We used it as a flimsy excuse for a farewell knees-up and invited several of our friends from around the country. I felt a little cheated that my buddy, Pokemeister, bought the best raffle ticket, but it didn’t win him any prizes. We all drank a little too much, except Pokey’s other half, who had way more tequila than she could handle and after redecorating our bedroom with her lunch, and a couple of hours on the big white telephone to God (Bleargh! Oh… Gad!!) spent the next 24 hours feeling incredibly delicate.

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Happy 30th Mate!

This week has been crazy hectic, with a social engagement for 8 days straight since Pokey’s Pants Party last weekend and ending with VIP passes to the Carling Academy in Birmingham for Toni’s 30th this Saturday — that’s her 3rd from the left with the flashing skull headband ;-) Notice her other half, Ian, showing off some of his head-spinning break dance moves like it’s still 1989; And yours truly taking center stage with Guinness in hand, and inane grin on face.

Needless to say a fabulous time was enjoyed by all, and it was great to catch up with another of our buddies celebrating the death of their youth!

Happy 30th Mate!

Hot on the heels of my recovery from last weeks rave sensation, my buddy Paul Vaughan (drummer for The Donns, and no relation) invited us to his 30th birthday party last night. He unwittingly volunteered himself as a shining example of why downing a £15 top-shelf drink before coming home is not good for your health; posing here barely recovered from passing out for the 2nd time on his living room floor before midnight :-) We did have a fabulous time though, and the Pants theme (that’s underpants in American) made for some hilarious fancy dress.

The rest of this week is a non-stop social marathon for us, with someone to visit every night now right through until next Sunday…

Although I am exactly the right age, because I would only listen to heavy metal during the 80′s and 90′s, I have never been to a rave. Since I started to appreciate electronic music in the last decade, of course I’ve gone to promoted events with DJs (the rave tent at the Bulldog Bash is excellent by the way), but I didn’t mix in the right circles to go to a proper word-of-mouth rave in a field on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Until this weekend that is! The music was LOUD, mixed live in 3 separate tents… and played continuously for almost 18 hours starting from 7pm on Saturday. About half way through, the organisers set fire to the outline of a maze in the pitch black, which was absolutely spectacular. Octavia made a video of the huge line of people (ourselves included) walking through it, which you can see in its entirety at my new gallery page.

During the afternoon before the party, we thought it might be fun to try a spot of mountain boarding. Or rather, my buddy Stoney mountain-boarded his way down some bumpy, twisty tracks, and I followed behind variously on my backside, shoulder or head :-)

Yesterday was spent catching up on the sleep I missed, and nursing my aching muscles. I’m still not sure whether that’s down to colliding with a mountain too many times on Saturday afternoon, or too many exuberant dance steps all through the night. Either way, training tonight is going to hurt!

Neither of us could drive, but a short train ride to Bristol, and then a bus into Reading followed by a taxi to the Leisure Centre got us to the gig plenty early, and gave us the afternoon to sink a few beers at the adjoining sports bar before we needed to join the ticket queue. And we could even hear Annihilator’s sound check across the hall while we waited. We had never heard guitars so loud, and were grinning inanely in anticipation over our beers when Jeff Water’s (Annihilator main man) walked in for a couple of beers, and said “Hi” to us while he waited for the bartender. Completely star-struck, I managed a nervous hello, told him I loved the album and that the sound check sounded amazing.

Anyway, I digress… a few hours later we’d made our way into the hall, and the first band, Horse (London), had finished their set, shortly followed by another band I hadn’t heard of, fellow Brits Onslaught – almost an hour of crunching guitar riffage punctuated by the soaring vocals of Steve Grimmet. I was blown away by their sound, and the intimacy of the set, with band members actually coming out among the small audience of a couple of hundred kids. Annihilator were great too, but Onslaught really made that gig for me, and I bought a T-Shirt and a tape of their just released album, In Search of Sanity. I played it so often that my cassette deck eventually chewed it up. So I rebought it on CD, I think it was the second CD I ever bought after Metallica’s Am I Evil maxi-disc.

