Frank Turner and The Gaslight Anthem

As you may be aware, it's Reading and Leeds Festival weekend! My personal favourite festival, and of course I'm looking forward to tonight's (Sunday) headliners Blink-182 and the likes of Paramore and Weezer won't disappoint me either. However, I want to concentrate on two acts who played yesterday (Saturday), evidently the two acts that take up this posts title.

I'll start with Frank Turner. I have no idea how, but this man hasn't taken the world by storm yet. It's completely baffled me ever since I first discovered him how he hasn't got a billion fans across the world yet, he has such talent, such emotion and so proud of what he does that he deserves to be in the mainstream, tearing up the charts (to steal a lyric from one of his songs "I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous") making riches for what he does. And yet, because he isn't quite as popular as he should be, that's probably what makes me adore him so much. I have talked about Turner before, but he really his one of my very few artists in my music collection that only a handful of people I know have heard of. He has four albums, I own them all (interesting fact, he and The Gaslight Anthem are the only two artists that I have their whole back catalogues (all four Turner albums, all three Gaslight albums)). All of his albums are completely different, with a unique sound to each of them. I love Frank Turner is what I'm trying to say. Even if you haven't heard of Turner before, I recommend you watch his Reading set, you will be converted into the realm of Frank Turner. You won't regret it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/festivals/readingandleeds/2010/artists/frankturner/

A final note on Turner, in his song "Photosynthesis", he has the perfect lyric to summarise me - I won't sit down. I won't shut up. But, most of all, I will not grow up. I'm getting that tattooed onto my back one day. I've decided, I'm going to lose weight and then when I'm respectable, I'll get that tattooed. I promise.

The second artist is, quite simply, one of my favourite bands of all time. My favourite is Green Day, but The Gaslights have shot up to second place in the band list, purely because, like Frank Turner, they've not hit the big time yet, they write all their own songs, not influenced by any big name labels or producers, they stick to what they know, and my God they do it brilliantly. It's not to say they don't have a huge following because they do, every single fan of theirs knows practically every word to every song they've ever written. The '59 Sound is, in my opinion even though I know of one who begs to differ, their best album, but their newest outing American Slang comes mighty close. Their rip roaring anthems of being young in New York City, admittedly, aren't ones I can empathise with. But it's the way they go about it. They tell stories and though none of their albums are concept albums, you can hear a slight narrative woven into the lyrics. Perfect example, in the title track of American Slang, there's a lyric that says you can dance with the queen if you need, and she will always keep your cards close to her heart, and later on there is a track called "The Queen Of Lower Chelsea" (oh yes, another reason to love The Gaslight Anthem for a Chelsea reference! (I am aware that it's referring to the area called Chelsea in NYC, but still!)), and the chorus is as follows: When you're working full-time and spending all of your nights, never dancing like you did, and the gravity hangs on all the selling points you had, should've stayed and been the Queen of Lower Chelsea. Now, you can't deny that they have put a hell of a lot of thought into every song, every lyric, every beat. If you haven't heard of these before either, I recommend you check their Reading set out too, because it's just as brilliant as Frank Turner's, if even better.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/festivals/readingandleeds/2010/artists/gaslightanthem/

These two are two of my favourite music acts. First is Green Day, second is The Gaslight Anthem, third is Biffy Clyro and fourth is Frank Turner. Simply brilliant. And, I'm happy to say, I've seen them both live, and am seeing them again before 2010 is out. Life, at the moment, is absolutely brilliant.

How many roads must a man walk down?

Apologies, Andrew, you used that blog title before, but seen as this is actually my 42nd post, I think I deserve to use that title!


As you may be aware, I've been panicking for ages about my A Level results. Absolutely ages. I've been bricking it for too long. Finally, about an hour ago, my wait was over. My results came through and, to steal a quote from a previous post, "a smile formed accross my scared face. Colour seeped back. I'd passed. I'd passed all of them." And more importantly, my place at The University of Nottingham has been confirmed! UCAS confirms it with this wonderful statement:

Congratulations! Your place at The University of Nottingham (N84) to study French Studies (R120) has been confirmed. 

