We dutifully parked up in my Aunt’s favourite spot; overlooking the sands. I could smell the salmon paste buttes and flasks of coffee wafting down the front.

We even spotted an old couple looking out and reflecting on 64 years of marriage (You get less for murder!)

Because it was hot, we decided to find a nice sheltered spot in the sand dunes. Here is Anita unpacking our picnic.

And Yes!! That is a Booth’s bag. We loaded up on locally sourced Pork Pies and Strawberries. This was a celebration after all.

This is a picture of Anita & Me noshing on our lunch and trying to smile with a broccoli quiche slice lodge in our teeth :)

Following our picnic celebration we upd-sticks and decided to walk off our lunch (or was that dinner?) with a walk around town. Oh the memories!!! Can you see the young lad eyeing up the windmills? He wasn’t the only one!

I don’t know how I actually resisted!

I even had to resist a bag of chips.

But I couldn’t resist the joke shop.

Nor the Magic Mirrors!

We then took a walk down the pier. I think the Victorian’s had some notion that this was a healthy lifestyle option, much like Yoga and Pilates today. And just look at the British flags flying. Eeeee… We are a proud nation.

Now then! Because it’s your 60′s birthday, the town of Southport spared no expense and they put on a concert in June Hurt’s name. Chris Igoe had top billing. White handkerchiefs and pints of lager coloured the scene. Although the ass scratching dance move I wasn’t so sure about :-/

It was show time and even Chris’s Dad wanted in on the act. They had to prop him up mind. The fella only has a few more days to live. Still, it was a good show!

Sporting activities followed. A round on the Pitch n Putt.

And a spin on the Merry-Go-Round.

After all that entertainment, we decided to call it a day and headed down the wobbly road and back to Leyland. All that driving made us a little dry so we decided to pull into Robinson’s and well …

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUNTY JUNE.

WE LOVE YOU TONS AND TONS.

YOUR NEPHEW,

MARTIN XXXX

–

Photographed by ‘Cahill Photography‘ on iPhone 5.

Congratulations to everyone who has contributed to this success – The Ko family. The Cahill family. The Ionescu family. Meanwhile & Collider 12.

• Founded in 2012, Collider12 is an accelerator for startups and early stage companies run by Pembridge Partnership Ltd. seeking “productive collaboration between startups and brands.” The brands in question invest alongside Creative England and include Unilever, Bauer Media, BBC Worldwide, CBS Outdoor and Bosch.
• Moment.Us has been developing its technology for two years – a context intelligence platform that enables brands to deeply understand and engage their customers so they can be served exactly the right content for exactly the right moment.
• The company is accredited by the UKTI’s Global Entrepreneur Programme.

Oopus has changed. We are now Moment.Us.

BIG congratulations to the team, now based in the Northern Quarter (Manchester), who have worked tirelessly to establish a context intelligence platform that can better serve exactly the right content for exactly the right moment.

A long road travelled, and a long road ahead, but as someone much smarter than me once said …

“It’s about the journey and the moments that take you there.”

It all started with a song ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) by Frank Wilson’.

Its upbeat tempo and passion infused lyrics are intoxicating. You can’t help but feel it. You can’t help but dance to it, and you can’t help but want more.

My parents were both born in a Northern town (Leyland, Lancashire) and lived their young adult years through the sixties and early seventies. They were heavily influenced by the movement that was Northern Soul.

When I hit 25, my Dad started revisiting many of the sounds that emerged during this time. I hadn’t realised there was such a back catalogue of soul music. Music that stemmed from the great American music scene that was Motown.

I always loved Soul music – Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin etc, but I was cautious never to play it too often. I believed that the tracks were few and the sound precious. I didn’t want to wear it out!

But here was Northern Soul. A movement consisting of 1000’s of previously released and unrealised soul records.

During one family event, the music proved so popular that my Dad and his original mod crew decided to setup a charity soul event - Soulaid. Since the turn of the century the charity has held six to ten soul nights each year, each event raising up to £1000 for a local charity.

