How To Write A Song

I enjoyed this article and it inspired me to share my own experience with songwriting. 

Firstly the article's headline is a bit of a lie, like most headlines, and any mention of "top songwriting" and "taylor swift" is, swiftly, given the boot after the first paragraph. This not about hit-making. This is about the very Guardian-esque act of trying to learn how to write a song via the medium of going on a retreat. In Wales. Because you can't go on a retreat in, say, Amersham. It's gotta be Wales. They go on walks, they get pissed as farts, they discuss being open and fearless, and then they put pen to paper and write the most god-awful shit you've ever heard.

That's not entirely fair. The resulting song is actually, when the aim is considered as part of the final product, totally fine. If PJ Harvey did an album of dark folk standards about the Lincolnshire Fens and this thing was on it, it'd get five stars in, well, the Guardian. It goes on about mothers and brothers and fathers and sisters and probably draws a line from the roots of human frailty to the blood of trees and sap or something. It's pretty good, but it's also fucking horrible. 

What stood out to me from this article though is the total grift at the moment for masterclasses. No one wants to pay for music anymore but they'll pay to be a hobbyist, playing at music themselves, and so you've got Maestro and Masterclass and all manner of shit coming down the pipe. Like anything, there will be some small nuggets of usefulness from any of these classes, and if you have the money they're probably not a bad thing to do. They certainly won't set you backwards. But I don't think you should pay for it, because it's fucking songwriting. so I'm going to give it to you here, for free.

So. Here's some shit:

One. You don't need a retreat. Obviously they are a lovely experience and if you get the opportunity to go, you probably should. Why not? No work, Wales, making music in a little cabin thing, presumably pissed off your face -- just do it. But if you don't have access to that, then don't fret. You don't need it. You can write your song on the toilet. 

Two. It's easier to write ten songs than one song. That one song has to carry the weight of ten ideas but those ten can be one idea a piece. Sometimes not even that. Make a song with one chord and one word. Done. Move on. 

Three. Get happy. You cannot play your instrument (and you, your own voice, might be your instrument) if you're depressed, sad. If you're sad you can't even get out of bed, never mind wield the harmonic power of a guitar or the full range of your voice. So get happy. Go for a run or a walk. Do some morning pages. Write down a list of ten pigeons who wronged you. 

Four. Songs about love are always assumed as based on fact but no one ever asked Bernie Taupin if he went to space. This is the fallacy, the bullshattery, of Authenticity. Men are perceived as inherently more authentic than women. Notice that no one questions any of Ed Sheeran's totally stupid fucking songs but Taylor Swift gets pulled to bits -- "from Brixton, to Shoreditch, and back to Highgate. These are undoubtedly places that exist in London, but to visit them in the order that Swift describes is frankly farcical, not to mention time-consuming".* My advice here is to fuck it all into the wind. Who gives a shit. Eric Clapton grew up in a house with a garden in Surrey but is somehow regarded as an authentic bluesman, in a lineage with Robert Johnson. It's all nonsense. If you say you are, you are. Do whatever you want. 

Five. Related to Four -- imagine you're someone else. Nothing more authentic than that. For some reason Tom Petty is a potent character for me. Imaging his voice as I try out a melody, imagining the way he in his early stuff really focuses on just slamming a big suspended chord or doing the descending bass thing. Just bam. 

Six. A song can be anything and that can overwhelm you. So you need to set barriers and walls to box it in. Make it so it's only three chords, max, or that it's going to be 1 minute long. 3 chords, one minute, all the lyrics are about a man trying to find his keys. Go. This will be the easiest and stupidest song you've ever written but you'll finish it. This is stolen from the White Stripes. Jack White set strict parameters for the band -- we're going to limit ourselves to guitar, drums, voice -- right down to the three colours. From there you can strain and push against the walls you've put up. Without walls, you can fling off into the sky and never finish anything.

Seven. Go for a walk if you get stuck. That's stolen from Ray Davies. It'll work itself out. It's not "if it's meant to be" it's just.. the process. Sometimes staring at it no longer works and you need to get away from it. There's no other way and it's just a step towards finishing it. 

Eight. Completely rip someone off. Chances are in your beginner state you will end up something so different no one will ever be able to tell. 

Nine. If you can dance to it (and "dance" is a very broad term), your song is by default ten times better than one that you can't dance to. To write a good song with a non-danceable beat takes immense skill -- you're appealing to the listener's sense of melody, emotion, lyrics, because they're going to be paying more attention. If you do a load of 8th notes like the most basic Joy Division rip-off you're halfway there. I highly recommend you make every song like this. Completely copy the beat of "Just Like Heaven". "I Will Follow". "Disorder". Do ten songs like that, all the same, doesn't matter. You now have a live setlist. Writing good songs like Oasis, the majority of which have a loping hip-hop beat, is almost impossible. You will make something bland and plodding -- I know, because I wrote loads of those. They rely on exceptional melody, exceptional vocals, and exceptional amounts of compression on the recordings.

Ten. You are allowed to do this. You are more than whatever you thought you were.

And that's it. I hope you read this advice and give it a go. If you don't think I'm qualified you might be right. But here's my stuff. These are, by any definition, completed songs. Melody. Lyrics. Production. You might think they're crap but they're finished. That's the only bar we're looking at here - completed work. 

Have fun.

*Also this is a totally fine counter-clockwise trip around London. You can leave Brixton via the nearby Overground and take it up to Shoreditch, and then get on the Northern up to Highgate. It would be perfectly fine to do this. The only reason to claim it is not fine is because you're writing about Taylor Swift and you have to be a dickhead for some reason.

 

Opting out

I used to like the idea of an online profile. Not one that people knew about in the modern sense, but a different one per forum, or, later, a different one per platform. 

