The version of Flying North that Thomas Dolby recreated for his Sole Inhabitant tour has become my favourite version of one of my favourite songs. I was thinking about it a few moments ago, chatting to hunkymouse on Twitter about my Great Circle tomorrow, up north into the dark and then south again into the sun and desert...

Luckily the man has put it online for us, as part of his podcast series.



Enjoy!

At last - we have a date for the release of the next Kleptones album.

Uptime/Downtime will be released at Midnight GMT on 01/01/10.

As today is an auspicious anniversary, I spent some time delving through my music collection to put together tracks that fitted the event. Of course this is only a small selection of possible tunes - so feel free to add your own to the list.

A playlist for the 40^th anniversary of the first moon landing.

• Launch of Apollo 11 - NASA - Lunar Landing
• Apollo - Alan Parsons - On Air
• Matta - Brian Eno - Apollo Atmospheres & Soundtracks
• Let There Be Light (BT Mix) - BT - R & R
• Money - N.A.S.A. (Feat. David Bryne) - The Spirit Of Apollo
• Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun - O.S.I - Office of Strategic Influence Bonus CD
• Apollo - Way Out West - Don't Look Now
• Let There Be Light - Mike Oldfield - The Songs of Distant Earth
• Sleeping Satellite (12") - Aurora - Sleeping Satellite
• Armstrong Sets Foot on Moon - NASA - Lunar Landing
• Stars Die - Porcupine Tree - Stars Die
• Sleeping Satellite (Extended Version) - Tasmin Archer - Sleeping Satellite
• Pump Up The Volume - M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up The Volume
• Walking On The Moon - The Police - Greatest Hits
• The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon
• Dark Side Of The Moon (12" Mix) - Dune - Dark Side Of The Moon
• Full Moon Low Tide Remix By DJ Toshio - Afro Celt Sound System - POD
• Fly Me to the Moon - Agneta Fältskog - My Colouring Book
• lunar orbit four: back side of the moon - The Orb - The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
• Trip to the Moon - Alex North - 2001: The Legendary Original Score
• Aristillus - Camel - Moonmadness
• Moonraker - David Arnold (featuring Shara Nelson) - Shaken and Stirred
• Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun - Pink Floyd - Ummagumma (Disc 1)
• Moonage Daydream - David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust
• Bike Ride to the Moon - The Dukes of Stratosphear - Chips from the Chocolate Fireball
• Ticket To The Moon - Electric Light Orchestra - Time
• Tsukiyo no Hikou (Moonlight Flight) - Joe Hisaishi, Azumi Inoue & Suginami Children's Choir - My Neighbor Totoro
• Lunar Sea - Camel - Moonmadness
• Moonshine - Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells II
• Moonbase - Thomas Dolby - Gate to the Mind's Eye
• Tranquility Base - Planet P Project - Planet P Project
• lunar orbit five: spanish castles in space - The Orb - The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
• Lunar Ascent - Philip Sheppard - In the Shadow of the Moon
• Lunar Sunrise - Terra Ferma - The Best Of Platipus
• An Ending (Ascent) - Brian Eno - Apollo Atmospheres & Soundtracks

"Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

Friday evening I got access to the Office 2010 Technical Preview release code, and fired up the FTP engines. Just under 2GB later it was sat on my hard disk, where I installed it on my main Windows 7 test machine. By the end of the evening we'd done one clean install, and one upgrade install (just to see if it worked).

Over the weekend I:

(a) baked a lemon/peach polenta cake with marypcb.
(b) made a red chicken thai curry for friends whow were coming round for dinner (again with marypcb).
(c) introduced those friends to The Middleman and Jennifer Crusie.
(d) reviewed Office 2010 and wrote two articles on it, for different audiences, coming in at around 5500 words - plus 22 different screenshots.

I think I got to bed at about 4 am this morning, before getting up to finish the screenshots and captions and take part in a call with a Microsoft spokesperson.

