Sometimes Photoshop just seems to easy, but then it doesn't really differ all that much from the "colouring in" I used to do with pen/ink and watercolour. It's just musch faster and cleaner.

Just watched a DVD of "Heathers", a film I very clearly remember seeing when it first came out. Had forgotten some aspects- the dreadful 80s sound and colour, Christian Slater's abysmal Jack Nicholson impersonation. But still feel the same amazement that the American media didn't grab hold of it 11 years later, in the wake of the Columbine shootings.

Given that it depicts a character in a black overcoat pulling a gun in a highschool canteen and shooting two jocks, it sure beats whatever Marilyn Manson might have been dribbling about in 1999. OK, slater's character actually fires blanks at the jocks, for which he is only suspended- maybe the whole idea seemed so absurd at the time that the writers could only imagine a response so trivial. Or maybe his being expelled/arrested might have just brought the narrative to a premature halt. Go figure. He then goes on to actually kill several fellow students, with Winona Ryder's unwitting conivance, disguising them as suicide. The film in general is fairly fucking absurd, but hey, it's allegory, dude.

Maybe the extremities of absurdity and the large swathes of pseudo-sociological guff that often comes out of the characters' mouths meant it was all too much for the shockjocks and rentaquotes to take in. Maybe they'd just forgotten it. But how on earth could such a loaded (literally) tale have been so overlooked ? In many ways it's a brave attempt to confront the very issues that would eventually contribute to Harris and Klebold doing their stuff.

The main thing I remmber while watching it aged 17 (same as the characters in it) was amazement at just how rich and overdressed they looked. They all had cars. Musselburgh grammar school looked kind of tawdry by comparison. And though i had my own issues with "popularity" (or lack of it) and adolescent notions re love, death, revenge et al, I was glad I wasn't in an environment where it was quite that stoked, plus with real guns lying around. Fuck only knows what it's like now in the wake of Columbine- if British schoolkids are lucky, they'll be at a stage where "Heathers" just looks like some very dated pre-pre-precursor to "Buffy", and not like everyday life.

So it seems like the solo singer-songwriter style is more popular than it has been for about 3 decades. How odd. The main thing that I wonder is not why this is so, so much as why do people choose to adopt it ? I'll admit that when I first started playing the guitar I was emulating fairly obvious idols- Neil Young, Nick Drake, Van Morrison. But you quickly realise it's a very generic and very over-suscribed genre. You see the same stereotypes at every gig/open mic- willowy hippychick cooing nothing much at all; wounded bloke extracting revenge in song; babyboomer who's just recently found time to reconnect with his/her younger self. I suppose even if they're not old enough to really remember it, they still have that general revulsion towards the tawdry, overproduced sound of the 80s. If they're not too old they'll be tired of dance music's domination- if they're older then they've probably always hated it. Certainly sampler or sequencer-based music can't claim precedence anymore just due to being innovative. It's part of the furniture and has ceased to progress fundamentally, plus people like Beck crossed it with "real" music so effectively that the battle-lines aren't as stark as they were. So what can a poor boy do to differentiate himself from the rest ? 1- Spare us the angst, go out and live a bit, 2- Try to write about other people than yrself, 3- Think about why you've chosen to write and play your own songs, rather than just sing someone else's. I recently asked a girl at an open mic what kind of songs she wanted to write- she looked at me like I'd asked her for the code to the human genome. Why bother if you've got no fucking idea why ?

Listening to "She Hangs Brightly" by Mazzy Star, the latter half of which I used to find fairly tedious, but I've played fairly constantly since I got a CD copy a couple of years ago. Hope Sandoval tended to sing fairly flat, but her voice is so lustrous and sexy, combined with the stoner musical setting, it still kills me.

Wrote another song today- another outpouring of verbosity, this time of the somewhat wounded and bitter variety. Butit's actually about the futility of writing wounded, bitter songs. Come to my gigs, where the fun's at !

Might I just say as well that Kirsten Dunst is awfully pretty. I know there are many millions of men who think the same, but thought I would chip in my own ha-penny's worth. G'night for now.

I recently discovered a couple of old pencil-sketches during the year I lived in Grevena, in northern Greece, of the singer and bouzouki player from a local folk band I used to go and see quite often. Thought that, ten years on, it was high time I finished them. Brings back good memeories, though I must admit through the haze of collosal amounts of booze. They're below, since I couldn't figure out how to upload themn with text.

