Wanking Androids: Why Conspiracy Theorists Can Never Be Wrong

From ScienceDaily.com:

'Confirmation bias is a phenomenon wherein decision makers have been shown to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis, and ignore or underweigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis'

This Sunday marks ten years since the attacks on 11th September, 2001. That alone is a terrifying thought. I can remember being on holiday in Portugal; to quote Stewart Lee, 'that seems distasteful now, but I wasn't to know at the time. I didn't plan it.' 

I couldn't make sense of the images I was seeing on foreign news channels without any idea of what was really going on until a man on the same campsite as us came running over saying 'They've blown up the World Trade Centre!' Being on holiday, I think, magnifies one's desire for news and current events as it reduces the feeling of disconnect brought about by the change in routine so being on holiday during a huge occurrence such as 9/11 was surreal. 

In the aftermath of such an event, it was natural that people would seek to make sense of what had happened in their own various ways. The problem with these events, though, is that the closest one can get to a full conclusion is a jigsaw with a few too many missing pieces. The gist of the image is there but there are gaps in the detail. 

Inevitably, some people have a burning need to fill these gaps. Firstly by taking existing pieces of the jigsaw and stretching them, then by making jumps of logic based on what they can see and just filling the gaps themselves. 

Enter the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, aka the robot-wankers:

It's only when the final square is revealed that we can see Mr. Chips is not actually evacuating his baby-maker all over an enthusiastic reptile. Never mind that there is no way a masturbating android would ever be shown on teatime television - that's what it looks like. Based on what we cannot see. This is the crux of the 9/11 conspiracy types: jump to conclusions, then fill in the gaps.

That's the M.O of anyone not interested in 'the truth' but only their version of the truth. Seek evidence to support a pre-existing conclusion; disregard that which does not. The beauty of a conspiracy theory which states that The Government Did It is that all the evidence which runs contrary to your theory can be dismissed as part of the conspiracy. On the other hand, absence of proof becomes proof of absence. 

For example - no videos or photos have been released of Flight 77 hitting The Pentagon. Never mind the pictures of plane wreckage outside the pentagon, the hundreds of witnesses who saw the plane hit the pentagon, the burned corpses which were found in the wreckage of the flight. Oh yeah, there are photos on the internet. I'm not going to link to any but you can find them pretty easily. We're talking about human beings reduced to scorched, mutilated chunks of flesh. Didn't happen. All 'pawns' in the government's game. The phone calls they made to loved ones as the plane came down? Faked. Using 'voice morphing technology'. 

You see, I could accept a decent conspiracy theory if it came with a shred of convincing evidence. If it wasn't so clear that Dylan Avery, the maker of Loose Change, and people of his ilk had started with the idea that 9/11 was an 'inside job' and then cherry-picked the evidence to support that conclusion. It's just inconvenient truths like, I don't know, the fact that Loose Change started as a fictional screenplay. Avery went through the evidence specifically looking for anything which could support his fictional hypothesis; that's not analysis. That is the textbook definition of confirmation bias. That's cool, though, because Avery was looking for faux-evidence for his little fiction project. Until bona fide mentalist Philip Jayhan stumped up some funding for the first version of Loose Change...at which point it became a 'documentary'. Just sayin'. 

It's not just bored students and paranoid nutjobs who buy into this. Their groundwork has convinced plenty of people that they might have a point and, yes, there are some engineers who claim that the official story is impossible. D'you know what, though? There are far more who don't think that. That's the other thing that really bugs me about these conspiracy theorists - if they're in agreement then one person with an engineering qualification is a voice of authority and absolutely must know what they are talking about. The thousands of people with engineering qualifications and various respected publications who disagree, on the other hand, are 'shills'.  

Every doctor who's ever been struck off the medical register had the relevant qualifications to do that job, yet failed to do so. It's not your degree that counts but your application of it. Hell, I have a BA(Hons) in English Literature from a Russell Group University; if I started a website claiming that my analysis of the oeuvre of William Shakespeare showed that it contained a code predicting the downfall of Western civilisation at the hands of a mob of heavily armed guinea fowl, would your response be

a) 'Well, he's got an English lit degree. Let's listen to what he has to say'

or

b) 'Well, that's clearly absolutely fucking mental'?

I get stick from people who buy into these conspiracy theorists because I absolutely refuse to give them the time of day or debate them. The reason for that is they don't want a debate. They want you to agree with them and if you don't, you're wrong. You're either stupid, or in on it. They are not interested in evidence which doesn't support the conclusion they have decided - not arrived at, not analysed, but just decided - is correct. 

Perhaps it's because they feel out of control of their own lives and want to feel that The Government control everything. The same Government who (in the UK, at least) leave laptops full of confidential information on trains and can't hide the fact they've paid for the cleaning of their fucking moats using their expense accounts. 

The powers that be are involved in conspiracies and the withholding of truth, all the time. There is no doubt about that. Batshit mental theories such as 9/11 'truth' simply support the idea that the Government is all-knowning, omnipotent and unbeatable. Yet leaves enough evidence lying around that a 22-year-old kid with a YouTube account can blow the whole thing wide open. You can't have your cake and eat it, guys. Or should that be: you can't have your cake and also blow up a decoy cake using a laser-guided missile while the real cake safely lands in a field and is destroyed by Government anti-wheat agents. 