On skateboarding forums I'd pick whatever avatar represented my tastes at that time and write my replies in the same considered style. This sounds idiotic, but it's true. And then I'd move into music forums and do the same. Maybe I'd be lower case posts, maybe proper grammar and spelling. It was fun to present a style to other users. 

And then it moved into social media. A chosen Facebook photo that's both casual (because whoever cares too much is weird) but considered, and only posts that are the same. An Instagram feed of nice photos, nothing too wordy, nothing too emotional, presenting a digital life that looks fun. 

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not talking about presenting a "false" life, or only sharing the good things in life in order to inspire jealously in others. It's different, but hard to explain. You want people to look at your profile and think "cool". They'll look at the avatar or profile pic (at one point it was pretty sharp if you had a photo of a photo, like a passport pic, as your profile), and think this a nicely curated selection of stuff. 

And over time that curation gets more and more selective, in a Spinal Tap kind of way, and soon you're not posting at all. It's like millenials and ring tones. We turned them off. I didn't realise this was a thing until I read it -- we all, as a generation, have our phones on silent. Not even vibrate. And so too, our social media presence is mostly on mute, as we simply opt out of whatever is going on. I just don't care anymore. Like this blog. I realised I like writing but I don't want comments, or even views. If you read it, great, I don't want to know about it. Go away. Comments are turned off. Forever. 

This is not the same as a digital-detox, or grounding, or some other way of replacing what having a Facebook profile once gave you. It has no replacement -- it just disappears. There's no joining clubs (IRL), learning a new skill (and then writing articles about it), or pouring yourself into some other social media platform. There is simply no longer any desire to reach into the world and see what resonates, whatsoever. The thing about the internet is that you can find your tribe -- we found them -- and then we lost interest.

There is only the further and furthering pruning of an online life until the online-you doesn't exist at all. 

What I learned.

I've spent the last week in a bedroom hiding away from my family with COVID. I'm the one with covid. Not them. Which is why I was hiding away. It's not that complicated, is it?

Anyway. At first I thought I'd use this time for something productive. In hindsight I'm not sure if I let myself off immediately from this. I thought of the cartoon of the bloke in a rowboat in a raging sea and how he's thinking to himself that he should use this time wisely. And I obviously thought of fucking Shakespeare and his fucking plague and his fucking writing hamlet. The prick. 

But then I realised that was his job. He just worked from home. He wrote plays all day every day. This was no different. For me, it was a massive shift from my daily routine, which I was now trying to use as some sort of creative retreat. Cue the bloke in the rowboat. 

But, eventually, I did use the time. And I learnt, or relearnt, a few things about myself and my creative process. 

1. Writing an outline is very hard, especially when you try to use Tom hanks "blowing through an 11 page treatment" of that thing you do "in a week". Was it even a week? Anyway. He clearly had a clear idea clearly in his clear head about that film and the treatment was just getting it on paper for someone else to read. Me, my treatments are more like a screaming brainstorm as I try to get the idea to stand up straight. The only way out of that situation is to type and try and work it out. Pick out the bits you can see and try to link them up. Colour around and outside the lines until the inside is clear. I went from an idea full of holes to a structure that allowed me to pour lampshades into the holes. Which is good enough for me. 

2. You can't write without the outline or the treatment. Or at least you can't get very far. Having a rough set of words to follow when tapping it into a script allows you to speed ahead and not get caught up in not knowing. 

3. You need an ending first. It might change later on, but you need an ending that feels good enough to work towards.

So. What would I take from this going forward? The lack of fear. The outline, the document of nonsense, is key. You start with that. Trying to pants a screenplay is insane and self defeating. Trying to pants an outline is how an outline should be written. I had a series of beats for the start of the story and then realised they were impossible to write unless I had the latter half sorted out already to some degree. So I wrote the latter half. And once that was done it was a lot easier to slot the start on. And now the start is done I can go through and fill in the holes, add little callbacks, link things up. 

What would I do for my next script? I'm excited. Because the biggest barrier has always been not having any fucking scripts. And now I feel I've figured out ho to write them. I feel like I can churn them out now, as long as I have the outline and the ending. And the fear of doing the outline ... well. I guess we'll see how that goes. I'm not sure how I got over the fear of the outline this time. I think I just wrote my fears of the holes in the story and eventually a coherent piece appeared from all the crap. I specifically remember typing a lot of freaked out shit about having no clear idea what I was doing and how much pressure I was putting on my self over it, until suddenly it was there. I think breaking things down into manageable beats, and then even more manageable beats, if it's not manageable, make it even smaller, over and over, until you can handle it. 

So. Let's try this with our next thing. It's going to be the phantom manor. We're going to make an outline. Break the bits down until we can handle them. We have the opening, with the handshake deal. And we have the Marie Celeste house scene. And we have Ethel skeletons coming out of the soil. And we have dad getting sucked into the Earth. And meeting the other kid. And then they go to the house for some reason. Something leads them there. Who tells them about it? I guess they know. Maybe they dig a hole to try find dad. Anyway. The ending. He reveals he sacrificed himself for his children unlike his idiot parents and this sacrifice is more than the phantom can handle (because he made a deal with the oil Earth to save himself but end we up sacrificing his own family) which breaks the curse. A nice logical ending. No boys, it was meant to be this way. And do they get him back? Maybe. Who knows. So I've got the beginning and the end and the dad is a fun buffoon character who actually has a heart of gold and love for his child. That's beginning and end and a tiny bit of the middle. So we're off. Let's fill that middle in.  

Oh I forgot the one other thing I learned. I learned I actually do like this. I like the act of writing. I like it. It's fun. What I don't like is hesitating and staring at the blank page. So as long as I fill it up, I think we're good. Get that outline, get that ending. 

