Scribblings about music from a 15-year-old me

The thoughts of a teenage ambient fan

It's been a while since I wrote a blog about anything music related but I came across an old essay I wrote at school when I was just 15 and thought I'd share part of it.

The essay is entitled 'Where in the world do you find beauty and what is your response to it?' and gives you some insight into my young mind and reveals the roots of a future music hack. I'm not sure if its naivety is endearing or annoying but you can see the 1992 version of me adopting several (questionable) journalistic traits.

These include dealing in absolutes for effect, displayed by the 'I loved rave music and now I hate it, I love this ambient music instead now' stance. The fact is I still love rave music and never stopped loving it (though admittedly I don't listen to Tetris by Doctor Spin any more) and I also still love ambient music. That wouldn't sell (or at least get my English teacher's attention) though would it?!

This old build it up, knock it down mentality has been used by hacks throughout the ages, mostly by the NME. My excuse is that I was a fickle 15-year-old, I'm not sure what the NME's excuse is. Anyway, here is an excerpt complete with the bad punctuation, the scarcity of paragraphs and never-ending sentences it was originally written with.

Where in the world do you find beauty and what is your response to it?

GCSE English essay, 12th October 1992. (Aged 15)

[…] Beauty for most people makes them feel at peace and tranquil and extremely happy and restful. But the question is, what do I see beauty in? 

Above all, above nature, architecture and art, I must say that it is music that gives me immense pleasure to listen to and I let myself be taken away by the beats, electronic instruments and melodic, mellow sounds that have been used to create a wonderful sound. I, like many others now, used to be into Rave music. This music is made up of one-hundred and forty to fifty beats per minute backing, a repetitive “chorus”, (made up of up to five notes played over and over again), or a singer, singing the same few words (that have no meaning) over and over again. Plus, in many of the tunes these days, there is a sample, or extract, from a television tune or computer game. These have included records like, “Roobarb ‘n’ Custard”, “Sesame’s Treet”, “A Trip To Trumpton”, “Super Mario Land” and “Tetris”. All of which are popular for about three weeks and then the creators of them are never heard of again. I began to go off this music when it turned into a novelty, a joke, a gimmick, and was solely aimed at five-year olds. But, I thought to myself, what is there to go on to after listening to this weak, soulless music for so long?

It took a trip to my sister’s, who also liked rave for a long time before me, to realise what I should be buying to replace the mind-clamouring mess I had been wasting my money on. It was fairly late on a Friday night and my sister took a tape from an old shoe box and put it in the deck of her expensive stereo system. As soon as I’d been listening to the music for about two minutes I had been taken in by it. It filled my senses with happiness and joy and lifted my spirits endlessly. The long melodic chords and the dream-like instruments were indescribable along with a female singer at times with the odd sample, in better taste than the rave ones, winding its way into my ears. My sister called the music Ambient or Dub music and it’s still my favourite music today. I really let myself become engulfed by the music and absorbed by the slow, inconsistent beat. Nearly always when I am lying down on my bed and I’m listening to the music I get so taken in and relaxed that I fall asleep. Sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, I can let my mind create “pictures” and these also help me to doze off to sleep until the tape reaches its end, produces a loud clicking noise and wakes me up.

This music is slowly finding its way into the hit parade and becoming popular. One of my favourite bands The Orb have already had two top twenty singles plus the prestige of a number one album. Their song titles include “Little Fluffy clouds”, “The back side of the moon” and the incredibly long “A huge ever-growing, pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld”. So not only do the tunes have a good, melodic, beautiful sound the titles of them do too. There is so much going on in the records that each time I listen to them my ears seem to pick out something new, like a sample or instrument I haven’t noticed before. I find this type of music beautiful.

However, sound and music are not the only things in life I find beauty in. I also find certain scenes in nature beautiful and an example of this is the sea. […]

Sideshow: The Orb Circus continues

Kris 'Thrash' Weston

Well, I posted that last blog, copying in Kris 'Thrash' Weston and The Orb on Twitter, and this is what happened.

