So after hearing the catchy and charming song ‘In For The Kill’ by La Roux, and seeing the spate of remixes to hit the internet, I felt like throwing my own into the mix. I did it a few weeks ago and sort of forgot about it, but now here it is, in all its unabridged glory. I hope you like it!
In For The Kill - The C# Remix(For those of you unfamiliar with the original song, here’s that:)
Tom
The first edition of Milsom FM! With my special guest star, Tom Bacon, in which we play No More Women and generally have a marvelous time.
Oh yeah, and we also totally touch penises.
No More Women, starring Toms Milsom and BaconSo while I was in the studio recording Alex Day’s fantastic new EP ‘117% Complete’, probably the best EP about video games I’ve ever had the pleasure to produce, we listened to a lot of different things for inspiration and guidance. In particular when working on ‘Pokemon, What Happened To You?’, we listened to a lot of the old music from the games over the years and a lot of music related to the shows that listeners might recognise. While doing this research, we came across this gem:
Now, we were stopped in our tracks by this. We realised that in every song to do with pokemon ever released, there had always been this rapper, doing his business in the background. Mostly consisting of repeated mantras of ‘yeah’, ‘come on’, and ‘yo’, expertly interspersed with obscure references to pokemon, this guy was clearly an essential part in any song about the game. With this revelation, we came to the sad conclusion that we’d made a horrible omission in the final cut of our own attempt.
But we are sad no more, because today in the studio, we took half an hour out of our busy schedule recording Alex’s new album to make a few little additions to the song. Below is ‘Pokemon, What Happened To You’, with myself rapping throughout. We like to call it ”Pokemon, What Happened To You?’ What Happened To You?’.
'Pokemon, What Happened To You?' What Happened To You?You can buy the original EP, with this song, albeit rapless, by clicking here.
Tom
It is a regular and pleasant occurrence in my life that when I go downstairs in the mornings, there will sometimes be a package waiting for me. I am lucky enough to have a few friends who love me enough to send me regular parcels of good-will and caring, whether they be books or CDs, or just a drawing. They are a nice, understated way of letting me know I’m cared for from afar. I find it ultimately very comforting. So imagine my surprise and bemusement when this morning, these turned up:
Now, I didn’t even know you could deliver flowers by post, so this was an unfamiliar variation on the theme to me. (A side note – they came in a cardboard box – I supplied the vase and arranged them myself). I soon recalled, however, that my lovely friend Brett, who lives in California and seemingly has more money than sense, made some references to having sent me some things in the post. This, presumably, was the culmination of this. Sure enough, I later found a card in the box confirming that they were from Brett. What a darling he is. All was well.
Upon finding them a home (which was a challenge – we don’t get many fresh flowers in, but we eventually settled for the kitchen windowsill), I retired to my room to take a dose of Dexedrine1, for the first time in my life. I have ingested numerous forms of medication in my time, all of which aspire to cure me of my inability to do anything repetitive for any length of time. While in recent years this has declined in severity, the period of my life between when it would be reasonable to assume memories would start forming and, say, 16 are a complete haze. I can remember not one instance from that decade of what should be at least partial sentience and clarity in any form of sentience or clarity. Every memory is viewed through a gauze of utter disconnectedness and a rampant internal monologue. And I remember – I remember seeing it like that at the time. I was impossible. School was impossible. Wading through my life as a child with what seemed to be a firmer, thicker skull on the outside of my own with a magnetic attraction to anything that wasn’t work was impossible. But I managed, and here I am.
Sometimes, things are still impossible. I tried to put up the chords to all my songs today under my music pages. I had taken the Dexedrine, and I was focused. I was ready. And then the doorbell rang, and -
For the second time in my life, and for the second time that day, somebody had ordered flowers for me through the mail, and they had arrived, beautiful, resplendent and fragrant, but utterly homeless and more than slightly confusing. Eventually, as you can see, we found a place for them on the mantelpiece, but it required some ornament shuffling that I won’t even go into. I went back upstairs, putting the flowers from my mind, and for the second time in my life, and the second time that day, took another Dexedrine, and completely failed to do any work whatsoever for the next eight hours.
The problem with medication of any kind is that it’s pretty blunt and general, and the human body is infinitely complex and detailed, particularly in bits like the brain. Very specific problems can arise in bodies, and the medicines we make have basic functions that can raise or lower things generally, but can never be precise enough to target just the bit that’s wrong. This is why side-effects exist. You can’t not fuck something else up when you fix the thing you’re trying to fix.
