Thoughts on AV

This week, the UK will have a referendum on whether to switch from the current First Past The Post voting system to the Alternative Vote system. A degree of bollocks has been put forth by the Yes campaign. An incomprehensible quantity of bollocks has been put forth by the No campaign. Purely based on the lower level of bollocks spewed by the Yes campaign, I would vote for them. But I would also vote for them for political reasons. Although the principle behind changing the voting system is theoretically apolitical, any change worth bothering to organise a referendum for is obviously going to benefit one party and damage another.

The way history has worked out, we have ended up with two centre-left-ish parties and one centre-right-ish party. So the left-ish votes get split. The right-ish votes do not. And we end up with an unrepresentatively right-wing government, both in terms of number of Tories voted in and in terms of how far the other parties have to shift to the right in order to woo the unsplit-and-hence-doubly-valuable right-wing voters. I have left-wing beliefs, and so obviously I want the country to be run by a more left-wing government. Hence I will be voting "yes" on Thursday.

If history had panned out differently, perhaps we would have had one left-wing party and two right-wing parties. If this were the case, the right-wing parties may well have been pushing for a change to a more representative voting system. But this is not how things have transpired, so I would recommend that anybody unfortunate enough to have a right-wing outlook on life should vote "no" on Thursday; politically, it makes sense.

It amuses me slightly that the Yes and No campaigns are campaigning as if this is not a left-right issue. The most controversial poster of the campaign so far shows a picture of a newborn baby in an incubator, with the caption "She needs a new cardiac facility, not an alternative voting system". Even putting the aside the hilarious maths used on the poster, it seems odd that the No campaign are suggesting that voting "no", which will retain the status quo and hence benefit the Conservatives (otherwise they wouldn't be backing it), will result in more funding for hospitals. The Tories are currently demolishing the NHS for ideological reasons; whatever a new voting system costs to implement, it seems highly unlikely that switching to AV (which will shift the balance of power to the left and hence move money from rich people's salaries into public healthcare) will make it less likely that any theoretical new cardiac facility would be built. Perhaps the cardiac facility in question is a private one, and the silver spoon has been Photoshopped out of the baby's mouth.

Of course, there is a third voting option. Rather than voting out of self-interest, you could vote based on logic. Alternative Vote delivers a more representative democracy than First Past The Post, as it prevents quirks of history (such as the existence of both Labour and the Lib Dems) splitting the vote and allowing the third-most-popular party (the Tories) to triumph in many seats. Isn't it odd how a very similar but utterly incorrect argument is being used by the No campaign?

If you are properly committed to democracy, and to the idea that the government should represent the people's wishes as closely as possible, then you should vote "yes". I am lucky, in that I can honestly say that my vote will have logic on its side, even if I am mainly voting out of political self-interest. If you are right-wing and unbothered by the principles of democracy, vote "no"; you will have my grudging respect. But please, whatever you do, don't base your decision on any of the fucking posters.

Please

Yesterday, I was greatly saddened to hear that a friend of mine from school has been involved in a car crash and is in a serious condition in hospital. Details are unclear, but the person at fault appears to have been under the influence of drink and drugs. I have genuinely lost count of the number of young people I know who have been killed or seriously injured as a result of drink-driving.

I don't want to get on my high horse and say that everyone who chooses to drive a car after drinking alcohol should be instantly locked up for several years. Actually, that's a lie; that was exactly my instinctive reaction after hearing what had happened. But I feel it is more helpful to explain my feelings in this way:

A car is a lethal object. Operating a car requires responsibility and attentiveness at the best of times to minimise the risk of killing other humans. Drinking any quantity of alcohol before driving increases the risk of you killing other humans.

And yet people still do it. Why? Well, let's be very charitable and say that it's because of a lack of understanding of statistics. A lot of people drive after drinking, but only a relatively low proportion of these people will kill someone. But let me explain it this way, using a simplified model:

Take a typical pub with a car park. How many people will drive home from that pub after drinking? The number (for this theoretical pub) would depend on drink-drive statistics, but let's say 500 per year. Perhaps one of these people in a particular year kills somebody because they drove home after drinking. Does that leave us with one absolute twat and 499 innocent people? No. It leaves us with one unlucky absolute twat and 499 lucky absolute twats. I hope you don't find it too melodramatic of me to say that this situtation is like those 500 people collectively deciding to kill this one person. The statistics are out there. It's hardly a secret that 3,000 people are killed or seriously injured every year through drink-driving. And it's just a question of luck whether it's you or somebody else who ends up killing someone. So if you know these statistics, every time you drink and drive, you are taking a conscious decision to join a group of non-specific murderers. You don't know exactly how large the group is, you don't know exactly how big a role you are playing, and you have no idea who the victim will be, but you're still in the group. You're still, statistically and logically speaking, a murderer.