I should clarify that the outline starts off like a professional log line kind of synopsis and then devolves into snatches of dialogue or whole scenes and random question marks and other nonsense. It's bits to be stitched together later. 

The definitive artistic statement of 2021

You can hear it when the chorus hits.

It’s not often that you can hear a singer smiling while singing, but you can hear it in the "Taylor’s Version" of Love Story. The song has come home.

For those not on the frontline, 2020 was largely about turning inward. That could be reassessing what’s important (“why am I commuting two hours a day just to use my laptop in a different building?”), or reassessing what’s not important (“trousers”).

For Taylor Swift, country megastar and planet-eating pop-Galactus, it was to pursue a new musical direction while simultaneously dragging her beginnings into the future with her. It was about navel-gazing to the point of releasing two albums within six months of each other. New year, new pandemic, new you -- she used the time to release something that reflected where she was now musically, a break with the previous pure pop of 2019’s Lover. 

This might, then, seem like a weird time to release your first albums all over again. Most artists would look at their beginnings, especially if they’ve moved entirely out of the genre they started in, with a sense of cringe. But not Swift. She chose to wrap both ends of her career inside a big cardigan and pull them together like the siblings they are.

She chose to record the definitive artistic statement of 2021.

The audacity of following through with it, based purely on principle and 'fuck you'. What once seemed an impossible Goliath to defeat is now slain, like returning to your hometown with superpowers and showing everyone who's boss. The decision to keep the same players as the original. The decision to ever so-slightly turn up the country elements, but otherwise leave it the same.

It's not a remake, it's the song, again, a twin, free from the clutches of an evil money-grubbing bastard. You can hear that in her voice as the chorus takes off, flying away from the grasping claws of Scooter Braun and whichever private equity scumbag he's sold her masters to now. It's off, up, and away, out of here, into its rightful place with its writer and creator and the band playing on it. It's free.

The song feels light under their fingers. A decade of playing it has made it second nature, but the act of re-recording it has awakened that killer instinct, powering home a version of the song like a seasoned pro showing you how it's done. It's muscular, lean, light, forceful, match-fit.

She clearly doesn’t need the money. Both 2020 releases went to number one and sold a million copies each. Her house has a Wikipedia page. And besides -- the royalties would continue to flow in regardless of which faceless private equity firm owned the masters. 

This was about something else, something more important than money. It was about control, about the self, about what you're willing to put with.

This was about bringing something back to where it rightfully belonged, taking something sullied by business and making it pure again.

Bringing it home, again.

Isles of wonder

 I remember watching it go out live.

We had planned to move but this cemented it. It was like a ripcord being pulled. 

I remember my wife, then girlfriend, crying, as we watched it at some ungodly hour. 

I can't remember which bit finished her off. Was it the NHS beds? Kenneth Branagh watching the satanic mills shoot up out of the countryside? James Bond?

It all sounds a bit silly on paper, but even now it moves me to tears. Even the BBCs opening bit, flying down the Thames, is magic.

It's a sincere outpouring of love for a country. 

A beacon.

I might go watch it now.

A distant ship

 You ever hear a lyric that sounds like a whole world?

"A distant ship smoke on the horizon".

It sort of comes out of nowhere in Comfortably Numb. There's no other mention of ships, horizons, seafaring. Maybe it links to the "waves" in the next line -- It's purely a metaphor for some trouble or pain now being distant and no longer relevant except for it very slowly washing up on your shores -- but I also love the way it causes a mental image to flash in front of your eyes.

There is no pain, you are receding. Ok. More medical stuff. And then -- a distant ship smoke on the horizon. Look. You can see it, right now, a little ship, way off, barely perceptible, with a small plume of black smoke drifting away from it into the darkening blue skies above an impossibly huge, a comfortingly huge, ocean. It bobs around on the currents, detached from whatever turmoil is going on back on land. 

I sometimes wonder if it's referring to a painting the protagonist saw in a doctors office as a child. After the waves line he leads into a half-remembered memory of an illness as a child. A fever. A fleeting glimpse. The painting burning into his memory forever through the formative and traumatic trip to the emergency room. 

You can imagine that image, the painting, the ship, returning to his fevered mind as an adult. He lies back and goes into a Proustian stupor, instead of a biscuit (was there more to Proust than the biscuit?) it's the numbness of narcotics. They, obviously remind him of being an ill child (or just a child, The Wall seems to be entirely about adults dealing with childhood trauma), and that's where the painting of the calm, soothing ship appears in his mind and he slips back into the haze.

Somewhere else

 Have you ever found a little bit of your small town that looked like somewhere else and, if you blocked out whatever was on either side of it, you could pretend you were somewhere else?

Hamilton has a few of those. One of them was a passage next to the central library. For apparently no reason this passage was done up in an Art Deco style. I think it even had a name, as if it was a tiny shopping mall. There was a barbers in it, and some other business. How either of them attracted customers with zero roadside visibility is a mystery. 

Anyway. If you walked down this passage you could almost convince yourself you were in New York City. Or Chicago. Or one of the sets of either of those cities in a muppets movie. Nearby, a pizza place parped out that olivey, peppery, tomatoey, bready smell, a bit like the nose onslaught of Subway today but I don't think it was on purpose. It was more likely just a shitty building with ventilation ducts that vented into other parts of it rather than just straight outside. 

Anyway. Pizza. Art Deco. Muppets. Essential ingredients to convince one's sad library-going brain that they were somewhere far more exciting and atmospheric than bloody Hamilton. 

Apparently actual adults felt the same way, and they soon built a Mediterranean inspired passage across town, called Casabella Lane. It had white, Greek island inspired walls, cafes with metal outdoor furniture, and boutiques that seemed to just sell shit with fake flowers stuck on it. Directly outside the passage was a massive car park for a paint shop and an instrument store, and at the other end was a mostly vacant street with a Salvation Army store and a discount electronics place. 