At the end of that year, I got much better grades in my exams, and qualified for the University of Warwick, where In Search of Sanity continued to be a favourite over the years ahead. Although I much prefer playing guitar, I played drums in Hemlock for a month or two on the strength of their cover of Onslaught’s Welcome to Dying, but luckily for them they found a real drummer before I got a gig, and I went on to form Alien Fuck Beast later that year. After University, I found a job in Worcester where my first house was robbed while I was out at work in 1995 and, among a few other insignificant things, my entire CD collection was stolen — including my beloved Onslaught disc. In the years since then I’ve pieced back together most of the discs I lost by scouring garage sales, and second hand record shops, but I never seemed to be able to lay my hands on a copy of that particular album, which had long since been deleted.

Fast forward to 2002. I was lodging in the spare room of a long time University buddy, and Alien Fuck Beast drummer, where the nearest pub doubled as the clubhouse for Past It’s MCC. After some months of drinking with the bikers, and going to their rallies and parties I would occasionally talk music with a couple who played in a cover band at the pub regularly. Late after a gig one night, following many beers I recounted this story to the band’s guitarist and vocalist, Tony, who told me that Steve Grimmet had left Onslaught after that album, and Tony himself had recorded demos for much of what would have been Onslaught’s fourth studio album, until the label pulled out on their deal and the band had split. Tony had then fronted Praying Mantis among others, and was currently working on a solo project. He gave me his number and said I’d be welcome to a copy of the Onslaught demos he’d worked on. The next day, hangover very much intact, I thought that the conversation had mostly been the beer talking, and the world couldn’t possibly be that small. Shortly afterwards I moved to Stourport-on-Severn, and more or less lost touch with Past It’s MCC.

This morning, while pruning my junk email, I found an alert from the iTunes Store for a 2007 release by “Reformed UK Thrashers, Onslaught”. Mildly stunned, I bought Killing Peace and listened to it a couple of times. It’s an excellent album in fact, raw and brutal, with chugging riffs that make you want to grow horns and play air guitar. Intrigued, I thought I’d research a little to find that Onslaught had indeed reformed last year, and have been touring Europe since the album was released. They have a myspace page and a new website, including a page about Tony O’Hora who fronted them between Steve Grimmett quitting, and the record deal falling through, no less! Armed with a full name, a quick search of iTunes turned up a new album Escape into the Sun, perhaps the solo album he had been working on when the beer was talking? Not at all Thrash Metal, but a brilliant and extremely accomplished album none-the-less. Damn me if the world isn’t a really really small place after all!

And to cap off this rather wonderful day, In Search of Sanity has been rereleased. :-D

When I organised my CD and LP collections, I would keep them alphabetised by artist, and then by date within artist. So if I wanted to play the latest Megadeth album, I could thumb through the racks to M and then see all of their albums in the order they were released, followed by all of Metal Church’s albums, and then Metallica and so on. The system doesn’t take into account compilations and soundtracks, so I would put them in among the artists, ordered by title, so my Matrix soundtrack albums sit between Marilyn Manson and Meat Loaf; and my Metal Hammer Magazine cover discs would live between Megadeth and Metallica, starting with the oldest and so on, and so on.

(If you’re happily downloading all the awesome metal by bands with names that start with M from the links above, you should probably pick up the fantabulous new return-to-oldschool Machine Head album while you’re at it.)

As far as I can tell, there’s no way to do this with iTunes :-( I had hoped to be able to sort the year column, and then rely on the sort algorithm being stable so that a second sort on artist wouldn’t jumble up the years. No luck there. Worse, sorting by artist splits up all my soundtrack and compilation albums and puts the tracks in amongst the albums from the track artists. However, the latest release of iTunes does have a new Sorting tab in the File -> Get Info menu when a single track is highlighted, and that allows me to type whatever I like into the Sort Artist field, and have that override artist as far as sort order is concerned. Here is how I could make iTunes sort as I’ve described above:

1. If the album this track comes from is a soundtrack or compilation, put the album name followed by the album release year into the Sort Artist field.
2. Otherwise, put the artist name followed by the album release year into the Sort Artist field.