And yes, I'm sure you believe yourself to be a decent driver after a pint, or two, or even three. But are driving licences handed out on the basis of who believes themself to be a good driver? No. There's a rigorous and difficult test, which you probably didn't take under the influence of even half a pint.

Oh, and just to drag politics into this, the government has just decided not to reduce the legal limit for drivers' alcohol consumption, despite expert advice that doing so would save up to 300 lives per year, presumably as part of the Tories' stated (and apparently unironic) aim to "end the war on motorists". Yes, I quoted that accurately.

So, since we can't count on our leaders to act responsibly, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you, Big Society-style, to "do your bit": don't be a murdering dick. Don't drink and drive. Cheers.

Poetry in Motion

Ha! I wrote these lyrics on a bus. That's why the title is hilarious. Pretty standard holier-than-thou, green, Tory-bashing stuff but practice makes perfect, innit.

Why are you driving your two tonnes of metal
Down flat concrete runways they paved over petals
To transport your offspring the two hundred metres
You measure in paedos instead of in litres?
And why are you flying your family away from
These rolling green fields that your kids could have played on?
Oh! Were you converted, and now do you pray,
At the altar of Hammond, of Clarkson and May?
Do you scream to the sky that the world has gone mad?
And does peer-reviewed science make your thick heart sad?
Are the mathematicians a dangerous cult?
Do you take their equations with six grammes of salt?
Are your prim, prickish politics "power to persons"?
Do you feel that, since Maggie left, all things have worsened?
If so, I guess now your fat face holds a grin
For the Etonian cunts that your ilk voted in.
I hope you're happy.
I hope you're happy.
I hope you're happy.

A List

I was about to write about the rush of creativity that I've experienced in the past week, and about how well my album is coming along. But I don't want to allow the enthusiasm to leak out by documenting it so, instead, here is one of those list-based things that you see on Facebook, which a lot of people probably find annoying/mundane but which appeal hugely to my personality.

Apparently, this is called The Thirty Day Song Challenge (although obviously I'm doing it in one go):

day 01 - your favorite song
Grandaddy - The Crystal Lake

day 02 - your least favorite song
Sandi Thom - I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair)

day 03 - a song that makes you happy
Leonard Cohen - Sisters of Mercy

day 04 - a song that makes you sad
Leonard Cohen - Alexandra Leaving

day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone
Arctic Monkeys - A Certain Romance

day 06 - a song that reminds you of somewhere
Jack Loyd - Pirates

day 07 - a song that reminds you of a certain event
Weezer - Holiday

day 08 - a song that you know all the words to
Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger

day 09 - a song that you can dance to
Radiohead - Lotus Flower

day 10 - a song that makes you fall asleep
Radiohead - 4 Minute Warning

day 11 - a song from your favorite band
Radiohead - No Surprises

day 12 - a song from a band you hate
---

day 13 - a song that is a guilty pleasure
Kylie Minogue - Your Disco Needs You

day 14 - a song that no one would expect you to love
Katy Perry - Hot and Cold

day 15 - a song that describes you
Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag

day 16 - a song that you used to love but now hate
---

day 17 - a song that you hear often on the radio
Jessie J - Price Tag

day 18 - a song that you wish you heard on the radio
John Cage - 4'33''

day 19 - a song from your favorite album
Dodgy - One Of Those Rivers

day 20 - a song that you listen to when you’re angry
Radiohead - How To Disappear Completely (And Never Be Found)

day 21 - a song that you listen to when you’re happy
My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

day 22 - a song that you listen to when you’re sad
Don McLean - American Pie

day 23 - a song that you want to play at your wedding
Harry Mudie and King Tubby - Dub With A Difference

day 24 - a song that you want to play at your funeral
Bob Dylan - Death Is Not The End

day 25 - a song that makes you laugh
Matt Winkworth - Bees

day 26 - a song that you can play on an instrument
Matt Bradshaw - Monolayer [of] People

day 27 - a song that you wish you could play
The Mario theme tune

day 28 - a song that makes you feel guilty
---

day 29 - a song from your childhood
Babylon Zoo - Caffeine

day 30 - your favorite song at this time last year
Matt Chanarin - Not In Our Name

Nain

I'd like to share a poem by Joyce Grenfell that was read as my grandmother's ashes were scattered last year:

If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower, nor inscribe a stone
Nor, when I'm gone, speak in a Sunday voice
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must:
Parting is hell,
But life goes on
So......sing as well.

pReview

I think my music has changed quite a bit since I first started writing songs, aged eight. Stylistically, I have moved from pop to pop-rock to electro-pop to folk-pop to pop-punk to rock to prog-rock to weird-folk. Instrumentally, I have moved from keyboard to electric guitar to acoustic guitar to bass to synthesiser to assorted. Thematically, I have moved from hamsters to simplistic right-wing politics to nature to Taoism to simplistic left-wing politics to sex with misogynist undertones to sex with feminist overtones to... well, it's difficult to say what one's songs are about while one is writing them. Slightly-more-pressing-but-perhaps-still-simplistic left-wing politics, maybe.

