Couple of recent international gigs that deserve mention...

Had a great time at Mr Scruff last Friday at Subnine. It was a five hour set - I think we saw four hours of it, during which he traversed funky breaks from crackly, vampy old northern soul instrumentals to weird minimal tech garage or something, on three decks, while tweaking all hell buggery out of everything with a grunty filter. And behind him all the while was a cute flash animated story/ad for his new mix CD, 'keep it solid steel' - I think it's on his website. If you wanna look, find it yourself. He's got a real tight aesthetic, kind of blighty funk, cups of tea and steak and kidney pie and cute and nothing too hard or weird. Very 'dance music for people who struggle with anything too modern', but a great great DJ...

The following Monday was Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, which topped off an outstanding year for country gigs (despite a no-show from Lucinda Williams) with Steve Earle and Jay Farrar and Will Oldham all also being transcendent. Gillian and David played their third of three sold out shows at the Paramount theatre, sound was great, audience was reverent, music was gospel and murder (and botany), patter was intimate folksy. If you don't know her music or missed the shows, just go to the library and check it out, it's timeless, perfectly realised simple stuff, transposing the hellfire damnation/salvation of pre-WWII country to a contemporary setting, without touching the original aesthetic. I like.

Oh and I found this a little while back, which you really should read - best music writer in the biz writing about one of the most interesting labels of the last couple of years.

Ra ra look at me - my Staple article about Taika Waititi has been posted online on 'the big idea: an online blah creative blah blah'.

Suffice to say it was a bad scene.

The usually eloquent Tom Tomorrow had this to say.

And here's an interesting but brief piece of analysis by a Politics Professor which runs against the common thesis that 'moral issues' swung this election for Bush. Instead, he argues, it was the fear of terrorism:

Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him.

Either way, as Ross points out, we're f*cked.

Cute insight into how John Peel chose what to play:

"...his method for choosing what to play on the show was so arbitrary. He called the system 'childish and unfair'. He worked out that every week, if he listened around the clock every day, he received three weeks' worth of music, so he often chose the music that came in good sleeves (skulls particularly appealed), or by bands with great names, or that he'd been handed in a taxi on the way to work."