Had a bit of a funny turn last Friday at an open mic night. A guy (English) was singing "Caledonia" by Dougie MacLean, and a Scottish acquaintance behind me started singing along and asked me if it reminded me of "the Old Country". I'm afraid I snapped at him that it meant fuck all to me. Honestly, it doesn't. There are plenty of things I miss about about Scotland, but things like that just can't get past the underlayer of English in me (Brummie and Yorkshire parents). I'm afraid if you put my soul under a microscope, the greater part will consist of tea, toast and constant apologising for no reason. Not hugely fond of that either, but we do what we can.

Blimey, I actually seem to have a readership, even if it is just the two buggers that I work with. The 15,000 figure was a stab in thedark, I admit. One of the neo-cons in the Independent claimed something even lower (if you can consider 15, 000 "low")- I vaguely remembered looking at the iraqidead site a few months ago and seeing 12, 000. Of course that was a few months ago, and the scale of destruction in the meantime has pushed it up to a level I wouldn't even have dared to suggest without checking. 33, 000 people............. why are phrases like "a city the size of Peterborough" only used regarding immigration and not this ?

It was screamingly obvious right from the start that Britain and America didn't have a post-war plan. They had to mobilize quickly to exploit the momentum of the all the dodgy "evidence" of WMD they had, in lieu of UN backing. What a lethal combination- the American desire for a quick fix and the British ability to implement a discreet bodge.

See even the neo-cons are chorusing we should get out of Iraq. Just took 15,000 Iraqi dead, 2000 Americans and 200 (?) British to jog them along. Up til then, I was reluctant to join the general leftie slagging of Tony Blair, but from the minute Baghdad fell, I thought he can just fuck off, the pious, naive little prick.

I am NOT an all-purpose sceptic. When he supported the invasion initially, I hoped and prayed he was playing it the same way he did the 1997 election. For the two years between his election as Labour leader and then, his silence was deafening, but it was a Trojan horse. When the elction came around, he just suddenly produced a whole array of policies from his inside pocket and just blew the Tories away. Scoff all you like, Trots, but without him we would still have had Tories in power for at least another term. I hoped that once the invasion was over then there really would be WMD piled up behind the schools and hospitals, though my overwhelming suspicion was that there wouldn't. And of course there weren't, in fact.

So, reasons for his back ing it ? Could be

1) He believed whatever trumped-up evidence of WMD Shrub and Rummie showed him, and thought we had to avoid a Chamberlain appeasement situation. Verdict- naive little prick, resign now.
2) He doubted whatever they showed him, but still thought that it was worth deposing Saddam's dictatorship, if it was done for it's own sake, not oil. Verdict- naive little prick, resign now.
3) He somehow thought he could sneak nice, fluffy policies into the neocon agenda once Saddam had fallen- "Hey, guys, could you take your mind off the oil for a moment ? I want to send that nice Clare Short over to give them, y'know, electricity and running water." Verdict- naive little prick, resign now.

Went to the launch of a new Nick Drake biography last week, and have been thinking again about characters like him. I'm like any male muso- look through my CD collection and you'll find stuff by loads of doomed characters who died young- Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley, Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis, etc ad nauseam. i like to think that I do take them on their merits, without the attendant mythology, and in most cases I think I do. Tim Buckley actually does very little for me, I haven't listened to Joy Division in years, Jim Morrison without the Doors was crap and vice-versa (take it from me, I've heard both the recordings he made without them and and them without him- they're dire.)

Nick Drake.............I have periods where I think he was over-rated and I should have grown out of it now. But he just creeps back in. Maybe because he's dead and never got the chance to soil his image with crap material- not that there isn't some crap on his albums (the instrumentals on Bryter Layter, drippy nonsense like Thoughts of Mary Jane and Way to Blue). His music has just drawn me in- he's one of the few people who I could tell you what I first heard, and where (sitting in my bedroom, proabably drawing, age 16,listening to a radio documentary about Island records- they gave a 5-minute life-story and played a snippet of "Fruit Tree"). When I listen to him now, it feels like I'm giving time to someone who's too honest and inscrutable to cope with usually, and who you feel a bit guilty about brushing aside. Does that somehow still romanticise his young death ? Don't know.

Handy hints for home-recording musicians- don't leave your microphone preamp switched on and leave it indefinitely- the same thing that makes it very hot will cause it to eventually burn out completely. Oops. Just pray to God the mic itself is OK- that's the expensive bugger.

How divine is Souad Massi ? Truly I am in love. Buy everything by her- if an Algerian woman singing in French and Arabic over North African/Gypsy/singer-songwriter music sounds like your bag, then she is it. And the sound of the oud is just the most luscious instrument. Other sounds of the moment- Fela Kuti, The La's, Donovan (quiet at the back !) and Muddy Waters.