Archive for March, 2003

Faxed my MP again: FOR

Published by Dan Sumption on March 11, 2003 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

Faxed my MP again:

FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

Mr Richard Caborn
MP for Sheffield Central
House Of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA

Tuesday 11 March 2003

URGENT: LICENSING BILL [HL]

Dear Mr Caborn,

I am writing to express grave concerns over the Licensing Bill [HL] currently under consideration by Parliament, despite having not received a reply to my previous fax on the subject of identity cards (I feel I ought to make you aware that I participated in a survey related to that fax, which is being used to compile a league table of MPs’ responsiveness - having checked the results of that survey you do not come out of it particularly well).

The proposed Licensing Bill includes a repeal of the “two in a bar rule” which allows certain types of music performance to take place without licensing. I strongly believe that proposed legislation will have a detrimental effect upon live music. As a sometime-musican myself, as well as somebody who has greatly enjoyed listening and participating in open folk music nights, a centuries-old tradition at many Sheffield pubs, I am astonished and mystified at the government’s heavy-handed approach which is likely to criminalise many such events.

The proposed legislation is all the more unfathomable given that satellite or terrestrial tv, radio, and jukebox music (all with rather shorter provenances than live music) are to be exempt from licensing, no matter how powerfully amplified. In addition, the majority of noise-related complaints connectred with pubs and similar establishments arise from the noise made by drinkers leaving the premises (as somebody who lives 100 yards from two pubs, in an area popular with student drinkers, I can certainly attest to this). The decision to exclude places of worship from the remit of the bill also strikes me as somewhat illogical.

Should you be unfamiliar with the details of the bill, some of the injustices it seeks to make law include:

- 110,000 on-licensed premises in England and Wales (pubs, bars, restaurants etc) lose their automatic right to allow one or two musicians to perform. A form of this limited exemption from entertainment licensing control dates back to at least 1899.

- The provision of a piano for public use becomes illegal unless licensed.

- 5,000 registered members clubs lose their licensing exemption for public entertainment.

- Thousands of private events, hitherto exempt, become licensable if ‘for consideration and with a view to profit’.
The same applies to any private performance raising money for charity.

- A new licensing criterion is introduced: the provision of ‘entertainment facilities’. This could mean professional rehearsal studios, broadcasting studios etc.

- Carol singing on front door-steps and busking could also be outlawed under the proposed Bill. Government lawyers dispute this, but Government Ministers in the Lords have confirmed that organised carol singing in such places as railway stations or shopping malls would be licensable.

- Musicians organising their own gigs could face criminal prosecution if they don’t first check that premises hold the appropriate authorisation for live music. This would apply even to a performance in your local pub.

- While premises that sell alcohol do not face an extra costs to apply for an entertainment license if applying simultaneously, premises which do not sell alcohol will be faced with costly additional administration. Even normally licensed premises are likely to face the additional time and cost of local authority scrutiny, public consultation, and possible public hearings.

- Similar legislation in New York was struck down because it violated First Amendment rights; it is quite possible that the proposed Bill could be found in contravention of Article 10(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

- The proposed legislation is open to over-zealous enforcement, as was the case when Westminster Council recently fined a pub in Soho over its customers’ “swaying”, which the council interpreted as unlicensed dancing.

- The maximum penalty for the provision of unlicensed performance will be a £20,000 fine and six months in prison.

In summary, the bill appears to be illogical, draconian and very poorly thought out. The government has stated that its intention is to stamp out anti-social behaviour, but I believe that a more likely effect will be to deter those who do drink and behave responsibly, smother traditional practices and the grassroots of the UK music industry, while doing little to address the real issues.

I would welcome your comments on all of the above points. I very much hope that you will not be voting for the bill in its present state, and will instead push for a system more in keeping with those which are popular and succesful in more liberal countries such as Scotland and Ireland.

Thank you,
Dan Sumption

We finally made it to

Published by Dan Sumption on March 8, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

We finally made it to Chez Lahlou’s restaurant last night - it’s only around
the corner from us, literally 1 minute’s walk, and is about the only French
restaurant in Sheffield, always fully booked and I’d heard good things said
about it… all of which makes it strange (very strange, for me) that
we’d never been there before. OK, slight lie, we went there a couple of years
ago, when Gill was about 6 months pregnant with Lola - but Gill came over very
dizzy, walked outside for some fresh air, and then fainted up against the front
of the restaurant, waking up in a slight mess of mixed bodily fluids - all of
this before our starters even arrived, so we caught a taxi straight home, and
my escargots somehow didn’t taste quite the same re-heated from the bag.

