08:52, 13/02/2006

The state of things

A brief update from the World Wide Miss K

Perhaps the greatest thing about this Internet thing is the friends we make. The social effects, the networking, the building. I've made many friends since I started this weblog, and many before. But sitting there in the middle of all those friends, like a spider lady in her web of links, is Lindsay. She predates my blog by abut six months, and, as I mentioned earlier, was in essence the inspiration for it.

I met Lindsay in Second Life. We became friends when she came to one of my Bunker Klub nights - I was probably the only person running a club and DJ night that involved rock and alternative music at the time - and I think we were immediately drawn to each other because of our shared stupid, fringester attitude to SL. We liked to see ourselves as the two chicks from Ghost World. I'm afraid I was Rebecca, and she the far more interesting Enid.

It was through my friendship with her avatar, Thea Donovan, that I became acquainted with her beautiful and frightening poetry, discovered a shared love for dream narrative, and started to read one of her many weblogs, which she opens and folds with a regularity that would be metronomic if it wasn't so unpredictable.

After a while, I decided to follow through a thought I'd had for a while and weblog myself. And here we are.

So it's her fault!

Anyway, the reason I'm writing this is I'm terribly excited that I'm finally going to meet Lindsay after almost two years. In that time, while I've lived my fairly staid life in London, she's moved from Leeds to Dublin to West Virginia and back to Dublin, changed jobs more times than I can count, and written a great quality (if not quantity) of work. I'm still waiting for the collaborative piece she promised me.

Anyway, I'm off to Dublin on Wednesday and will hopefully spend some good time with my friend before I get back on Thursday. We always say that "we'll hate each other" when we finally meet. Now that would be funny.

In Lindsay's own words, "aaaaaiiiiieeeeeeeee!!!!"

I'm going to Dublin with two good friends, Jennie, the bass player from my (old) band Electric Shocks, and her boyfriend, who is one of London's top rock DJs. He's playing at the launch night of a new club there and we're going to go and drink, smoke, get rocked and be hungover (in that order, hopefully).

I say "(old) band" as the Shocks are no more. We finally petered out last December after four good years of rocking. We formed back in 2001 right in the thick of the new rock insurgence (bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes had just made their first visits to Britain) and initially things moved very fast for us. We were playing regularly, our first single was released within six months, with an album, Wild Dog Setting, on Artrocker records about six months later.

In the first two to three years we played gigs with the likes of Electric Six, The Darkness, Art Brut, Bloc Party, The Unicorns and Babyshambles, as far afield as London, Birmingham, Jersey, Madrid, Amsterdam and Berlin. It was fucking exciting.

But it never truly ignited and as we were recording our second album last summer we knew it wasn't happening any more. The songs were good, but we weren't interested in it like we should have been.

Funnily enough, we all contacted each other on the same day to call a band meeting, and that was it. Our last gig, in September last year, was at Artrocker Club, where it had all started, which is fitting.

If anyone's interested in copies of our stuff, let me know, and I'll send you some. you can also listen to streamed stuff at Mperia.com listen to streamed stuff at Last.fm.

Music doesn't stop. and the Shocks had slowed down too long. Four years seems to be the shelf life for bands who don't quite make it but have enough sense to quit before it gets too sad, and that's what we did.

Now I'm doing new music with Jennie. The other three Shocks, Dave, Dan and Johnny, are doing their own thing as well. It's all good.

in fact our new stuff is bloody good. I'll share some demos here soon.

Take care and goodnight!

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