One of the things about using the same email program for a decade or more means that you can find out what you were doing exactly 10 years ago, and then either wince at the stupidity of your younger self or, just occasionally, nod in appreciation at a creative streak you once had that seems to have vanished since. In the dead post-Christmas period in 2001 I wrote this song as a present for my friend Vic, who I'd just met and who I was bowled over by - mainly because of our shared love of caustic turns of phrase plus self-deprecation.
One of my better tunes, I think. Smugly pleased with that line: "I'll try not to be menacing, if you promise not to bring the kind of moods that tend to swing." How Vicious We Are the alleyways that fill me with terror are picnics when it's a sunny day they lead to a perfect place to write sketches - at a snail's pace prepared to say that we made an error and laughing at our ability to talk so offensively but it's done so diplomatically how vicious we are and we wouldn't put up with bogus films in our cinema how vicious we are and we wouldn't put up with tasteless food in our restaurant so let's go out it would be a pleasure and i'll try not to be menacing if you promise not to bringthe kind of moods that tend to swing and then we go and get drunk together and cos i'm not dressed so casually you say "don't stand so close to me" but there's nowhere else i'd rather be how vicious we are and we wouldn't put up with rubbish left in our rental car how vicious we are and we wouldn't put up with english tea in our samovar how vicious we are and we wouldn't put up with loutish youths in our spanish bar as cool as you are i hope that you're taking careful notes at this seminar
In about 1950 my great-grandfather bought a reel-to-reel tape player. My mum just dug out some of the first recordings he made with it. It kicks off with my great-grandmother reciting Mary Had A Little Lamb – stirring stuff. Then Mr Jones pops round, and my great-grandmother attempts to engage him in conversation for the tape. "Why are you being so serious?" asks Mr Jones after half a minute or so. "Well, you try the other way if you like," she says. "Tell me a little fairy story." In the third part, Mrs Jones turns up, and they marvel at hearing their own voices on tape. "He's so Welshie!" says Mrs Jones. It's all just lovely.
This is a long saga, but maybe someone can tell me what might have happened. FreeParking aren't shedding much light on it.
There's a domain name that I look after for a friend of mine, dickonedwards.co.uk. In early September I had an email from FreeParking saying it's time to renew it. To be honest, I'm a bit sick of FreeParking; the website's a mess and long overdue a rehaul, and I've started transferring domain registrations away from them when they're up for renewal. (They have a bad habit of persisting in asking for renewal cash even after the domain is no longer in their hands, but that's another story.)
So I tried initiating a transfer out, which for co.uk domain names means changing the IPSTAG - in my case from FIBRANET to PDR-IN, which is Dreamhost. But I never received a security key in my email to complete the transfer into Dreamhost. And because I'm such a BUSY MAN I just thought meh, forget it, I'll just leave the registration with FreeParking, I can't be arsed to look into it. On 20th September I paid them £15.98 and got a receipt ("thank you for your payment of renewal fees") for dickonedwards.co.uk. On the 16th November, Dickon noted that his website was down. I checked the WHOIS:
Registered on: 12-Oct-2005 Renewal date: 12-Oct-2011 Last updated: 08-Sep-2011
B-b-but I paid for renewal! I sent an email immediately to the support team. Mark replied, saying:
The renewal will go through this end if you change the IPSTAG to FIBRANET and use the transfer in to move the domain back here, an action for which there is no fee.
I went to try and change it back the next day, but dickonedwards.co.uk had, in that time, completely disappeared from my list of domains in the FreeParking control panel. So I told them this. And I told them again. And again. On 23rd November I had a reply:
The domain is not registered here - you transferred it out in September.
I pointed out that they'd accepted £15.98 from me on 20th September for renewing it, and that the domain seemed to be in total limbo, with me unable to access the FreeParking control panel to revert the IPSTAG, and unable to change it at Dreamhost because I couldn't supply them with the security key to transfer it out. Later that day, FreeParking said:
Your best option is to have Nominet change the IPSTAG to FIBRANET - we cannot do it as we are no longer authoritative for the domain.
