e–resistable: Why did no–one think of this before

In the interests of full disclosure I’m writing this now as apparently I can get some free food by doing so. It’s something I’d have written about eventually anyway, but given my backlog of blogging topics it might have been years.

Anyway,

e-resistible online takeaways is a simple concept. You visit the website. You tell them where you live. You tell them the sort of food you want. They they give you a list of all participating stores for which you are in the delivery radius. You pick one, look at the menu, choose what you want and then either pay them by card or arrange to pay the delivery guy on the door. There are even special offers, though to be fair generally not as many as if you get a promotional menu from the place itself.

But it’s so damn simple. Even if it ends up costing you a few quid more it’s worth it when ordering for a bunch of people as you can keep track of what the hell you’re buying and it’s not down to the poor sod phoning it through to try and remember. Obviously the level and speed of service depends on the place you’re ordering from, e-resistible are just a sort of middle-man service. They do encourage you to review the outlets and let them know delivery speed, food quality, etc.

I find myself wondering how they work. Do they have arrangements with individual restaurants, or do they just take your details then phone the order through for you? They have 8 places in Coventry, which is enough, extrapolated country-wide, that it seems unlikely to be the former. But if it’s the latter they’d have lots more.

Why I find this fascinating, is that I used to work for any question answered text messaging service Texperts, responding to customer questions. And you could guarantee that at around 11pm-midnight there’d be a ton of people asking for an open pizza place or chinese takeout that delivered. And those questions were really hard to answer. e-resistible would have been awesome for research back then. And oftentimes customers would ask us to order for them, which we weren’t allowed to do. It’s weird that it’s taken the internet this long to do something people have been after for years. And people laughed when they first announced you could order real-world pizza in Everquest…

Where it’s most useful though is if you’re away from home, or have just moved somewhere new, and don’t know any decent take-out places. I am kind of surprised though that, despite ordering multiple times from a nice Indian place, they’ve never put a menu in with my food to try and convert me to a ‘regular’ customer. I wonder if there’s some rule against it.

Well there you go, worth a try next time you fancy takeout and don’t know where from. Given what I saw at Texperts, that applies to a lot of people!

Dean Love : 03 Feb 2010 23:04 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reckless Comedy in Leamington Spa

Should have written this ages ago, but anyway, I’m promoting, running and MCing a new comedy gig in Leamington. I say new, it’s basically the old Reckless Moment gig, insofar as it’s in the same place, with the same aim, at the same time, and hopefully with the same awesome crowd.
Just now being run by me, and Tom and Pete kindly let me use the Reckless name.

We have a Facebook page for the first show

Our first show is this Monday (Jan 25th) and the details are like this:

MONDAY 25th JANUARY
ROBBINS WELL, LEAMINGTON SPA
Doors 8.30pm, Comedy 9pm
Entry just £2

Comedy returns to the basement of Robbins Well in much the same state it used to be in, but a bit different. Same confectionery, fewer 80s music icons.

We kick off a run of shows on the 25th January with some awesome acts, bringing you some of the best funny people on the comedy circuit.

Possibly the funniest night out you can have in Leamington – please come along and tell all your friends.

Starring:
Nick Helm
Owen Niblock
Gareth Morinan
Jonathan Elston
Nick Hodder
Catie Wilkins
Luke Mason
Dean Love

Dean Love : 24 Jan 2010 01:15 |  Tags: Comedy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My experience with Audible UK

Addendum 1: The following blog entry has been edited following a complaint from Audible UK’s MD, Chris McKee. I have no intention of getting my lovely blog provider in trouble, so I have removed the ‘offensive’ personal attacks. Ever wondered what a company MD does on a Monday morning? Vanity Googling, it turns out.

Addendum 2: It may be entirely unrelated, but a few hours after their MD saw this blog and complained about it, Audible have now finally agreed to refund my money – sometimes getting angry does work!

The story starts simply enough. I’ve been saving iPoints to get an iPod Touch. You sign up for free trials and such and just make sure you cancel them on time and you get points. You do enough, you can get something nice. I should point out at this point that most of my points were from signing up with online casinos. Now online gambling is probably one of the dodgiest sectors out there: the whole concept is flawed, as the software could be cheating you (hey, the card draws aren’t random) and you’d never know. They always have a load of offers designed to sucker people in and everything I’ve heard about them says they’re often not run by the most savoury of people.

From about ten different casinos, I’ve never been fraudulently charged or lost any money unfairly from doing this. Occasionally they’re a bit reluctant to hand over the points, but they all do in the end after a bit of prodding. Casinos tend to offer around 5000-15000 points, incidentally. Audible was offering just 450, but it was the last 450 I needed to get a 32gb iPod Touch.

