Up with the year's batting average

I have to share with you some of my musical habits as the naughties draw to a close and the teenies begin. Where does a dyed in the wool Radio 4 listener get his musical inspiration from these days? I don't particularly want to live in the past; the Katie Melua-laden nonsense of Radio 2 doesn't appeal (not since that red-headed stepchild Evans minor has taken his place as the nation's favourite tw*t) - although I openly mourn the passing of the Janet and John innuendo fest from that station - nor the Moylesian banality of Radio 1. I cannot listen to Heart/Radio Suffolk/Vibe FM (or whatever it is nowadays) and be inspired to purchase anything at all. So music radio is all but finished for me as a way of persuading me to buy fresh stuff to listen to.

No, Radio is past it's sell-by date. I 'd accumulated most of what they laughingly call a playlist (when was the last time you heard Fischer-Z on the BBC? Or Tom Robinson's Winter of '79? Still banned, I shouldn't wonder...the subject of another rant-in-progress) over the years, and I'm still incredibly driven by new and undiscovered stuff. Spotify is my best friend, but how do I find out what I might have missed? Where is the Genius playlist when you need it? Well, there is this peculiar phenomena that fellow bloggers seem to use to publicise old and unfashionable stuff. They record their old Vinyl copies of things and pop them up onto rapidshare. To whit, this evening, I found myself humming an old Propaganda (*) tune, 'Dr Mabuse' on my way back home, and thought - "wow, that was a defining use of synthesiser in the 80's.....where is my copy"? Well, of course, the answer for anyone of a certain age is to work out which of the XW's (TM) have the offending vinyl...and then go and seek it out online instead. The Coward's gambit, he said, grinning. I found it on a blog, and I've downloaded it, and I am listening to it as I write. It is brilliantly of it's time - I suspect I hear Mr Horn and his Fairlight at play in a lot of it, but it still stands up as a piece of work to be appreciated. It still sounds great, if you cut it a little slack. Under-rated at release, I think it has stood the test of time.

The point of this, lest you think I have wandered off on a McCartney-esque 'Long and winding' one, is that while I was on the page, my eye was caught by "Fortran 5" - a name I haven't heard for ages. And no, it is nothing to do with it being my least favourite programming language (it is unstructured basic, after all) - it is a band that went on to become "Komputer". I am now listening to their first album, "Blues" and I am particularly over the moon at re-discovering a version of Syd Barrett's "Bike", the vocal being made purely from samples of Sid James. Ah the spirit of 1991 is strong in this one, Obe-wan. Now where did I put my glow-sticks?

I told you I was only trying to keep my 'one a week' batting average up.....

(*) Propaganda, A German band signed to ZTT and promptly under-promoted by Morley et al, when that bunch of Liverpool existentialist sloganeers seemed to be more successful at surfing the zen zeitgeist of the mid-Thatcher years.

Shooting From The HIP

I'm going to try to stay a little calm and detached during this entry, largely because this is affecting me directly at the moment. And we all know that you can, in the heat of the moment, launch the exocet rather than just the depleted uranium shell that would be the more appropriate weapon. (How can depleted uranium ever be appropriate? )

I'm selling a house. It is a normal house in a normal street. It is, in fact, this one. It didn't require a HIP when it was first listed by the estate agent, but it does now. So I stump up my fee and expect this glossy pack to be generated telling me all about this wondrous product I am selling that should have had the buyers flocking to my door. I can visualise the handshake and the final handover of the keys, teeth glinting in the setting sun of the day. You get the idea? £399 to ensure a quicker and speedier sale if someone decides to buy it and less legwork (because half of the work has been done) for the solicitors should mean a trouble free transaction, right?

