No Chord Use, No Crime

After the highly successful guest blog-spot here by Boris F-Smythe with his unique perspective on Mp’s Expenses, I’m delighted today to give you syndicated news content from the Music-News/Music-Soothes site. As always, syndicated contact cannot be guaranteed for accuracy.

We know America is the land of the free. This is both useful and irksome, as freedom so often comes with lawsuits and litigation.

The estate of classical composer Johann Pachelbel have today launched several lawsuits against contemporary artists who they claim have sampled or borrowed their forefather’s creation. Due to a strange quirk of copyright, that famous progression of eight chords appears to have a unique protection independent of copyright laws, and the estate is aiming to preserve Johann’s work for future generations.

Such lawsuits are becoming commonplace in the 21st century. Even late in the 20th century there was the famous clashing of horns of Apple Records and Apple computers. This long-winded and, at times, bitter argument later resulted in the owners of Apple Acme Inc. attempting to register the phrase ‘a is for apple’ as their own personal creation, leaving grocers and farmers the world over fearing for their livelihood. The hashtag #apple became Twitter’s highest-rated trending topic for several consecutive days as Twits the world over traded ideas for a possible re-branding of the humble apple should the judge rule in favour of the big corporation.

Details of those named in the Pachelbel estate’s suit are unknown as lawyers eagerly prepare dossiers for the courts, but speculation is rife. The action could see a number of major recording artists under the spotlight. Green Day’s worldwide hit ‘Basket Case’ may escape the net as the penultimate chord missed, but Sir Paul McCartney’s hit ‘Let it be’ may not get off so likely.

Speaking from the Pachelbel Chateaux in Austria, Johann XII told press reporters, ‘I’m not copyrighting individual chords, just a simple 8-chord progression. Of course there will be some royalty money involved, but I’m not just doing this for the money … it’s to preserve my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s work. We will use the money to start our own radio station playing and touring group. We also have researchers working in laboratories to see if the Canon can be transposed into other keys. There were early experiments in F major, but we simply ran out of funds’.

Whilst those named in the action have yet to be named, some widely-respected songs may simply disappear from Music Store shelves, leaving gaps in almost every genre. Avril Levigne’s text-speak-spelt  ‘Sk8ter Boi’, Chirpy Antipodian popster Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’, and the Emerald Isle’s golden son Bono’s hit ‘With or Without You’ all use a strikingly similar chordal structure. Nineties Madchester sensation The Farm’s ‘Altogether Now’, Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian hit ‘Get Me Away From Here’. The Bob Marley estate may release a modified version of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ using the chorus ‘No Chord Use, No Crime’ in order to raise public support for the freedom of eight simple chords.

At the time of writing, new attentions we being placed towards lift manufacturers around the world, who are thought to have further compounded the problems by incorporating a special audio system in lifts which can only pipe-out the Canon in D.

It remains to be seen how this will develop. It is entirely likely that this argument will continue to go round in circles underneath the spotlight. So far it has gone around at least 56 times in an endless ostinato.

Going green with rage

Cast your mind back a few years. To a time before the internet. Before the letter ‘i’ could be placed in front of anything to make it sound cool and sleek (the i-sausage, for example). Have you done that? Okay, now go back a little further to the dawn of civilisation.

I’m sure it happened a little more gradually, but essentially some primitative people must have woken up one day and decided to work together for everyone’s benefit. Rather than competing against one another for food and shelter, they found they could pool their resources and make collective decisions which would allow everyone to move on together. An amazing event which would ultimately bring us Starbucks, vote-based television shows democratic legal systems hundred of years later.

Inevitably there would be those societies who would safeguard this gift and value their cooperative above everything else, and there would be those who would use it as a front to bring in their favoured cronies as leaders under a smokescreen of fake democracy and a heabily-censored free-speech.

One of the great things about any society is that they all have their watchmen. People who are looking out for everyone else. People who give up their time to make sure the things that happen do so without damaging everybody else, and thankfully that happened this week.

I’m not sure if it was a slow week on Jeremy Kyle, or whether the economic disaster gripping the world has led to a catastrophic rise in the cost of needlework kits, but eighteen people complained about a television advert in which a Welsh d-list celebrity rides a bicycle through a supermarket and a thorough investigation was launched and reported its findings this week.

Now, I’m not the greatest fan of Health and Safety. It’s ridiculous that we can’t play conkers, throw snowballs or run with axes. A questionnaire for teachers this week suggested that children can’t build things out of egg cartons through fear of salmonella and teachers must wear goggles when using drawing pins. But for once, I don’t blame the helmet-wearing high-vis-clad steel-toe-capped goggle-wearing HSE.

