What time do you call this?

Happy new year! Sorry I'm a month late. I've been a busy Bobby.

As a new year gift, I've done a podcast especially for you lovely, lovely people via Edit Radio. Listen, download share etc. If you like it, let me know and I'll do some more of that sort of thing. It includes some never before heard songs, some of which I penned myself. 

http://www.editradio.org
link to the file --> [edit] radio podcast 163

Anyway, yeah, I've been a little busy and haven't done a blog in a while and I apologise. I've been busy doing various things including special effects for a sci fi film starring her out of Pulp Fiction and him out of Pirates of the Carribean and him off of Game of Thrones. I'm not sure what I can say about it so I'll keep quiet. 

I also did the Resident Evil DVD launch yesterday in which I played the hero and it involved running around with a machine gun killing baddies to impress/scare jounalists. Anything for a weird life.

As well as the usual band recording that takes up most of my time, I've recently been experimenting with a bit of filming bands in the studio. The results will go up here very soon. I'm actually going to start making music videos eventually, so if you're in a band and need a video or a record made or both at the same time, hit me up! 

Love Bobby x

Does it what?

Does it what? 

I have only once had to spread my butt cheeks for military men to peer into and quite frankly it's not something I want to repeat.

When people asked me what I did for a living, I never really knew how to answer. Even though dioyy toured solidly for years, the band were only ever at the cult level and the band certainly never pinged on the radar of immigration officials in foreign countries. So the answer "I'm a rock star" could never work. Besides, only an utter twat would say that. The equally excruciating "Im in a band" response, it seems, to a highly trained but barely English-speaking man with a moustache, sounds almost exactly the same as "I have cocaine inside my anus". 

All of the possible permutations of the statement 'I am a person in a music group' lead to the utterly dreaded follow up question - 'What's the name of your band?'. The answer "Does It Offend You, Yeah?" begets so much confusion and hands tightening on pistol grips, that it has to be avoided at all costs.

Does it what? No it doesn't. Do I offend you yet? Yes? Yeah? Why are you called that? Are you on drugs?

For a while I attempted the old "I work in the music industry". That too was abandoned because it seemingly also translated as "I have a kilo of Bolivian marching powder wedged high up in my colon".

So I settled on the answer on the visa forms - ENTERTAINER. Reassuringly vague.

Of course, in bars or hotels, if I answered "entertainer" I would again look like a twat. So it would have to be "I make music" or "I am a music producer". Which was a deliberately drab answer crafted to put people off the trail to the same conversational downward spiral. Sometimes though, it was just inevitable.

What's the Name of Your band? Does it what? No it doesn't. Do I offend you yet? Yes? Yeah? No it doesn't...

With the dioyy stuff now on indefinite hiatus, I have more of a problem answering exactly what it is I do. I'm producing a few projects, deejaying, managing a band and working every week with Zed Events. 

Zed Events are the people who put on the Zombie Mall Experience. Essentially people pay to go into an abandoned and very dark shopping mall to take part in a full-immersion experience that is half theatrical play, half themed airsoft skirmish against the undead. It's all moaning, shambling, smoke, loud bangs and screaming, (so not all that different from touring really). 

The zombie mall has been on several international news networks and consequently is fully booked for nearly a year in advance. My actual job role changes from week to week. Acting as armed police officer or zombie or a dead clown, sometimes running around "backstage" with a smoke machine and doing bits of sound effects, often firing blank firing weapons, wearing prosthetic make up and creeping around... and there's lots of pretending to die.

So now if people ask me what it is I do, the genuine answer - "music producer and band manager and DJ and multi-rolled person at a thing that's a kind of themed play event thing with zombies and member of the now sleeping does it offend you yeah" - is the most excruciating yet. And still leads to that conversation again. Does it what?... 

Anything for a weird life.

at the Call of Duty Black Ops II UK launch as a zombie clown.  

bobby x

hello

My lords, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, willkommen et bienvenue to the grand opening, the spectacular premiere, the splendiferous ordinal pointless scribble of this here bloggy thing. Tremendous. Yes, I've finally joined the blogging internet revolution. More than a decade later than everyone else but I've joined it nonetheless. (Been kinda busy)

Were this 1998, I'd be a pioneering HTML web logger and you would be the sort of person who painted lead figures and had an X Files poster. Now that it's 2012 (I've been assured) it's perfectly normal to "blog". Its no longer just for tinfoil hat wearers or attention-seeking hipsters. Ordinary folk like you or I can do it. I mean, hey, some of my best friends are bloggers and, well, everyone is a little bit blog-curious eh?

Anyway, I imagine, dear reader, that if you are reading this (are you mad? It's paragraph three into this drivel), then you a fan of something musicky that I've been involved in or someone interested in music production. Or you're mistakenly here looking for a blog about my namesake ancestor, in which case you are in the wrong place, I'm not an English labouring class Romantic poet, I'm a floppy haired music producer from Reading. Possibly, chillingly, you're a psychotic stalker looking for more material to print out and place on your wall of hate. In which case, please don't hurt me.

I will be blogging about the various creative thingies I'm currently and historically involved in. That could be who I'm recording now, stories I can actually remember, where I'm performing whatever it is I'm performing next or updates on the bread I've been developing**. 

Right. That's it for the introduction. Well done if you made it this far. More pointless drivel to follow soon.

Love,

Bobby x

* If you want to know what I was doing in 1998, quite frankly, so do I. I'm fairly sure it involved loud repetitive noises and colours.

** This is so exciting, it involves frying wet dough to make a brand new kind of garlic naan/crumpet/muffin/paratha hybrid. Its the best thing since normal bread.