The 3-D internet

There's been a lot of talk about Google Streetview of late (the UK version of which launched recently). Most of it has been about privacy issues. The press focussed on the fact that people were likely to get caught out (or perhaps burgled) as a result of that black car with the Googlecam on top doing the rounds. Love affairs blown. Joints cased. Dudes walking into sex shops in Soho being highly embarrassed.

Well, perhaps that may be so. But the real story is far more interesting.

What Streetview does is give us a hint of the way that the internet is going: 3-D. With Streetview, you can walk down a street, take a left turn, swing around, cross the road, have a look at something that catches your eye - all rendered beautifully. It's extraordinary.

If I may be so bold as to make a prediction, I reckon what will happen next is that certain businesses will allow users to 'go into' buildings - to click on them and be taken inside. At the moment, using Streetview, you can just 'stand' outside say, WH Smiths at Kings Cross. But in time I reckon you'll be able to click on it, go in, stroll down an aisle and order some books. Or click on a Domino's Pizza, have a bit of a stroll around and order, well, a pizza. Go into a HMV and buy a record. Walk sheepishly into the aforementioned shop in Soho and order something for the weekend. Or perhaps you might do something slightly more cultural and explore the exhibits of the Tate Modern - yes, you might one day be able to look at a urinal and a pile of bricks in an entirely new way altogether, and from the comfort of your own home.

If this comes to pass, we're going to be looking at a 3-D internet, where sites are no longer flat pages but virtual places to be explored (and most likely, shopped in). In fact, some of this has already been happening to a degree: the Second Life community is a 3-D online world which can be explored in the manner I'm describing. And people spend millions in its virtual shops. But so far, its userbase is still only a small percentage of internet users.

A more 'general' shift to 3-D seems like the logical next step for the net - where the 3-D, virtual world becomes the default browsing experience. Websites are still, generally speaking, flat pages with text and images on them, but the creation of Streetview gives us a glimpse of an internet which is really more of a virtual world; where websites could be housed within virtual buildings; where a chatroom is a virtual bar.

And technology being what it is, all this could get very sophisticated, and fast. Virtual reality isn't just about a visual experience; there are a host of devices - from headphones to helmets to 'wired' gloves - which all serve to make the virtual experience more physical. If the internet goes 3-D, computers get very fast, and physical devices are made available that let everybody 'touch' the virtual world, we are suddenly in the realm of science fiction: the holodeck from Star Trek's Next Generation.

Captain Picard aside, in the not too distant future, the internet could well morph into a virtual world that is indistinguishable from our own. It sounds far fetched, but so did the motor car, electricity and a mouse that grew a human ear on its back.

So bizarrely Google Streetview raises an existential question. If the internet goes down this route, it will become a man-made universe, perhaps one day turning into a digital dimension running in parallel to - and feeling just as 'real' as - our own. This points to the obvious: is 'real' life actually just a digital, virtual experience? After all, pretty much all life in our 'real' universe works like a computer program, built by a set of coded instructions in our DNA. And (okay, paraphrasing a bit here) physics is basically all about electricity and numbers - just like the internet.

Damn, it's The Matrix. A Keanu Reeves film explaining the meaning of life. What an annoying conclusion to have to come to. But perhaps not as weird as you might think.

Special guests at the Troubadour show

Hello all,

Would just like to draw your attention to the special guests at the Troubadour show.

They are the fantastic Silverfall and John Gibbons.

Silverfall are racking up great reviews and some nice airplay too. Their musical influences encompass David Bowie, Coldplay, RufusWainwright, Jewel and others too numerous to mention; you can check out their melodic acoustic sound at http://www.silverfall.info/.

John Gibbons - who will also be doing vocals during my set - has one of the most soulful voices I've ever encountered. He regularly gigs with the likes of The Killers, Razorlight and Cat Stevens and I'm really delighted he's doing a set for me. You can check him -and his multiple influences out at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=53284211.

Look forward to seeing you there.

The Beatles didn't break up

Post Beatles break-up, John Lennon said that those people clamouring for a Beatles reuninon could just put their own Beatles album together - one track from a Lennon solo album, another from one of Paul's, one from George's and so on...

In this age of iPods this is now an intriguing possibility, and putting together 1970s Beatles albums is surprisingly satisfying. To my ears, for example, the first 1970s Beatles album, possibly called 'Instant Karma', would have had the following tracks on it:

Side 1
1 Instant Karma
2 Every Night
3 Isolation
4 My Sweet Lord
5 Junk
6 Jealous Guy
7 Maybe I'm Amazed

Side 2
1 Too Many People
2 Love
3 Imagine
4 Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey
5 All Things Must Pass
6 The Back Seat of My Car
7 Oh My Love

And I think it would have made a good album too.