What were those eighteen people thinking? There they were, outraged that Duffy was not wearing a high-vis vest whilst riding her bicycle. And wait. What’s that? I don’t think she’s got lights on her bike either. Presumably they’ve come home from a hard day at the office, put their feet up with a glass of chianti in one hand and suddenly found themselves so insensed that they just had to write in and complain with the other. Except, of course, they hadn’t had a hard day at the office – they’d probably spent all day polishing their Mary Whitehouse bust and waiting for something to come on that they can complain about.

A further 4 people complained that children may emulate the Welsh pop-princess. I’m fairly certain we weren’t going to have elderly ladies knocked over beside the frozen peas as dozens of tweeny-boppers raced laps around aisles 12 and 13 in Morrissons. But thank you. You are the Guardians of liberty and watchkeepers of our security.

At least they complained, of course.

Also this week people around the world where aghast at the situation in Iran, and hundreds of people turned their Twitter avatars green in a gesture of solidarity to Iranian protestors. I’m not sure how many people fighting on the streets for their democratic rights, and in some cases lives, will have taken time-out to logon to see people around the world changing the colour of their avatar to show solidarity with them, but it was at least some kind of action.

President Obama went from ‘showing concern’ earlier in the week to talking directly to Iran and today warning them that ‘the world is watching’.

The truth is that we have a leader in this country who will take time out to phone a slightly troubled singer from a television talent show who is in the midst of her fifteen minutes of fame, but who takes a far less radical and direct approach to the more serious and fundamental problems in the world.

But don’t worry. We can all turn out logos green and the twits will tweet about injustice from every last corner of the globe with uncensored and unblocked mobile phone reception, but I have a better solution. If we can get Duffy to rig a mock election and then embark on a genocidal rampage throughout some town in Mid-Wales whilst advertising a tasty beverage, we’ll see the world leap into action in direct response. Well, only if she forgets to wear the appropriate safety-wear.

Are we serving?

Sitting in our quiet local pub, whiling away a sunny Sunday afternoon. It’s almost like a song by the Kinks. Life can’t get much better. Unless you factor in that it’s a Greene King pub, and therefore quite homely to a Suffolk boy like myself.

As a musician, you get to know pubs quite well. It’s very rare that a gig comes up on your doorstep, and unless you want curly hair from eating crusts and half-melted cheese sandwiches, pub-grub becomes a staple part of your life.

Every single person entering the pub asked the same thing though, ‘Are you still serving food?’

What has happened to us as consumers in this country, that we now ask apologetically if we can buy something. You see it in shops too: ‘I’m sorry, but do you stock… um… perhaps… some tea?’. We ask mechanics if they might possibly be able to fix our car. If you walk in to B&Q, and at this point I implore you not to, people say, “you don’t stock grout do you?”. We assume the negative and seem surprised if they can help us.

Strangely it doesn’t happen elsewhere. Mr and Mrs Mondeo don’t go to the Year 8 parents evening and say, “I don’t suppose you could teach little Billy something, I know he’s a little difficult” – no, they go there and accuse Mrs Smythe of underestimating their little prodigy’s skills. Patients don’t arrive at casualty saying, “Sorry to interrupt doctor, and I hate to impose, but could you remove this spear that’s annoyingly become lodged just below my left lung?” – no, they cry bad management and threaten to call Lawyers Direct (TM) the moment a nurse sneezes.

I was going to put it down to our expectation of poor service, but do you know what? It’s a lot better than it used to be. And our local little pub is fantastic – peas served in gravy boats, and a semi-circular gammon steak served on a square plate by a waitress with a friendly smile.

I guess that only leaves the reservedness of the English to blame. I can’t imagine Joe Yank walzting into a bar asking politely if they could rustle-up a cheese sandwich – he’d have specified how rare he wanted his steak and which national fag he wanted his fries to depict on his plate before Jonny English had caught the eye of the barman.

I suspect the same would be true of our European neighbours. We just don’t have that ‘the customer is always right’ consumer-orientated 24/7 society going on here. Sure, there are times I wish I could get my tall-skinny-fairtrade-decaf-vanilla-latte at 2am, but would I want a world where men walk into pubs and demand food without asking if the chef was in? I think not.

Sowing the seeds of a post

Words will arrive here soon. In the meantime? A photograph of this charming shop in Kensington, London.

Signs you chose the wrong holiday

I grew up in Suffolk. Sleepy, rural and flat. Mostly flat actually.

However, a recent trip to the beach found me reading this sign with slightly more attention than normal.

Just one thought. ‘What should I do? Leave the area immediately’… Ummm Yes.

