Just got an e-mail from a friend in the States who is flying over here in a couple of weeks for a visit. Anyway, she gave the flight details and it turns out that she's flying from Detroit Wayne County Metropolitan Airport. Which made me sit up and go, "Huh?"

Detroit Wayne County Metropolitan Airport

Hey, I know that the UK's got John Lennon International Airport and George Best Belfast City Airport. Do you suppose the good burghers of Motor City realised what they were doing when proudly naming their brand spanking new airport (tenth busiest in the United States and the nineteenth busiest in the world) - that they were accidentally also naming it after a 1970s transsexual New York punk rocker!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_County_%26_the_Electric_Chairs

Or as the saying goes... D'oh!

One of the most fascinating of recent podcasts (for me anyway)was the one focusing on music technologies - and in particular th erise of AutoTune and maximisers. Well, that's all well and good but I just came across THIS video/product. Flippin' heck! If AutoTune and ProTools jiggering with the recorded performance has been considered to rob much modern pop from a lot of it's individuality and feel, what will this allow producers/engineers to pump out?

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna&L=0

Well, Mystic Dave has been holding forth for a while. "The music industry is broken..." quoth he, maintaining that there needs to be a new business model if the industry is to survive, let alone flourish.

We're already seeing the internet, medium-sized touring, direct and distribution sales indie (broad terms not jangly guitars meaning) artist carving out a small scale career for themselves. "Send me a tenner and I'll send you a CD in 8 months when I've actually recorded it" etc

But Mr H's personal hankering to a return to the simpler, more song based days of the 60s seems a little closer. The says when the song, the single and the EP were the thing. The days when bands recorded two or three songs and put those out as they were recorded and albums were an afterthought rather than the be-all and end-all.

The following from the BBC website: Muse 'might ditch album format' http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/music/newsid_7292000/7292404.stm

From an Australian comedy show. The Beatles playing Stairway To heaven...

It just so happens that I was in the studio audience for the recording of this version of California Dreamin'. Loved it then, still makes me smile now!!

I'd love to do my homework from this week's podcast. However, on the posts where tunes have been posted all I get is an empty white box which does nothing when clicked. Is there some ActiveX plug-in that should be downloaded or a media player that needs to be running in the background or something? Sigh...

OK so forgive me for some shameles promotion of a band some friends are in. However, I'm a big fan of the film Serenity/TV series Firefly and, like I said, also know the guys from a rather good Progressive Metal band called Threshold. OK, stop sniggering. I know it's a genre more comfortably in the likes of Classic Rock, Kerrang!! or Metal Bludgeon magazine or whatever, but the guys in Threshold actually make some great, intelligent music which values melody and taste over widdling at a gazillion miles an hour like most bands in the genre...

ANYWAY.... I came across this on YouTube. A "music video" constructed from excerpts of the film with a track from Threshold's latest album as the soundtrack. And it's not half bad either, if you ask me (as a slightly biased fan of both the film and the band). It's been done by some web/graphic design bod from the States.

Anyway, here it is...

...

See what you think. If you should happen to like it, there's more about Threshold here... http://www.thresh.net/ Threshold's new album, Dead Reckoning, also features a rather good cover of Muse's Supermassive Black Hole on the "Special Limited Edition" version. Check it out!!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dead-Reckoning-Limited-Threshold/dp/B000NA7FFU/r...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ravages-Time-Best-Threshold/dp/B000VO8O12/ref=sr...

Shameless plug over. It is an interesting phenomenon with the advent of YouTube that there's the urge for people to display, what is effectively, their own noodling on the laptop to the world. Some, like this, seem to be quite well done. What I'll never get is these teenagers who video themselves mining along to a pop song - hairbrush microphone in hand - and then post the damn thing on the internet. Madness. when I was their age my Mum would have dismissed the whole thing with a scathing, "Ignore him, he's just attention seeking".

"Hang the graphic designer, hang the graphic designer, hang the graphic designer..."

I was just looking at the advert for Cat Power's new album, "Jukebox" on the back of this month's mag. It struck me that it may well be a covers album but, once again, Ms Marshall has managed to release a product with a spectacularly under average cover. "The Greatest" may well have been an amazing album which won many plaudits... but none of them were for the cover - a cheap and tacky affair with, let's be charitable and call it, a "gold" charm bracelet with a pair of little boxing gloves hanging from it. All this presented on a vomit inducing cerise background with boring grey writing. Mmmm... classy. I also note that there are other issues of the album available with a different cover.

So what do we have for the new album. Well, the boring grey is back, put this time as the background field for a picture of Chan Marshall (seemingly on the way to the osteopath after a particularly nasty Health and Safety incident - bend the knees, then lift from the hips and knees while keeping the spine straight, silly!) presented as a mis-aligned RGB colour separation. Is it just me or does that look just a wee bit pants?

It put me in mind of another excellent album from a few years ago with a woefully amateurish cover - "The Roads Don't Love You" by Gemma Hayes. In a Stalininst airbrushing out of history the original cover has been replaced with a nicely understated cover with Ms Hayes looking coy and not a little sexy leaning on a lamp post on a street corner. However, the original was rather less aesthetically pleasing - apparently put together by a 7-year old by tearing a photo of Hayes out of a music magazine and sticking into a scrap-book. No, we're not talking Peter Blake pop-art collage or postmodern Sagmeister design, we're talking cheap looking and amateur!

It made me wonder whether anyone had any other favourite miserably "C minus, must try harder" album covers lurking around in their record collections?