This little exercise got me thinking about why Lennon and McCartney's 70s solo albums ended up being inferior to their Beatles ones. Rock critics usually attribute this to the lack of the Lennon-McCartney dynamic and intra-band competition; I think this is partly true, but I also have a slightly different angle on it.

As a proper solo artist (i.e., not seven-writers-on-my-record James Blunt), you have to write 10-14 songs on your own to fill an album. But whilst in the Beatles, John and Paul only had to contribute 5 or 6 tracks to each album (and let George get a couple in). Obviously it's much easier to write 5 good songs a year than 14, and you can devote more time to producing them. When the Beatles broke up, the demands of putting out one solo record a year (or sometimes two) meant that John and Paul had to fill whole albums with material - something that is much more difficult to do and which they weren't used to. Which invariably led to fillers like Lennon's Oh Yoko (which has the same melody as Three Blind Mice), or McCartney songs with titles like Single Pigeon (classic).

But when you take 5 or 6 of their better efforts from their solo albums and put them in the same pot, as I did above, you do end up with a record that shapes up pretty well, and had George Martin been at the wheel, might have sounded damn good. Don't think Single Pigeon would have ended up on a 70s Beatles album somehow though.

Dawkins and Darwin

I really enjoyed Richard Dawkins' recent television series about Darwin, The Genius of Charles Darwin. Dawkins is treated like a god by atheists (or at least a pope), and it's easy to see why. He's a very intelligent guy who is passionate about evolution as the explanation for the development of life, intelligent or otherwise; and he explains how it all works brilliantly. Not for him the creationism or 'intelligent design' theories propounded by many religious groups.

I'm sold on evolution as the explanation of how life developed, and even more so after watching Dawkins' series. The evidence for evolution is there in abundance - in fossils, bones and DNA - and Dawkins' presentation of it, despite my prior knowledge of how the process generally works, was illuminating. Dawkins described nature as it really is: an arms race between species, with only the winners getting to pass on their genes - resulting, over time, in the emergence and development of different kinds of creatures.

Above all though,  The Genius of Charles Darwin depicted how bleak evolution is. Natural selection isn't concerned with morality; it is all about effective mechanisms passing their genes on, regardless of what the mechanisms in question do. This is why parasites that feed on young children's eyes have evolved successfully, or viruses like AIDS. When you look at these horrendous examples of nature's handywork, it almost seems as though they in themselves argue against the existence of a creator, or certainly a benign one. What kind of creator, for example, would want to create cancer?

Looking at the biological evidence presented by Dawkins and other scientists, and the sheer brutalness of nature, I'm convinced that natural selection, not godly intervention, is the driving force behind the development of species.

What still confuses me though, is the context in which all this happens. Natural selection has to operate in accordance to the laws of physics: it can't circumvent fundamental laws/units or concepts such as matter, time, space, or gravity - regardless of how much a clever insect wants to pass on its genes. There is an order in the universe which all processes and entities have to obey. The apple must fall from the tree; the electron has to spin around the atom; a triangle has to have three sides. 

Which inevitably leads to that age-old question: why? I don't think Dawkins or Darwin, for all their brilliance, offer us an answer to that. Accepting the reality of natural selection - and it is very real - doesn't detract from the other reality, which is that we may be naturally selected, but we're still living in a very odd (if beautiful) universe with lots of big balls going round other big balls. I find this profoundly weird, and natural selection doesn't explain the origin of the laws of physics, or, let's face it, natural selection. Frankly, I want to know why the universe was created the way it was, and why its fundamental units facilitate natural selection.

It is nature's fundamental laws - for laws they are - that leave the door open in my mind to the existence of a creator. During my time on this particular big ball, I've never come across a physical law that natural selection was responsible for (and not a civil servant). Earthly laws, at least, are created; could the physical ones be?

If a creator is responsible for the laws of the universe, I'm not sure whether he, she or it is a God, and I certainly think that if he/she/it exists, it's not necessarily benign, and maybe it's not even clever. Part of me suspects that the universe may have been created by the cosmic equivalent of a GSCE science student who heated up some dodgy chemicals using his Bunsen burner when his teacher wasn't looking (I know I tried that in the lab; somebody's probably blogging about it at a microscopic level right now). 

I remain a big fan of Dawkins and I love his work; he's really got me thinking about nature. But more than that he's got me thinking about why nature exists at all. And neither he nor any religious figure has ever answered that one satisfactorily for me.