So I signed up, and then cancelled right away. Here, I made a mistake. I didn’t check for a cancellation e-mail. So something went wrong at my end, or something went wrong at their end, and it wasn’t cancelled. Come the end of December I get charged £7.99 for the first month of au Audible subscription.

To explain how Audible work, you can buy stuff outright at crazy prices, or sign-up for a subscription and get two credits a month, each of which you can trade for an audio book. So no problem, I thought, I haven’t spent these credits, I’ll just e-mail them, explain it, and get a refund. No big deal. After all, the reason I did this free trial is that Audible proudly proclaim that they are “An Amazon company”. They are owned by Amazon and Amazon are awesome.

You ever wonder why Amazon won the whole web-retail thing back in the 90s? I bought a book from Amazon back when all they sold was books. It turned up with a very small, barely noticeable scuff on the cover. It also came with a note, explaining that they were aware of this, but it was the last one, and they figured I’d rather have it now with a small scuff than wait months (it was a US import) for another copy. But if I didn’t I could send it back to a freepost address, and they’d send me another when they got one in. That’s customer service folks, and even though they’re not as good as they used to be, they’re still one of the best.

My hackles were raised when I remembered how you had to cancel an Audible account. You either had to phone a number, or send an e-mail with a very specific subject line. It’s a fairly normal if foul practice to make cancelling more inconvenient, as it has to go through a person, who can try and dissuade you, and it allows them to claim some lag time, so if you cancel just before the new billing date, they can still charge you for the next month as the cancellation hasn’t be processed. There’s no reason to not let you just click a button to instantly cancel. Oh yeah, the original cancellation e-mail was still in my Sent Items folder, the one that never reached them. Error at their end then.

Customer services respond, tell me they have no record of my cancellation, and won’t cancel my account as I have two credits in it that I’d lose, and can’t give me a refund unless I can prove that I cancelled. I have the cancellation e-mail I sent them, but no confirmation (never got one). It isn’t good enough. Some more back and forth and it ends with me telling them to refund my money in five days or I’ll have the bank do a chargeback. That’s a white lie out of frustration. I can’t do that as it’s a debit card, but it’s a Visa Debit card and lots of people don’t know they exist yet and assume any Visa is a Credit Card, which I would be able to charge back on.

So I wait. They don’t respond at all.

Tonight I need to re-cancel before they bill me for February, and time I’d spent on this was already more than £8’s worth of my time. I figure I’ll give up, but if I’m doing that I may as well grab a couple of audio books with the credits I have before I cancel. Logging in I find I don’t have any credits. I check my bank account – no refund. They’ve taken my money and provided no service whatsoever. I assume they’ve cancelled the account, but I half expect them to bill me again next week and tell me the first two credits were eaten by gerbils or something.

Now, so far, so much shitty customer service. It’s annoying, I might blog about it to embarrass the company concerned, but it’s not abnormal.

As you might have noticed from the sub-title of this piece, I’m a little bit more angry than that.

The Audible UK business model is set up to get people to subscribe then make it as hard as possible to unsubscribe. You see, it’s £7.99 a month. You get two credits per month. Two books. Other than the inconvenience of signing up and cancelling, you can effectively just buy two credits for £7.99 whenever you want. Subscribe, spend them, cancel.
So they could just sell credits for £8 for two. It’d be the same thing.
The scummy bit is, you can’t keep credits on your account unless you have an active subscription. So if I find I’m not using the service much, I can’t just cancel right away, I have to spend the credits I already have. There’s no reason for this, no reason an account can’t have left-over credits even if you don’t subscribe, other than to try and stop you from doing so.

Likewise, in my case, I got charged for a month and given two credits. There’s no other benefit to having a subscription, I didn’t spend those two credits so didn’t get anything back from the money I spent at all. So there’s no reason that customer services couldn’t be told to refund people’s money in such cases. But instead, they’re told not to. And when they tell that person they won’t refund the money and remove the credits, they delay things even more. As the customer won’t want to cancel right away as they then need to spend those credits to get their monies worth and if they forget to do it on time… they get charged again.

This folks, is a scam. If you have a good product and a good company you can get away with just selling it fairly to the customer. Maybe your customer service is good, maybe it isn’t, but you just sell a product. The entire Audible sales model is based on suckering people in with free trials and hoping they forget to cancel, then trying to lock them in as much as possible when they do. I’m appalled to see such a cynical system used by an ‘Amazon company’.

