I have a problem...

The first step, I'm told, is recognising that you have a problem. I like containers, there I said it! I like containers and I like collecting things. Containers are useful and you shouldn't throw away things that are useful...

They're useful, ok? I'll use them!

But often useful containers look alike and then having a set of them means they'll tessellate well making the most of the space... and also they'll look cool!

Maybe I'll refill them with spice, it'll save us money!

Then of course some things have nostalgic value as well. I have fond memories of being allowed Golden Syrup drizzled on my rice crispies when visiting Nain and Taid. It's also the only food stuff that comes in paint tins. 

Come the apocalypse I'll have to choose between using these for target practice or storage

And then sometimes containers contain good things and keeping them is a way to keep a sort of journal of your other hobbies. Bottles with cork stoppers are cool.

Referring to Gin as a hobby is probably a bad sign.

These four photos catalogue everything I'm throwing out today*, inspired by the possibility of moving house and not wanting to carry empty containers! I am ashamed to admit that my collection extends far further than this, but I've made the first step on my path to recovery.





*except those 4 identical jam jars, they'll be useful!

Vinyl: Continuing thoughts

Some more thoughts on vinyl and possible future purchases, in no particular order.

The Black Keys
I saw The Black Keys play the Astoria (rip) back in 2005 (?) It remains one of my favourite gigs. The stage was virtually empty just two men, a set of drums and a stack of amps but the sound produced was immense. Stripped down blues roots rock at it's very finest, and if I was buying on vinyl I'd probably want to go back to Rubber Factory. Their latest album Turn Blue is to my mind a bit of a disappointment it's not bad as such it just doesn't meet expectations and doesn't reach the heights that the previous two albums Brothers and El Camino do.

Nirvana
Somewhat clichéd I know but Nevermind is an album that defined my generation. I will confess to only having a passing interest when they had their day, Inutero and Bleach meant very little to me and I liked bits and pieces from Nevermind but not the whole thing. The first of Nirvana album I loved start to finish was Unplugged in New York which my brother and I used to play on loop whilst we played Doom. I've grown up a lot since then or at least got older and I've come to love Nevermind and recognise how brilliant it is and worthy of every piece of praise it's receive or the years! Add to all that the seminal cover art.

The Beastie Boys

The Beastie Boys seem have always seemed like good fun, three friends who liked playing word games and being a little bit silly. I can relate to that. Their music has a playfulness and a freedom that comes from having enough success to do whatever they like, which luckily has always sounded good to me. Their are plenty of worthy albums to choose from with excellent songs and equally iconic album artwork: the Blues Brothers-esque drive through of Ill Communications (arguably the "best" album); the plane tale of Licence to Ill; the 360 street photo of Paul's Boutique (an album I listened to extensively whilst designing ducts!)

But, for me, nothing quite sums the Beastie Boys up as well as Hello, Nasty. It may lack the raw brilliance of Ill Communication's Sure Shot or Sabotage and the cheeky humour of Licence to Ill's She's Crafty and Girls but it makes up for it in consistently lively and entertaining songs. The cover says it all here are three friends apparently riding through space in a sardine can, intergalactic pioneers!

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
One of the things that amazes and amuses me in equal measure is how Nick and co  can produce such diverse songs from some of my favourite songs to a rare few which I struggle to listen to all the way through, and every thing in between. This makes picking a single favourite album very difficult.Murder Ballads will always have a place in my heart as the first Bad Seeds album I owned and as such was my intro to Nick definitive style of blood and rhetoric (with that album very much dwelling on the blood). In my late teenage years this loving violence or violent love seemed a perfect antidote to the nauseating pop of the day, much aided by the Nick and Kylie collaboration Where the wild roses grow. I've always (perversely perhaps) enjoyed the image of Nick recovering in Australian rehab (which I imagine to be something like One Flew Over) obsessing over the girl on the TV in the only program deemed calm enough to show the patients - Neighbours.

Dig, Lazurus, Dig! is raised to deity level by the inclusion of More News from Nowhere a tale of life on the road for an ageing musician retold as the Odyssey and is quite possibly my favourite song of all time. The double album of The Lyre of Orpheus and Breathless fits together so perfectly, The Boatman Calls is an album that I keep rediscovering and find more in each time, so much to choose from!

Thoughts, comments and suggestions welcomed!