I'm going to leave you with a quote I heard earlier from my occasionally-infuriating but annoyingly succinct brother: 

'All I'm saying is there's defo some stuff going on there that they're not telling us...but probably not as much as we'd like'. 

Just Stop It.

So Amy Winehouse has died. Inspired by some less-than-thoughtful comments I'd seen on Twitter, I originally set out to write a short but reasoned polemic on why the 'Drugs are bad, mmkay' attitude doesn't help anyone.

Then, helpfully, a few lovely individuals on a forum to which I contribute offered up the following nuggets of brilliance, demonstrating far better than I could why this attitude is just downright unpleasant:


"The only people I feel sorry for right now is her parents. Her dad was so vocal about wanting to help her with her addiction and over and over again (and her multi platinum single will tell you so) she just didn't want their help.So fuck her basically."
Yeah fuck you, you awful corpse. How dare you just lie there, being all dead and stuff. Bitch."I think drugs are bad, if one of my friends died from drugs I'd hate them for it, but I'd be sad because its one of my friends... Not a celebrity who had no personal impact on my life aswell as glorifying her drug usage which is ultimately going to be what killed her (if you try and say there is no known cause of death at the moment, and it had nothing to do with drug useage, then you're a grade A idiot)."
Yeah, drugs are bad. Now you're not only an idiot if you take them but you're an idiot if you don't automatically assume that the as-yet-unidentified cause of the death of someone who happened to take drugs is drug related. Surely that should be 'CLASS A' idiot? So busy being a total dick that you missed an obvious joke there.
"Drugs are illegal for a reason.Legal drugs that can harm you in large doses, help in small doses. It is one thing to say smoking weed won't kill you, but Amy Winehouse wasn't, she was taking pills and class A drugs. To say that doing those kinds of drugs isn't dicing with death is moronic. As has been said in this thread already, I feel bad for her family, but fuck her." 
Yeah, Drugs are illegal for a reason! Apart from, you know, all those legal ones. Well, plus alcohol too. which doesn't really help anyone. Um. Yeah, bad. BAD.

The irony and the idiocy comes thick and fast where drug use and addiction is concerned. Everyone who doesn't take drugs immediately takes the moral high ground and becomes a medical expert. Equally unhelpfully, people who take drugs frequently then attempt to hold themselves up as examples of why drugs are just fine which is hardly objective and more often than not the response of what they perceive as the personal slight against them in narrow-minded comments such as those above (which also completely fail to understand the nature of addiction). 

I could cite the experts who have written on how our current model of prohibition does more harm than good - the way it drives the drug trade into the hands of unscrupulous and unregulated criminals; the way it ensures the quality and purity of substances will never be consistent and the way it puts already vulnerable individuals, addicts, in the company of some seriously dangerous and unpleasant people.

Similarly, I could cite the various Government-funded studies which suggest that Alcohol should be a Class A substance. Comment on the fundamental ludicrousness of non-addictive empathogen-entactogens like MDMA/ecstasy being in the same class as addictive opiates like Heroin. Really though, it comes down to this: just because someone is a drug user it does not take away their humanity. If your sympathy and empathy dries up because someone has a problem which you can't understand and which you're convinced you'll never share then you're a pretty dreadful human being. 

In Praise of... Exit Ten

L-R: Ryan Redman, James Steele, Stuart Steele, Chris Steele, Joe Ward

First of all, full disclosure: This is a post about a group of people with whom I've been friends for years so it's not even going to be on nodding terms with the words 'balanced' or 'analytical'. Exit Ten are incredible musicians and great people who have over the last eight years come close to 'making it' on several occasions, just to be persistently set back by what can only be described as several metric fucktons of bad luck. They've also knocked out some absolutely banging tunes and like the Fresh Prince of Metalcore, I'd like to take a minute just sit right there and I'll tell you how I ... became acquainted with Exit Ten.

In December of 2002, my four-piece pop-punk band Shameless (yes, I know) performed at Reading's now-defunct Bar Oz venue. The night was memorable for several reasons - the fact that none of my friends were allowed in as it was an Under-18s Only gig, the drummer from the headlining band being kicked out of the venue by security prior to showtime - but the one thing it wasn't was an 'I Wish I'd Been There' moment. None of the bands on the bill - Sullivan, Shameless, Audax, Inuit Monk, Stem. - went on to do much of note. With one exception.

Midway up the lineup was a five-piece band consisting, apparently, of three children in jeans bigger than them, a wiry boyband refugee and a very angry man screaming over the top of it all. I was at the time listening mainly to Blink 182 and The Ataris and thus found the nascent Exit Ten, though musically very precocious, to be the aural equivalent of being set about by a gang of youths in an alleyway.

At that time, my best mate Ryan was singing in a Bracknell-based indie/funk/what-on-earth-is-this-genre-exactly band called Ant Salon. Ant Salon could have been a really good band, but what they were was a talented singer backed by decent musicians who all wanted to play entirely different genres of music to one another. One day in 2003, Ryan sent me a text saying something along the lines of,

'Hey dude, have you ever heard of a band called Exit 10?'