The company is just set up to rip people off. Someone in it made the decision to not let people keep credits after they cancel. Someone made the decision not to let people get refunds on credits they don’t want. And they made those decisions to rip people off. Chris McKee is the MD of Audible UK, he made or signed off on, those decisions.

The sad addendum to this rant, is that Audible’s range of titles, and level of pricing, is awesome. And I love listening to spoken word stuff on the bus but don’t have enough podcasts to keep me going. Had I been treated fairly, I’d have probably subscribed with them at some point in the future. As it stands now, I won’t ever touch them again. I’m sure they’re happy to be keeping my £7.99, as it must be worth far more than the £100s they could have got off me in the future, had they not been cunts

Dean Love : 24 Jan 2010 01:13 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New podcast!

So sometime in 2008, Anna and I did a podcast. Well now there is another one. Of it.

The Lowman and Love Podcast – Episode 2

It sounds pretty good, there’s still some hiss and a few annoying peaks, mostly as everything I learned about editing podcasts 18 months ago I’ve now forgot.

Show notes below, and apologies for neglecting the blog of late, am planning a “TV shows of the Decade” mega-feature, but need to decide what they are first.

TV
Psychoville
The Thick of It
Californication
Life
Ashes To Ashes
Dexter

Theatre
Jerusalem

Music
The Duckworth-Lewis Method
Frank Turner
Gavin Osborn

Comedy
Mark Watson
Tim Key
Stewart Lee
David O’Doherty
Tim Minchin

Doctor Who

All music by How To Swim

Dean Love : 06 Jan 2010 20:03 |  Tags: Comedy Music Podcast TV |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Christmas Number One Thoughts

It’s been happening for a few years now. Some reality TV show winner puts out a single right before Christmas, and then a bunch of people on the internet try, and eventually fail, to get another song to the number one spot instead. Most notable was last year, where to protest a cover of
Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah taking the top spot, the internet hoards tried to get a different cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to number one instead.

But let us not forget that strange week a few months back where Web 2.0 and social media finally seemed to be growing some teeth. In the course of just a few days, members of Twitter both exposed a huge cover-up by oil giant Trafigura and alerted the world to the fact that Jan Moir was an unpleasant person. After that, everything went a little quiet, but now the impotent fury of the middle classes is once again manifesting itself, but this time on Facebook, a site that remains far more popular than Twitter solely on the basis that you can’t use Twitter to archive photos of your friends looking like tits for all eternity. Well, that and Farmville.

So with X Factor ready to churn out some more garbage, a Facebook group was formed with the intention of getting Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name to the top spot instead, primarily because it would be funny to have a song with the word ‘fuck’ in it as Christmas number one. Things snowball. And for the first time, it looks like this might actually work. I hope it does. But I just can’t bring myself to buy the track.

There’s a couple of things fishy about the whole enterprise – firstly, both the X-Factor track and Killing In The Name are on a Sony label, meaning the proceeds from both end up in the same corporate pockets. Secondly, Simon Cowell himself started talking about the campaign which gave it more media exposure than it could ever dream of, and the kick up the arse needed to give it a real shot at working. Of course, whatever you think of the man, he’s not a fool and he didn’t do this by accident. Instead he’s purposefully created what seems to be a genuine race for number one. It means people like me, that would otherwise have let the whole thing pass them by and ignored the charts this Christmas suddenly know more than we ever want to about X-Factor (someone called Joe is doing a cover of a Hannah Montana song) and it also pretty much guarantees, with the extra media attention, that even if Joe only makes it to number two, he’ll still have out-sold last years’ X-Factor winner by a fair chunk.

But essentially I just can’t bring myself to buy Killing In The Name as I don’t really like it much. It’s a song of its time with the lyrics and meaning co-opted in to being something else. It’s early 90s shouty teen anarchy and frankly we’ve moved on since then. It’s no longer particularly edgy to shout ‘fuck’ a lot. As a friend of mine opined, if people really wanted a subversive Christmas number one they should have started a campaign to get people buying Another Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas With all that considered, I just don’t want to be buying a song I don’t like without really thinking about it simply because my friends think I should; that’s the logic that leads to X-Factor getting 19 million viewers.

I hope it does make it though. It would be a victory for music that at least has some passion and thought behind it, even if that thought is about twenty-years too old. Personally I’m backing another horse: there’s a far less popular campaign to get the wonderful Tim Minchin’s White Wine In The Sun in to the Top 20. It’s not going to make number one, but it’s a lovely, touching, amusing piano ballad about loving Christmas despite all the cheesiness and dodgy religious connotations. Buying it won’t piss-off Simon Cowell, but it’s a great song and y’know, is actually about Christmas. Which makes it good enough for my 79p.