OK. Jeez. Went to the Nominet website. I don't have a Nominet login. No idea really how to get one. Rushed off my feet, I sat on this information for a few days. But then on the 26th November I had this unprompted email from FreeParking:
The retagging of dickonedwards.co.uk is now complete. We have also renewed the domain for a further two years and reset the DNS records within the WHOIS. If you were using third party name servers before the name was detagged please use the maintainance pages of the freeparking web site to reset the nameservers. The name will become available across the internet when Nominet next reloads its nameservers (usually early morning).
Whoo! But... the WHOIS information still indicated that the domain was suspended. And the website still wasn't functioning. By this time dickonedwards.co.uk had appeared back in my FreeParking control panel, though. So I reset the IPSTAG to FIBRANET. But it made no difference. I asked FreeParking what was going on. Today I got a reply that made me go "AGGGHHH":
I said you should change the IPSTAG back to us...the IPSTAG needs to be FIBRANET.
If anyone could explain to me who has screwed up here (it could well be me, I understand this), and what on earth I'm supposed to do to get this domain back up and running, it would be much appreciated.
Green's Power Mac G5, which he's been using since 2004 and has all the raw material for the forthcoming album on it, has sadly bitten the dust. All the hard drive content is fine – phew! – but we need an identical G5 machine to put it into.
Any model that's newer than this won't work, tragically; the software and hardware that we use would suddenly need upgrading and it would all become prohibitively expensive. We've spent hours assessing our options but this is what we need:
- Power Mac G5 (we have the June 2004 model: http://support.apple.com/kb/sp80) - Dual 2GHz (or above) - preferably not one of the liquid-cooled ones - PCI-X - 8 RAM slots running PC3200 RAM - a QUIET fan system that isn't knackered
It's a long shot, but if anyone knows anyone who might have such a thing, and would be prepared to sell it for the going second-hand rate, we'd be IMMENSELY grateful. Drop me a line at rhodri@mac.com.
The Keatons had so many dreadful gigs it's hard to know where to start. There was one in Krommenie, Holland, that ended up with the venue being trashed by Nazi skinheads. That was pretty bad. Then there was the one at Dalston Crown & Cushion on the night of the World Cup semifinal in 1990 where the landlord stopped the gig because the four crusty punks in attendance weren't buying any beer - that was pretty pointless. But the worst was probably on the 24th May 1990 at North London Polytechnic.
We were offered £100 to put on an "evening of entertainment", which at that time was as big a windfall and exciting a prospect as a slightly shit indie band from London could expect. My memory is of a hand-made poster saying "The Keatons / Magic / Elephants / Golf", which wasn't true, but looked funny. I know that we were the only band on the bill, though - and the support act consisted of our friend Mo, a performance artist who later joined the band, acting out a sumo wrestling bout on a table using hard boiled eggs. Yep.
Inexplicably, the venue was quite busy. More explicably, Dave, our guitarist, was late. He was working as a lawyer for a firm of complete bastards in Bayswater, and he'd been under intolerable stress for longer than the rest of us cared to remember. He turned up behaving very, very strangely. "What's wrong with Dave?" I asked Steve, the bass player. The consensus was that he was drunk, but it wasn't a kind of drunkenness we'd ever seen before. He was going up to people with a small purse of coins in his left hand and a watch in his right, staring intently and weighing up the two objects carefully. When you talked to him, he extemporised on the twin themes of time and money in a barely coherent fashion. It was all very distressing - but as he wasn't having trouble walking about we figured he'd be alright to play. Show must go on, and all that.
We used to do this pointless gambit at gigs where Dave would go onstage first and play this repetitive, atonal riff for about a minute before the rest of joined him. Just before he walked on, he turned to us and said "You know what - I'm going to EXPRESS MYSELF." Dave wasn't the kind of person to either a) express himself, or b) announce that he was going to express himself, so this wasn't unworrying. Steve and I exchanged a nervous glance as Dave picked up his guitar, turned on the amp, and just started strumming the open strings with his eyes shut. This went on for ages. I mean, ages.
