Swing when you're winning.

I made a conscious decision to do absolutely nothing this week. In the end my resolve cracked on Thursday (see below), but Monday to Wednesday were filled with nothing other than mundane domesticity: work, cook, watch crappy TV, play bass, and booze. Gill's a boozehound par excellence:

RF: "Guys, dinner's ready."
Gill: "Thanks!" <sound of wine cork popping> "Splashy splashy?"

Swing on Thursday was chuffing great. It was the last session in the beginners' block and we were taught a few new Charleston moves. Although I came dangerously close to freaking out in the middle of the lesson (I have a finite and rather low capacity for getting to grips with new moves, after which my brain starts generating rather more heat than light), I gathered my shit enough so that by the end of the evening I managed to dance with, and lead Gill for all of three minutes without abruptly stopping and apologising profusely.

Ya dancer!

Afterwards we went to the pub and congratulated ourselves with lots of beer. Excellent evening all round.

Doug and I went along to Waxy's birthday bash in the west end of Glasgow on Friday night. It was a rather good night - I met the semi-mythical Jesus Andy (turns out he's neither mythical nor much resembles Jesus anymore, but still has excellent chat) and his girlfriend Lou, and after the pub closed we sat in their flat eating kebabs, drinking their beer and listening to Lou shame us all with her guitar-playing virtuosity. It was...kebabylon. That's the second decent kebab I've had in as many months. Fortunately, it's also only the second kebab I've had in as many months.

Back in Edinburgh on Saturday, I was fashionably late for Katie's dinner party being held in honour of Ben and Joanna's return to the fold. My pirate gear from last Hallowe'en had apparently been looted (alright, I'd thrown out a load of old clothes that had previously been deemed piratical) and so I donned instead my RAF gear and pretended that I'd misheard.*

Once Jez arrived with the French girls in tow, we took a pair of taxis into darkest Leith, looking for a party Katie had been invited to. "I didn't tell Laurence that I was bringing anyone," she said, "but I'm sure it'll be okay." It was. The party was taking place in four flats around a central courtyard, best summed up by Devon as a yuppie commune.

"You're a waste of taxpayer's money!" a short, slightly posh man said to me as I cracked open a bottle.

"I'm not actually in the RAF," I said. "You twit," I almost followed it up with. Instead I said: "This is a fancy dress party, right? Look - there's Teenwolf. I'm dressed up."

On reflection, an RAF uniform probably only really works in context. Like at Vegas, for example. Or if one is, in fact, in the RAF. I'll stick with Vegas for the time being.

* <snort>

I've had

a rather stimulating week.

TM convened in the Brill Building on Tuesday night for a practice. We'd been stagnating for a while, to be honest: concentrating on recording apparently made us incapable of coming up with any particularly, y'know, good original material, and we were automatically steering clear of playing too many covers because mostly we'd done them to death.

Then Mart suggested that we play a certain cover. After moaning that I hadn't had time to practice it (for some reason I was in an unreasonably foul mood that night), I caved in and after a few listens to get the bassline fixed in my mind, we played it. It rocked. It's a bit...zeitgeisty, so it probably won't stand an outing at more than one gig before it sounds old, but it's going to fucking rock your socks off when we do play it. I shit you not - it's the best cover we've done since the epic How Many More Times / Seven Nation Army segue. And that one is still being talked about today. By Doug.

The practice had been shunted to Tuesday so that I could go along to Myriam and Frauke's farewell dinner party. Apart from the burning shame and tacit admission of alcoholism of turning up with booze but no food, it was a very pleasant evening. At one point I looked out over the civilised throng and thought "Christ - we've all grown up," and then immediately followed that with "but I do miss the drinking games."

Swing morphed into jitterbug on Thursday, and it was good. The constant march towards being taught every swing move in existence was suspended in lieu of a new dance, and I was very, very happy for the respite.

This was the first weekend I've had without any things to do during the day for something like three months: no band practice; no meeting up with parents and no colossal hangovers restricting me to the couch. Coming to work this morning, I felt like I was returning after a week away.

I don't mean to say that I actually used the time profitably or anything, unless you can count attempting to rewrite TM.net, which is currently held together by elastic bands and spit, in a more sensible way. And given the number of TLAs I'd need to describe what I was doing, I certainly don't count it as anywhere approaching interesting for non-spod types.