Dean Love : 19 Dec 2009 17:54 |  Tags: Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Scrubs Med Review

The show was meant to be called Scrubs Med. It was meant to be a spin-off show. But instead the network insisted it be called Scrubs Season 9. This is your fault. If you don’t believe me, put your hand up if you would have watched an eleventh series of Friends. Now keep them up if you persisted with Joey for more than ten minutes. Exactly. The metaphor falls down, however, as Joey was gut-wrenchingly awful while Scrubs Med is actually alright. (Don’t even get me started on Stargate Command).

The one concession to sanity is a little logo under the Scrubs one in the title sequence that says “Med School” on it, other than that the show does everything it can to suggest that it’s business as normal. It opens with JD, Elliot and a joke about boobs, Braff is still doing the narration and all the regular cast crop up with the exception of Carla, even if only briefly to explain why they’re not going to be in the rest of the series.

Still, something is odd. The sets are new while the characters stay the same. Except with three new ones. One interesting thing to note is that two of our three new characters are stunningly hot. Lucy and Drew, Kerry Bishe and Michael Moseley, are your typical beautiful Hollywood actors. It’s only on seeing them you realise how the original cast were shockingly normal-looking for a prime-time network sitcom. Zach Braff is possibly one of the oddest looking TV stars out there, it’s practically a running joke on the show that Donald Faison gets about halfway to Denzel Washington then bottles it, and Sarah Chalke is lovely but brings that sort of geekish girl-next-door appeal meaning she never appears quite so intimidatingly hot as our two new stars. The fact that they both appear topless in the first two episodes (alas, only from the rear in Bishe’s case, this isn’t HBO) is hardly co-incidental.

But still, that doesn’t matter as long as it’s funny. And it mostly is. We get shared narration between JD and Lucy, and it works well, though Lucy’s fantasy sequence was a bit of a disaster, here’s hoping she develops the range to play the more over-the-top crazy daydream sequences Scrubs lives on.

The tricky thing is that Braff’s character is very much at the forefront of these two first episodes, his antics with Turk being a major part of the show, as per usual. But unless they really start bringing the new characters to the fore in future episodes, it’s going to feel really awkward when JD vanishes after six episodes. Have to admit, would rather they’d been a little braver and let Lucy take the narration from the start, using JD as a background character. It would have certainly helped the show find it’s own tone a lot more easily. Despite what they might want you to think with the name, it’s never going to be the same as the old show and I can’t help but think it would have been more beneficial to let it strike out in its own direction right away, rather than attempt this strange transition from one show to another. It’s kind of like deciding to have a break-up by only seeing each other once a week for a bit – you don’t really have what you used to have but you can’t get on with the rest of your life either.

So with that said, I can’t wait to see what happens after these first six transitionary episodes. Here’s the other reason it’s not like Joey: hand’s up if your favourite Friends character was Joey. Now hands up if your favourite Scrubs character was Dr. Cox. If you’re going to spin off a show, may as well keep the characters with the best lines.

Dean Love : 07 Dec 2009 23:14 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New thoughts on intelligent design in schools

I’ve written plenty on this in the past. It’s fairly obvious what my opinion is. And hundreds of others have debated it to death too. So I kind of wanted to throw out some stuff that I haven’t seen talked about before. These are half-formed and part-informed ideas but maybe they’ll be interesting.

It started with me reading this article, It treads the same old ground and my initial uncharitable response was that it’s just another old man, who when faced with his own mortality, is desperate to cling on the to hope that there’s something after. Mean and somewhat ridiculous but no more so than the bollocks he’s spouting.

So my initial counter-point was the same as ever: intelligent design isn’t a scientific theory (there’s no falsifiability to it for one), and even if you cast it in such a light that it could charitably be deemed to be one, it’s still a really bad one. It’s basically psuedo-science at best, and if we’re going to teach that in science classes then we may as well throw in homeopathy, psychics and UFOs too. They could all claim to be based upon scientific theory and evidence, but just like intelligent design, the so called ‘evidence’ has not been throughly vetted or peer reviewed, so it doesn’t get taught in science classes.

I fall back to my default position: intelligent design has it’s place in RE, let’s leave science to focus on real, respected theories. I’ve always adopted that position. It’s the obvious one for those of us arguing against the invariably religious intelligent design advocates: “you get your say here, let us have ours here, and lets all get along”.

