Even more January greetings from hannahjdavies.com…I realised that it would be a cool idea to keep a track of how many posts I’ve made by occasionally quitting with the ‘oh-so-ironic’ names and actually just telling you a number. So here we are: post number 24. Yeah, I was gonna make a Jack Bauer joke there but I think a Dane Bowers one might be more appropriate considering that the ‘singer-songwriter’ has just come second place in this year’s Celebrity BB.
Is it just me or…
1) Does Dane look weirdly like Anthony Costa? Are they, in fact, the same person?
2) Does a “Dane Bowers” sound like a specially bred sheepdog?
3) Am I the only person who heard this:
on loop everytime he engaged in parlance with other members of the house? It’s stuck in my head like a tapeworm.
Anyways, I digress, Alex Reid – the loveable ‘doofus’ of the house came out on top (not a reference to his new adult flick) – and Dane has seemingly gone back to being a ‘singer-songwriter’ for the time being. Whatever that means. Swedish voyeur Jonas aka Basshunter has presumably flown home, so us girls can breathe easy for a sec without having to worry about him re-enacting the moment when he left a pencil lying around for a helpless lass to chew on…which had been up his friend’s “area”. Should always observe that rule about not chewing borrowed stationary, right?!
Meanwhile, foul-mouthed ‘Lady’ Sovereign’s raison d’etre was to shock us with her childish behaviour, and then slag everyone off for “treatin’ me like a child!” She really made a (corned beef) hash out of staying popular in the house. Not sure if it was just me who thought that this Daily Mail pic looked like Davina “Peter Pan” McCall had gone all Fantasia on us and spawned an evil, (younger) twin?
Annoying Davina actually went in to the house, albeit for 48 hours, but the real stars of the show were big-lipped billionairess Ivana, who was duped into thinking she had won a business award, and Dane, whose chilli-themed attempts to ruin dinner for a task were actually met with culinary compliments. He went on to fake a nightmare in order to win the task, but to be honest I doubt anyone in the house was getting sweet dreams with oddball Stephen ‘Alex’s Brother’ Baldwin’s cautionary Biblical tales and glammma modull Nicola T’s spooky premonitions that something was wrong with her baby daughter.
Anyways, I digress; but this is a little scary:
Celebrity Big Brother 7 was one to remember, alright. We had a bit of everything, really, including wrinkly Ronnie Wood’s ‘girlfriend’ Katia, who bore a striking resemblence to a creepy doll and didn’t really have a lot to say for herself.
Sisqo was surprisingly cool. Guess I would be chilled-out too if I’d been living in the bargain bin of Asda since 1999, right next to all that Birds Eye.
Moving swiftly on…
Are the KIDS united?
I hate book-ending ‘pop culture’ posts with ‘culture posts’ but here we go…
Jacob Wheldon is your average 16 year old.
Until his parents took away his copy of COD this week, he could happily spend hours online and his penchant for Facebook is undeniable. He loves Cheryl Cole. Oh, I almost forgot…he’s a musician who was sharing a stage with Bloc Party when most of us were just getting to grips with the idea of ‘indie music’ rather than dance compilations of Billie Piper and Sonique (I do genuinely own a few of those). For all intents and purposes, Jacob has been Lo Fi Culture Scene since the age of 13, although he caught up with me to talk about his future now that the band are on a hiatus…
Here’s a tasty portion of vintage Lo-Fi if they’ve escaped your radar, with “ABSTRACT” from 2008:
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Hannah J Davies: “Abstract” was written when you were rather young…is the girl in question real, or was she a composite figment of your combined pubescent imaginations?
Jacob Wheldon: I write all the lyrics for the band, i think “Abstract” really was a large overreaction to friends who were starting to drink/do drugs/smoke for the first time. The girl is basically just a metaphor for what I hoped it wouldn’t do to my friends. I still hope it doesn’t, but i’m less worried now.
HJD: Officially best hidden drug ref since ‘Golden Brown’ in that case. Your video for the new single “Waxwork” was filmed at Bush Hall, which is a beautiful venue…do you prefer ‘haunts’ like this to the commercialised ‘chains’ of venues *coug&h O2 Academys etc?
JW: Definitely, with no disrespect to any of the O2 Academies we’ve played, we are not fans of them at all. Bush Hall is the venue I use to put on all the shows that I promote, it’s a beautiful venue, and the people there are the best people to work with. I think it’s a shame that there aren’t more venues like it.
Lo-Fi with “WAXWORK” (’09), as heard on Radio 1. Ring the changes…:
HJD: Do you ever get any weird fanmail?
