He’s hiding alone and he’s crying alone
  Afraid of dying alone
  And nobody wants to see him
  He is younger than you
  And more troubled than you
  He doesn’t want to go home
  Now he’s walking all alone

  (…)

  And did you tell him he’ll meet a girl who loved to dance
  Who had the wrong clothes didn’t stand a chance
  And who is turning meaner by the minute
  Making nasty plans

(From Don’t Kill The Clowns)

I’ve been listening to this song at least once a day for more than a month now and every time both the lyrics and the music almost make me cry. So beautiful. Words won’t suffice.

The facts: Soda Fountain Rag is the solo project Ragnhild Jordahl from Bergen, Norway, who is also in the 80s indiepop band The April Skies. Her solo recordings are more electronic and, especially, more powerful. Don’t Kill The Clowns is my favourite song, but I have yet to hear a bad song. There’s a five-song EP that came out on French label Anorak, which is called Qui a besoin d’une voiture? and looks quite pretty too. Soms songs can be listened to at her Myspace, while her Norwegian website has a lot more mp3s. You’ll love them.

(And if you wonder why I’m repeating myself, then that’s because it’s all so true.)

Johnny plays guitar, Jenny plays bass and Martijn is just a bloke who happens to like music and enjoys writing about a bunch of songs that he found on other blogs recently.

‘Every band that sings in Swedish sounds a bit like Bob Hund’ someone once said. Me, in fact. It is true in the case of Almedal, who also sound quite Labrador-y, especially in Och Alla Platserna (which, I guess, means and all places). Mira el Péndulo links some songs of and has some words about the band, though some knowledge of the Spanish language would probably help with the latter.
The Charade, from Sweden too, have never been embarrassed about that Shermans connection. Two new songs can be found at Hello! Surprise! among which My Song For You is my favourite.
Former Shelflife band Souvenir –you know, the Spanish couple that sing in French– have a new album out. It’s called 64 and you can find the very Saint Etienne-y Allô Allô over at Filles Sourires.
Shelley’s Children is a band that sounds like they were on Damaged Goods in the early nineties. Well, that might be because they actually were on Damaged Goods in the early nineties. Like most bands on said label, little is known about them, but for the time being the fact that they recorded the rather brilliant Circle Line suffices for me. You’ll find the song at Indie MP3.
Finally, we discovered The Indelicates when Alistair played their incredibly catchy single We Hate The Kids at the now-legendary first edition of Exeter Goes Pop. It seems to have been a small indie hit last summer, when I was too busy with other things. The song can’t be found on the band’s website (though you will find some other tunes there), but it seems that the Homo Eclectic blog still has a working mp3.

And back to mod_perl we go.

Song of the day: Rocketship – I’m Lost Without You Here

This one’s for Dimitra.

It’s always sad when it’s Monday and I have to leave Devon again, but after a really nice weekend together*, it’s even worse. Of course. And much as I heart this job and much as I don’t mind being on my own, I’ve come to realise I have a really hard time not falling into the trap of being stuck in a rut and just roboting through life until it is Friday again. On the positive side, I’ve got tons of work to do, so I hope the days will go by really fast. One down, four three-and-a-half to go.

* actually, we had a friend over on Saturday. Which made things even better.

(For you pop kids who care more about music than about me –fair enough, I’d say– this song if from Rocketship’s debut album A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, that Slumberland released a little over ten years ago. It’s a classic in both American indiepop and in my own little pop world. Last time I checked, Dustin Reske was still recording music under the name of Rocketship, and some of his recordings were quite okay, but never as good as his mid 90s stuff.)

“Ah… Postbank… is it a Dutch card?”
“Erm… yes, I am Dutch.”
“Nice. Which part of the Netherlands are you from?”

And so we exchanged some small talk a week ago, me and the bloke from Reading station’s ticket office. That was the last time I saw my credit card. I wonder whether it was the same person who shredded my card and wrote my name on the Shredded Credit Card List they keep at the station, following First Great Western’s official How And When To Destroy Customers’ Credit Cards procedure.

(It’s not so bad, actually, and it was a good reason to go to the bank in Exeter on Saturday to apply for a British credit card. So I had to go through the same boring procedure of giving them all my personal details, including my previous address, that I have been through so many times since we’ve moved to England. And each of these times, I regretted my last Dutch address being one in the unspellable Hellevoetsluis…)

While walking to work this moning, I was listening to an mp3′ed-version of a mix-CD my friend Maja had sent me from Germany. She had put a cover version of Tullycraft’s Wild Bikini by American band Saltine Crack Whores (what’s in a name…), that I hadn’t heard before. The cover is quiet and acoustic, with female vocals; hence quite different from the original (which, I just found, is named after a film), but it’s still good. Which just shows once more that Tullycraft write brilliant tunes, despite their image of ‘just a group of silly American twee kids who like to put tons of geeky indiepop-references in their songs’.