What I never considered was the inverse.

Lets say we scientific folk bow to the pressure of the intelligent design lobby. Fine, you win. We’ll start teaching it as a theory in science lessons. If you want rid of this demarcation between science and belief then okay, we’ll start presenting it next to evolution as an option. To be fair it’ll probably be five lessons studying the development of evolutionary theory over the centuries, then five minutes at the end going “magic man done it” (thanks to Robin Ince for that one) as that’s the entire ID theory, but fine, we’ll mention it.

There are, however, consequences.

I want my science in your RE lessons. It sounds preposterous, but when you think about it carefully you do start to wonder why our schools teach Religious Education and not the broader subject, Philosophy, of which religion would simply make up a (not insignificant) component. Why was I taught about Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism at length, but never once encountered the phrase ‘secular humanism’ until I started reading the internet? The reason given, of course, is that religion is a big part of the lives of many people, and it’s essential to teach children about it as it’s part of making sure they can live and operate in modern society. Essential knowledge, just like learning how to use Google and Microsoft Word or learning how to read. It’s a notion that seems fair at first glance, those of us that aren’t religious are in the minority after all and kids need to know how to deal with what the majority think, even if they grow up to disagree with it. Problem is, last time we checked only 19% of Britons regularly went to a religious service and 33% don’t believe in a higher power at all. A third! Don’t believe at all! I’m not even in that group and I’m writing this!

Back when we weren’t a primarily secular nation the RE thing made sense, but now I no longer see why it should get special treatment. Sure, lets teach our kids about Jesus and Allah, but lets also teach them about Descartes and Popper. The religious apologists continually throw out that claim that ‘science is just as much of a belief system as Christianity’ and while you can explain how they’re technically wrong, you can also see the point they’re getting at. So next time you hear that one, how about suggesting we start covering the scientific method in RE classes instead? See where it goes. I’d be intrigued.

And y’know what else. In these new philosophy classes, we can teach our kids proper fucking science as well.

One of the criticisms the ID movement use of modern science teaching is that things like evolution aren’t presented as theories, they’re presented as fact. As much as I hate it, they done have a point. Pretty much all science is just a theory. Tim Minchin has a brilliant line about if everything is just a theory, maybe the theory of gravity will stop applying and the apologists will just “float the fuck away”. The irony there being that a lot of Newton’s theories were proven to be untrue in certain circumstances by Einstein. It’s not until you hit relativity in A-level physics that you’re introduced to the idea that what you’ve been learning the past ten years is all in flux and that science is a developing field, and you’re being taught theories, not absolute truths. The ID people think this is terrible, and I somewhat agree.

Funny thing is, I’m fairly sure the fact that science (and for that matter, history) is taught this way is the reason we still have 67% of the country believing in a god. Because if you start encouraging kids at a young age (or even at bloody GCSE age) to think for themselves, to question what’s given to them, to seek out alternative theories… well my friends, you’re going to raise a generation of atheists and agnostics. Because kids aren’t, on the whole, dumb. You tell them to start questioning what they’re taught in science class and you can be sure they’ll be applying that to RE too. More to the point, they might start asking difficult questions of mommy and daddy on the weekly trip to church. Maybe they’ll question the preacher or the cleric. It really is playing with dynamite, and I’m in favour of blowing their minds wide open.

Because science at school does sort of suck. Yeah, we get to set stuff on fire and see chemicals react, and we sure as hell have the scientific method beaten in to us: hypotheses, method, results, conclusions. Every GCSE science kid writes down those headings about a hundred time over the two years. It’s the way you do it, it’s the scientific method. But they never teach you why. They never tell you where it comes from, or the philosophical basis behind it. Which really sucks as it’s bloody annoying at times and a lot of kids grow up thinking we do stuff that way because their teachers were pedants that wanted everything in a set format. Or because that’s what you need to do in the exam. You never get taught about why it’s there and why it’s so important. Perhaps because that’s not really science either. It’s philosophy. Which we won’t teach at GCSE. Because RE is more important.

The message for the proponents of intelligent design is simple: you can’t have it both ways. And personally, at least once you get to GCSE level, I’m in favour of giving the kids the benefit of the doubt. Let them drop ID in next to evolution and let us get rid of this pointless, increasingly irrelevant ‘religious education’ and start teaching kids how to think, not what to think, instead.

