Excellent night at the Sage Gateshead last night, a small warm-up gig for the Word in Your Ear gig later this week. And everyone else was taking photos so I thought, why not, just one...

The hands-swapped over rendition of Don't You Want Me Baby was a definite highlight.

One question to anyone who's seen Neil Hannon do "Can you stand upon one leg", with the audience-supplied joke. Things looked momentarily like they might get ugly at this point, with a significantly refreshed gentleman deciding to wander on stage and tell his joke, before needing quite a lot of persuasion to return to the floor. All worked out fine in the end though, and the joke wasn't bad. So, does it usually go like that, I wonder...

As a warm-up for the Word in Your Ear gig in London later that week, Mr Hannon's filling Hall 2 of the Sage, Gateshead on Nov 1. I have my ticket and rather looking forward to it.

Anyone else going? Possible opportunity for a beer-based gathering of the North-East contingent?

Mr Danny Baker's got EL and, indeed P visiting him on his r5 show at this moment. He's quite excited about it...

Anybody experienced anything like this?

I decided to finally get around to purchasing the Duckworth Lewis Method the other night, on the strength of really, really liking There Goes the Knighthood. I did this by the still rather exciting method of buying it via itunes on my ipod touch, and all came down the invisible wires seemlessly.

Next day I plugged into my pc to synchronise the ipod and, as expected, got the bonus booklet (never really seen the point of having these booklets as pdf other than to make you wish you'd bought the actual cd, but never mind). What was not expected was that, following synchronise, all but 4 of the album tracks had disappeared, and were nowhere to be found on either ipod or pc.

I'd only got as far as 'The Sweet Spot' at this point, and there it was, gone - just the first 2 and last 2 tracks remained.

So I've mailed Apple but so far received no response. From what I read, they're quite likely to smugly ask if I made a backup. But who backs up before each synchronisation? Me, from now on I suppose.

Anyone had similar trouble?

Very pleasant surprise to encounter David Hepworth during the interval at Randy Newman's concert at the Sage Gateshead last night. I was aware he was there for an afternoon panel discussion on music journalism - which I sadly missed - but had assumed he'd have high-tailed it back to the Big Smoke by the evening. So, nice to chat to you David - a proper gent who tolerated my attempts at conversation with good humour. I'm so glad I resisted the temptation to open with "Excuse me, aren't you Mark Ellen?"

The concert itself was magnificent. One man and his piano filled Hall 1 of the Sage. My first time seeing Randy Newman, and I should confess that other than the well-known songs such as Short People, I knew him best as the man responsible for the songs in any number of Disney/Pixar films including the one in Toy Story 2 - When She Loved Me - which always reduces me to tears. It's thanks to the Word CD that I'd been introduced to his recent album Harps and Angels and got to grips with his combination of acerbic lyrics and toe-tapping music.

The man belted through songs old and new, pausing to take another run at a couple of the trickier intros to some of them and full of self-deprecating wit while doing so. Some very entertaining asides about the Toy Story films as well - they keep interrupting his songs with talking and crazy action sequences, apparently. Meanwhile I'm sat there thinking, all these years I thought Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear was written by Alan Price.

After a standing ovation, the encore consisted of a couple of songs (what, he wrote Feels Like Home as well?), another ovation and that's your lot. Excellent - leave 'em wanting more, but best of all, all done and dusted before 10pm.

Well, there's another gap in my musical knowledge identified.

Saturday Live on R4 a couple of weeks back featured Alison Goldfrapp's Inheritance Tracks (if you haven't heard it, think of Desert Island Discs reduced to 2 tracks with the subject talking over them).

Her "what I'd pass on" choice was Expecting by Minnie Riperton

Sublime, no? You can see why the Ooh Laa Laa Hitmaker likes it.

After a quick visit to itunes it's been fairly prominent on my ipod ever since - and I've just spotified, and then purchased, the rest of Come to My Garden, the 1970 album from which this comes. I've also learnt of Minnie's tragic life story thanks to last.fm, and twigged from a search on this very website that she's also responsible for Lovin' You, so nobody's perfect.

My point? Oh I dunno. Funny how songs work their way into your life these days, innit?