But if you blocked out whatever was on either side of it, you could pretend you were somewhere else. 

5 Nice Things

 1. Writing. It's still nice. Look. I can do it! Some people aren't very good. I am above average at writing. That's something. Don't tell me it's not. 

2. London. Still here. Always here. Long after you fucks have tried to destroy it. Try to level it down. Saw off the bits you don't like. I'm not even talking about property developers or gentrifying or anything like that. London has always had that. London is that. London was built on the twin powers of geography and commerce (like any town, obviously) and London will continue to exist because of them. You can snap little bits of and put them elsewhere in a misguided attempt to grow a bit of London somewhere else but it'll just grow back, back down here, in London. Pour money into what already exists in those other places. They have the tools already. They don't need London's, which are only ever going to be temporary. It's not hard. 

3. This was mean to be about nice things but it's turned into a rant. Or a pep talk to myself. Weird. I guess a third nice thing is donuts. Yep. 

4. GarageBand. It's great! Where has this been all my life. I can't believe I'd been struggling about with random Windows programmes like Acoustica MixCraft -- as good as it is, or could be, it's just not the same. It's just not an entire studio in a phone, that runs with zero lag. I don't know how they do it and I don't care. MixCraft probably had more dynamic range (I can never quite recreate the miles-away-across-the-fields reverb in GarageBand) but everything took forever because I could never afford a powerful enough computer to run the fucker. Things that I would puzzle over for months are now worked out and discarded within days. 

5. My wife. 

Form 1, Form 2

In Form 1, my teacher seemed to regard me as a writing genius. If you think this blog doesn't match up to such high praise, well, consider the fact that I haven't actually improved or progressed linguistically since Form 1. Quite impressive then, less so now. 

I remember receiving praise for every story I wrote, having my work read to the class, and a note on my picture book project that said "please keep this for your grandchildren". My school speech was received rapturously and I consequently had the confidence to read it to the school. People laughed. None of it get like a bad idea. My teacher and I knew it was good and funny and fluent and so I read it without shame. Looking back, this was probably the first encouragement I received from school as a writer. Since I seem to recall it all so vividly I suspect it's had a lasting impression. I could even say that I'm still operating on the fumes generated from those compliments, two decades ago. 

The following year (Form 2, if you can believe it), I had a different teacher and my talents were appraised in a completely different direction. Sure, I had my work read to the class, but I also had the weird punishment of being made to read a hastily written poem in front of the entire school. This was nothing like the speech situation of the year before. We, my new teacher and I, both new it was garbage. I had left it until the last minute and was sighted writing it before school -- it was, obviously, awful. But despite that it was somehow considered as good as or better than the majority and I was told it had been selected for presentation at the school assembly. I had to read this fucking thing. In front of people. It was about a cat, hunting a mouse. One line was simply: "darkness". It blew ass. Three words into the recital I pretended that I forgot the words and sat down again. In hindsight that probably just made the event stick out in people's minds more - you can zone out during a performance but as soon as silence hits your ear you snap awake. The absence of student drone breaks the spell. Someone out there probably still remembers it. I know I remember it more than the successful speech of Form 1 -- in fact I only remembered the speech when I started thinking about the poem. The success of that speech is completely overshadowed by the enormous failure of the poem. 

Two teachers, two different approaches. But was it me? Had I changed significantly in between those years that the only way to deal with me was the approach the new teacher took? Or was what was an appealing trait in a 1st Former actually quite horrible in a 2nd former? Was it me? Or them? There had to have been some way of dealing with me that was more positive than the one I received. I guess we'll never know. 

Elizabeth Day's How To Fail with Elizabeth Day, presented by Elizabeth Day, with your host, Elizabeth Day

One of my favourite bits about How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, presented by Elizabeth Day, is that her name appears in the title. 

It's as if we're actively failing with her, alongside her. I'm sure it doesn't really mean that and it's actually just a kind of branding exercise so that the podcast name is linked with her name in your mind. But it did get me wondering why it's written like that, and why she introduces it as such: "welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, with your host, Elizabeth Day". 

You might wonder why I'm not curious about the titles of The Adam Buxton Show and Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast -- the difference, besides my obvious failure to examine my own gender biases, is that they have no format. The pitch is: a man, talking with (or at) another person. With How to Fail, with its rigid three-failures-per-guest format, the format is as important as the host, like a regular Radio 4 programme. Presumably, like those, you can swap out the host--but in this instance I don't think that's possible.

Take how she often says "thrilled", "so lovely", and "beautiful". It's that slightly posh (as in, person who went to university in the 1990s, not actually old-money-posh) way that sounds sincere and insincere all at once. I suppose the insincerity comes from my own perception -- no one could possibly be that thrilled. Or even thrilled at all. I spend my life either impotently enraged or aggressively disinterested. Hearing someone who is actively thrilled by anything is lovely to hear. Imagine tuning into my podcast, a series of half-finished mutterances about what's pissed me off in the news today but I've blocked out most of the really enraging details of the story in order to continue to function without constantly shitting with rage. 

It's a good podcast. There's no real snark. It's somehow one of those "celebs have thoughts!?" podcasts but without being one of those. It's part of the endless ring round of comedians going on each other's podcasts but at the same time it's different because of the structure and because Day doesn't really riff with the guest like Adam Buxton or Richard Herring. In fact maybe the key difference is that those two podcasts are as much about their hosts (which is why they are so good) as they are about the guest. I deliberately put on the Jack Whitehall episode of RHLSTP purely to hear Herring boil over with unrestrained resentment at his massively successful young guest (if you're wondering--he does not disappoint. It's fantastic).