Music by numbers

A while ago, I wrote a blog post about the increasing importance of data to musicians. The gist of it was that in the burgeoning 'free music' era, bands and musicians should aim to capture the details of people who are downloading their songs for free. The idea being that even if artists are not making money directly from recorded songs, they can generate income in other ways by marketing merchandise, tours and so on to fans whose email addresses they have obtained.

There's another type of data which is of increasing significance to musicians, and it doesn't necessarily involve email addresses. It's statistical data.

With the rise of social networks like Facebook, Myspace, iLike and Last FM, musicians now have a plethora of ways to measure how many people are listening to their music. For example, any band with a Myspace page will be able to see how many plays of their songs they are getting; which tracks tend to be more popular; and how many songs are downloaded (as opposed to just listened to). On iLike, there are similar statistics, which again let musicians see how many plays their tracks are getting, and other interesting counts, like how many people are adding a band's songs to Facebook pages and how many people are sharing particular songs with friends.

These statistics tend to focus on two things: popularity of songs, and listeners' behaviour. Both are of enormous interest to musicians.

The popularity measurement is fairly straightforward. Thanks to Myspace and Facebook a band can put up, say, five tracks on a profile and run an unofficial focus group on which of their songs would make the best singles (depending on how commercial-minded the band is, the tracks that get the most plays).

Looking at listeners' behaviour is more complicated, but extremely interesting. Thanks to social networks (and other sites) you can examine what listeners are doing with music. With a bit of investigation, you can find out who is

• adding your song to their social networking page
• dedicating your songs to friends
• listing themselves as being a fan of your music
• recommending you as an artist to online communities
• feeding back on your music
• talking about you behind your back

The list goes on, depending on which websites a you are using, but essentially, when you look at the data, pictures of behaviour emerge that can influence how bands and artists communicate and build relationships with fans.

All sites are not equal when it comes to music statistics though. Of all the social networks that I've used to promote my music, the one I trust the most for music statistics is Last FM. This is because it doesn't just measure online plays of music - it goes far beyond that. Every time a registered Last FM user plugs their iPod or MP3 player into their computer, it looks at what they've been listening to and uses it to compile statistics; the same happens when a user plays a cd on their PC. The statistics are extremely comprehensive too, with charts being compiled on a band's most popular songs overall, by week or over a 6 month period. And you can see exactly who's been playing your music, and how much.

Crucially, Last FM distinguishes between listeners and plays. This is not the case with Myspace, where you can only look at the number of plays of songs - there is no listener data. This is pretty useless really; generally, once a Myspace page is visited by either a human or a search engine webbot, the play tally goes up, regardless of whether the song has been listened to by the human or, er, webbot in question. And unlike Last FM, none of the data is stored; once you've removed a song from your page, the data goes with it.

In essence though there is a lot to be gleaned from the musical information that the web provides - by looking at who is playing your music, and what they're doing with it, I think it is possible to grow fanbases and understand what makes people tick musically. But it's hard work, and you have to be able to work out the good stats from the bad.

Songwriting

Been talking to some mates about songwriting lately, and reading some blogs about it. Several musicians I know have recently done courses on the subject, facilitated by people who are presumably qualified to instruct others in the art of songwriting. It got me wondering whether you can actually teach somebody how to write a song.

The way these songwriting courses seem to work is that there are various workshops where an 'expert' in songwriting imparts words of wisdom on how it's done to an audience of (presumably) aspiring songwriters. Then everybody pairs off and writes songs together, and there's a bit of a love-in where everybody's efforts get discussed en masse at the end of the day.

Thinking back to how I learnt how to write songs, I suppose that in a roundabout way, somebody did show me how to do it: Lennon or McCartney, but (sadly) not in person. From listening to their songs, I worked out how to structure my own, write a Beatle-esque melody, harmonise and so on. As a precocious songwriting teenager, I copied the poor band shamelessly (some would say that I still do -- and that I'm still precocious). I listened to them non-stop and tried to soak up as many of their ideas as I could; and in their day, the Beatles did exactly the same, with Elvis and Chuck Berry. This 'soaking up' forms the building blocks of every songwriter's music (there's no such thing as an original idea after all).

This makes me think that a) songwriting is, initially at least, all about copying stuff and b) other musicians influence songwriting immensely. Which leads to this: how good a songwriter you are will depend in no small way on your ability to copy things (think of it as similar to being a good draughtsman) and on the quality of the musicians you are copying.

In other words, if you're into James Blunt, you're fucked.