 

I actually can't believe it. I'd been panicking for so long, I couldn't even imagine myself passing, let alone getting what I got (French, A. Drama, B. History, C.)! Amazing. Absolutely fucking amazing.

 

Short post, yes, but I'm just so happy at the moment. So fucking happy!

This is the day of destiny. This is...the Arockalypse!

Oh yes, Lordi in my post title. That's an achievment. Do you remember Lordi? Those epic people that one the Eurovision Song Contest a few years back for Finland? Yeah, they were awesome. Anyway, that's all I have to say on that matter, as for once, my title actually has some sort of relevance to what I want to talk to you all about, even though the title makes out that today is the day, but in fact it's 24 hours in the future.

Thursday, the 19th of August. Also known as, results day. Or, the day I die.

Hopefully, I won't die. But it's a very important day. For me, for nearly every person aged 17 or 18 all over the world. Tomorrow is the day many dreams of students going to their first choice University will be realised and, sadly, many dreams of students going to their first choice University will be smashed, to be utterly truthful. Now, I have a horrible feeling I will be in the latter group as I have a sinking feeling I screwed up my French exam in one way or another, be it completely failing at my verb conjugations or simply writing it all out in Welsh as opposed to, er, French. It may interest you to know that I started writing this yesterday, which was Tuesday, the 17th, and I continued it today, Wednesday, the 18th. Which means I'm even closer to my death day.

Why is it that results day is among the most stressful day in all of mankind? I mean, day one of World War One and Two must've been pretty scary. But I doubt it mounts to as much stress as A Level results day in every year since the first ever results day. It's petrifying. Interesting RBJ fact, I'm a shaker. I shake all the time, I have no idea why, I just do, it's impossible for me to not shake. Today however, my shakyness has increased tenfold. Everytime I finish a sentence to think about what the next sentence will be, I stare at my hands quivering with anxiousness. It's insane, I remember being nervous before my GCSE Results, which I told you all about in my awful first post, I won't link to it because you just shouldn't read it, but this is insane.

Tomorrow, be on the look out for my inevitably depressing blog in which I tell you that I didn't manage to get my A for French*, reveal what I got in Drama and History (my guess is a B and C, respectively...I hope) and that I did get to a University - Trefforest Industrial College for the History of Ironing. Sounds good.

So, wish me luck!

*To get into Nottingham, I need ABC with an A in French. Yeah, that's not going to happen.

A complaint.

This isn't going to be a very long one, and sadly this might offend some people, don't read if you get offended easily. It's a short query about Talent shows.

We all know the score. To do well in a talent show (let's just say a singing competition) you not only have to have a good enough singing voice, but you also have to have a pathetic sob story to go along with it. You know the one - "I lost my goldfish in a terrible toilet-flushing accident, so I'm competing today in memory of old Fishy." The public get influenced (see, there's my link to my musical blog!) by these sob stories, the judges get influenced by these sob stories which leads to, what I hate the most, not very good singers, getting far because they feel sorry for them. It's ridiculous.

The reason for my mini-rant of a blog is this one. While sitting in my living room, my Mother turned on one of the many America's Got Talent episodes she missed while she was on holiday. One of the contestants on this show was an opera singer. Fair play to her, she had a good voice, she wasn't amazing, she wasn't terrible. But, my little brother made a comment as simple as this - "Boring." Because, let's be honest, not that many 12 year olds take a massive interest in opera nowadays, and he was just stating he isn't a fan of her singing, because he couldn't sit there for 30 minutes or even an hour, just watching her sing in concert. He's one of the many youngsters in today's society that gets influenced by others around him, listening to the Jason Derulo/Ne-Yo/Chris Brown/Justin Bieber love children that are out these days. My Mother's retort to his one word statement about the opera singer? "But she had cancer!" That's exactly my point. Yes, she had cancer, but that doesn't mean that one suddenly has to like whatever she's doing. If someone went on this America's Got Talent program, killed cats on stage but because they had cancer, the public would vote for them. It's bizarre why the public think like that.