Wedding: Draw Down the Stars

As wedding photos go I always tend to prefer casual to formal, I'm not particularly comfortable posing for photos. Harriet and Tim's greatest skill then is perhaps their ability to seamlessly integrate themselves with whatever event they're shooting. They felt to me like any other guest at our wedding and very quickly the fact that they were taking photos didn't bother me at all. Between Harriet's sincere and effervescent enthusiasm and Tim's easy natured friendliness they were in fact very welcome guests. Tim and I bonded over a clearly similar taste in music - I complemented him on the Tom McRae reference of "Draw Down the Stars" and he complemented me on our table names being song titles and the Wedding CD we'd created. It seemed, throughout in fact, that they had a clear understanding of what was important to us.
On writing this I haven't actually seen the photographs but having seen Chris and Kennedy's (who recommended Draw Down the Stars to us) I am very excited and itching to see ours!

Wedding: Lavender Dining

Obviously the catering is a huge part of any wedding but Lavender Dining go far beyond just providing food. We cannot recommend Lavender highly enough. Ben and Clare make an excellent team, husband and wife as well as business partners - Ben in the kitchen and Clare seamlessly managing front of house.

From our very first meeting with Ben it was very clear just how different they were from any of the other caterers we had looked at. Too often companies we looked at made it feel like you were just another in a long line of weddings to be churned out, picking from a list of standard menu options and feeling more like you were organising a buffet for a corporate event.

Ben took the time to get to know us and the style of the wedding we had planned, the menu itself developed organically with us sending ideas back and forth until we had the meal that was perfect for us. Then we got to taste everything in our own home - a great insight into the boutique home catering that Lavender offer. It was an excellent evening after which we felt we had to temper our expectations to the effect that, when scaled up for the wedding, it wouldn't be as good.  Turns out we were wrong!  The food at the wedding was amazing as many of the guests commented. We had a number of people with dietary needs including a lactose intolerant bride, vegetarians, gluten intolerants, and one guest who has a plethora of serious allergies, all of which Ben took in his stride, subtly adapting the menu to accommodate. All of this was at a considerably more reasonable price than others we looked at.

To us though Lavender's greatest asset is Ben himself who has constantly gone above and beyond the role of caterer to ensure that our wedding day was perfect. He had an excellent understanding of the kind of thing we were looking for and added tweaks to the service to suit - little touches that made a big difference. Perhaps the best example of the lengths Ben went to was the Sunday after the wedding when he stuck around long after his things were tidied away to help us sweep and clean the venue itself before helping us load all our things into various vehicles to take away from the site. On seeing us struggle for space he loaded his own car and followed us back to our place and helped unpack! Judging from the time, energy and enthusiasm Ben was prepared to dedicate to us it'd be very easy to assume that we were his only wedding, but we know they have had functions nearly every weekend this summer!

It didn't really feel like a business relationship, despite being very professional in all our dealings, Ben was just another friend helping us with our wedding and we are sad that now the day itself has passed that has ended. We will be looking for any excuse to use Lavender Dining again in the future!

Vinyl: Purchases!

Yesterday I bought some records! The experience of going into Sister Ray Records was equal parts exciting and terrifying, a voyage to a new world with no idea whether you will be welcome or even if you'll like it. It reminded me of when I started to collect comics - rows and rows of things to buy with little real knowledge of what you wanted and whether they'd have it, all of which were being flicked through by people who seemed to know exactly what was going on and what they wanted.

"I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smith singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't... well... kinda one of them."

I tried not to think about it too much, not to worry too much about my collection being perfect from word go, just to relax and see what they had. First thing to note of course is they don't have the infinite range of choice that we have grown used to thanks to the internet, and then there's first/second hand to consider, again much like collecting comics. Obviously I had thought quite a lot in advance about what records I might like. I thought 3 or maybe 4 would be good to start the collection off and in no time at all I had found 4 I wanted. I briefly questioned whether I needed them all, which obviously I didn't, but I wanted them so I bought them anyway.

The National - Boxer

I first bought Boxer (on CD) on a whim, I'd never heard of, or heard anything by, The National but I wanted some new music and the cover spoke to me. This might be your kind of thing, it said, give it a go. Turns out it was a thoroughly awesome album start to finish. I have listened to it more than any other album in my collection, according to iTunes I've heard the whole album over 250 times and one of the songs 400 times, of course I've also listened to it on other computers iPod and CD. So yeah it's an album I needed to own on vinyl. Alligator and High Violet have similarly high play counts and are both spectacular albums, the pre-Boxer albums are good but don't really measure up. I haven't listened that much to their latest album Trouble Will Find Me much yet but am enjoying it greatly so far.

