Paperjam

Morrissey (or perhaps his record label) has a fairly poor record when it comes to choosing the singles off each album. Hence the rather eccentric (bizarre) line-up for the new greatest hits offering, although you get a couple of classics the rest of it is pretty average (shonky) when you compare it to the rest of his back catalogue.

In a rather Paint A Vulgar Picture way there are a couple of extra tracks tacked on to encourage the bedroom-dwelling Moz-loving completist to part with the reddies. That’s How People Grow Up is a bit of a MOR plodder albeit with some shrieking and some wry stuff about how you might be a sad lonely bastard, but at least you haven’t got spinal injuries. The other new track is a storming gem called All You need Is Me: pounding, catchy, funny and with the memorable closing refrain “You don’t like me but you love me – either way you’re wrong. You gonna miss me when I’m gone”. Total genius.

So guess which one he’s put out as a single? Sigh. I give up.

Still you can get hold of All You Need Is Me on its own from iTunes I suppose or alternatively via this possibly naughty link here – which is what I did. Bedroom-dweller I may be, but even I’m not shelling out to own two copies of the dreary In The Future When All’s Well.

Actually, while I’m at it if you really do want to get hold of the fifteen best Morrissey songs I suggest that you could do worse than scouring your favourite (legal, obviously) MP3 source for the following:

1. Black Eyed Susan
2. Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself?
3. Jack The Ripper (live version off Beethoven Was Deaf)
4. Angel Angel Down We Go Together
5. Reader Meet Author
6. Our Frank
7. Suedehead
8. Teenage Dad On His Estate
9. The Loop
10. The World is Full Of Crashing Bores
11. The National Front Disco
12. Everyday Is Like Sunday
13. Friday Mourning
14. Billy Budd
15. Margaret On A Guillotine

Following a workplace discussion the other week on the nature of tramp juice and the entertaining web site dedicated to its existence - I return from holiday to find two cans of something special lurking in a dodgy tesco carrier on my desk.

On perusal I find the surprise package contains two fine examples of the bench-dwelling connoisseur’s reason for waking up each day. I am now the owner of two fairly intimidating cans of super strength lager from the possibly legendary Amsterdam brewery, proudly proclaiming (perhaps unnecessarily) in big gold letters “Imported from Holland”.

Firstly, tipping the scales at a socially/morally/spiritually irresponsible 11.6% is the terrifyingly named “Maximator”, sounds like a villain off a kids cartoon, doesn’t it?

The second can is entitled “Navigator”, presumably because at a relatively paltry 8.4% you can happily enjoy a few before discharging your duties as a scout leader, taxi driver or co-pilot.

I drink the Navigator while dozing on the sofa listening to the smooth drone-rock of Electrelane (do check the link, ace song), probably a first for this particular tipple – it’s not bad but when I stand up to go to the toilet I do feel a bit woozy and suddenly feel the need to shout something like “yaaaaa fukkkkennnn basssshhhhtard copppppers ahhllll wankerrrrssss”.

Could it be the Electrelane?

A day later and I’m drinking the Maximator as I’m writing this and to be honest my fingers are going numb with each, surprisingly tasty, gulp. In essence it is an entire night out in a can. I am scientifically observing (in real-time) the following results:

- My nose has gone red
- I want to write to all the women that have ever rejected me to be slurrily apologetic, then aggressive and finally start crying. Somehow. In text. Via e-mail.
- I feel like singing something by Sinatra, or maybe, Sinitta.
- I definitely want to have a fight with someone, ideally a middle aged alcoholic lady wearing a shell-suit and preferably in a bus shelter
- I want to go to Kelsey’s (bit Leamington that, sorry)

Check out the Amsterdam beers web site, two things to note: Firstly, you can’t buy it in the UK and secondly, they do another one called the “Explorator”. Hmmmm. Think yourselves lucky I didn’t get hold of that.

Following a workplace discussion the other week on the nature of tramp juice and the entertaining web site dedicated to its existence - I return from holiday to find two cans of something special lurking in a dodgy tesco carrier on my desk.

