breaking down each stand-up show and relating clearly how the prepared material blends with the live unfolding moment, how the set might digress or not, what he says and what he’s trying to say. It’s not just fascinating but truly useful: obviously (the task of) stand-up is a magnified, concertina’d version of (the task of) music performance: the audience feedback that happens every 3-4 minutes for a songwriter, at tacitly agreed points (between each song) happens near constantly, second-by-second for a comedian. They need to be far greater masters of crowd control than we are, especially if they’re trying to do more than tell jokes, if they have an underlying point. Thus it would be less relevant if Lee were a populist gag man but his stuff is multi-layered, a complex, ambitious beast unfolding with plot and rhythm.

Beyond the analysis, I also found How I Escaped… brutally honest, yet oddly reassuring about the continuing potential for a career in minority interest, uncompromising performance arts today. Lee’s comedic rebirth and his refusal to bow to the shit he’d bended to in the past, exactly mirrors the ‘new DIY’ approach so many of us musicians are facing/embracing. He’s not trying for an over-arching message but I took from it a determined: ‘the quality will out’.

Read it if you can.