Monday 23 March 2009

The lovely folks at Criminal Damage.




Well, far be it for me to take the moral highroad and whinge about corporate sponsorship and punk rock how the two cannot go hand in hand... it's the stuff of forums called stuff like xtildeathordishonourx.com, and frankly I have better things to do than worry about if I'm going to hardcore heaven ( it's run by Earth Crisis as it happens ).

Anywhoo, so last Tuesday we were all in London with the aim to meet with our accountant ( that's another story which I'll elaborate on at some point ) and then we had a rare treat in the way of a rendevous with the nice folks at Criminal Damage clothing.  At this point I'd like to address the small issue that this is not about to turn into that Simpsons episode where Krusty becomes a stand up comedian and then as quick as a flash sells himself out the Canyonaro Jeep company and bestows their virtues as part of his act (  Season 9, The Last Temptation of Krusty if you haven't seen it...it's glorious ). They make nice clothes which they let us have and gave us cans of redbull and we took a couple of photos for them and thats about it, job done.

Except...well us being us we couldn't help but notice the range of , ahem, alternative clobber that they also make a very fine living out of and well...us being us we ( sigh, ok, MEM & I ) decided to try the stuff on.

Children, look away, its about to get a bit blue.














Sunday 15 March 2009

Single Artwork.

This is a new one on me, for those of you who haven't clocked this, I'm ( as in Tom, the singer, you know, the ginger one ) responsible for the artwork for the upcoming record. Thats all been taken care of now, much to my relief as its a huge fucking burden/responsibility/untaking, made doubly so by the fact that we actually had some artwork ready to go done by another artist and for whatever reason we ended up not using it, so I was in the position of having to provide artwork for something that someone else had already had a take on.... not fun. 

I should really have been ready for all of this, we as a band are ( pretend this bit is in huge text ) BLOODY FUSSY AT THE BEST OF TIMES ( and back to normal now), so we happily will just change stuff at the last minute. I think it worked out for the best, I wish I could at this point show you what we've done for the art but alas my slave-masters will get medieval on me to the point of barbarism and its Sunday night and I can't be bothered to clean up the mess. 

My point being that after all of this, I've now been informed that Single artwork is also required,and wuite frankly I hadn't thought of that at all. Singles? Ghost of a thousand in the hit parade? Somehow I think not, but since Top of the Pops ( for our overseas readers who may have missed this as kids, a mainstay of British Tv for years was the Thurs/Friday night music show TOTP, in which artistes appeared to flog their latest hit, usually by miming incredibly badly to it whilst performing ' live' onstage ) is no longer with us to be honest a Top 40 hit is a number on a CV rather than a huge achievement ( i.e. getting to meet Andy Peters! ).  A mighty shame. 

But still, yes single artwork, how to approach? Remix of album artwork in simpler style? Plain old Capitol record style text? Big logo? Thoughts on a postcard?

 I guess what I'm asking for is if anyone can think of an album they like which its subsiquent single artwork worked really well with it, I'm thinking Ok Computer and its string of hits...let me know I sinking fast.

Monday 2 March 2009

You and him were...buddies weren't you?



I guess one of the unseen things that we do is sitting around for hours and hours waiting to play shows, Sam Christmas ( no I'm no making that up although he only comes once a year, boom boom ) came to our show we played at the Scale in Febuary this year and took some pictures, noth onstage and off, which I rather liked. 

Recently I noticed that in actual fact the only pictures I have of everyone are either press shots, or live ones and that seems a little imbalanced . As anyone in a band knows, the majority of your time is just being with each other in small spaces, be it van, backstage room, sound check etc etc... We are, rather helpfully, a fully functioning family unit these days, and I say these days because we used to bounce off the walls in each others company. Maybe a disfunctional family, but at least we're all still speaking to each other.

 You can see the 'live' shots that Sam took on our myspace of course, but I think these document us in a way that maybe isn't that often, so for that reason alone ( well, they also make me smile in a sentimental way ) here they are. 

I'm looking forward to reviewing our digital legacy when we eventually and inevitably stop being in Ghost, but I worry that alot of it will end up in the big digital urn that is the recycle bin on some eternal desktop somewhere.





So, humble beginings.

Ok, so there is something strangely scary about a long empty white page, its exciting but daunting, expecially for someone with little typing skills. N.B. I'll apologise in advance for all the unitentional, albeit hilarious, spelling and grammatical errors that will no doubt dot this blog as it advances, I ask for your patience and your corrections ( if you feel they'll make a difference, undoubtably sometimes it will .

This blog has come about mainly as a new way for this band to express itself, obviously you can still find us on the myspace; there is now a Facebook and a Twitter, and I aware that someone is maintaing our last.fm site for us, although as it stands its NOT one of the band or our team. At this point I'm pretty happy with this, user ( dare I say 'fan'? ) generated material on us is 9 times out of 10 much more useful and illuminating that the stuff we write, generally because I hate self eulogising about our music/art/output, so I'd rather read it coming from someone else rather than one of us. 

One of the odd things about being written about in this way is realising how little your own opinion matters on such things, it seems the general perception is always the excepted one, so I'll happily conceed to it. It never ceases to amaze me how often I get things wrong , a good example being any number of scannings of album of the year lists, bands to watch etc etc... I worry that its an age thing perhaps, myself being 26, the ages of the band ranging from 22 to 29 at present. Maybe we're the old farts before our time, maybe thats a medical condition to look into.

I'm rambling already, but I believe thats the point. What I'll do with this is keep you updated on what exactly we're doing, alongside the cheeky little Twitter site we have set up, my thoughts on that site are as yet undecided...what exactly is it for? And for that matter, what the hell is Bebo? Its seems to exist in that odd grey area between Facebook and Myspace and I wasn't aware that such a thing was needed..again the age thing, I still attempt to keep the real world and the online as two seperate things, maybe some of you think I sound like one of your parents ( or worse Grand parents..eep).

Anyway, as the title suggests, to humble beginnings then.