Dean Love : 02 Dec 2009 23:37 |  Tags: Politics Religious |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why Rock Band matters

I know a lot of people reading this blog don’t care about video games, but you might find this interesting

My copy of Beatles Rock Band arrived today, to go with the dirt-cheap 360 I got yesterday. Don’t care overly for The Beatles but it’s the only way to get the far superior Rock Band 2 drums in the UK at the moment. I loved Guitar Hero on the PS2. I remember loving it as a concept with Guitar Freaks on the PS1, where all you could play was bizarre j-pop on import. It’s a fun party game, and I’m not going to deny I’ll happily spend an hour of the evening playing it on my own to try get five stars on some song or other. But there’s more to it than that.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been huge success, especially with the ‘youth’ of today, and that’s something that really matters and is really worth thinking about. It’s generalising for sure, but young people today engage with music differently to even my generation. It started with Napster, it currently ends now with Spotify and Bittorrent: there’s so much music out there, legally or otherwise, that the music collections of young people today are ridiculously huge. I’ve spoken to people that download every top 40 album, most get listened to once, if that, but they have a massive archive just sitting there. People will listen to random playlists on Spotify instead of the radio. Taken together with the loss of Top Of The Pops and Later turning shit, this has an interesting effect. Young people, these days, are exposed to far more music than we ever were. In some ways, this is a great thing. But it’s also a great loss. Remember those ‘difficult’ albums? You bought them as you loved that one single but really didn’t get the rest of the songs on the CD? But dammit we paid £12.99 for it we’re going to listen to it at least nine more times. Sometimes it turned out that it was shit all along, but many times the songs were hiding their true beauty and brilliance behind an off-putting façade that you had to work past.

But would we have done all that if we didn’t pay for it and every other song ever released was available to us? And so many young people today exist in this world of ephemeral musical tourism, never listening to a song more than once, letting the music wash over and through them but never truly engaging with it. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs to be honest.

But on the other hand, there is Rock Band.

Rock Band says “you’re not going to pass this song on Hard on the first go, you’ll need at least three. And if you’re even thinking of getting five stars on it be ready to spend at least half an hour playing it over and over again.”
And suddenly these people that wouldn’t normally listen to a song twice are listening to a single track on repeat for ages in an attempt to master playing the guitar solo on a plastic instrument. They’re listening to it. They’re engaging with it. And what’s more they’re even more engaged with it than we were. When you’re playing Rock Band, it’s just you and the music. You can’t play Rock Band and cook dinner, or play Rock Band and browse the web. On harder songs it’s difficult to play Rock Band and have a conversation. All those usual distractions when you put a CD on are gone, the game demands you engage with the music.

And of course, what you are doing in the game impacts upon the music itself. Unless you’re a musician, there’ll be certain things in songs you just don’t pick up on. You won’t realise how elegant a certain guitar solo is, or spot a lovely bit of symmetry between two riffs, or a strangely different drum beat. But the Rock Band player will. Because he has to learn how to play them, albeit in an abstracted way. He’s not only now paying attention to the song, but also to it’s structure, it’s form.

I really wish I was a massive Beatles fan because if I were, Beatles Rock Band might be the single greatest thing ever. I’d be happy for years if a James Rock Band was ever released.

Yes, Rock Band is a fun game, and a laugh with mates. But it’s also an entirely new way of experiencing music, and one that stands apart from MTV-isation of modern music, of it’s relegation into a background track for our lives, one that says “no, you will fucking pay attention to these songs because music fucking well matters”.

Dean Love : 29 Oct 2009 23:29 |  Tags: Games Music |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On White Poppies

None of these thoughts are really original, but a few people asked me about it and so, a blog is born. I don’t wear a red poppy at this time of year. That’s the main reason you won’t see me hosting Have I Got News For You or Buzzcocks this series, coincidently – because the BBC mandate that everyone who appears on TV for most of October has to wear one. This annoys me. For an organisation that have to be entirely unbiased in everything political and social, that don’t let their newsreaders wear any other symbol, this yearly obsession with the British Legion is unseemly.

It annoys me. But that’s not why I don’t wear one. After all, anyone that knows me is quite aware that my non-conformism is limited at best, and a façade hiding a ridiculous truth at worst.

My problem with the red poppy is two-fold. Firstly, especially over the past few years, with the war in Iraq, it’s become a symbol representing a certain level of jingoism, nationalism and pro-war sentiment that I’m uncomfortable with. Now, that’s not the fault of the British Legion. Yeah, they’re a big organisation and some of them are bound to be a little warmongery, that’s just numbers. But the majority of them do good work. Alas, the symbol and the cause have been co-opted by certain elements to help with support for blowing up Iraq. Couple that with the fact that it’s pretty much compulsory for members of the media to wear one, as it is in some offices, and it all becomes a little icky: “You must support this charity, even if it represents something you’re hugely uncomfortable with”.

