Procrastination

Well, I was going to write my next blog entry sooner but I needed to erm wash the dishes and watch that programme about the sex life of fleas and then there was the reorganising of my bank statements into date order which I really HAD to do NOW, OK?! Anyone who remembers studying at school or university will identify with being faced with a deadline and feeling compelled to do just about anything else under the sun aside from the task in hand. It can be the same when faced with writing an article. Out comes the hoover, you feel compelled to call that friend you've quite happily neglected for the past three months and you find yourself taking a real interest in Murder, She Wrote for the first time in your life.

If the TV isn't a big enough distraction then there's the time sapping black hole of the internet to contend with too. The interweb is a devious beast as well because even when you do finally start researching your article online you can either find yourself distracted by the 'related links', which often send you off on a completely useless tangent, or you automatically log into your Facebook account out of habit. This can often lead to the obsessive compulsive procrastinators loop of Facebook, Hotmail, Facebook, Hotmail, Facebook, BBC Weather, Facebook, Hotmail. Neither direction is a good one to go in when you have that big black dreadline cloud hanging over you and can only lead to a very late night, two hours sleep face down on your keyboard and then the realisation when you awake with marginally more sense that nothing you wrote before you passed out makes the slightest bit of sense and even if it does there's five times the amount of words you were commissioned to write. The wood and the trees look remarkably alike but you're on a promise to get the article in first thing in the morning and that happens to be a mere 90 minutes away. You struggle through in between swearing and frustratedly tugging at clumps of your hair while feeling like some kind of drug-addled space cadet.

But somehow, you make it. You meet the deadline. The editor is happy and no one aside from you knows the ordeal you've been through to get the article written. To think you could have just bloody well got on with it without the impromptu spring clean or the assistance of Angela Lansbury... but that's something the professional procrastinator can only dream of.

Anyway, time to exorcise some more chart trivia from my overloaded noggin with useless music fact #2: The Prodigy reached number three with their debut hit 'Charly' in August 1991. The fairground style follow-up 'Everybody In The Place' went one better and hit number two but it wasn't till 'Firestarter' in 1996 that Liam Howlett and co. finally hit the top spot. However, even though that is their best known track to date, follow-up 'Breathe', which also hit number one, sold more copies. Fancy that eh??

Till next time…

Originally posted on http://blog.ianroullier.com on 8 June 2009.

Pitching

Hello and welcome to a blog that only I am following at the moment. Exciting eh? I've spent the past two evenings pitching. Once for features and once for albums. A good pitch involves having a decent sales technique as well as a good idea, because a great idea poorly outlined to an editor will simply appear to be a poor idea. I keep pitching funny feature ideas, ie not chin-strokingly academic articles on the nature of electronic music and its role in forming popular culture, rather ones along the lines of 'Bodily Functions That Sound Like Dance Tunes' as a made up for-instance. This makes for a lot of fun when I'm writing but I feel the need to get a feature about something a bit more weighty under my belt again soon. Two of my feature pitches were ideas for humourous pieces and one was based around DJ Food whose 'One Man's Weird Is Another Man's World' EP is bloody amazing. Really traditional Ninja Tune cut and paste stuff with loads of samples but heavy on quality throughout. Can't wait for the album that's due out later this year following a couple more EPs.

Anyway, my first proper blog entry draws to a close and what have we learned? Well, not a great deal but I never said it was my job to inform! I will leave you with this though as I need to clear some of the old clutter out from my brain by revealing some of the music trivia I carry around in my head. Useless music fact #1 then: Bryan Adams' 'Everything I Do (I Do It For You)' spent 16 weeks at number one in 1991 before being knocked off the top spot by a new entry at number one, U2's 'Desire'. Wet Wet Wet fell just short of equalling the lumberjack shirted, gravel-gulletted crooner's record by spending 15 weeks at the top with 'Love Is All Around'. That too was knocked off the top spot by a new entry at number one, Whigfield's novelty-dance tune 'Saturday Night'. I wonder who was the happiest about conceding the throne?! I don't think Wet Wet Wet ever recovered from that kick in the teeth did they?

Originally posted on http://blog.ianroullier.com on 30 May 2009.