Mustang Sodbury

Classic Car run in our town. Loved the blue of the Mustang.

No Chord Use, No Crime

After the highly successful guest blog-spot here by Boris F-Smythe with his unique perspective on Mp’s Expenses, I’m delighted today to give you syndicated news content from the Music-News/Music-Soothes site. As always, syndicated contact cannot be guaranteed for accuracy.

We know America is the land of the free. This is both useful and irksome, as freedom so often comes with lawsuits and litigation.

The estate of classical composer Johann Pachelbel have today launched several lawsuits against contemporary artists who they claim have sampled or borrowed their forefather’s creation. Due to a strange quirk of copyright, that famous progression of eight chords appears to have a unique protection independent of copyright laws, and the estate is aiming to preserve Johann’s work for future generations.

Such lawsuits are becoming commonplace in the 21st century. Even late in the 20th century there was the famous clashing of horns of Apple Records and Apple computers. This long-winded and, at times, bitter argument later resulted in the owners of Apple Acme Inc. attempting to register the phrase ‘a is for apple’ as their own personal creation, leaving grocers and farmers the world over fearing for their livelihood. The hashtag #apple became Twitter’s highest-rated trending topic for several consecutive days as Twits the world over traded ideas for a possible re-branding of the humble apple should the judge rule in favour of the big corporation.

Details of those named in the Pachelbel estate’s suit are unknown as lawyers eagerly prepare dossiers for the courts, but speculation is rife. The action could see a number of major recording artists under the spotlight. Green Day’s worldwide hit ‘Basket Case’ may escape the net as the penultimate chord missed, but Sir Paul McCartney’s hit ‘Let it be’ may not get off so likely.

Speaking from the Pachelbel Chateaux in Austria, Johann XII told press reporters, ‘I’m not copyrighting individual chords, just a simple 8-chord progression. Of course there will be some royalty money involved, but I’m not just doing this for the money … it’s to preserve my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s work. We will use the money to start our own radio station playing and touring group. We also have researchers working in laboratories to see if the Canon can be transposed into other keys. There were early experiments in F major, but we simply ran out of funds’.

Whilst those named in the action have yet to be named, some widely-respected songs may simply disappear from Music Store shelves, leaving gaps in almost every genre. Avril Levigne’s text-speak-spelt  ‘Sk8ter Boi’, Chirpy Antipodian popster Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’, and the Emerald Isle’s golden son Bono’s hit ‘With or Without You’ all use a strikingly similar chordal structure. Nineties Madchester sensation The Farm’s ‘Altogether Now’, Scotland’s Belle and Sebastian hit ‘Get Me Away From Here’. The Bob Marley estate may release a modified version of ‘No Woman, No Cry’ using the chorus ‘No Chord Use, No Crime’ in order to raise public support for the freedom of eight simple chords.

At the time of writing, new attentions we being placed towards lift manufacturers around the world, who are thought to have further compounded the problems by incorporating a special audio system in lifts which can only pipe-out the Canon in D.

It remains to be seen how this will develop. It is entirely likely that this argument will continue to go round in circles underneath the spotlight. So far it has gone around at least 56 times in an endless ostinato.

Going green with rage

Cast your mind back a few years. To a time before the internet. Before the letter ‘i’ could be placed in front of anything to make it sound cool and sleek (the i-sausage, for example). Have you done that? Okay, now go back a little further to the dawn of civilisation.

I’m sure it happened a little more gradually, but essentially some primitative people must have woken up one day and decided to work together for everyone’s benefit. Rather than competing against one another for food and shelter, they found they could pool their resources and make collective decisions which would allow everyone to move on together. An amazing event which would ultimately bring us Starbucks, vote-based television shows democratic legal systems hundred of years later.

Inevitably there would be those societies who would safeguard this gift and value their cooperative above everything else, and there would be those who would use it as a front to bring in their favoured cronies as leaders under a smokescreen of fake democracy and a heabily-censored free-speech.

One of the great things about any society is that they all have their watchmen. People who are looking out for everyone else. People who give up their time to make sure the things that happen do so without damaging everybody else, and thankfully that happened this week.

I’m not sure if it was a slow week on Jeremy Kyle, or whether the economic disaster gripping the world has led to a catastrophic rise in the cost of needlework kits, but eighteen people complained about a television advert in which a Welsh d-list celebrity rides a bicycle through a supermarket and a thorough investigation was launched and reported its findings this week.

Now, I’m not the greatest fan of Health and Safety. It’s ridiculous that we can’t play conkers, throw snowballs or run with axes. A questionnaire for teachers this week suggested that children can’t build things out of egg cartons through fear of salmonella and teachers must wear goggles when using drawing pins. But for once, I don’t blame the helmet-wearing high-vis-clad steel-toe-capped goggle-wearing HSE.