On perusal I find the surprise package contains two fine examples of the bench-dwelling connoisseur’s reason for waking up each day. I am now the owner of two fairly intimidating cans of super strength lager from the possibly legendary Amsterdam brewery, proudly proclaiming (perhaps unnecessarily) in big gold letters “Imported from Holland”.

Firstly, tipping the scales at a socially/morally/spiritually irresponsible 11.6% is the terrifyingly named “Maximator”, sounds like a villain off a kids cartoon, doesn’t it?

The second can is entitled “Navigator”, presumably because at a relatively paltry 8.4% you can happily enjoy a few before discharging your duties as a scout leader, taxi driver or co-pilot.

I drink the Navigator while dozing on the sofa listening to the smooth drone-rock of Electrelane (do check the link, ace song), probably a first for this particular tipple – it’s not bad but when I stand up to go to the toilet I do feel a bit woozy and suddenly feel the need to shout something like “yaaaaa fukkkkennnn basssshhhhtard copppppers ahhllll wankerrrrssss”.

Could it be the Electrelane?

A day later and I’m drinking the Maximator as I’m writing this and to be honest my fingers are going numb with each, surprisingly tasty, gulp. In essence it is an entire night out in a can. I am scientifically observing (in real-time) the following results:

- My nose has gone red
- I want to write to all the women that have ever rejected me to be slurrily apologetic, then aggressive and finally start crying. Somehow. In text. Via e-mail.
- I feel like singing something by Sinatra, or maybe, Sinitta.
- I definitely want to have a fight with someone, ideally a middle aged alcoholic lady wearing a shell-suit and preferably in a bus shelter
- I want to go to Kelsey’s (bit Leamington that, sorry)

Check out the Amsterdam beers web site, two things to note: Firstly, you can’t buy it in the UK and secondly, they do another one called the “Explorator”. Hmmmm. Think yourselves lucky I didn’t get hold of that.

The only band who can say that I have been to see them four times were in fine, noisy and boisterous form at ULU last Wednesday. The set was pretty much the same as last time but the evening did throw up a few lessons and due to the academic nature of the venue I felt it only right that I should share them with you:

- Art Brut are probably the least appropriate band to stumble onstage to a brass section playing “Thus Spake Zarathustra” but it worked for me.

- The drummer has really nailed the throwing the stick in the air and catching it trick. Nice.

- The new song about “the people in charge” sounded rather good to me.

- I am shockingly irreparably old. How has this happened? Apparently I’m not a total dead loss - I should have more confidence and go and see a life coach.

- Eddie Argos is quite heavy when he lands on you, but still lift-able.

- The whole well drilled Good Weekend closer is still brilliant no matter how many times I see it.

- The Althena Hotel is a bit scary and may possibly be haunted in a very mundane way but for £25 it knocks spots off the Generator.

It's our first time in the Hare and Hounds, sister to the Bulls Head in Moseley, and we're impressed - it's a lovely Victorian pub. Lots of original looking tiles, a smattering of 60s retro furniture, plenty of decent beer on tap (although I'm on lime and soda tonight), and the bar has that array of leaded windows above it that screams “you are stepping back in time”. Two gulps of a pint and we're already hatching plans to move here.

Up the deadly, narrow stairs - thankfully I'm not wearing heels, tonight - to the 7inch cinema, which tonight is thrown over to annual lo-fi film competition Straight8.

The idea is that you send them £70, they send you a 3 minute Super-8mm film cartridge. You shoot your film, and send it back to them, unprocessed, along with a soundtrack. They do the processing, and if all goes well, the first you'll see of your film is when you turn up at the premiere night at a cinema, possibly at Cannes if you're lucky.

So - there's no editing in post. No post-processing. No bleedin' big-eyed cartoony computer generated furry models neither. Just 3 minutes 20 seconds (or thereabouts) of scratchy, flickering film, with all the edits and effects done in camera, which generally means plenty of under/overcranking and stop-frame animation. One clever-clogs managed a split-screen effect.

And admittedly this is a best-of, but it's really good fun. Our favourite is probably the filthy Flying Lizards-esque pop-video Stick and Balls by Jacqueline Wright and Alice Lowe. I know paper-jam Jim will appreciate Jour de Glories, performed by a brave man with plenty of room for all that beer.