Both the original and the cover version can be found at the Skatterbrain blog. Which I just discovered and which seems pretty good. Speaking of blogs, you know that Tullycraft’s official website has been an mp3-blog for quite a while now, don’t you?

From the indiepop list:

“The Lucksmiths played [The Go-Betweens'] Bye Bye Pride as their last song during the last ever Candle Records gig here in Melbourne last Saturday”

Wow. How much I’d love I could download music right now. For you lucky people: a 2004-live version of the song can be found here.

(For the not-so-into-indiepop visitors: Candle Records is an Australian record label that has just ceased to exist. The Go-Betweens are a legendary Australian band, whose member Grant McLennan suddenly died last May. The Lucksmiths are… well The Lucksmiths. They’re from Australia, too. And damn great.)

Song of the day: The Hermit Crabs – Vegan Vows

Camera Obscura will play in Oxford, in April. It’s on a Thursday night, so I’ll probably go. I saw the band once, back in 2002, and that was just awesome. But I doubt if I will enjoy it as much this time. It’s not that they stopped writing good tunes (check Lloyd… or the cover of Abba’s Super Trooper), or that I liked them better back then because they were a lot smaller. But I can say I liked them better when they still sounded smaller?

It’s probably not fair to compare other bands to Camera Obscura, especially not if they not only musically come from the same melting pot. But what if I say I don’t mean it in any bad way? At least in the case of both California Snow Story and The Hermit Crabs it is meant as a big compliment. The former will have a debut album coming out soon, which I must have mentioned a million times already, but it won’t hurt to listen to the brilliant Suddenly Everything Happens –with boy/girl-vocals and all that– once again. The mp3 is still available from their label Letterbox.
Among The Hermit Crabs are some former CSS-members. They released a four song EP on Matinée in November –and, apparently, a full length will follow this spring– and it might come closest to the aforementioned smallness. ‘I read your books, I liked your style. Maybe we could hang out for a little while.’ That should say enough.

(Vegan Vows is criminally unavailable online, but some other songs can be listened to at MySpace.)

Listening to The Rain Fell Down’s new radio show on my mp3-player made me almost regret that internet exists and that it almost killed music radio. But then, without internet, I wouldn’t have been able to listen to a radio show on Glaswegian student radio while being in a train across the West Country. (Actually, without the internet, I’d most definitely not be in a train across the West Country.)
I could write about the show every week, as they’re all so damn good. The perfect introduction into the world where Dan Treacy is the messias, Pam Berry is a saint and Sarah, Postcard and Subway books of the bible. And it gives some insight in old testamental soul and garage too. As I write this you can download the next show already –I’m always a week behind– but on the website you’ll find a bunch of old shows to download too. Which you should do.

Unicef has done a research about the well-being of children in 21 industrialised countries. I think hardly anyone has read the research, but the results have nicely been ‘summarised’ in a league table of the 21 countries. Number one: The Netherlands. Number twenty-one: The United Kingdom*. Now rather unsurprisingly, this has resulted in quite a lot of media coverage here about Dutch children and Dutch families. Not sure if I agree with everything that’s being said, but after years of hearing Dutch people only moan about anything Dutch, it’s good to hear an outsider’s point of view for a change.

* English British children are, apprently, unhealthy, unmotivated, lazy, dumb and have an un-natural interest in sex, drugs and alcohol. Most politicians have said it’s not so bad as the research claims (if they’re of the ruling party), or that more should be done about this (if they’re part of the opposition). But I bet they’re all happy that, for a change, such things aren’t said about them.

Because ‘MySpace runs the world’ is one of the reasons Katy gives for putting her fanzine Baka-Poi to an end. Now that is probably true, but it doesn’t mean that you can put handwritten personal stories on it. Nor does Rupert Murdoch let you cut and paste type-written snipplets into an interview, or hand-colour pages with crayons.

So we will miss the cutre little fanzines (twee as intercourse), of which I was lucky to have gotten four or five issues. The first of which was sent to my university address, where the white-with-pink envelope looked as cute as out of place between all the maths books in my pigeonhole. You can still get hold of the latest issue though –it features Fugu, Ping Pong Monster and Juni Järvi among other things– by contacting Katy though the zine’s page on MySpace.

If people come down from as far as Dartmouth or Taunton to attend your clubnight, if a few others who probably had no clue about there going to be a cluhbnight suddenly start dancing and if even more people walk around the Phoenix wearing the badges Alistair had made, I think once can say it has been a good night. Or actually, what matters even more is that the four of us had a really good night, playing some of our favourite records for four ours. I can’t remember most of what we played, but then what you play accounts for only ten percent of an DJ-set doesn’t it? So you’ll just have to come one down to Exeter one of the next times.

Your first opportunity will be in 30 days from now, at 14 Feburary. Which is a Wednesday, so sadly enough it’s quite unlikely thay you’ll see me there, but that shouldn’t be a reason not to come. Well, it’s not that I was brave enough to do more than a bit of assisting anyway.)