Well, no. What happens in reality is that all the problems like drainage and shared access and all of the really important stuff - where are the deeds, for example - are handled by inept unqualified halfwits who, when they do eventually produce the HIP, produce something dryer than the proverbial Vicar's wife and more content-free than your local council's free-sheet. And then, when the solicitors (I use the term advisedly, and interchangeably with 'conveyancing technician') get hold of the case, they will check and recheck everything that was alleged in the HIP, because they aren't stupid and know that there will be errors because they weren't produced by 'a professional'.

So - I am left £399 poorer fiscally, no better off in terms of time saved (I am actually worse off because a slice of my life has been given over to answering inane questions like "will anyone live in the property after it has been sold".... at that point I will have readied my inner Meldrew) and overall my selling process has not been enhanced. The house sold (STC) without anyone actually looking at the HIP. And I'm £399 poorer, did I mention that? And it is a mandatory part of the selling process.

Well, that is the crux of the matter. £399 paid over to the treasury as a tax on the transaction (yes, I know that is what stamp duty is, but stay with me) would give me something tangible to wag my finger at from the dizzy heights of this rickety soapbox. Or to believe that I have helped the NHS or whatever. But no, it seems like a pointless extra charge with no actual benefit to the process. If I think long and hard about it - and follow the money - the only people who seem to benefit are the conveyancers who offer the HIP, so you could argue that the legal profession have managed to monetise and obfuscate the process all in one easy 'extra' step. Which, if you think about it, is a masterstroke - Tony Blair (for it was he) should be proud of his incessant championing of the HIP, and for sticking with it through to implementation. All that effort for no apparent benefit to anyone except the legal profession. I mean, that is a selfless act in itself - no taxation involved, just good old fashioned cause championing.

I can't think of a single reason why he would want to improve the cashflow of the legal profession.

Fu** Christmas and other seasonal sentiments

John Peel - gone but not forgotten - used to have a 'festive fifty', invariably populated by such dizzy luminaries as Half-Man Half-Biscuit and Splodgesnessabounds. Well, having walked into yet another shop playing that compilation of shocking christmas tunes (was it me or was 1971-75 the era of the christmas tune? Even Sailor had a christmas ditty...) I feel compelled to compile my unfestive (and anti-christmas) top five. A selection of songs that you may not have heard - spotify can be your friend here - but I have....and I appear to have been saving these up all my life for a cathartic rant. So here goes

1. Death may be your Santa Claus - Mott The Hoople (From 'Brain Capers')

Many of you will know (oh, the arrogance of assuming I have a readership - but please, bear with it) that I have a love of pre-Bowie Mott The Hoople that I affected in the first form at school as a way of appearing cooler that I actually was. Conversationally, this would give me the moral high ground over anyone extolling the virtues of "All The Young Dudes" or "Foxy Foxy" with the sharp put-down of "well it's not "Darkness, Darkness is it?", thus bestowing me with the aura of someone who knew his onions when it came to music. All I was really doing was raiding my next door neighbor's record collection, which is how I come to be afflicted with an early affection for the Faces, Mott The Hoople, and Roxy Music. Glam-itus? Oh, and David Bowie, but that is another story.

Anyway, the track "Death may be your Santa Claus" is possibly the finest anti-christmas song title ever. Typically of Ian Hunter though, it is absolutely nothing to do with christmas...(but then "Wheel of the quivering Meat Conception" from the same album really doesn't belie the title either...)

2. I won't be home for Christmas - Blink-182

Leaving behind the outpourings of my early years, here I find myself in the naughties proper and hanging with the 'Jackass' generation. Now this is just a brilliantly normal anti-christmas song. A close run thing between that and "Happy Holidays, You Bastard", but I think this wins out, if only for the line about Bubba unwrapping his package. Go discover....

3. Fu** Christmas - Fear

Gosh, I am displaying my west coast punk roots here. Or rather, I've been caught raiding my children's record collections. Steady on, I'll be seeing Black Flag stickers on Cadillacs, next. This is 40 seconds of nonsense and 6 seconds of a refrain that you can probably guess from the title. Delightful. One to slip on when the rellies are around - a bit similar to being a '77 teen-subversive by slipping on "God Save The Queen" by the Pistols when the royalist grandparents are around for tea. Yes, ears were clipped. No, still unforgiven.