You can check out my words at ZDNet UK here:

Microsoft, like Apple, has one customer. Apple's is Steve Jobs, while Microsoft's is the Microsoft Corporation — all 70,000 or so of it. Once you realise this, it explains much of the thinking behind Office 2010. It's a suite of tools that primarily addresses Microsoft's own organisational problems — and we're lucky that most of those problems are the same as for any other business, from the smallest to the largest.

Codenamed 'Office 14' (Microsoft skipped neatly over the unlucky number 13), Office 2010 has been some time in the making prior to this public Technical Preview. There have been some snippets of information over the last year or so (among them its final name) but Microsoft has managed to achieve almost Apple-like levels of secrecy. One fact that's been known for a while is that this is the first 64-bit version of Office, part of Microsoft's transition to the current generation of processor architectures.

Read more.

I also put together a hefty image gallery for the site, drilling down into many of the most interesting features.

The other piece was another first look piece, this time for IT Pro:

Microsoft is using its World Wide Partner Conference to finally publicly unveil Office 2010, in the shape of its first public technical preview.

We’ve been playing with it for a few days now, and it’s clear that, while there are plenty of excellent new features, this is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, release.

The Office 2010 technical preview isn’t going to be widely distributed. If you weren’t at TechEd US or the World Wide Partner conference, you’re unlikely to get access – though there is a waiting list sign-up at Office2010themovie.com. You’ll need SharePoint 2010 to get the most from Office 2010, but it won’t be available until after October.

Read more

There's more to write on the subject - we've got commissions from magazines to fulfil too.

But now, I think, it's time for an earlier night.

Following on from tamaranth and others, here's ( my list of bands seen )

I'm sure there've been more. Pretty eclectic, even so...

I loved "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", and have been waiting for the release of Brian Eno and David Byrne's latest collaboration, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

It's just out - with digital downloads available today in advance of the physical discs in November.

One thing: it's not the sampled ambient soundscapes of "My Life...", and instead it's much more like Eno and Cale's "Wrong Way Up", texturing, looping, and layering simple rhythms with samples and Byrne's vocals. It's been thirty years, and the two artists have changed their focus and their interests many times in the intervening years - but it's good to see that that doesn't mean that creative spark of collaboration isn't lost.

If you're not sure what you're getting into, they're streaming the entire album so you can hear just what "Everything That Happens..." sounds like. It's a flash widget - so you can start listening to it here and now.

"

Thanks to micheinnz for the pointer

Managing a large digital music library can be tricky. Often the album art is missing - and it can be hard to track it down and drop the right image in to your music management tool of chouice. Some, like iTunes, will download images from their associated stores - but they're by their very nature limited to what's in stock. The result is a significant proportion of the library without any cover art.

This afternoon I found a useful tool in the shape of AlbumArt. It's a very basic service that's nothing more than an album art search engine. It's generally accurate, and very easy to use. The only things it's had trouble with so far have been self-issued albums by bands like Marillion, magazine cover CDs, and some compilation albums (which is probably more down to my initial data entry than anything else!).

Recommended.

You've heard of the slow food movement. Now let me introduce you to the slow music movement. Its members don't know they're part of it, but they all have one thing in common: exquisitely crafted albums that appear years apart. Kraftwerk are one such band, and the UK's main proponent are the superb The Blue Nile.



They played a rare concert last night, one of a short series that recaps nearly 25 years of craftsmanship. It wasn't a big gig, in fact, compared to our last concert at a festival in Spain it was positively minute. But it was people who loved the band, who loved their music, and who'd managed to fight London's broken public transport infrastructure to reach the courtyard of Somerset House.



The concert ranged widely through the band's four albums, and introduced one new track (as well as a distinctly Blue Nilish take on "Strangers in the Night"). The atmosphere was electric, with an enraptured audience hanging on every perfect note.

( For the completists, the set list )

An excellent gig, and one which bodes well for further concerts (and more albums).

According to El Reg, the servers have been stolen from the data centre where they've been running both his and the WOMAD sites...

Maybe someone was listening to this song as they walked off with the hardware...

I know something about opening windows and doors
I know how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors
I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers
Slipping the clippers
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires
The sense of isolation inspires
Inspires me
I like to feel the suspense when I'm certain you know I am there
I like you lying awake, your baited breath charging the air
I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear
Intruders happy in the dark
Intruder come
Intruder come and leave his mark, leave his mark

Still, the site is slowly coming back - so score one for data recovery.