I feel cold and empty as I write this. I feel a sort of detachment that isn’t sadness, necessarily – but it’s on the same level as sadness. The drugs have tried to fix whatever’s wrong in my brain, and they have missed. They’ve hit me in a place I’m not sure I entirely understand even though I’m living through it, and if you were to ask me how I feel, I’d say I don’t know. If you asked me what I want to do, I’d say I don’t know either. I’m blank right now. There’s nothing inside me at all.
It’s at low points in a life that the simplest things can make huge differences. Everything we know is relative to everything else, and it’s astonishing how quickly things can change. Happiness is one of the most free-spirited and fleeting things I know. At the start of today, I felt loved and cared for, and in only a few hours I forgot what it even felt like to be loved at all. It’s happened before on other medications, and it’s always horrible.
Now, though, I’m feeling a lot better. I’ve restored the kitchen windowsill and the mantelpiece back to how they were, and now there are two vases of flowers sitting on my desk, surrounding me with tenable proof of what it’s like to have someone love you and care about you, reminding me of how wonderful my friends are, and proving, in their own sedentary, unassuming and sweetly fragrant way, that a little token of happiness will always go miles further than any chemical compound will. I’ll never quite work the way I’m supposed to, but at least for now, I’m happy again.
Tom
1a.k.a dexamfetamine sulphate. Dexedrine ®UCB Pharma Ltd.
Most of which is aimed at YOU! YES! YOU!
I did a video, for one thing:
So that’s nice. The thing with Lady Gaga songs is that while they’re technically very well written songs (and why wouldn’t they be, she has a team of crack writers behind her at every turn) they tend to be polished down to nothingness, not to mention the fact that they all use the same, salient chord sequence (which is very convenient). So I did a piano cover of all of them at once. Lady Gaga! Pianos! YouTube Success – I am your bitch.
What else? Oh yeah, I’ve been working with the lovely and talented Alex Day producing his new EP, 117% Complete, an EP about video games which I think may well be the most musically accomplished thing we’ve ever done together. It sounds beautiful. Orchestral and 8-bit at the same time. Check it out when it’s released on March 1st. I wanted to make it so that it would be really enjoyable even if the listener had no idea what a video game even was. I think we totally achieved that. I’m psyched, and you should be too. So to summarise this paragraph, CLICK HERE to go to DFTBA Records and check out a magical preview track and pre-order and stuff. You don’t want to miss this.
Things I have been doing in the FUTURE*:
- Producing Alex Day’s NEXT ALBUM ^_______^ which is called The World Is Mine and will be so bloody cool it will make your skin go inside out in pure amazement and joy.
- Producing Eddplant’s FIRST ALBUM ^_________^ upon which production has been started, and which should be out this year fo’ sho, because people are sick of him ONLY EVER RELEASING EPs.
- erm… third album? You’ll be lucky, but it could happen. More in a later blog. Promise. <3
Right, and on that bombshell, back to feverishly refreshing the comments on my new video! 
Tom
*things I have been doing in the future? Things I will be doing? Tenses? Wurds? Gramur?
So a lovely group of designers over at how fucking romantic are putting together a visual representation of every one of the 69 love songs by the Magnetic Fields. Inspired by this, I decided to do one of my personal favourites from the album -
Another drawing for ya. Why not, eh? the shading colour was originally a light green in tribute to Ghost World by Daniel Clowes – my favourite graphic novel of all time – but it didn’t look quite right, so after going through every hue that the visible spectrum has to offer, I resigned to boring ol’ grey. Hey, you win some, you lose some.
I wrote some music today as well, which is just awesome. I’m working on a lot of projects right now and am going through a very productive period (as you can probably tell from all the blogging I’ve been doing) – expect Amateur Lovemaking Monthly ed. 4 out soon!*
Whenever I have a spare moment, I sit down and draw something tricky to draw, like a dishcloth covering a hedgehog, or I write some music or fiddle with some sounds. So I have a question for you guys – what do you all like to do in your spare time?
Tom
*the Monthly is a lie. You already knew this though.
Evening!
Today I had a few hours to spare, so for the first time in about three forevers, I plugged my Wacom tablet in and started doodling. This is the end result, a nice little pic of a bloke wearing a jacket and skinny jeans. I feel horribly generic-thirteen-year-old-girl-with-a-deviantart-account because of what I ended up drawing, but I can’t be held responsible – I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired.
I haven’t really drawn anything lately – I used to practice for a few hours every day for ten years before music became such a pressing issue. There are a lot of people out there (David Heatley and James Kochalka to name but two) who treat music and comics as equal endeavors, and are as good at one as the other. Comics was always my first love, but music just came to bloom before comics did. Perhaps I should start drawing again. It seems a waste to stop doing something after I’ve spent so long practicing it and learning how to do it.