Which leads on to my second point: the British Legion do a brilliant job, they’re sorely needed, and the money raised each year by the poppy appeal goes a long way towards that.

And that’s why I fucking hate the British Legion.

I’m not entirely a pacifist, but I do feel war should be a very last resort. World War 2 was justified. The Iraq war wasn’t. It’s a dangerous road to go down and it should only be travelled in the most dire of circumstances. And the consequences of war on the government, and the country as a whole, should be huge.

Part of that consequence should be, that if we, as a country, are sending people off to be killed for our benefit, then we sure as fuck should be looking after their dependants financially for as long is necessary. If you’re not aware, that’s what the British Legion do. They look after, as much as they can, those families that have lost people in the war, or those brave men and women that have suffered so badly they’ve lost the ability to work. It’s an amazing charity. But it’s a charity. And it really fucking shouldn’t be. That sort of care, and indeed a lot more than the Legion can afford, should be provided for by the state. By us. Taxpayers.

“But that would be crippling on the economy and require massive tax rises,” shout the imaginary masses. “Exactly,” says I. Two million people marched against the war in Iraq. Can you even imagine how many more that would have been if a declaration of war came with a flat 10% income tax rise for the duration of the war? Can you imagine how many more people would be clamouring to get our troops out now it’s apparent to everyone that we’d can’t do any more to help?

In times of dire need and necessity people would accept it, on the whole. But the government would need to put a far more convincing arguement to the public than they did last time. And even after that they’d not be likely to get another term in office. The cost on all fronts would be huge.

As it is, most of us (my primarily middle and upper-working class readership) won’t even know anyone that died in the war. Those less politically inclined didn’t even have an opinion on if we should go to war or not. It didn’t effect them. The only place the war would really hit us (short of conscription) was in our pockets. But the government just borrowed more money and settled for giving the troops inferior equipment and passing it’s responsibility for the injured/killed and their families on to charities like the British Legion. Who through the poppy appeal do just enough good to take the edge off, to stop the treatment of troops and their families being a completely obvious travesty. And as long as they keep doing that good work there won’t be enough people left to get angry about the fact that they even have to. And so the government can go to war knowing that the final bill will be a lot less than it really should be.

Of course, you can’t fit all that on a white poppy. They just say “PEACE”.

You can buy white poppies here and if anyone local wants one I have a few spare, just give me a shout and throw a few quid towards those guys or any other charity you find worthwhile. There’s also a Facebook group for those so inclined here and for those so incensed by this they want to punch me there’s another one here .

Dean Love : 27 Oct 2009 21:16 |  Tags: Politics |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Mitch Benn & The Distractions, Mill Arts Centre, Banbury, 6 October

Whatever you think of him, it’s fair to say what Mitch Benn is doing at the moment is something entirely unique in the UK comedy scene. And the UK music scene for that matter. Technically, it’s a comedy gig. But there’s a band, and the between song banter isn’t much more than you get from a chatty front-man. The songs are funny, but most of them are musically accomplished enough that they’d be decent songs even without the jokes. And some of them aren’t even that funny: they’re amusing and will make you smile but they’re not the sort of comedy songs that are packed full of punchlines. Not most of them anyway.

The show is also almost entirely divorced from Mitch’s ‘day job’ club sets. African Baby and a certain rock-opera cross over, but even if you saw Mitch headlining the Glee Club the other week this tour show will be an entirely different experience.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point. Mitch has being touring with the band and putting out a new album nearly every year since 2004. The early shows with the Distractions were hit-and-miss: lots of the album stuff worked brilliantly but the shows were fleshed out with awkward re-workings of solo tracks (who remembers Crap Shag – Slight Return? Exactly.). Meanwhile banter was kept to a minimum as working with a band meant sticking to a setlist and keeping things smooth. But it was a bold experiment and five years on it’s matured amazingly.

With five studio albums under his belt, Benn no longer lacks for material in this pretty hefty show that weighs in at nearly two hours. He mixes up a lot of stuff from the new album with the highlights of the old ones to create a show that never loses it’s way and is paced brilliantly.