On Saturday night I headed down to the Cumberland for Devon and Neil's joint birthday bash. An excellent night out, and again civility reigned. I blethered away to a load of people I hadn't seen for ages and talked variously about football journalism (seriously!), Scapa Flow (again) and Tom Waits vs. Teenage Fanclub (again). One particular conversation went:

Dee: "I know you!"
RF: "Yes! Hello, Dee. How're you doing?"
Dee: "You're clean shaven! And you've had a haircut."
RF: <checks chin and hair> "Uh, not really either. But...thanks. Are you sure you know who I am?"

On Sunday I'd promised to try to sort out the network at the old flat. (In Josh's absence, I seem to have become the default computer person. Much to my chagrin.) After a fruitless hour of farting around, I gave up and was about to leave when I was invited to stay for dinner, chat and Lost, all of which combined into a thoroughly pleasant evening. (The cheesecake! Good Lord. Incredible.)

Not a weekend exactly stuffed with hilarious anecdotal fodder, but I haven't felt this refreshed and chilled on a Monday afternoon for ages.

As an aside to Saturday's post,

I thought I'd mention an article by Irvine Welsh in the Guardian that seems rather appropriate to the weekend's fucked-upness. Also Devon writes about the associated but more genteel, urine- and vomit-orientated Edinburgh night out.

Sunday afternoon's alright for driving:

at least on the east coast.

Jez gave me a lift* to Craiglockhart to view and test drive my first potential Nürburgring car. It was a 1.9 Peugeot 205 GTI and I'd been an assiduous little car nerd and printed out a load of buyer's guides for it beforehand. I prodded it, bounced the corners up and down and generally behaved like an obsessive nitpicker. In the end I couldn't really find much wrong with it that would cost more than a couple of hundred quid to fix, and at £995 I couldn't complain.

The test drive, though, was...informative. The gear shift was far too sloppy (worn out linkage somewhere?); the steering was bus-like in weight (not a mechanical problem, but a 'feature' of the car, it seems) and there was a persistent clonk noise from the rear suspension (worn out bearings, needing £600 worth of dealer work, or £125 in parts and apparently a month off work for the DIY solution). The heavy steering coupled with front drive made it feel a little reluctant to corner, although once it did it was pretty much without body roll.

Despite all of this, it was still fairly impressive. The engine was obviously still in pretty good nick and it pulled surprisingly well on the motorway without sounding strained. By the time we came back, I was seriously considering getting my hands dirty and fixing the suspension myself, and was hoping that the gearbox fix wouldn't be as nasty as all that.

It was only in the last minute that I was convinced otherwise. Selecting reverse to park, the gears persisted in crunching, even with the clutch fully depressed. We bargained the guy down to £900, but the screwed gearbox seemed like a problem too far and we politely took our leave.

Conclusions: £1000 probably isn't quite enough to buy a car that I'll be confident won't seize up at 120 mph; on reflection, 205 GTIs are getting a bit long in the tooth to ever be as problem-free as I want, and lastly, I'm more attached to rear-wheel drive than I had thought. So now I need a new model to fixate on, and it looks like it's going to have to be an MX-5 or an MR2. Unless anyone has any less hairdresser-type ideas...

* Jez is now the proud, lunatic owner of a Fiat Coupé Turbo. He took it easy on the way to see the 205, popping the clutch in 2nd gear only a couple of times. I was reminded of Jason's Skyline GT-S, the one car in which I've ever been truly afraid for my life. Coming out of Oban during a camping trip, he accelerated up the hill and I'm pretty sure that the rate of acceleration was increasing as we thundered up it. When we came to the corner at the top I thought "Right; this is it," as the forest yawned before us. He nonchalantly yanked the wheel to the left and the car clung to road with the tyres squelching and the engine roaring and we conspicuously stayed alive. Not something I want to do again. Unless I'm driving.

Saturday night's alright for fighting:

if you're in the west, anyway.

Our TM practice that day had gone encouragingly well. It was the first session for a while that felt free of the "must record!" impetus that's been in evidence of late. Finally producing something (subjectively) good enough to make publicly available (you didn't think I'd seriously forget to plug it, did you?) seems to have exorcised that demon for the time being, and we're back to messing around in an attempt to generate some new songs.