Beck - Guero

Beck has for a long time been a favourite artist but picking an album to have in the collection was always going to be tough! The styles of the albums he's produced are so varied it's pretty hard to compare them. Mellow Gold certainly has palace in my heart as the first Beck album I owned and obviously includes Loser but if you're looking at early Beck it's hard not to go straight for Odelay as a classic with instantly recognisable cover art to boot. Midnight Vultures despite some excellent tunes probably comes across as too electronic to really fit listening on vinyl, somehow it would seem at odds. If inclined more towards a full album experience with something more melodic to wash over the listener Sea Changes or Morning Phase are both very good options and to most people probably sound least Beck-ish.

I've only seen Beck play live once and it was a truly amazing experience, the high point of which being whilst Beck himself did a little acoustic number, Golden Age, on guitar the rest of the band sat down at a laid table and were served food as they listened to Beck play. Then, slowly at first, they began to tap along, growing louder as they chinked glasses and hit cutlery against crockery building to the massive percussive sound of Clap Hands. All of which was repeated in miniature by marionettes at the front of the stage, this in turn was filmed and projected behind the band so you could watch the whole thing unfold in triplicate! Guero was the album Beck was touring with when I saw him, it might not end up being the only Beck I buy but it's an excellent start.

Radiohead - The Bends

When thinking about buying/owning vinyl it's very hard to not give in to nostalgia. I suppose it is in its very nature nostalgic - hearkening back to a previous technology which somehow is better than anything and everything since. For me that nostalgia manifests in two ways: firstly in classic albums that were originally released on vinyl and secondly in albums that were important to me, favourites listened on constant repeat through sixth form and university. Radiohead and Portishead are both very firmly in that second category. The Bends is one of a few albums that reminds me of sixth form and uni in equal measures, for me it is the quintessential Radiohead album. Definitely worth listening in its entirety, whilst all the songs are excellent somehow the album adds up to that much more. Portishead's Dummy is still an exceptional album and I probably don't go back to it often enough. At the time it was something entirely new to me, I kind of music that was unlike anything else I listened to. Haunting and beautiful. I suspect it will benefit from the extra depth and deliberateness of vinyl.

Portishead - Dummy

I haven't listened to them yet, but that's my plan for the rest of Saturday!

Vinyl: Desert Island Discs

"...what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films - these things matter."

The ownership of a record player raises the obvious and important question - which albums do I want (or need) to own on vinyl? I like collecting things so this has dangerous cost implications and must be carefully controlled! I have a very large digital music collection which will remain as the body of the collection, in fact I don't imagine owning any thing on vinyl that I don't already have on some other medium.

So (and excuse the pretension here) but the record collection will be reserved for albums that warrant listening to in their entirety and not just hearing piecemeal. Albums which will benefit from the visceral experience and depth of sound (again excuse the pretension). Favourite albums which are the heart of the collection.

So what is (or would be) in your collection?

If I was a more measured man I might try to limit myself to a new album a month/quarter/year but I don't have that kind of discipline so I'll make no such promise. My (more in depth) thoughts on what I might buy will follow and after that I might even review some vinyl!

Things of Ginterest

I like gin, I've liked a gin and tonic since a uni friend introduced me to them. When buying you a drink he tended not to wait to find out what you wanted instead you drank whatever he was, which was usually a few pints of Guinness followed by G&Ts to round the night off. A rather excellent combination, the light crispness of the gin is the perfect counterpoint to the heaviness of the stout. In case you hadn't realised it gin is having a pretty big revival and reinvention - the gins that remind you of your grandparents are still around, medicinal and pretty hard but more and more are becoming available with subtler flavours and greater depths of taste.

It turns out that the gin industry took a huge battering thanks to Smirnov who owned the spirits market through the 80's and late into the 90's. The rebirth is at least in part to the Bombay company who added more botanicals (shown on the side of the bottle) to their gin to give it a more floral taste, served it in a blue bottle, called it Bombay Sapphire, and marketed it primarily to women. It showed the greater potential of gin with the addition of extra botanicals. The trend now is to have anywhere from six to twelve botanicals. A botanical is just something derived directly from a plant - seed, bark, berry, etc. to make a gin you get alcohol (pure as possible ethanol) and bung all your botanicals in it, boil it up and condense it down!

Earlier this year I went to the Portobello Road Ginstitute, it was amazing. Best described as a school trip where instead of having to look after children I had to "look after" gin! There is education, science and gin, a fine combination in appropriate proportions. On arrival  naturally there's a gin and tonic waiting for you as you wait for everyone to gather in the bar (about 12 total). Once assembled we we're taken upstairs to the Ginstitute proper by master gin maker Jake. The Ginstitute is a small room done out in the style of a gin palace - ornate mirrors, brass detailing, and glass cabinets filled with ancient bottle and cocktail recipes. 