'Yeah, we played with them at that Bar Oz gig.'

'Any good?'

'They're...HEAVY. Really, really heavy. Why?'

'They're looking for a vocalist and I thought I might audition.'

Now, I'd been saying for several months that I'd love to hear what Ryan's voice - the exact lovechild of Jeff Buckley and Dryden Mitchell from Alien Ant Farm - sounded like with a band that rocked out a bit more than Ant Salon.

Wait, you're still baffled by the Alien Ant Farm reference aren't you? Ryan and I loved ANThology and I'd argue that a larger number of his vocal inflections are influenced by Mitchell's singing than by Buckley or Maynard James Keenan, to whom he's often compared.

As should be obvious by now, Ryan's audition was successful - although according to legend, it was down to him and one other person so the boys had made a list of pro's and cons which read something like:

RYAN - Pro's: Owns a van

OTHER GUY - Pro's: has dreadlocks

Practical decision-making there.

Ryan made his début with the band at 21 South Street Arts Centre later that year. I missed the show as I was stuck in traffic driving up from Southampton and arrived during the closing notes of the very last song. What I heard sounded great...and loud.

The next 8 months were a blur, both for Exit Ten and for me. I was in the final year of an English Literature degree I'd fallen out of love with many months earlier; the band were making waves up and down the country with their unique (to Britain at least) brand of brutally heavy riffs with accessible, melodic singing.

The band recorded an EP with Mark Williams including a track, Sold Out, which featured lyrics inspired by a break-up I'd recently been through. The lady in question and I had gotten back together...but this didn't stop me informing the poor girl, with undue pride, that lyrics like

Now it's time to decide, you can choose to be with him or be with your selfish mind

were about her.

'Isn't that cool? What's that, you don't really want to come to the gig now? Aww, why not? '

Both Sold Out and The Absence of Forgiveness from that EP are fantastic songs. Massive, heavy-yet-hooky riffs with choruses that bury themselves in your brain like the larvae of the Tumbu Fly. Not only did this young band have incredible chops but let's face it, they're not exactly hard on the eyes.




Pictured: Not Lemmy From Motorhead
As a result, the boys got a fantastic reception everywhere they played. This was around the time that Killswitch Engage were starting to get exposure in the UK and there simply weren't many bands doing what Exit Ten were doing, let alone doing it well. By mid-2004 they'd impressed enough people that they were featured in Richard Branson's take on Donald Trump's The Apprentice, The Rebel Billionaire: Richard Branson's Quest for the Best.
That was a strange summer. While I was living with my parents in the middle of nowhere and spending every penny of my tiny lab assistant's salary on driving to Reading each weekend to get drunk with my friends, Ryan was playing gigs in front of and getting feedback from members of Eternal and Richard freaking Branson.
I was at my girlfriend's mum's house in Kendal one weekend when I got the text.
'We are opening the V Festival tomorrow :)'
He'd been in the band for less than 12 months and tomorrow they were playing at the bloody V Festival. For a TV show. I was simultaneously sick with envy and obese with pride.
What happened to The Rebel Billionaire, though, was a strange portent of things to come. On its initial airing in the States it was watched by about five and a half million people, but this was considered a failure by American standards. It wasn't a hugely hyped show and by the time it arrived in the UK in 2005, it was quietly broadcast by ITV2. To no fanfare, but I expect to the great surprise of any UK metal fans who happened to be watching it.
Put it down to bad luck. Although their appearance at V2004 did generate the band's first piece of National press... on the 3am page of the Daily Mirror:
Brian BreadmanIncidentally that last bit about '...and the boys performed a storming gig' always reminded me of Ralph Brown in Wayne's World 2. 
Throughout 2005 and 2006, Exit Ten continued to build their profile and write bigger, better songs. I was living back in Reading by this point and was hitching a lift in the minibus to gigs all over the place. They were simply one of the best live bands I'd ever seen, especially in these tiny venues, and the reaction Ryan gets from the crowd was always something to behold. As they gained a manager and record companies started to sniff around them, the band's close bond and strong work ethic didn't leave room for egos to swell and prevented them from... well, from turning into dicks, basically. 
In early 2005 they won the Bukandskit Battle of the Bands competition in Reading at the very venue they'd played their first show. They beat the incredible Mydriasis (who I always thought could also have been huge), a fantastic band called Symmetry and a terrible pop-punk band called Thirteen, whose singer now fronts lumpen Britpop necrophiliacs Viva Brother. Their prize was recording time at Windsor's Running Frog Studios, which resulted in two brand new demos: Better and Deny. 
Both songs were miles ahead of the EP and demonstrated Exit Ten's developing feel for the nuances of songwriting, with Deny featuring atmospheric vocal melodies reminiscent of Ryan's work with Ant Salon. Listening to those tracks now brings back so many memories; inevitable when one knows the people and events behind certain songs I suppose but it's still strange how long ago it all seems now. 
All the various gigs have pretty much blended into one collective memory of excitable teenagers, motorway service stations and grimy venues. There was Farnborough's Tumbledown Dick, which had devil-horn made out of LEDs at the back of the stage; the gig at Kingston's Peel where Ryan and I bumped into our old head of sixth form whose son's band, The Siegfried Sassoon, were playing; the Barfly and the Underworld in Camden (where my brother was chastised by the head of Bring Me The Horizon's label for sticking pictures of Ollie Sykes' disembodied head onto the cover of Exit Ten CDs) and of course High Wycombe's White Horse, where you have to wait for the strippers to leave before you get access to the dressing room.