Anyway. What I wanted to say was that what has stayed constant is the way I imagine songs (and groups of songs) before/during the writing process. I imagine somebody reviewing my tracks, always positively, and imagine the sort of things they might say. Then I try to create the track I have just reviewed.

So, this is my current working review for my new album:

The artwork for Matt Bradshaw's latest offering, "Salt of the Sky", depicts a mustard-yellow sky, seemingly teetering between disease and defiance. A spectral cityscape is impossibly reflected there, as though in a lake, upside down and ominous, though the setting (or rising?) sun shines up in hope. It is clearly not an image that has been chosen by accident, as the music treads this same line: hope and despair, anger and acceptance, creation and decay.

The building blocks of the tracks are artificial; drums machines, synthesisers, effect-laden guitar. But this is merely the bread. The meat, the shining soul of the music, is the quiet acoustic balladry that permeates the noise. "Salt of the Sky" is the sound of a folksinger coming to terms with his anachronistic nature and making peace with it; it is the sound of a sad-eyed observer floating through cities and wondering just how much of the ugly vista below is inexorable.

That's vague, I know. And perhaps it is egotistical, but surely modesty is something you should conjur after you've created something? Right now, this is my target. No point aiming for the Demo Dumper (cliquey Oxford reference!).

Right. Bed. x

Happy Place

I have half-written many, many entries about politics for this blog. But I can never finish them. Perhaps it is because I am a layman and I don't feel confident publishing amateur thoughts. But I don't think that's it. I think I am tiring of the need to express my political opinions in the context of the current government. And by "current government", I mean any current government (though perhaps this one in particular).

When you express a political opinion, you are trying to influence others. You are trying to push for change, whether good (left) or bad (right) (I like simplicity). You are trying to fix something. But imagine you are trying to fix a car. The engine is running, but a cylinder is misfiring. To fix the car, you turn off the engine, right? But in politics, the engine is always running. We don't have the luxury of stopping it to replace the parts.

I guess I'm saying that I much prefer designing utopias to shouting into an unresponsive blob, and I don't understand why other people aren't the same. As Labour have lurched right, the arguments about conflicting utopian visions seem to have been lost. I find it fascinating that there isn't a detailed, defining, unchanging utopia set out by each party long ago and towards which that party aims. I'm imagining model cities in glass cases, or a list of bullet points. A left-wing party might imagine a perfect future to have equal access to healthcare and education for all, and a guaranteed minimum standard of living that is not so very far below the highest standard of living that anyone has. A right-wing party might imagine a perfect future to see every child brought up by a married, heterosexual couple, or for people to have the right to pass on their financial privilege to their children.

Even writing those sentences, I guess I see why this idea wouldn't work. A utopia is a grand vision, a society that works harmoniously and where everyone is happy. The idea of a utopia is, itself, left-wing; it is based on the idea that you might not just be looking out for yourself. You can't design a right-wing utopia. Every time you write down a bullet point, you see how it would fuck up life for some group of people.

A left-wing utopia, the model in the glass case, would be an oblate spheroid, containing the whole planet. The right-wing utopian display model would be a series of small glass hemispheres over Chelsea, The Cotswolds, Monaco...

Yeah, let's fucking shout about the lethal shit that's being done in the name of financial necessity while the bankers laugh at their ridiculous stasis. But let's not forget to construct our own utopias, on paper or in our heads, in song or in dance, and let's not pollute them with bullshit compromise. Change should flow from your ideology into the world around you, not the other way around. Yeah, Labour?

Eponymous

I don't think it would be a huge step to say that every song I write is about me. I can't speak for everyone, but I think that even my less obviously self-absorbed songs (those about politics &c) are very much coloured by my personality and the filter through which I view the world. And given that an album tends to be a group of songs that are written at roughly the same time, I think it would be fair to say that an album by a solo artist is a set of songs that describes their personality at the time the album was written.

So here is my theory:

A musician's name refers to a person. A musician might release ten solo albums under the same name because the person, the body responsible, hasn't changed. But the persona changes constantly. Saying that the dark Leonard Cohen of the late sixties is the same artist as the calm, spiritual Leonard Cohen of the noughties because they shared a body is like saying Radiohead is the same band as Supergrass because they shared a home town.

