Through a series of unusual and interesting connections today, I’ve been offered a ride on the Goodyear Blimp on Monday. This Monday coming. I’m really incredibly excited about that. Can’t wait.

There’s just one hitch though – it’s taking off from a field in Essex, and it’s nowhere near anything remotely resembling public transportation. In other words, I can’t get there. Don’t have a car.

The good news is – there is a spare seat on that flight and I can offer it. If you’re free to go on a bit of a roadtrip and have a car that will make the journey down from Birmingham to Essex and back – and you’d like to go up in the Goodyear Blimp just to have an adventure, a great experience and a story to tell – let’s do it.

I’d really appreciate the lift. It’d be three of us, actually. You, me and Jake. We promise to be good company and keep our feet off the seats.

Serious offer. Once in a lifetime opportunity. Massive favour. Please let me know if you’re up for it.

I was on the way back from the conference in London today, when the announcement came that the train was being diverted. If we wanted to carry on to Birmingham New St, we could stay on, and have an extra 90 minute journey that took us through Stafford, or we could get off at Nuneaton, get a train to Coventry and get to Birmingham International from there.

We chose the latter… which turned out to be a mistake. The train to Coventry had already been cancelled, and there was no sign of any more trains to come. So Tim, Nick and I found ourself in a taxi van with three strangers heading towards Birmingham.

Interesting bunch. One man was a logisitics consultant for the newspaper industry, the woman worked in e-commerce solutions for businesses, and the other guy was a voiceover for cartoons and radio – a guy called Marc Silk.

The cats in Ashleys Worlds

Of course, meeting Marc reminded me of a cartoon (for radio) series I’d created about thirteen years ago with Belinda Todd, Craig Parker, Merv Smith, Carl Bland and David Weatherley. Ashley’s Worlds was a great fun series to make and played on about 26 radio stations around New Zealand.

There was talk about turning it into a tv series – and at one point, into a motion-capture live-animated chat show with real guests and an animated Ashley (voiced by Craig) as the host. Never got anywhere with it, but always wish we’d gone further with that.

I’m going to give Kerryn and Haydn a copy of those shows, because I think their boys will really enjoy them. Unfortunately, when I went digging, it turns out that of the one hundred 4-minute episodes we made (two 50-part series), four five consecutive shows are missing. Hopefully someone out there has a recording of them, or they’re gone forever.

Birmingham voice talent
I looked Marc up when I got home, and I found an article about him in the Birmingham Post from late last year. I didn’t really know most of the characters he’s known for – mostly because I’m not under five, and we don’t own a television – but I was familiar with his work in what (through no fault of his) was the most disappointing movie in cinema history.

Still, an interesting ride back from Nuneaton, a winter wonderland outside the window, and a bunch of half a dozen strangers who were able to get it together to organise transport more efficiently and effectively than National Rail.

In the last three days, I’ve been delayed through train faults, staff non-arrival, ice on the tracks and other events that you would expect might be foreseeable and avoidable, what with the seasonal nature of winter (it being a season and everything).

But it’s nice when muckups like that lead to encounters with talented and interesting people.

The MeCCSA conference
Incidentally, if you’re interested, I recorded the conference presentation by Nick about the unreliability of research into online music that informs the public debate on filesharing, and the one by Tim and Simon about the creation of an online archive of a British jazz legend.

We didn’t record my presentation, about digital narrative and the Aftershock Project, but let’s pretend it was amazing, and the hundreds of people there were interested and impressed (in fact, it went okay and the audience both clapped at the end).

Photo by Infodad

So, that’s it then. The end of 2009.

Looking back over the notes, this was a pretty good year, and since I’ve blogged a fair bit of it (though with some significant gaps – must watch that in 2010), I thought I’d do a quick wrap-up of some of the highlights.

But let’s start with a lowlight.

January
Jake got beaten up at school, and we had to go get him checked out at the hospital. Both traumatic and infuriating, but it came at a really pivotal time at that school, and if there’s one thing positive you can say out of that whole event, it’s that there’s one teacher there I now have a lot of respect for – and he’s running the show.

Clutch and I started doing whisky tastings online, and launched Twhisky on Robert Burns’s 200th anniversary.

February
Jibbering Records closed down, which was an end of an era for us. Jibbering was where we met all our new friends when we first moved to Birmingham, and it was the social hub, coffee joint, second office and second home to us Moseley laptop warriors. Still a bit sad about that.

I went to New Zealand to work on an album by Caitlin Smith, speak at a public event and do some interviews for a radio documentary about Zane Lowe. It was a pretty busy week, and I was pretty jetlagged by the end of it – but I did some cool stuff out there, and it was nice to see everyone.