'Loving your work' - Ryan and me, circa 2004/5One of my favourite memories of Summer 2006 is driving down a packed Camden High Street on a sweltering day, with the windows of the van down and everyone on board clapping in unison to Muse's Starlight. 
Everyone except Ryan... I hope. He was driving. 
It was around this time that a certain major label started to show an interest. They'd recently signed a vaguely similar band with a sort of hamfisted Killswitch-meets-whining metalcore lite sound who were making waves in the industry. Exit Ten's manager at the time, naming no names, had allegedly made a big deal out of the fact that they had brokered said band's deal with this label so everyone in and around the band was pretty excited.
I remember sitting with Ryan in Reading's Caffé Nero at some point during that year, poring over a first-draft record contract which the label had sent over. I'd never seen a real, live recording contract before and I was tingly; this was it. My friends were going to make it! It had caveats about overseas royalties and second albums and advances and promotional budgets and massive words I didn't understand at all. It felt proper. 
With the promise of some big label cash coming their way, the band decamped to Derbyshire to record a five-track EP with UK metal legend Andy Sneap. The list of bands Sneap had produced or mixed read like a who's-who of the international metal scene at the time: Napalm Death, Machine Head, As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, 36 Crazyfists, Trivium, Bullet For My Valentine, Arch Enemy... the list goes on and as a result anticipation when the recordings were complete was high. 
Without getting into too much detail, I think it is fair now to say that the manager in question was... well, put it this way: if truthfulness was currency, we could put this person in charge of solving the national deficit. Regardless of what happened, the end result was the band had a huge recording bill to pay and no label to pay it.
It's important at this point to highlight the fact that all through these events, the band were working day jobs. Joe had at least two jobs and Ryan was flitting between temp jobs, having to use up holiday or leave altogether every time a tour came up. Exit Ten were not a band touring up and down the country in a brand new Mercedes Sprinter sleeping in hotels and recording EPs funded by the Bank of Mum and Dad, they were and still are working their asses off to try and make an impact. 
Eventually, distribution company Pinnacle came to the band's rescue and cut a deal which got This World They'll Drown into the shops on Exit Ten's own 'Deep Burn Records'. By a rare stroke of good fortune, the band managed to get a video produced for the anthemic Resume Ignore by a professional video outfit more used to making videos for top-ten dance tracks. As I recall, the video was shot in half a day basically as a warm-up for a 'proper' video shoot taking place in the same space later that day. 
Every single track on that EP is an absolute banger, including the reworked Better (now titled A Path To Take) and you should go and listen to it right now. I defy you to listen to My Great Rebellion without fist-pumping and air guitarring yourself into a frenzy. 
As 2007 rolled around and the band looked to secure funding to record a full-length album, the damage done by the band's previous manager started to become clear. Though well-known throughout the industry and possessed of a reputation as not only a phenomenal live act but five seriously good dudes, the band had been marked as 'ones to watch' for about two years now and were arguably starting to be viewed as damaged goods. I wouldn't say the band's profile diminished in that time but it felt to those of us around them that the momentum had slowed down and they were at risk of turning into one of those bands who always support bigger bands on nationwide tours. Big enough to pull a crowd, too small to headline. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. 
Eventually the band signed with Pinnacle as a record label rather than a distributor this time around, effectively turning Deep Burn records into a Pinnacle imprint. Ink dry, they set off to Criterion studios with Mark Williams once again to record what became their début album, Remember the Day.Artwork by the awesome Jack Brindley
In my opinion, the band made some odd decisions around this particular release. Firstly - despite recording a new version of Piece By Piece By Piece (one of the strongest songs they'd written to date) for the album sessions, they decided to leave this track off the album. Secondly, and more strangely, they included re-recorded versions of the two most popular tracks from This World They'll Drown. Both Fine Night and Resume Ignore, with their enormous singalong hooks, remain staples of their live set to this day and it's understandable that they wanted to get maximum value from them; the problem is that intentionally or otherwise, the production on Remember the Day is a lot rougher round the edges than Andy Sneap's slick (and much more expensive) work on the EP. The result is that the newer tracks on the album sounded more like rough demos of the earlier tracks. Again, just my opinion, but I think this disappointed a few fans. It also allows, hell, invites direct comparison of the two records.
That said, there's a reason I'm not a record producer or a music manager so maybe we should chalk it up to personal taste. What's not up for debate is that Technically Alive and Warriors are two of the strongest tracks on the album and so unsurprisingly they were singled out for videos. In April 2008 I found myself 'between jobs' for a few weeks and so joined the band on both shoots, manhandling a camcorder on the shoot for the Technically Alive video (which resulted in this 'behind the scenes' video). That was an experience.
The director, Johnny, was one of the campest men I've ever met and had never directed a rock video before. Setting eyes on the band, he couldn't believe his luck and by the end of the day he had them all topless and covered in fake blood. The resulting video and the YouTube comments thread underneath it are legendary. As Ryan said at Sonisphere 2011, 'Go on the Technically Alive video on YouTube and please, comment on my sexuality'. The 'debate' goes from a few people saying 'LOL THIS SINGER/BAND R GAY LOL' to people further down mounting a spirited defence of Ryan's (apparently now confirmed) homosexuality as it 'doesn't make a difference to the quality of the music'.
Probably the most memorable part of the shoot, other than having to walk the entire length of Dalston looking for batteries (seriously, is it twinned with Beirut or what?) was when halfway through, the proprietor of the local kebab shop brought in several burgers, salads, kebabs and other greasy post-pub dishes for Johnny's crew to photograph. I seriously doubt Coldplay have to share their video sets with cheese analogue and suspect cuts of meat, but we were keeping it real baby.
The shoot for the Warriors video on the other hand, directed by Nick Bartleet (fresh off the back of making this McFly video), was a much more professional (and therefore rather dull) affair. His concept was a take on the 'band playing in a room' angle which included cutaway shots of martial arts champion Zara Pythian covered in cables and generally breaking free from some kind of science-fiction hell. Also, Nick had bought Zara's costume from some kind of fetish site and I'm pretty sure it was second-hand. -shudder-




