Hector and Me

A bit of a cheat today, as clearly I was posing too hard to actually take this photo. Katie did that - but it's far superior to anything I took today and I cropped it just enough to take a credit for 'artistic direction' so I reckon I can just about get away with it (phew!) A nice day: a bit of work (last singalong of the year), a bit of shopping, a bit of cake (and coffee with the lovely Beck) and an awful lot of rain...

Another bit...

#9: 'The Defenestration Of St. Martin' by Martin Rossiter

...In what was nearly as unlikely a comeback as Bill Fay's earlier in the year, the former Gene frontman produced an album of what he himself calls, with typical modesty "beautiful, secular hymns", just piano and vocals, and got it released via pledgemusic. It's a collection of simple, slightly eerie and moving meditations on depression, age and the like, shot through with black humour and lifted by a well-honed ear for a fine melody. Opener 'Three Points On the Compass', a scathing ten minute attack on his absentee father, is worth the price of entry alone but there's plenty more here to enjoy. Gene have been consistently tarred as amongst the least cool of the early-nineties Britpop crowd but I've always had a soft-spot for their first album, 'Olympian', and debut single 'For The Dead' is a pretty much the equal of what more feted bands like Suede, say, were producing at the time. Let's just say that if a degree of overfondness for the words and manner of Mr. Stephen Morrisey were a crime there'd be plenty of worse offenders in the dock than Martin Rossiter. That said, whilst this album is unlikely to garner a legion of new fans, or even necessarily please the old ones, I'm not sure that the man himself will be overly concerned...