Oddly Gabriel is keynoting at Salesforce.com's European DreamForce event in London this week. I don't think this makes him quite the poster boy for SaaS!

One of the more fun TV shows around is The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about four physicists and a waitress. It's pretty funny, and it's also pretty geeky (the show employs a consultant physicist).

The (science themed) theme tune is sung by the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, and they've released a full length version:



Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started.
Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unravelling the mystery,
That all started with the big bang!

"Since the dawn of man" is really not that long,
As every galaxy was formed in less time than it takes to sing this song.
A fraction of a second and the elements were made.
The bipeds stood up straight,
The dinosaurs all met their fate,
They tried to leap but they were late
And they all died (they froze their asses off)
The oceans and Pangea
See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya
Set in motion by the same big bang!

It all started with the big BANG!

It's expanding ever outward but one day
It will pause and start to go the other way,
Collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard
Our best and brightest figure that it'll make an even bigger bang!

Australopithecus would really have been sick of us
Debating how we're here
They're catching deer (we're catching viruses)
Religion or astronomy, Descartes or Deuteronomy
It all started with the big bang!

Music and mythology, Einstein and astrology
It all started with the big bang!
It all started with the big BANG!

I know one or two of you out there enjoy the musical stylings of those likeable wags The Kleptones.

They've just "released" a live album (with some new tracks), from their appearance at Bestival - along with a video of their appearance.



Fire up your torrents!

It's one large MP3 with a cue file for anyone wishing to split into individual tracks.

In other Kleptone related news, I found a DJ playing War Of Confusion at a press event earlier this week...

I have a secret obsession that many of you already know about - because many of you share it.

I collect songs about Apollo and the moon landings. Sometimes they appear at just the right moment. We were driving through the high desert plains of Utah last weekend, through red rocks and green trees, and I was reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, watching plants struglge to grow in thin air and dry red soils, as ice pellets fell from a cold blue sky. I found myself thinking that I'd never see that fantastic landscape for real, that as wonderful as robots on Mars were, there's nothing that beats the images of people walking on a new world - exploring that old high frontier.

The high plains were once that frontier, and it seems we have turned our back on the new one...

Then this song came up on the old iPod shuffle, an apt piece of poetry from the Bard of Barking:

When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

At his best (and this is one of his best), Billy Bragg can capture a complex feeling in just a few words. You can find a live version of the song here.

I guess I'll still keep dreaming...

3,000 entries and still going strong!

A spoof 80s pop video from his latest Drew Barrymore romcom.

For those of us who lived through Top of the Pops in the 80s...



Via Whatever.

For all the Thomas Dolby fans reading, TMDR just announced on his blog that the Sole Inhabitant DVD and CD are now available - on CD Baby and iTunes (I'm not sure if it's on the UK iTunes store yet).

Order quickly to get one of the limited edition signed copies!
I did!

Thomas Dolby has posted a new track online, performed at the TED conference last year.

One of the presenters this year was Peter Gabriel, who was there to talk about a cause that’s dear to his heart. I’d met Peter before and found him very affable, so I took the liberty of sampling one of his most famous tunes and mashing it up with a new piece of my own. The session was entitled ‘The World Flattens’ so I triggered some sound bytes from my own Flat Earth Lecture. I think Peter was sitting in the front row when I played it. As TED is for a good cause I’m sure Peter won’t mind if I put a recording of my performance up online! Download it, link to it if you like, but please don’t recirculate it without asking me.

Good stuff.

[Link to the track on his blog entry].

...there's a new Kleptones album on the torrents...

w00t, I say. It's a double, too...

(and today we fly from Las Vegas to Dallas)

...came from Microsoft's UK developer tools team, with the heading "Music to code to".

The survey of more than 100 developers revealed that rock is the preferred music to code by for professional developers of all ages. Those surveyed were also keen chart watchers with the votes for top band going to four big hitters of 2005 - in first place Chris Martin's band 'Coldplay', followed by U2, third most popular were Manchester boys 'Oasis' and in forth position, Stereophonics.

