Taking My Ball Home

As far back as 1999, violent video games like Doom were being blamed for teenage murders, school massacres, exhaustion deaths and suicides. Controversy still rages today over whether games like Grand Theft Auto IV are harmless or whether they lead to real-life aggression.

However, I think all these university boffins and tabloid editors are barking up the wrong tree. I'm NOT disagreeing that video games don't incite violent, psychopathic rage.....I merely believe that they are focusing on the wrong kind of game.

Take me for example. I can quite happily play on Halo 3 for a few hours, mow down half of an alien civilisation and then spend the rest of the afternoon arranging flowers while listening to Enya. However, put me in front of FIFA '09 on Xbox Live for more than ten minutes and I will most likely be reduced to something closely resembling the Tazmanian Devil with a severe bout of Tourette's. Rather than spending the rest of the afternoon carefully placing orchids into a vase, I would probably be trying to coax my children out from behind the settee with packets of Haribo sweets and apologising to my wife for my "game rage".

Although I have a long history of this condition (several Kempston joysticks were fatally wounded during the long Sensible Soccer campaign of the mid-nineties), it is reassuring (or worrying, depending upon your point of view) to know that I am not alone.

FIFA is a game full of statistics (I can tell you, for example, that my longest barren streak is 222 minutes without a goal), but the one stat that everyone is proud/embarrassed of is the DNF percentage.

DNF stands for Did Not Finish and gives an indication of the seriousness of your "game rage". Players with a high DNF tend to be those who have a higher "game rage" themselves while, paradoxically, they also tend to be the major cause of "game rage" in others. These "quitters" are usually players who cannot handle the crushing emptiness caused by losing a game, so prefer to escape from the game and disappear in the closing minutes (often accompanied at my end by "don't you dare....don't you f*&@ing dare!!" as the game futilely searches for the connection). Some, however, haven't even got the staying power to wait until the end; my record is someone who quit after ten minutes because I managed to score my one and only direct free kick against him.


"Quitters" however, are not the only reason for "game rage" on FIFA. My top ten other "game rage" triggers are:

1) Playing anyone on Xbox Live who chooses Manchester United.

2) Especially if they play Ronaldo up front and just run him from the halfway line all the time.

3) Playing some cocky t@*t who, just because they are better than you, starts doing stepovers and flicks all the time. With Ronaldo.

4) Closing a striker down with a defender, only to find that the Xbox switches the man you're controlling at the vital second (usually resulting in you making the second defender sprint aimlessly in completely the wrong direction).

5) That moment where, for some reason, your centre back decides to stand totally still, just long enough for the striker to go clear on goal.

6) Clearing your lines, only for the ball to hit the heels of one of your players and land at the feet of the opposing star striker.

7) Getting beat by someone who does a fancy goal celebration whenever they score.

8) Getting beat by someone who insists on watching the replay of EVERY goal they score. Three times.

9) Getting beat by someone who is so obviously far worse than you, but manages to score eight flukey goals.

10) Getting beat.

Life In Tokyo?

It's funny how teenage influences can affect adult life.

My last post talked about how being attracted to mixtapes and samples at 13 years old found me 27 years later making mashups and posting them online. Mixtapes aren't the only legacy of my formative music years though.

Back in the day when the popular money was being spent on Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and Wham! (who'd have thought George Michael would end up being a gay cottaging icon with a more than passing resemblance to 24's Tony Almeida?!), my hard earned pocket money was going on The Teardrop Explodes, Aztec Camera and a failed art-rock band from Lewisham.


Japan started out life as close to being a Roxy Music tribute band as you can get without actually calling yourself Proxy Music or Virginia Again or something. In what would be seen as an attempt at career suicide these days, their first two singles were a cover of a Barbera Streisand song from Funny Girl ("Don't Rain On My Parade") followed by the controversially titled "Adolescent Sex" (also the name of their debut album). Funny how Simon Bates and DLT didn't feel the urge to play that single...bet Peely did though.


However, I don't think it was the music that initally attracted me to Japan.....it was the summer of 1982 and "I Second That Emotion" (another cover) had just been re-released for thousandth time, this time finally managing to trouble the top 40 (in fact reaching as high as number 9). The video was played on Top Of The Pops and I'm sure it was the sight of David Sylvian, the beautifully made up, foppishly dressed singer with the blond "joey" haircut to die for that drew me in (that and the fact that the song was the soundtrack to a particularly successful friend's 14th birthday party....if only I knew then that she liked dressing up as Boy George....but that's for another post on another day).

After that summer, I caught up on Japan's back catalogue (which seemed a bewildering array of permanently re-released singles, albums, and E.P's as the myriad record companies who had previously discarded the band milked their belated popularity) and found myself repeatedly playing both "Assemblage" (a "greatest hits" from their Hansa years) and "Tin Drum", the closest a Japan album ever got to being "mainstream" (do they have a quota for speech marks on Blogger?!).

What left a lasting impression on me as I listened to these albums was the Japanese and Chinese imagery created by songs such as "Life In Tokyo", "Cantonese Boy" and "Visions Of China", and with it came, apropos of nothing, a desire to visit those countries which remained into adult life. Japan became my number one dream destination once I discovered Ryuichi Sakamoto through his collaboration with Sylvian and realised that Japan was "cool".