4. Christmas with the Devil - Spinal Tap

Ah - the genius of Spinal Tap. They seem to have gone out of their way to sound 'off' more than they usually do on this track, but I think that is the point - overuse of '11' is bad for the overall creativity inherent in a band. Cough. Now I may be wrong here, but I think they have lifted the Whitesnake riff "There ain't no love in the heart of the city" which is admirable. It doesn't sound particularly christmassy, but ...ah - the genius of Spinal Tap. Wind like the break, Mr Burns, wind like the break.

5. Santa's Gonna Kick Your Ass - Arrogant Worms

Well there had to be a canuck connection in any top five of mine, and an anti-christmas rant should be no exception. Which reminds me, a treatise of Canadian music for those unable to move past that dwarf Dion and the equally diminutive B. Adams should be forthcoming shortly as an entry in Astonished's blog. The Arrogant Worms are like nothing we have in the UK, and that is a sad inditement of our post-Cowell music industry (a rant for another day I think. I'm not sure I have 5000 words left in me to express the vitriol I wish to cast at his antics). Humourous, witty and irreverent, they tackle the prospect of Santa having a drink problem and a bad attitude because his wife has run off with a chiropractor with alacrity and precision. And I like to think that there are one or two of us that can identify with that.

So - track them down (sorry) and enjoy. I'm going to return with renewed vigour to my CanuckRock (TM) mentioned earlier....

The Personnel Department

I had the misfortune to listen to a friend describe the process by which people are made redundant in organisations these days. Rather than just pin the redundancy tail on the poor donkey who will be the recipient of the job loss (hand them a cheque and say "sorry, it didn't work out"), these HR idiots first decide that two people are in the frame for the the loss, and then subject them to a process whereby they have to compete for their job - the job being called the 'Competitive Slot'. This process takes up to 3-4 months, during which the poor people are made to perform like cage fighters with each other, trying to out-do the other and be the 'winner'.

This is all done to make the process seem fair and consultative, and I daresay, to make it appear that everything has been done to protect the company from litigation should someone decide that they have been badly treated. The poor sods, they don't know the half of it. Lets consider the flip side. Imagine, you have been put into a competitive slot, in say, September, and you'll know the outcome at some point in December, and that your performance will be judged and weighed and balanced in that time. Are you going to :

a) work out that it is both of you that they want to get rid of, so they can bring in someone new?

b) go home, and tell your wife and family that you have the possibility of losing your job around christmas time?

c) get depressed, drunk and give up

d) watch 'Falling Down' over and over again

e) all of the above...

Well, yes - 'e'.

But above all, you are going to be very stressed. You are going to go through at least 5 circles of hell, have numerous sleepless nights, take it out on your wife and kids - and possibly your colleagues, generally be wary of interacting with the very people who have already and will continue to judge your performance, and generally be perceived as a bit of a dead man walking. After all, you were put into a competitive slot, so there must be something wrong, right? But suppose you win? Will you ever be able to trust 'the company' again for putting you through that? I'm looking at this and thinking that there is a big negative in staff morale that no one seems to weigh up here.

I believe, and yes, it is a bit cynical of me, that this sort of nonsense is HR making work for themselves, to justify their own pitiful existence. They create the stress and then deal with the consequences - is it all a big job creation scheme for them? Or is it another manifestation of the crass insensitivity displayed by the newly machismo'd up department called HR that we all used to know as 'Personnel' and ignore by and large. When did they get so bloody important that they are allowed to play with people's lives when their qualifications are probably no better than the average estate agent?

The disturbing upshot of this is that the possible outcome of the competitive slot business could be one of the competitors deciding that the garage rafter and a noose is his only way out. Whither HR then? Culpable?