Your Genre or Mine?

Another chance for me to state the obvious - so what?

I heard someone on Insta talking about artists and bands who defy categorization, they don't easily fit into the established and understood genres. Nice. It's probably where most artists would want to be if they could choose. Floating around in that cosmic minestrone.

So what's a genre anyway? Well it's a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or type of content. So in music there are some artists who some might say really only belong within their own personal genre - Zappa, Beefheart, Velvets, The Fall, Primus, Tool, The Cure and so on ... you may disagree but ... this is just my personal perspective. I could do a proper list but it would always be an opinion based thing that's hopelessly fluid.

How important is genre?  Genres still matter in modern music but how they matter has changed a lot in my lifetime. Maybe they matter as much as you want them to, perhaps to settle a decent pub arguement or define some odd element of style or content.

 
Why genres are useful: Genres act like some shared dialect or code between artists, listeners, and industries. They can be understood. Ask anyone who runs a record shop. It makes sense.

Orientation & expectation: When you hear “jazz,” “metal,” or “folk,” you immediately anticipate certain sounds, moods, and values. That mental framework helps you enter into the music more quickly or dismiss it more easily. "Free form Jazz is a load of shit!" "Dad Rock sucks!". "Boy Bands - God help us". You can easily understand the origin of your bias. Try and work on your self awareness for a few days. 

Cultural and historical context: Blue's roots in tough Black communities, Punk’s anti-establishment and rich kid bollox, Country’s ties to rural storytelling and suffering. You have a quick (but not always correct) understanding of why the music sounds the way it does and what it’s responding to and how that impacts on you. Maybe.

Community & identity: Helps people find each other. Fans don’t just like music, they bleed it. They often fixate with a scene, fashion, attitude, or worldview connected to a genre. Tattoos and T-shirts and scary, crazy fan obsessive shit. 

Practical stuff: Playlists, recommendations, radio formats, festivals, more fashions, shops and marketing all normally align with scenes or non-scenes. You instinctively know what to avoid. Five years later nostalgia says you're a fan.

Where genres fall short: Modern music is often all over the place. It's broken, fragmented and for some, pretty tired out. Bedroom recordings and sonic experiments. AI slop isn't helping either (and that's a recent new genre nobody saw coming). Everything has it's product life cycle and there will another one along in a minute.

Things can get blurry: Artists blend rap with rock, electronic with folk, jazz with hip-hop. Rigid genre labels can feel misleading or dated. Keeping up with lists is a pain.

Algorithmic listening: Streaming platforms often sort music by mood, vibe, or activity (chill, workout, alone and so on) rather than traditional genres. They do all the heavy lifting for you, just plug yourself in. Curation is a dead thing. We shift the focus from structure and lineage to emotions and consumer convenience. Music's only another commodity after all.

Audience access: Artists draw from traditions worldwide. A single genre label could lose the complexity of multiple, diverse influences. Somebody might care about that.

Artistic intent: Some artists intentionally resist genres as a statement - it's how they might see themselves. But they may still fit into one easily just the same. Esoteric fixes and the bloated ego. They're only flesh and blood.

 
Do genres help us understand what it all might mean? Probably. I can't say too much about that at the moment.

Genres can try to explain: The hidden language of the music. The musician's intentions. The traditions it builds on or what it rebels against. How did we ever get ourselves into this awkward place?

So please continue to kick out the jams ... if you can be bothered.

There's probably more to say but this piece has gone on long enough.

"Aye, that's all fine then."

 Venezuela is also very rich in rare minerals, gold, etc. etc.

So everything seems to be going quite well.

Alright for some.

Paper Sun

It’s a fake kind of winter. Only a paper sun. Low in the sky. Blinds you when driving. The snow is within touching distance for us, if you’re prepared to go 60 miles. I’m happy to avoid that. We’re on the coast. But it’s still killer chiller. All this warming just makes us cold. The sharp kind of cold that pings your ear’s insides and rises up through the tiles or tarmac into bones and nerve ends and into your core. In a non specific way. The older you get the thinner the skin, so you feel less protected, like wearing cling film in a freezer. 

Old age: The chilled blade of the traitor’s knife has your name on the hilt. We've fallen into that trap already.

I have trouble spelling. I can’t concentrate. I’m waiting till it’s a sane time to light up the logs and then count them down. Hoping for a clean burn. One good, big hot meal. Might include alcohol. Pots of soup can last us three days. Add pepper. Books, TV streams and guitar noodling. Looking out of windows. Charge up the devices.

Nobody ever says, "I really think that I should check my phone a little more."

Winter is full of ritual - or is that just life? How dark is the dark? Check the air and wind direction. Does the sea water look choppy? Trees are moving. OK to let the cats out? Good time to let them in? Boil a kettle. Is the Co-op open yet? Empty the drier. Why are those people waiting out there? The buses seem to be running. Bin's out. Bed time soon.