It took him a while to find the right words but he seems to have forgotten that all direct tweets generate a message that gets sent to the recipient's email account, even if the sender subsequently deletes them.





First attempt: So we start off with some more family-themed, Greggs-related, skip-related humour. Nowt wrong with that.

Second attempt: Then the insults start.

Third attempt: 'Plank' and 'wanker' clearly weren't descriptive enough so we'll add 'cunt' and a threat of violence shall we? As for support, perhaps he could have just said 'Thanks, but no thanks'?

Final attempt: Aah, that's it, nailed it. No threat of violence as that would probably get him kicked off of Twitter. We'll double the 'cunt' count and make out that I've ruined his day to get some sympathy, when all I set out to do was give him some help.

So, I approached KW as an Orb fan of around 23 years to offer my help and support by sending him the transcript of an interview I did with Alex Paterson about The Orb's live sets. This has somehow transpired in KW calling me a wanker and a cunt and saying he wants to hit me. To say I'm a bit miffed is an understatement. But, as mentioned in my previous post, this is not my battle to fight and just because somebody produces art that you love, that sometimes bears little or no reflection of the personality or likeabilty of the artist. I also need to learn that when someone says they don't want help, then I should respect that and channel my energies elsewhere.

There are a few thoughts I'd like to share and I'll leave it at this for now:

So what came first? Is KW like this because of the way he was treated back in the early 90s or was he treated like that because he showed the same attitude back then? I think it's probably the former. Even if it is the latter, that his personality led to the fall out, that still doesn't excuse his intellectual property being stolen and exploited without him receiving any credit or royalties. The law should be there to protect everyone. Despite his insults, I still hope KW gets justice and the royalties he deserves and is legally due. And when the financial damage is undone, I hope any damage done mentally or emotionally also falls away.

If this is someone who wants no support from people, why is he appealing to people like me, Orb fans from the time he was driving their creative output, to back his new album and raise £38,000? Why are those that have contributed called 'supporters' on his website and why add such niceties as 'I've made every effort to make sure your support counts!'? I was more than happy not to mention his rant or The Orb again, focus on the new project and contribute financially to it. I even considered writing a feature about the story for one of the music magazines I write for to help his cause. Then I read the tweets above. Regardless of how much I love The Orb's early output, why would I contribute any money to someone I tried to help and then treats me with no respect and calls me a cunt? Friends can call me that in jest and I don't mind in the slightest, and this is a great tune, but it's all about context. My original actions were rooted in kindness, but don't mistake my kindness for weakness.

Finally, why bother sharing the rant in public in the first place if KW wanted no reaction, no support and no comment from anyone else on it? Yes, writing it was probably cathartic for him but sharing it publicly will have made no difference in that respect. Surely he could just have written it, got it all out of his head and on to paper/screen and got on with starting legal action. Then he could easily have done what he insists he and everyone should do and focus on his new project rather than the past.

I have no idea what psychological issues may be involved here. Alex Paterson's Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Ego? Or KW looking for drama and attention and then playing a game when people, whether they're long-term fans or not, actually give it to him? Perhaps he has just been completely messed up by the whole experience, for which he has my sympathy (regardless of whether he wants it or not). Perhaps he's insecure. Perhaps the ultimate truth is he's just not a very nice person. Who knows?

Whatever it is, I couldn't care less any more. I'll still listen to and enjoy Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, UFOrb, Blue Room and the like but without an apology (which I know I'll never get) I won't be investing any more money, time or energy into Kris 'Thrash' Weston. Life's way too short.

The Orb Circus

“Not my circus, not my monkeys” – Polish proverb

The other day I checked in on Twitter, something I don’t do very often because of the key flaw in Twitter; the more people you follow, the harder it is to keep up with people or gauge what’s going on. Anyway, I came across this message from @swearymonkey:

I clicked through and then read an extensive rant from Kris Weston (KW aka Thrash), formerly of The Orb, against ‘Dr’ Alex Paterson (AP) and other Orb members and collaborators over the years (I’d actually forgotten that @swearymonkey was Thrash until then to be honest).