Potentially the most offensive post on my blog, but it really pissed me off. Sorry about that.

I'm a fire and I burn tonight

Oh yes, I used a Biffy Clyro lyric as a title, that has no relevance to what I want to talk about.

I just want to fill you all in on something, and I have a query that I'll ask at the end. As you may or may not be aware, my vlogging career has finally started (which doesn't mean I'll be leaving blogger!). If you don't know, there is a link right above this post, in the red bar, if you just click the one that says "YouTube" then you'll be beamed directly via UFO to my YouTube channel, where you'll see I have three vlogs, if you will.

Now, you may recognise the title of one of them - the Film Reviews one. Yes, I've, kind of, converted my hugely successful (ahem) film reviews blog to video form (which doesn't mean I'll be stopping those on blogger either!). I went away for the weekend, and when I returned, I had numerous e-mails from YouTube, mainly a discussion with CrazyDistortion about video editing, one about a comment I had on my Toy Story review and 2, yes, 2 comments on my Inception review, and finally one from someone called "everydayadventuring" (yes, they have no capitals in their YouTube name, an annoyance if ever there was one), I'll copy what they said to me:

"hi RuhBuhJuh1
I just watched your vlog, I really love it! How did you get so good at making them? Can you take a look at my vid and give me some pointers? Please subscribe if you enjoy it :D"

You can take that two ways. The optimist in me sees that as someone random has actually stumbled across my channel, watched my videos and enjoyed them. Or, the pessimist in me sees that this is just a bit of spam sent by YouTube to improve my moral as my Inception video had a meagre 39 views - and that's my highest. Personally, I see it as spam, but nevertheless, I shall believe that this message is in fact a real person and I shall make a video giving a few pointers from vlogger extraordinaire, RuhBuhJuh1. Yes, there is a 1 there because I fucked up signing up to YouTube under my new pseudonym. Don't take it seriously, I won't call myself RuhBuhJuh1 unless I want to prove a point of some sort. What the point will be, however, I have no idea. We'll see where the wind takes us. 


To end, I have a query. Undoubtedly, I will scour the googleness of the Internet in order to find my answer, but to make my post a bit lengthier, I'll ask you on here too. You know Typewriters (Interesting fact: Typewriter is the longest word you can type by only using the top line of letters on a QWERTY keyboard. Did you know that? Didn't think so.)? Can anyone tell me how they work? As far as I can tell, it's magic. You're there, typing away at this magical machinery, and your piece of paper gradually moves to the left as you type more and more words, until you feel necessary to hit it back and it shoots across the typewriter, makes a bing noise, and the whole writing a line of letters (or symbols, as Snefru happily (did you see what I did there?) calls them) starts again. So, let's say you have one letter left to fit on the page before you need to ping it back, meaning your piece of paper is almost as far to the communist side of the spectrum as it can go, but the last letter on that line you want to type is the letter "P." How does that work? I was under the illusion that there were 3 rows of stamps, if you will, that put the letters on the page. Surely the P would be too far away to be placed on the page? Is there some rule that by the time you turn the page into an extreme communist, you can only use words on the left side of the keyboard, like "sad" for example? There is no reason why I chose sad there, I just saw it as the first word I could use on the left side of the keyboard. Or, a solution I thought up while writing this paragraph, are there wires leading from each key to its corressponding stamp? That sounds quite logical. Answers on a postcard, if you please.


To be fair, that was a very YouTube dominated post. I might aswell make one more YouTube reference, watch this video from a person called hexachordal (there's that lack of capital letters again! Although, I like this guy, so I'll let it slide), a YouTube vlogger who makes weird and wonderful videos. This is my pick of the bunch.





The first 40 seconds is all you need to watch, really, but you may watch the rest. It's very bizarre humour, but he is highly amusing. Side note, watch the video "Explorers Four" and try and make some sense of it. I understand it now, but it took me hundreds of viewings to fully comprehend the complexity the video beholds.


Over and out.