March
To clear my head after so much travel, I went for a bit of a bike ride around Stratford-Upon-Avon.

I also went to a conference in Copenhagen (about jazz, rather than climate change) and another one in Leeds, but I think I was taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging at the time and didn’t record much about either of those events.

However, I did make a little game out of music online by mixing up Twitter and Spotify, getting people to make playlists on a particular theme and then compiling a ‘best of’ album out of it. I know people who still play the Imaginary 80s Romantic Comedy Soundtrack.

April
I went to The Specials’ 30th anniversary concert with my friend Owen who was over from America. Great gig.

Then there was the music industry conference in Helsinki that was so ‘old thinking’ it was farcical. Like ‘Carry On’ farcical.

An article I wrote was published in a very cool book called After The Crunch. The book was a collection of essays by people reflecting on the Creative Industries and how (or whether) they could lead Britain out of recession. Some of my favourite thinkers were included, and it was a really big honour for me to be printed alongside them.

May
Apart from anything else, May was New Zealand Music Month, and so each day that month, I posted a music video by one of my favourite kiwi artists – like The Veils, Dimmer, Sola Rosa and SJD.

I went down to Brighton for The Great Escape – another music industry conference, and Clutch and I went to the island of Jura on a whisky-tasting adventure.

June
At Un-Convention in Manchester I made a music video for my friend Brad’s band Merchandise, and chaired a really great panel called Outside The Box, which featured some very cool people talking about their unusual approaches to the music business.

And then in Groningen, I spent time with my friends Lykle and Ard at their New Music Labs office, consulted a few bands, and then had a bit of an adventure getting back to the UK afterwards.

July
I was (inexplicably) invited to be a guest of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, so had an amazing time hanging out, seeing lots of great bands and being given countless CDs by some amazing people.

I went to Liverpool, Manchester and Scarborough with Jez, Dr Jazz and Professor Tim, which was a bit of an adventure – and I caught up with some friends (and made some new ones) while I was there.

August
I went to Toronto to speak at an international Radio Conference. It was great to catch up with the guys from my old university in New Zealand as well as see a bit of the city and meet some new friends.

I followed it up with a week in Hamilton, ON – where I hung out with the brilliant guys from Vibewrangler studio, consulted with some very fine local musicians, and even got to go and be a tourist at Niagara Falls.

At the end of the month, Jake received his (very good) GCSE results and we went on our annual family music festival holiday.

September
Didn’t blog much in September. At least – not on this site. I did do an awful lot of project-specific blogging, but none of that ended up here.

The month started in Swansea for another Un-Convention. Then it was off to Berlin for a music industry conference, Scarborough for the jazz festival (which has its own blog that I was one of the main contributors to), and Marseille for Aftershock (another project with its own blog, that I was frantically uploading stuff to).

I also started a blogging project of my own, to take a photo of everything I eat and drink for a year, starting on my 42nd birthday. That blog’s still going, despite a number of people who were insisted that it’d never last more than a few weeks…

And Mum and Dad came and visited from New Zealand. They’d come over primarily to visit their newest grandchild in London, but we got to hang out with them for a week or so, which was really cool – and I entirely failed to blog any of it.

October
Back to Berlin for the NetAudio Conference, which was amazing, but exhausting.

I managed to finally get around to doing an interview with Zane Lowe for the radio documentary, and I posted it online, unedited.

And I came up with an idea for a TV show, which is now in development by a production company called Isis, who are best known for making a series of programmes called Classic Albums.

And then I went to Brussels to keynote a conference about Digital Music. It was my first time in Belgium, and I was only there a little over 24 hours – but I managed to pack a lot into my time there.

Another project that had its own blog was the one we did with UB40, in their campaign to Save The Rainbow (a local pub). That was a lot of fun (and a lot of work) – and it was great to meet and work with Brian Travers, the band’s sax player, on that.

November
Big month. It started with the creation of a new Sunday jazz radio show (of sorts). Essentially, it’s just a weekly Spotify playlist, but I programme it as I would a 2-hour specialist music show.

I went to India with a bunch of people, including my friend and colleague Jez. For the purposes of a general, personal blog like this, there was far too much to talk about from an insane two weeks in Kolkata, Shillong, Delhi and Mumbai – so Jez and I made a separate blog just for the occasion. I did manage to post a very abbreviated round-up of the trip here though.

And as soon as I got back, it was off to Manchester for an academic conference about jazz. Interesting, but still a bit of a come-down after the amazing time in India.

