July 21st, 2008 by Ed
I’ve recently created a ‘drop’ for myself over at http://drop.io/edsdrop. It would be cool if you felt like using it as a way of passing on recommendations of anything cool that you think I should be made aware of: podcasts, books, songs (old and new - you can upload MP3s or whatever directly into drop.io), links to cool stuff online, exhibitions…all of it. By its nature drop.io is anonymous, so if possible leave a note of who you are when you make a recommendation so that I’ll know who to thanks later.
Side Note: First Stupids rehearsal for me tonight for the gig on Saturday. It’s going to be an interesting evening.
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June 14th, 2008 by Ed
There was a fascinating piece on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan on last Tuesday’s episode of Democracy Now! Here’s the summary:
Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explains how the US ally Pakistan has armed and financed the Taliban after the US invasion of Afghanistan; how the CIA pays Pakistan to arrest al-Qaeda operatives, but Pakistan uses the money to fund the Taliban resurgence in northwest Pakistan; and how the US and NATO’s failure to deal with Afghan civil society has led directly to the huge rise of the opium trade that funds the Taliban.
I urge you to go and watch/listen if you interested.
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May 25th, 2008 by Ed
I finally ponied up the necessary and bought myself a decent second hand Denon cassette deck off evilBay. This means I’m now in the position to start working on the slew of unreleased studio demos, 4-tracks, live stuff etc. etc. from the past. Don’t hold your breath though; while I have overcome the technical problem of not having a cassette player, I still have to overcome the less tangible one of not having very much time to dedicate to this site.
However, I have been going through some cassettes over the last few days and discovered a decent radio interview I did for a local radio station way back in the Sink days. It’s actually not too embarrassing. Will try and post it and other rarities (ahem!) as soon as I can.
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May 2nd, 2008 by Ed
From a 1992 interview in Guitar Player magazine…
NY: Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genious guitar players. They’re unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber. But I can’t relate to it. One note is enough.
JO: ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ The one note solo.
NY: Oh yeah - two strings, though. The same note on two strings. The wang bar made every one sound different.
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April 13th, 2008 by Ed
My first stage outing in about 3 years went off without a hitch at The Portland Arms in Cambridge last night. Great atmosphere, sold out venue, loads of friendly faces from Ippo, Narch, London and (natch!) Sandy, Beds. It was wonderful playing with John again after all this time and I think we pulled it off just fine despite a few hiccups here and there (see notes below). Can’t wait to do it again, so get in touch if you want us to play.
Photos and possibly some video footage of the event will be available from here in the near future, but for now here’s the whole set (mercifully minus most of my between-song-banter) recorded by Jacqui on a Sony DSC-T9 digital camera - how the world has changed. Photos by Kirstie Green.
Many thanks to Chris and Ashley for inviting us to play. Roll on the next one!
Anorak Notes: Most of the songs here are faithful to the original recordings, just without the other instruments, but two of them we messed about with a bit. Carousel is in a different key so that I could sing it higher, but this meant that John’s harmony vocal ended up being too high for him. To compensate he’s written a new guitar part and, boy is it wonderful. On Jigsaw Catch I wanted a different feel so we changed both the key and the tempo, so that it sounded more like Tim Buckley’s song, Buzzin’ Fly. On this one too, John has written a kick arse new guitar part that I could listen to all day. This is the one I was most looking forward to playing, but in the event it got screwed up because the acoustic guitar all but disappeared from the monitors for most of it and I spent the first verse struggling to find the right key to sing in.
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