Ice cubes in the fire

Is it just us?

Really, what is it about TypePad that spawns all these vaguely paradoxical blog titles. Ice cubes in the fire? Snowball in hell? Just coincidence? I think not...

Although considering the title for this blog comes from the demented ramblings of a certain stoner ex-boyfriend, I wouldn't eliminate the possibility.

Tragic

This is too tragic for words...

Hehe, sorry Cosmo, but you can't expect anything different. Give my best to the little lady.

So this is what it feels like

I'm not quite sure what has just happened. I woke up this morning, thinking it would be a nice, quiet, relaxing Saturday. Maybe I would see a few friends, have a few drinks, get some work done. Never in the proverbial million years would I have expected to see the band I adore, playing in the ideal venue, with myself standing about a metre away from Matt Bellamy, the heart and soul of Muse.

That's right. I saw Muse today. They were doing an astonishingly intimate recording of three songs from Absolution, for an audience of about 150 people. The songs were, if you're interested, Time is Running Out, Hysteria and the mindblowing Butterflies and Hurricanes. The chain of events that led to me seeing this band in such a perfect venue is somewhat complicated, and involved a little trickery, a little indecisiveness, a whole string of coincidences, the presence of David Isaacs, and a whole lot of luck, but somehow myself, David and Pip Kennedy managed to smuggle ourselves into Studio 1 - Riverside Studios and end up being within touching distance of perhaps the greatest musician of our generation. I'm not afraid of hyperbole, not after this. If you live in the UK, and have the time and inclination, watch the next episode of CD:UK. You'll see me standing directly in front of Matt Bellamy, grinning like an idiot, making a fool of myself and being the happiest man alive.

I'm still in shock.

And one more thing...

Woo I'm doing a lot of posting today...

Anyway, yes, I've added a whole bunch of photos to 'The Cast' album, go check them out! And I am planning to add more Glastonbury photos someday, I promise.

I don't even like Timberlake...

I'm with Chris on this one - "this boy is soooo gay"

How the mighty fall...

This has been floating around the blogosphere for ages, but since I've just come across it again, I thought it might be worth highlighting. In 1991, fellow Brit Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece for Harper's Magazine attacking the Bush Administration for starting the first Gulf War. Twelve years on, and he is one of the leading voices defending the second Bush Administration for starting the second Gulf War.

But here is what he wrote then:

The call [to war] was an exercise in peace through strength. But the cause was yet another move in the policy of keeping a region divided and embittered, and therefore accessible to the franchisers of weaponry and the owners of black gold. An earlier regional player, Benjamin Disraeli, once sarcastically remarked that you could tell a weak government by its eagerness to resort to strong measures. The Bush administration uses strong measures to ensure weak government abroad, and has enfeebled democratic government at home. The reasoned objection must be that this is a dangerous and dishonorable pursuit, in which the wealthy gamblers have become much too accustomed to paying their bad debts with the blood of others.

Read the whole thing here.

Oh I so am!

find your queer as folk personality

Oh trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again...

Have just returned from a "modern" production of Romeo and Juliet, called Shakespeare's R&J at the Arts Theatre. I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet - it's very clever, transposing the play from medieval Verona to a repressive (obviously) Catholic seminary/boarding school somewhere in America, and using a cast of four guys in their twenties as the schoolboys, who find a banned copy of the play one night and decide to re-enact it, in the process awakening their own sexuality.

I'm still not sure whether they really pulled the idea off, but it was certainly a diverting evening's entertainment. More thoughts shortly...

What is this Radiohead of which you speak?

Being a hot-off-the-presses review of the album Absolution by Muse, to be released 22nd September 2003

(written with Dave Isaacs)

"You've got to be the best, you've got to change the world and use this chance to be heard." Matt Bellamy (all-round musical genius) could well be talking to himself, because if Absolution gets the reception it deserves, he might achieve it. It's good, it's very good.

From the opening march of the apocalyptic opener, Apocalypse Please, you know that this album exists in its own world. Distorted guitars, crashing pianos and Bellamy's wailing, sonorous and yearning voice all come together to make it sound - to all intents and purposes - like the end of the world. This is a truly universal album; the paradoxically hopeful first single 'Time is Running Out', a frantic mix between love song and funereal dirge, comprises of a Michael Jackson-esque vocal line rising above a baseline reminiscent of Radiohead, but the end result is something only Muse could produce. It is a song for every man, woman or child who has ever felt in danger of losing something valuable. The general tone of the album ranges from the brutal, violent Stockholm Syndrome to the gentle disco ballad 'Endlessly', in which Bellamy sings - his tortured voice sounding more pained than ever - 'I won't leave you falling if the moment never comes'. It's beautiful.

Perhaps the highlight of the album is Butterflies and Hurricanes, in which Bellamy's trademark guitar sound plays against a soaring orchestra, before breaking down into a solo piano attack. With the upcoming 'Kick up the fire and let the flames break loose' and Elbow's stunning 'Cast of Thousands', we are witnessing a revolution, banishing all those garage rock bands and their overstyled haircuts back to the seventies. Is this the end of music as we know it?

(Everything is going wrong)

The man who fell asleep has to be one of the funniest, and most beautifully depressing web-sites I have seen in a very long time. Its contents range from 'sad jokes' -

Two men are sitting in a pub.

One man turns to the other and says: "Last night I saw lots of strange men coming in and out of your wife's house."

The other man replies: "Yes, she has become a prostitue to subsidise her drug habit."

to random snippets of conversation overheard on the tube. My favourite has to be

"No, I'm not pro-war. I just can't muster up the moral outrage and smugness to oppose it."

Go visit, it's very woo.