The first time I read about MySQL*, I thought the drop database command was a dangerously easy way to delete a full database. Yesterday afternoon, I found out the hard way that it is a rather dangerous command, especially when your terminal window has a different database loaded than you thought it had… And for a change I regretted there was no Microsoft-style ‘are you sure you want to delete the whole database and be under severe stress for the rest of the evening?’-warning.

Luckily, there are things such as backups and server logs, the combination of which led to the harm being rather small after all and relatively easy to undo. But still, it took some hours before the stress got out of my body.

* MySQL is a widely used database system. It should, apparently, be pronounced my sequel rather than my s-q-l.

Yes, it is still frustrating that when someone blogs about a song I would like to hear, I have to wait until the weekend to be able to hear it. I’ve always thought music, and pop in particular, was very much about here and now, about being in the mood to listen to a song at this very moment; not about building a playlist for next week, nice as the songs may be.

But well, those are the facts, and the current situation is good for a lot of other reasons. So let’s just celebrate the fact that there are some decent mp3-blogs out there. I thought I’m Not Always So Stupid deserves another mentioning for Nancy’s head-in-the-80s-heart-in-the-UK posts, most of which do have a couple of classic indiepop tunes linked with them. And this morning in the train to Oxfordshire, while me and my mp3-player were catching up with a few weeks of missed mp3s, I happened to really want to listen to The Flatmates, The Chesterfields and Aztec Camera.

We went to Budleigh Salterton in the weekend. We had some lunch and then spent some on the pebbled beach in the shadow of red cliffs, for a change enjoying the lies in the previous night’s weather report. Budleigh us only a few miles east of Exmouth, but there’s no train going there, so we had to wait for someone with a car to take us there. There used to be a train though, until in the 1960s Beeching Axe closed dozens of small branch lines in the UK. And although yes, I do understand why there might be sound economic reasons behind the closure, it’s quite sad isn’t it? It would be so nice if one could still go from practically anywhere to anywhere else by train.

I had told you about the Dutch documentary about Exeter City. So when they were about to play in Wembley, I sent a short email to the NOS, just in case they were interested. I got a short, formal reply, thaking me for bringing it to their attention. And then I suddenly got an email from my mum, who told me about this two-minute item (wmv-link) on Dutch TV last night. I can’t help thinking I contributed to that. A bit, at least.

In other football news Hansa Rostock, my friend’s Maja’s favourite team and therefore my favourite German team, got promoted to the top tier of the German League system, after two year’s absence. But if you don’t care about football, don’t worry, the new season won’t start again until August. Enough time for me to pump some energy into this body, listen to the truckload of albums that’s waiting there for me, and write about them. Perhaps.

It’s Tijs’ first birthday today. Tijs is our first (and, so far, only) nephew, the son of my sister and her boyfriend. I haven’t seen him since August last year, so obviously he has grown a lot. That’s what children of his age do. I don’t really miss anything the Netherlands, but it would have been nice if we had the chance to see him grow a bit more. When we last saw him he was really just a little baby.

Apparently, he went to the zoo in Rotterdam today, with his mum and both his grandmothers. Not sure if that was such a good idea…

Keith Girldler has died. You might have heard of him, as e was in Blueboy, Beatmont, Arabesque and Lovejoy and therefore kind of an indiepop legend. I’ve never met him, but judging from his obituary, he seems to have been a really great person. Someone who definitely left his tiny mark on the world. And he definitely made some fine music – just a few weeks ago, we were thalking about asking Lovejoy, who have an Exmouth Connection, to play at Exeter Goes Pop! And now I kind of wish I could listen to Beaumont’s This Is… album.

Leo has died too. Cancer, too. He was an uncle of mine, married to my mum’s sister, and a really nice person too. (He didn’t play any music though.) I’ve never really been close to any of my relatives, but Leo has always been good company and has left me with some good memories, the last of which were from our wedding last year. I should be grateful for that.

From Wikipedia:

Soup is usually a savoury liquid food that is made by combining ingredients, such as meat, vegetables and beans in stock or hot water, until the flavor is extracted, forming a broth. Boiling was not a common cooking technique until the invention of waterproof containers (which probably came in the form of pouches made of clay or animal skin) about 5,000 years ago (possibly longer), so soups presumably were little-known before that time.