I dunno.
Three is the number of times I’ve attempted to start a proper full length comic book, and I’ve never really got past the first twelve pages. There’s a lot of planning involved that gets me down. Storytelling is everything.
There are a lot of technically brilliant artists out there who treat it as a hobby, as I do, but then there are a lot less technically able people who’ve released a lot of books and are very well respected. It’s finding that combination between what you do and how you do it that’s partly the key to the whole thing, but also a strong sense of being able to breathe life into what you draw. There are a lot of beautiful illustrations of people that are so close to lifelike but look almost dead (fan art is a brilliant example of this for some reason) to the point that it’s creepy. I believe the term for this is ‘Uncanny Valley’. Look it up. On the other hand, there are people (like the aforementioned Kochalka) who create these amazingly animated characters out of a few flicks of a brush. It’s a sort of magic that only comes with years and years of practice and skill.
This blog post is all over the place and not at all coherent, and I apologise for this. I’ll try to form my ideas about drawing – and in particular the world of sequential art – into another later blog post. I might do a Just Imagine later as well. Look out!
Some artists and works I strongly recommend you check out:
Daniel Clowes, in particular Ghost World
Charles Burns, in particular Black Hole, which is beautifully rendered and which I just finished reading
Chris Ware, in particular Jimmy Corrigan (which I gave PJ for Christmas – ask him how good it is)
Julie Doucet, who has this really intense, full style that always seems messy to the point of chaos, but isn’t
Seth, who is a lot more nuanced and grownup than his monosyllabic moniker would suggest.
You go far into the future. Many thousands of years into the future. You find yourself among a race of humanoid creatures not overly dissimilar to how we are today, who live in a world barren of obvious habitations and urban areas. A world which stretches off into the distance completely devoid of any signs of concentrated human life. You find one of these humanoids and explain to them your situation. After the reasonable period of confusion and subsequent amazement and interrogation has passed, a thought occurs to you. You ask one of them whether they have ever heard of Coca-Cola. They shake their head and look nonplussed. You ask them about McDonalds. About Pepsi. Again, nothing.
This is amazing. You have outlived seemingly immovable, impenetrable, omnipresent bedrocks of the society you were born into*. Admittedly, you cheated some. You haven’t been a constant feature in the timeline they inhabited, but even so, you were there when they were, and now you are here after they have fallen. This raises so many other questions. How did they fall? When? Where? What has replaced them? But you know none of these can be answered now. There will be plenty of time for research later, since your time machine seems to be a little on the dented side, and you have to get that fixed before you can return. For now, though, you have one more question. “Okay, how about this one?” you say.
“Jesus Christ. Ever heard of him?” There’s a pause, and the people turn to each other. They begin to smile. Then laugh. “Why?” One of them asks. “Who was he?”
“Do you know him then?” You ask**.
“We didn’t know he was a real person. It’s just something you say, isn’t it? Like; ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, not again’, right?”
You tell them you’ll explain later. For now, you’re rather dumbstruck by how interesting this all is. Gosh, it’s interesting.
==========
Time passes, once again at the now rather staid and tedious rate of sixty seconds per minute, and you fix your time machine in a matter of weeks. You learn a lot about this new society, and they learn a lot about you (”You grew up without the Internet? NO WAY.”). Eventually it is time to go home.
But you overshoot, don’t you? You silly little creature, you forgot to fix the dial, and it’s all wonky and you put the numbers in the wrong order, because while you were trying to fix it, a future-woman was telling you something simply fascinating about sentient dishcloths, and now you find yourself in the past, in a long-forgotten society before pens and paper, when the natives worship an omniscient being they call Gordon Bennett.
Tom
*and at this point I apologise to people who fall upward of my target 16-25 demographic, to whom this may not apply.
**I know putting direct speech into your mouth is a tad presumptuous, and not least a little bit insulting to your imagination, which I’m sure could do perfectly well on its own from herein, but… oh, just humour me.
that there’s this big planet somewhere off many galaxies away that’s trapped in a binary solar system, trapped between two identical suns so it’s always daytime, and with a constant average temperature of a warm spring day. The entire planet is covered by well trimmed grass, which is kept in form by a team of massive roving lawnmowers the size of skyscrapers, which move about the land like mobile oil rigs. There are two types of existence on this planet. People who live underground in tunnel houses that are light and airy and full of glass ceilings only occasionally blocked by the massive roving lawnmowers, and people who live in the dark, oily depths of the lawnmowers, keeping it working and making sure it runs smoothly.
I know it doesn’t make any sense, but just imagine.
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