Category Archives: Personal

A Little Bit Sleazy, A Little Bit Sad. My Songs of 2011 (Spotify Playlist)

Listen/subscribe to my Sleazy, Sad Songs of 2011 Spotify Playlist

As I’ve been “doing other shit instead” I haven’t exactly had my ear to the ground this year in terms of cutting edge new music, so this is resolutely populist for the most part, and the vast majority will be familiar. But hey, it’s what I listened to this year.

A few also might have been overplayed, but I’m not letting that take away from the fact they’re great tracks. However I don’t know many other people who like both Jonnie Common and Britney Spears, so maybe this is quite an unusual playlist?

And I think it all ties together quite nicely in this order and is actually bloody amazing. But then it is my fave songs of 2011 after all.

Also bear in mind that quite a few songs I liked this year are not on Spotify so could not be included (e.g. Conquering Animal Sound & Rob St John).

I’m discovering loads of stuff I missed through everyone else’s playlists of course – and I may well add a few more over the next wee while, so GO ON, SUBSCRIBE. Give it a chance. You never know you might like Drake’s creepy confessional R’n'B/hip hop (or you might be offended by certain words he uses, you have been warned).

Tracklisting:

1. SBTRKT – Never Never (feat. Sampha)
2. The Shivers – Love is in the Air
3. Metronomy – The Look
4. Found – Johnny I Can’t Walk The Line
5. Wild Beasts – Loop The Loop
6. Jonnie Common – Summer is for Going Places
7. PS I Love You – Subtle & Majestic
8. Little Dragon – Ritual Union
9. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Bubble
10. Slow Club – Two Cousins
11. Britney Spears – Inside Out
12. Drake – Marvin’s Room
13. Kurt Vile – Baby’s Arms
14. David Guetta – Little Bad Girl (feat Taio Cruz)
15. Battles – Ice Cream
16. Bill Wells & Aidan John Moffat – The Copper Top
17. St Vincent – Northern Lights
18. Wale – Focused (feat Kid Cudi)
19. Foster the People – Pumped Up Kicks

Other lists worth checking out which will no doubt have numerous gems I’ve missed (in no particular order):

The Tidal Wave of Indifference (currently counting down)

Song by Toad reader’s top 5 (he will have more lists soon)

Aye Tunes

Glasgow Podcart

Pitchfork

And of course, VICE

(note: my favourite is always Said the Gramophone but their list isn’t up yet)

Home and Dry from Homegame

Phew. That was a busy week, in which blogging just hasn’t been near the top of my list of priorities, so sorry about the lack of posts recently. As well as doing some decorating (yawn), I went to see Grizzly Bear/Beach House (which was an excellent excellent gig – see Evil Stu’s review for more details), played my first gig as ‘Famous Drunk’ with my friends Iain, formerly of Private Jackson and Chris, formerly bassist for Arab Strap and currently playing with the Gothenburg Address. It was a total shambles of course, but I was very grateful to them both for helping me play some of my songs, and I think we’re all keen to do something again in the future but with more than one rehearsal next time, which I am delighted about.

All the other people who performed were brilliant, especially the poet Paul Birtill who possibly has the most bleakly brilliant sense of humour ever (he is John Cooper Clarke’s favourite poet) and a fair bit of cash was raised for the charity Great Little Libraries.

Then it was off to Anstruther in the east neuk of Fife (or Anster as it is known to the locals) for the annual Fence Homegame festival. As with last year, it was a brilliant laugh, with highlights being the Friday and Saturday nights in Legends where Findo Gask and the Silver Columns (as well as DJ sets by On The Fly and John Maclean from the Beta Band/Aliens) got everyone whipped up into a pulsating frenzy of boogying with a little help from the crazy dancing Frenchmen from Francois and the Atlas Mountains. Other stand-outs were a rare and compelling live set by the Lone Pigeon alongside the Pictish Trail, Withered Hand, and a wonderful fireside performance by King Creosote on accordion in the Smuggler’s Inn (as well as witnessing the recording of his 8th bit of strange which was very special indeed). Anyway I will probably write more on both Homegame and the Grizzly Bear/Beach House gig for the next issue of the zine, if not for the blog in the next wee while.

