Catmachine

Our lives are slowly being stolen from us an hour at a time. I am of course rather predictably complaining about Daylight Saving Time . Well I would at this time of year. However, I think it is something worthy of study. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. Clocks go forward, clocks go back. But how come we only ever notice them going forward? I'm serious. In the autumn when the clocks return to GMT where they should remain (it is, after all, based upon the Sun being overhead at the Prime Meridian at noon) you don't even notice. For all the talk of " a whole extra hour in bed " time seems normal and certainly come Monday morning, getting up for work is just as difficult (or easy, depending upon the temperament) as it ever was. There is no discernable difference. However, in the Spring when they are advanced an hour in a bid to give golfers more time on the green it couldn't be more noticeable. Despite it not seeming so bad...

Tuesday 7 June 1994 Once again I found myself standing at the exit of a service station with my thumb out. Compared with the previous day's journey, today's was going to be a piece of piss. I'd got the bus from Manchester City Centre to just beyond the suburbs and made my way down country lanes to Knutsford Services where I'd sneaked in the back way and from where I was hoping to get a lift straight down the M6 to Birmingham. It didn't take that long and I did it in one hit. Once in Birmingham I had ample time to find somewhere to freshen up, get something to eat and make myself feel slightly human again. After that I went in search of the venue. It was called Edwards and I eventually discovered it tucked away in a side street slap bank in the city centre. The entrance was tall and narrow, squeezed in between two other businesses; once inside there were a couple of flights of stairs leading up to a dark nightclub decorated in black, blue and mirrors. I arrived ...

Previously on Dreaming of the Starlight: After the first gig at Sheffield's Leadmill I'd curled up in a corner of the coach station. Now read on... Sunday 5 June 1994 By the time it started getting light and other people started hanging around, I hadn't really slept. Despite the fact that this was only the first leg, I really felt I couldn't face an all day hitch to Glasgow after no sleep. Suppose I missed the gig? To go all that way for nothing would be too much to bear. Luckily having spent the night in the coach station gave me a cunning idea. I could go by coach. And so it came to pass that I ended up rolling into Glasgow on a bright June afternoon. Being able to check the locations of such things quickly and easily on the web was still a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye at this point (and the Google founders were still two years away from their groundbreaking PhD research project) but luckily I had been at the self-same venue selling merchandise for Toya...

"In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul."  Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything Sunday evenings are amongst the most unpleasant time spans it is possible to experience. Whilst both Tony Hancock and Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged may have had a problem with Sunday afternoons , it's only during the evening when things start to get really nasty and you become filled with a sense of disappointment and self loathing because once again you didn't get nearly enough done. This isn...

If you were to look at what was once my record collection, became my CD collection and now in the digital age is ascending to a higher state of MP3, you'd find that a large proportion of the music has female vocals. Perhaps not as large a proportion as there should be, but I suspect that is merely a reflection of the sexual inequality that is still as rife in the music industry today as anywhere else. However, if you were to look at a list of my favourite bands, the top ten as it were, you would find that they almost all have female vocals. This is no coincidence. To me the sound of a female voice is so much more pleasant than a male one, a woman singing has a cold, clear, and above all coherent beauty that is such a long way from the fake american accented drawl of so many male artists. This is a personal preference of course and there are exceptions to every rule. But on the whole... Yes, I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't that either. When I first started g...