Exit Ten with... a really fit girl in a rubber fetish suit. Standard.



All I really recall about that day is staying in the Worcester travelodge the night before (where I shared a bed with Joe - jealous, ladies?) and that I left the warehouse never wanting to hear that fucking song ever again.




'Could someone please prop Stu up?'With the videos released to music TV channels and the band's profile rising again, Exit Ten set out on a tour with Alaskan metallers 36 Crazyfists (fans of Arrested Development will appreciate that Crazyfists' guitarist is called Steve Holt). At the Cambridge date of the tour Ryan appeared on Destroy the Map, the video of which actually sent shivers down my spine the first time I saw it. This was nothing, however, to the swelling of pride I got when I saw the videos from Exit Ten's performance at the 2008 Download Festival. Look at that crowd! Listen to the singalongs!
With the album's release around the corner and the band's songwriting at its peak, once again there was a feeling that this was it. Tings gon happen. Big tings gwan, bruv. The album was released in mid-2008...
... and then this happened:






...balls.
I don't believe in God, but if there is a God - he really, really hates Exit Ten. So now the band were touring an album which wasn't physically being produced anymore. Plus, Remember the Day was technically an investment on Pinnacle's part so it now became about getting a return on what had become an asset of the label's administrators BDO Stoy Hayward. BDO wanted money for the rights to Remember the Day. A lot of money.
BDO Stoy Hayward is an anagram of 'Doy! How Bastardy'. Coincidence? I think not.
By this point, you could have forgiven the band for just jacking it all in and taking up careers in professional bitterness. Instead, they forged ahead and continued to play all over Europe, selling Remember the Day until their copies ran out. They arguably spent too long trying to get the album back but you have to ask - if you'd spent over a year crafting and capturing a collection of songs only to have someone turn around and say, 'MINE' - wouldn't you want to take your art back?
In a strange way though, the entire experience of the Pinnacle débacle probably did more for Exit Ten as a band than any other single event in their history. After several attempts to demo new songs which continued the sound they'd maintained on Remember the Day, the band retreated to their Phoenix practice space to lick their wounds and start writing their second album. Consciously or otherwise, they started to move away from the 'metalcore' sound which had defined them for so long and which to this day guarantees that every gig they play will feature at least one BROO0TAL band with a name like 'CRUSHING YESTERDAY'S ASHES'.
Towards the end of 2010, Ryan asked me if I'd go along to one of their practices to listen to the material they'd been working on. I was blindfolded and driven in the back of an unregistered van to the middle of a field, where I was thrown into a chute leading to an underground cavern constructed from the bones of recently-redundant music industry executives.
Most of the last paragraph may have been lies.
It's an odd experience, sitting in on a band's practice. Even when they're people you've known well for years, there's a sensation of being somewhere you shouldn't. It's like when you walk into a room and a couple have been arguing, or indulging in heavy petting. The dynamic is slightly out. I sat down on an amp and adopted my best 'music critic' face, as the band launched into the new songs. I was immediately struck by how the tone of the songs was so much softer than anything on Remember the Day and how Ryan's voice was really coming to the fore.
Then they played Suggest A Path.
Hearing it for the first time, I thought 'This is the best thing they have ever written'. It was uplifting, loud, life-affirming. I honestly started welling up when the chorus kicked in because I was just so taken aback by what they had achieved and how... the phrase 'radio-friendly' is often used as an insult by elitist twats, but that's what these songs were. They were fucking good rock songs, not 'metalcore', not 'melodi-core' not bloody anything-core. They just rocked out.
So here we are. 2011. The album, Give Me Infinity, is finished. And it's great. Really, really great. The metalheads might not like it so much, but if it's more blastbeats and pinched harmonics you want you can nip back to 2004 'cos they've got shitloads back there they're not using anymore. For a sign of what to expect, you can listen to the first track released from the album, Curtain Call, here.
So what next? Well, more hard work to start with. Since the first sun of Summer arrived the band have been gigging pretty much constantly and there's a whole heap of hard work to do to get them back to the position they were in before Pinnacle went tits up. Sure, a lot of people have probably already written them off.
What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. Or ill, or occasionally deformed. But in this case, stronger. For anyone who doubts that pure hard work and good songs can get you anywhere, let's trip back in time to that Summer that Exit Ten opened the V Festival. One month previously Ryan had come with us to watch my band play third from the top at an all-dayer in Frome, Somerset.
The Cheese & Grain is an 850-capacity venue which wasn't quite sold out. The headline act that day were rabidly loved by their adoring fanbase but completely unknown to the wider public, despite relentless touring for the previous three years. They arrived at the show in a battered minibus directly from a gig in Europe and with a 2-man crew. On the brink of releasing their THIRD album, it would still be another 2 1/2 years before anyone paid any real attention to them. The band's name?
Biffy Clyro.
It's a tough slog in the music business. But if this is the album that finally breaks them, no-one can say Exit Ten haven't worked for it - and worked hard.