Of course, the thing about these songwriting workshops is that it's highly unlikely that the great songwriters are going to turn up at them to do a spot of teaching (you're probably going to get somebody who had a bit of a hit in the 80s or knew a man down the pub who did). And if you were lucky enough to have a great artist show up, would they really be able to teach you anything?

If McCartney decided to give a masterclass in songwriting, I'd love to attend it: he is universally acclaimed as one of the best writers the world has known, and he is a massive inspiration to me. However, I still doubt there is anything he could verbally articulate that that could teach me how to write a song. In fact, and being slightly cruel here, he hasn't written a good one himself in quite a while -- so if he can't teach himself how to do it again, how on earth would he instruct me? I'd say he'd be more interested in suing me for occasional attempts at plagiarism.

The other thing about songwriting which makes me think that it is difficult to teach is the personal dimension. The great songs are all inspired by personal traumas or joys. I could not imagine anybody at a songwriting course being able to supply either of those on tap (well, unless a certain Mr Blunt I referred to earlier was doing the teaching -- there would be plenty of trauma in that instance). The great songwriters do not overtly teach; we listen to their music and absorb their ideas over time.

Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh on the notion of songwriting classes. There are very basic elements which I suppose can be taught: structures (intro/verse/bridge/chorus -- you know it all now), and maybe some history around the topic. But not much more.

However, I'm quite Cartesian at heart, and in the spirit of trying to teach people how to write a song, I'm going to give it a bash. In a mathematical way. Here's an equation which I think will predict how well you will be able to write a song:

Ability to rip an artist off + quality of artist being ripped off + own personal experience/inspiration = Quality of song

Sadly the word 'quality' crops up too many times in my little equation. Quality is an impossibly subjective notion: one man's meat will inevitably be another man's poison. So even if somebody thinks they know how to teach somebody else how to write a fantastic song...somebody else will think that the song that ends up being written is, quite frankly, shit.

My conclusion: songwriting can be learnt, but it sure can't be taught.

Scouting for Girls...

Well, I'm just back from a well-deserved break in Italy. It was great. Visited an island that had a volcano on it and smelt of farts; went on a trip at sea that involved a small boat, a singing captain and no life jacket; saw a Pizza called 'McDonalds Pizza' which had chips and a burger on it (note: didn't order it, just looked at it). All in all a good holiday.

The one thing I'm extremely glad I didn't encounter was any Scouting for Girls songs. As I lay back on the beach, reading my overpriced international edition of the Guardian and getting a Cornetto all over my chest, I was listening to the stuff that they're currently playing on Italian radio. Much of it was the same as what is dominating the airwaves in the UK right now: Estelle, Duffy, Mark Ronson doing his celebrity karaoke thing - but thankfully there was absolutely no Scouting for Girls.

Clearly the Italians have taste (when it comes to music - we shouldn't forget that they recently re-elected Berlusconi.)

Now, I've been at the receiving end of rock criticism, both good and bad, so I tend not to write blog posts slagging off other music. And I don't want to encounter the inevitable response of 'You're jealous - they're selling more albums than you'. Or the 'You can't argue with popularity' argument. (Popularity is hard to argue with. Mind you, Hitler, Thatcher and James Blunt all enjoyed massive degrees of it).

But I'm sorry, I simply have to make an exception to my 'no slagging musicians off' rule for Scouting for Girls. I can't bear them. It pains me to have to hear them every time I turn on the radio.

In one way, what they've done is quite an achievement: they've effectively released pretty much the exact same single 3 times. And they've got massive airplay on each occasion.

The formula is simple: a tune with one note repeated ad nauseum, some staccato piano, and a pained, earnest voice singing any of the below trite lyrics:

She's so lovely, she's so lovely, she's so lovely, she's so lovely
or
Elvis isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead
or
I miss a heartbeat, I miss a heartbeat...

The band will also stop at various points in each song, and sadly, just as you think it's over and you're getting a much-needed respite from the staccato piano and crap one-note tune, they'll start up again, singing the same crap one-note tune again over a backdrop of staccato piano.

I just don't get it. Or maybe I'm getting old. But I have to say, I think this is the worst band I've ever heard. Westlife appeal more and I bloody hate them too.

But one way or the other, if this continues I'm moving to Italy. If you haven't heard them yet (unlikely), go to http://www.myspace.com/scoutingforgirls. Bring earmuffs.

//

Your very own White Album

I was reading a book recently by a chap called David Quantick called 'Revolution' which is about the making of The Beatles' White Album. It was entertaining, but ultimately not very enlightening, and certainly wasn't in the same league as Ian MacDonald's similarly-formatted 'Revolution in the Head'.

