Indie Boys

This song by the band The Whatevers came up on my MP3 player the other day. I can't remember where I came across them but it was more than certainly on a music blog somewhere. This song made me laugh and made me think of someone I know.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink Drama- The Whatevers

This song is from their City Lights Fade EP. This is their website. Music is available on a pay what you think it is worth basis.

Their music is lo fi, twee and sounds like stuff that you could make yourself. Punk only not as noisy. That'll do for me.

Academic Inspiration

My Powerpoint training session (see below) got me thinking about music and how I listen to it and who I listen to .

I realised whilst preparing my presentation that one of the main music influences ( and influence in general) on my life has been Paul Weller.

If you are old enough to remember Punk you will probably remember that this was primarily a London thing. For me a teenager from a London sattelite town when Paul Weller sang “ I know I come from Woking and you say I’m a fraud./But my heart is in the city where it belongs” I knew exactly what he meant, I came from a town like Woking and I knew my heart was in London where it belonged.

Listening to him and The Jam led me into reading Colin Macinness's  classic book about being young and living in in London  Absolute Beginners and George Orwell's work starting with 1984. For those two things alone I  will always be in debt to him.

Its easy for people to laugh these days at The Modfather, his hair and his personal life and drinking habits but to me and many others he has been an inspiration throughout his career ( OK maybe a few years in the late 90’s weren’t that good and I do struggle to forgive him for inspiring OASIS)

I’m not going to post any of his stuff (last time I did the post  got removed by the DMCA lot ) but I will say if you don’t know anything about Paul Weller, start with his website and play catch up. If you like good music, attention to detail and a healthy respect for what has gone before in music but still looking around you for inspiration, you won’t regret it.

Burning Sky

Yes, yes I am still here. Just been a bit busy at work these past few weeks. No meetings with heads of big corporates, just recruiting, appointing, feedback and gas canister explosions in blocks of flats.

Just booked a weekend in Berlin for the end of this month. We are off to see the son.

Will be back soon.

Blue Is The Colour

What an incredible end of season we have had. Man City getting two goals late in the game to snatch the Premiership title out of Man Utd 's hands and last night Chelsea robbing Bayern Munich of the Champions League title in a penalty shoot out.  This was football and the reason why we love it.

Spurs have missed out on a Champions League place thanks to Chelsea but I can't begrudge them their win. They are an English team after all.

The Art Of Presenting

I had to attend a stupid and, at least on my part, unnecessary training course last week about Microsoft Powerpoint. This came about because my boss was impressed by a couple of young staff who did a powerpoint presentation at a recent staff briefing session complete with graphs, charts and one slide where the text came in from the side.He was very impressed.

He wanted to know why we weren't all doing the same when we did our presentations to staff

The fact that the young things also stumbled and mumbled their way through the whole thing obviously passed him by. The real art of presenting is building a rapport with your audience not dazzling them with fancy tricks and mind numbing stats.

Anyway there we all were sat in front of PC being given lessons on how to create a Powerpoint presentation by a girl almost young enough to be my grandaughter let alone my daughter..

Anyone who has applied for a job in the last ten years and has had to do presentation as part of the process can use Powerpoint. If you turned up at an interview brandishing your slides and asking for the Overhead Projector it is very likely the normally young admin assistant/pa who greets you would not have a clue what you were talking about.So I already know how to create a presentation and can even set up the projector etc. I'm not an expert but I can get by.

However,judging by the rest of my area management team's reaction to attending this session I am the only one of them who has applied for a job in the last ten years. Despite sitting through many hours of tedious powerpoint presentations in their working lives, none of them had ever created a presentation themselves.

My presentation was a quirky non work related topic, music. Doing it got me thinking about music and me and how I listen to music and what music I listen to. More of that later