Polar Bears, eh? Can't live with 'em...

To test the strength and therefore the genetic quality of a male suitor, the female polar bear will run away from him. While she occasionally slows or looks behind her to ensure she still has his full attention, the male will give chase. He'll follow her, running, over hilly and glacial terrain - no small feat given that he might be up to twice her size. If she runs too far, the male will just give up, exhausted. When this happens, the female will come back to him and sit nearby displaying her genitals and putting on a show to reignite his interest. When he comes to claim his prize... she runs off again.

My attention was recently drawn to a blog by the name of ‘Dirty Knickers’... no, come back, it’s nothing like that. It’s actually a well-written blog about all being a single girl in your twenties and all that jazz. You can find it here and I recommend that you take a look. In particular, it was this entry which drew some flak from fellow internet-types and I’ll admit to disagreeing entirely with its fundamental assumption which seems to be that relationships are necessarily a bit of a ballache.

I’d argue that if you’re with someone and you feel obliged, rather than motivated, to do things for them then you’re probably in the wrong relationship. Then again my girlfriend is so low-maintenance that she doesn’t even really know when we got together. Subsequently, no ‘anniversary’ pressure for me - result. I’ve got some friends who look forward to nights where they can just get pissed while watching Tarantino movies and eating chips. I call that 'date night'.

The web is full of blogs complaining about how men are afraid of commitment or women are over emotional and expect too much; men are only after one thing; girls use sex to get affection. I think you can basically take ‘men’ and ‘women’ out of the equation entirely and just use the phrase 'some people'. Makes it a bit less exciting though, doesn’t it? ‘Some people are mental’. Well yes, yes they are. They have special homes for them and everything. ‘Some people don’t really enjoy sex’. I’m bored already.

There are high-maintenance men and high-maintenance women. There are dudes who’ll act irrationally and in seemingly bizarre ways just as there are girls who are scared of commitment and run away at the first signs of anything getting too ‘serious’. I’ve been confused in the past by someone running hot and cold until one day they just don’t bother responding to texts, or blow me out by telling me they’re 'too busy' to date.

I’d say they should just have been upfront and said ‘Don’t fancy you enough to continue this – buhbye’, but we’ve all been there. Someone comes on strong, you dip your toes in the water and by the time you’ve decided the water’s tepid (and you don’t fancy it) the water’s texting you every day and acting like you’re married. So you ignore them until they go away. I’m not proud. Of my behaviour, or of the way I tortured that poor metaphor.

By contrast, I wouldn’t even be with my girlfriend if it weren’t for the fact that ‘tact’ doesn’t really feature in her vocabulary. At the end of a fantastic first date during which time I’d managed to psyche myself out of kissing her on roughly four different occasions, I allowed her to get in a taxi and saw her off with the phrase, ‘Stay in touch!’ But for a ‘what the hell was THAT all about’ text message a short while later, we might never have seen each other again. Sometimes, people (me) are stupid and you just have to spell it out for them. If you like each other, a little bit of blatant obviousness goes a long way.

You either like someone or you don’t, but don’t act like a bloody polar bear OK? Polar bears are mental.

What's wrong with being sexy?

This piece originally appeared on The Guardian's Comment is Free site on Friday, January 27 2011.

While with my girlfriend, I recently made reference to something a friend of mine had said to me about a particularly attractive girl we'd encountered at a party: "I would absolutely ruin her." My girlfriend laughed out loud and asked: "You don't say things like that do you?" Somewhat sheepishly I had to admit that, yes, I had been known to utter similar phrases. Her bemusement wasn't based on the objectification of women or any perceived sexism – she thinks my male friends and I are too posh, too nice, to use such "laddish" terms. She knows we're not sexist, not "really like that" and thus to her it was somewhat akin to someone's dad showing up at a rave and trying to buy drugs off their friends. Unconvincing and more than a little embarrassing.

Among ourselves, I think we probably see this type of language as ironic, knowing; somewhat akin to the schtick that has become Ricky Gervais's bread and butter. Things that would be offensive taken at face value but which we see as contextualised by our respect for and attitudes toward women. If someone says something which crosses the line – veering on the sexist, racist or homophobic – they'll either be challenged with a wincing, but friendly "is that ... OK? Do we say stuff like that now?" or otherwise a shouted "waahey, lads, football" – the implication being that the person speaking is no better than a lairy hooligan.