Just after dropping Mart off in Renfrew after the practice, we were pulling away from his house when Doug stopped behind a stationary taxi in the middle of the road. We looked at the scuffling people outside it and the local colour swarming towards it to wade in and simultaneously glanced at each other. Doug flicked the central locking on and reversed with alacrity, keeping a weather eye on the wrestling by the taxi. He stopped a split second later when a gentle thud came from the back of the car. We looked round at the unfortunate Renault sitting behind us and again at each other.

"Fuck", I said. "This is unbelievable."

Doug pulled forward a bit, unlocked the car, jumped out to check the damage to each car (none) and got back in, locking the doors again. The tussle had calmed down by now and the crowd was dispersing, leaving the taxi driver to shake his fist a few times and drive away.

Christ knows what the hell had just gone on. Someone trying to do a runner without paying for the taxi? Family feud? Pretty depressing, whatever it was.

We drove back to Glasgow and had a couple of pints in Mono (pretentious? Moi?) before heading off along Argyll Street, me to the station and Doug to the Arches. Doug had just come out of a shop after buying some cigarettes and we walked on, talking about something or other. Just then I became aware of three guys maybe ten yards ahead of us. One of them was on the ground, one was standing over him and kicking him in the head and the third was watching. We both stood and looked at them for a second - what the fuck was going on? People were walking by and ignoring the scene, and then a second later the two standing guys walked off past us with a laugh and a shout back at the poor bastard they'd beaten up.

I really could not believe this. We walked over to the guy on the ground and asked another passerby - a vaguely sketchy looking chap who made a halfhearted grab at Doug's packet of cigarettes right in front of our eyes, presumably hoping that we were distracted by the spectacle of the wretched bloke on the ground - what had happened. He said he had no idea, and proceeded to hover around as Doug called an ambulance and I knelt down to see how the guy was.

Luckily, he was conscious, if a bit groggy, and was trying to sort himself out. He was fairly bloody - it looked like his nose was broken; his lip was swollen and he had various nicks and scrapes but it looked ugly rather than life-threatening. I asked him how he was doing (let's face it: he was doing pretty badly, but I wanted to make sure he was more or less all there) and he mumbled incoherently as he tried to replace a shoe that had come off. It sounded like he was pretty drunk, but I couldn't smell any alcohol on him. On something, maybe?

Doug came over, said that an ambulance was on its way and knelt down to speak to the guy, giving him a cigarette when he asked. The dodgy guy asked for one as well and lit them both, giving one to the now-slightly more coherent victim. We asked him what had happened and again he had no idea. It seemed scarily plausible that he'd said something ill-advised in a drunken stupor to the wrong people; the whole thing had a feeling of utterly casual violence, and the way the two attackers had wandered off as if nothing had happened was astonishing. Here's some guy with a broken nose, blood dripping out of his mouth and barely able to string a sentence together, and the only person to bat an eyelid is some chancer trying to take the opportunity to get a fag out of the situation.

It struck me that the guy on the ground, now sitting up and puffing at his blooded cigarette, was indignant rather than shocked, and this made me think that he'd seen or experienced this sort of thing often enough for it to be utterly unsurprising. The cigarette bloke had the same kind of attitude - a sympathetic "yeah, it's a fucker when this happens" solidarity with him.

The ambulance was supposed to arrive fairly soon. We got promises from both of them to wait around until it turned up and left.

Quite probably we should have stayed around with them; I get the feeling that neither of them was there to meet it, and perhaps if we had stayed they would have been more inclined to wait. I think at the time we both just wanted to put some distance between us and what had happened: certainly I see this kind of thing sufficiently rarely that it freaks me out a little when it does happen, and then I just get depressed that it seems so mundane to everyone involved (Doug not included, obviously).

The whole episode had a slightly inevitable air about it; earlier on we'd been speculating as to why there were so many loud, drunken idiots around Glasgow Cross of a Saturday evening, and to get a brutal reminder of why this is a pretty fundamental problem was not quite as out-of-the-blue as it might have otherwise been.

[Well, that was Saturday. Sunday was reassuringly brutality free, and I'll write something about that later on.]