If you fancy giving it a go yourself - the closing date for entries for Straight8 '08 is March 26th, and there's plenty more films over at Straight8's website.

Saw a brief write up for this while on the train back from Art Brut the other week, a black comedy about a nasty A&R man at the tail end of the Britpop years. What’s not to like about that?

Some routine library enquiries revealed that they didn’t have it so I strolled into Leamington Waterstones the other Friday to make the triumvirate of ladies behind the counter very happy by asking if they had a copy. “It’s got a rude word on the cover”, one giggled. “Is it ‘motherfucker?’” I whispered, they all giggled. The conversation continued, James shook his head in the background and muttered something about the effect that counters seem to have on me.

After such a good start it is disappointing to report that Kill Your Friends is a bit of a let down. There are some good jokes at the expense of various no-mark indie bands (quite a few of which I actually liked) and the absolute disgust that the author holds the music industry in comes through very clearly.

Thing is, it seems like a low-calorie version of Brett Easton Ellis, there is a hateful central anti hero who is out for himself to such an extent that a spot of murder fits in nicely with his career path, everyone is snorting coke all the time, all his co-workers are hateful yuppies and every woman is described as some kind of spunk-gargling street walker. Every chapter starts with a wry state of the industry summary usually involving Ultrasound or Gene.

So effectively American Psycho crossed with the NME. It certainly isn’t terrible and I reckon it would have made a cracking short story, but at over 300 pages it does drag on a bit too long.

One interesting point is the opening quote from the late, great Hunter S Thompson, who in just 32 words efficiently sums up the entire novel that follows and makes you laugh out loud:

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There is also a negative side."

1. It only comes in small bags, nudge nudge.

2. It comes from Yorkshire, the home of hemp, as you know.

3. It is shockingly pricey, even by the standards of the thoroughly creepy health food shop in Warwick where they wear white coats and act like a bunch of pervy doctors.

4. No, you can’t get high off the steam while it is cooking, but it will clear your pores out beautifully.

5. It is slightly courser than normal pasta.

6. It tastes quite nice, subtly herby.

7. It is very good for you, although probably not after drowning it in homemade sauce feauturing three different types of meat and more garlic than you would find in a French vampire hunter’s travelling bag.

8. It probably won't give you the munchies, but if it does, you are already eating.

I must be about the last person to see “Death Proof”. It was waiting on the door mat when I got in late on Saturday, so after I grabbed some fish and chips, I bunged it on. And I was a bit bored.

By far the best thing about it (apart from the heartstoppingly lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Rosario Dawson - pervy moment over, thanks) was having actress/stuntwoman Zoe Ball do her own stunts.

To see her balancing act on the front of the Dodge Challenger and to know that's her, no computer graphics or nothing, was thrilling, in the same way that when you watch “Bullitt” and the Mustang spins out at one point, you see that it is McQueen himself putting his arm out on the window and whacking it into reverse.

In fact, dammit - that's the only thing that's impressive these days about special effects in films - if the film that can somehow convince you that it's all done in camera and that Industrial Light and Magic have been nowhere near it, I'm vastly more impressed.

I know that computer graphics have got better, but you really can tell - in the dogshit-tastic “Spiderman 3”, when he puts his mask up, all of a sudden his movement becomes eerily fluid and bouncy in a way that humans really aren't. To see Rosario Dawson looking horrified, and then really excited in the passenger seat while watching Zoe Bell on the bonnet of the Challenger was really engaging.

But the film, the plot... all the characters all spoke in Tarantino-ese, it seemed massively overlong at 114 minutes, and Tarantino could only be arsed to keep up the scratchy film effect until the beginning of the second half.

Also the idea of using soundtracks from other films was just a bit rubbish, I wish he'd give it up - during the chase, I said to myself: “eh up, that sounds like Franco Micalizzi” and that took me completely out of the situation. “Jackie Brown” is still his best film by a thousand miles.

You may well be aware that we will be driving around Europe in the near future as part of the Coyote Rally. The route takes in Paris, Munich, Prague, Amsterdam and probably some of the continent's most scenic lay-bys and prison cells.

The rules state that we can't spend more than 500 notes on our car - so far we have purchased one wheel (for a fiver off a bloke in the pub) which Nick has been rolling up and down the street like some kind of tartrizined up eight year old.

The rest of the car should be following shortly - and could possibly be a bit like a burgundy mid-90's rover...

Oh yeah, we are also hoping that you will all sponsor us in aid of the Alzheimers Society - a worthy cause I'm sure you will all agree. So get yourselves over to http://www.justgiving.com/nickjimrayinarover and cut loose with the spare change.

I only ever saw Spiritualized in 1997, or possibly 1998 at the Que Club in brum (before it got shut down - it's back now). They were touring at what was probably their absolute apex following the release of the amazing, seminal, landmark and played repeatedly in my bedroom Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.

I went with my mate Clare who was really, really, really into the single Electricity at the time. The gig was great, but the three things I remember most clearly are:

- The support band, Acetone, who I really wanted to see hadn't been let into the country

- The whole place was full of a dense smog of spliff smoke

- Clare dragged me out to get the last train as Cop shoot Cop was hitting the twenty minute mark.

Skipping forward at least 10 years, J Spaceman has recently cheated death, toured acoustically, helped out the lovely Samantha Morton and got a new album together.

The first thing off it is Soul On Fire which you may have heard via the acoustic mainlines tour, the recorded version was played on Zane Lowe's show the other night and helpfully copied onto the internet by all sorts of people.

If pushed for a proper description I would say that it mixes some of the drone guitar noise of early Spiritualized over some of the epic song-writing of Let It Come Down with a huge grand-standing chorus that Noel Gallagher would sell his cock to have come up with.

Otherwise I would just say: It's ace. The following album "Songs In A&E" is out late May. I've got tickets for the gig at Koko, the whereabouts of which I am starting to get very concerned about, secure mail - oh fucking yes.

If only Rover had thought of this, maybe they would still be making cars at Longbridge. Yes, we are really going to attempt to drive this around Europe next week. Painting the car involved the following meticulously planned and executed steps:
1. Heated artistic conversations on what was going to look good splattered across a burgundy Rover 620 bonnet in the cheap gloss section of Do It All.
2. Trying to put down wafer thin plastic sheeting in a force ten gale - at one point Ray did a fairly good impression of Laura Palmer.
3. Freezing our collective tits off covering all the vulnerable bits of the car in a chaotic mix of masking tape and old newspaper.
4. Me throwing paint all over the car, my shoes, my trousers and, in a final act of punk nihilism, my hair - the others daubed in a thoughtful and all together more sensible manner.
5. Running away like kids when anyone turned up in the rather private looking car park where the operation was carried out. The CCTV tape will be hilarious.

Once the second snow storm began we retreated to the warmth of the pub, but not before I enjoyed a happy half hour in the shower, scrubbing my head with fairy liquid - I got some funny looks later, probably people who work in kitchens.

Returning to the scene of the crime several hours/pints later, we were amazed at our artistic prowess. Returning to the scene of our amazement the next morning I was impressed at how much of a crime we had committed.

Get yourselves over to http://www.justgiving.com/nickjimrayinarover if you haven't already.

Well, it' nearly time to set off for the Coyote Rally jaunt. I've set up a blog for anyone interested in up-to-the-minute Al-Jazeera style reportage on how things are going - quite probably including fundamentalist politics, regime change and improvised explosive devices.

Each member of the team is preparing for the trial ahead in their own meditative, spiritual way. Nick and Ray are spending quality time with their respective ladies and I, err, well I'm writing this.

You can follow our voyage of discovery at: http://nickjimrayinarover.blogspot.com/.

Dunno if there's something in the air at the minute, or we just haven't been paying much attention (probably the latter) but there seems to be a lot of short film action going in the West Midlands at the minute.

For instance, only today I found out about these people in Coventry called Call The Shots who, in their own words:

> We are a filmmaking organisation based in Coventry which is open to everyone and our aim is to encourage people to get involved in filmmaking. Whether you are a seasoned pro or a total newbie, you are welcome to come along to our monthly meetings.