Now I’m going to talk about the set, so forgive me as I drop in to Mitch Benn – geek mode. Yes, I’m one of them that sits at the front and mouths the words at him. The show opens in an initially disappointing way: The Interactive Song, a bonus track from Too Late To Cancel. Except it soon turns out it’s been entirely re-worked with all the gags being changed, and you get to feel smug if you know who John Cage was. From there we get a bunch of stuff from the new album, a lot of which will be familiar to Now Show listeners. I do wonder exactly how beneficial it is to Benn’s career to do the Now Show. Plenty of people go along to the shows as they’ve heard him on Radio 4, but I know plenty of others who won’t as they think he’s not very good, based on what they’ve heard on Radio 4. And the truth is a lot of his Now Show stuff is either bad or mediocre – there’s a reason that of the 60 or so tracks he’ll write for that show each year, only four or five will make the album. But you try writing three topical comedy songs every week for a few months at a time.

Anyway, we get a whole bunch of new and kind of new stuff: Love Handles mocks the fake-ness of celebrity, Motorway Food is about exactly what it says, and Not Bitter is one of those songs with a laugh every line and is all the better for it. Disgustingly In Love is an interesting one for any dedicated fans. The lyrics are different but the song is the Busted parody Don’t Release Us In To The Wild from an old Now Show episode that actually featured Mitch with the band and not a backing tape. Might sound cheap, but it’s actually great as that song had a ridiculously catchy riff but would have made absolutely no sense outside of the very specific context of the news story involved. I’d love to see If We’re All Still Here from that same episode released in some form some day. And besides Scary Weirdos was a Now Show Christmas track. Or the other way around. And now back to stuff that normal people can understand.

The first half of the show also features two songs that deserve a special mention. “Now He’s Gone” features bass/keyboard/backing-vocalist Kirsty Newton on lead vocal. This is great for three reasons: a) she’s awesome (not to mention ‘fit’ as my friend ably pointed out, like I hadn’t noticed), b) it’s a great change of pace and c) you get to see Mitch dance around the stage while playing guitar. “West End Musical” also trades lead vocals between the two of them, ending in this intricate two-way thing that is just brilliant. The fact is, not wanting to denigrate the efforts of drummer Ivan who is fantastic, the whole thing is practically a two-man show. Kirsty’s backing vocals just add so much to the whole thing (she even does the ghost noise in Macbeth) and musically it’s probably fair to say she outshines Mitch. Lucky for him she’s not as good at writing funny songs (although her own, not funny, band Siskin are worth checking out). She’s been playing with Mitch for over five years now and it shows: there’s a level of comfort and familiarity there that makes the whole thing seem so much more natural than at those early shows, and they take the piss out of each other like only friends can. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine the show without her. And she’s better on piano than Rick Wakeman. And nicer to look at. Bad call on that video.

During the interval Mitch goes off to write a song about some topics suggested by the audience. When it works, this is brilliant. I’m spoiled, having last year saw him put together a brilliant Irish jig in relation to their government underwriting the banks during the economic crisis: “Give us your money lads”… this time, not so much. It rhymes and it just about works but isn’t exactly brilliant. Then again, the fact he can come up with anything at all in 20 minutes is impressive.

The second half sees a bit more old stuff, including tracks like Beatles parody Please Don’t Release This Song given a new sense of relevance with all the re-releases. There’s a new Elvis parody (though the old one was enough, really) and semi-serious song Where Next?. I actually like all of the non-funny tracks on the albums, there’s enough now for an EP. Hmm. The show is bought to a close with (My Name Is) Macbeth before a very short gap (“It’s been too long a day to milk it”) leading in to a quick encore of Peel tribute track, A Minutes Noise. It’s a fitting way to end an awesome night.

It’s interesting to note that the ‘hit single’ Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now is absent entirely, as is I May Just Have To Murder James Blunt, which demonstrates Mitch’s justified confidence in the material he is playing. I’d personally have liked to heard last year’s Alternative Energy Song as it’s just musically so fun, but I think that demonstrates how far this whole thing has come: that I can come out thinking “it’s a shame he didn’t do that one”.

The tour is only just starting; you can see the dates here and I really do urge you to go. It’s an entirely unique night out, an experience you just won’t get anywhere else, and for that reason alone it’s worth giving a go. It also has enough variety that there’s something there for everyone. This year I went with a friend who’s never been to a live comedy show before. Last year I went with my Dad and younger brother, the latter of which hates my taste in music and comedy. They all loved it.
And lastly thumbs up to the Mill Arts Centre in Banbury, who didn’t do what a lot of venues do when faced with a show like this and do the sound like a rock gig so you can barely hear the words. When the words are half the point. Bless you Mill Arts Centre, for having a fucking clue.

Dean Love : 24 Oct 2009 01:25 |  Tags: Comedy Music |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem