Albums and Cranes Shows

Well, my record is nearly finished. The majority of the last song, called ‘You Left the Wrong Man’ is almost complete. I will look to finish this final song by December and then think about the mastering. It will finally be done. Snippets of the record so far can be heard here, please feel free to comment on them. The order they appear in the little player on the linked page is not the final order. Just something I stuck up there to keep people off of my back and who keep bugging me to ‘put something out’!! Well, it’s coming so you can just shush your pie-holes now.

It’s that time again, Cranes rehearsals. Once again, lots of songs being rehearsed for our upcoming shows in Spain and Romania. During the week I had the Blue Meanie on the bench, tuned down a semitone and re-intonated the stubborn bitch. Locking trem guitars are bastards to intonate. But it needed doing and it is done and she’s all greased up to do some filthy work.

This time out we’re flying to the shows so I won’t be taking the boogie. Yes, I hear you cry, time to have your equipment smashed to shit by baggage handlers, hmmmmmmmmm. Hired backline will be brought in and I have a spec list for amps. All three on the list are Boogies and any one of the three will do just fine. As long as I don’t turn up and find some knackered Fender Twin that a million users have flanged the piss out of I’m sure it will be fine. Fuck knows what is happening with the keyboard setup though. I have my laptop/mainstage setup and I will take that plus a midi box so all bases will be covered.
If you’re thinking of coming to any of the shows they are:

• Spain, Barcelona at Salamandra 2 on Friday November the 23rd.
• Spain, Madrid at Sala Cats on Saturday November the 24th
• Romania, Bucharest at Panic! on Saturday December the 1st.

If you come to one or all of the shows, PLEASE come up and say hello!! Don’t be a stranger. And, of course, it is a welcome break from being cooped up day and night with those other bastards.

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Fonticles

Some of you may or may not know that for the past eight years or so I have worked on and developed fonts. I have always had a strange fascination for letterforms of all languages. The development and design of letterforms is an exact and articulate process, however, for faces to survive and be used they must be useful and imaginative. These things don’t often go hand in hand and this is the intrinsic nature, which often seems at odds with itself, of type design.

Like a lot of things these days, it seems, people tend to want to do things like ‘making a font’, and music, without putting too much effort in. Or any effort at all. A fine example of modern thinking spewed out of someones mouth just the other day, it was ‘Don’t you just press a button to get that?’. I gave them the short answer, which was, ‘No you fucking don’t’. This may sound old fashioned but I try to work hard and to think just as hard about what I want to do and why. This doesn’t mean that the idea has to be fully formed before you begin, it can evolve as you go along, but thinking is still so important, it really is. I think I could easily go the rest of my life with this interest in fonts and still not scratch the surface of what is really involved. There is something I quite like about this though. Always having something to learn is not such a bad thing.

My new font is a month or two away from completion, depending on what other work comes along. There are no kerning pairs, as yet, still got a few glyphs to design before I get to that. Here are a couple of snippets from it……….

Three of the letter outlines as drawn in Fontlab Studio.

Here we have our lower case ‘m’, our Pound Sterling symbol, our German double s which is comprised of a tall s joined to a lower case s and not a bastardised ‘B’ as some people think, and our upper case ‘A’.

This will be an OpenType font with eastern and western European Roman characters.