December
Jake played drums in the college performance of Return to the Forbidden Planet, which was great – and his playing has improved out of sight since he’s been performing with other people.

Dad had a significant birthday.

I made my usual efforts at an end-of-year music list – this time, a top 10 albums of the decade, based on how often I returned to them.

I also made the usual New Year Resolutions, but in an unusual way. I’ve already been grocery shopping for my first 30-day adventure – a post-Christmas detox.

Christmas itself was spent in Prague with Bobbie’s sister Kelly, who’s over in the Northern Hemisphere for the first time ever. We saw some amazing sights and had some wonderful cultural experiences, did a bit of shopping and ate some great food.

And that about brings us up to date. As always, I take plenty of photos wherever I go, and you can see them all right here on my gallery page.

Really looking forward to 2010 – if only because it looks like there’ll be a lot more of this sort of thing going on.

Have a great new year yourself. Cheers!

Ard & Lykle at the New Music Labs office.

I’m spending this morning working in the office of New Music Labs, Lopend Vuur and De Ondernemers – three inter-related businesses in online music, design and promotion based in Groningen in the North of Holland.

I’m over here to consult and speak at the Academy of Popular Culture in Leeuwarden – not too far from here – organised by the New Music Labs guys. That’s this afternoon and this evening.

The moment I got off the train yesterday afternoon, it was straight into the bike hire shop and then Lykle and I were off, in true Dutch style, to the Labs office.

Lykle gave me a tour of the office – a former bank (watch the video) – and after a strategy meeting (while I checked my email), we headed back to Lykle’s place where his girlfriend Annet had made a really great dinner.

We spent the evening on the balcony watching the bats, which flew erratically and frantically – hunting for food, presumably – and we tried to trick them by making little floaty insects out of empty teabags and letting them flutter off the balcony. It didn’t work, and after a quick inspection, the bats completely ignored them.

The downstairs neighbour, however, will probably be curious about the teabag debris on their back lawn this morning.

Clutch and I went to the Isle of Jura over the long weekend on a bit of a adventure. All the details are over at the Dubber & Clutch blog, complete with videos and interviews, tasting notes and stories. But I thought you might be interested in some holiday snaps.

They look quite good if you ‘full screen’ them. It’s the little button with arrows on it on the bottom right that appears after you press play.

I know I’ve been travelling a fair bit recently – and I haven’t even said anything about Copenhagen here yet, which is where I was earlier in the week – but for reasons of procrastination, I needed to get out of the house today, and I remembered to get out my Flip camera this time.

I went to Stratford-Upon-Avon just to clear my head and get a bit of fresh air. It was nice.

I’m back from New Zealand, where I had a fantastic time doing all sorts of interesting things. I gave two presentations, did three radio shows, met up with friends and family, attended a couple of industry events, visited several cafes, interviewed half a dozen interesting people – and worked out the structure, treatment, instrumentation and musical personnel for 14 songs.

Here’s video of the speech I gave for The Great Blend;
Here’s the Kim Hill ‘Playing Favourites’ radio interview (mp3);
Here are some photos I took;
Here’s a video stroll through Real Groovy Records;

I’d be more comprehensive, but not only did I not have a single moment to sit down and blog the whole time I was there, now I’m back – I’m rather jetlagged.

Thanks to Mum & Dad for having me stay and the use of their car; Caitlin for the airfare and the chance to work on the album; Russell for the opportunity to share billing with Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic; Mark Cubey for inviting me on Kim Hill’s radio programme; Wammo for inviting me on his; Mark Robinson for inviting me on his; Nathan, Blackie, Nick D, Mark Roach, Manual and Danny for the interviews; Brendan for the NZ on Air function invitation; and everyone else for being so nice, friendly, helpful and interesting.

I’ve been trying to find a way to get over to New Zealand in the next few months. I’ve been asked to present a radio documentary about Zane Lowe, and I need to sit down with some people back in New Zealand with a tape recorder rolling.

Of course, there’s no budget, and so I put the call out to a bunch of friends and contacts back in Auckland and Wellington to see if there’s anything going on out that way that may add to the list of reasons to head home, and which may help subsidise the journey.

It’s £1000 return at the moment (summer in NZ, you see…), which is pretty prohibitive.

Anyway, I had an email last night from Russell Brown, asking if I’d take part in a Great Blend event, alongside science fiction author Bruce Sterling and feminist political activist and filmmaker, Jasmina Tešanović.

And of course, I’d love to do that. It’s a huge honour. Unfortunately, as with all such things, the appearance fee doesn’t go terribly far towards covering my travel – but it’s a good start. Here’s the thing though – it’s in just over two weeks time – and I need to find the rest of the money from somewhere.