It was… well, it was exactly what I expected, which I’m sorry to say wasn’t
a great deal. See, although I’d heard good things about it, I know my
expectations of a restaurant are somewhat different from most of my friends’,
South Kensington has left me jaded. And from the short time we’d spent there
before, I did have an inkling what it would be like.

First of all the place is just too damned crowded - small restaurants are great,
not so milking the maximum out of them by squeezing tables up alongside one
another and not leaving enough elbow room to swing a steak-knife (which, incidentally,
is what Gill was given to eat her duck with - isn’t that supposed to be a bad
reflection on the toughness of the duck, or something?) Even the entrance was
tiny - a person-sized space between two doors which doesn’t leave room for the
two doors to open, making entering the restaurant a complex operation (especially
as both doors are prone to jamming) and let in vast quantities of the chilly
air that I presume the two-door setup was supposed to help keep out. We managed
to squeeze ourselves inside, and I climbed into my chair with some difficulty,
wedged as it was between table and wall.

We were promptly given two menus, no offer of aperetifs though, a shame because
I really fancied a Kir Royale - but as aperetifs were obviously very much out
of vogue there, I very much doubt they would have cracked open a bottle of bubbly
just for my sake. Unfortunately the menus did not come with a wine list, this
only turned up about 10 minutes later after we’d ordered. The wine itself arrived
a lifetime or two later, after we’d finished our starters. Even then, the waitress
opened it and left it standing on the counter for about 10 minutes before bringing
it to our table and pouring our glasses. The thing I was looking forward to
most when I set off for the meal was knocking back some half-decent wine - I
know things are supposed to be better if you have to wait for them, but it is
possible to have too much of a bad thing.

While we waited for our food we were brought nibbles - some little pieces of
chicken on the bone, with a crust of sweet something or other, and vegetable
crudites with a thick vinaigrette dip. I know I shouldn’t, but I just had to
try the chicken. Tasty, but very greasy. Next came some bread (hmm… two courses into the meal
and our starters haven’t even arrived, let alone the wine) - slices of supermarket
faux-baguette. Finally our starters arrived (along with some more bread - much
nicer this lot, home-baked soft mini-ciabatta style rolls). I had garlic mushrooms
(actually, I think there was something in the menu that made them sound slightly
more interesting that standard garlic mushrooms - flamed in pernod, or something,
but it didn’t notice that much). The plate of mushrooms was huge - it would have
made a decent enough main course, especially garnished as it was with half an
orange, slices of apple, cucumber, lettuce and onion, and swimming in butter.
Gill had a similarly huge plate holding a fish I’d never heard of before (pigeot
or something? Gill was worried it might turn out to be a pigeon), with maitre
d’hotel sauce and a garnish of strawberries - the fish was overcooked, too dry
and chewy.

For the main course, I had lemon sole with bearnaise sauce - probably the best
part of the meal, although still not great - the fish was encased in batter
and the sauce had a rather ageing glazed look, but the fish inside was at least
cooked right. Again, there was masses of garnish. Gill had duck - when the waitress
asked how she wanted it she said "just a little bit bloody", to which
the waitress enquired "medium?" - I warned Gill that this meant it
would be overcooked, and of course it was. There were tiny flecks of pink in
the centre, but most of it was brown and a little too dry. I much prefer the
approach of the serving staff at Simply
Heathcotes the other week - when Gill ordered the duck there, the waitress
says "it comes very rare, a little bloody - is that OK?" - leave
the chef to make the decisions, eat it when they think is best unless you have
strong reasons for wanting it otherwise. But, of course, this is Sheffield,
so not allowing a person the option of getting it "well done" would
be a sin. At least Gill didn’t lack for quantity - there seemed to be an entire
duck there, swimming in its own pond of orange sauce.

And, as if we weren’t struggling enough with the food on our plates, the waitress
turned up again as we were well into our food with a huge bowl of vegetables
(new potatoes, roast potatoes, cauliflower cheese, red cabbage, green cabbage,
courgettes, carrots, and probably a couple of others I’ve forgotten). More proof
that in Sheffield, the less you hear "less is more" the better. We
struggled bravely, but in the end we were only able to manage about half of
our main course each, and a measly quarter or less of the massed vegetables.
It has long been fashionable to slag off "nouvelle cuisine" with its
"tiny portions", but I have to say that even when I’ve eaten in places
where the servings looked tiny, I’ve never left feeling undernourished (especially
after 3 courses of tiny portions). It seems that people prefer quantity to quality.