They've just moved from the Herbert Art Gallery to Warwick Arts Centre (wonder what went on there?), and they're starting to run training in scriptwriting, pre and post-production and camerawork.

Plus they had a short film night on, but - ah - it's on tonight, Tuesday 22nd. Damn.

Elsewhere, Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum (that'll be the Pump/Pimp Rooms, then?) are running a short film night, and it's 7 Inch Cinema time again this week, with I for India at the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath.

This weekend has been a particularly difficult one, well it might have been. I got so drunk on Friday night that I can't remember very much at all - although I am informed that a cocktail known as "The Stepfather" played some sort of role.

Saturday was therefore mostly spent in bed with severe hangover anxiety and the dreadful knowledge that virtually everyone I know was smugly stretching their hamstrings in order to do the Two Castles run. I ran twice to the toilet, but I'm not sure that there is much of a comparison.

Luckily sporting redemption was at hand in the form of the revived paper-jam gambling challenge. Two years ago I completely failed to win a single bet during the course of the world cup - a feat described by some observers as "Statistically improbable" and by others as "Proof that you are the unluckiest person that I have ever fucking met".

Anyway, with the European championships kicking off this weekend I rapidly allocated myself £50 to speculate on the next 19 days of footy in an attempt to either redress the balance after last time or get into the Guinness book of records as the most inept gambler of all time.

Kicking things off was a double on the Czech Republic and Turkey to win their opening fixtures, while I also backed Turkish Striker Tuncay to begin the scoring against Portugal.

The Czechs did their part albeit due to an unconvincing sliced-shinned effort that (former division 2 golden boot winner) Mark Bright hilariously described as "A good finish".

Unfortunately Turkey didn't really set the world on fire against Portugal, aside from the surprisingly accomplished Colin Kazim-Richards, their man of the match was probably the crossbar.

Oh well, three quid down and forty-seven to go. On the plus side Malc's ancient herbal hangover cure of pizza, lager and jazz cigarettes did sort my hangover out.

I've set up an exciting Google spreadsheet to record my fiscal downfall over the next few weeks, you can find it at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=psx3zVzHb7nEzr43-g5QbUA&hl=en - I will sort out some sort of graph when I have lost some more money and the visual impact will be greater.

Cursing my luck at not sticking a few quid on David Villa for top scorer before he took the piss out of Russia, I stumbled into Betfred this afternoon to continue what you would have to describe as a fiscal downward spiral.

My aimless guesswork led to me sticking:
- a quid on not-quite-good-enough-to-play-for-Brazil-but-still-not-bad Deco for the opening goal at 16/1.
- another quid on the Czechs to be leading at half-time but Portugal to eventually win, because the odds were high.
- 2 pounds on Nihat to open the scoring for Turkey against the Swiss, the logic being that he appeared to be the lone striker in their last game.
- a quid on Turkey and Switzerland to draw - because they both look boring as fuck so far, odds are 11/2.

Amazingly Deco managed to scramble one home at the start of the first game, a moment that caused ne to exclaim "FUCKING YES! GET IN! SIXTEEN QUID!" while still sat at my desk in the office and supposed to be doing some work.

Now lounging on the sofa and watching the swimming gala masquerading as the second match this evening I have already missed out on the NIhat bet due to some terrible goalkeeping and an assist from a puddle allowing the swiss to get in front. Having dried up a bit the Turks have started to play a bit and OH YES just pulled level.

What I want now is thirty five minute of dull lifeless midfield drudgery. but its more likely to be a seven goal, four sendings-off thriller. It will all be updated here, either way.

So far the whole gambling thing has been going reasonably well, I've won now and again and even seem to be a few quid up.

Its all a bit dull though really so to liven things up I am going to use different techniques to guess the results of the knockout rounds. To this end I have procured an 18-month old child, lets call her "Maya" - I am hoping that this little girl is going to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams Mwa haaa haaa haaaa etc.

