Sights and Sounds

Looking forward to this weekend’s Sounds Film Festival. Especially the Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound For Glory, and the opening night’s Ballads Of The Book film which will be followed by live music, including the most excellent Zoey van Goey.

Aftercon

So, Newcon went well. Three days of chat, drink, chat, drink, the occasional panel (I was on one, but wasn’t able to offer much of a contribution) and lovely books.

Top five moments:

• Meeting up with friends – Gary, Andrew, Michaela, Sam, Paul, Al, Heather, Debbie, Tiffany, Chaz, John (of course), Chris, Tony (but no Eric, sadly) and actually getting time to talk to them for a change as a result of the membership being so petite, and making many new ones too
• Understanding why Resurrection Cola is so named, and being glad to see the restorative effects of the convention experience taking effect too
• Getting that old inspiration rush once again, boosted by – rather than dampened – public humiliation by certain well kent faces in the business. I shall never watch Family Guy in the same way again.
• Holding the marvellous Subterfuge anthology in my sticky little hands
• Una McCormack’s story “The Great Gig In The Sky” in said book, read on the long journey homeward.

Newcon was well timed for me in a multitude of ways, and I’ve rolled out the other side of it in great creative shape. And that – as they say in the hokey-cokey – is what it’s all about.

Roll on Eastercon.

Stop Press!

Just heard that The Ephemera has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. It’ll be presented at Fantasycon in September. I’ve already signed up, but I’m not holding my breath – the competition looks fierce!

Out!

So, maybe it’s the weather or maybe it’s the clocks going forward or maybe just because it’s May, but all of a sudden good people are putting on good things to go and see. In the last two weeks we’ve seen a shitload of good music, for very little outlay.It all started two Saturdays ago with the Littlest Album 3 launch at The Note, and seemed to steam roll from there. There’s too much to go into detail, but here are the highlights:

Tuesday 2nd – the ever-entertaining Scunner and The Glasgow Glambangers at Bloc.
Thursday 4th – Super Puny Humans (author Alan Bissett reading along to the music of Y’All Is Fantasy Island and Zoey Van Goey) at Oran Mor.
Saturday 5th – Popup Films’ Music and Moving Image at Oran Mor. Five bands interspersed with showings of experimental films. The films were interesting, and the pick of the acts were A Band Called Quinn and Isa And The Filthy Tongues.
Sunday 6th – Boudica’s Ball at Oran Mor. A six act bill featuring female-fronted talent (that could have been better phrased I think). Best for me were Lou Hickey and a soaring set by organiser Colette McKendrick.
Wednesday 9th – WordDogs at The Note. No music this time, but plenty of good stories and the entertainment was top notch. Great to see some old favourites reading new material, including the car-crash punning of Gavin Inglis’ “Springheeled Jock” [spoiiiiing!], and to hear readers I’ve not heard before, like Martin Belk.
Thursday 10th – the last of eight T-break heats, at Tut’s. Six bands given 20 minutes each to impress enough to grab a slot at T In The Park. Some great stuff going on here, interesting and varied. Top of my pile were the lush and majestic Miyagi, with honourable mentions to the spikily energetic Miss The Occupier and totally madcap Cider Spiders. I’d like to see more of the Sorren MacLean band too.
Saturday 12th – not an entertainment as such, but our friends Phil, Janie and VV held a party to wave goodbye to the West End. Lots of good craic there, but we couldn’t last the pace, ending up plonking ourselves on the sofa with pizza, wine and Eurovision.

What do you think we are, party animals?

And that’s it. Have a relatively quiet schedule lined up for the forseeable. Which is a good thing, all things considered.

Not a ConReport

I’ve always thought that if you do Eastercon right you should emerge on the other side with very little you can remember to tell people about, just a sort of warm, fuzzy, drained feeling like you’ve been on a week-long stag-do with a happy-go-lucky bunch of psychic vampires. So, considering that I feel I pretty much did Eastercon (in Chester) right this year, I won’t be doing a report. I know these days people tend to blog on the spot, but c’mon for me that gets in the way of the slow and enjoyable process of Achieving Horizontal as the weekend progresses.But if you’re interested here’s what I do remember:
- I drank some beer (and a small quantity of strange Thai whisky and nasty raspberry vodka, although not at the same time)
- I ate some delicious food (particularly of the Thai variety)
- I toured the Ye Olde Disneyfest of the old town a couple of times
- I talked to many wonderful people
- and I got inspired.

This last point is very important. I usually find the interaction with other writers and the like at Eastercon an inspiring experience, a resetting of personal goals and receiving the energy to go and achieve them. Often – tired though I undoubtedly will be – I head up the road brimming with ideas and twitching to get back to the laptop. I love this aspect of it, but this year I really felt that I needed it, and am exceedingly grateful for the inspirational influx that came from talking to my agent and my friends and people I didn’t know, but do now; from seeing people I admire do well; from seeing the last copy of my collection being sold; from being asked to contribute to a forthcoming anthology; from even being asked to sign a copy of the very first anthology I was in. And if people ask why I go to Eastercon every year – even on a year like this when the event that took place was a, necessarily scaled-back and yet more expensive, replacement for the cancelled original, resulting of many familiar faces not making the trip down from Glasgow and other places – that’s why.

