a week is a long time in record shopping

it's been a whole five days or so since my last post. I arrived back in Dublin eager to catch up on all the great seven inches that had been released whilst I was on my holidays and lo and behold there's fuck all to buy out there. that said I did manage to finally get my hands on the seven inch of 'Steppin Out' by Joe Jackson. It's a bit warped at the start of the record but I reckon I can live with that. A live version of the tune was recently released on 12 inch but its a complete bag of shite. On the new release front I only managed to pick up the latest seven inch release by Roots Manuva entitled 'Buff Nuff'. It's a dancehall flavoured bass-tastic piece of funk and the video is reminiscent of something that George Clinton was doing back in the eighties. The tune seems to be a bit of a departure from his usual stuff but I'm digging it wholesale. There's an instrumental of the tune on the b-side that rumbles.

Given the dearth of musical material on the seven inch front I've taken to reading the papers. All sorts of papers would you believe. Fergus Murphy was just over from Copenhagen and he dropped a few copies of Bitchslap into All City Records. It's a great magazine. It doesn't seem to be about anything in particular but would probably lean towards highlighting various cultural and artistic activities, which is nice. I was banging on about it before in this post.

Also just released is Issue 4 of the now almost nationwide 'Analogue' magazine. It's front page has been typeset in a font that reminds me of the old Open University graphic from all those years ago on late night BBC2. That aside its still choc a bloc full of news, reviews and interviews with all the up and coming bands that I should know about and with some bands that I already know about. A free Storkboy Choons CD came with the magazine but I haven't got around to listening to it yet. Soon come.

I was a great fan of zines years ago and I had just assumed that they had gone the way of the Sinclair C5. It appears that that is far from the actual truth. I'd seen the 'loserdom' zine around quite a few years back and I was intrigued to see that it was still going when I picked it up in a record shop the other day. There's a wonderful innocence about the medium of the zine. It's as if it was born without original sin. They're usually very honest in their tone and there's rarely the cynicism that's found in the more conventional media. The latest issue of Loserdom treats such topics as the Cork Ladyfest, the London Zine symposium and the end of the occupation of Iraq. It also has five pages devoted to reviewing other zines. I thought it funny that you'd devote time to reviewing what is essentially your competition and then I remembered that the zine world is most likely not that competitive.

I'm off to Farmleigh this weekend to check out this years instalment of the Farmleigh Affair. The weather ain't looking too good here so I'll have to hedge my bets. I got a little bit damp at last years event and I'd hate for it to happen again. I'll let you know all about it.