The Lucky Tiler household is abuzz because we've had a local film production company round asking if they can use our house for a location in a forthcoming movie. Setting aside the emotional appeal - particularly for the teenagers in the house - of having that David Tennant on the premises, I'd appreciate the benefit of any experience the Massive have of this...

- Do they reward you handsomely or do they consider the kudos enough?
- Do they wreck the place? Do they put right any damage without debate?
- Do they stick to committed timescales?
- Do you get armies of saddos hanging around forever after, in costume (a colleague from Wales tells me they get Torchwood impersonators hanging around the locations used for that)?

In short, would you go through it again?

Deaf School have had a few mentions here (Beany, Rushy, Paul Waring, Freddie Owen) and their treasure trove of recordings was reviewed in January's Word.

As a fan myself, I was sorry to hear that singer Eric Shark died on 7th January. As well as being a key ingredient in the band's huge persona he was a real trooper, appearing on stage in their reunion gigs last year seated and breathing through an oxygen tube.

It's a sad loss.

More here: http://deafschoolmusic.com/

There was a lively buzz when the Hammersmiths gig next month were announced, and here I am gig-ticketed, train-ticketed, bedded for the night, only lacking the suits and the platform boots, and wondering:

- Who is going then?
- Which night?
- Any Word cohort pre-drinks planned?
- Anyone going to the Meet The Keys event beforehand on the 5th and 6th http://www.morgan-fisher.com/hoopling.html ?

Having had tickets for a gig on their cancelled final tour in the 70s, I've been waiting a long time for this.

The Archers gets a mention from time to time on here in an oblique sort of way, so I thought someone here could enlighten me...

It would be arrogant in the extreme to say it's crap, just because I don't like it, when it has so many fans, and it has survived so long in a highly competitive environment, but if it weren't for those significant bits of evidence, that is exactly what I'd be calling it. I fully accept that it must have a huge amount going for it, and this is a genuine question

What I think I hear are plots which develop predictably and at geological pace, two-dimensional characters you don't really believe in enough to care about, bad accents, lots of heavy sighs, and scenes which don't seem to add anything to the story other than another cameo of uneventful rural and domestic life.

There's a lot of it about, so it would be quite handy to enjoy it. Can anyone help me here?

It's entirely possible that I simply don't understand because I am selfconsciousness personified, but what is it with people who go absolutely mental at gigs? I don't mean, they get quite lively at the end, I mean they are unilaterally leaping about and shouting, one or two songs into it, and never stop.

Do the same people do it at every gig they go to?
Or is there, for everyone, a gig which would bring out this kind of behaviour?
And do they think nobody notices?
Or maybe they do it because people will notice?
Is their spirit moved irresistibly by the experience or are they just good old-fashioned show-offs?
And when they're old, are they the people at your children's school concerts who start clapping along at the first hint of a steady rhythm?
Have YOU ever been that person?

Me, I've just been to one of the best gigs I've ever seen, and all I did was sing along quietly from time to time, tap my foot and smile.

Am I alone in finding it, well, a bit irritating?

It's not like me to go all evangelical, but last night I saw a gig that I have to rank up beside Bob Marley & The Wailers at Glasgow Apollo: Hot Club of Cowtown at Glasgow ABC. It was one of those where you nearly don't go - can't be bothered putting your boots on - but you think, Oh it might be fun, and make the effort.

Fun? It was sensational. They played a blend of Western swing, swing in the Grappelly/Reinhardt style, jazz and hoedown, which can sound frivolous if you're not used to it, but within minutes of them kicking off, I along with everyone in the audience was completely captivated by their unaffected enthusiasm, their tasteful selections and arrangements and their sheer virtuosity. Virtuosity is not a thing I see much these days, so I felt all the more privileged to be in the company of not one, not two, but three virtuoso performers.

And yet they came out and chatted with us afterwards. An incredible night, right out of the blue. So, for the first time in 30+ years of going to gigs, I bought the T-shirt.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you find this clip at all engaging, you'll love seeing them live. UK tour dates here

Sunday night I saw Edward II (very good), Sly & Robbie & the Taxi Gang (excellent), Edwyn Collins (good, considering) and the Orange Juice Dub Arkestra (under-rehearsed and self-indulgent) playing in Glasgow's Celtic Connections Festival.

At the end of the gig the Taxi Gang (6 piece) were joined by the OJ Dub Arkestra (6+ piece) and a few local musos for a big finale. It wasn't just one song either, but four or five, and you know what?

The sound was reduced to mush by so many instruments, there was no sense of arrangement to it - everyone just playing along as best they could, and nobody seemed to know when or how to end the songs. It struck me that this not insignificant component of the set hadn't been put together for the benefit of the audience so much as the musicians themselves, and maybe any hungry photographers present.

I've seen this a number of times, usually at benefit concerts with multiple bands involved and

Or have members of the massive enjoyed such an event?
Can a song be improved by having multiple vocalists sing one line each?
Might there be a good musical reason for having two bass players (when one of them is Robbie Shakespeare)?