None of our friends or girlfriends take offence, but you might ask – does that make it OK? You'd probably say no, and you'd probably be right. But I can tell you that not a single person I know, male or female, would think it OK to assume a woman would not be able to do a specific job because of her gender, or to refer a woman as "it" – as Keys does in the recording of his conversation with Jamie Redknapp. "Did you smash it? ... hanging out the back of it ...". If I was with someone who spoke like this they'd get shouted down immediately, and rightly so. Even my most laddish friends agree that Massey is excellent at her job. Each revelation about these men paints a picture of a boys' club where women are not welcomed other than as eye candy or sex objects. And regardless of the kind of language you might use around your friends, that is totally unacceptable.

Why I Heart Pain

The Summer of 2000 was one of the best. I'd just passed my driving test, so felt like I had more freedom than any boy in the world. I had a job at Our Price in Bracknell which meant I got to listen to CDs before they came out (this was in the days of 56k dialup internet, remember) and I finally had a band. With actual songs!

Ok, they were awful songs and we were an awful band but my God did I enjoy it. We'd spend about 4 hours every Sunday afternoon locked in a GP's surgery in Crowthorne, writing songs about Scooby Doo and pissing off the neighbours.

The band consisted of me on bass (at 17, the oldest member by two full years), my younger brother on guitar and vocals, a trendy chav called Matt on drums and one of the strangest people I've met in my life, my brother's friend Sam, on lead vocals.

I'm reluctant to call him a "singer" and anyone who heard our demo will understand why.

Ten years ago today, we played our first ever gig. Show. Concert. Whatever word you want to use for four teenagers playing instruments very loudly and very badly. The show was organised by my best friend Ryan (who subsequently discovered he could sing like a man possessed and went on to achieve more success than any of us with his own band) and took place at the school he, and 3/4 of my band attended.

As I recall, our set comprised entirely of original compositions with the notable exception of Blink 182's What's My Age Again? on which we committed some kind of hideous aural massacre. We closed the set by dedicating our song, Fuck the System, to the school's head teacher. Man, were we ever controversial. Edgy like a nineteen-year-old student in a beret and Ché Guevara t-shirt. The lyrics to the song, which I'm ashamed to say I wrote, were something like:



Full of hate
Trapped inside this cardboard shell
Everyone is evil
Go to hell


Fuck the system
Buck the trend
Don't let the bastards grind you down


Not only did I deliberately plagiarise (I prefer "pay homage to") a feminist novel I'd never even read but I also managed to use the phrases "full of hate" and "everyone is evil". I honestly thought I was writing an ironic faux-teen-angst anthem (angsthem?) which cleverly doubled as a non-ironic, genuine teen-angst anthem.


Yes, because if anyone was going to become the "voice of a generation" it was going to be an overweight English, French and Theatre student at a school in Ascot, wearing bright orange combat trousers, loading his gear in from his mum's purple Ford fiesta. Oh, I hadn't mentioned the orange trousers?

I'll be honest, I've looked better

Incidentally, the singer from the third band on that evening (also from my year at school) is now doing pretty damn well in the quite fantastic Goldheart Assembly. Tellingly, he wasn't wearing a neon boiler suit that evening.

Anyway, following the success of the one-off show, Ryan and I decided to put on a few more under the moniker "Century Promotions". This resulted in one more gig ever, and a joint bank account in our names sitting dormant, containing eight pounds sterling. The way I see it: if they ever discover time travel, the two of us can travel hundreds of years forward in time and be millionaires. Following the relative lack of success of 'Century', Ryan later attempted to start up another promotions label under the name 'I Could Catch a Monkey'.

Although a quote from The Office, the monkey in the title was inspired by a postcard which had inexplicably come into Ryan's possession. The first time I saw this thing, I totally lost it. Couldn't stop laughing.

The postcard read, "The smaller the chimp the more it looks like it would kill you at the first available opportunity". Above this was a small, cheerful chimp wearing a yellow "I LOVE NY" style t-shirt. That t-shirt read: "I [HEART] PAIN".

On Food Snobbery

When I was six years old, a family friend asked my brother and me what our favourite foods were. Younger bro's choice was the predictable "cheeseburger". To be honest, ask him that today and you're likely to get a similar response. After all, real men don't grow up - they just start ordering steaks. I, on the other hand - a chubby, slightly precocious child with a high-pitched voice well within the "posh" spectrum - replied that on balance, my favourite food was probably Duck A L'Orange. Come on, it was the 1980s.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm no stranger, nor am I averse, to "good" food. It's how I was raised; one of my Dad's favourite anecdotes relates the time he and my mother were personally invited back to Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons by John Burton Race to dine on the house, following a disappointing experience there.

That said, though, the food I most looked forward to on a weekly basis was the inevitable Monday night bubble'n'squeak which followed Sunday's family roast. To this day, I appreciate a decent spam fritter (although "decent spam fritter" may well be an oxymoron). I may be the only person I know who doesn't regard corned beef and luncheon meat as chemical weapons.

