Rob and Si are well known as Burger enthusiasts and co-write the excellent review blog, Burger Anarchy. Their love for all things Burger-related is utterly infectious and I’ve always enjoyed their blog for that reason, but it wasn’t til my friend, restaurant owner Tim Styles was round at ours one evening when I mentioned them and he excitedly said “what, you mean the guys who write Burger Anarchy?” that I realised the breadth of their influence and expertise.

The pub is run by the eponymous Brewdog Brewery of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire who, judging by their Wikipedia entry, seem to be the Enfant Terrible of the beer world, chasing ever stronger and more valuable brews and upsetting the well ordered calm and proud traditions of the world of beer.

It’s a nice place to be and, as a Proper Pub, with great, non-formal food (it couldn’t for a moment be described as a Restaurant), it’s the kind of place Camden Town is crying out for, dominated as it is by tourist traps, music-centric pubs and pub/restaurants (before anyone mentions it, there are one or two worthy exceptions, but there’s still a need for unique, slightly hidden pubs). I’d rather not talk too much about the burgers and tread on Rob and Si’s infinitely more talented, purpose built toes, but I can say that we had a cheeseburger each, and a pork burger and curry burger on the side to share, and that they were uncommonly good, served almost in the style of massive, extravagant bar snacks than actual meals.

So yes, good times, good company and a good thing for an area of London that is very close to my heart. Go!

We drag our hung-over bodies from bed, vowing to no longer drink, do all those bits of DIY that have been queuing up for months and to make a greater effort to realise the potential at work that we all know we can. As we gulp down that pair of Paracodol, we sweep together each failing, vice and moment of weakness and vainly promise ourselves never to let them happen again.

For my part I’ve tried not to get too involved in the self flagellation this year. Last January, I aimed to cut down on drinking (which lasted at least a week and a half) and to update this blog on a more regular basis (which lasted a little longer, but was eventually torpedoed by apathy and a general lack of imagination subject-wise).  My lapses in both cases led me to think that, for most people, the idea of kind of ‘saving up’ self-improvement for one day of the year is a loser’s game; if you really wanted to stop (or start) doing something, why would you not just do it any other time?

So, I suppose, if I were to have any resolution at all, it’d be to be a little more pro-active and actually do things when they need doing, rather than save things up for occasions like New Year’s Day.

In any case, Happy New Year!

It’s hard to believe that the finishing of four tunes has taken up quite so much time but, somehow, it has.

Here we are pioneering a new way of playing the bass, coined by Alan.

Well, that’s not 100% true, as a cycled to the shops a few days ago, which we can think of as the planting of a seed, but yesterday, I really went for it.

Our friend Francisco recently moved to Koh Phangan in Thailand to become a diving instructor and run a bar, and he left a few things at our house, including his bike, which he encouraged us to use as we pleased.

I used to cycle all the time, especially during my summer holidays when I’d regularly make the round trip from Waldringfield to Woodbridge and back just for the pleasure of being able to go from one distinct place to another under my own steam and all the independence and freedom that bought.

Anyway, somehow my cycling lapsed and I fell into flabby inactivity and public transport patronage.

Yesterday I was transported right back to those wonderful feelings as I cycled first across Hackney Marshes and then along the five or so miles of canal to Angel, never having to join a road along the way for more than a few moments. I saw people living on boats, single scull rowers, picnicing families, sleeping alcoholics, amazing street-art, huge green spaces, utterly unpolluted by the sound of traffic all of whom would have been hidden from me if I’d made my way to Angel on a bus or train. Not one of the people I saw sported a frown or looked run down or tired which, whilst it was a bank holiday, is a rare pleasure in a town like London.

I stopped for refreshments at The Gallery Cafe (wonderful, sunny, friendly and oh so Hackney), the Narrowboat (very nice, with a door onto the canal) and, with my friend Sonya (whose blog for Time Out you must read; it can be found HERE) an excellent pub called The Charles Lamb, where I permitted myself a half pint of Guinness.

So, with all this joy from such a simple afternoon out, I’ve resolved to get myself a bike (as Fran will want his back at some point, I’m sure) and get cycling more often. It’d seem a shame to waste the chance of seeing amazing hidden corners of London at the same time as saving a fortune in travelcards.