First thing: Clean out the wood stove. Wipe the carbon and creosote away. Remove excess ash from the pan bottom. Collect logs from outside. Add some kindling on the way. Order more logs in about a week or so. Put tomorrow’s logs under cover to make sure they’re dry. Construct the cold, dry fire. Maybe chop sticks later. Once in a while it lights up spontaneously - warm embers and my careless ways of working to blame.

Every year a different fire building method emerges. One horizonal log across the back. Two vertical at the sides. Kindling in the middle, a mix of thick and thin. The logs can’t be too big to begin with. Add a log into the red hot the middle after about fifteen minutes. Never change the method, repeat and repeat till summer wipes the memory clean. Next year’s method then has to be decided. Experience is learned but I seem to forget. Fire is it’s own master. Still a just paper sun up there.

2026 was the year that I decided to do something.

Mindful

Staring deep into the same old void after the first rumblings of the new year: It was the second of January and we decided it was time to take down the Christmas decorations - but in a mindful way, without panic and pain. It is never too soon to act if you get the urge.

The great festival of extravagance, indulgence and general confusion has passed. Both meaningful and meaningless it's the perfect expression of how lost we've all become. There's no way back either. So let's bury it in the past, not that it was particularly bad this year, just a reasonable dose of all the normal Christmasy stuff everybody in our wee world gets on with. 

With a positive mental attitude the mindful hard labour and removal of Christmas tat and tinsel isn't so bad. Our tracks and footprints are silently erased by the incoming tide as we journey on, the pale winter sunlight almost warming those worn and weary hearts.

We breathed in a lot. 

Sang a Joan Baez organising song.

Stopped and considered things.

Got high on a step ladder. 

Exchanged observations.

Untangled the various cables - slowly. 

Breathed out even more. 

Rejoiced that we'd less stuff to put away than last year. 

Unshackled the "real" tree and returned it to the "real" garden in the "real" cold. Just about everything was real it seemed. 

Spread brandy butter on various baked goods. 

I also ate the slightly overage blue cheese.

Used the dustpan rather than a noisy hoover. 

I wore plimsolls.

Maintained the silence of our souls.

Once the boxes were full of all the cables and gnomes, paper and golden stars, baubles and switchgear, they were duly sent off into oblivion until about the 13th of December 2026. Perhaps I'll  join them there.

Lucky Cat Lego

Almost Happy "lucky cat" New Year time.

Next up - 2026.

Apology for Anthology

Is it strange to say only *my generation had the Beatles? Not the younger ones. Not the older ones either. Just that narrow strip of time I happened to stand on. At the time it did not feel strange at all. It felt ordinary. There was nothing unusual about them. They were simply there. As if they always had been.

I was eight when the songs arrived and something in me noticed. Awareness came quietly then. You did not know what you did not know. How the rest of the world was waking up at the same time. The records were already spinning. The television already showed them. Newspapers, magazines, cinemas - all carried the same faces. It seemed fixed. Wasn’t that how the world worked?

Later they called it a Boomer thing. At eight, words like that had no weight. I knew about the big War, even if it had already ended. I knew rockets were chasing the moon. I knew cowboys, Elvis, and the long cold pause between nations. I knew the Light Programme, Children’s Hour, and Doctor Who, when the TV signal held. The Beatles slid into that knowledge without friction. Black and white faces. Scratchy records. Radios humming and glowing in the corners of rooms. They were not separate from life. They were part of it's texture. Like Bible stories or sherbet fountains. They were everywhere without trying to be.

The adults disapproved, or it felt that way. They said the songs meant nothing. They laughed at the words. They said the hair was long and wrong. They said Liverpool had never produced anything good. That was what they said. It did not matter. Everyone else leaned forward. We tested loyalties with pain and laughter, Beatles or Stones and we pretended it was a choice. The Beatles were better, everyone knew. The Stones were dangerous. Their danger complicated things. The adults said it would pass. They were wrong, though some of them understood. The ground was moving. You could feel it if you stood still long enough. But the establishment never believes in a movement until it has already fallen and is a piece of history.

The end, it turns out, is always closer than the beginning. The gods became men. Flesh and failure. They had warned us in the songs, but belief is easier than listening hard. Understanding asks something of you, and most people prefer not to pay.

By the time I'd turned sixteen it was finished. On the skids. The fractures came. Then the departures. Then the scandals. New names in music followed, eager and loud. They could play. They could write. They could perform. But they were not walking into open ground. They followed footprints already pressed into the earth. That walk could not be easily repeated. What came after was a pale imitation, sometimes beautiful, often competent, never the same. An original moment does not forgive repetition. It can only be viewed through glass, thinned and dulled. The world began to spin faster, and our heroes proved not to be bulletproof.