MP’s Expenses – MP for Lichgate South

NB: Today’s content has been syndicated from the blog of Boris Flarty-Smythe, MP for Lychgate South.

Dear Constituent,

I’m sure you’ll have seen the recent press coverage of MP’s expenses, and I wanted to just take a few moments of your time to set the record straight.

These are times of hardship for all of us. The world is facing an unprecedented crisis. Banks are in turmoil. Household bills are at an all-time high, and property prices are falling faster than a sky-diving elephant. Every single one of us faces uncertainty in our jobs and our situations.

I too am having to scale back. I know have only 3 gardeners. My swimming pool is only being heated Monday to Saturday, and my Moat is only being cleared once every other month.

Household bills are as certain as death and taxes (unless you’re an MP and you’re talking about Capital Gains Tax, obviously). I have turned the radiators down to number 3 in bedrooms 5 through to 12 in the East Wing, and now only put the immersion heater on for 12 hours a day in the South Wing of the House. We are all looking closer to home for food as increased transport costs affect even a small red pepper at the checkout. As a result, I have employed my 3 gardeners to convert 5 acres of my country estate into an allotment, and my 12 househ0ld staff are now fed exclusively by home-grown lettuces and potatoes.

In these days of hardship, rest assured every single one of these changes has reduced my outgoings. This is excellent news, particularly as all of these bills are part of my second home allowance and save you, the taxpayer money.

I have even sold my trouser-press on Ebay. My new ironing-maid will take up residence amongst the other household workers next Tuesday, and will be paid for 3 hours a day to ensure my trousers are crease-free at the minimum wage.

Remember – Vote Boris Flarty-Smythe at election time.

It’s my birthday- Quick! Where are my swimming shorts?

Birthdays, for most people are big occasions. Those ending with a zero even more so. With this in mind, myself and the lovely Sarah decided to head off for a night in Bristol followed by a stay in a posh hotel to celebrate my latest such birthday.

In many respects it seemed a suitable ‘grown-up’ thing for a man who’d recently bought a ladder to do. No pounding dance music. No drinking of alcoholic beverages in every colour available as a shell-suit in the late ’80s. No singing my way down the street.

In some respects it was a defiant act of making sure I wasn’t acting too old.

It was all going well. Quick trip into town in the car. Underground car park. Check-in. Room with lights in the wardrobe, full-size ironing board, cupboards that go ‘fummpff’ and gently glide to a close rather than ‘ker-chunk’ like the Ikea ones. Then there was the marble bathroom, complete with array of ‘natural’ cocoa-chuma extract toiletries – or something like that.

It was posh. It had lasagne and wild-rocket penne available as room service 24hrs a day. It had a gym. It had a swimming pool.

That last one was important. We had selected it because it had one of those. That and a cheap last-minute deal, obviously. But mostly because we remembered it had a pool.

What I didn’t remember, however, were my swimming shorts.

And so it was that I spent some of penultimate hours of my twenties, running around Bristol as the shops closed trying to find some swimming shorts. More precisely, I spent them in JJB Sports, which as everyone knows is the wardrobe of choice for Jeremy Kyle participants.

Walking in I looked about as out of place as a man in a spacesuit walking with gorillas across the jungle. The shop was empty and, fearing I was as open to attack as a neon Wildebeest, I plucked up the courage to ask an assistant to point me in the right direction. He tried his best at customer service, trying to make small-talk through his breaking voice, and I selected one of the only pairs not finished in Bermuda- or Jackson Pollock-inspired patterns.

At the till I was served by a charming young lady, who chatted to her fellow till-worker about her evening’s plans through a wall of spearmint, which was  going around her mouth like socks and kittens in a tumble drier. She asked me if I wanted my receipt in the bag, and wiped her nose and flicked her fingers over the till before picking up my receipt and placing it dutifully in the bag.

We walked back, somewhat dejectedly to the hotel. Too old for sport shops – that’s definitely a sign of my turning thirty. But then, I can’t remember EVER feeling an appropriate age to be in a sports shop. It’s just not a natural habitat for a musician.

Later we ordered our 2 glasses of wine in the hotel and left a large banknote on the table on top of our £13 bill. The waiter whisked it away with a apologetic whoosh designed to go almost unnoticed and avoid the embarassment of a financial exchange, and we looked around the bar area filled with very elegant people covered in Prada and footballers’ wives. We did this for about 15 minutes, wondering whether the waiter had assumed that we’d just been very generous with our tip, and thinking that we’d really have preferred to have some change. Was there some part of this interaction we’d failed to grasp?

Why am I telling you this? Well, it seems I’m stuck in a no-man’s land – too old for some things, not old enough for others. I was so worried about the things I’d now be too old for, I’d forgotten to think about the new things I’d have to get good at for turning thirty.

