Record Reconstructor

   Dashboard! One of the strange side effects of being the child of a military family, the son of a father who worked for the Royal Air Force for 25 years, and with whom his family travelled the country and the world in line with whatever military base he was posted to, was the strange reality of not being from  anywhere.  " Where did you grow up?"   people have asked, and I always hedge with an answer which is some flavour of "We moved around a lot".  The real answer is I was born on the Italian island of Sardinia and grew up in The Costwolds, Stafford, York, High Wycombe, Warsaw in Poland, a fleeting residency in the US, and whistle-stop visits to half a dozen other countries besides, all before I had turned 14 years old.  We're you to ask my sister, she would tell you this experience was plague on her adolescence, made it impossible for her to make friends and left her isolated and alone when we finally did stop moving from place to place;...

  This Week: Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud, No, It's The Children Who Are Wrong, Tramlines Festival Roundup and a few odds and ends Behind us, a young woman is complaining in quite heated terms about her boss, who is apparently upset at the amount of time she spends going to the toilet while she should be working.  "They said I was in there for twenty minutes every hour, and it's not more than 10 or 15.  My boss said I should make better use of my breaks and not go to the loo 5 minutes after I come back from lunch, but sometimes you just need it, you know?". I know. I have some sympathy, but if you need to visit the toilet for 20% of every hour you either need to visit a doctor, or you are skiving. "My boss even told me I need to go to the doctor if it's affecting me like this, what's it got to do with her?" I'm not her boss, for the record,  I don't know who she is and couldn't pick her out of a lineup, but everyone within 50 meters in ev...

Dashboard! People who have been reading this blog in sequence might have noticed a certain level of reluctance for me to engage with the music streaming services which ultimately are powering this entire project;  obviously, I would much rather the musical artists I love get paid well for their artistic contributions instead of what modern distribution allows them.  Gone are the days when musical acts toured in order to promote the album, sales of which was the primary revenue stream for them and their label (and in fact, many tours lost money).  Now, where getting 30,000 plays on Spotify pays less to an artist than a single sale of a £30 vinyl from their direct storefront, live music tours, and their associated merchandise have become the primary source of income for anyone trying to really make a living as a professional musician. Also, if you've been paying attention, you will be aware there were long sections of my life when I have been very financially disadvantaged;...