In any event it reminded me that this year is the 40th birthday of the record.

I first heard The White Album in Cologne, when I was 11 or 12. At that point I'd absorbed all the Beatles albums that happened to be in my parents' record collection or which they had copied onto tapes (tapes, remember those?) . They had all of them except The White Album and Abbey Road (more on the latter another time).

We were in Cologne because my parents were during a tour of Europe of sorts - my dad is an academic, and at the time we were driving round Europe in a blue and white VW camper van, stopping off at various university towns so that he could be suitably professorial (I'm sure he would put it differently, but you get the gist). We had stopped off at my uncle Ciaran's place, who at the time was in his mid-20s and living with a bunch of slightly eccentric Germans. One of them had the White Album on a couple of cassettes.

Well God, I didn't know what to make of the album (nor did the Germans when I woke them up with it every morning for a week). I loved 'Back in the USSR', misheard the lyrics of 'Sexy Sadie' as 'Sex is easy' (very exciting that for a 12 year old, I must say), and was utterly bemused by Revolution 9.

And I still don't know what to make of it. There are some fantastic songs on it, but as a whole it leaves me somewhat cold, or bemused. I think that I agree with George Martin's initial assessment, that the band should have opted for what would have been an incredible single album, rather than a double one. To my ears, the record sounds like a load of amazing songs interspersed with a load of bootlegs; indeed, much of the Anthology stuff that came out years later could have happily sat on the White Album - it certainly reminded me of it.

Many will swear by The White Album in its entirety. For those of us who are less gone on tracks like 'Wild Honey Pie' or 'Don't Pass Me By', it presents us with a fascinating (and fun) opportunity: to edit it down, and make our own 'single' album version of it. The idea being to reduce the 30 songs to, say, a more manageable 12-14. After some reflection, here is my perfect White Album.

My ultimate White Album:

1. Back in the USSR
2. Dear Prudence
3. Happiness is a Warm Gun
4. Martha My Dear
5. I'm So Tired
6. Why Don't We Do It in the Road?
7. I Will
8. Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
9. Sexy Sadie
11. Revolution 1
12. Cry Baby Cry

I know, it's sacrilege. But it would have been bloody good, eh?

The Charlatans miss a trick - or do they?

The Charlatans are the latest in the line of well-known acts (including Radiohead and the Nine Inch Nails) to release their album for free on the internet. It's downloading on my PC as I type. Following on from my recent post about 'the future of rock and roll', it seems as though that future - where musicians do not make money from recorded music but use it as a stepping stone to sell other stuff - is moving a step closer.

What confuses me about the Charlatans' move is that they seem to be ignoring the 'sell other stuff' bit of the free album approach, because they are not capturing data during the exercise. In other words, they haven't asked fans to submit an email address in order to access the download. You just click the link and it starts downloading.

This means the band have lost the opportunity to email tour dates or merchandise offers to the people who have downloaded the album for free. They haven't even done an honesty box thing, so that they can generate income from people who want to donate what they think the album is "worth".

Either the Charlatans are being very clever or very stupid - and I'm trying to work out which. There is a big upside to making the album available without any strings attached: they'll definitely get far more downloads of it. I know from looking at the statistics from my own free album offer that of the people who go to www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/, one third download the album; I'm fairly sure that my asking for an email address is putting the other two-thirds off.

If more people download The Charlatans' album, there's more scope for a big "word-of-mouth" effect about the band. I can see why this could be extremely useful in attempts to increase awareness of up-and-coming acts...but the Charlatans are, if not necessarily a household name, a well-known band who have had several number one albums.

The best explanation I can think of for their approach to this free release is that the band are aiming to get the largest number of people possible downloading the album, generating as much positive word of mouth about it, before doing away with the free download and making only a paid-for release available. The hope being that the bigger word of mouth effect generated by the 'no strings' free release will boost sales of the paid-for copy. The wished-for scenario being something like:

Mr A: "Oh have you heard The Charlatans' new album, it's great."
Mr B: "Cool - must go and grab the free download."
Mr A: "Actually it's not available for free anymore - you have to get it in the shops or on iTunes."
Mr B: "Ok I'll do that."

This is fine, assuming the album is very good; if not, the band risk bad word-of-mouth publicity which could actually impact negatively on sales: if it's crap, and it's free, why on earth would you pay for it? There is also the possibility of their core fanbase, who typically propel The Charlatans to the top of the charts every time they put an album out, not being quite so energised to go out and buy the cd if they already have the free download. And the thing most likely to happen during Mr A and Mr B's exchange is that Mr A will offer to send or burn Mr B the album for free anyway.

