Grim meathook future / it's all fucked give up now / no 3g signal for John Keys
This weekend involved a night at the Columbia and a few hours in the Borderline feeling like something of an outsider.
It was all a bit oh-god-how-long-ago, really. On the upside, the Columbia has lost next to none of its character, the breakfast still sets you up for the day good and proper, and it was lovely to bump into Maria.
The gig itself was a psych/prog all-dayer jointly organised/sponsored by An Record Label that sold actual records and, er, Record Collector magazine. For reasons that seemed blindingly obvious at the time, I spent quite a while talking about the NSA and Dutch hacker culture with one of the artists. After a while, I wandered out to discover that several of the bands were all about large and unwieldy organs. Mind, if that's the sort of thing that sinks your boat then I'm sure a Hammond or a Mellotron would be most efficient.
Meanwhile, back at the record stall next to the bogs, terrible discoveries were being made. The carrier bags, supplied by Record Collector magazine, and you could tell that because they had 'Record Collector' printed on them in big white-on-black letters, which would leave you in no doubt that the primary interest of the people who wrote the articles and paid for the adverts was likely the buying and selling of records, weren't quite big enough to fit an album inside. An album is a 12" record. The sort of thing that you might find written about in Record Collector magazine. Who had supplied the carrier bags. The carrier bags with 'Record Collector' printed on them. That were just too small to slide a record inside. I could see the middle-aged blokes on either side of the stall staring at the bags with a mixture of disbelief, resignation and failure. I certainly found it hard to believe that physics wasn't just having a little drunken laugh and soon the bags would become the right size, as we all remembered from when we would collectively emerge from our different local record shops with carriers filled with a 12" on Chapter 22 Records, a Big Black LP or perhaps a Peel Sessions EP. However, it was not to be. It seemed we had arrived in a rubbish universe where carrier bags were actually the size of an unknown manner of consumer durable and our mistake was in wanting a thing from our past, rather than wanting what we were told to want which was the thing that fitted in the carrier bag. This is the subliminal message from the military-entertainment complex - you will want the things we will sell you and they will be the size that is most convenient for manufacturing and shipping, rather than your own desires or utility. (See, for instance, Ikea mugs)
In the end, there was a burst of punk rock as the bloke behind the stall slashed two carriers open and gaffered them together round the double LP set. Sticking it to the man, as it were.
It was all a bit oh-god-how-long-ago, really. On the upside, the Columbia has lost next to none of its character, the breakfast still sets you up for the day good and proper, and it was lovely to bump into Maria.
The gig itself was a psych/prog all-dayer jointly organised/sponsored by An Record Label that sold actual records and, er, Record Collector magazine. For reasons that seemed blindingly obvious at the time, I spent quite a while talking about the NSA and Dutch hacker culture with one of the artists. After a while, I wandered out to discover that several of the bands were all about large and unwieldy organs. Mind, if that's the sort of thing that sinks your boat then I'm sure a Hammond or a Mellotron would be most efficient.
Meanwhile, back at the record stall next to the bogs, terrible discoveries were being made. The carrier bags, supplied by Record Collector magazine, and you could tell that because they had 'Record Collector' printed on them in big white-on-black letters, which would leave you in no doubt that the primary interest of the people who wrote the articles and paid for the adverts was likely the buying and selling of records, weren't quite big enough to fit an album inside. An album is a 12" record. The sort of thing that you might find written about in Record Collector magazine. Who had supplied the carrier bags. The carrier bags with 'Record Collector' printed on them. That were just too small to slide a record inside. I could see the middle-aged blokes on either side of the stall staring at the bags with a mixture of disbelief, resignation and failure. I certainly found it hard to believe that physics wasn't just having a little drunken laugh and soon the bags would become the right size, as we all remembered from when we would collectively emerge from our different local record shops with carriers filled with a 12" on Chapter 22 Records, a Big Black LP or perhaps a Peel Sessions EP. However, it was not to be. It seemed we had arrived in a rubbish universe where carrier bags were actually the size of an unknown manner of consumer durable and our mistake was in wanting a thing from our past, rather than wanting what we were told to want which was the thing that fitted in the carrier bag. This is the subliminal message from the military-entertainment complex - you will want the things we will sell you and they will be the size that is most convenient for manufacturing and shipping, rather than your own desires or utility. (See, for instance, Ikea mugs)
In the end, there was a burst of punk rock as the bloke behind the stall slashed two carriers open and gaffered them together round the double LP set. Sticking it to the man, as it were.