Worth checking out is this great Homegame slideshow done by Billy and Su of Under The Radar which has a great atmospheric soundtrack too – though steel yourself for the photo of Mel and I watching an impromptu live performance by Men Diamler outside the Anster Town Hall, as we were pretty hungover at that point on Sunday afternoon!

And the dry part..

The empty bottle of whisky pictured at the top of this post was a special blend made for this year’s Homegame, and very nice it was too. But it is also special because it is the last drink I will be having for a while. I’ll be taking it one day at a time, and my first aim is to give up for a month. But ideally (and perhaps over-ambitiously) I’d like to stay off it until next year’s Homegame which will be closely followed by our wedding. That could be extremely tricky though so let’s just see how I get on this month – the most difficult occasion to be sober in the near future is likely to be the Hinterland Festival, but I am determined to at least last the first month out.

I know it may seem an extremely antisocial goal to have, but in actual fact I’m hoping it helps me develop my social skills better, as I have in the past been quite reliant on the booze for socialising. I actually relate to the very first part of this extremely sobering account of being an alcoholic in terms of how drinking brought me out of myself to begin with at school but then led to me basically being a bit of a dick and making some terrible decisions at college, though luckily things have never got as bad as described here.

Anyway, that’s what I meant by Home and Dry. And I will be blogging a bit more regularly again so please subscribe so you don’t miss my blather.

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A (Not So) Brief History of My Creative Efforts – Recap

Seeing as I’ve not had a chance to properly research a ‘Gaseous Brainstorm’ post this week, and am off to Aberdeen for a stag weekend tomorrow morning (weather and liver permitting) I thought I’d delve back into the archives.

Those of you who’ve been reading a while and have particularly good memories might remember I started this series about my (mostly ill-fated) creative efforts but never got round to finishing it.

So far I’ve covered up to around 1999, so there’s a decade still to cover. I couldn’t quite keep it as brief as I’d hoped though, and I’d already written a lengthy series that covered around 1999 to 2004 called ‘I Was a Swivel Chair’ which covers a fair few misspent years in shit jobs, behaving like an utter twat and trying to get a comedy band off the ground (and failing spectacularly). Given that it doesn’t particularly paint me in the best light I was reluctant to revisit it. However I’ve decided to put it up here for a short time so anyone who cares can have a read before it is deleted from the internet forever!

Anyway here’s what’s come so far, and what is still to come, as a reminder or for anyone who wasn’t around at the time.

A Brief History of My Creative Efforts – Part 1

September 3, 2009

So what is all this “Gaseous Brain” nonsense all about? What does it actually mean? Good question….

A brief history of my creative efforts Part 2

September 11, 2009

FILM OPENINGS After deciding that I didn’t have the excessively extroverted character necessary for a career in the theatre, I decided that being behind the camera m …

A Brief History of My Creative Efforts Part 3 – A Good Face for Radio?

September 24, 2009

I had also managed to secure a decent bit of work experience with a radio production company called Unique. The course itself made no provision for this, but I was lucky enough to have a cousi …

A Brief History of My Creative Efforts Part 4 – Fear and Loathing on the Job-hunting Trail

October 28, 2009

A Novel Idea In my final year of college I also started writing lyrics and other random stuff in a bit of a creative outpouring, due perhaps to the fact that I’d kept my creativity bottled up for so long (or drowned it in a sea of booze might be more accurate) and incre …

Next: I Was a Swivel Chair

100 Days to Get My Shit Together – Week 1 Update

I thought it was about time I updated you on how I’m progressing with Getting My Shit Together.

After I made the pledge on Monday, Fabian from the Friendly Anarchist rightly called me out for being obtuse about what I was actually going to be doing each day, so on day 1 I decided to make it more ‘measurable’ and amended the pledge to ‘will get my shit together and document my progress in a daily journal’. I thought this might at least ensure I am doing something specific each day to progress.

If you are interested in becoming more productive yourself then what follows may be of use as it has taken me quite a bit of research to work out this system.

If you only come here to read about music and couldn’t give a flying rat’s anus about productivity systems then you’ll probably want to ignore the rest of this post as it gets fairly detailed!

Day 1: My Journal Set-Up

I’m adding the journal entries to the native notes app on the iPhone as this automatically adds a date stamp to each entry. The iPhone’s chief weakness is it’s not a lot of fun for typing at length, but I intend to keep the journal entries very short anyway – I am basically inputting what I managed to achieve each day, and what didn’t go to plan so that I can improve in those areas in the future.