Another interesting aspect of this free release is that it is being done conjunction with the popular indie station XFM - you have to go to their XFM website to download it. This makes me wonder if XFM paid the band to release the album "catch-free" on their site. I'm puzzled though as to why this would be the case - if I was an XFM marketeer I would have viewed this as an opportunity to capture email addresses not only for the Charlatans but the radio station too.

There is one final possibility: that The Charlatans are simply being altruistic. After all, they must have a bob or two after all these years, and they may honestly be interested in giving their music away for free (although I doubt it). That's fine for established bands, but this approach poses problems for up-and-coming acts.

I still feel that new bands need to get something when they release their music: if not income, then the possibility of future income, via an agreement between the act and the downloader to swap the music for the opportunity to communicate about live performances, merchandise and so on. Speaking as a musician, when you attempt to forge a career out of it, music is simply too time, energy and money consuming to be given away for absolutely nothing. If recorded music is good, then it does have a value, and even if that's no longer going to be measured in immediate financial terms, we've got to remember - particularly in the dawn of this free-album era - that this value does exist.

Right. Moralising done - now go get my album for free at www.singletonmusic.com/freealbum/. The Charlatans' record is available at http://www.xfm.co.uk/news/2008/download-charlatans-new-album-for-free?&DCMP=EMC-EMR2007 //

Sicko - Michael Moore's new film

A non-musical post this one.

Saw Michael Moore's film 'Sicko' last week. Which is about American healthcare - or lack thereof.

As is the case with Moore's other films it had some flaws, mainly to do with a bit of selectiveness with the truth and a 'well-I-never' faux surprise at the existence of publicly-funded, universal health systems in Britain and France. Yep, they do exist (although probably not for much longer, if in Britain the Blairite 'reforms' continue and in France, Sarkozy has his Thatcher moment).

But 'Sicko' is one of the most moving films I've seen. I was expecting it to deal with the issue of the millions of Americans who don't have health insurance (and thus no healthcare) but it dealt more with the Americans who do have health insurance...and no healthcare. In other words, it tells the stories of the victims of insurance companies - organisations who look for loopholes in insurance policies to actively deny people treatment and maximise profit.

For me there was one overwhelmingly touching part of the film. It dealt with a woman whose husband got cancer. He had health insurance, but despite his family having paid money to an insurance company for years, and having found an exact match for a life-saving bone marrow transplant, the company wouldn't pay for his treatment (on entirely spurious grounds). You see footage of the guy with his son, laughing and chucking a football about, and then you hear the wife explain how, after the final decision by the insurance company not to pay up, she came home to find him hiding in the toilet, crying. His pride made him repeatedly ask her to go away, but finally he explained that he wasn't afraid of death; he just didn't want to lose his wife and son. I can't explain how sad this was to see and hear, but it reduced me and my girlfriend to tears.

There are lots of other examples in Sicko of how American health insurance companies use red tape and loopholes to deny people life-saving treatment. The film makes it very clear that once you introduce the profit motive into health insurance, it is in the insurer's interest, wherever possible, not to pay claims. And that only leads to people who need healthcare being denied it. And the whole thing made my blood boil.

It makes me feel glad that in the UK we have the National Health Service, which, for all its flaws, does not make income a prerequisite for life-saving treatment, or require you to be insured by an unscrupulous company before it lets you past the doors of its hospitals. Sadly, whether the NHS will continue to offer good, free healthcare is open to question; both the main political parties in the UK seem quite determined to let private companies become more and more involved in running it. That will bring the aforementioned profit motive, and the results will be distastrous - if profit becomes king in the UK, healthcare will eventually become the preserve of the well-off; or, private companies (read 'middle-men') will charge the government (read 'tax-payers') so much that it becomes unaffordable, and the quality of care will deteriorate to the point of no return. Needless to say, some camera-friendly Tory (read David Cameron) will then pip up that it's time to privatise the whole thing - and bye bye free healthcare.

If you don't believe me, watch Sicko.

Here's a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ot7BnvD7yQ.

Greystones harbour

Before I moved to London, I lived in Greystones for many years, and I've spent a lot of time in the beautiful Victorian harbour, just walking on the beach or enjoying a pint and watching boats come in.

I'm really saddened to see that developers have been given the go-ahead to build all over it. In other countries, the harbour would be preserved, treated as 'listed'.

I've set up a Facebook group that people who want to campaign against this development can join. If you use Facebook, please do everything you can to spread the word about this group, which is dedicated to using what little time is left to save Greystones from losing something which is really worth treasuring.