My first attempt to get to the Land Of The Rising Sun (don't think this phrase is copyright Eric Burdon??) was by attempting to enrol on the J.E.T programme while at university. J.E.T sent British under-graduates out to Japanese cities to work for a year as English teaching assistants in schools. Sadly, I wasn't successful...perhaps my being a Computer Science student with no English or teaching qualification went against me? I prefer to think my application got lost in the post. Incidentally, I can't pass by my university years without mentioning my great friend and university house-mate who turned out to be an even bigger Japan fan than me (although, as a bass player, his fixation was on Mick Karn, not David Sylvian). I don't know if he's ever been to Japan, but I'd like to think he's been drawn by the siren's call too.

I finally managed to visit Tokyo, my number one destination, in 1998 and found it everything I'd hoped it would be. Everything imagined in the songs, everything alluded to in films like Blade Runner (a film with imagery inspired as much in the blast furnaces of Redcar as the treets of Tokyo) was there in neon-lit splendour. Highlight of the trip was undoubtably visiting Akihabara; the electrical district. Imagine a branch of Richer Sounds, but housed in a shop the size of Binns (if you're not from Middlesbrough.....imagine your local House Of Fraser instead). Now imagine that EVERYTHING electrical can be purchased there; from the largest t.v to a replacement button for an original 1970's Space Invaders arcade cabinet. Incredible.


At the time of my visit, mobile phones were just taking off in Tokyo (but barely available outside of The City in Britain) and so vast swathes of display space were taken up with this new-fangled technology. Of course, being Japan, they weren't content to simply offer two or three conservatively specced models to introduce the idea gently to the public....there were hundreds, along with cases, phone charms and skins; a fashion that took years to reach the UK.

I am well aware that going to Tokyo and then saying you;ve "seen Japan" is the same as thinking a week in London has exposed you to everything England has to offer. I would love to return and venture outside of the capital, I've even been looking at getting some skiing in there. One day maybe?

The final part of my quest, obviously, is to visit China. The China of my youth no longer exists, taking with it my desire to visit Peking (now Beijing, of course). Shanghai has replaced Tokyo as my "must see" destination, although Beijing has put itself firmly back on my map after hosting a near faultless 2008 Olympic Games, particularly the mind-blowing, jaw-dropping opening and closing ceremonies (I fear for London's 2012 riposte).


When I do finally get to visit China, I will go with a newly instilled desire to visit some of the more rural areas after reading Jung Chang's wonderful biography of Mao Tse-tung (Mao: The Unknown Story). Chang's book is the first truly "independant" biography of Mao and explodes some of the myths about the man and his regime. Be warned though, at over 700 pages, it's not light reading and there are so many characters that play an integral part in Mao's story that you'll often find yourself flicking back to remind yourself who is who. I also suspect that, released from the shackles of any Sino-censorship, Chang has swung the pendulum slightly too far in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, a stunning, educational read.

Finally, just for the hell of it.....a link to my favourite Japan song.

Cut & Paste

So here it is, my virginal blog, and I go and taint it by using it as a shameless plug for my mashups!

What are mashups? They're an extention of the favourite love token of the music-savvy teenager; the mix tape. However, unlike a mix tape, mash-ups don't usually contain full songs. Rather they consist of snippets or smaller segments of songs blended together, often with some quirky soundbites and samples thrown in for good measure.

I've always been interested in mashups...I can remember making a crude one of Duran Duran and A-ha (with snippets of The Jungle Book mixed in) using a twin-deck cassette player. I wish I'd had the foresight to keep the tape. God knows how I managed to get anything worth listening to, but at the time I thought it was great (but then I would have only been about 14).

Of course, the kings of the mashup are the Dewaele Brothers, possibly the only decent contribution Belgium has made to modern music? Their day jobs are as figureheads of the band Soulwax, (I can't decide whether this is a brilliant website format or a migraine waiting to happen?!) but by night they morph into 2ManyDJ's; producing tens of bootleg mashup albums (and two or three legit ones too). If you've never come across them, check them out. If you want somewhere to begin, then As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt2 is the seminal recording, although Radio Soulwax Live - Get Yer Yo Yo's Out! is a personal fave.

If you are already a 2ManyDJ's fan, and fancy something different, look no further than Brighton's one-man-masher The Kleptones (aka Eric Kleptone....although I am suspicious that that is not what his mum calls him). The Kleptones have produced two of the weirdest mashup albums ever in Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots and A Night At The Hip-Hopera, mixing hip-hop with, respectively, The Flaming Lips and Queen. It shouldn't work....but it does. If hip-hop's not your thing (and it's not mine either, but I love those albums), then give 24 Hours a try. This is a double CD mashup based on a full day in a person's life; very clever as well as being an aural treat (check out the stunning "0900 Daft Purple").

My final recommendation is CCC's first Beatles mashup Revolved. This is basically a mashup album using each track of The Beatles' Revolver as it's base. My favourite tracks are the opener "Tax Jam Pollution" (mixing Beck with Tax Man) and "Close To No One" (For No One meets The Cure). CCC followed up by giving Sgt Pepper's the same treatment Cracked Pepper but, for me, it fails to hit the heights of his first attempt.

So finally, what about my own mashups? Well, they're not in the same class as any I mentioned above, but I've done three worth releasing into the ether. The first is a mashup of indie tracks with a dance beat called "Indie Cindy Dances Round Her Handbag"; the second was done for a friend and is a "Madchester" mashup called "Ecstatic For It?" and the third is a festive mashup (inspired by the brilliant DJ Riko christmas mashups) called "I Bet Yule Look Good On The Dance Floor". You can find them all on b00mb0x, a DJ mixtape site with some other splendid mashups to try.