What's the relevance of all this, you ask? ('You' being two people). I have a good friend whose boyfriend is the epitome of a "foodie". Dude's an excellent cook, makes everything from scratch - including mayonnaise, which if you ask me just seems like effort - and has also established himself somewhat as a food critic in the slightly acerbic, AA Gill mould ("the blonde" has been replaced by "the vegetarian", although either would have sufficed).

Now, I can remember a time when the girl in question used to make her culinary decisions based solely on how much washing up would be generated. Anything which could be microwaved, was microwaved - including mushrooms (always a source of some contention between us). So it seemed to me that her opinions must have been formed not just by exposure to someone with strong feelings on the subject, but by first-hand indulgence in the food itself.

I first noticed the transformation when a request for dining suggestions in Reading was met by an anti-chain restaurant rant, and the insistence that I visit a restaurant I consider to be one of the pricier establishments in town to sample their locally-sourced "market" menu.

Having just checked said menu to ensure my facts were correct, I have to say it looks awesome. Great value, too. I really must check it out at some point. This isn't reverse snobbery, I do think people should eat better food on the whole and I certainly take her recommendations very seriously indeed when looking for somewhere a bit different, or a good place for a date. But it really got me thinking. Something about the attitude that all chains were automatically just awful and that everyone should be eating at places like Forbury's didn't sit right with me.

Fundamentally, of course, my friend is right. Reading is full of inexplicably popular chain restaurants which offer overpriced versions of the same pre-prepared, what I would consider flavourless food. Old Orleans, ASK, TGI Friday's, Giraffe - none of these are what you'd describe as "good restaurants" and in fact some of them are downright appalling.

And yet.. and yet... people like them. People genuinely like these places. The restaurant which triggered this particular discussion is Las Iguanas - slightly different to the other chains in Reading albeit no different to every other Las Iguanas in the country. It's not expensive, the staff are always really friendly and I genuinely enjoy the tapas. Regardless of how "good" it is, or "authentic" - The Vegetarian's boyfriend had written a particularly scathing article about it, to which I'd been directed when I mentioned that I was going there again - I'm yet to come away from there feeling like I've been ripped off.

Compare and contrast with: London Street Brasserie, one of Reading's "better" restaurants. Literally the only place I've ever seen a chef, having had a particularly dry and tasteless lamb dish sent back to him, send the plate back out to our table claiming, "That's how it's meant to be." This place fancies itself as some kind of modern, chic dining experience. All moody lighting and slightly pretentious vegetable dishes served with £20 rabbit mains.

The food snobs have a point. If the retail units at places like The Oracle charged the kind of rents which could realistically be afforded by independent operators, we would definitely have a better choice of restaurants in Reading. Pizza Express, Zizzi's, ASK, Bella Italia et al are all basically the same thing (I'm going to exclude Strada because, again, I think it's an example of affordable chain dining done well) and that doesn't count as a choice.

I've always felt there's no justification for the prices at places like TGI's and Zizzi's. If you're going to spend that much on a main then you SHOULD expect more and better. I was absolutely over the moon when Chilli's went broke because it was so relentlessly, unforgivably awful. But you know what? The "great" places do exist, and they're there for those of us who want to go to them. More people, it seems, would rather go elsewhere. Like Old Orleans.

I hate Old Orleans. Like, really, really, really hate it. I'm not the biggest fan of TGI Friday's, but it's something of a guilty pleasure on the occasions when I can ignore the revolting frozen vegetables and someone else is paying the extortionate and completely unjustifiable prices. Old Orleans, on the other hand, takes the TGI method of "deep fry all the food, serve it with chips, decorate your restaurant with faux-Americana crap and then charge a 300% markup on the lot" and removes the "food" part of the equation.

Cheap, bad food, overcooked (or undercooked depending on what day you go in there), shit cocktails, and an average price of about £10-£15 for a main. Yes, Old Orleans can fuck right off. The only reason I'm not writing about Chilli's is because, as previously mentioned, that clusterfuck of over-salted chicken and burgers quite rightly went to the dogs over a year ago.

Again with the "but"... but, these generic canteens are great places for leaving do's, or hen do's, or generic parties. If you're paying >£60 a head for an indulgent dining experience then the last thing you want is a room full of drunk people talking loudly. Therein, I believe, lies the appeal of most of these places. Not just the food, but the informal nature of them. Knowing what you're going to get. The food's alright, not bad enough to notice, but it's just part of a familiar comfort zone.

I guess in summary I'm saying that I actually agree with food snobs, personally, but that they might be missing the point slightly. What People Want and What Is Good is so rarely the same thing. If that sounds like some kind of patronising class thing, it really isn't meant to be. I don't think "taste" and "class" are inextricably linked, and hell if you can afford to pay what Zizzi's charge for a soggy pizza then you probably aren't that poor. God, I hate Zizzi's. It's fucking awful.

Put it this way (as I did to my friend, who's probably reading this right now and disagreeing with every single word): One of my favourite breakfasts is a McDonald's double sausage and egg McMuffin "meal". I'm not about to claim it's good food, well made or even good value. It's none of those things. It's full of salt and fat. That's the only reason I like it, probably. Anyone who appreciates "decent" food should hate McDonald's and everything on its menu...

But damn, that shit is tasty.