In a similar way they also prefer choice - I’m quite happy going to a restauraunt
that only has three dishes on the menu, as long as they’re good dishes, my only
gripe with that is that if it’s a really good restaurant then I’m likely
to go back soon and two of the three dishes are likely to be the same - but
I can cope with that. But people want freedom of choice, freedom to choose crap,
the Americanization of sandwiches and ice cream, 573 varieties of everything.
This struck me when I visited a gastro-pub in the Derbyshire Dales a few years
back - I was mesmerised by their row of blackboards advertising meal-after-meal
of enticing-sounding grub. There were about 20 to 40 each of meat dishes, poultry
dishes, fish dishes, seafood dishes, vegetarian dishes, plus God knows how many
starters. It took me about half an hour of mouth-watering anticipation just
to choose something… then when my food turned up it was a heavily overcooked
piece of white fish in a mediocre sauce. I had to give up eating it halfway
through, the fish gunged my mouth up so much that I could barely swallow it.
Freedom of choice, pah! Give me a chef who can show me what I didn’t realise
what I wanted, not one who can make a pathetic attempt at what I thought I wanted.

Anyway, maybe I’m totally irrationally prejudiced, quite possibly so and I’m
certainly generalising, but I see Sheffield (and perhaps more generally
South Yorkshire) as the centre of quantity/choice culture. So culturally backwards
and closed to new ideas. Of course, most of the world is like that really, but
somehow it seems to me that here they are morseo. Gill’s opinion on the subject
definitely influences my views on this (as with most things), after all, she’s
from the place, she should know it well enough, right? If you were to personify
Sheffield, you couldn’t do much better than the "Rubbish"
character from the Fast
Show (whose philosophy of life, in fact, almost exactly mirrors Gill’s dad,
right down to the use of the word "Rubbish", every bit as much as
the Brilliant
character could be Gill’s brother - in fact, I rather suspect that Paul Whitehouse
and Charlie Higson may have been sitting next to the two of them in a public
place when they were writing this part of the show).

So, did I enjoy my night out? Well, yes, I did actually. Despite my many protestations
about Chez Lahlou ("it was bluddy roobish!") it does have one or two
redeeming qualities. The food, despite not being good, certainly wasn’t bad (like I said, I’m just spoilt). It wasn’t cheap but neither was it frighteningly expensive
(especially when you calculate the price by volume) - we had the most expensive
bottle of wine on the list (a Sancerre which was, surprise surprise, fairly
mediocre) which cost £22. The meal including wine came to £55.
Also the staff, despite their treacle-slow dizziness, are as friendly as hell.
I felt less embarrassed about taking back a doggy-bag of snails last time, after
they offered to bag up the (substantial) remains of our meal for us on this visit too (but somehow
carrying home half a duck carcass, half-eaten fish and a market-garden’s worth
of vegetables didn’t appeal, neither did trying to tackle them again the next
day - although the cat might genuinely have been happy). Similarly, I didn’t
feel so bad about leaving early on our earlier visit, because this time a group of people
arrived, sat down for 20 minutes or so and ordered, and then made excuses and
left (I didn’t hear the reason why - I think it may have been the arctic gale
from the front door just next to them, possibly backed up by the fact that a
dish they wanted wasn’t available).

I went for a walk

Published by Dan Sumption on March 8, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I went for a walk in the sunrise this morning. Actually, tell a lie, I was about five
minutes too late to catch the sunrise in its full glory, and walking in the
wrong direction, but the view from Bole Hills and Rivelin Bank is almost as
inspirational as a sky full of marmalade-cream clouds - I do believe I had a
tear in my eye as I looked out across North-West Sheffield (although that was
probably as much down to lack of rest and love of live as anything else), I felt
like I could fall forwards, arms outstretched, and soar across all those rows
of boxes like the Angel
of the North.

I’d woken up earlier at 3.30am, realised that F1 qualifying was on TV, and careened
upstairs in time to watch the end of Jensen Button’s lap followed by Michael
Schumacher caressing every curve on the circuit, in the most virtuoso display
of human computer interaction I’ve ever witnessed. I tried going back to bed
afterwards, but my mind was still racing so I came upstairs to work, type emails and
blog. I saw those blue-white-orange strips in the sky signalling morning’s approach, and knew I had to get outside (it
struck me yesterday that the only time I’d left the house in about three days
was to use the washing machine in the outhouse in our back garden), just too
late to see anything really spectacular.