Now machines revive what once lived free.  Still photos move again. Voices return without breath. It is something you may accept, but not something you can savour if you were ever there. It is hollow in the way belief becomes hollowed out when it asks nothing back. We watched the progression and sensed where it led. Souls sold cheaply, performing their tributes while everything around flattens into a cartoon form. History repeats, yes, but never faithfully. Time does not always improve what it touches. Small corruptions accumulate into monsters. The Devil stays down in the details. He prefers it there.

You try to tell your version anyway. You have to. It might matter, though few will believe it. Then people age, die and vanish, and the story returns again, edited, softened, looped endlessly for easier consumption. A version of memory becomes content. Context disappears.

The planet does not need more amusement. It needs care. It needs stewards. It needs people willing to serve rather than extract. Once there was a moment when that almost surfaced. Then errant machines closed over it and it was snuffed out. Corporations and governments learned faster ways to take without giving. We arrive at the future we earn. It did not have to be this way.

* I never, ever bought any Beatles records when I was young. No LPs, books or posters either. Nothing, I don't know why. Later on I bought a few CDs and books. There are still some Beatles albums I've never listened to all the way through.

-----

Sometimes I get my head into knots over imagined desert island options i.e. If you could only take one band or artist's music with you to the island, which one would you choose? 

Perhaps: Mozart, Bowie, Gershwin, Tchaikovsky, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, CSNY ... ?

Once the internal pub argument is over,  I think ... it's the Beatles.

Perpetual Anxiety

"Either you accept the terms of our cookie policy or you reject them, and if you do, you pay. That's nice - welcome to the happy and inclusive realm of journalism and web content in 2026-ish. Nobody gives it away. Everybody has to pay and pay.”

-----

I may have perpetual anxiety. 

I don't know for sure. 

It's just running in the background.

A quiet little programme. 

But I'll be looking over my shoulder.

Keeps the adrenalin high and the heart pumping. 

It's maybe for the best.

Or,

More likely.

Do we all have a dose of it?

Fight v flight.

Something up ahead. 

Just running on and away. 

However close to empty.

Unseen threats.

Panic in the air.

We are all animals after all.

Wild animals.

Well, some wilder than others.

-----

Control

Couldn't have put it better myself, whilst also conscious of still being a bit of a hypocrite here. Modern life is a series of contradictions, convenience and complications that I can't easily navigate. Everybody wants to control the world, or at least what they see as their part of it and then add those extra bits they also want to conquer and exploit. Fun-suckers.

As an alternative to my pathetic moaning here's some "happy wee cute cat" gift tags that arrived on Christmas morning attached to gifts, strangely enough.

Now ... and Then

Photo above by LB, Koln 2025.

As above, farewell for the time being.

P.S. Not this year but in case anybody forgot ...

Pre-Christmas Post

It's that time of year again. I'm of an age where I know fine well that there's not much I can think, write or say about Christmas that hasn't been widely said or shared before so I'll not bother. However I quite like the little piece (above) that the often unjustly cursed and much misunderstood internet has kindly provided for me. Please note that at times the internet has also done or at least facilitated some pretty bad things. Users beware. Happy Pre-Christmas.

Spotlight

Spotlight on Zippy, the cat who gets a little less photographic attention than sister Bungle or brother George. It's not that he's any kind of shrinking violet, it's more down to him being quite elusive and flighty compared to his siblings. He remains under the radar, carrying out his own secret missions and ... he's a better predator than the other two, a proven hunter. That of course comes with a number of other problems.

14 Downloads

So happy to know that my downloads are being scanned by McAfee before they ever dare enter the sanctity of the download folder.

The pre-Christmas malaise is upon me this morning. The feeling that things need doing and that doing needs things but also that my operating system is running in slow motion, in an agreeable way, so much so that I have no intention of jump starting it. I don't want to disturb myself.

Today the weather is also crumbly and rickety with a slight chance of pesky developing later on in the day. 

Fourteen years we were in Madeira according to Google photos and who am I to argue with a machine? It's been brought to my attention that fourteen is also the only correct way to spell 14, never forteen, apparently.

Thanks For 2025

2025: You're actually better listening to or downloading our stuff (or most other's) on Bandcamp, but I quite like the "free" graphic that Apple kindly (?) supplied for the year end. We don't do a ton of business on Apple and as you'd imagine their artist's rates are just about as piss poor as Spotify* - but over time the listener and streaming numbers add up, it's just the money that doesn't at this miserable end of the business. Fat cats and toothless minions everywhere rejoice - but know that for you, a day of reckoning (?) will come.

 *The customary moan of the creator prevails.

Art-Craft-Science

Quasi-religious moments bordering on possible wisdom described by the use of meaningful titles and labels: 

Maybe in no particular order - or is there a natural set of rules that things just follow, do we mistake that for design and purpose? 

