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