I went to CMJ in New York late 2007 on donations from New Music Strategies readers, but that was a one-off. First, it was completely relevant to the interests of the site (rather than a documentary about a radio presenter).

Second, I’m reluctant to ask people who read my website (largely poor musicians and struggling independent music businesses) for donations to get me to New Zealand in summer – seems a bit rich, right?

And third, I actually think there must be some value in this for somebody who’d find this sort of cash down the back of the couch. I’m talking corporate sponsorship.

Whether UK Trade and Industry want to load me up with products and brochures; some brand wants me to represent them globally; New Zealand On Air want to send me back to the UK with press kits and CD samplers for the UK market; Air New Zealand want me saying nice things about the high standard of their business class on my blog; a distillery company can think of a use for an online whisky taster to sample their delightful products in an antipodean environment; or somebody wants me to wear their t-shirt at the prestigious Great Blend event – I’m pretty much up for sale.

I just want to get to New Zealand and back. Accommodation’s all sorted (right, Mum?)

Here’s the trick though: just over 12 hours ago, I told Russell that I would let him know whether I’d be attending within 48 hours. So – I’m looking for ideas, and I’m looking for them quickly. Thoughts? Contacts?

If you could send this to people you think may be able to find other people who may be able to help, I’d really appreciate it. The Zane Lowe documentary (and the Great Blend event – not to mention NZ itself!) is very personal to me, and I’d really love this opportunity to do it justice.

If you’ve been sent here and are wondering who I am, what I do, and how I might be helpful… have a look at these links:

My bio on New Music Strategies
A bit about me personally
Whisky tasting on Dubber and Clutch

Thanks in advance for any help you can be. It’s much appreciated.

We had another couchsurfer come and stay with us. An American, this time. Steve from the Bronx. Nice man, who had previously been in Vienna, but had spent a long time in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya introducing the clergy there to the idea of gay Christians.

A man who’s up for a challenge, then.

He was in Birmingham for a conference / convention thing at Carrs Lane Church where he was spreading the tolerance and inclusion message. It was a tough mission. He is, after all, a member of one of the least understood, least accepted and most socially-ostracised groups around today:

He’s a McCain supporter.

He actually ‘came out’ to us as a Republican after he arrived. Had we known he was ‘one of those’, we might have thought twice about inviting him into our home. Seriously though, lovely man and a delightful house guest.

So far – nothing but good experiences. Couple more coming up this month – and I need to find a place to stay in Cardiff next week, so it’s back to the Couchsurfing website.

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Over the weekend, we had a couple from the Czech Republic couchsurfing at our house.

Petr and Dasa arrived on Friday and I picked them up from the train station. I walked them to Bobbie’s work, and then she gave them a lift home (I was on the bike).

Of all things, it turned out that they had met in New Zealand. Judging by the sheer size of their backpacks, they travel pretty extensively. Anyway, the story goes that Petr was looking at buying a car from a friend of Dasa’s. He rejected the car, but ended up with the friend.

We gave them a key and some local info about buses and so on – but mostly, we left them to their own devices, and – armed with a map – they explored the city centre. I told them about the canal system too, and they went and had a look at that.

We did end up arranging some activities with them though…

Dancing
On the Friday night, I took them out to the Hare and Hounds to catch Juggla and the Friendly Fire band. Really great night, and they seemed to have a good time. Especially Dasa, who danced pretty much the whole time. With pretty much everybody.

The band were great (naturally) and the DJs beforehand were superb. Robin, Juggla and Damon all got on the decks and there was the usual assortment of guest vocalists. Really good night. [More photos here]

Driving
On Sunday, Bobbie took them go-karting at her work. Petr’s an engineer, who had worked at Yamaha and so was no stranger to motorised speed. Dasa was a little more reticent on her first time out, but on the second set, was a bit more enthusiastic with the accelerator. [More photos and a video here]

Once again, a lovely Couchsurfing experience. They were not only no trouble, they were nice people who have now decided to look for work here in Birmingham for a few months so they can winter in England. As you do.

Drinking
As a parting gift, Petr presented me with a bottle of a Czech drink called Becherovka. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it’s an alcoholic drink made with herbs – most strikingly, cinnamon and anise. And it’s quite yummy.

I couldn’t quite knock it back in one go like Petr could – but I suspect that comes down to practice.

So, we made some new friends, learned some interesting things, had a good time – and now have an open invitation to come and stay next time we’re in a small village 50 miles out of Prague.