Unfortunately, there Sorting tab isn’t visible when selecting a whole album’s worth of tracks, so I’d have to go through all 9000 tracks in my library one at a time and paste this information in manually. Sounds like an ideal job for Applescript to me, and since I’m trying to learn the language and add it to my repertoire I’m inclined to jump in head first and code it up…

But first, hasn’t anyone done something like this already? Surely I’m not the first person to be frustrated by the crappiness of iTunes’ sorting? Or have I just missed some clever whizbang option right there in iTunes already that would save me a day of coding? Please enlighten me in the comments!

You’ve probably already noticed that I created an amazon affiliate account recently, and indeed I’m tying it in to the excellent Now Reading WordPress Plugin. Now that I have my sleep schedule under control, and actually read paper books again, I’ve started logging the books I’m reading, along with reviews and links to the amazon store in the hope that my recommendation of books I’ve enjoyed may generate a few affiliate sales.

Most recently, I also joined the musicmp3 affiliate program. For the last few months I’ve been using this site to re-buy the contents of my gigantic, if somewhat aging, music cassette and compact disc based music collection to save myself the time involved in digitising it myself. At just a dollar or two per album, with all of the tracks in fully tagged mp3 files without DRM, it takes no more effort to get them into iTunes than buying from the ITMS and removing the DRM manually — except that you save $8 per album. The site is run legally and professionally, and just by joining up through the button to the right of this page you get some free downloads. The site has agreed to pay me $2 per month for displaying the button regardless of whether anyone clicks it or not, though they offer upto $20 per month for higher traffic websites.

But, from the ashes, a new band has arisen! “Ill Will” has more or less the same line up, but for the drummer: Rog has moved to Coventry to run a recording studio, so the stix in Ill Will are now handled by Dr. Mac. (with midi sequencing courtesy of John and myself). We changed the name because we wanted to break out of the Heavy Metal cliche, and make something new and different. Our new sound has a Dance/Rave/Techno inspired groove, while still retaining the crunchy down-tuned distorted guitar driven riffage backbone. In short: It’s pretty damn cool!

In preparation for our first CD, we’ve set up a Cafe Press store, Ill Will Gear with original artwork from Jam emblazoned on shirts, hoodies and mugs. We’ll continue to add a new product most weeks, and when the mix on our new songs goes gold, you’ll be able to buy the CD from Ill Will Gear too.

The limited Pure Evil mug is a must-have for all our fans! Buy one now before we replace it with a new design…

The bands were playing on Saturday and Sunday, but Steve, some of his mates and I had paid for the £105 tickets for use of the camping facilities for the weekend, and set off on Friday afternoon. We stocked up on beer and easy to prepare food, had a hearty fry up and hit the road at about 2pm. We arrived in the queue for the car park well before 4pm, which was slowed by the organisers charging everyone another £5 for parking! The cheek of it! We trickled along a dirt track for a couple of miles until we reached a field and were directed to park. I was a bit surprised at how far the parking was from the main gate on the other side of the race track, and pretty disgruntled that we had to carry our tents, backpacks, beer and food all the way back to the gate on foot. We joined the back of the queue a little after 4pm.

53I say queue, but really it was just a sea of people, maybe 30-40 people wide stretching about 150 yards into the distance towards the gate. And not moving. Every 20 minutes or so there was a surge and we jostled forward a few tens of yards, and stopped again. We reached the gate at about 5:30pm, only to discover that we had been queueing to join the queue to be searched… one of us had our camping gas bottle, for our camping stove (to use for cooking food when camping) confiscated by the idiots on security, and eventually after another 30 minutes, having been rudely told to change lanes, we were then allowed to join another queue to exchange our camping tickets for wristbands, whereupon we were finally allowed into the outer part of the site. We walked across it to join a (mercifully shorter) queue to get into the camping area. After another half an hour, it was pushing 7pm and we had finally pitched our tents.

There were several scaffolding lookout towers with halogen search-lights erected all around the edges of the camp site, in radio contact with groups of mobile security. If they spotted anyone lighting a camp fire in the camp site, or using a barbeque or the like they would rush over, douse it with a fire extinguisher, and tell the owner off. Apparently, anyone who had smuggled in bottles of alcohol had them confiscated too. Wankers.

Despite the organisers’ best efforts to quell any outbreaks of people enjoying themselves, we managed to get nicely drunk on our contraband beer and went to sleep before midnight, exhausted by the days tribulations.

