Music bargain of the year!

Attention! Particularly if you’re reading this on Facebook! The Superlative MJ Hibbett has had a funny turn and reduced all the prices on his online shop. So if you like tunesome, heart-warming, funny but at times devastatingly acute songs, head over there now! One of the very best albums of 2006, We Validate!, can be delivered to your door for eight miserly pounds! For another four quid you can get his debut album Say It With Words! Buy both and you’ll get two free CDs crammed with treats! It’s Proper Indie at Value Prices! Seriously, I’d do it if I didn’t have them already (except the free CDs, actually…).

No miracle

Crikey – for the third quarter of that match I thought I had tempted fate dreadfully. But Croatia were remarkably resilient, playing stylish and pacey football right to the end of a match they didn’t even need to win. It’s the most exciting I’ve found football for years!

Come on Croatia!

I’m not the sort of person who blogs about football, indeed I refuse to create a “Football” tag on this blog. That said, I was so pleased when I flipped over from How To Look Good Naked to see Croatia two-nil ahead that I just had to write something while it lasted.

Here’s why I don’t want England to qualify. Primarily, it’s to save us all from a summer of shite next year, when the media will go mad and pretend they think England will win. England will be transformed into a nation of morons with flags everywhere. It will just be awful. Writing at half time, it looks as though there is at least a chance we could be spared all that. Trouble is, whenever I watch England matches on the telly, the buggers always win, to my annoyance. Still, at least if they get through we will have the consolation of being able to watch them crash out of the tournament proper next year.

We need to be honest: England is not a great footballing nation. Our national team isn’t all that good, when compared to serious contenders for major championships. We are enthusiastic, but we are not great. In particular, the England team has a habit of failing to win matches that it really ought to, against weaker opposition or when they’ve taken an early lead.

That said, we are just about good enough that we ought to be able to qualify for a major tournament without major drama – there can be no doubt of that. If England do indeed fail to qualify, there can be no justification for Steve McClaren retaining his job.

I’m going to go back to grinning now, unless and until England equalise. But I do feel Scotland and Northern Ireland deserve recognition for strong efforts to qualify that do them, as small national sides, a lot of credit.

The MJ Hibbett Experience

I was slightly shocked at how long it was since I had seen MJ Hibbett – I’d missed sufficient gigs that one of my friends feared from my successive absences earlier in the year that I might be dead.

So last night’s Totally Acoustic(TM) night at The Lamb reminded me – not that I should have needed reminding – just how darn enjoyable a Hibbett gig can be. It was indeed an animated Hibbett, swinging around with ukelele and guitar (not at once), to the point where I couldn’t get a decent photo on my admittedly limited camera phone. Pete Weiss, by contrast, stood reasonably still for photographic purposes, and also turned in a charming set, apparently made up from a list of songs he might possibly decide to do, rather than an actual set list of songs to do, in order.

The evening did confirm my suspicion of Young’s ales to some extent: their Winter Warmer is a lovely, but rich, dark pint, but their Special and Bitter don’t quite do it for me. Young’s Bitter is the only ale served at my club (ooh, get me!) and I’d throught they perhaps just didn’t keep it well, but maybe I was putting the blame in the wrong place. That said, I was kindly bought several pints of the stuff last night and, ahem, managed to drink it.

Said drinkage culminated in a final conversation of which Mark claims to be able to remember little. My only recollection was that it involved a lot of reminiscing – by chaps slightly older than myself – about mud-ridden Glastonbury festivals past, and trying to work out which were the two consecutive years where it was really bad. I suggested ‘97 and ‘98, as I remembered seeing it reported… on Newsround. This was not true, but nevertheless I was jovially told to fuck off.

[edit] Grr, the options for laying out multiple picture in Blogger are a bit limited, aren’t they? [/edit]

Here’s a record you should buy

Album review: A Million Ukeleles by MJ Hibbet

MJ Hibbett keeps giving me things – CDs, badges, T-shirts – all sent through the post with a breezy note invariably beginning “Hello young man!” Mark is by no means the worst offender in this – almost everyone I encounter via work is a fair bit older than me – but I always have to remind myself not to feel irked or condescended-down-to by this: there will be a generation of dreadful young people whom I can justifiably address as “young man” and who will remind me of my increasing age and impending mortality before too long. So the trick is to try and enjoy it, really.

If you don’t know MJ Hibbett’s music, or him personally (I’m not sure one without the other is especially common, and this is a Good Thing) you should rectify the situation immediately. He has just released a new album, A Million Ukeleles, after three records with his band The Validators (named long before Oyster card readers came on the scene), with a fourth to follow. It’s an intriguing sidestep: the songs retain their humour, their optimism and their honesty, but obviously they sound a bit different with Mark playing most of the instruments (plus sundry Validators and others as occasional guests). The effect is, as you’d expect, a more basic sound, though it’s not truly “lo-fi” – all told it recalls Mark’s old tape releases of the mid-nineties, which had more or less petered out by the time I first encountered him in 1998 (free cassette with a fanzine! Ah, those were the days…), but escapees from which have cropped up as bonus material on some more recent releases.

Some of these are old songs, and some are perhaps those that didn’t find favour with the Validators. Down the Narborough Road and Chips and Cheese, Pint of Wine, revisit the nostalgic territory of Insert Title Here and Last Orders from 2003’s Validators album This Is Not A Library, while She Tastes Like Sugar, Save a Meadow and Hey William go to show that you can be sentimental in a song and still make something that is worth listening to. The strongest track of the collection is probably the title track, which kicks off the album with an unexpectedly rustic sound, and which reminds me of Jim Bob’s album School of last year. Like a lot of Mark’s songs, it expounds a rumination, in this case the idea that ukuleles (or however you wish to spell it…) would be a far better instrument for getting kids enthused about music than recorders or what-have-you, and are cheap and easy enough to be viable for the purpose.

As a Hibbett devotee of quite a few years’ standing, I enjoyed this record enormously. If you’ve not got any of his previous albums, you might be best to start with last year’s superlative Validators outing We Validate! – available from his website, g’wan, click on the link to the right! But if you’ve any sense you’ll then want to follow up with this, so be warned it’s available as a download only (there are some hand-packaged CD copies, but I feel pretty sure they will all have gone by now). As a solo side-project (and it’s wrong to call it that – it is, after all, a full MJ Hibbett album!) it’s a damn site more rewarding than Thom Yorke’s Radiohead side-step The Eraser.

If you’re in or near London, MJ Hibbett is playing upstairs at The Lamb, in the Bloomsbury Square / Gray’s Inn Fields area, next Tuesday, November 6th, in a special “after work” acoustic gig, kicking off at around 6:30 (I think). See you there!