It can also be a state one’s head is in after days of trying to get a server to work by putting together a lot of different programs and scripts that were probably never meant to work together in the first place.

‘At least Plymouth didn’t make it to Wembley’ one person told another at Exeter St Davids station this morning. Plymouth is Plymouth Argyle, Exeter City’s arch-rivals and currently three tiers higher in the English football pyramid. And they will be three tiers higher next season as well, as, in what probably was Exeter City’s most important game ever, The Grecians failed to beat Morecambe and are forced to spend another season in the romantic, very indie, but ultimately terribly frustrating Conference League.

Next year they’ll just win their league, okay?

From Wikipedia:

J was originally an alternative version of I. There was an emerging distinctive use in Middle High German. Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds.

I understand mose people haven’t heard of this Petrus Ramus. I haven’t either. Still, there is a ‘j’ hidden in my name, where it joins forces with the ‘i’ just before it and is guarded by the ‘n’ behind it. I know that the ij-combination (actually, it’s kind of a single letter) isn’t very well known, so I can understand that English people don’t know how to pronounce it. Except that they do know, or pretend to, and almost everyone I meet calls me Martin. Which is, actually, very badly wrong.

Because I’m too shy to correct people (and would be too awkward if I tried to), there we go: 1. the emphasis in Martijn is on the second syllable; 2. it rhymes to wine and 3. it doesn’t really rhyme to wine, so if you want to do very well, make it sound a bit closer to veign. Just so you know.

(I got an email today in which my name was spelled in three different ways. All three were wrong…)

For quite a while now, they’ve been giving away 750cl bottles of water for free, when you buy a newspaper– sometimes the Telegraph, sometimes the Independent– at WH Smith. These bottles normally cost £1.35, while you get a newspaper for 70p, slightly more than half the price of the bottle. Which makes me wonder: are bottles of water insanely overpriced, or a newspapers so desperate to find readers?

Well, I happened to be thirsty. And I had never really read the Independent, so this was a nice excuse to buy it. Even though, being an avid Guardian reader, I felt kind of weird walking around with a different paper. Well, it wasn’t like I was going to meet someone that knew I usually read the Guardian. But I was actually quite dissapointed by the Independent. I’ve never liked the screaming headlines on their front pages, but it wasn’t the kind of paper you can spend hours reading. It didn’t differ that much from the free commuter’s papers, with a lot of very short articles and interviews completely based on with readers’ questions.

The water was nice though.

Only for the fact that sometimes, out of nothing, I find myself with a few lines of a Cat’s Miaow song in my head and a smile on my face, the Australians are worth their name in gold. Shame there are no mp3s of the band available on the whole of the internet.

(I could, of course, post a few here. I should, actually. But perhaps I shouldn’t promise such things too much. I still owe you a Rainyard song, don’t I? ‘I couldn’t find it fast enough’ is a rather weak excuse.)

Oh, wait, look what I’ve just found:

(Not sure whether this is an ‘official video’, but oh well.)

Song of the day: The Pooh Stiks – On Tape

My first ‘walkman’, which for legal reasons wasn’t called walkman, was one of HEMA’s own brand. It was too big to fit in my trousers’ pocket and its headphones were held together by sellotape for most of its life (which says as much about the quality of the walkman as it does about my clumsiness). But that was what these things were like back then. I must have listened to my best-of-UB40 cassette during hundreds of car rides to relatives or holiday destinations.

That was only sixteen years ago.

Eleven years ago, I got introduced into indiepop through a couple of mixtapes from a nice Canadian fellow that I’ve long lost touch with. (Rob Pearce from Lethbridge, anyone?). I often wonder where I would have been now, music-wise (and kind of non-music-wise too), without having known The Cannanes, Go Sailor, Rocketship, Heavenly and Tullycraft since then.

And only six years ago, I owned neither a CD burner, nor a discman, so I used to go around with mixtapes I had compiled myself. My preference of songs is rather conservative, so most of these tapes actually contained the same songs (the aforementioned 1,000 Years, for instance) in a different order and based around different themes.

