In case anyone worries

that I'm abandoning the wicked crazy life of rocking, rolling and Trølling in favour of pursuing a career in cookery writing, worry not. I had in fact intended to chronicle this last week's escapades along with its foodie highlights on Monday, but somehow they didn't gel. (Or caramelise, perhaps.)

Dave and I went to see the Mighty Boosh the Friday before last. Dave and the Scotsman both loved it; I was a little underwhelmed by the recycling of jokes from the TV series and earlier stage shows, but the odd new one ("Unicorns. With AIDS!" intoned by a dwarf wearing a parka is always good for a laugh) rescued it.

TM reconvened for our first post-gig practice in Bridge Court Studios, in the semi-dereliction of the industrial estates by the Clyde. We've tried maybe seven or eight different rehearsal studios, and only Berkeley 2 and the Brill Building/Core Studios/Q10 Studios/whatever-the-hell-it's-called-this-week rise anywhere above mediocrity. There's a simple recipe for constructing a decent rehearsal room:

• Make it exactly like Berkeley 2.
  

There, I've said it. You don't need a flashy website - just tell us your phone number and address. B2 doesn't even seem to have a website, and yet Snow Patrol and Idlewild rehearse there. Rooms should be warm, well-equipped, sound-proofed and well supplied with extra power sockets. The guy on the desk should be friendly and helpful, like you'd expect in any high street shop. The number of places run by sociopathic music-business time-servers and grunting neanderthals is disappointingly high.

Core/Q10 gets away with reliving the grunge era by virtue of its innate charm and practical rooms, and Berkeley 2 blows the rest of them away by choosing to be consummately professional and unpretentious; it's as simple as that. (By the way, I don't want to knock Bridge Court entirely; it wasn't out and out bad, just had a DIY feel about it and was disappointingly small.)

On Sunday, I finally got round to investigating a clanking noise that had been coming from underneath the Saab for a couple of weeks. After a previous bit of investigation on the web, it sounded like it might be one of the rubber exhaust hangers either having come off or perished, and so given that they only came to about £25, I had speculatively ordered all the related parts.

Armed with said parts, a jack and some axles stands borrowed from Steven at work, I parked the car in the work car park (this being the only place I could guarantee that I wouldn't be run over while poking out from under the car) and jacked it up.

Now there's nothing actually interesting about what I fixed while I was under there, but the nagging fear that a ton and a half of metal is about to pulp the upper half of one's body is a novel feeling. I sincerely hope that the next thing I fix doesn't require me to risk (uninsured) life and limb - there'll be plenty of time for that during the upcoming Nürburgring madness...

On Sunday night, Giancarlo was supporting a guy called Mark Eitzel at Cabaret Voltaire, and Ash and I wandered along to offer some moral rather than musical support. Giancarlo's lot were rather good; further to my earlier rant about drummers messing with the holy trinity of tom-toms, the drummer here used only the floor tom and yet rather impressively got away with it.

I'm torn between minimal and maximal approaches to music, and I think TM is too: I'd love us to play three-chord rockers with Weezer-esque skill and abandon but at the same time the FF stylings of our new stuff, with all the attendant synth and effects magic are especially satisfying when it all comes together. What I do know is that Eitzel's set, with only his own guitar as backup, was perhaps fractionally too minimal. Maybe it was my largely unfounded antipathy to singer-songwriters making itself felt, but it seemed a little too close to performance poetry; I like my live music to be a bit more enthusiastic.

(As an aside, it turns out that Eitzel is something of a darling of the American alternative scene, and so no doubt every other audience member would disagree with me - at least I can offhandedly tell my grandkids "Mark Eitzel? Yeah, I saw him in 2006. He wasn't all that," before unpausing Grand Prix again.)