Jake makes us a Tom Collins and begins to tell us about the, let's face it wretched, history of gin. On talking about Hogarth's gin alley we sample a truly unpleasant gin which has been created based on historic accounts to taste as it would have done then, I've tasted better paint thinner! We're told of the military's struggles to get the men to take their malaria medicine (having recently had to take some I can sympathise) and someone coming up with the cunning plan of combining this tonic with their daily gin ration and lo the G&T was born, for purely illustrative purposes we get and gin and tonic at this point. Jake is a fantastic raconteur, who has a great passion for his subject matter and is consequently a delight to listen to.

His story done he takes us upstairs to the distillery/mixing room it's a clean crisp white room that speaks of great works of science! Clear bottles of great size line the walls, smaller ones with taps sit on shelves, Jake sits at the head of the table, in front of him is a massive array of botanicals in different size jars, phials, and dishes. He talks us through each in turn and how they add to a gin's flavour and what combinations work well. We smell the botanicals themselves, but better still for each the Ginstitute has distilled a gin with a single botanical flavour so we can taste each individually. Now it's our turn to do some work as, under Jake's careful guidance, we have to decide on a blend of botanicals for our own personal Gins. Jake then makes them for us, mixed from the single botanical gins, we taste them all and have a bottle each to take away with us!

Science!

Technically of course it's a bit of a cheat creating them this way instead of mixing all the botanicals first then distilling but it's a very worthy shortcut to do it the other way round, makes for an excellent experience, and of course lets me walk away with a bottle of my own gin!

Proud father

So gin made we head back down to the bar and are furnished with a martini for the road and we wend our merry way a bottle of our very own blended gin and one of Portobello Road. A final cherry on this magnificently alcoholic cake is that they keep all the gins people make on file so you can order more of your gin if you feel you've done a particularly fine job! Mine is 5302 if you are looking for a summery gin with tones of lavender!

Find an excuse, find someone to go with, get yourself to Portobello Road and get Ginstitutionalised! Huge thanks to Gemma for buying this experience for me and to Aled for being my partner in Gin that day at the Ginstitute.

The Brothers Gin

Vinyl

Stephen listens. I would excuse any of my friends for not listening to me, I talk a lot. I hope most of what I say is worth saying but I'll admit to rambling and saying whatever's on my mind often without thinking it through properly first. You'd be forgiven if you couldn't keep up and just tuned out now and again, but Stephen listens. More than that he takes things in and in the catacombs of his mind he has detailed files. Some time ago I regaled Stephen with my plans for when I win the lottery - the central premise of which was using the wide and varied expertise of my friends to acquire the top things in their respective arenas, in return for their help I would buy them the same. I would ask Stephen to design a sound system centred around a turntable. 

Music is very important to me.

In his late teens Stephen had worked for Technosound in MK and has never really recovered. His love of sound and all things audio possibly exceeds his love of music, his knowledge and understanding is in-depth, and he has an exceptional ear. I've previously utilised his expertise to find some very good headphones without paying the world for them. You can take a dip into his mind at his blog ThinJetty. I have made no secret of how much I covet Stephen's sound system and have always wanted a turntable of my own but with my entire music collection digitally a record player seemed a decadence that I couldn't justify. 

We've always agreed that the physicality of vinyl is fundamentally pleasing, the practical nature of how sound is produced means so much more than the 1's and 0's of digital music. Hearing the needle make sound without amplification gives me a weird amount of joy because I can understand how it works, simple mechanics and vibration in action - the same as dragging your nail down a rough surface. There's also something very pleasing about the deliberateness of putting on a record that has been lost with the convenience of digital music. It's too easy I find for music to be played without much thought - not sure what you want to hear? Just hit shuffle, thousands of songs at the touch of a button. But some albums, good albums, deserve to be listened to in their entirety. There's artistry in the music that goes far beyond single songs. Add to that richer sounds and album sleeves big enough to do the artwork justice and listening to vinyl is clearly an experience that goes far beyond just listening to a song. 

"Life is like a record... it goes around and around."

Anyway Stephen had listened and been amused by my idea and it turns out had stored it away for later use. When I got married Stephen and his better half gifted us 2 lottery tickets and, just in case they weren't winners, a record player! It is a Linn LP12 reconditioned by Peter Swain of Cymbiosis, a turntable born in '81 - a nod to the year my new wife's birth. My wife it should be noted has been extremely cool about the gift which went quickly from "our gift from the Broadhursts" to "my record player". In her words: "they bought something they knew would make you happy knowing that that would make me happy!" She went on to say that we ought to get somewhere proper for it to live - evidence, if evidence was needed that I'm very lucky. 

Stephen listens and, now I have a Linn LP12 Record player, I can do likewise.

If you want to hear Stephen talking about Hifi you can find him at ThinJetty