Bright and early on Saturday morning, not too excited by the early bands, we came to slowly, all nursing hangovers. By about 10am, we could see an enormous queue forming around the perimiter of the camping area… 10 people wide and stretching as far as the eye could see. Entry the previous day had been handled so badly that there had not been time to organise wristbands for entry into the main area with the stages. We had pretty much had enough of queuing at that point, so we shamefully joined as near to the front of the masses as we dared. We were given our wristbands reasonably promptly, and congregated at the beer tent inside within 15 minutes or so. They confiscated the cans we were drinking in the queue of course… although, for once, I could see the sense in not allowing tin cans into the arena.

62I wasn’t terribly surprised that in order to buy beer from the tent you had to queue to buy beer tokens, and then join another queue to exchange them for an actual drink. The selection was pathetic. Carling from the pump. Cans of Strongbow (transferred to a flimsy paper cup). Or (plastic) bottles of vodka ice. Great. We sensibly bought a weekend supply of beer tokens to save queuing repeatedly, and went to sit on the bank and wait for the next band to start on the main stage.

I was looking forward to Soil, but the first day was pretty light on bands that any of us were keen to see. As we were making our way to the front to get a good position to watch from, the screens announced that they had pulled out at the last minute. Bah! I went for a wander around the stalls, and on the way through a building full of skaters spotted a poster billing a freak show and a rock-n-roll burlesque show at 11pm that night and the following night…

Cradle of Filth, who I have seen twice before, came on the main stage a bit later but weren’t really suited to an open air gig in full daylight. I quite enjoyed their 30 minute set because I knew all the songs, and they had a few of their usual array of acrobats and stilt-walkers, but they didn’t capture the crowd.

58We had some time to kill, and went for a look at the After Shock tent, on the promise of some free shots. They had a cool setup, with a jacuzzi, giant hand bag fighting, bouncy castle etc. The new black-currant After Shock flavour is really nice too. Much better than mouth-wash flavour, and liquorice flavour… or whatever the original ones are supposed to be ;-)

The next band I wanted to see was Arch Enemy on the second stage, but the other guys all wanted to watch Iggy Pop on the main stage. We arranged to meet later for the headliners and went our separate ways. I have read a lot of good press about Arch Enemy, but haven’t heard any of their material. They were (deliberately) very cliche, but with big riffs and air punching anthems aplenty they put on the best show of the day so far. I’ll have to start collecting their back catalogue.

Static-X were billed next on the second stage, but characteristically of this weekend, they too had pulled out. I was chatting to some of the other people in the tent, who had heard a rumour that Fear Factory would be making an unannounced appearance on the third stage shortly. So I fought my way across to the other end of the site and suffered a pretty dire band called Ikari Colt. Musically they weren’t bad… but the singer was a git, and that came across to the twenty people in the audience more than the songs. The secret appearance didn’t happen, so I went for food and tried to get in touch with the others.

60No joy there, but I did get pretty close to the front for Linkin Park, who were awesome! Definitely worthy of the headline spot on the main stage, even if they only had enough material to fill an hour. My throat was hoarse after shouting along to every single song. And it was only 10:30pm, so I texted the others and headed for the freak show.

It turned out to be a glorified rock disco, punctuated by an occasional near-naked rock chick on stage. Fair enough! Things got a bit raucous with one of the acts, and I got splattered with pig guts… rock and roll! When it finished, we had to leave via the front entrance since the main arena was closed down, and then I discovered that we were camping within a couple of hundred yards of our cars, and that we stupidly had to walk all the way to the other side to get in, and then back across to almost where we started, barring an unused pair of gates, to reach the tent. Who thought that up? I got back to my tent at about 3am, and the others were already zipped in and snoring.

56The next day had a much better line up, and we had nothing to queue for with our supply of beer tokens and full complement of wrist bands :-) We didn’t get ourselves up and going early enough to catch Breed 77 on the main stage at 11am. Shame, because I could hear them from my tent over breakfast and they sounded pretty good :-( I bought a coke in a plastic bottle which I drank some of and then topped up with Jack to save myself the cost of £3 per pint for beer I don’t like.

