The Seldom Seen Kid Squared

My eagerly-awaited copy of the new version of Elbow’s last album arrived this weekend.

Recorded for the BBC in January, the new version has Elbow backed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and a full choir to play The Seldom Seen Kid in full.

The dratted ‘red button’ wouldn’t let me hear the show when it was broadcast on iPlayer and I decided the Listen Again steam in the web wouldn’t do it justice. So I hadn’t heard any of it until the package arrived, and waiting made sure it was a real treat.

The original version is a bit of a masterpiece, and here virtually every song is improved on.

The opening tracks Starlings sets the tone: an album already full of strings has a new depth and delicacy. The Bones Of You is subtly enhanced, free of compromise that’s inevitable with a band in the studio. The feeling is that this is what they’d have done originally had they had an orchestra and a dozen choristers to hand. It segues into an exquisite jazzy ‘Summertime’.

The standout track is a heart-stopping Grounds For Divorce with its deeply textured arrangement and huge brass punch. But for the most part the original template is followed: subtlety an understatement win out, adding to the original songs rather than over-egging a near-perfect pudding.

Even the overblown The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver works more: the contrasts, emotion and crechendo coming together better with the orchestra.

Two tracks disappoint slightly: The Fix lacks some of the punch and humour of the original. One Day Like This is difficult: the studio version is a manipulative, string-laden slice of overblown but utterly trumphant glory. So what more could they do? Not much, so other than for completeness it’s a case of why bother? It’s still pretty wonderful though.

It’s beautifully recorded and well mixed. A masterpiece turned into something more masterful: Elbow absolutely at the top of their game.

Me Around The World

After pondering on a previous post, I decided to reach out myself and attempt to find new net buddies.

I started by searching my own name in Facebook. And would you believe it, I share a name with 9 pages of fine gentlemen around the world! And one of them is right in my home town!

That was too happy a coincidence to miss, so I sent him a message.

Then I thought, since I found the closest one, where would the furthest one be? So I messaged one in New Zealand. After all, if you go further than New Zealand, you start coming back.

I carried on browsing. There were three others in New Zealand. It would be rude to contact one but not the rest.

Amazingly, there was also one in Malaysia. So I said hello. And then I sent another hello to one in South Korea. The South African one was in-between, so I said hello to him too.

That’s a total of eight namesakes contacted. I hope at least one of them replies…

Reasons To Like Brighton No 328

A man on a tightrope playing the violin…

And three painted people playing Kylie songs on the banjo…

Not-So-Social Networking

A few years ago, I had several Internet buddies.

They were scattered around the world, the closest being a girl just a few miles away that I was very friendly with for years but never met, and the furthest being a sweet but slightly bonkers girl in Thailand. There was also a woman in Prague, an Aussie in Germany and an interesting guy in Slovakia who I talked politics and current affairs with.

That’s what I saw the Internet as: an inherently social device, levelling all differences, shortening all distances. It wasn’t just an intricate web of computers, but also of people.

I gave out my MSN contact (censored@electro-web.co.uk) and ICQ number pretty much willy-nilly because I would enjoy there being someone to hold a conversation with anytime I logged on. Or I could block them, like the London woman who insinuated marriage after one or two occasions of exchanging pleasantries.

Indeed, it was through the internet I met most of my friends (and my now wife). I moved to Brighton, joined a local site and got to know people. We moved it from the screen to the pub pretty quickly.

But somehow, the Internet has got smaller. Despite all the continuing hype of social networks, that’s rarely what they are.

Facebook is diverting enough, though Twitter, Picassa/Flickr and delicious/digg/Google Reader do each of its functions better individually and in a way open to non-Facebook users. But it’s not social; it merely keeps me in touch with my own current friends and I was doing that anyway.

Yes, I’ve got old Uni friends on there, but it hasn’t led to a reignited friendship even though I know what some of them had for breakfast.

All these people I already knew/know and it would be an odd breach of etiquette to be added by a total stranger. The Facebook tools aren’t even designed for that: there’s no real way to get to know someone, merely to stay in touch. Myspace is slightly better, but only marginally.

I miss meeting new online buddies in odd corners of the world.

The tools to do it have gone: I’ve not used it for years, but IQC’s “I’m here and bored, come and say hi” webpage has long since disappeared. Skype’s similar but less obvious “Skype Me” status has gone (though I always found the Skype concept a little too intimate for that). While many sites foster an inward community, it rarely spills out of the specific site anymore.

In short, social networking isn’t.

I’d love to know of chat clients or
online communities that encourage us to connect to new people and start learning things outside our own social sphere and our own country again.

And no, hotsweetcandy18xxx@aol.com, I don’t mean you even if you have got a cam.

Hello? World Calling!

One of the things I like about my job, is when the phone rings and it’s someone calling me from India.

I get excited when it’s an apparently remote or out of the way country: not America or Australia. They’re too easy and obvious and full of white people who’ve been making phone calls for years. I mean Brazil or Kenya or Kazakhstan. Interesting, exotic places.

I love that by pressing a few buttons I’m connected to people who just a decade ago, didn’t even register on the average British person’s radar and often still don’t.

I love the technology behind the fact that, last Thursday I needed to speak to a colleague. I dialled his mobile number and he picked up.  While talking to him, he nearly got run over by a bicycle. In a street in Shianghai.

Incredible.

I have to stop myself from asking irrelevant questions when, for example, I was talking to a guy manning Dell technical support in Bangalore. He was a sarcastic bugger – I asked where he was, he replied “India”. I asked where specifically, he said “India. It’s in Asia, have you heard of it?” but I suppose he was a bit wary of me being one of the many racists who write off call centre staff simply because they’re not in this country. I found him polite, knowledgeable and helpful and he spoke better English and was probably better educated than many English people.

Sometimes, like for train times, it helps to be in the same country. Most of the time it’s irrelevant: like when fixing hard drives that were made in China anyway.

What I’d really like to ask isn’t “can you help me fix my hard-drive?”, it’s “where do you live? what do you do for fun? who are your friends and family? what do they do? what does your city look like?”.

I wish it was the done thing, but no doubt they have their call quotas to fill and at 50p a second I can’t talk for long. But wouldn’t it be nice if, after finishing your banking you could just have 30 seconds to learn a little bit about each other?

Square Root Day!

03/03/09

Both the day and the month are the square root of the year. Isn’t that pleasing?