ot my normal style or technique of work, but I’d always wanted to try out using a graphics tablet.

I bought a very cheap Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet form Aldi, or maybe Lidl, some time ago. This shirt design gave me the excuse to have a play. I was quite pleased with the results, and it created far less mess over the garden, the carpet and the curtains than chucking paint at a canvas by hand like I normally do tend to. Anyway, have a look…

Three Counties MG are an MG based car club covering Staffordshire, Worcestshire and Shropshire run by enthusiasts to promote interest in MG cars throughout the Midlands area.

lot has been said on this in the past view days and if you do like the station and would like it to stay then this blog offers some great advice. There are also a wide range of eloquent, heartfelt letters being posted on the forfolkssake website.

Speaking personally its the only ‘music’ station I regularly listen to, well, okay, I do listen to Brumcast on Rhubarb Radio too but thats just the once a week, Several of the shows on 6 Music fulfill the two things I want from music radio. Presenters who are enthusiastic for what they do and music I’ve not heard before. Its been good to hear John Peels name mentioned so often within the pieces I’ve read about the station and I think it true that the station as a whole goes some way to replacing a lot of what he did for both new and old music.

When ever the license fee discussion comes up I think that both 6 Music and BBC 7 justify the cost to me. I can’t say much of the output on many of the other stations and certainly a large portion of the TV content does for me.

As I saw someone write on Twitter

John Peel would be spinning in his grave. Quite possibly at the wrong speed

onight I’m going to be cooking Spaghetti Pomodoro and watching a film from the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill collectors box, and seeing if they are as enjoyable to watch now as when I first saw them when I was about ten years old.

Incidentally the box set contains a different ten films to those listed on some websites, including the place I bought mine from, but for a little over a tenner I’ve no complaints. I was going to work my way through them in order but given the very Basic dutch packaging, that I can’t read, and the numerous AKA’s for each title I may just start with the first disk.

I shall report back…

*I should explain the post titles is one of the films American titles, also know as ‘Al Capone enantion trinita’, ‘Der Dicke in Amerika’, ‘2 angeloi tou samata’ and the original ‘Anche gli angeli mangiano fagioli’

I was checking up on the upcoming UK dates from Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby and came across Erics new radio show.

Its passes the two requirements of ‘good’ music radio in my book; One, The presenter isn’t annoying, in fact Eric has a great line in amusing assides as anyone whos seen his live shows or read his book will know, and Two, I ended up buying a CD from a band I’d not heard of before after listening to it. Result.

You can ‘tune in’ here for as long as it continues.

o it seems I’ve missed my chance to see Alex Cox‘ latest last film, Again

I would happily pay to see it at a cinema, I’d buy it on DVD, but it seems you can’t do either, the only way to see it so far is on the BBC. ‘Fantastic thats free’ I here you cry, but alas, when it was broadcast on digital tv I was away on holiday, and for its terrestrial premier of last night, well, the early hours of the morning to be precise.
Me? I was unaware it was on and fast asleep have driven round half of Wales yesterday. I know I’ll see it eventually some how, but its a shame that a possible gem like this from arguably the most interesting British director working today it goes unannounced, untrailered and is screened at a time when people might happen upon it.

I wonder if I’ll see this Searchers 2.0, or Repo Chick first. Only time will tell…

{insert tumbleweed here}

couple of my older illustrations are currently featured on The Rumpus dot net website. They feature to illustrate a short story titled ‘Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And With Hypochondria’ by Dan Kennedy.

I told myself she reminded me of Liz Phair, but without the marijuana-steeped tomboy, devil-may-care, laid-back attitude of Liz Phair.

Intrigued? read the complete short story here…

More updates of an artworky nature online shortly…

To continue the recent midlands theme…
ast week as a part of Three Counties MG [Staffordshire, Worcestshire and Shropshire in case you wondered] myself and a small group of us were lucky enough to be given a tour around the MG Motor UK Limited Longbridge plant.

I was actually surprised just how much of the place was left. It seems every time I’ve gone through Longbridge over the past couple of years there is another massive area flattened, so it was good to see that cars are being built there, and also that the space to build more is still there too.

My own history with the place is limited to a confused job interview about eight years ago, to work on the website. I arrived with about three other people to much confusion with no one expecting us, I only remember an exchange student who was only there for half a day running back and forth trying to sort things out. That and several cups of coffee in different waiting areas. I didn’t get the job, which was maybe for the best.

Visiting the plant we got a chance to see where and how our own cars were put together and take a look at the new MG TF’s being built there. The walking tour through the factory that we we’re taken on was very honest, open and entertaining, we got to walk along the production line, to be honest there was a very refreshing amount of common sense over health and safety about the whole thing, it was very refreshing. It was also nice to see and hear facts about the cars and the business rather than the chinese whispers [no pun inteneded, honest] that seem to float about online and in the press. The new cars do look more solidly built, certainly more so than my ten year old F, and the interiors, which are rarely refered to without the word dated, looked good too.