(Please don’t conclude from our excitement that hundreds of people came down to Exeter. It was just a nice evening where you could talk to people, listen to nice music, talk to old friends and make new ones. Which is actually what matters.)

It seems that every week, something breaks down these days. So after the bank account (sorted) and the fridge (repaired), this weekend it was time for our phone to decide to subbornly not ring when someone calls. So I had to call BT’s helpline, which, like most big companies helplines, use a system designed by Franz Kafka himself. But at least they’ve entered the twenty-first century and they can actually send you help files though email. Which meant I had to spell out my email address through the phone. Uh oh. But somehow, I sense that this woman isn’t very familiar with this whole interweb thingie either…

‘…and then gmail dot com.’
‘Can you spell that for me, please?’
‘G – m – a – i – l…’
‘G – m – i – a – l?;’
‘No! G – m – a – i – l…’
‘Ah, okay.’
(long pause)
‘Is that with double l?.’

and I got carried away by your beautiful eyes.

Well, kind of, as those beautiful eyes are down in Devon, where there isn’t any snow. And I didn’t exactly got carried away – I had to walk all by myself, which means that I might need to count my toes, as soon as they’re defrosted. But it should be said that fresh, untouched snow at dawn makes the country looks pretty.

Speaking of the weather, I got an email from the Met Office the other day, who invited me for an interview. It’s only the second time since we’ve mover to England that I got actually invited to an interview so it’s kind of flattering that they’re interested. Especially since over a period of three months, I had applied for five different jobs with them, and I had got quite frustrated that they didn’t seem to be interested in me at all. But sadly for them, that first interview got me this job, which I happen to like a lot.

(Original ideas is not something indiepoppers are famous for. Sorry.)

Back in 2002, I did an I interview with Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo. There is a reason why I’ve stopped doing interviews, as lack of imagination made me ask the most boring questions possible. ‘How did you guys get together?‘, ‘what are your influences?’ ‘when will the next album be out?’ I was always too nervous to start a proper conversation and talk about things that really matter. I did, however, mention to Robert that I was doing a PhD in mathematics. You should have seen his face when he heard that.
Mathematics, it appeared, was his super ultra mega absolute favourite hobby. (Hugging people that came to see the band in a very ADHD-y way probably was a close second.) He gave me his super-dooper secret email address and we exchanged some emails about mathematics. He had thought of some things himself and wanted to share these ‘discoveries’ with me. Although nowhere near Fields Medal-winning, it was surprisingly interesting. We lost contact after a few emails or, well, just stopped sending them. He was divorcing from his wife it appeared later.

But now, according to Stylus, on the band’s new album New Magnetic Wonder he

… went so far as to create a new musical language, the Non-Pythagorean Music Scale, for the album. A novel if not exactly new concept, he used equations based on the properties of natural logarithms to replace the standard 12 tones in a musical octave with a different set of frequencies. Several of these new frequencies show up in the 12 instrumental link tracks that segue between the 14 “eal” songs, à la Her Wallpaper Reverie, making New Magnetic Wonder a sprawling mass of tunes and teasers. For the most part, the link tracks work as palette cleansers; teeth brushing for Schneider’s saccharine tunes.

Uh oh.

(It seems that one can stream the whole album here. Thanks.)

One of the downsides of staying far away from home during the week, is the lack of fresh vegetables one eats. I try to make up for that during the weekends in Devon, by using as much of our box scheme’s vegetables as possible. Last night, I made a traditional English cottage pie, followin a recipe from Dutch Kosmik blog, which turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever made. Dimitra said so, which means that it’s probably true.

Also, it’s the first time I’ve ever sent a blog link to my mum.

(Bas, who runs said blog, is a very nice bloke. We wrote for the same website once upon a time. Our respective musica
l tastes differed in such a way, that if one of us liked a certain band, the other could safely ignore them for the rest of their career. Having said that, the recipes he puts on his blog are usually great.)

I was listening to The Visitors while walking through Abingdon this morning and realised they were actually a pretty good band. Which is great, as not only were they around at the right time (from 1986 to 1988) and had their songs re-released on the right label, but they also hailed from Sidmouth, only a few miles east of Exmouth (and now famous because of the presents that ended up on their beach). Sadly enough, they were a rare Devonian contribution to indiepop. (Although I just found out that The Morrisons, who had an album released by Firestation records recently, hail from Torquay.)

But Devon isn’t lost for indiepop. Next Friday, the 9th of February, we will start a monthly clubnight Exeter Goes Pop! We that is Alistair, Dimitra, someone called Orlando (who, I think, works at the local record shop) and me. We’ll play some nice pop tunes and, hopefully, will be able to put some bands up as well. Its location is the Exeter Phoenix, a nice place to hang out in general and only a short walk from the central station. We will start at around 8pm and will keep playing records until at least 11pm (as if you couldn’t read that on the poster). Just come and say hi, have a drink and enjoy some nice music. (And, if you promise not to tell anybody we’re using it, you can say hi virtually too.)