This works well as I actually use Simplenote (as championed by John Gruber of Daring Fireball) for all my other random notes, such as ideas for blog posts or stuff I want to be able to find in future (the equivalent of what Charlie Gilkey calls his ‘Idea Garden’).

It syncs to a brilliantly basic and fast web app meaning all my notes are automatically backed up online for future use, and which I can access both on my home and work computers.

Day 2: Deciding What ‘To Do’

I knew the first thing I have to do was come up with a system for managing what I had to do and stick to it. Luckily I’ve already been looking into this before I started the 100 days challenge, so it was just a case of revisiting it briefly.

If you’re anything like me you probably need a to-do list to remind you to do your to do list

As you can tell I’m a big fan of the iPhone and have tried pretty much every to-do app there is. A lot of people swear by Things which syncs with a paid for desktop app (mac only) or for a web app Remember The Milk is probably the leader in its field but you need to be a pro user to access the iPhone app.

For me Appigo’s To Do has the best features of any iPhone productivity app, however although it will sync with Toodledo’s web app or iCal, it would really need its own web-based app for it to cover all my needs.

If it’s simply reminders you’re after, a really good new service is Task.fm which sends you email reminders and is very easy to update.

Let’s face it thought, all that time I wasted trying out the various to do apps I could have been actually achieving something. Testing productivity tools can become a way of procrastinating in itself. Which is why I’ve now given up on technology-based productivity systems all together.

If you struggle to stick to a to-do list, I heartily recommend you check out the Todoodlist system (affiliate link). It will probably help you have some prior experience with mindmaps, but all in all it’s a very simple system and I’m using a separate page for work and home.

I admit I am still reliant on technology for reminders though – I add them to my iPhone’s native calendar app because it allows me to set two reminders for each event to ensure I can’t ignore or miss it.

Day 3 – Goal Setting

Fabian also mentioned I might want to try top productivity blogger Leo Babauta’s Zen To Done system (also an affiliate link), funnily enough as I had started re-reading his book The Power of Less that very day.

Both have a lot of great info but Zen to Done is perhaps an easier system to integrate as it’s pretty much laid out step by step. Leo’s key message is one of simplicity and focus – both things I am much in need of in my life which has become a mess of trying to do much at the same time.

Focusing on one key goal and ignoring all others until it’s achieved is probably my main challenge as I am usually all over the place.

The World’s Strongest Librarian probably put it best:

Whatever goals you have made, this one must come first: The goal is to keep the goal the goal.

Read that again: The goal is to keep the goal the goal.

An unnecessary translation: quit bouncing around. Pick a goal then measure all your actions against it. Does what I’m doing help me reach my goal? If not, eliminate it. Do not spend your time doing things that don’t get you closer to your goal. Avoid distractions at all costs.

So that’s what I decided to do. Now I just needed to know what my one key goal was.

Day 4 – Hmmmm

Day 4 I achieved very little except for getting massively drunk as I had my work’s Christmas lunch, which was an obscenely boozy affair, followed by the Found/Mersault/Panda Su gig. However one of my friends told me to stop being so hard on myself, I’m not going to berate myself too much.

Day 5 – Focus Pocus

I did some more work on my goals this day. I wrote down all the things I want to do, which included:

Getting a new job and saving up money
Improving this blog and increasing the number of subscribers
Getting better at the guitar and playing live now and again (despite reading this reality check from Feeding the Black Dog earlier in the week: 5 Reasons You Probably Won’t Be a Rock Star)
Starting to earn money from my writing
Moving flat/getting married
Running a 5k in January

And there are more but you can see that even this is a lot to try and do. I still couldn’t make myself choose one to focus my full attention on, so clearly it’s going to take longer than a day to sort my head out.

Day 6 – You’re reading it.

That’s today, right? Well, I’ve written this blog post. That is progress on goal number 2. I’ve also included two affiliate links for the first time (both are products I genuinely recommend). This might help me with goal no.4, and is at least a step in that direction and is helping me get over my mental blocks about earning money from my creativity. Either that or it might cause a massive backlash from my regular readers

And er, I’m off to write my journal for the last three days.. or I suppose in a way I have already done that right here.

Any tips on how to get my shit together? Are you taking part in the 100 Days project? Please let me know in the comments.

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