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The lowstar lowdown 15 - monday 11th Sept

hi-de-hi lowstar campers! ted can't hear you... hi-de-hi!

that's better. i hope you're all well and are reading this with joy in your heart. we'll try not to douse it with a cold bucket of misery if you are. well it's been an exciting week in lowstarville, so here are the headlines, stay tuned to find out more...

DONG! lowstar become fivestars on the national news!
DONG! lowstar become destiny's child as they announce new gig!
DONG! lowstar become bananarama as they attempt to finish new songs

and in other news, imaginary alan returns and a fluffy thing does something cute. so in time honoured tradition we'll save the best to last, so keep reading if you want to hear about the fluffy thing...

in years to come this footage will be used as an example of how someone nearly managed to train a monkey to play guitar and talk almost coherently yes, it's true, lowstar - or at least two of them - whether it was the 'low' bit or the 'star' bit i'll leave up to you - were on the channel 5 news bulletins at 5.30 and 7 last tuesday. did you see us? i know what you're thinking, did the throb finally catch yogi and boo-boo with their fingers in the pickernick baskets? were the daily mail demanding they be sent back to where they came from? were the tories blaming the government for their soft stance on pickernick-basket thieving cartoon bears and the quotas of them that we allow in this country? no. has magic been arrested for his building his rainbow of rock without planning permission? no. while carrying out his last fill during drone did tharpy's arms break the sound barrier? probably, but it didn't make the news. how about keith? did he do anything whatsoever that might be of interest to the rest of the world... i'm not even answering that one. no, it was all about myspace and music and that. magic and the paradiddler spoke knowledgably and at length about the subject and both had nice hair. then they played a bit. the other two couldn't be arsed to turn up, so we should probably ignore them for a bit. i certainly think they can forget about the woestar award this week. anyway, thanks to everyone who's sent us messages after seeing us on the news.

right, so anyone else get a bit lost by the destiny's child bit of the headlines? it's clever, well sort of clever, ok ok, it's the best that could be done in the 20 minutes we set aside to write this stream of consciousness. lowstar will be returning to a stage near you - providing you live near old street - next month. we'll be playing on the 12th october at the mother bar near old street... details to be found here... but for the sake of this ham-fisted attempt to crowbar in another all-girl singing group into the headlines earlier.... it is lowstar's 'destiny' to appear IN the mother bar, like some kind of unborn 'child'.

thankfully tharpy brought enough t-shirts to find one which went nicely with the background er. let's just move swiftly on, nothing to see here. so after all that excitement, back to the rehearsals of last week. there was a very nice ginger cake, some biscuits - although one of the bisciuts was already in the tea, floating around looking like some kind of soggy inebriated pondskater - and a microphone that sounded like one of those tin can phones that kids don't make anymore cos they're too busy with the playstation or eating chicken twizzlers or beating up grannies (with thanks to the daily mail's editorial). but more importantly, there was a whole heap of chopping and changing of the new songs. minds were scrambled, insanity was approached, the 'star went 'bananas', but great progress was made and it's only a matter of time before the new songs are ready and played live. how much time, i'm not saying. quite frankly it could be years. depends if everyone remembers the same incarnation or not. but it sounded great.

the other main news of the rehearsal was a rival weather system to magic's rainbow of rock... slowly over time, keith has been growing his collection of pedals and now, laid end to end, he's probably only a few miles behind magic. however, while magic colours his sound, adds gentle hues and subtle tones to his playing, with a wide array of pedals of many different colours, keith's are mainly grey. dark grey. and they generally make nasty, terrifying noises that are very loud. so it's less a rainbow of rock and more a nimbostratus of noise, which for those of you who have more important things to do than listen to the guessers who do the weather - the weathershamen if you will - is a dark heavy rain cloud. i don't think it'll catch on like the rainbow of rock though. still it's good to know he's making an effort.

apparently they were gonna go with 'the paradiddler - monster of rock' but it got edited out at the last minuteon another night it could've won him the woestar award, but sadly (ha ha) it's not to be. by failing to turn up to the interview on five, he not only gave five's viewer's a lucky escape but also counted himself out of a woestar again... rob, is also similarly excluded, it's not such a crime in his case as he's much further away and can you imagine what sort of havoc yogi and boo-boo would wreak without ranger rob the throb. but still, rules is rules.

so it's between the ians, again. the award could easily go to tharpy for bravely stepping in to the breach while his bandmates let him down, and his hair did look very nice. and it is true that he was in blistering form despite the slightly sore back from god knows what. but its magic's award this week, for sterling work in front of the camera; for only taking two t-shirts to the shoot; for bearing the full brunt of keith's nimbostratus of noise with semi-good grace; for enduring the poor microphone so that his bandmates didn't have to move to the tiny, sauna-like drum room and for dealing with the paxman-like questions with aplomb.

thoughts from practice...

- if nimbostratus of noise doesn't catch on, how about 'keith's 5 gears of grunge', for with his new pedal he has 5 levels of noise he can go through, each more noisey and nasty than the last. all of which wouldn't be so bad if he didn't drive in 4th gear most of the way.
- the throb had two days of rest following the latest practice... two days! it's a scandal.
- tharpy revealed himself to be two thirds of the three bears, with his 'the verse is too short' and then 'the verse is too long' and his 'this bit's too loud' and 'this bit's too quiet'. ian, find the baby bear within, man...
- is magic the only man on the face of the earth with a picture of a huge plate of sushi on his mobile phone?
- ike the ikea trolley, still present, but unused now by lowstar for several weeks, is feeling lonely, could you all spare a thought for ike and any good will messages for him will be gladly passed on.

so before we go a quick update on imaginary alan. imaginary alan, having been missing for several weeks now, has finally resurfaced. turns out he had taken one of his 'trips' abroad and was incognito and unreachable. keith with his terrier-like persistance, managed to track him down, in his flat where it looked like someone had been living for several weeks, although keith assures us that the lights hadn't gone on in all that time and no one had come in or gone out. apparently imaginary alan looked a little bedraggled, slightly unkempt, a bit malnourished and smelled as if he hadn't been able to use the bathroom because its window was visible from the street for weeks. still they watched ping pong, the excellent film about table tennis with cgi effects and eventually keith left.

all the best
your friendly neighbourhood lowstar

blog list
recording november 2008
gig email - 20 nov 2007
gig email - 24 jul 2007
happy new year - tuesday 16 jan 2007
lowstar lowdown 17 - monday 16 oct 2006
lowstar lowdown 16 - monday 18 sep 2006
lowstar lowdown 15 - monday 11 sep 2006
lowstar lowdown 14 - monday 28 aug 2006
lowstar lowdown 13 - monday 14 aug 2006
lowstar lowdown 12 - monday 31 jul 2006
lowstar lowdown 11 - monday 24 jul 2006
lowstar lowdown 10 - monday 17 jul 2006
lowstar lowdown 9 - monday 10 jul 2006
lowstar lowdown 8 - monday 26 jun 2006
lowstar lowdown 7 - monday 19 jun 2006
lowstar lowdown 6 - monday 05 jun 2006
lowstar lowdown 5 - lowstardate 27th may.6
lowstar lowdown 4 - monday 22 may 2006
lowstar lowdown III - return of the blog (15 may 2006)
lowstar lowdown 2 - wednesday 10 may 2006
lowstar lowdown 1 - friday 28 april 2006