I had my MP3 player on - started off with some Bow
Wow Wow again. Something struck me - I’m often asked who my bass playing
influences are, and I always reel off Lemmy
(Hawkwind era - and yeah, he is the one that hooked me on the idea of Rickenbackers
- assisted by Chris Squire and others) then later Jean
Jaques Burnel and finally Bill
Laswell (mainly Material/Massacre/Baselines era, and subsequently Last
Exit totally threw my musical direction and altered my life irreversibly),
with a few other minor influences in between who I always forget, they’re so
influential. But hearing Bow Wow Wow again after a break of years, I realise
that this is where it all started. The first record I ever bought was Adam
and the Ants‘ Prince Charming - I came to music late, was 12 at
the time, for until then I remember being frightened of having an opinion on
any music in case my Dad didn’t like it. I loved Adam and the Ants, but they
were pop, everyone loved them, but Bow Wow Wow were my own little secret (and
how proud I was when they achieved chart success and coolness was duly conferred)
- I think my next purchase was the gloriously titled See Jungle! See Jungle!
Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! - I still have it,
although the wonderful
cover of my Cassette Pet, which I folded, unfolded and gazed at endlessly,
is now rather ragged. Anyway, listening again I recognised the wonderful bass
sounds of Leroy Gorman as something akin to my own - that spindly tinnyness,
the nervous itchy far-too-many-notes-in-one-bar-iness, the it-shouldn’t-work-yet-it-sounds-wonderful—to-me-at-least-ness.
I never really left my spiritual home. I realised that, in Bow Wow Wow, guitar
and drums were the rhythym instruments with bass playing lead - what I had always
assumed was a double-tracked drum kit on C30 C60 C90 Go and other tracks
is actually the guitar, while the bass wonders off pulling fanciful melodies
out of bags. Ahhh

Anyway, next up were The Coral - the
first time I’d given their album a proper listen. I first heard them on Top
of the Pops and was blown away - probably the most awesome performance ToTP
has ever seen, or is ever likely to, if you pushed me I might even say it was
second only to the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s angle-grinding
up of The Word’s set with California Uber Alles in terms of televisual musical
brilliance. Anyway, the album matches up to all expectations, fuck knows how
this bunch of teenage scousers manage to replicate and improve on 60s Nuggets-esque
garage music, but they do, almost every track is a classic, full of depth, symphonic
variations within short pop songs. Respect. Of course, the lyrics are pretty teenagery and crap, but I never give a toss about lyrics anyway except in exceptional circumstances.

I wish I’d taken my camera with me. I’ve never been able to frame a picture,
but today was one of those rare days when pictures frame themselves. Ah well.
I also discovered places I never knew existed, a couple of streets away from
my house. Glad I went out.

Rowan got some hair

Published by Dan Sumption on March 8, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Rowan with hair gell

Rowan got some hair gel with her Red Nose.

I love Vice Magazine! The

Published by Dan Sumption on March 7, 2003 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I love Vice Magazine! The more I read it, the more I love it (and Andrew, Vice’s UK publisher, is a very fun bloke to be in the vicinity of). And their “How to get reamed up the cake” article has changed my life forever :->

I heard this story reported on Radio 4 a while back, but somehow Vice give it a, err, slightly different spin (”No More AIDS… And There’s Going to be Fucking in the Streets”). They are big, they are clever, and they’re funny as hell - they’re rude and offensive as hell as well, but only ever in the nicest possible way, you know they’re only Joshing. Vice’s journalistic style is just about as damn close to perfect as I can imagine a magazine ever coming.

Posted a new review to

Published by Dan Sumption on March 6, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Posted a new review to Amazon - of Delia’s new vegetarian book.

We finally went through the

Published by Dan Sumption on March 6, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

We finally went through the hatch in our living room
roof last night! Yeah, only about two years after moving in
(and a year since John K came to visit and got so excited about
what might be up there), but we made it eventually. We
saw there… not a lot. Well, a triangular space the length of the
house, with actually 4 hatches in it, but the other 3 are all
plasterboarded over. It’s about 5-foot high at the middle, and pretty
sound structurally. Lots of cobwebs and dust and bits of insulating
fluff, but nothing else up there. But wadda space!