As she wouldn't stop crying about something or other yesterday I couldn't get a result out of her for the Germany-Portugal game. However now I've turned the music down and slipped her a couple of gins she has picked out the following treble for the other quarter finals:

Turkey to beat Croatia (Hmmm, I know she isn't 2 yet but even so this seems naive)

Holland to beat Russia

Italy to beat Spain

In Ladbrokes they asked what the gurgling and crying noises were coming out of my bag, I explained it away as a new trend in executive ringtones and bunged £5 on the whole lot coming in. It will be £97 if they all come in, so pints/rusks all round, or I'm going to trade the kid in for a pack of Tarot cards.

Juneau Projects, banging on about squirrels

To the Rainbow in Digbeth for 7 Inch Cinema’s five year birthday bash, animation and film shorts and music and cake, and got there just as Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham finished up - luckily I can watch the rest over at Birmingham’s Not Shit.

VJ Hooker/FilmFicciones was really good fun as ever, pulling out some daft shorts including Jim Henson’s ace “Time Piece”, unfortunately stripped off YouTube by boring bastards, but this is kind-of related:

Mike in Mono popped up, unfortunately no playing live this time round, so we couldn’t go nuts to his version of “Male Stripper” like we wanted, but instead he battered everyone’s eardrums with some of his ZX Spectrum generated videos: here’s “Red Square”, utterly brutal when played through a massive PA:

Mike had also done a new soundtrack for Norman Mclaren's "Neighbours" animation short from 1952- here's the original on YouTube, stick with it kids, it really is extremely violent.

And we finished up with Juneau Projects, two men wielding strap-on woodland creatures fashioned into guitar triggers for their indie-ish electronics. Not my thing, but their art stuff looks more entertaining.

Oh and happy birthday 7 inch...

From Coventry Telegraph CV3 blog post :

Festival goers will be banned from taking alcohol into the three-day event. Any booze found on people entering the site will be confiscated by security guards and disposed of in large skips.

Eek. Seems they weren't joking when they said don't bring your own alcohol to this weekend's Godiva Festival in Coventry.

After last years' violence and general bad atmosphere it's not surprising that action has been taken, but it's difficult to see how they can police this absolutely, there's lots of ways into the Memorial Park. But there's more...

Drink will be available to buy at high-street prices in designated areas of the park but must be consumed in restricted areas. Anyone drinking alcohol outside of the areas face an on-the-spot fine of £50.

I wasn't planning on going this year, but I'd be interested to see how this all turns out, and if this is a workable solution.

SFA/Notting Hill offshoot The Peth are out on tour, notably at the Hoxton Bar and Grill on Friday 10th and The Greenman Festival in August. London types who like catchy, stomping, glam-rock noisiness should act accordingly. I am once again logistically incapacitated and thoroughly fucked off about it.

This should of course be in the bit on the right-hand side of this web site - but if it was I couldn't bung the strange video for the excellent Shoot On Sight just down here. All together now: "WE HAVE FOUND THE INSURGENTS".

I went to see a load of art by the Chapman brothers a few years ago, the upshot being that it ended up annoying me quite a lot. However, I was definitely nowhere near that warehouse when it went up.

Jake Chapman has now partially redeemed himself in my eyes (yes, I imagine it will be quite a weight off his mind) with the video for You Lie You Cheat by Spiritualized. It seems to combine the attempted suicide from A Clockwork Orange with that Polanski film The Tenant. It also calls to mind that sketch in Jam about the man jumping out of a low window repeatedly rather than throwing himself from the top of the building - in case he changed his mind halfway through.

Whatever the antecedence of this camera-abusing short film, I really like it. See what you think. Great song too.

We've seen these flyers lurking about the Tin Angel and been a bit mystified, but it's becoming clear.... A Thing About Machines is an audio/visual arts festival in dear old Coventry, happening from the 19th to the 21st September.

Artists include Andy Votel, Frog Pocket, film heroes 7inch cinema (who are running an all-day event in honour of electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire), Talking Birds, Modulate and more, all playing and arting about in some unusual venues, including The Crypt of St Mary's Guild Hall.

Tickets are £12 for the 7inch cinema/Sonic Boom events, get them over 'ere.

Now that my patience for film photos has waned, mostly due to the sheer cost of it - medium format is essentially a quid a shot - I'm liking this little photo-grunger-upper application called Poladroid. It's Mac-only for now, but they're promising a Windows version soon enough.