"Start the fucking song," came the shout from the side of the stage. Dave came to, and started playing properly. We all walked on, and started the song, but after about 30 seconds I looked over and saw that Dave had reverted to open strumming, this droning, distorted din blaring out of his amp. I shouted over at him, but he was in his own world. The song ended. Steve asked him if he was OK. Dave said yes. The next song began, and Dave launched into his distorto-blare thing again. There was utter confusion onstage; we didn't know whether to keep going or what, but there was a lot of shouting going on. To my shame – I was only 18, forgive me – I marched across the stage and booted Dave in the leg; violence, as we know, solves everything. A few seconds later he stopped playing, and started crying. He walked over to Andy, the drummer, who also stopped playing, and they hugged each other for maybe half a minute. There was silence in the room, the crowd staring in disbelief at this bizarre spectacle.
Dave, tears streaming down his face, turned and said to Steve "Do you think I should leave the stage?" Steve replied "Yes, I think that would probably be a good idea." He did, and as we continued playing without him (which seems somewhat inappropriate in retrospect but we still, on balance, thought he was drunk) he wandered around the venue looking massively distressed. As we finished a lacklustre, dispiriting set, we left the stage, and saw Dave sitting there with the purse and the watch, looking upset and confused.
Dave, our lovely friend Dave, was later picked up by Brixton Police in the middle of the night after he'd been found handing out money to passers-by on Brixton Hill. He was later sectioned, and eventually diagnosed with manic depression. (These days he's just fine, thank goodness.)
Jowe Head from the TV Personalities, who was in the audience that night, said later that it was one of the most extraordinary gigs he'd ever witnessed. "It was like watching a band falling apart in front of your eyes." It was one of the strangest evenings of my life. (The clip below was filmed three weeks later. Rock and roll. And toothbrushes.)
My dad gave me a tour diary which he found in the attic. The band was called The Keatons; I was in them from 1990 to 1995. I've been reading it on the tube. Here's an excerpt.
10th April 1992: Hasselt, Belgium We get to Hasselt. On arrival we discover that the gig is in fact 10 miles away in Herk de Stad. We're supporting a band called Maximum Bob, who'd just finished soundchecking when we arrived. What a bunch of tits they are. The drummer is called "Chaos", which tells you all you need to know. They insist that we use every piece of our own equipment, thus ensuring maximum onstage disruption, and then continue to behave like rock stars and get annoyed when we leave the dressing room door open. Naturally we leave it open at every possible opportunity. The Keatons turn in a very poor performance, the sound onstage is utter bollocks and I break most of my guitar strings. When Maximum Bob go onstage we steal all their beer and get hammered to compensate. After the gig, we dance stupidly to crap heavy metal and laugh until we ache. We load the gear into the van. An old man comes up up to the van and starts shouting at us in Flemish and hitting the van. Dave says to him earnestly, "Go away and stop hitting our van," causing us to lapse into uncontrollable giggles. We split into two factions. Although we didn't know this at the time, one group were to eat, sleep soundly and comfortably and arise fresh in the morning. The other - including me - were to remain at the venue for three hours getting force fed with beer and dope, driven away by a drunk, stoned Belgian down a dual carriageway with one of his feet dangling out of the window, going to a gay bar for more beer, going back to the man's flat and listening to very loud music until the sun came up. I succeeded in locking myself in the bathroom for 30 minutes and a glass panel had to be smashed to get me out. We then slept on a cold, tiled floor from 7am until midday, whereupon the man put on very loud music again. Piles coming on, and frankly who can blame them?
An email from my mother. "I've just found the will of your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, William Williams. This is what he left to his wife on his demise in 1789:
I give and bequeath to Catherine my beloved wife one bedstead, one feather bed, two blankets, one green rug and the green curtains, one bolster and its case, one pillow and its case, also two sheets, one great chest and the little chest, two tablecloths, and the little table with the drawers, two chairs, the best grate, one pail, one iron pot viz. the greatest, six large pewter dishes, and the twelve small plates viz. pewter, one pewter tankard, all her clothes and half the handkerchiefs that are in Glan y Rhyd [their farmhouse in Ystradgynlais], two brazen candlesticks, one smoothing iron, one tin skillet, half a dozen of glass bottles, and the corner cupboard together with the spinning wheel and the wooden bowl.
"What more could a woman need?" concludes my mum. I'm just wondering who got the other half of the handkerchiefs.
I've been suffering a bit from anxiety recently. I was having an email exchange with a friend of mine (who is having similar trouble) about how to combat it. She sent the following reply, which I'm attempting to memorize.