All of this suggest Elizabeth Day is a mere sounding board for her guests. She's not. That genuine sense of being thrilled and of caring about her guests pathetic little failures (or their massive life changing ones) isn't really apparent in any one I can think of. The closest comparison to How to Fail is Desert Island Discs, and yet the hosts of that, or at least the best hosts, have been fairly arms length. My favourite was Sue Lawley, who seems deeply suspicious of everyone placed in front of her. It's now a bit different, a bit more of a therapy session, which is fine -- after so long on air the show has inevitably become This Is Your Life with music. And yet I don't think any of the post-Lawley DDD hosts could replace Day on How to Fail. Trying to imagine the podcast without her would render it a completely different podcast. You can't have How to Fail without Elizabeth Day. Format and host are inextricably bound together, and I hope they're stuck together for years to come.

A short and unfinished analysis of the personality types that create the humour maelstrom of How Did This Get Made?

 I could listen to any episode of How Did This Get Made. It used to be dependent on having seen the film, or heard about it a bit, or knew of the lead actor. But none of this is a requirement anymore. The strength of the three presenters -- Jason, June, Paul -- is such that they can riff on absolutely anything and it's entertaining. There's a dynamic there that is rock solid. The stereotype of each host is Jason = chaotic, Paul = straightman, June = confused. Or at least, that's how I first approached it. But what's become clear is that those initial personality traits are really just masks for a deeper one. 

Jason Mantzoukas often comes across as widely read, or widely watched, and has knowledge of things you wouldn't assume he has (women's clothing, women's health, women in general, perhaps). This might seem like a weird thing to point out, a pointless bit of info about him, but it so often plays up against Paul's fellow "secret" personality trait. 

Paul appears to have had one of the strangest childhoods imaginable, which has lead to some strange ideas (or at least a willingness to reveal the strange ideas he used to have) about relationships. Jason is often the one to pop in with "what?" when Paul gets going with a bizarre anecdote about trying to french someone he really should not have been trying to kiss. 

June comes off as confused but she's not confused. More often than not, she's angry. Not in a campaigning sort of way (although she obviously has done this also), but in a defiant, I-will-not-watch-multiple-Marvel-films-just-to-have-the-adequate-amount-of-back-story-required-to-watch-the-latest-one kind of way. "I will not pander to those people" she said recently, when asked if she had explored the backstory of Super Girl within the wider DC universe. Absolutely not.

What this ultimately gives us is a wildman who is actually very reserved and sane, a straightman who is deeply unhinged on a subterranean level, and a confused woman who is actually razor-sharp in her focus. Somehow these are not contradictory traits, it's as if they all choose to be the initial personality in order to function with the second. The second is perhaps their true personality. Maybe the pain of being intelligent and knowing the world is full of bonkers nonsense causes Mantzoukas to lash out and embrace the chaos. Maybe the pain of growing up utterly abnormal causes Scheer to act as Normal as possible. Maybe the righteous fury within Diane Raphael causes her to use confusion as a shield, a way to keep her simmering rage-brain under control, to shield it from yet more bullshit and nerds. You could argue that's a common trait for almost all women. 

Video rental stores and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Before Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+, there were video stores. I'd like to say it seems weird now but it doesn't. I could imagine video stores coming back, even now. It seems like movies are more popular than ever and if someone somehow came up with a way to make physical video tapes a profit making business, people would go get them. Eventually the streaming services will merge and de-merge and monetise and throw adverts on what is already a pay-service, to a point where you find yourself locked out once again and marveling at the concept of being able to rent a single movie without signing up for a year's worth of streaming. 

In some places, though, video rental shops never really went away. Where I grew up, in Hamilton, NZ, you could map the city by video stores alone. There was Hillcrest Video Ezy, Hamilton East United Video, The Source just over the bridge in town, the big United Video on the way out of town and into Frankton, The Source in Frankton. That's three competing chains in one small town alone. A fourth, Civic Video, inexplicably joined them in the mid-2000s.  

Each store required its own membership, even within a chain, so you'd end up with multiple Video Ezy accounts if you found yourself stranded in a zone of Hamilton without a video store less than 300 metres from you. It could happen! 

We usually went to the United Video in Hamilton East, once a week, one video for a week's rental. It was on the way home from the central city, and probably had the best parking which was obviously a deciding factor for my dad. United Video also had a pretty large range, although they seemed to lose interest in having actual categories of films and instead opted to just bung everything in an ever-growing 'Highly Recommended' section that soon took up 3/4s of the shop. 

For some reason, we once branched out and went to The Source in Frankton. The Source was weird. There were fewer of them, they had a weird name, and they had the most constantly played TV ads despite having fewer stores. After years of United Video, The Source was a strange new world with strange new videos. An unfamiliar children's section located perilously close to the horror section, with a few adult cartoons like Heavy Metal randomly thrown in there by either some mischievous teenage employee, or someone who had no idea that they did cartoons for adults. 

Usually we would only sign up for a membership to a new video store if they had something we couldn't find anywhere else. This time, that something, was a previously unknown Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. I'd seen the first one, and Secrets of the Ooze, and even TMNT 3: Turtles in Time. But here, at The Source Frankton, was apparently a fourth TMNT film. I couldn't believe it. 

My dad duly registered for an account at The Source and I rented out this incredible new film, got home, and popped it in the VCR.

The first hint that something was amiss was the box art. I can only assume I was overcome with a kind of delirium upon sighting a new TMNT film and didn't sober up until I'd got home. As I looked at the box, I noticed the turtles themselves looked a bit cheap, a bit weird, and Shredder was wearing possibly the most revealing crotchwear since David Bowie in Labyrinth. It was, essentially, Shredder's junk pushing out of the box art at the viewer. 