Here's the original photo, Emma outside the Old Bell Tavern in Harrogate (which by the way, is a fine pub...):

...and here's the vignetted, messed-up Poladroid-ed version.

So it's a bit daft and all and dead retro-y/regressive, but when digital seems so clean, it's understandable why people are going back to these effects. I half wonder whether in 40 years time todays' youth will be tightly JPEG compressing their photos down to get that shitty, blocky phone camera look.

In a life full of glittering achievement (highlights including my cycling proficiency test, sitting through all of Revolver and the evening I spent with that foxy Iranian waitress who fortunately turned out to not be a bloke after all) one feat towers above the rest: If you whack “Animals That Swim” into Google then an article I wrote ages ago appears quite near the top. I realise this isn’t on the scale of solving the energy crisis or isolating the Higgs Boson, but it does make me happy.

In the five years or so since I posted that article a small but select group have left comments in support of my theory that ATS are indeed the most underrated band of all time. We even heard from the band too, which is almost certainly the most showbiz thing that had ever happened to me until I had occasion to enquire “You alright mate?” of a thoroughly bemused Henry Rollins a couple of months ago.

Relatively speaking the last eighteen months has seen a whirlwind of Animals That Swim related activity, so in dragging my lazy arse to the keyboard to actually write something, I thought what better way than to provide a bit of an update for any ATS acolytes that find their way here. Remember; they haven’t actually split up – they just haven’t recorded anything for ages.

- Hank Starrs appeared on the Art Brut single Direct Hit in a duet with Eddie Argos.

- Hugh Barker published a book called Faking It about authenticity in popular music, theres also an associated blog right here.

- A chap called Alex set up an actual proper ATS website with decent writing, a discography and everything - hasn’t been updated in a while, but dead good.

- Someone updated the band’s wikipedia entry to state that they had asked to play gigs in London in 2008 but, tantalisingly, “They declined, for the time being.”

- Hank Starrs made mention of a possible MySpace page while also mentioning that former bassist Terry De Castro had a page with a really very cool cover version of East St O’Neill on it.

- Someone known as Craydee75 actually slapped the video for Faded Glamour on youtube:

I lost many hours to the Amstrad CPC version of SimCity as a kid. Now that I don't have so much time to waste, what a brilliant idea to buy it all over again, for six quid off the Apps Store? Probably not.

By all accounts it's pretty much a version of SimCity 3000. Here's quite alluring office-y type woman from the tutorial. Oooh, she looks kind-of pissed off at me. Mmmm. Give me a slap, go on.

Slightly crappy typography but we'll let that slide for now - and not that I'm in a position to criticise.

During the tutorial dragging over the map is a bit of a, um, drag - your finger seems to get in the way. The secret seems to be to zoom in a bit more by pinching or double tapping. Here's me trying to shut up my demanding Sims by shoving in a bit of precious road - the circled arrows are the buttons you drag out.

Zoom right in and you get some detail, although it gets pixellated at the extremes. There's smoke stacks, traffic, mysteriously disappearing trains, and this Flea Market in the Commercial Zone.

As usual, Shitsville quickly started to fall apart when I took my usual hippy approach of building a public transport system alongside the road infrastructure. Briefcase wielding chappy looks unimpressed with my rail system. He goes on to say "personally I'd go with roads". Dammit, I'm trying to build the ideal town here.

SimCity ran impeccably, if a bit slowly on my 1st gen iPod Touch, which is reportedly the bottom of the bunch when it comes to performance. Other users have reported crashing on iPhones. The recommendation is generally to reboot your device before crying your shiny little eyes out in forums and blog comments. Zooming is a bit laggy, the pinch method is a bit slow compared to the double tap.

But it's great, if, you know, a bit pointless. There's already been a bit of whinging about the price being too high at £5.99, but how does it compare to the average DS game?

Also there's a whole load more; schools, water pipes, recycling, lots of advisors, taxes, ever increasingly ornate parks - all with the feeling that whatever you do, it's going to shit either way. It feels deeper than yer average quick and dirty iTouch game and it's worth it.