4-track demos, part II:

we've just posted the first MP3 of the demos we mixed the other day. It's called Dead On, and it's a whole 50% scarier than the rest of the stuff we play. Have a listen!

The juggernaut of Hat Night '05

swung inexorably into action on Friday evening. The usual crew assembled at the old flat and the games began: hats were assigned and Josh concocted (I can't bring myself to say 'made', not when the end result tastes like 100° proof cough medicine) a batch of 'Liquid Gold' to fuel the proceedings.

Ali A wasn't drinking, so we turned him upside down and poured beer on his head to compensate.

Ally G on the other hand was drinking. He needed no help in that respect.

The evening becomes agreeably fuzzy in my recollection after we left the flat. We visited the Barony and the Phoenix, which I don't imagine I'll be visiting again any time soon. It's rare to see the normally poker-faced barman there so much as crack a smile let alone a frown, and hey: I don't remember seeing him do either, but then I also don't really recall Ally dropping the four pints, Jeff and I jovially scuffling in the corner or my solo dance routine beside the jukebox either, so there you go.

Hats were placed on random punters, as per Hat Night procedure.

Later on (once the Phoenix bar staff were really starting to get antsy), an oxymoronically sober Jez shepherded us back to the flat, along with the two young French girls he'd found to take Josh's vacant room (see below) for a few months. Presumably they'd turned up for a quiet get-to-know-you session with their new flatmates. Quite what they made of the drunken carnage they were greeted with is anyone's bet.

(I know, I know: any one part of the phrase young French girls in combination with Jez is enough to give me a thrill of sympathetic fear for them.)

The evening ended, after a lengthy and earnest conversation about the intersection of scuba diving and indie music (clues: Scapa Flow and British Sea Power), with me cycling up the road in a foolish and multiply illegal fashion, and receiving a rebuke from a rather testy policeman for my troubles.

A classic Hat Night, and one that shall be (mostly) remembered.

Next day was my birthday, and I felt categorically awful. I crawled to the living room couch in an attempt to get up after fielding enough "Happy Birthday!" phone calls to feel guilty about still being in bed at 2 pm. Gill put on Swingers in response to my grunted instructions (and surprisingly seemed to like it - I'd always seen it as a guy film in the same way that certain films are 'chick flicks') and by 5 I was able to function normally again.

I walked up to the Golf in Bruntsfield, where Josh had gathered the great and the good of the Mafia for a final drink before he headed back to York. I was good to see everyone in one place; what with job interviews, theses, work, the band and so on it seems like we've all been busy for the last month or so. I hung around long enough to say hello to everyone (and to talk up vests for a while) and headed home for a relatively early night.

I'd hired a car to give Josh a lift home on the Sunday, with the ulterior aim of viewing a few suitably mental hot hatches for the Nürburgring trip while I was down there. I arrived at Enterprise to find out that my booking contained no information about A) what kind of car I wanted (an estate); B) no agreed price (a ludicrously low £51 to match Alamo, negotiated over the phone a week ago) and C) no mention that I wanted a one-way rental.

<sigh>

It was sorted out in the end, and we made the journey in about four hours thanks to some entertaining A-road action. I found out once we arrived that the one car I'd really wanted to view had been sold an hour before we left Edinburgh. A second car turned out to be so old I couldn't get one-day insurance to drive it, so the automotive side of the trip was pretty much dead in the water.

Deprived of any car-related high jinks we ambled around York for a while, eating lunch, dropping off the hire car and finally coming to rest at Bar 38 on the bank of the Ouze about three. We had a few pints to kill time until I had to catch the train, but neither of us was exactly bursting with energy. It was the first 'holiday' I'd had for ages, and I was content to watch the tourist boats and rowers head up and downstream as the sun sank towards the rooftops. We walked to the station for 6 o' clock, I said goodbye to Josh and wandered into the ticket office, feeling a little melancholy.

At least I was feeling melancholy until it turned out I'd prebooked my ticket for Sunday by mistake and had to stump up £60 for a single back to Edinburgh, only to miss the first train back and end up sitting on the next one in a carriage empty apart from the four people singing karaoke for three bastarding hours and the snacks trolley guy hounding me relentlessly to buy a coffee made of platinum or something, given the astronomical cost of the bloody thing.