So I'm sat at work while half listening to the version of Pink Floyd The Wall which took up rather more of my Saturday than expected to convert with the old usb turntable. Audacity had the, well, audacity to crash after side 4, leaving me to pick between stitching together all the temporary files or start over. Yes, should have done each side separately.

Anyway, I'm sat here feeling all nostalgic for every scratch that has been lovingly converted when the 'secret' backwards message at the start of Empty Spaces reminds me of the attempts I made, all those years ago, to hear the message by either running the record backwards or taping it and feeding the tape backwards, and it dawns on me that I can now very easily hear it with help from Audacity, probably. I haven't actually tried, because of the second thought which came hot on the heels of the first - what's the point? It's too easy, and besides I know what it says (congratulations, you have discovered the secret message. Please send your answers to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont).

File that under "things you'll never do again".

But that did make me wonder if people still do this stuff. And who was it that had a backward message along the lines of "congratulations, you have ruined your stylus"?

One of my other favourite haunts on the interweb is FlowingData - http://flowingdata.com - which celebrates good and bad examples of data visualisation for all sorts of stuff. No, wait, it's fascinating. Have a look.

This one rang a bell - an investigation of "why music sounds worse than it did a few decades ago", as discussed on the podcast some time back in the last decade.

http://flowingdata.com/2010/01/05/a-visual-history-of-loudness-in-popula...

I hold no brief for the Sun, but have to admire this advert (released online in honour of their 40th anniversary)

Seen at paidContent

So it seems it's 5 years yesterday since John Peel left us. I saw a few tweets yesterday suggesting an appropriate tribute would be to find a track by some obscure band and play it at the wrong speed. Instead I dug out the 2 CD tribute compilation I'd splashed out on at the time - first track not the inevitable Teenage Kicks, but this by Lonnie Donnegan:

(clip is, of course, in tribute to some other Lost John)

The newsletter has just landed on my virtual shagpile carpet, including a link to the latest Hitler "Downfall" spoof. Which is lovely as it gives me an excuse to share my favourite one:

Something for all you twitter fans: Paul Smith, a Newcastle-based journalist, is aiming to travel as far around the world as possible in 30 days (he started on March 1st at Newcastle Central), relying only on the goodwill of people using Twitter, and raising money for charity:water as he goes.

So far he's got the ferry across to Amsterdam, thence to Paris, and now on the way to Frankfurt (I think he's then been offered a flight to New York, from, err, Amsterdam again). He's only allowed to accept offers of travel and accommodation on Twitter, and he can only plan 3 days in advance - hence his somewhat circular progress so far.

Anyway, follow his adventures on http://www.twitchhiker.com/ and @twitchhiker on twitter. It's a great read, particularly last night's soul searching about whether flying to New York is cheating and whether he could get away with murdering the snorer in the next bunk in the hostel.

Ooh, and: what d'you reckon he's got on his iPod?

... that their Caroline Quentin vehicle "Life of Riley" is a turkey, and no amount of advertising it on the radio is going to change that?.

Thanks, I feel much better now.

Just finished listening to this, courtesy of Speechification:

http://speechification.com/2008/12/07/freedom-pass/

This is a repeat - kind of coinciding with the anniversary of Alan Coren's death - of a day trip to Southend by Alan and Christopher Matthew. As it says over at Speechification, it's a lovely programme and does get rather poignant towards the end. But what struck me was, when the pair of them are sat having their fish and chips at the end of Southend Pier, it could have been the Word Podcast - similar sound quality, but also similar impression of evesdropping on a couple of old mates talking utter bollocks. Hugely enjoyable.

I could probably answer this question by going back to the podcast in question: however, I can't remember precisely which one it was.

Sometime after the Olympics I remember sitting in the departure lounge at Newcastle Airport being mightily cheered up by a podcast in which a book was mentioned. This book, if I recall correctly, was one man's attempt to track down and interview all the people who'd set foot on the moon. At the time I thought "hey, that'll make a nice xmas pressie for the Mrs". Sadly, the only time I remember to go looking for it is when I'm at the same airport, and I'm hampered by the fairly crap Wh Smith's, plus the fact that I can't remember the title or author.

Could anyone put me out of my misery, now that I've succeeded in remembering about this while in front of a pc? I believe it was that nice Mr Hepworth that was talking about it.