The group is here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4311437482&ref=mf

Thanks,
Chris

Green Friday. Or, synesthesia.

I never used to think that believing Monday was orange, that Wednesdays were yellow or that the number 2 was a female was particularly unusual, until my girlfriend brought home a copy of a paper with a big feature about 'synesthesia' in it. Or, as Wikipedia, the font of all dubious knowledge, puts it, "a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled."

Synesthesia is an odd condition, and manifests itself in lots of ways. For synesthesia 'sufferers', letters or numbers can be associated with colours; days of the week or months can take on personalities; musical notes can have a gender.

Here's some more examples of how I interpret the world:

Friday is dark green.
The number two is a strong-willed female.
The chord of E is also a strong-willed female.
The number seven is a bit of a fey man.
The month of May is white in colour, and female.
The letter Z is female.

It happens with songs too. For example, even though it's sung by a man, I perceive 'Yesterday' by the Beatles as being a female song, whereas their 'Don't Let Me Down' is a male song. I perceive the first song as a grey-ish green; the latter as browny-red.

The more I write these associations down, the more odd this all seems. The links seem completely arbitrary, but you could ask me a question about any letter, number, day or month and I could tell you what colour it is, what sex it is, and what kind of personality it has (and these descriptions wouldn't change, even if you asked me the same question a year later).

The Wikipedia explanations of synesthesia make the mind boggle a bit - particularly at this hour of the night - but regardless of why I have it, I have to say I like having it. It's a nice feeling, and I like being able to assign little personalities and colours to everyday things that quite frankly don't "really" have them.

Besides which, famous synesthisiacs include Beethoven, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix - so I'm in good company. And the number seven IS a fey man.

A World Turned Up - Hyperacusis

The below post details my experience of hyperacusis and the treatment I received to deal with it.  Please note however that I am not a medical professional; information given on this page is not medical advice; before acting on any of the information on this page you should discuss the matter with your GP or other qualified medical professional; and I can't take any responsibility for any problems you may experience as a result of acting on any information provided on this page.

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It was when going to the toilet became difficult that I knew I really had to do something about it. The sound of a flush was, for me, as loud as standing beside somebody drilling a hole in concrete, and extremely painful.

Other pain-inducing noises included showers, telephone ringtones, espresso machines, badly-oiled car brakes, the beeps before tube doors shut, and a certain friend of mine who has a rather high-pitched voice. These sounds might irritate most people; for me they hurt. This was my world turned up: for nearly two years, I heard everyday sounds at incredibly loud volumes. And, being a musician and songwriter, this nearly put an end to all hopes of career in music.

The problems all started when I started to feel a strange 'fullness' in my left ear. It felt a bit like when you get water in your ear in a swimming pool. At first I didn't think much of it, attributing to an infection, but then I started to notice that the fullness seemed to get worse every time I heard a 'loud' noise. In my case, the loud noise was usually the sound of my own voice, coming out of a pair of speakers in a studio. Most musicians love the sound of their own voices; mine was starting to cause me distress.

The first port of call was my local GP. He had a look at my left ear and said I had a small hole in my eardrum, and gave me some antibiotics to treat it. A couple of weeks later I returned, and apparently it had healed. But by now something else was happening: I was starting to find certain noises, particularly high-pitched ones, painful – and not just in my left ear; my right ear was behaving strangely too.

This started to have a subtle effect on my behaviour. When getting on a train, I would always look for the loudspeakers which announced the station names, and find a seat as far from them as possible; when going to a café I would distance myself from the coffee machines. Needless to say, social situations started to become really difficult. Bars and clubs became a no-go area without the aid of earplugs, and wearing them drew unwanted comments about foam fashion accessories. Gradually I became more and more dependent on earplugs, and wore them not only in bars and clubs, but in just about every situation.

And of all the noises that caused me difficulties, music was the worst. I was in the middle of recording "Twisted City" and was spending a lot of time in the studio, trying to mix it, a lot of the time in considerable pain. This problem was having a disastrous effect on the album. I would turn the volume down and try to mix at daftly low levels, or I would mix with foam earplugs in. Both approaches to mixing the album had predictable results: it sounded rotten. With repeated trips to my GP (each at 50 Euros – £40 – we don't have free GP visits in Ireland) came reassurances that nothing was wrong with my ears, and that my hearing was fine. Eventually, I was referred to a specialist – the first of several.

I walked out of the consultant's office 150 Euros worse off, and no wiser. The rather stern chap, who wore a dickie bow (this was the only redeeming feature of the appointment), gave me a hearing test and told me I was fine. He referred me to another clinic where I could get a more in-depth one 'just to put my mind at ease,' which I did. Another 60 Euros; no answers.