He originally posted the rant to Twitter with this message:

The general gist of the rant is summed up here:

“As a result of the constant unauthorised re-releases, the unauthorised remasters by people i would never let touch my music, the fraudulent royalties, the lies, the shameful exploitation of my work by Island / Universal Records, the stealing of my work and renaming it, the illegal broadcasting of my music at gigs and such without my permission, the unauthorised use of my intellectual property and one other seriously fucked up thing I have decided to wage all out war against these people until such time as they stop exploiting my work, give me the money they owe me and GTFO.”

Much of what KW writes is contained within a Gearslutz forum interview he did towards the end of last year. In short, having been responsible for what was The Orb’s creative and commercial peak, KW had received little recognition for his percentage of the workload at the time, subsequently not received his fair share of the royalties and then seen his hard work passed off as someone else’s and his production credits dropped. His opinion of AP comes across loud and clear:

“The truth is Alex Patterson is a DJ. He cannot play an instrument or write music on a computer or anything else […] [H]e has spent the last 25 years in the press trying to cover up the fact he plays no instrument and doesn’t know how to use any piece of music technology. He can hardly manage to send an email!”

While I realised this was just one side of the story, I felt for Kris – I hate injustice in all of its forms and he seemed to have been wronged constantly during and after his time with The Orb (and I can only imagine what the other “seriously fucked up thing”, that “serious allegation against him [Alex Paterson] and Youth which I’m not getting into here” is).

The Orb's Kris 'Thrash' Weston and Alex Paterson, 1993. (Image source: Sound On Sound/The Ferrari Brothers)

Why do I care about The Orb? My sister introduced me to The Orb’s debut album ‘Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ when I was around 14/15 and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Expansive, richly layered compositions laced with ambient and dub that the more you listened to, the more you heard. If that first listen wasn’t life-changing, it was definitely an epiphany for me. Its depth and beauty was a far cry from the hard-edged rave music I was listening to at the time; I even wrote an essay about it for GCSE English. As with many of the bands you love during your formative, teenage years, The Orb’s music has stuck with me ever since. Then ‘Pomme Fritz’ came along in 1994 and as much as I tried to love it, it just sounded like a meandering, directionless, self-indulgent mess. Listening to it while I type this, my stance on it has softened slightly, but it’s nowhere near the exciting, immersive and captivating Orb material that went before.

Years later this dip in form was explained to me during an interview with Alex Paterson. He said they’d thrown out the original version of the album and rushed together the version that was released to spite their record company who he said had left them out of pocket.

Anyway, I cast my mind back to that interview with AP (or Twattercake as Kris often calls him in his rant) for IDJ magazine and a feature called ‘Pioneers of Live Dance’. If what KW says is true, then interviewing AP for this was misguided and almost laughable, although nobody has had KW’s side of the story until now and AP’s had been the only voice available. As KW has extensively quoted interviews with AP during his rant, I thought I would put a more extensive transcript of the interview I did with AP out there. I even asked a couple of fellow Orb loving friends on Facebook if I should and they said to go for it so I did.

As you can see, there was nothing much groundbreaking that was discussed during the interview, but I felt it might help KW’s cause. So I sent him the link and the exchange (where I've clearly, perhaps prematurely, taken his side) panned out as follows:

Fair enough you’d probably argue, KW does say at the start of his rant not to contact him about it. So I left it at that and moved on. I thought I’d read through his Kickstarter (or Krisstarter as he’s called it) page on his website and thought I’d give some support to him in the way that he actually DID want it, by contributing towards the funding of his new album. It was then I came across this sentence:

“I've found myself caring more how I'm living than what I'm earning."

This resonated with me massively due to difficulties I have recently been through personally, followed by taking stock of what is truly important in life (more of which in another blog perhaps). So I decided to tweet the quote. The following conversation then happened, which I thought was mindless, not-very-funny gibberish but light-hearted gibberish nonetheless:

Hilarious, I'm sure you'll agree. His reaction, while fairly polite in its tone, seemed completely unfair and I was a bit miffed though. I showed the exchange to my wife and she said: “This looks like two mad people talking to each other. He sounds like an arsehole, why do you care?”

