Part of the reason for me doing new content every month was to force me to prepare two new tracks for serialisation. And I gave myself a headstart of… remixing everything I’d released so far, basically. But after next month that’s going to run out, and I don’t have a new album lined up yet.

I found myself explaining this to someone recently. How I started it earlier in the year, but when I came to look at the ideas I’ve been sitting on since my last album release (in 2013) I realised I’d just moved way past them. Many of the songs I had lined up were written over a decade ago, and… they’re fine. But I don’t have a record company pushing me – I am really doing it purely for the love of it. And I don’t want to do ‘fine’ anymore. I have a lot of new ideas, and they’re already taking shape, but I’m sort of rebuilding everything from the ground up. I feel I now have the chance to make the music in my head that I’ve always wanted to hear and that I feel no one else has quite managed to get close to. And I may not get that chance later, so I’m very focused on getting it done.

But still… months go by… (more…)

I wonder how many other men walked out of Blade Runner 2049, thought to themselves ‘I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, but that film had kind of a lazy and/or shitty attitude to women, right?’, only to then be frustrated by finding all of their go-to film critics gushing about how, finally, a worthy sequel had arrived to their favourite film ever. I’m a fan of internet & US TV star Adam Savage’s Still Untitled podcast, and Savage is such a fan of the original Blade Runner that he actually appears in a recent spinoff film, so he unsurprisingly liked the sequel. But I was heartened to hear that at least he and his (all male) crew took seriously the issues that (mainly female) filmgoers were having with this movie.

Anyway, the reason why I mention this is because I found myself grinning a few weeks later when listening to the latest Still Untitled episode, when Savage said he had been enjoying a stunningly good podcast made by film historian Karina Longworth, called You Must Remember This. I was grinning because I was wondering whether he had done exactly what I did after seeing the Blade Runner sequel. Had he also read about the debate, and concluded that, as a man, he simply didn’t have anywhere near enough understanding of this issue to be able to critique the film properly? Did he also feel like he needed expert help? I wonder how many other subscriptions Ms Longworth has acquired from men post-2049 typing the words “women review movies” into their podcast apps in exasperation.

You Must Remember This is not a movie review podcast. It is a movie history podcast, about “the secret and/or forgotten history of Hollywood’s first century”. It was not the podcast I was looking for. But it was definitely the podcast I needed. (more…)