Of the developers surveyed more than 29% claim that rap or hip hop was the most off-putting music to code by. The other genres that developers were least likely to listen to whilst working were country music (12 %), ambient music (9%) and opera (8%).

An odd selection. Me, I code and write best to both ambient and trance. So thank goodness for the nice folk at Platipus records (where Art of Trance have started recording again).

HMV has a "Music to code to" radio station on its web site. So, if you really need wall to wall Coldplay...

Paddy McAloon's "I Trawl The Megahertz" is an underrated masterpiece, an album of melancholy and bleak despair enlivened by hope of light. This is McAloon's response to the debilitating illness that temporarily robbed him of sight.

The title track is a 21 minute spoken word piece, a calm female voice reads snippets transcribed from short wave radio, turned into poetry, accompanied by music.

Hers is the wing span of the quotidian angel,
so her feet are sore from the walk
to the well of human kindness,
but she gives you a name and you grow into it.

And echoing the poetry of the stars.

They are listening for smudged echoes
of the moment of creation.
They are listening for the ghost of a chance.
They may help us make sense of who we are
and where we came from;
and, as a compassionate side effect,
teach us that nothing is ever lost.

It's wonderful.

I know I have talked about this album before, but the title track just came up on our massive random play list, and made me sit back for 20 minutes wonderful minutes.

The folk behind the Music Genome Project are using their database to drive a new service at Pandora.com.

Type in the name of a band or a song, and Pandora (a little box in the middle of your browser) will generate a personalised Internet radio station that plays music related or similar to your request. It's quite fascinating to sit there and click the forward button to see what's next (and occasionally wonder just why that one was chosen...). And of course you get the option to rate or buy the music you've just heard.

An interesting experiment, which has the prospect of hours of fun...

I had a horrible experience yesterday. Too horrible to speak about. Far too horrible to even think about.

So I'm going to make you all read it.

Leaving a press round table at the Savoy I took a wrong turn, and very nearly gatecrashed a launch party for...

...The Choirboys

[FX: runs away screaming]

At least they weren't singing "Walking In The Air"...

This morning's thunder seems to have finally reset my body clock. As a result, a quick update.

Boston: good fun, thanks to a day wandering around the delights of Cambridge with teddywolf. There's a good quote from the day, but I said I'd leave it to him. I was surprised that all the various containers of chai syrup I'd picked up didn't lead to my case being opened by the TSA. Much book shopping also occurred, as did a sweep through the sales in the mall next to my hotel (£18 for a jacket? £10 for chinos? I do like the current state of the dollar...).

My real reason for heading over, the two days of press conference, also proved useful, and should lead to some interesting articles in the future.

Billy Bragg: the hot weather I'd missed in Boston arrived with a vengeance as I stepped off the plane at 7.15 on Saturday morning. The best way to keep jet-lag at bay is to be busy, and Saturday was a most active day. Lunch al fresco with marypcb's sister and her fiancé, followed by rupertg's 40^th birthday drinks in a dark Soho pub (where we briefly saw codepope). There was some time to kill, so we filled up with sushi in a park before heading over the river to Billy Bragg's Meltdown 2005 gig at the QEH.

Much fun was had by one and all in the concrete depths of the South Bank. A semi-acoustic gig with a bunch of the Blokes, Billy's set veered off into new directions and new arrangements of familiar songs. The highlight was a mash-up of "John Barleycorn" and "England Half English" performed with Eliza Carthy. A righteous dose of politics, some Woody Guthrie and a mix of new and old songs made it a gig well worth staying awake for, even in the heat of a summer evening...

An excellent support too - I missed his name, but he was from the East End, and mixed rap, folk, blues and rock with an anger and energy I've not seen for a long while. I'm going to have to do some research.

Down by the river: yesterday afternoon was spent picnicking and lazing on the banks of the Thames down at Ham, reading the papers, and some more of karentraviss's Hard Contact (one of my Boston book purchases). Extremely hot and sunny, but there was some shade, and a touch of a breeze off the river.