One solution to this would be for artists to come up with a new album title and artist name every time they release a new record, and I would have some sympathy with this "standalone" approach. But it would be a lie to say there is no continuity between an individual artist's records. So how's this for a compromise:

What remains constant should be the album title, because the subject of a group of songs is almost always the person who wrote them. The artist name should change every time (unless the artist feels ze has undergone no development since the last album), and this name should reflect the person's current personality.

I'm sure I've tied myself in knots there by trying to distinguish a person, a persona and personality (without actually looking up the relevant pedantry on the web), but I hope my point makes sense. The artist changes, but the name of the subject does not. Which is why it is quite likely that my new album will be entitled "Matt Bradshaw".

How I Took a Naked Photo of Amanda Palmer By Accident

I have been asked by Amanda Palmer to publish a naked photo of her. That is factually accurate but probably merits further explanation. The explanation itself may be somewhat inaccurate, due to 22% of my life having passed since the event I am about to describe took place; please forgive any inadvertent lapses into fiction.

Six years ago, I was at Glastonbury Festival. It was life-affirmingly wonderful. On the Sunday night (I think), Bright Eyes were due to play on the John Peel Stage. Ryan Adams had also been due to play, but for some reason this failed to happen. So Bright Eyes took to the stage in front of an audience composed of disgruntled Ryan Adams fans and disgruntled Bright Eyes fans (disgruntled because Conor Oberst, the frontman, appeared to be quite spectacularly intoxicated). I can't say for sure which group of spectators were heckling Conor with cries of "Play Summer of Sixty-Nine!".

Anyway. The set happened, and it appeared to split the crowd. Between songs, Conor was taking what seemed an eternity to compose himself. He also indulged in some mockery of "Make Poverty History" and made some seemingly ill-judged comments about the then-recently-deceased John Peel. There was booing and verbal abuse. But the music itself was unbelievably fucking awesome. The band basically played the whole of their album "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn", which was a synth-laden departure from their usual country-ish sound and to this day ranks as one of my favourite records. When we got back to the campfire that night, there was polarised opinion about whether we had just witnessed the best gig of our lives or the worst. I came out on the side of "best".

The incident that pushed that night toward legendary status, as far as I was concerned, was the appearance of a stark-bollock-naked female running onto the stage near the end of the set and making out with Conor for a prolonged period. I was (/am) a somewhat reserved and naive creature, and it was a revelation to witness something so fucking unashamedly rock 'n' roll.

I have told the story of this gig many times since it happened - it's my default conversation piece when I find myself in the company of a fellow Bright Eyes fan - but I've never been able to capture the magic of that night. Something was missing. And perhaps the thing that was missing is this:

I am a big Amanda Palmer fan. I love her music, I cover her songs, I've seen her live and I regularly check her blog. The other day, said blog contained the following clue (to a mystery I didn't know I was trying to solve):

"god damn the man pens a clever fucking lyric. so sorry conor, i stole it for my blog subject. better than attacking you naked….i suppose i’m all grown up."

That set off some alarm bells. Two minutes' googling later, I was pretty sure that the streaker in my Bright Eyes story was, indeed, Amanda Palmer. It made sense; I remembered seeing that the Dresden Dolls were playing that year, but at the time I didn't know their music so I went to see something else. That decision has always haunted me slightly, due to the fact that the band split by the time I did get into them. The knowledge that I do now at least have a mildly cool Amanda-Palmer-at-Glastonbury story has taken the edge off the regret of not seeing her play there. And this newfound knowledge also has an interesting consequence: it means I have had a unique, naked photo of Amanda Palmer on my hard drive for six years without realising it. I had been inexpertly documenting the festival with a shite film camera and naturally snapped the spectacle on stage that night. But I didn't know it was Amanda Palmer. And now I do.

The photo itself is beyond awful. The camera had no zoom and the lighting was cack and I'm not a photographer. But that's not the point. There are other, far superior pictures of Amanda Palmer in various states of nudity. But this one is mine. I took it. And (to me) it sums up that glorious night better than I ever could in words.

No more ado. Here it is:


And here are the few pixels that matter:


A brief epilogue:

When I found out the truth about this photo, I became very excited and started telling everyone. One of these people was my permanently-connected-to-the-blogosphere(-but-with-more-interesting-things-to-say-than-most) housemate, Sophie (who blogs here). She tweeted my news in the direction of Amanda herself, and got a response indicating that Sophie should "TWEET THAT SHIT". So, as I said at the start, I have been asked (indirectly) by Amanda Palmer to publish a naked photo of her. And now I have.