Monday, September 20, 2010

News Book

According to the Equinox website, The Lost Women of Rock Music will be out in September 2011 and not January as I had hoped. However, the good news is that it will be affordable (I hope!) at £14.99 and will have photographs too.
This takes the pressure off me for a while as I have a conference paper to write for the Art of Record Production conference in December, and I am also doing a short graphic contribution to a book called Punkademics, which needs to be finished by then as well.
I will be relying on the therapeutic nature of music making to see me through the next couple of months. On Thursdays I have to leave the house at 7 and won't be back till 7 in the evening, with two three hour seminars of rookie students. Then I teach a three-hour songwriting/production class on Friday mornings.
So no gigs on Thursdays until December, apart from the one I have already got with the Desperado Housewives.
At least I still appear to have a job. For now....

I've just got back from a grocery trip and patted myself on the back for not charity-shopping.
The house has had that rather sweetish-stale aroma of second hand clothes for quite a long time, but Mary Portas* has finished off the charity shops in Barnet: they have been well and truly Portassed!
Savvy experts have come in and re-priced the last-season designer clothes and the vintage finds 'more realistically', so the chance of finding a gem hidden in the tons of nylon, faded curtains and stretched-out babygros has vanished.
Someone should have told her that part of the joy of using charity shops is finding something really fabulous at a fraction of its cost, precisely because the ladies behind the counter are more used to arranging flower displays in the Church than searching eBay for the latest price for some 1960s Lego.
If a pair of shoes costs £20 in Oxfam, we will all go to Primark instead and destroy the environment while encouraging slave labour of children at the same time.
Not so clever now, Mary, are you?


*For my non-British readers (pretentious, moi?) Mary Portas is the star of a TV series that revamps tired and failing independent shops and doubles their profits as a result. She recently applied her skills to a thrift shop in South London, upsetting a lot of the staff in the process. I didn't realise how upset I was until I started writing the rant above. No more cheap recycled clothes for me!


Finally, here is another Helen and the Horns video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-fZqy9Slsg



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What would we do without charity shops - after buying the Shetland knitting book for £2.50, I saw it on a secondhand book stall for £20!!

Anonymous said...

If you really want a charity shop experience, try the ch*ldr*ns S*ci*ty shop in St Albans. Apart from being greeted with a sneer when you take stuff in, the blue rinsed sensible footwared 'lady' behind the counter will happily tell you that they make over 500k GBP a year, and that the stuff that isn't good enough gets sent to Sheffield. Yeah, cheers.

Scope in the Maltings gets my vote, and obviously, goodies.

W of St A

oh yeah - videos good, but when I looked on youtube last night I was perplexed to see what lurked in the 'you might also like to watch' column. War in Eritrea or something similar. Couldn't see the linke myself...

Unknown said...

I've recently been introduced to the delights of Oxfam on Oldham Street in Manchester.... I don't feel bad telling people about it though, because I think all the savvy and skint people in the Northern Quarter already knew about it...

Jude Montague said...

Good news about the book. I think. Pricing wise I mean.

Helen McCookerybook said...

Anne: that's exactly what I mean, finding treasure!
Wilky: I'm off to Sheffield- sounds like the best stuff goes there!
Cazz: that's where I'm off to next time I'm up your way!
Jude: I am over the moon- even I might be able to afford a copy now! :)