These Soul Nights introduced me to the culture that envelopes Northern Soul – the dance, the fashion, the community, the talcum powder, and most importantly, the discovery of new sounds.

And as you get a little older, and you learn about love – love gained, love lost, the lyrics, they call out to you. In 2012, they saved me. Some call it ‘Tears on the Dance Floor’.

The tempo so fast that you sweat out the heartache, the bass so strong that you can’t help but smile, and the lyrics so heartfelt that you can’t help but shed a tear.

So here it is. I’ve put together a seperate blog dedicated to my own journey with Northern Soul – keepthefaith65.tumblr.com.

The blog is an opportunity to share this unique and special sound with friends and and anyone else out there. An opportunity to promote events in the North of England as the movement continues its resurgence the 21st Century.

I aim to post Northern Soul music that I have found and why it speaks to me, but to also highlight contemporary artists who have adopted elements of Northern Soul, for example, Plan B, Angie Stone, Jennifer Hudson, Rebecca Ferguson, Emeli Sande, Paloma Faith, Amy Winehouse, Raphael Saadiq, Noisettes and many others.

I also hope to try my hand at spinning the decks in 2013 so I’ll let you know how that particularly ambition plays out.

Wishing you all a great year ahead.

Keep The Faith.

“With more than a decade of fashion photography success behind him, Tim Walker already holds residence in The Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as The National Portrait Gallery. He has captured an eclectic cast of individuals throughout his career, from David Attenborough to Scarlett Johansson, and his photographs have graced the pages of some of the world’s most influential magazines. As well as collaborating with icons such as Kate Bush and Richard Nicoll, Walker’s career has evolved from photography to other genres of the art world and his progression into film-making is clear to see in his most recent work.

Inspired by the spreads of fashion powerhouse Vogue, amongst other internationally renowned magazines, Walker has created his most spectacular space yet, bringing together not only some striking photographs, but also the ‘back-stage’ elements of what it is to create an image. The exhibition is a beautifully constructed experience, featuring models, builders and set designers, to name a few, in their ‘production roles’, and brings out the characteristically theatrical nature of Walker’s work. A nearly life-size replica of a Spitfire fighter plane and a sprawling desert are only a couple of the pieces on display at this intriguing exhibition and visitors will also get the chance to see a series of films, specially curated by Walker himself, such as cult favourite The Red Shoes and his own The Lost Explorer.

This exhibition brings together all the ingredients intrinsic to the art of photography to create a truly stimulating, sensory experience.”

Free admission and running to January 27th 2013, there is no excuse not to go and visit.”

Review from Vintage Seekers.

18 October 2012 – 27 January 2013 (Daily 10.00-18.00)
Somerset House
East Wing Galleries, East Wing
More information at http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/tim-walker-story-teller

This exhibition explores early photography from the mid-19th century and the most exciting contemporary photographs, alongside historical painting. It takes a provocative look at how photographers use fine art traditions, including Old Master painting, to explore and justify the possibilities of their art.

The National Gallery
31 October 2012 – 20 January 2013
More information at: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/seduced-by-art

This was a question asked by a Hi-fi supplier in Manchester City Centre yesterday.

Think about he said.

“You buy your iPhone or iPod. You buy an expensive laptop or iMac to manage your music library, you synchronise your music library, and dock your portable music player into the latest Bose, Bowers or JLB music speaker system.

And somehow it is all a little flat. It just sounds a bit rubbish.”

In my case, it often kicks out. Try transmitting your iTunes over wireless and your musical moment comes crashing down when you switch on the microwave to defrost the chicken.

2K’s worth of hard earned cash invested in the latest and greatest music technology known to man and it doesn’t even work.

But is this the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

We are all led to believe that Apple is the trailblazer for music. Buy Apple and you are at the forefront of music innovation, but it is all a big lie.