Indeed. This was a complete stranger I was chatting to, and by bestowing him with positive qualities it made me no better than a rabid One Direction fan. Besides, as a music journalist that has always treated interviewees as people above all else, equals rather than stars or idols, I should have known better. But if supporting somebody is annoying, if caring about people who have made some of the music that defined your teenage years and beyond is annoying, if showing some compassion is annoying, then I think I’ll just continue to be as annoying as I possibly can.

I come out of this wondering what the full truth is, but even if it’s somewhere in between what AP says in interviews and what KW says in his rant (and his ex-manager and others previously involved with the Orb say), it seems to be a pretty negative and bitter situation. With my own personal dealings with KW taken into account, it seems that neither party is particularly nice or covers themselves in glory: one man responsible for stealing all of the credit (and royalties) for somebody else’s work and another man who, understandably angry, is lashing out at people without considering whether they may actually be trying to help him. At a time like this, you need support, people fighting your corner, especially if those people are the ones you would like to fund your new album project.

The moral is, just because people have created something you love (like ‘Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’), it doesn’t mean you would love the people that have created it. I genuinely hope that AP puts forward his side of the story (and holds his hands up if need be) and that KW gets the credit, respect and royalties he seems to be long overdue. In the meantime, I shall continue to listen to ‘…Ultraworld’ without any of this buzzing around my head and souring the experience.

I have to take the standpoint that this isn’t my fight to fight, which is what reminded me of the Polish proverb above: ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’. This battle between KW and AP is not my fight to fight, and they’re not my monkeys to train.

PS Since I wrote this, KW has unblocked me on Twitter. Storms. Teacups. Monkeys. Circuses.

Funeral Songs

I was at a club night run by some friends recently when the DJ started playing a certain track. “I’ve always thought I wanted this tune played at my funeral,” I turned to my friend and said. He looked a bit bemused or maybe uncomfortable (after all, it’s hard to tell in a dark nightclub) that I should mention something so morbid but it got me thinking. While there are so many people out there opting for ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams or Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ as their swansong, I started thinking, ‘Why not choose something a bit different?’

So, while it may seem a bit morbid and I hope to remain on this mortal coil for a good 100 years longer, I came up with this list of potential songs I’d like played at my funeral. What would yours be?

1. Joe Smooth - ‘Promised Land’ This was the track that came on in the club. It’s very cheesy and about “angels up above” and may well have been written about Ecstasy (the drug) rather than ecstasy (the heavenly type) but it should bring a smile to people’s faces.

2. Future Sound of London - ‘Papua New Guinea’ In my opinion, the best dance track ever made. A bold claim but it’s my opinion and I’m standing by it. It’s danceable but uplifting, pumping but mellow and moves both feet and souls.

3. Aphex Twin – Untitled (also known as ‘Rhubarb’) A great believer that music without words can move people just as much, if not more than, a song with set, concrete lyrics, this is one of Richard James’ most beautiful ambient compositions. A track that proves you don’t need a song about love, angels or bunny rabbits to make people well up.

4. The Orb - ‘Blue Room’ This is a bit of a cheeky one but just as the Orb’s Dr Alex Paterson decided to take the piss by releasing a track that lasted just three seconds less than the legal 40 minute limit for a track to qualify for the singles chart (this rule has since changed several times), the full-length ‘Blue Room’ would preclude the need for any tributes, eulogies or any other words to be spoken during the service. Or for anything else to happen for that matter. The congregation could always sing along from their hymn sheets: “Owooowowooowowooowowooowawa”!

5. Moby – ‘Thousand’ A bit like playing Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, this 1,000 bpm monster is guaranteed to wake people up and should weed out anyone who’s just turned up to make up the numbers. A definite Marmite moment to split the crowd between ‘sitters’ and ‘quitters’.