Hmph. I must be getting old...

4-track demos.

Last night TM convened at the flat to mix down the recordings we made on Saturday. The plan was to transfer each track individually from the 4-track to my laptop, and then to use that to mix them and hence give ourselves a bit more control.

Doug was, of course, a full hour late. How we laughed.

The pizza was also a full hour late. There was considerably less amusement about this. Once the delivery driver had discovered which street the flat was on, I watched him stop halfway up it - outside number 23, a single door down from the flat - and get out, then get back in and sit motionless, apparently waiting for something to happen. Divine inspiration? The small but measurable chance that the pizzas might spontaneously relocate to the flat? (Trust me on this one - it's unlikely to happen before the universe implodes.)

I went down and retrieved the pizzas. "I was going to try coming round another way," he said. "Another way? To travel six feet?" I didn't say.

Perhaps I'm banging on about this a tad much.

[By the way, the stuff that follows is band/mixing geek chat, so consider yourself warned!]

We'd recording 4 tracks: vocals, lead, bass on a track each and then drums and rhythm guitar mixed down to the single remaining track. Not ideal, but probably the best arrangement given that we were limited to 4 tracks.

We transferred each track separately onto my laptop and lined up the starts. All great, except that the timing, which started off perfectly aligned at the start of the song, was out of kilter maybe thirty seconds in. Almost at the same time, we slapped our foreheads and muttered that the tape deck in the 4-track would have been turning at a slightly variable rate each time we rewound and restarted it. So much for our master plan...

Instead, we used the 4-track directly as we've done in the past. Mart's floor effects pedal was used to process the vocal track, adding a bit of reverb, compression and the like (and occasionally, a soupçon of white noise) and after about an hour per song, we had three 'real' mixes and one extra free mix of a tired, hungry but rocking Happy 2/34^th Birthday. With any luck, they'll be up on TM.net over the next few days.

We cracked open a few cans and listened to the mixes. Job done, and no-one fell out of the window.

I went out for a couple of drinks

(My God; how many posts here begin with that phrase?) with a workmate on Tuesday night. We ended up in the Candy Bar. I say "ended up"; it was more that I couldn't be arsed to make a decision as to where to go and so she steered us toward George Street. I'd never been there.

We ordered two (2) drinks. "That's £9.95," the barman said.

I believe that I actually laughed in his face. "Dear Christ," I snorted. "Ten quid?"
"Yes," he said, stony faced.
"Fuck me."

They were tasty beverages, it must be said. But then so was every other pint of beer I've ever had.

The rest of the week was fairly standard issue, revolving around the three main things I'm doing at the moment: rehearsing with TM; learning to comport myself with some reasonable dignity on the dancefloor, and preparations to avoid a glamourous but pointless death on the Nürburgring.

The swing lesson was pretty good this week. The crazed instructor that usually takes the second half of the lesson ("Tonight, we're going to interpret the later works of Cecil B. DeMille through the medium of contemporary Balboa. Don't worry, this is suitable for complete beginners.") was in charge for the whole session and I was pleasantly surprised. Behind the smirking, I'm-a-dancer exterior there lurks a competent teacher. My concentration always collapses about half an hour into the lesson, but even by then we were all a damn sight better than last week.

Friday night was a post-work blowout in the usual style, and I dragged myself out of bed after four hours' sleep to get the train to Glasgow. We'd booked a monstrous 6-hour session at Berkeley 2 with a view to recording a few demos of our own songs.

Davis was, of course, a full hour late. How we laughed.

In the end we got three or four reasonable takes of each of the three tracks we wanted. This is maybe a little disappointing given how much time we had, but the inclination during a 6-hour session is rather perversely to overestimate how much time there is to get stuff done. More discipline next time. And less farting about.

With a bit of luck, the final tracks will appear on TM.net sometime later this week, and the "Recent News" page will once again be semantically valid.

J&J turned up with a six-pack on Saturday night for some engagingly un-PC chat. We wandered along Rose Street for some light drinking, and the libellous character assassination that passes for conversation after a few beers. Excellent stuff.

Sunday was taken up entirely in virtual fishtailing around the Nürburgring. Jez wants to buy a Fiat Coupé Turbo for the trip. He's fucking insane.