We also got a chance to see the upcoming MG TF 85th Anniversary model, if I only had £15,664 lying about the place (I know I haven’t, I’ve had the place upside down this week looking for a pair of swimming trunks for the Screamin’ Festival next week) It does look a fantastic car, photos don’t do the paintwork justice and even the graphics, which I was none too keen on, do look quite good in person. with less than a couple of hundred a hundred only fifty being made I can see myself spending many hours scouring the autotrader website in a few years. Anyway, heres hoping for a sunny summer, which can only help things along all round.

In the meantime, if anyone’s stuck for a Birthday present for me next month…

Many thanks to Ian for organising the day and Ian Pogson for the tour, I’m now reading Ians book ‘Carry on car making…’ which is availible from all good book stores, and here.

Normal music related posts and maybe even some comic book work, here shortly.

nder the cover culture lover was going to be the title to this post but I was worried about what kind of hits I might get from google.

I’m not sure quite how I came across Ian Perrys Midnight Line, I think a friend of mine was a listener, once I’d heard it I soon became hooked, an under the cover culture lover as Ian would say. Broadcast from Wolverhampton on Beacon radio and also on WABC via medium wave, I could only pick the show up when the winds were blowing in the right direction and when I really should have been getting some sleep for school the next day.

Weeknights from midnight until 2am the show would run with either topical national or local stories or else one of its regular feature formats. One of these was a roughly bi-monthly show featuring John Starkey [who sounded at the time to me to be a man in his sixties]. These we’re some of the most genuinely ’spooky’ shows I’ve ever heard, while you could argue on some calls he was reading the persons responses on the other end of the line, more often than not he’d pluck something completely off the wall, but very specific, and be spot on. I think during just about every show there would be a hair standing up on the back of the neck moment. I see from his website that John is younger now than he sounded at the time, given this was nearly twenty years ago, and is still doing the odd radio show, I must try to catch one, a lots changed in the media since then and it would be interesting to hear how the show is received today.

The show was a true local programme, providing both a service for the local community to air gripes and complaints with local issues as well as opinion on wider national and international news and more importantly provided entertainment and a sense of community for the housebound, people working unsociable hours and for people like me, who should really have been asleep. Most of all, it was always great fun, Regular callers like Eric, the Captain, Wing Nut, Johnny Morris & Jammo the parrot would always give you something to laugh about. Ian was a very good host, managing to make hosting such a show seem effortless and being able to draw peoples opinions out of themselves in an era where people were far less ‘media savy’.

I don’t know when or why the show ended, I went away from the midlands for a few years and when I came back there was no mention of Ian Perry to be found anywhere. Since then I did read he was working for BBC Shropshire Though I’m yet to be up at 5am to listen and the show didn’t seem to be podcasted when last I checked.

Listening to a few shows again now, I used to start the tape recorder at midnight, which given the fact that most of my tapes we’re C90’s meant I always missed the last half hour, the shows are much as I remember them. One thing that stands out is just how much general opinion and society has changed in the past fifteen years, and how un self aware most of the callers we’re, it was very honest and open radio.
The other thing that struck me is how the callers who we’re ‘characters’ on the show, we’re genuine characters, they weren’t frustrated performers phoning up with made up personas, which unfortunately seems to have become the norm on most modern talk radio shows.

It was everything that can be good about radio, it was intimate, gimmick free and offered a genuine insight into other peoples lives. Listening to the Christmas Grotto show with a friend on a road trip a while back we still we’re reduced to tears of laughter.
Its a shame that there is so little ‘local’ radio today, let alone so little good talk based radio. Heres a couple of links to some archived shows;

‘Free For All’
‘Commision for Racial Equality’
‘John Starky’

Tony’s maitreya never did show up mind.

urprisingly I have actually completed a couple of pieces of artwork in the past couple of weeks. Sadly the photos I took didn’t come out too well so I’ll have to take them again.

Until then I’ll just upload a couple of pics from the second fish-eye film I took, here, here and here. Came out okay, a little dark at times.

I also had a go at constructing my own matchbox pinhole camera from various items found around the home, and a couple of things from poundland, with the very excellent guide on matchboxpinhole.com. Sadly though when I picked up the photos I only received a roll of developed film back and no printed images. Annoyingly, it was my own fault, I wasn’t winding on the film enough and most of the photos are overlapped. I remember when I was younger photo labs used to just process films like that, giving people ’spooky’ photos to send in to the ghost section of ‘Take-a-Break’. But apparently its all done by computer now and the computer can’t cope with out gaps in the film. Hooray for progress.

So I’ll have another go at that. Meanwhile my Tomatos are growing well…
Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

I’m starting to think that dispite how the packet reads I am going to have to re-pot them as this just isn’t going to work…