Are things happening for understandable reasons or are they only happening by chance? 

Sometimes the answer just drops into your head from out of a clear blue sky. 

And if you fall the universe will provide you with a soft landing.

Here are next week's winning lottery numbers ...

:-------------------------------------------------------------:

John Lewis Advert 2026 - Part 2

 

Another day, another John Lewis bag. Same cat.

South Queensferry Daily Dump

A small thing: A child's scooter parked up in Hawthorn Bank. It's more abandoned than parked really. Somebody in authority should do something or perhaps the owner will come or a member of the public will react and deal with the lost scooter. It seems to have malfunctioned. The rear wheel is either jammed or pretty stiff, not turning freely. Nobody has claimed it so far. It's a broken scooter.

Maybe it's been dumped. The child, the parent, they've had enough of it. So they left it behind, expecting somebody else to notice, to use it or fix it or just dump it for them. They didn't feel responsible. So we'll maybe put some messages or a photo out on socials that there's a kid's scooter sitting on the corner. Been there all day, etc. etc. Everybody checks their socials. Right?

No surprise that nobody has claimed the scooter, or came looking or anything. So I suppose we'll hold onto it for a few days and if nothing else happens we'll dump it ... or actually do the right thing and take it to the proper recycling centre. But that's something we don't have here in SQ. We've got the bottle banks, clothes containers, cardboard bins and stuff. No proper place for this kind of thing though. You have to go into Edinburgh, to Sitehill, ten miles away. 

😒

Winter's Tale

In the dark in the mornings it's hard to find the floor. Pale shadows. the click of door handles. Run the tap. Stick the kettle on. Open a jar and check the milk. Nobody has Ovaltine first thing in the morning. Rain on the windows and wild winds coming and going but still rattling the chimney flue. Ashes in the fire place. Clean it up later and get some more firewood in. They're going to outlaw log burners soon and encourage heat pumps. I'm too far down the road for any of that. The roadway to Hell is paved with good intentions, most of which are just turned over and picked at by the crows.

They don't understand the insultion problems that most Scottish houses have, it's down to the way they were built back then. But understanding a problem before you take action isn't high on the current list of political skills and talents these days. Just do something that sounds about right, that makes a good a sound bite. It'll probably be the first thing that comes into your head or the head of your special advisor who has a degree in Australian flora and fauna. The BBC will run with it. They always do.

Breathing out the old man broke character and moved his thoughts on, "enough of that". Then he whispered something strange to the dancing shadows. He took time. He watched as they slowly disappeared into the wall, or wherever it is that shadows go once they're done. Then he went outside into the dim light and filled the feeders so that the birds might enjoy an early breakfast. There's still a lot of quiet satisfaction to be had out there. A calm sea of silence beats the thunder of a vacuum.
 

Letterboxd

Some choice material that I added: I saw somewhere that there was a thing on line called Letterboxd (without the"e") that was all the rage amongst the bright young things*. It's for fans of cinema and so on. I think by losing the offending"e" they avoid a few awkward "urban" sexual terms that don't fit so well with listing and reviewing films. More of a cinematic themed style of name might have been better. 

Letterboxd is probably no longer so popular now that I've signed up, opened an account and picked as film or two. I created a short list of those that I may have liked at some point in the past. That seems to be the whole point of the site. Know your history and brag about stuff you know. I'm no film buff, I've forgotten most of what I've seen and why I liked what I liked. 

On LB a person can interact with their fellow members but I'm not sure about that. What kind of people would even do that? Facebook for film fans? I'm averse to long, dull conversations about film and cinema anyway - though I might tackle a quick one after a wine or three. If it's a good watch then enjoy it but don't sweat over the details. I'll likely unsubscribe in a few weeks then forget anything ever happened.

*Or older weirdos.

John Lewis Advert 2026

 

 

Did an impromtu photo session yesterday with George the tuxedo cat. Turned out that we got some good material. We'll probably submit it to John Lewis once we are evacuated from the wreckage and debris of 2025. I think we have a strong contender here for the big fat John Lewis Christmas 2026 ad campaign. Things will just snowball for us, no doubt. Not sure what Christmas tune might go best with it. I know that it misses the mark but I've always had a liking for "Christmas Wrapping" by the Waitresses, my favourite bit of seasonal pop-bop.

eBay Treasures

Buried treasure: Always fun to see our stuff turn up on eBay after 20 years of who knows what kind of treatment. This is another one of the "black" promo CDs we sent out to all sorts of people and places - 20 years ago or so. They didn't really further our musical career at all but it was fun at the time. We tried and, after well over a million plays, streams and downloads on numerous platforms we're still here, standing watching the skip fire that's the music industry. Ours is a pretty common experience. I've no regrets, well not many. Messages in bottles do get found eventually.