JW: We get a lot of strange messages through our Myspace, most prominently from Japanese fans as their English isn’t great, but all of it is really appreciated.
HJD: Do you think having four out of five members with curly hair impoves your indie credentials or makes it harder in a way…besides avoiding cities with high humidity you must get a lot of people assuming that you are a standard Kooks/The View cover band?
JW: Yeah a surprising amount of people comment on all of us having curly hair, i don’t really know what it does for our ‘indie credentials’, we get a lot of people relating us to The Kooks, which i don’t see as a bad thing at all, though many do, but i loved Inside In/Out [The Kooks] [Ed: can I join…please?]
HJD: What has been your favourite track to play live with Lo-Fi?
JW: Favourite track to play, in all honesty was our cover of “I Gotta Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas at our school’s Battle Of The Bands to end the night in November, and that was incredible. But of our own songs, probably a song called “Yes”. It gets people dancing and people are usually singing along with the chorus before the end of the song, even if they’ve not heard it before.
HJD: Finally, where does Jacob Wheldon go from here?
JW: I’ve got to get my GCSEs out of the way – we all do. For the moment i’m doing a lot of lyric-writing, and some songwriting. I’m working on with a guy called Dean Tynan which i’m very excited about, then soon we’ll [Jacob and Lo-Fi members Angus, Tom M, Tom H, Callum] be getting back together to start writing for whatever the name of the next project will be. I’m also starting to write for a website called Get Your Ears Out, reviewing a few shows and introducing some new bands. I’m hoping to do some more promoting as I did a few shows last year at Bush Hall to raise money for Teenage Cancer Trust so i hope to do a few more this year. I also want to get involved in some form of acting if i can as soon as possible…so i’m busy as ever.
Sounding off:
Jacob on… the disposable music industry:
Haha, well i would say that i’m very separate from the others [members of the band] in that, i got very very bored of guitar music about 6 months ago, and as a result have just looked elsewhere for new music. It’s not just pop music that i’ve taken to, but there was definitely something that intrigued me as to the way [pop producers] Xenomania work. They seem to have some kind of formula to writing great pop songs, and it was intriguing to see how they’d managed to do it for so long without really having to change a lot in terms of style. What interests me about pop music is the core of the songs and the melodies..I think if you can look past all the over-production and the auto-tuned vocals, a lot of it is very good stuff or else the people who wrote the songs wouldn’t be paid to write them.
Jacob on… the lowest point of Lo-Fi:
It was probably an internal thing at some point. It’s not like we don’t get on, but there’s always going to be arguments in any relationship. It keeps things fresh and exciting, though it’s important not to let it turn into an episode of Hollyoaks, which has happened on occasions.
Jacob on… freebies:
We got a lot of free albums and studio time from labels who wanted to sign us which was quality, we were delighted with it. Our booking agents also get us absurd amounts of guest passes to various shows which we are eternally grateful to them for.
Jacob on… mixtape heaven*:
Bloc Party – So Here We Are
Coldplay – The Scientist
Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road
Mark Knopfler – Sailing To Philadelphia
Curtis Mayfield – Move On Up
*subject to change…every few minutes 🙂
– Thanks to Jacob Wheldon. Lo-Fi are represented by 13artists and Kids records.
VICE VICE BABY: Noam Chomsky
Before I go I better talk about VICE. I’ve – rather excitingly – just become part of their new Blog Network (you can find a list of the other Vicetastic members here.
This just means that, from time to time, I’ll cover new and exclusive content from Vice and VBS, but it doesn’t mean that my output won’t remain typically hannahjdavies!
Firstly, VBS caught up with Noam Chomsky recently…you can watch the full interview here, and below is a little teaser of the esteemed academic and ‘father of linguistics’ talking arts, speech, protest, Bad Religion, Obamarama and Americana plus much more, all with his usual eloquence and Conservative brand of anarchism.
Slightly more sense spoken between Obama’s online publicity guru Kate Albright-Hanna and Chomsky when they caught up in Dublin where he was giving a lecture, than happened here in 2006:
Chomsky proves himself to be a thought-provoking speaker in both interviews, although the latter certainly sheds more light on the world of politics and arts than Cohen did, although oddly enough, he is also Jewish and has a pretty good degree behind him so maybe they talked more enlighteningly off-camera.
Do watch Kate Alrbight-Hanna and Noam Chomsky having a truly intellectual interview here.
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Adieu til next time,
x x x x
Hannah J Davies 