Well, it is hard not to get nostalgic by reading this

An mp3 of The Pooh Sticks’ On Tape –which is an indiepop classic– can be found here. And for reasons irrelevant to this post, you’ll find an mp3 of The Ronnettes’ Be My Baby there too.

Song of the day: The Rainyard – 1,000 Years

Because I don’t see this rain go away in a thousand years, while I’d like to go home in less than that. Or something. No, actually, I was catching up with some recent podcasts of the always brilliant The Rain Fell Down radio shows, and it was nice to hear Chris mention that this is one of his favourite songs ever. It’s one of mine too. Or perhaps it was, until I kind of killed it by including it on every bloody mixtape I made. But well, even so, it is a great song.

I’ll try to upload it somewhere, once I find the time to.

Oxford(shire) missed out on a chance of returning to the Football League, and they’re not going very pop too. But you shouldn’t worry about that and just make your way to the fourth edition of Exeter Goes Pop!, tomorrow at eight.

I won’t be able to make it myself, but it’s not that that will make much of a difference anyway. I bet Alistair will play a nice mix of old and new, little-known and even less-known, happy and sad, but always very Pop! songs.

Oh, and it’s in the Phoenix, as usual.

Today any song by The Visitors would do as a song of the day. I mean, what are the chances of running into someone you know in London? And what are the chances of that person actually about to take the same train as you? And what then for that person to be a fellow Exeter City supporter, a former Exeter Goes Pop!-headliner and lead-singer in Devon’s sole contribution to indiepop* The Visitors?

So I ran into Mr. Tim H yesterday, at London Paddington. I was on my way to work, and Tim and 30-something fellow London Grecians on their way to support Exeter City, in their play-off semi final second leg against Oxford United. It wasn’t that Exeter had any chance of winning –they had lost 0-1 at home by an own goal and Oxford is a bigger team, with more money and, probably, better players– so it was only out of loyalty that about a thousand Grecians made the journey to Oxford. Still, I kind of envied them for going to see the game.

I should have gone. Listening to the game on BBC Radio Oxford wasn’t the same.

Exeter won. 2-1, making it 2-2 on aggregate. Then came extra time and, because of lack of goals, penalties. Exeter won those too.

These less than 25 words probably describe one of the biggest miracles in Exeter City’s history. Suddenly, they find themselves looking forward to the play-off final, in 11 days time, at the new Wembley stadium. And suddenly, the prospect of returning to The Football League seems very real. Go, City!

* This, of course, I only wrote because it sounded nice. When thinking of Devon and indiepop ‘it’s important not to forget about our dear friend Harvey W, and Another Sunny Day’.

When it comes to supporting your local football team, the English say that it’s your team that chooses you and you can’t but hope that it’s the sort of team that you would like to support. Well, I can consider myself quite lucky with ever-struggling Exeter City. Nicknamed The Grecians –as if I needed another reason to support them– they currently play in the fifth tier of the English League system, which means that even in theory they won’t win the Champions League until 2012.

In practise, it would be great if only they made it back to The Football League, as the top four tiers are called. They were a League member from 1920 to 2003 (always in the bottom two tiers though), when they were dramatically relegated to The Conference. There’s a pretty good Dutch documentary about the lost battle against relegation called That Final Day and it can be watched here (wmv-link). Most of it is in English (with Dutch subtitles), so you shouldn’t have a problem understanding the thing.

On Saturday, I saw my first Exeter City match. Well, it was only for ten minutes, and I only watched through a hole in the fence, killing some time before taking the train back home. It was still quite an experience though, watching over 6000 people shout for Exeter to win (‘Go-o City’), which they quite probably needed to secure themselves a place in the play-offs for promotion. I couldn’t see all of the pitch, but I did have a pretty clear view of, erm, that sandgrounder that got over-excited when he put Exeter one down just before half time. Ouch.

Back home, it appeared that Exeter scored two in the second half, and that they wouln’t even have needed that. So now they’ll play Oxford United, of all teams, in the play-offs semi-finals. I’m already getting a bit nervous.