Tongue in cheek, and with apologies to bank employees, I came across this on the eWeb yesterday:

I was unable to apply, as I don't have a criminal record, but with new acts of criminal irresponsibility in the world's banks coming to light daily, isn't it nice to see them being honest about the kind of people they employ?

...are women and famous people.

Women
Trying to be objective, I reviewed the most recent two pages of Word blog and found:

It's a thing I've long taken for granted, but why is this? Is "Intelligent Life on Planet Rock" so predominantly male?

Famous People
Surely, given all the strong opinions expressed and intriguing questions asked, once in a while they must come to the eyes of one of their subjects, who would wish to respond in some way? I'm sure we've all longed for a star to respond to some opinionated blogger, like the movie director in the Woodie Allen movie who steps out from behind a billboard to tell a cinema queue show-off "You know nothing of my work".

Is it 'not done' for stars to mix with the massive at this level? And surely, being 'not done' would be the cue for some to do it.

What restrains them?

I play bass in a covers band and popped into a pub that had booked us, to drop off some posters. The guy looked at me and said "You'll be the bass player eh?". (Correct, but should I be flattered or insulted? It's better than Mark Knopfler, who I'm often accused of being.)

So... can you tell what instrument a musician plays by looking at them? What stereotypical features would we expect in a drummer? How would we expect a typical pianist to behave? What famous musicians look most and least like you'd expect, given their instrument?

And it gives me an excuse to post this from John Byrne's 1987 Tutti Frutti TV series. We see three members of The Majestics, Vincent Diver (Maurice Roeves), Bomba MacAteer (Stuart McGugan) and Fud O'Donnell (Jake D'Arcy). They are guitarist, bass guitarist and drummer, but not in that order. Can you tell from the stereotyping which is which?

Or just enjoy the skillful overlapping dialogue. It's a masterpiece.

Inspired by a discussion on the Label Obsession thread about all the things to look at in a vinyl album package, nominations please for the best text captured on vinyl in this way.

Maybe you didn't even know they were there, but every album I've looked at had something.

- The album number is bog standard
- Some also have the name of the person who mastered the album, scratched on the master by hand
- The real gems are the messages to the outside world from the poor soul trapped in a mastering booth, e.g.

- Variations on the "Porky" theme, such as "Porky", "Another Porky Prime Cut" and "Porky" on one side, and "Perko" on the other
- On Madness's One Step Beyond, "The nutty sound" on one side and "All the way from Camden Town" on the other
- "Arcane to fool the magician" on an album I can't remember
- "Enough research" c/w "Tends to prove your theory", again lost in the mists of time.

Dig them out and let's hear them, but hey, remember, kids...

Last night's B-52s gig at Glasgow Carling Academy was every bit as good, and better, than we've come to expect.

A band that specialises in shameless kitsch gets a certain amount of licence in the merchandise, and last night's revelation was a 5ft inflatable pink rock lobster. An absolute masterpiece! There were a few of these flying around the hall, and it led me to wonder:

In a market where sales are fuelled by euphoria and stimulants in abundant quantities, what extremes can be achieved?

We can draw parallels with the holiday merchandise market: Witness the streams of pink people getting off return holiday flights clutching sombreros and stuffed donkeys which you know are destined for a long wardrobe-top sabbatical, with at best the occasional Hallowe'en outing, before finding their final resting place in a bin or jumble sale rejects pile.

Back to gigs, the Bob Marley marketing men must have been laughing all over their faces seeing the hordes of pale, middle class Glasgow boys proudly sporting red gold and green woolly Rasta hats.

Nominations please for the most extreme items of gig merchandise. Any extreme will do: Value for money, trashiness, appropriateness, usefulness, irrelevance, tastelessness.

I never buy the stuff, but maybe someone who does would like to offer something as a prize?

The true greats of times past, like Sgt. Pepper's band, go in and out of style, but always return. Occasionally someone attains a legend status that could be a meal ticket for life and manages to blow it: the Glitter fades. A third phenomenon needs examining, as it seems to afflict a lot of people who should know better... the rehabilitation of things which were formerly awful.

Let's be blunt here: We hated Abba, and we hated Neil Diamond, and we hated Top of the Pops. Yet here they all come again. Was Abba's candy-coated pap somehow ahead of its time and only now recognised for its true greatness by virtue of being sensitively framed in a movie? Was Neil Diamond misrepresented and hence misunderstood, and only able to appear in his true colours to the Glastonbury hordes who always knew there was something there? Is it a trick of distant memory that has us remember TOTP as a flat, unatmospheric affair, with embarrassed stars miming very badly, while Britain's Ugliest danced vacantly on the spot in front of them, and greeted the end of each song with the most blatantly drummed-up cheer in broadcasting history?

Answers: No, no and no.

They may all three be less irritating from a distance, and no longer command resented space in the media and our consciousness, but nothing in their content has changed.

They were rotten 30 years ago, and they're rotten now.