We are edging towards the end of what has felt like much colder winter than the past few years. Not that we see snow on the Kent coast – our winters here are wet and windy, almost constantly. But I grew up further north, on the fringes of the Pennines, where winters hit hard.
For much of my life, I’ve lived in the hillier areas of this country. From my early years in the surprisingly hilly Medway Towns, to the West and South Yorkshire hills, even the hills of North London. Even now, on the Kent Coast, if I want to go any appreciable distance from my now home, […]
The advent of the COVID-19 effective lockdown has left many of us in a quandary. How do you keep fit when you should be avoiding leaving the house as much as possible? The Government has advice on this, of course, and when we take a walk locally each day, we are seeing an awful lot […]
Back to the usual routine of weekly Friday posts, containing new music or events to consider. This is the usual amodelofcontrol.com round-up, of new music coming your way this week and soon, as well as a look at the events and gigs in the future, and finally nods to any other notable news that affects […]
For the first time the other Friday, I took /amodelofcontrol.com on the road. Sure, I’ve done a semi-regular podcast for the past year or so (next one before Infest, it was recorded last night), and I present (in smaller rooms, and in front of much smaller audiences) in my day job fairly regularly. But until […]
Some statistics: over 2017, I saw 114 live sets, across 45 days-worth of events (I count festivals by the day, so Infest covers three days-worth of events). Remarkably, by the way, my wife Daisy saw 18 days-worth of the 45 with me (perhaps a larger number than usual!).
Onto week two of Countdown: 2017 on amodelofcontrol.com, and this week I’m looking at the best tracks of the year. These might be the singles, they might be album tracks, they might be one-offs. But all of them are songs I love in one way or another. Weirdly, some of these have been really difficult […]
Last week I was looking at weakness, and songs thereof, and this week, it’s the flipside.
Today’s post falls with somewhat unhappy timing.
About eighteen years ago, while I was still reading Geography at King’s College London, the subject of my dissertation proposal came up.
Narcissism: “the pursuit of gratification from vanity or egotistic admiration of one’s own attributes.” Egotism: “the feeling or belief that you are better, more important, more talented, etc., than other people”
This year: 170 bands, 57 days worth of gigs. Five festivals, three countries, eight cities/towns. From venues holding thousands to those holding tens. Due to personal issues and, frankly, being too damned busy for much of the year, I didn’t get to write about many of them aside from the festivals, so writing this list […]
Heroic. Ballsy. The Greatest Band of All Time. The six-strong band known as Arnocorps are not short on confidence, that’s for sure.
The subject of lies and deception, perhaps not unexpectedly, unleashed a torrent of potential songs for this week – even if I covered Betrayal a few years ago. Indeed there are so many songs that I could have featured that I could probably do a second ten sometime.
Time again to delve into an area I’ve touched upon before but in different ways. Back in the distant past I’ve looked at songs about space (/Tuesday Ten/079), and robots (/Tuesday Ten/063), but remarkably I’ve never looked in general at science-fiction in music. So, time to right the wrong, and go boldly beyond…
So, for the last part of my run-down of my 2008 musical highlights, here are my top ten gigs of the year. When compiling the list, I realised I haven’t actually been to anywhere near as many gigs as I thought I had been this year. Still, only two (Ladytron and Ministry, since you ask) […]
I first heard of Arnocorps a while back…I thought that this was a joke band that could never be funny. It turns out that I’ve been missing the fun. I had no real interest in the support bands, however – punk is not my scene whatsoever and so The Hyenas and The Dagobah 4 were […]
