S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

Yes. I have what is known in Latin as “cerebrus friedum”. The fried brain. Too much Flash over the past few days, designing and building some web apps - quite cool ones actually. One was helping out my mates at Spook with a Christmas Tree project to raise money for Cancer Research. The other is just mental, involving videos, out-of-tune staff singing carols (very funny though) and multi-dimensional arrays. If you don’t know what a multi-dimensional array is, then I suggest you smile sweetly and think of Doctor Who running across space with his scarf billowing behind him. Chased by Daleks, of course.

The album is coming on GREAT!!! Brian Eno called me last week to say that I could come up to the studio to collect a track he’s been producing for me. Its a completely shambolic track that I wrote and recorded on the spur of the moment, in realtime, during a session with Jules Maxwell. Its very “mono”, and halfway through, it just opens into “Eno World” with a beauty that is like someone opening your head and spilling in Alpine sunlight. Wonderful. To top it off, he finished the day by asking me to come back in a couple of weeks to do a session for the new Herbie Hancock record. Mad, eh?

I have decided to open up the final track on my album so that anyone with the means to record a vocal to the track can contribute. I will be posting a loop, a guide vocal some harmony parts that can work as a ZIP on the S*T*U*F*F* site, so if you fancy being on the record, go grab them and go for it. I promise to include ALL vocals that are not unusably bad.

It has been busy with my web design company G-RAFF recently. We launched our biggest site to date - Wedge Card. No point in me explaining it here, but in a nutshell, its an affinity card for small independent traders, rather than the Nectar cards of this world and their behemoth partners. Its the brainchild of John Bird, who founded The Big Issue - a feisty and characterful man whom I admire greatly. He really got a bee in his bonnet about Wedge, and I have had the privilege of watching it unfold from the days when it was something else, something less memorable.

The Wedge launch was on Friday night up in Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury, London. I had one of the best sensations of my life seeing Wedge in real life - I designed the logo and branding, and there it was, all over doors and shop windows, on the cards themselves. Touchable, real, and a good thing. Its so recognisable, and of that I am actually quite proud. We are hoping that one day this will be as commonplace in the UK as the Big Issue itself… its a very positive enterprise. The best thing about it - on the site are photos of shops where Wedge Card gets you a discount. I was adamant that I wanted the owners in the pictures… and with good reason. When I was walking up Lamb’s Conduit Street, I saw all those faces - familiar faces, and smiled, feeling I knew them all. When was the last time you ever felt anything LIKE that going into Sainsbury’s? No. Supermarkets are not about that, really, are they?

I suppose we have it easy in London - there are, after all, so many little stores, boutique traders, enclaves of independent shops and cafes, farmers’ markets etc. that it makes it easy to find alternatives. We buy all our meat down the road at William Rose, for example - its fantastic. We go to the farmers’ markets, and use the local shops round here. I hate the big shops. But for people outside London, it gets harder. Thinking of my grandparents, for example, in Bangor, Northern Ireland… would THEY have a use for a Wedge Card? Are people there now just resigned to the fact that its a choice between Tesco or Sainsbury’s? Or in Kelty, Scotland, where Diane’s folks live… why would I want a Wedge Card if I lived there?

Well, I can think of a few shops in or near my home town - McKeown’s fishmongers… great little place… The Ava - a funky little wine emporium… The Cabin - great ice cream… Jeffers - a standalone cafe… and there’s a farmer somewhere doing a roaring trade with boxes of organic veggies. These are the kinds of place that Wedge is looking for. And will find. Belfast must have loads… I really do think the timing is good. Anyway, enough on Wedge for now. It has pretty much been my life for the past month, though.

Right, it has now reached that time - WHHAAAAATTT?? o’clock. I need sleep. As the Japanese day, “Oyasuminasai”