Wow… schloozed out on uber-sweet

Published by Dan Sumption on March 6, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Wow… schloozed out on uber-sweet lemon genever, subbing articles for the next FAD, and Bow Wow Wow MP3s playing - fscking blast from the past or what!

C30 C60 C90 Go sounds almost fresh again - still an amazing song, and it’s home-taping philosophy fast forwards well to an era of file-sharing.

It used to break my heart when I went in the shop
and you said my records were out of stock
so I don’t buy records in your shop
now I tape them all ’cause I’m Top of the Pops

Well I don’t need no album rack
’cause I carry my collection on my back

If you’re rich enough to have a record collection
I’ll bring my bazooka round for inspection

C30 C60 C90 go
see-three-oh see-six-oh
C30 C60 C90 go
see-ninety-go
three-oh six-oh nine-oh
GO!

Yeaaah!

It looks like our housing/money

Published by Dan Sumption on March 5, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

It looks like our housing/money problems could be all solved… or at least pushed far enough into the future for us to forget that they exist. See, we’re foolish enough to be actually paying off the money we borrowed to buy our house. Stupid idea. Latest craze is to leave it owing, and mortgage our retirement instead.

The way the sums work is like this - we owe the bank £120k which we are paying back over the next 17 years, along with interest. Stupid idea. Scrap that. Put the debt up to about £175k (the house is, after all, worth about £100k more than that), forget about paying it back for another 25 years, and in the meantime just pay the interest. Means that instead of paying the bank £800 a month we only have to pay them £400, and meantime we get a whole bunch of cash to pay off all our debts…

…AND to build our dream home. See, we finance all this by turning what is now our living room into a three-bedroom house (there is room in there, believe me)… leave the front third as it is, a lounge with a big stained glass window and a very high ceiling, split the other two-thirds by putting a floor halfway up the wall, turn the bottom bit of that into a kitchen and an office, the top part into three bedrooms (the front one of which has a balcony overlooking the living room and sharing the light from the stained glass window), lots of Velux windows in the roof, it’ll be amazing, trust me. We already have a toilet/bathroom outside on the landing, so no worries about that, and the entire downstairs of the house can be turned over to rowdy students who will hopefully pay our mortgage for us by renting it out. And we live happily ever after. In 20 years time, our kids leave home, by which time we either split the house properly and sell a leasehold on the bottom half, or sell the lot (not forgetting that by changing it from a 4 bedroom house to a 7 bedroom house in one of the most expensive parts of Sheffield we have almost doubled the value of the house) and emigrate to a warmer climate.

Oh, and we also demolish the outhouses in the backgarden, leaving the bottom few layers of bricks so we can turn them into a pond and stuff, and at a stroke our garden seems like it’s twice as big.

What can possibly go wrong? (rhetorical question, answers not welcome)

I love Gill’s master-plans, and this time I really do think she’s onto a winner.

I was thinking earlier of

Published by Dan Sumption on March 4, 2003 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I was thinking earlier of throwing together some sort of words of advice for young people, á la William S Burroughs (”If you’re doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, get it in writing. His word isn’t worth shit. Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal”). Kind of near-truisms that I really ought to have realised at the time but that somehow escaped my mind.

And yet… now I can only really think of one, perhaps something to do with my recent failed attempt to get to sleep, while nestled in a deep depression (physical, for a change):

Never buy a matress from IKEA. It may say “pocketed sprung” on the label, but there’s pocketed sprung and there’s pocketed sprung.

<sigh>

(of course, this is subsumed within the greater Dan-ism that you should never buy anything from IKEA… aside from the oft-remarked inability to assemble their cack-goods once you get home, the whole stressful traffic-jam-parking-space-warehouse-shelf-till-queue experience is just not worth it. I have managed to banish IKEA from my life and I’m a much better person for it, my anger at the world has all but disappeared).

Maybe hearing Nick Hornby’s paen to his favourite songs on Radio 4 also prevented me from sleeping. I’ve been hearing about this book all over the last couple of weeks, and it annoys the hell out of me that somebody can get paid good money to ramble on about their 31 favourite songs. Actually, it was very interesting, despite tonight’s installment being about two songs in which I have no interest (well, it would have to be really… I mean, “my favourite 31 songs” is just too personal unless you can make it a good read as well). But still… the very idea. The barefaced cheek of it. Gissa job, I can do that.