I think we need a fantasy. This could be it: We both go and live in an extremely pretty country cottage. We have a shed in the back garden containing a team of doctors, counsellors and psychologists. They provide round the clock medical and psychiatric support and reassurance should we need it. Otherwise we just ignore them. And anyone who wants to come and have sex with us can come and stay in our dedicated sex wing. Apart from that we just concentrate on eating nice food and drinking fine wine. We can take turns to cook. The government gives us £5000 a week to live in this way. This enables us to put a bit aside each week in an ISA that pays 95% interest. What do you think?
So, I wrote this piece for The Independent today about the process of internet dating, and how it can affect people's self-esteem. It was pretty honest. Not meant to dissuade people; more meant as a reassurance to those who are finding it tough going. I just received this email from the PR Desk of Easydate PLC. It annoyed me.
Dear Rhodri, I was interested to read your article in I on online dating (IQ 'WLTM', Thursday 4 November 2010) and how you see it as essentially a process for lonely people who have very little chance of finding true love. At Easydate plc we operate various online dating sites including Cupid.com, SpeedDater.com and Datetheuk.com and the majority of users of these sites see it as an easy and fun way to meet likeminded people in a safe environment. Of course there is no guarantee of finding true love, but by avoiding the often intimidating process of approaching a stranger in person, you can avoid the uncomfortable chat-up lines in bars and increase your chances of finding someone with similar interests in a more open and relaxed space online. By lowering your serious expectations of finding 'true love' and seeing online dating as something more light-hearted and fun you can increase the likelihood of finding a compatible date which could, in the long run, lead to something more serious.
I was in a pub with some friends in Mile End last night. Adam turned up, smiling. And he said (roughly) the following:
You wouldn't believe the bus journey I've just had. Incredible. I was just getting on this bus, and I could see that a bloke in front was having a heated argument with the bus driver. And the first thing I heard was the bus driver saying "Look, mate, there's no WAY that she's 10 years old." And this guy was clearly trying to get on the bus with a girl and not have to pay her fare, and he was saying "She IS 10. How DARE you. You think I don't know how old my own daughter is? She's 10!" And the bus driver was just shaking his head, saying "She's not 10, pal. She just isn't." And anyway, this girl had gone to sit down on a seat, and so I looked over, and I wish I could have taken a picture of her to show you, it was so funny – she must have been 22. She was, you know, incredibly well-developed. Either that or smuggling melons. It was just ludicrous. I mean, she was definitely 18, but probably in her early twenties. It was one of the most ridiculous situations I've ever seen. And there was this guy shouting at the bus driver, saying "You don't know how old my daughter is! I know how old my daughter is! She's 10!" And the bus driver by this point was almost crying with laughter, saying "Mate, she's not 10! Look at her. She just isn't 10!" And by now everyone else on the bus was getting quite worked up about this, because we'd been sitting there for 3 or 4 minutes arguing whether this girl – I mean, let's face it, woman – was 10 years old. Some of us was just laughing, but others were just getting impatient, and there was this bloke in a big, orange cowboy hat sitting there and he just screamed "She's not fucking 10 years old, now pay up and move the fucking bus!" Which seemed to get things moving. Anyway, the only seat was next to this guy with the hat, so I went to sit down, and the first thing he did was grab my thigh and say "Nice big legs," so, you know, I thought, this isn't good. He was incredibly odd, but very tenacious, so basically I was stuck there for about 20 minutes with him firing questions at me. And, seriously, this guy now knows everything about me – he knows my name, where I work, my girlfriend's name, my birthday, all the names of my brothers and sisters, he knows that I'm coming here tonight, he knows pretty much everything about all of you lot. And when I told him a name, he'd always do the same thing – so, like, he said "Do you have a girlfriend?" And I said yes, and he said "And what's her name?" And I said Debs, and he said "She could be Debbie Harry. The singer in Blondie." And then I'd say that I'm coming to meet Tommy, and he'd say "He could be Tommy Vance, the DJ." And when I got to you, Dave [points at his brother] he had a fucking field day – "He could be David Beckham, he could be David Bowie, he could be David Blunkett…" Anyway. "There's no way she's 10!!" Fucking priceless. Anyone need a pint?