Thank gawd for Eastercon.

Interzone is 25

With the publication of its latest issue (in the shops now!), Interzone magazine is officially 25 years old. I’ve been reading it for at least 80% of that time and over the years it has introduced me to an uncountable list of fantastic writers that have enriched my life. I’ve eulogised about the mag before, and there’s no need to do so again in detail, but:

1/ Interzone started me writing (and has yet to find a way of stopping me).
2/ Interzone has for a long time now been the keystone of British genre fiction; its editors have an unerring eye for new talent that quickly become household names.
3/ Interzone 209 (out now! buy it!) features an interview between myself and Mr Duncan, plus a new Book Of All Hours story by Mr Duncan, PLUS new stories by M John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Alastair Reynolds, Jamie Barras and Daniel Kaysen.

How is it possible you’ve finished reading this and not gone out and bought the thing, or better still ordered a subscription!

It’s a Book? A Film? And a Song?

So, it’s been a busy old week that’s hardly seen me in the house. I don’t normally like having so much stuff happening at once, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable.

So, what’ve we had?

Monday : Band rehearsal ahead of the year’s first gig later in the week. Blasted through the set first time with the energy of an erupting volcano…and left ourselves no juice for the second, decidedly limp run through. Left confident, however, that we’ll put in a good performance – as long as we only have to play the songs the once.

Also, took delivery of the drum tracks from the previous weekend’s recordings (though of course there’s been no time to even listen to them yet).

Tuesday : Worked late and then met up with Em for an impromptu trip to GFT. Babel was not the tough, middle-eastern espionage actioner that I had surmised from the very little I knew about it. Instead it was a thoughtful but rather unremittingly grim study of human communication and language. And is heartily recommended…as long as your not expecting Brad Pitt to be rolling around in the dust blowing things up and shooting people.

Wednesday : Word Dogs day. The event went very well. The venue was well chosen and comfortably attended, the stories well selected and all the readers took the theme of Cry Havoc! to their breasts and did an excellent job. Highlights for me were Eliza Chan’s piece of perplexed Austinian outrage, Rich Mosses’ sleep deprived slice of contemporary bravura, and the ever entertaining Gav Inglis’ tale of retail hell. And then there was Al… his reduced, prosified reworking of his now infamous 43 verse sea shanty was a veritable, joyful broadside of a performance. It was a red-lit Captain Jack Flash dolled up in red and black punk gear, patched with the Jolly Roger even, ranting in our faces like a force-ten and leering like the Pink Privateer hisself. Brilliant.

Me, I read a section from the novel. People liked the monkeys.

Thursday : Gig night, playing for the Pinup guys at their new Ambulance Station night at the Admiral, which if you happen to be in Glasgow, has a great wee venue downstairs from the main pub bit. These kind of multi-band nights are always a bit of a variety show, and this one was no exception. We followed the full-on power fuzz of Conscious Pilot, and after us the assembled audience got to chill and dance a bit to the happy, happy twee-indie (twindie? tweedie?**) songs of Mia Beane And The Asthmatic Scene. Afterwards we kicked back with a few drinks and enjoyed the unbelievable – and occasionally unmentionable – depths of Mr Paul Puppet’s CD collection.

[** This sparked a conversational game. Assuming that any musical style can be performed in a twee manner, a whole new vista of sub-genre names are suddenly available to the music journalist: twee-folk might be "tweek", twee-pop is surely "twop", then we have "twazz", "twock", "twing", "twelectronica". And best of all improvised jazz singing performed with fey vocal delivery MUST be twee-scat. This I want to hear - not just for the juvenile appropriation of the name, yunnerstand - I really want to hear it.]

And there’s more.

Tonight’s extravaganza is a trip to the Academy to see Ben Folds abuse his piano. I’ll watch, listen – possibly marvel even – and be grateful that I don’t have to do anything but be there.

Word, Dog

A date for yer diary, should you be interested in this sort of thing.Wednesday 24th January, 8.30pm
13th Note, King Street, Glasgow
Word Dogs : Cry Havoc! An explosive evening of high-octane fiction readings on the subject of conflict, war, ruckuses, barneys and gentlemen’s boxing brought to you by Word Dogs, the exhibitionist arm of GSFWC.

The format will be something like:
1/ grab a seat and a beer
2/ listen to two or three entertaining stories
3/ grab another beer and have a chat
4/ more stories
5/ more beer… and so on until closing time.

Easy, fun and quieter than Murnie. Come on down.

If noise is more your thing, however, I should also take the opportunity to point out that Murnie are rolling out the loudness guns the following night for Pin-up’s Ambulance Station at the Admiral in Waterloo Street.

Aye well, at least it’s never dull round here.