My latest blogging silence can be unashamedly attributed to the time I’ve spent enjoying the warmest Easter sunshine our usually rainy nation has enjoyed in some six decades.

We’ve been visited by friends and had a little more time on our hands thanks to bank holidays and school breaks, so we’ve been spending a lot of time in our beautiful garden, taking coffee out there almost every morning, and even managing dinner out there a few times. It sounds like a small thing but, just wandering around London, you can really see how much happier everyone looks when the sun is shining. The convivial atmosphere has been most inspiring.

Another by-product of the fine weather has been the plants in our garden going absolutely mad with growth and, coupled with the frost damage to some of our perennials from a very harsh winter, the whole place was looking a little messy and overgrown, so we enlisted the services of a gardener to cut back an enormous amount of foliage and take it away in his van, meaning that formerly shaded areas of the garden are now bathed in glorious spring sunshine. This new-found space has given us room to plant some climbers on the side of the house and on the pergola by our shed. It’s all very exciting.

So, in the absence of great life changing revelations, enjoy the garden pictures.

The event was billed as being In The Spirit Of events held by Jean Dupuy in New York between 1974-75 and bought together all kinds of artists in the common cause of doing something for two minutes. It’s perhaps unsurprising that, faced with the challenge of making an impression on a theatre full of people in two minutes, many of the performers prepared something that’d make people laugh;  Martin Creed‘s ‘Pass Them On’ saw him singing a whimsical song in front of a giant projection of a breast, Tim Etchells‘ ‘And Counting’ almost took the form of a stand-up comedy routine (whilst Penny Arcade‘s monologue definitely did) and John Butcher‘s ‘Pure Bristle’, a virtuosic and dazzling saxophone solo, unashamedly played on certain comic special technical effects.

Other less comically minded pieces saw Christian Marclay smash an enormous pile of shellac 78s, William Cobbing pull a mobile mountain of wet clay, complete with protruding, slapping human arms, across the Barbican Stage and a hugely effective ‘Sounding Poem’ from a choir dotted around the auditorium led by Nicoletta Tiberini.

Marcia’s piece consisted of her first describing, then unpacking from a vacuum shrunken plastic bag and eventually putting on and dancing off the stage in a huge fluffy, sewn-together blob of old coats, collars and un-stuffed childrens’ soft toys, as Sam and I played quasi-stripping music in the background. Marcia aimed to show the audience that ‘The Blob thinks it’s sexy’ which, judging from their reaction and the people I spoke to afterwards, they understood and appreciated.

So it was a wonderful evening generally, and an educational and enjoyable foray into the world of performance art for me.

It’s a video of Adebisi Shank playing at what looks like an absolutely tiny club during that famous music industry free-for-all, SXSW festival in Texas. Seeing as they’re one of the most searched-for things on this blog, I see no reason not to celebrate them on here. The performance is of Europa, from their latest album, and it’s an absolute stormer. Never seen a band like it.

Here’s the most memorable music video I’ve ever seen, for Hella‘s Try Dis.

It’s epic yet budget, fantastical with elements of normality and all seems to fit the tone of the music incredibly.

First things first, we don’t go to the cinema nearly as often as we should, and we always realise that after we watch a film somewhere good and love it. The Curzon’s screen #1 is somewhere good. It’s comfortable, with a large screen and an excellent speaker system operated by someone who neither wants to deafen you, nor deprive you of the cinematic experience. We also had cake and coffee in the cafe upstairs and it reminded me of why it’s such a special cinema. If you have a choice, choose this place, or the Rio in Dalston; both are spectacular, homely, and seem to care about film and cinema enjoyment, rather than ice-cream and popcorn.

As for the film, I can hardly remember enjoying and identifying with something so much for years. I’ve never seen such an accurate representation of the unintentional and essentially benign selfishness of adolescence, and the film steered clear of blame, allowing everyone to be both culpable and a victim and , with one notable exception, pretty likeable.

I’m a useless film critic, but the whole thing looked absolutely beautiful and filled me with pangs of nostalgia for childhood summer holidays with its scenes of the epically broad deserted coastline of West Wales. Its Super 8 footage and deadpan, wistful voice-over also piled on the nostalgia unashamedly and the whole experience turfs the viewer back onto the streets after viewing feeling winded and subtly but fundamentally changed, like every good film should.

Here’s the trailer. If you haven’t go and watch it.

