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Blog: 1995: THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

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It was a strangely Old Fashioned weekend for me this weekend, tho it did not start that way - i got a stern knock at the door about 9am to tell me that my EXCITING New Computer had arrived! WHOO! This is all part of the general transformation of our Downstairs Spare Room into my UBER DEN, and I gleefully set to unpacking it. I'd tried to get as many BELLS, also WHISTLES as I could, but I was still surprised to find the immensity of the sound system I'd bought - my computer now has a SUPER WOOFER! ZOINKS!

Twenty minutes after THAT arrived there was ANOTHER knock on the door - my new SIDEBOARD was here! I'd got this for TWO purposes - as a means to hide all the guitar cases/sleeping bags/boxes full of tapes that were sitting around with nowhere else to live, but also for something to put my STEREO on top of. I was just about to get it BUILT when The Women went off to Tesco, so i nipped upstairs and did a quick TRANSFER of my files from our old computer onto my portable hard drive, then DELETED lots of old rubbish, so that it would be clear and free for The Command Prompt Of My Operating System to use as HER computer from now on.

Aren't I a GRATE boyfriend? So kind, so caring, so... accident prone when it comes to computers. Later on we switched it back on and it said "INVALID SYSTEM DISK". "Ah! It's just a floppy disk in the disk drive!" i thought, FORGETTING that nobody has USED them for about 9,000 years - what it LOOKS like has happened is that i had accidentally DELETED something. ARGH! THUS we were left without Interweb Access for the whole weekend - I didn't want to load BT Broadband onto the new computer yet, LEST it update EVERYTHING and make it inoperable on the OLD (Windows 98!) machine if we got that working again, so we spent an amazingly TRANQUIL couple of days NOT checking our emails. It was actually quite nice and like OLDEN TYMES. When I got into work this morning i was Quite Excited at the prospect of all the emails I might have got over the weekend... and got in to find 5 facebook notifications and some SPAM. WHOO!

Anyway, thus unhooked from THE FUTURE I was free to spend ABOUT SIX HOURS manhandling the sideboard together. You know those flatpack furniture items you get that are like clever MODELS, where everything slides into little slots and it's all done with 5 dowl plugs and a Securing Screw in about half an hour? THIS WASN'T ONE OF THOSE. By the time I'd finished it was DARK, i had BLISTERS on my hand and EVERYTHING ACHED. I might as well have made it myself!

STILL, it did look RATHER nice and all that effort meant I got to spend Sunday on rather more RELAXING pursuits, not least LAUNCHING into a Long Cherished Project: tracking down ALL the gigs I've ever done. For some parts of my life this was VERY easy - from 1991 to 1993 I pretty religiously TAPED every gig we did, and wrote it down somewhere, and KEPT it all, and then from mid-1996, when we did the big Voon Reunion, I did the same, leading up to late 1997 when I got on the Internet. HOWEVER, almost the whole of 1995 is a MYSTERY to me. I'm pretty sure i DID do some gigs - my diary for the year vaguely mentions some, The Council were still on the go, and I recorded the first of my cassettes that year, but when any of it happened I have no idea. I'm going to get it all sorted out and online soon, then get Those Who Were There to have a look, although to be honest most of them were in at LEAST as much of a STATE as I was, so I don't hold out much hope!

It was all very jolly anyway - I'm vaguely thinking of going back and doing a SIMILAR things with all these gigs as I'm doing with "My Exciting Life In ROCK" over on the PopArt Digest, though it'll be a while before I get the time to do it. There is still a LOT to get through - this week, the formation of The Validators and our first gig - Tomfoolery, also GIGGLING, AHOY!

posted 10/12/2007 by MJ Hibbett

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