By now two things were happening: first, I was moving to London to pursue a rock career and a relationship – and second, my ear condition was getting worse. What had started out as weird was really starting to affect me; I became very depressed about how this allergy to sound was affecting my attempts to 'make it' as a musician.

It's hard enough plugging your musical wares around London without having the additional worry of your music causing you physical distress. I also became extremely irritable, and a complete nightmare to live with; my relationship with my girlfriend suffered considerably as a result of me being on constant edge around any everyday sound. It got so bad that she started worrying about sounds herself, and was reduced to tiptoeing around the house whenever I was around. It lead to a series of rows where both of us had to whisper at each other – shouting was entirely out of the question.

Hitherto the health profession hadn't explained what on earth was going on – so, reluctantly, I turned to the internet. I finally found a description of a condition which, based on the symptoms I had, seemed to be what I was suffering from: hyperacusis, "an increased sensitivity to the sounds that most people are able to tolerate".

The problem was that all these websites on which I'd found references to hyperacusis seemed to differ in their approach to what it was, how it was treated, and whether it was something permanent. It was time to reapproach the health professionals; this time I thought, with a diagnosis of sorts, maybe I can get some treatment. I went to an NHS doctor, who was helpful, and put me on a waiting list to see a consultant.

By this point, and faced with a reasonably long wait, I was really panicking, and I decided (against my pinko-liberal instincts) to see a private consultant.

£250 later I walked out of the consultant's room. He had spent five unfriendly minutes with me, told me I had got the diagnosis right, and had given me a prescription.

I was elated about the prospect of taking a pill to remove the pain, until I googled the name of the drug prescribed, Clonazepam. It was an anti-anxietal drug, with strong side effects, some of which apparently could actually cause hyperacusis. More googling led me to the Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Centre in London; I rang them up and they informed me that you couldn't cure hyperacusis with a tablet, and that in fact they had told that very consultant in a recent seminar that prescribing Clonazepam was a bad idea! The centre offered treatment by desensitisation (where hyperacusis sufferers are played white/pink noise at gradually increasing volumes to readjust their ears to everyday volumes), but it was very expensive and, not having health insurance (or even a job) at this point I couldn't really afford any more private treatment. I gradually got more and more stressed about it all, and the more I got stressed, the worse the hyperacusis got, and the more I wore my earplugs to block out the sounds around me. Which, unbeknownst to me, was part of the problem.

The last resort was the NHS appointment. I waited the four months before it came round, and to be honest I wasn't expecting much from it, as at this point nobody seemed to have been able to help. But I was surprised. Instead of giving me hearing tests, prescribing dodgy drugs, or charging me thousands of pounds to go through a desensitisation programme, they gave me "hearing therapy". I was skeptical at first, because I didn't equate an ear problem with a need for a hearing shrink. Fortunately though I wasn't subjected to hearing psychobabble, but practical and (no pun intended) sound advice.

First, I had to stop using earplugs in everyday scenarios. I was told that this is one of the worst things a hyperacusis sufferer can do, as when the earplugs are taken out, the brain perceives everyday noises as far louder than they actually are. It reinforces the hypersensitivity to sound.

Earplugs – but special, expensive ones (they cost about £170) – were still to be used in loud musical contexts where noise levels would damage anybody's hearing - but they were to be taken out at regular intervals.

Secondly, I was told I had to try my best to stop worrying about sound, and to stop being 'afraid' of it. The more I worried about sound, the more I had been focussing on it, and the more I tried to avoid it. A reassurance from the hearing therapist that I had not permanently damaged my ears really helped in this regard, as did some simple suggestions on how to relax. Eventually, I learnt to go out and about without earplugs, and experience noise the way everybody else did again. And thankfully I was able to remix "Twisted City" at a reasonable level.

By the time I felt my hearing was back to normal I had spent approximately £760, and seen three GPs, three consultants, three nurses, two trainee hearing therapists and a hearing therapist. The emotional cost had been huge too: I had nearly given up on my music and my girlfriend.

Eventually I got very good help from the medical profession, but if there was more knowledge within it about hyperacusis I am sure I could have recovered more quickly and avoided those whispered fights with my girlfriend. But ultimately I think the whole thing was good for me; I'm extremely careful these days when it comes to mixing music at high volumes – the cause of the problem, I'm sure – and I don't do things which are effectively bad for my ears (or fashionista reputation) like wear earplugs in restaurants. 

For more information about hyperacusis and my experience of it, along with useful resources about the condition and on where to get help, please see my hyperacusis FAQs section.