Tuesday 30 March 2010

Band field trip

The Jetsonics had a band outing last night. Went to the Albert Hall to see The Specials. The Royal Albert Hall is a spectacular venue. Small enough to feel cosy, big enough to feel like an event. Excellent lighting and excellent sound. The Specials were exciting and fun and tight and after thirty years they still played Gangsters/Ghost Town/Too Much Too Young like they were playing them for the first time. Rude boy!

Monday 22 March 2010

The weekend that was

Went to Legoland. First day of the season and it was lovely, dry and mild. The boys had been looking forward to it since it closed for Winter. Nothing much has changed there, but familiarity and 6 months away just means it's all the more fun when you are five...or two. Even spotted The Wire and Rockstar actor Dominic West while queueing for one of the rides. He was looking very much off duty. Slouchy with shades. I still spotted him though. Kirk Cuddy at Legoland? Damn right.

Friday my band played an eighteenth birthday party somewhere halfway between here and Brighton, or at least a long way around the M25. Was good fun. A short set, but as always we put on a show and larked about. Had a Mars milk on the drive home. Bought it from the garage where the man served me from behind his glass window. I don't want to be in a petrol station at midnight. All the more odd that I was not buying fags or Rizla like everyone else. Mars Milk? Yes, Mars Milk. I don't think it's even called that any more is it? Mars Energy maybe?

Watch Adventureland. It's not the film the posters want you to think it is. It's not Superbad. It's not a laugh out loud teen comedy. It's a romance, filmed with love. It feels almost amateurish and innocent. There are a few laughs. But mostly it feels gentle and understated. In fact it feels a bit like TV show Freaks and Geeks. Not that good, obviously. But had it been the pilot for a TV show, I may well have watched some more of the series.

Tuesday 9 March 2010

The Jetsonics website

Now we're done with Dusty the Disco Dog, it's back to The Jetsonics. I'm working on the website at the moment. It looks pretty cool. I uploaded the idea including rollovers and graphics and it looks smart. Grungy and retor and cool all at the same time. Needs some tweaking to tie the thing together...oh and some content. That would be good. But otherwise I think it should be done within the week.

The gig at The Grey Horse was really good. A good venue with a large enough stage to ponce about on - while you don't need a vast audience to fill it. They were all lined up at chairs and tables in front of us, layout felt a bit cabaret at times. But the music 100% rocked and the crowd enjoyed it. Excellent turn out. The college kid on the sound did an OK job, but he just did the mics for vocals, no amp mic'ing. There is some video of it over at youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgGIIil9YRY

He's not just a dog...he's a disco dog

The song went down well. The remix was worthwhile. I took out some of the compression on the top end and it was less harsh. I added the noise of a whale. I added a crowd under the choruses which gave it a nice party atmosphere and a tambourine to give the whole thing some body. You know the wife was at playgroup today and some of the mum's were singing it. Solid gold hit.

There is talk of an additional verse - we'll have to see about that.

Monday 8 March 2010

The good news bad news

The good news is my Dusty The Disco Dog song sounded great at the first event on Saturday. I was busy taking photos so wasn't fully concentrating, but it came across well as far as I could hear. I'm pretty proud of that one. I think it'd be a good idea to make it available for sale - maybe on the official site http://www.dustydoesdisco.co.uk/ or as a CD single at the events. Maybe both.

The bad news is - photographs in a big dark room with disco lights look like photos in big dark rooms, unless you light the whole thing up. White balance? Not even close. Trying to avoid individual people shots with the 50mm, I was trying to take photos of the room with the 18mm end of 18-55 and these didn't come out too well. Better higher ISO performance and a 2.8 short zoom would have been nice. There're a few that are usable, but nothing to write home about. The decent ones I ended up with were when I fired the flash at the white ceiling ... bouncing is my friend. Although these don't capture the real-disco feeling of the event, they are much better, sharper photos.

Dull photo-centric interlude ends.

Wednesday 3 March 2010

Flabberwhopper

Searching on Google, results returned: ZERO.

Flabberwhopper needs to be on the internet, so here it is. Let's see how long it takes to index this entry and appear in a Google search for Flabberwhopper.

Flabberwhopper is an extraordinarily large creature, I don't think it has legs, though underneath its rolls of flab they may be there. Flabberwhopper eats and eats. Burgers mostly. The more burgers the better and the bigger the burger is - the more Flabberwhopper likes it.

Flabberwhopper can also be used to name something or someone of extraoridnary size:

"I'd like a Flabberwhopper portion of chips please."

"Did you see that elephant? It was a real Flabberwhopper."

Did you really need to know that?