What were those eighteen people thinking? There they were, outraged that Duffy was not wearing a high-vis vest whilst riding her bicycle. And wait. What’s that? I don’t think she’s got lights on her bike either. Presumably they’ve come home from a hard day at the office, put their feet up with a glass of chianti in one hand and suddenly found themselves so insensed that they just had to write in and complain with the other. Except, of course, they hadn’t had a hard day at the office – they’d probably spent all day polishing their Mary Whitehouse bust and waiting for something to come on that they can complain about.

A further 4 people complained that children may emulate the Welsh pop-princess. I’m fairly certain we weren’t going to have elderly ladies knocked over beside the frozen peas as dozens of tweeny-boppers raced laps around aisles 12 and 13 in Morrissons. But thank you. You are the Guardians of liberty and watchkeepers of our security.

At least they complained, of course.

Also this week people around the world where aghast at the situation in Iran, and hundreds of people turned their Twitter avatars green in a gesture of solidarity to Iranian protestors. I’m not sure how many people fighting on the streets for their democratic rights, and in some cases lives, will have taken time-out to logon to see people around the world changing the colour of their avatar to show solidarity with them, but it was at least some kind of action.

President Obama went from ’showing concern’ earlier in the week to talking directly to Iran and today warning them that ‘the world is watching’.

The truth is that we have a leader in this country who will take time out to phone a slightly troubled singer from a television talent show who is in the midst of her fifteen minutes of fame, but who takes a far less radical and direct approach to the more serious and fundamental problems in the world.

But don’t worry. We can all turn out logos green and the twits will tweet about injustice from every last corner of the globe with uncensored and unblocked mobile phone reception, but I have a better solution. If we can get Duffy to rig a mock election and then embark on a genocidal rampage throughout some town in Mid-Wales whilst advertising a tasty beverage, we’ll see the world leap into action in direct response. Well, only if she forgets to wear the appropriate safety-wear.

Are we serving?

Sitting in our quiet local pub, whiling away a sunny Sunday afternoon. It’s almost like a song by the Kinks. Life can’t get much better. Unless you factor in that it’s a Greene King pub, and therefore quite homely to a Suffolk boy like myself.

As a musician, you get to know pubs quite well. It’s very rare that a gig comes up on your doorstep, and unless you want curly hair from eating crusts and half-melted cheese sandwiches, pub-grub becomes a staple part of your life.

Every single person entering the pub asked the same thing though, ‘Are you still serving food?’

What has happened to us as consumers in this country, that we now ask apologetically if we can buy something. You see it in shops too: ‘I’m sorry, but do you stock… um… perhaps… some tea?’. We ask mechanics if they might possibly be able to fix our car. If you walk in to B&Q, and at this point I implore you not to, people say, “you don’t stock grout do you?”. We assume the negative and seem surprised if they can help us.

Strangely it doesn’t happen elsewhere. Mr and Mrs Mondeo don’t go to the Year 8 parents evening and say, “I don’t suppose you could teach little Billy something, I know he’s a little difficult” – no, they go there and accuse Mrs Smythe of underestimating their little prodigy’s skills. Patients don’t arrive at casualty saying, “Sorry to interrupt doctor, and I hate to impose, but could you remove this spear that’s annoyingly become lodged just below my left lung?” – no, they cry bad management and threaten to call Lawyers Direct (TM) the moment a nurse sneezes.

I was going to put it down to our expectation of poor service, but do you know what? It’s a lot better than it used to be. And our local little pub is fantastic – peas served in gravy boats, and a semi-circular gammon steak served on a square plate by a waitress with a friendly smile.

I guess that only leaves the reservedness of the English to blame. I can’t imagine Joe Yank walzting into a bar asking politely if they could rustle-up a cheese sandwich – he’d have specified how rare he wanted his steak and which national fag he wanted his fries to depict on his plate before Jonny English had caught the eye of the barman.

I suspect the same would be true of our European neighbours. We just don’t have that ‘the customer is always right’ consumer-orientated 24/7 society going on here. Sure, there are times I wish I could get my tall-skinny-fairtrade-decaf-vanilla-latte at 2am, but would I want a world where men walk into pubs and demand food without asking if the chef was in? I think not.

Sowing the seeds of a post

Words will arrive here soon. In the meantime? A photograph of this charming shop in Kensington, London.

Signs you chose the wrong holiday

I grew up in Suffolk. Sleepy, rural and flat. Mostly flat actually.

However, a recent trip to the beach found me reading this sign with slightly more attention than normal.

Just one thought. ‘What should I do? Leave the area immediately’… Ummm Yes.