I Wanna Jump Like Dee Dee

One thing I’m aware of in myself and others is a shortening attention span and fierce competition for our attention with the sheer amount of information we have to process. If ever there was “it was never like this in the good old days” moment, here you are. As an aside, I actually heard that screenwriters are being told by production companies, distributors or whatever that they need to write scripts that assume the viewer will also be scrolling on their phone whilst watching their show.&nbs...

New York has always been – bold statement coming up – my favourite music city. No question that it’s connected to my life changing discovery of the Ramones way back when. I still can’t walk past the Guild Hall in my hometown of Preston without a couple of nostalgic tears forming for when I first saw them play there – I tried my best not to wash off the water that Joey threw over me when things were getting a little hot. But getting back on track… all those New York musicians over...

I think relatability has become one of those words that has become overused and, as is usual with these things, the importance of what it means to be relatable has tended to become a bit diluted….it’s unfairly become a target for the old eye rolling emoji. But, I think being able to relate to other people is such a powerful tool to have in our box in whatever way we communicate – through words, action or our art – especially when we seem to be such a divided world and seem to have little desi...

One area of my being that I’ve been working on is not feeling the necessity to be ultra-prepared for things. Things like my podcast episodes. I’ve been able to trace this back to when I was a kid – long story which I won’t bore you with. I think this is tied into this obsession that a lot of society has with perfectionism – don’t make a mistake, be ready for all angles, get it right first time – when really, human beings are far from perfect and we don’t need to dig too far into the newspaper...

As we were recording this episode, Natalie Hoffmann was a week or so away from releasing a third album with her band Optic Sink called Lucky Number and you’re in for a treat. It’s like a modern day film noir on the rainy, lonely streets - well, the streets were definitely rainy where I grew up – trying to discover who you are. After all these years, I’m still taken aback with how music evokes strong feelings of time and place. It makes me wonder if we are more receptive to songs...

One of my interests that started well before I started this podcast - so we're talking maybe 8/9 years ago - was what sort of characteristics and attributes do we need as people to get stuff done in a world that was becoming more complex, uncertain, volatile and ambiguous. Fast forward 7 or 8 years to now and that world has changed at a pace that I’m not sure many predicted. One aspect of music that always intrigued me was how bands evolve. I’m not really talking about whether they evo...

The last song on Violencia’s album Viviendo Tiempos Aún Mas Oscuros is called El Exito Es La Droga del Futuro – Success Is The Drug Of The Future. For me, the nerd, this is interesting as I’ve often thought about how the words we use can take on specific meanings – appropriated oftentimes – I literally heard one just now – “Joy Is Resistance” started and often used by black women is now being appropriated by a bunch of white women. And there are times, where other equally valid m...