The Boy Least Likely To

i think perhaps the blog i posted earlier was a bit miserable. it all comes from too much sitting indoors when it's raining and eating too many easter eggs and listening to aidan moffat. i think perhaps i shouldn't do so much of that, even if he is the new amy winehouse and nothing tastes quite like refrigerated easter egg chocolate. i think perhaps i should get out more and not worry so much about every tiny little thing. i left the house for a bit this afternoon, and when i got home things didn't seem quite so bad after all. i remembered that i love being in the boy least likely to, and that even if sometimes it feels like i'm banging my head against a brick wall, there isn't really anything to feel sad about. because we're just a pop group and we just make pop records and it should be fun. and when i remember that, i feel happy and i want to make more of them.

x

aidan john moffat is the new amy winehouse. i'm not really sure what that means, but if someone was to ask me that's what i'd tell them. not duffy and not adele. aidan john moffat. i've been listening to his new album everywhere i go the last couple of weeks and i think it's really beautiful. i bought the bon iver album as well, but i haven't been listening to that cos it sounds like sting. aidan moffat sounds nothing like sting, but he does have one of those voices that if i listen to it too much then it becomes the voice i hear in my head speaking my thoughts. i get the same thing after i've been listening to hancocks half hour tapes and then sometimes i hear the voice bernard cribbins uses when he reads winnie the pooh. my thoughts don't sound like mine when someone else is speaking them. i sound more interesting to myself. more thoughtful.

i've been listening to 'little bit' by lykke li a lot too. it's my new favourite mixtape song, even though i don't make mixtapes anymore. i just make playlists on my ipod, which isn't the same thing at all. i miss making mixtapes and i miss having a walkman instead of an ipod. i don't think i actually like having thousands of songs available to me at any one time. i miss having to choose which tapes to take out with me before going somewhere. and i miss the excitement of going somewhere and knowing i've made a new mix tape and that wherever i'm going i'll always associate it with those songs on that particular tape. i don't even know if you can buy walkmans anymore.

yesterday i was sorting out all the manufacturing for the new single, which should be out in the middle of may and we're in the process of booking some gigs for around the first half of may as well. it's been three weeks since the last weblog. i was supposed to write one of these a week. it was my new years resolution. but sometimes so little happens in a week of being in the boy least likely to that i can't bring myself to write anything. it's all just having meetings and waiting to have meetings and making phone calls and waiting for people to ring back and talking round and round in circles and never really getting to do any of the things i formed a band to do. so then if i do try and write something i just end up writing a weblog about darts. and no one wants that again. so i decided that i'd wait until we were doing something exciting and that as long as i wrote fifty two weblogs this year that would count as one a week and i would have kept my resolution. and as soon as i have anything exciting to write about i promise i will write about it.

until then. it's always nice to have an egg for breakfast.

not that exciting though.

x

thank you to everyone that came to our london show and shouted out the answers to our crossword. for those of you that are still worrying about it, i can reveal that the "small stream" was indeed a "rill" and that "tagus" was a river in portugal. the type of crocodile that was also a word meaning "thug" was "mugger" as someone suggested, even though at the time i couldn't make it fit with the answer we had to the clue going across it for "early keyboard instrument" that gave us an "n" as the fourth letter. this morning i realised what had happened. we'd somehow managed to fit the word "pianola" into a nine letter space by spelling it "pianonola". which of course isn't a word at all. and i'm not even sure if "pianola" is a word either. anyway, the actual answer was "virginals". an embarrassing and silly mistake. i guess we must have been a bit distracted when we were doing the crossword that afternoon.

for anyone that didn't come to the london show, it wasn't as boring as i've just made it sound. i don't think.

x

"in a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
sleeps the baby mouse i found in the meadow,
where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
till i caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
cradled in my hand,
a little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
his absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon mouse,
his feet like small leaves,
little lizard feet,
whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle cap watering trough -
so much he just lies in one corner,
his tail curled under him, his belly big
as his head; his bat-like ears
twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

do i imagine he no longer trembles
when i come close to him?
he seems no longer to tremble."

- theodore roethke

we played our first gig in nearly a year last thursday. in kingston, at a place called the works. not the discount book shop, but a big nightclub. we were opening for get cape wear cape fly. we kept it a secret from everyone because we were worried that we wouldn't be very good and we wanted to do a warm up show before we played southampton on sunday. a warm up for a warm up. it was a bit weird being on stage again. i thought it would all be really familiar but it wasn't. at times i found myself wondering why i put myself through playing live. i feel awkward and self conscious enough as it is when i'm not on a stage being watched by people. i'm not sure how well we played the new songs. i spent the next few days worrying about it. thinking perhaps that it was a mistake to try and play them live and wondering if it would be weird if we didn't put any of our new songs in the set.

then on sunday we played our second warm up show at the joiners in southampton. we played a slightly longer set, adding three old songs and taking out one of the new ones. we had a bit more time to run through the songs in the soundcheck and it didn't sound quite so rubbish. and then i really enjoyed the actual show and didn't feel anywhere near as awkward and self conscious as i had done on thursday. so i guess it's all going to be okay after all and we can play the new songs live and perhaps even enjoy it.

i thought i'd better mention how amazing the two bands are that are supporting us on thursday at the water rats just so people know to get there early and not to miss them. first on are we show up on radar, who are one of my favourite bands in the world at the moment, and i'm so excited about seeing them again. although i think it might be a "him" not a "them" because i think it's a solo acoustic set. when i wrote about them before i meant to write that his lyrics remind me of the way theodore roethke writes, particularly with his greenhouse poems. so i've put the two halves of 'the meadow mouse' by theodore roethke at the beginning and the end of this weblog just for fun. you can listen to we show up on radar here if you don't already know what they sound like. and then on after we show up on radar is the wonderful one man band that is the voluntary butler scheme. he played before us in southampton and was really really special. you can listen to his songs here and then sing along to unnerve him.

a couple of other things i thought i'd mention while i'm here. we've got a new website. it isn't completely finished yet but it'll have all the latest news about releases and concerts on there and you can download a free copy of 'i box up all the butterflies' from the music page. there's also a link on there to go our facebook page. i'm not completely sure what i'm doing with facebook yet because i didn't have a profile til a week ago and i'm still trying to make sense of it all, but i do quite enjoy writing little messages on the wall. if you've got a facebook thing then perhaps you might like to join.

i must go to sleep now. i'm tired and i've got a lot to do tomorrow.

x

"but this morning the shoe box house on the back porch is empty.
where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
my thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?
to run under the hawk's wing,
under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm tree,
to live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom cat.

i think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
the turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
the paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising -
all things innocent, hapless, forsaken."

- theodore roethke