We hit play and the red flags continued. The film opened with an introduction sequence, featuring Russell the Rooster, a poorly designed and assembled puppet from a New Zealand children's show. That's weird, I thought. I didn't think TMNT had any connection to New Zealand. Maybe this was just a NZ-only bit tacked onto the start? Something for the local audience. Yeah. Despite this self-assurance, a wave of dread washed over me as the tape rolled. 

There were crowd noises. An audience seemed to be in this movie somehow. OK. Maybe it started with a crowd number. Vanilla Ice was in one of the other films. It's not completely out of the ordinary. Except this time it was a static shot. Even as a child, I could feel the difference between a movie camera angle and whatever this was. Lights came on. A curtain went up. More crowd cheering, noises. An announcer whooped, and the turtles bounded out onto the stage to perform an excruciating rock-rap number. 

My sister and I stared at the screen as this madness unfolded, at first laughing at it, and then cowering in embarrassment by association (we made the choice to rent this after all), before the sheer sadness set in as we realised this was the film we'd wasted this week's rental on. We had this thing for a week. 

I stared at Shredder's freaky mound one more time before silently placing the tape by the front door for Dad to return on his next drive past the video shop. 

a giant pile of shame

"I used to write it and hide it in a shoebox under my bed. Even back then, I knew it was a giant pile of shame." - Someone, whose name I cannot remember, posting on SomethingAwful's forums.

And it's true. It is a giant pile of shame that must stay hidden under the bed. Except now, you can make a small amount of cash out of it, too.

My first experience with fan fiction dates back to about 1996. The internet, at least in New Zealand, barely existed and the world was probably better for it. At the time I was a big fan of Sonic the hedgehog in all his money-spinning guises, and regularly bought the comics.

At some point the comic started featuring a dubious "Tales From Cyberspace" section. This would usually involve some guy writing about the month's Sonic-related "events" on the "web", or something, and I would read it, and could do nothing but sit and wonder.

And then one month it mentioned "extra" Sonic stories that could be found on the internet. So I fired up this internet, and had a look. Or rather, my parents had a look with me -- this being 1996, and the internet being an expensive, long-winded affair that required hours of dialling up and navigating vast empty stretches of cyberspace with nary a Jeeves to assist you.

This was also back when website addresses featured loads of ~'s and always had an .edu domain name, because only the universities could host websites (or, apparently, reams of fan fiction). I had to ask, and then watch, as they tapped in the address into the address bar and waited patiently while a giant pile of shame loaded up on the screen.

It was dutifully printed out and I found myself with 10 double-sided pages of what appeared to be some kind of Sonic the hedgehog novella. It was very boring. The thing opened with a lengthy description of some character named Bookshire, who I'd never heard of. He turned out to be a mole; a mole who was also a wizard, all shambling, stuttering urgency and enormous spectacles slipping down his face as he consulted the runes and talked mystical bollocks while I stared aghast at the page.

Sonic turned up a few paragraphs in, and I was elated, until he almost immediately fucked off and left me stranded with this Bookshire thing again.

Even then, as a 9 year old, I couldn't understand it. Why would someone write this? Why would someone think the only thing missing from Sonic the Hedgehog's comic book is a fucking magical mole-creature who shuffles around boring everybody to death? And why was I holding ten flippin' pages of this stuff in my hands?

"Tales From Cyberspace" couldn't explain it to me -- because you can't explain fan fiction. It's a giant pile of shame that should be kept hidden under the bed, and never shown to anyone, ever -- never mind selling the fucking stuff on Amazon.

So my adventures with fan fiction began and ended in 1996. I was told that, after I finish the first one, we could print another story out. Another ten pages of Bookshire. Faffing about in his hobbithole. Unspooling his tales of incomprehensible tedium. With Sonic only popping up near the start to write himself out the story altogether and abandon me to this madman.

I didn't go near the internet again until 1999.

a hideous, gnarled-up goblin of stress.

Being a penniless bastard has it's drawbacks. Aside from the obvious, it also involves a tremendous amount of stressing out.

Stressing out is probably not that good for one's health, especially since, even though I've managed to divert near-doom for another few months, I still occasionally like to have a bit of a mid-afternoon panic attack. Possibly just for old time's sake, but more likely because my body has become accustomed to a near constant state of stomach-churning fear. I tend to walk around with a perpetual half-grimace, ready at a moments notice to slip into a full-on scowl, just in case I remember some debt or payment that's still looming over my head. I figure it's only a matter of time (and worry) before I eventually morph into a hideous gnarled-up stress-goblin.

Being a bottom-rung scumbag who is (vaguely) on the climb has also shown me how quickly I am able to graduate from one worry zone to another. Got no job? Freaking out about no money. Find a job? Freaking out about having a small amount of money. I can only assume that by the time I'm a billionaire (not long now) I'll be worried about owning only one Greek island instead of two.

I've also become almost hysterically jealous of anyone I come across who looks likely to be richer than me. Due to being quite definitely Un-Rich, I cast a wide net; essentially anyone who isn't wearing readily identifiable Primark trousers, or has a pair of water-tight looking shoes is fair game for some scowling and muttering.

All of this has brought me to one final conclusion: should've studied economics. Oh well.

earning more than a fart in a sack

You're in London. You're talking to someone with a vaguely antipodean accent. You decide to start jabbering about Flight of the Conchords, when you're suddenly hit with a problem. Or maybe you just want to talk about how Paul Hogan's turn in "Flipper" redefined what it means to play support to a fish -- regardless, the moment has arrived: you've no idea if you're talking to an Australian or a New Zealander. 

Fortunately, there's a really easy way to find out, without causing offence:

"Are you making more money in London than you were at home?"