WAC was founded just over 30 years ago by Celia Greenwood, offering low-cost, high-quality drama classes to young people from low income families. Since then, WAC has grown into an institution that offers all kinds of arts education to students aged 5-25, many of whom follow the course from the very beginning into adulthood. Classes have been kept as cheap as possible, and still typically cost £1.50 per session (under the tutelage of arts professionals, paid at normal rates) and, for those from backgrounds where even £6 a month seems unmanageable, there are bursaries available to make sure that, if anyone is left out, it won’t be because of their background. The popularity of WAC is well reflected by an enormous, but well managed waiting list.

I first signed up as a student at senior WAC’s music class in response to frequent encouragements from my musical mentors Nikki Yeoh, Jack C Arnold and Mark and Michael Mondesir (as well as many of my musical contemporaries who were already signed up), all of whom spoke in hallowed tones of the classes they took under the late British Jazz legend Ian Carr, and how they’d shaped (or were in the process of shaping) the way they played, composed and approached music in general. Ian’s classes were unlike anything I’d experienced at that stage of my life, for reasons that there isn’t space to go into in enough detail here (just a collection of ‘Ian Quotes’ would represent a hefty blog entry of its own) but it’s worth saying that, rather than taking a professorial approach, Ian treated us as side-men (and women) in his own band, bestowing information on us not as not as a teacher at the front of a class, but as a true mentor and bandleader and, when Ian eventually retired, his successor Tim Whitehead continued to pass on knowledge in a similar way; every word vital, exciting, inspiring and, most importantly, never patronising. When I went on to teach at WAC myself, I realised that this was very much its signature style of teaching young people (not ‘kids’. Never ‘kids’) and I made every attempt to make my own approaches as convivial, friendly and open.

My own experience, however, is not why WAC’s funding being pulled is such a disaster; as an institute, it functions not just as a facilitator of brilliance (which, incidentally, it’s stellar list of alumni, who feature on nominations lists for  any number of Brits, Mercurys, Mobos, Tonys, Baftas and Oscars must attest to. More on them later), but as much, much more; 80% of students at WAC come from families who wouldn’t be in a position to send them other Arts Institutions whose fees can often run to sums that would be, to put it mildly, far from practical for parents on a low income. Far from being a training ground for fame, WAC has been a haven for young people for whom the social skills and confidence that are inextricably linked to learning to play an instrument, sing, act, dance or direct a short film haven’t necessarily been nurtured in the same way as for those who have been able to take for granted all those things. WAC is not a youth club, and does far, far more than just Take Kids Off The Streets for an afternoon each weekend, but it does provide them with a healthy, educational, inspirational and worthwhile experience at the same time as being taken off the hands of often overworked, underpaid parents who can be happy in the knowledge that their children are in a safe and happy environment. Seriously, just read through some of the comments on the petition linked below and see how often words to the effect of ‘safe environment’ are mentioned, and you’ll begin to realise that this unique college is about much more than learning to sing and dance.

I suppose a common counter-argument is that, though it’s sad and unfair that poorer young people might miss out, in a time of austerity, Arts Education is a luxury that we can’t afford to subsidise. Common it may be, but it’s wrong; there are often quoted studies that show that, for each pound invested in the arts, more pounds come back, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that educating people who, representing the UK, work in a truly international area of commerce, continuing to sell tickets, write soundtracks, direct, produce, act in and generally better pieces of work which pour revenue and investment into our domestic economy must be a good thing. That’s obvious.

So, an institute so popular it has a waiting list of over 1000 names, which nurtures the talent, confidence and social skills of young people, the majority of whom are from underpriviledged families, from the age of 5-25, keeping them from less wholesome pursuits and preparing them for a life in, or outside the arts in a genuinely caring way faces closure thanks to a cut of £109,000 per year? This despite the Arts Council saying of WAC “[its] list of alumni is impressive and the scale of delivery makes it an important contributor in delivering training opportunities to children and young people with least opportunities“? Does that seem fair, or conducive to a Bigger Society, after 30 years spent building and bettering its services?

If you think not, please, please sign THIS PETITION (you can skip the donation section if you like; registering your disagreement is the most important thing) in the hope that more young people will continue to be offered the chances that I, and many of my contemporaries have enjoyed.

Other organisations have had funding cut reprieves, so every one of your signatures counts.