Apple has only offered us convenience. It is convenient that our music is now portable and we can carry 1000′s of album in the palm of our hand, but have we made a mistake in assuming that convenience equates to quality?

And the swindle continues. Because we have invested so much in the iTunes revolution we continue to invest and download our music from the iTunes store. But do we ever own that music? Can a parent pass on their music collection to their son or daughter? What happens to all that content once they die? It dies with them. You never truly own the music. You are just borrowing it from the cloud. You are in fact buying air.

And the air quality is thin. The files significantly compressed to save space. They are a long way from the full studio quality output often described as FLAC – lossless audio compression and decompression.

iTunes does not have a hold on this space. There are online music stores where you can purchase FLAC. You can also burn FLAC files direct from your CD.

The man in the Manchester store sat me down, he downloaded a FLAC file and networked this with losless cables to a high-fidelity sound system.

“I won’t use a CD he said, because even the turn of the CD and the laser will lower the quality of the overall result”.

And what a result. The sound filled the room. The orchestra was right there. The vocalist sat across from me. Music like nothing you had heard before. And all for significantly less than 2K!

My advice to us all. Love iTunes for the convenience – listen on the commute, listen at work, but don’t stop buying CD’s. You own them and have a tangible product in your hand. You can also share them without a complicated password and home share system.

Convenience has been a revolution, but quality should always prevail.

Demand the best media experience available.

Is there a greater city in the world than Liverpool?

96 lives extinguished. Families kicked and ridiculed by the very authorities that are established to protect them.

The City came together, one large family, successfully boycotted a newspaper and took on the British government to seek the truth. They got it.

Has there ever been a greater example of a city acting with one voice and one heart? A collective setting out to clear its name.

In times of trouble which city would you want to be most closely associated.

The old cliches of Liverpool now downgraded to the gutter.

Liverpool – You have the world’s respect.

Starting a career in photography, in particular portrait photography, is a daunting prospect. There is the constant nagging that you aren’t quite good enough – today will be the day that you are shown to be a fraud. There is also the dynamic between sitter and photographer – What do they think? What is their mood? Will they understand what you are trying to achieve? What if they don’t enjoy the process or simply dislike you? These tensions are surely recognised across all photography studios and I suspect played out in the minds of even the most successful photographers.

But just imagine being asked to photograph The Royal Family!? What then of those questions? How much greater must those anxieties be? What if you say the wrong thing, lose their mood or respect, and what if they seriously dislikes the pictures? Is that treason? A hanging at the gallows or ex-communication to a distant land?

With these questions at the front of mind I visited Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton.

The images are truly exceptional, clearly reflecting the changing trends and fashions over the period that they were taken.

I was a little surprised to see just how informal many of the images were. I was expecting stateliness all the way; this was the 40′s and 50′s after all (!), but instead we were introduced to a a regular family. A beautiful young daughter. A princess and a mother with her children.

The stateliness was there too, but even these images portrayed a closeness between the photographer and the sitter. Patience and friendship was clearly afforded to Cecil Beaton and further proof of this was found in the many letters of thanks he received directly from the family (part of the exhibition). He was somehow a part of their lives – trusted.

I took from this exhibition that there is a much greater back-story to the monarch that I grew to know in the 90′s and 00′s. The Queen is a lady who suffered through the war years, married, cared for her mother, raised her children, all whilst fulfilling her responsibilities to the nation and wider-world with a very human grace and normality of stateliness.

To Cecil, he is a beacon for all photographers that suffer the anxiety of a shoot. A light for us all.

–

Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton: A Diamond Jubilee Celebration
8 February – 22 April 2012
This exhibition features portraits of Her Majesty the Queen by great society photographer Cecil Beaton and charts the Royal Family across three decades. It shows the Queen in her roles as princess, monarch and mother and celebrates the 60th anniversary of her accession to the throne.

Saturday night. A good meal and a few beers to the better. I am sat in the living room of my parents house. I suggest to my Dad that we play a few LP’s.