If the answer is yes, you've got a New Zealander on your hands. A grateful, begging, bottom-feeding New Zealander, clinging for dear life onto the big wide world of earning more than a fart in a sack.

If no, you've got an Australian, here for travel, here for the experience, but also dying to get back home to the land of $20 an hour at the most lowly retail jobs, of $25 an hour putting crap on shelves at Countdown.

Yesterday while temping I discovered I was alone in thinking that 8 pounds an hour for some filing and standing about was pretty good. Very good, in fact. So good that it was actually the most I've ever been paid (during a day-shift) in my life, and it was just as much as my partner's job as a reporter back in NZ.

The Australians thought we were mad. Their earning power back home is so high that all of them were planning to bugger off back long before their visas even ran out. Compare this attitude to the posts on the Facebook group Kiwis In London: every few weeks someone pops up asking how they can overstay, or how can they get back in as a tourist after their visa expires, or how can they get married to a British-born roll of carpet so they can stay in this wonderful little country for just a few years longer. 

When registering at a recruitment agency, they asked me what my salary expectations were. I suggested the "London Living Wage", expecting it to be about £6.83 -- a rough equivalent of the NZ minimum wage..

"Do you actually know how much that is?" 

"Er, well, no."

They then told me it was £8.50, and I fell off my chair.

A high-powered slicked-back pony-tailed bastard power-lunching through life like an Armani-clad bullet-train

I bought a suit the other day. If you've read the other posts, you'll know where I got it from. Normally, I'd proudly bellow about its origins, price tag and relative sturdiness, but in this case I'm overcome with shame.

There's so much psychic baggage associated with wearing a suit, and the price of the thing is just the start.

Yesterday, I went out in my suit to an interview. Afterwards, I strolled around central London for a bit. And I noticed something. Suddenly the other suit-guys, the presumed City traders, were looking at me. Sizing me up. Who's this guy? Do I know this guy? Doesn't he manage the Peterson account? Is that a BHS suit? I'd left the realm of lowly faux-hipster and, for a thrilling half-hour, I was a suit-guy.

I've always wanted to be a suit-wearing yuppie, even though the dodgy ethics of the whole thing clash head-on with my own half-arsed socialist values. A high-powered slicked-back pony-tailed bastard power-lunching through life like an Armani-clad bullet-train, helping to water the ticking time-bomb planted by Regean's market deregulation, and then pissing off scot-free to run for Prime Minister while pulling "Who, me?" faces as the economy burns. This secret desire likely started when I saw American Pyscho, and instead of nodding wisely at the 80s-materialism-taken-to-extremes motif (probably), I went and downloaded some Phil Collins and tracked down Wall Street. So despite being in London instead of New York, and being unemployed instead of having any kind of income whatsoever, I entered the world of the City trader.

It's a fast-paced world, for sure. We suit guys like to force ourselves onto the tube regardless of whether or not there's any physical room left on the train. We also like to run screaming towards the train from the other end of the station as the doors slowly shut, and then almost lose half our face forcing them apart. It's either that, or wait 3 minutes for the next one. It's no co-incidence that the 'Mind The Gap' signs portray a tie-wearing suit-dude tumbling to his death.

Sometimes we like to get together in a big group and collectively blank a Big Issue vendor. Bootstraps, buddy! Other times we like to stare at female office workers until it becomes not just creepy but really rather scary. When caught out, we widen our eyes and menacingly chew (cocaine-flavoured?) gum at them in slack-jawed defiance.

We've also become accustomed to berating fast-food workers. One particular gent entered a closet-sized Subway and demanded to know why there was nowhere to wash his hands. This is discrimination, he said. The soap's good enough for the staff, but not for us. "Are you nervous? Are you scared?" he asked, as he advanced on the manager. I stood agape at this profoundly ridiculous man, and then at the woman behind him, in a "Can you believe this guy?" fashion, until I realised she was his partner and trying her best to turn invisible. How his hands came to be so caked in filth, he didn't say, but in the end he ordered a sandwich and ate the thing, muck-encrusted hands and all. Presumably he picked it up with the napkins. 

Sadly, I completely blew my cover by being unable to stop myself taking photos of famous landmarks, and then posing for photos in front of famous landmarks, and then running around giggling and shouting the theme song from City Guys. I also passed on an overstuffed train, bought a Big Issue, forgot to creep anyone out, and successfully ate at a Subway restaurant without ruining my partner's day.

12 months of winter

I've gotten used to winter. It's become the norm. My natural setting. Bundling up in my coat before heading out, sloshing through half-melted snow, watching bright red blood streak across white grass as the wolves vanish back into the fog, etc etc. 

This is partially due to the power of central heating -- I don't think I've ever had a warmer, balmier winter. Combine the genius of the wall-mounted radiator with double-glazed windows and you've got the kind of temperatures normally associated with tropical islands. Sat around barefoot in a T-shirt, eating ice-cream; I'm surprised they're not growing hideous child-sized insects in the homes over here.

Compare this to my winter experience in NZ: even in my parent's house there was the mad dash down the arctic tundra of the hallway, that unheated space between the lounge and the bedrooms, so cold that it somehow smelt faintly of a freezer full of meat. And then there were the flats -- sitting up writing essays by the heater, clad in three to four layers, two pairs of socks, shoes, and a hood, with my hands clasped around a mug of scalding black coffee. And still freezing. 

Which is partially why I'm always baffled by the "So, how're you finding the winter over here, then?" question. I understand people over here think of NZ as a tropical island nation, but I still haven't been as cold here, outside in the snow, with my shoes soaked through, as I've been in one of the shithole flats I endured back in Hamilton. Zero insulation and a fan heater aren't a winning combo when it comes to keeping warm -- but it has prepared me for what has essentially been 12 months of winter. 

