Music

An archive of blog entries about music and music production.

Soho celebrity sightings

22 March 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It’s an exciting game you can all play when you’re wandering London’s media capital. Keep your eyes peeled and score ten points for a movie star, five points for a TV star and one point for a star from any other medium, such as radio or theatre. Double your score if you spot the star inside a building rather than outside. You can also double the score if the person you’ve spotted hasn’t been famous for the last five years. Treble it if they’re in a movie on release at the moment.

As an example, I spotted John Hurt on Broadwick Street yesterday. That means I get ten points for a movie star, five points because he also does TV work, one point for theatre work, one point for radio work and that’s all trebled because he’s in V for Vendetta, making a grand total of 51 points. If he’s done stuff in other media, I can’t think of it right now, so even if he has, that doesn’t count (we’re on Cribbage and Poker rules here).

As you can see, the points can add quickly, so regard them as having a conversion rate of 1 celebrity spotting to 1 Nectar point: in other words, you get £2.50 for 500 points, which can be used to buy a pint, rent a DVD, whatever, when you finish playing the game.

Soho’s definitely the best place to play this, incidentally. Desmond Llewellyn (Q from the Bond movies) once wandered into our offices, convinced we were an audio dubbing suite, and I scored big. Oh yes: the celebrities come to you at Soho – you don’t have to find them.

Music

Not exactly a requiem

21 March 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Bit of a catty theme today.

Spare a thought for Mark McCarthy, bass player for The Wonder Stuff. His cat Susan died the night before last Wednesday’s gig in Islington. She was the grand old age of 18 and “very well cuddled”. There were no wreaths, no pictures, no words. Just a very simple tribute:

Susan the cat

Goodbye Susan.

IT Crowd theme tune

5 March 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Since a lot of you are coming here now to find out what the theme tune to The IT Crowd was (why??), I thought I’d put you all out of your misery: it was a specially composed track by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy (who came up with the theme to Father Ted, you may recall). It’s not been released commercially yet, but I’m sure it will be at some point.

Review: Top 50 Break-Up Songs

14 February 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

I do like lists show, although Jimmy Carr’s omnipresence in them is something that’s barely tolerable. However, this was a Channel Five list show, rather than another Channel 4 show.

Two things I noticed:

  1. As I’ve been told by lots of audio and post houses, Five doesn’t give a monkey’s about sound quality. Did they even use microphones for their interviews?
  2. It was better than the Channel 4 list shows.

C4 list shows are generally populated by some talking head twats who had no recollection of the show in question until some researcher stuck a soundbite in front of them to read. The only exceptions are the people who actually made the film/TV show/song in question and the entire Guardian Guide staff – euphemistically always called “writers” rather than journalists, just to make it less obvious they’re all Stuart Maconie’s mates.

This particular list show, however, seemed to have a few people who knew what they were talking about and very few talking heads. It was also more intent on educating you about the history of the song, the artists and the era in which it was released than just trying to be post-modernly ironic or thick. How pleasant. Not exactly Reithian, but still better than a Channel 4/E4 sneer.