Looking through the album covers is like looking at works of art, and then there is the experience of pulling the record from the sleeve. Pop, crackle, the needle hits the track. Fuzz, hiss and the first chord is struck.

To all in the room, it was like discovering music for the first time. The quality of the sound oscillating from the speakers tugged at every emotion. You could feel the bass and almost witness the guitarist strumming. It was media in its purest form. The crowd cried out for more, and before the end of the night the room was dancing.

Why did it sound so good? Why did it affect us so strongly? Some clues can be found in our tolerance for quality. The innovations and social pressures of the digital age has suckered us into convenience as a replacement to quality.

Listening to that Hi-Fi on Saturday night I was reminded of what it feels like to have a band playing right there in your living room and later it made me think about what we have lost in our great march towards iPods and online players?

According to the article ‘Are You Buying Pre-Ruined Music‘, the formats adopted by popular music players is about one-eleventh the size of a full resolution CD, so the quality is invetibitably far inferior. It goes onto say that that such low-resolution tracks played through an iPod docking station that feeds into a decent hi-fidelity sound system is a disaster area.

Digital was designed for convenience, carrying your music with you when travelling or out running.

“I for one live and continue to use vinyl” Daniel Ek CEO of Spotify. According to Daniel, they believe that a lot of people will dip into music first on Spotify, and if they like it, they will buy it on vinyl or CD. Spotify is not a replacement medium. The evidence seems to confirm this claim – 86% of music sold in the UK is in physical form. While sales of singles are now almost exclusively digital, albums remain physical, with just eight per cent downloaded (1).

Presumably the tech industry will respond by improving bandwidth to rival the quality found on CD or Vinyl, but will they ever replace the tacit feeling of holding a record or the sense of ownership one receives from owning that experience. Where does the pop and crackle come from?

Perhaps technology was only ever a convenience. It was never meant to replace life, simply here to help us out a little.

I suppose there will always be two camps. Those who see the convenience of the web channel as a replacement medium and those who look to technology to simply manage the data that sits around our experiences with media, possibly capturing, sharing and documenting our experiences.

I have an inclination that the model could shift back a little. Back to high-fidelity sound, pure music, where we actually listen to instrument, voice and soul. The Internet is only an add-on that we use to collect and feed data. It is just data.

As we move further into 2012 it seems that even bigger questions are being asked of technology? According to Daniel Sieberg, technology has overwhelmed our daily lives to the point of constant distraction. Many of us can no longer focus on a single task or face-to-face conversation without wanting to reach out—or retreat—to the virtual world every few minutes. This is a real and significant problem (2).

Looking to the future of technology, John Harlow writes in The Sunday Times that after a technological advance from the iPod to Twitter, the flood of true innovation seems to have dried up – “techies are running out of ways to rock our world… Apple, Google and Microsoft are now mature refiners, concerned about their environmental footprints, not radical change, and with share prices to defend” (3).

Stronger challengers take this much further. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, passionately argues that Silicon Valley is only interested in harvesting quick profits at the expense of creating truly disruptive technologies that will solve some of the world’s biggest problems, for example, famine, cancer and new social and political systems (4).

Whilst the media and technology wars will inevitably play out for how and where we access our next media hit, I think I might take a moment to sit back, source myself a record player and start putting together the components for hi-fidelity sound. Bring on the revolution. It is the vinyl revival people.

And if the tech industry can do anything for us, can they please figure out the basics like a phone that actually keeps a signal?

–

1. Is this the end for your CD collection? Andy Kerr, Whathifi.com, 04-Jun-2009.

2. The Digital Diet: The 4-step Plan to Break Your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in Your Life. Daniel Sieberg, Souvenir Press Ltd, 01-Dec-2011.

3. Out with the old, in with the … arm, any ideas anyone? John Harlow. The Sunday Times, 15-Jan-2012.

4.Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough”. Techcrunch.com. 21-Nov-2011.