Either way, I feel I can’t be too old yet – afterall, not everyone spends the last moments of their twenties running around looking for a pair of swimming shorts…

Been Busy

Accelerating from Twenty to Thirty

Let’s get things straight, when it comes to birthdays I’m a bit of an Eeyore. There all well and good when they belong to someone else, but mine always seem to come with some kind of light grey cloud over them.

This year is a big one, and I currently have only a few hours left of being able to say I’m ‘in my twenties’.

I thought everything was going well, and I’d be just the same. I’d have to be admit I was now Thirty years old – I’m not some ageing bleach-blonde Californian actress working my way from A-Z on the celebrity guest lists pretending I’m not getting older in the hope of winning a cameo appearance on Desperate Housewives or anything.

But I thought I wouldn’t feel older.

But then that light-grey cloud appeared, and as a result I’ve spent the last 2 weeks feeling like there’s absolutely no way my body is going last another 2 weeks, let alone 2-score years. First there was the cold, which was careless. I don’t get colds, but somehow this one slipped passed security. As a result, I spent the penultimate week of my twenties excreting enough nose-pooh to fill the river Thames, and with the consistency to hold together any one of the bridges that cross it. The nose-pollen was accompanied by a cough which helpfully warned any members of the public who were near me that I was carrying some kind of deadly nose-plague by causing me to emit a 60-a-day Mike Reid-alike cough loud enough to be heard by offshore shipping.

Then, just as the cold was passing the back-ache re-emerged and I spent the next day trying to avoid to sit or stand at the exact angle which made every muscle in my body shout ‘Oi! Ouch! What do you think you’re doing?!?’, before eventually conceding that that was the angle my body naturally resolves to.

I’d spent months telling myself it was just a number, but it appears ‘turning 30’ will surely require me to make some kind of warranty claim in respect to my body. All that excercise and diet-reform, and it was all for nothing.

As if the constant reminder from my aching limbs that we are all organisms slowly dying, my final pieces of post I received in my twenties were an ISA interest statement containing a leaflet on how banks are all a bit miffed that the credit-crunch happened, and another telling me that NOW is the time to start planning for my retirement with information on their pension plans and a half-hearted promise that they’ll try not to lose all the money this time.

There will, however, be a big difference to my thirties. Why? Because, ladies and gentlemen, I am now the owner of a ladder. Not just any old ladder, but an exciting-sounding 3-way ladder. Now there’s one thing I didn’t need in my twenties. Things are looking up.

So long as this week’s post doesn’t include any post with little pictures of June Whitfield gliding up the stairs on a metal-incarnation of the hand-of-God, or Des O’Connor telling me to start saving now for my funeral expenses and to write a Will to make sure my non-existent offspring and moggy will be catered for after my demise, I think I can handle it.

See you on the other side! (Of Thirty, obv… not this mortal coil or anything)

Turning 30 *Groan*

Part 1 of an almost-certainly erratic series.

So, word has it I have a birthday coming up soon. And I have to say, word is right. Being a life-affirming optimist realist, I’ve begun to notice that rather like a car past its running-in period, there are a few signs of cracks around the edges as the years increase.

That said, there are very few things so far about heading towards 30 like an English olympic skier – by which I mean in the manner of an uncontrollable snowball, accellerating with gravity with bits of leg or arm ocassionally peaking out from the edges – that have been bad.

There is one notable addition to my otherwise smooth running – I’ve become aware lately of random involuntary noises. It’s something that kind of crept up on me. I can’t stand up or sit down without groaning. At first it was a simple exhilation of delight, a sort of ‘ooh’ that suggested that my new resting position was agreeable.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it began to build its part. The ‘ooh’ turned into ‘oooooohhh’ as I gently lower myself down having put my hands on the seat first (when did that start happening?) as if I somehow need to check the chair is actually there first. Then, almost inevitably, it turned into a ‘haarruummphhh’, lowering in pitch with my height relatively to the chair, and finishing off with an ‘aahhh’ – like I’ve never sat anywhere so comfortable in my life.

The lovely Sarah thinks it’s endearing, but I can’t help worrying as I enter my 4th decade that it’s only a matter of time before I need to start planning ahead before undertaking such a manouvre, or else set-up a base-camp part way to my cushioned comfort. It’s like that picture of the evolution of man, but in reverse.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there are other involuntary noises.

I can easily find myself humming a song as I walk down the street. I react with a sigh or other glottal noise at television programmes. And I find myself putting my fingers in my ears and screaming ‘la la la’ whenever I hear Janet Street Porter talking, although I suspect that everyone does that and it’s unrelated to my turning 30.