My last day of summer was in February, 2012. I left NZ at the very start of spring, and only had to deal with a few days of hot weather before I plunged myself into the howling winds of the UK's autumn. 

It's got to the point where the onset of summer is actually worrying me. What happens in summer, again? The clocks go back, as they did today, and suddenly the idiots are out in the 7pm daylight, on their way to drinks and barbecues, shouting and hollering at each other in the supermarket. In winter, it was just one rugged-up duvet-man after the next -- and now I have to see people. Half-naked people, in fact -- if my memory of NZ's summer serves. Which it might not. It has been over a year, after all. 

I mean, what do I wear? Sunglasses? Shorts? What about my coat? How will I cope without a coat? Where will I put my wallet and keys?  What do I wear on my feet? Do people wear jandals here? Do I even want to wear jandals? Will I have to spend day after day cooling off in the bathtub, soundtracked by the screams of pedestrians sinking into the melting footpaths outside?

Judging by the recent, snow-capped weather, no. And long may it continue. 

A giant fox head bellowing from the coach of the damned

It turns out gambling yourself into a whimpering pile of debt via your smartphone is a national pastime over here. Got a spare few minutes at work? Hit the bingo. Just sitting at home with two friends? Time for bingo. Playing bingo? Play more bingo. With your feet.

All this life-changing bingo playing is then followed up with an instant payday loan to smooth over any gaping holes you've just smashed into your bank statement, and then rounded off with a quick trip down to the local Cash4Gold (with whatever old mobiles, gold teeth and treasured family heirlooms you can scrape together) to pay off that loan before it multiplies by 1700%, leaving you back in the black, but now with slightly less stuff. It's a vicious cycle, with each revolution costing you one teapot each time you go around. Unless you manage to hurl yourself down some stairs, which will handily net you a cool £11,000. Well. Probably.

Of course, this is all just an assumption based on the sheer volume of bingo, payday loan, pawnbroker and injury lawyer ads.

An apparently hands-off approach to online-casino adverts has resulted in nearly every ad break containing at least 60 of them. Foxy Bingo. Mecca Bingo. Bung A Random Word In Front Bingo.

The ads themselves aren't much better. Foxy Bingo, for some reason or another, features a terrifying man-fox grooving and jiving aboard some kind of purgatory bus that hurtles round the country, filled with British stereotypes from eras gone by. Doomed to wander the earth and endlessly repeat catchphrases at one another for all time -- they can't cross over to the light until you play some bingo.

There're other, slightly saner, ads. Mr Green sits in a chair and pulls a lever -- where will you be whisked off to today? Athens? Monaco? Your front room? It's more likely your front room. You'll still be sat in the same old house pissing your life up the wall, but you'll have a fancy little backdrop of pyramids and hieroglyphics to entertain you in between the bouts of sobbing. If you're lucky, Mr Green might turn up every now and then and dip his bowler hat at you and say something cryptic at you, you devilish card. Wink Bingo refreshingly (for an ad) features topless men jigging about -- but then you realise this is because they're probably trying to target stay-at-home mums.

The worst might be Paddy Power's ad for their bingo app. A woman attending a yoga class opts to sneak out and do a bit of gambling in the car instead. A bit like, oh, a gambling addict. It's only a matter of time before some lad's mag has an ad where they replace 'yoga' with 'work', and 'gambling' with, er, 'reading'. 

Ten brooms (and other obligatory purchases):

The other week at a Poundshop, I bought an optical mouse. For a pound! Sure, it clicks like a 90’s r&b rimshot, and glows a sickly blue when you use it – that’s not really the point. The point is, it cost a pound. One pound.

Britain. Land of bargains.

For 10 pounds, I could get a pair of jeans at Primark. Admittedly, these jeans won’t fit my (apparently) massively overlong legs, but if they did, I could buy a pair for the pleasingly tidy sum of 10 pounds. The arse might violently tear out of them within a week or two (or less, depending on how much lunging needs to be done), but that’s at least as long as a NZ$35 pair from Jay-Jays.  

Or, instead, that 10 pounds could go elsewhere, and I’ll come home with 10 brooms. Ten of the bastards! Or 10 “vocal microphones” that are probably more likely to pick up big-bang static and passing ghosts than actual vocals. Or 10 2-in-1 pregnancy tests! Or 10 precision screwdriver kits! Or 10 dubious hair-dye kits! Or any combination of these, and more!

Based on the exchange rate, the equivalent to a Poundshop back in NZ should be the 2 Dollar Shop. The 2 Dollar Shop, however, almost exclusively deals in worthless crap. Kaleidoscopes, mood rings, bags of army men. You won’t find yourself walking out of the there with an armful of TV cabling anytime soon, I can tell you that.   

What I’ve learnt since arriving in the UK is that NZ is a rip-off. I was dimly aware of this already, what with Peter Bills causing an uproar a few years ago with an inflammatory column about NZ’s ridiculous prices, but it’s really struck me now that I’m actually here.

You can pick up 2 litres of milk here for a pound, or roughly NZ$2. Back home, it’s more like $3.50. A smaller country, sells less milk, prices are higher. Makes sense. But milk is a huge industry for NZ, a huge part of the economy. It goes all over the world – it probably produces as much milk as the UK. And yet the domestic market gets a higher price. It’s likely down to the monopoly Fonterra has over the NZ dairy industry. They’re the only one in the game, they set the prices, and there’s only two supermarket chain to barter with.

Britain, on the other hand, has at least 7 supermarket chains, all ready to claw each other’s eyes out in a desperate, blood-soaked grapple for my cash.

Which is why such a thing exists as 17p own-brand cola. Sure, it tastes like severely watered down imitation vanilla essence with an aftertaste of chewed paracetamol – but that’s not really the point. The point is, it cost 17p. At this price, it costs more not to buy it.