We got through the gates into the arena without any tedious queueing today, but they wouldn’t let me take through a bottle of coke I bought from one of their own vans. Apparently I was expected to throw this one away, and buy another one from another van run by the same company. Yeah right. Once I’d finished drinking the bottle and they let me in, I discovered that the beer tents weren’t accepting yesterday’s tokens. I think this is an outrage! How much more did they need to rip us off? Total, total assholes!

After that fracas, we bought some food from one of the vans inside, and caught the second half of Ill Nino, who played excellently. Again, the crowd was uninspired, but it was early in the day, the sun was beating down, and people were still suffering from the previous day’s excesses. Pity, the really were very good, and the people right at the front were having a great time.

Soulfly played next. They are the band that Sepultura should have been. The crowd was warming up, and the reception was definitely improving.

I had high hopes for Machine Head, who are one of my favourite bands on CD, but they somehow failed to impress live. I don’t know why, but something didn’t quite click. We got bored partway through, and decided that we should get more beer and food with the mighty Slayer about due.

When we got back to the stage, the screens pronounced that Slayer were delayed, and that they would be playing the second stage at the same time as Korn were on main stage. Bah! I wanted to see both. To fill the gap, Damage Plan moved on to the main stage, and probably were very good. I was too far back, and we were all having a moan about the chaotic (dis)organisation of the whole event, so I didn’t pay them much attention.

68Slipknot, however, totally blew me away. A couple of the band were whirling baseball bats around and beating the shit out of some mic’ed up beer kegs as part of the percussion!! Then they got everyone in the crowd to sit for the start of another song before it all went apeshit. Very, very impressed. I’ve got to see them again! Unfortunately we had to miss the last song to try and beat the crowd into second stage tent for Slayer.

When we got there, they announced that there would be another hour delay before they came on stage. Sigh. Should I fight my way back to see some of Korn? But then I’d never get back in this tent for Slayer. We all procrastinated for a bit, and eventually the others decided that they wanted to be at the front for Metallica and headed back, agreeing to meet at tonight’s freak show if we stayed separated. I stayed, and Slayer, when they finally did appear were, as always, absolutely spot on. I before the encore to try and beat the rush back for Metallica.

64I needn’t have bothered. I caught the last couple of minutes of Korn, and then there was almost a 3 hour wait. At about 9:30, a sheepish James Hetfield took to the stage and apologised, telling us that Lars was fine, but he had been rushed in to hospital, so the rest of the band had got some “friends” from today’s other bands to take the drums. They came on at 10pm, and blasted through almost an hour of classic songs with Dave Lomardo from Slayer and Joey from Slipknot. Considering the circumstances, it was pretty damn fine. And it meant we didn’t have to suffer any of the dirges from their latest studio album. But it just wasn’t Metallica. It was a real anticlimax to the weekend. At least it wasn’t raining. Oh wait. Yes, yes it was in fact beginning to rain.

I met up with half of the others for the freak show as agreed. The remainder had sulked off to their tents in disgust. And tonight’s freak show was cancelled, so the guys that met me didn’t get to see it at all.

In summation, a potentially rip-roaring top notch day of wall to wall big name old school metal moshing mania was very much let down by the facist organisation of the whole thing, and the last minute changes of stage and times. All crowned by a substandard headline slot from Metallica. I enjoyed myself, but it could have been so much better. I certainly wouldn’t go again. It was an extremely expensive weekend, and I hate queuing!!

After a lot of shopping, I saw about a million variations on the Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Strat, but not a great deal of innovation from the big names. Sound Control (formerly Musical Exchanges) is, I believe, the largest guitar shop in Europe, so I got to play with dozens of axes but nothing really grabbed my attention… except the BC Riches. My Iron Bird was near the top of the range when I got it ten years ago, and should have cost almost £600. It is a great rhythm guitar, but the neck is too fat and the frets to high, so I didn’t look at the new ones until my options were running out. To my great surprise, the new £300 range feel much better quality than my Iron Bird. I guess things have come along since I last looked :-) They have saved by taking off the Floyd Rose, but I wanted a fixed bridge anyway.

Next week, I can collect my new City of Brass artwork BC Rich Beast, replete with filed nut for 4 wound strings (3 from a 10 set, and a .46 as the lowest), tuned from C (a compromise for not having a 7th B-string) at concert intervals, and the intonation set up to match. Merry Christmas to me!