Be Excellent To Each Other

I've narrowed it down to two.

I have one in mind, I'll post it here if no-one takes it.

You could sell your choice to the highest bidder, effectively becoming a mercenary. All's fair in love and Song War.

(*Disclaimer: All is not fair in Song War, Song War rules are to be obeyed.)

Who voted for Jan Doyle Band - Gun last time? I'd like to thank you all very much as that was a track I did (not me on vocals though) in 2000. Even though it was last, it was still good that some people voted for it.

It was my second-favourite, I thought it was really atmospheric and generally ace. Nice work, sir!

I applaud your shameless self publicity.

Not enough Purple Haze

Cheers. I'd say a lot of effort went into but really it didn't take all that long to do back then. A bit of improvised string synth over a largely pre made beat done a while ago by my songwriting partner (and vocalist for this track) who had also written the lyrics some time ago. I just organise the beat into a song like pattern and then we played.

I now work as a solo artist for One Life Left every week with my Free Market Economy segment. A new 2 minute bit of music every week with me waffling on about selling games.
[quote="zardoz"]I applaud your shameless self publicity.[/qoute]

It was an experiment to see if I could compete with professionals.. evidently not. Still it's something with a bit of an acquired taste I guess. Oh and oops I've done the self promotion thing again.

I wish I hadn't been on holiday when this was being set up.

I didn't enter but I did have a good cover version.

So the cuban boys. You remember them from this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iulnYHD5Wg

But they also did a cover version of The Offspring's "Self Esteem".

I would probably have voted for that if it had cropped up in the voting bit.

This excellent cover of 'What a Fool Believes' by Self (originally by The Doobie Brothers) was entirely recorded on toy instruments.

That's brilliant. It's a pretty large shame The Cuban Boys aren't a lot bigger. Mind you, they do tend to only release about a dozen copies of their singles, so their cult status is presumably by design.

You can still get just about all of them from http://www.thecubanboys.co.uk and those you can't, you can legally download.

I very, VERY highly recommend the £5 purchase there of their new album "The Satellite Junkyard".

One more for the road...

Here's a one-man cover version of AC/DC's "Back in Black"

Having just skim-read today's... I'm going to use the word "events" in General Discussion, I feel compelled to add that if anyone wants to take a bit of a time out from the forum but still PM over selections for Song Wars, all the while keeping a tactful distance from any discussion threads, that's fine with me, and I'm not going to be drawn into it in any way (or get drawn into any discussion over "oh, so PERSON X won't post in this forum any more, but they'll still pick a song for this"). Similarly, if it's "yeah, I've had it with this forum", let me know and I'll tactfully stop nominating comically bad songs for them. Suffice to say, any actual real people falling out with each other due to a particular ordering of ASCII characters on the internet is a genuine shame, and while it would be for the benefit of humankind if everyone could just make up and be lovely, that's possibly not going to happen. Hopefully, the whole thing will blow over, and everyone will join together again in unanimous appreciation of whatever brilliant song I choose for week 5. So, y'know, whatevers.

And now, some music.

If anyone's ever stuck for a theme PM me, I thought of a good one on the train and of course, can't use it

It looks like there's going to be a couple of people not choosing songs for a few weeks in a row (unless they fire off their choices to me in the next 85 minutes*). To keep things interesting, I think it should be possible for someone unable/unwilling to continue in the Song Wars to hand over the reins to a new 'manager'. If there are no massive objections from anyone else, if either of the people involved want to give someone the chance to turn around their 'season' (and of course, if Dudley or anyone wants to take over), they could offer up their position here. Just imagine the kudos of taking a Song Wars franchise and turning it around, just like someone is going to try and do with Spurs any week now.

(*Although to be honest, there's a bit of leeway there, as I'm going to bed because my head feels like there's an incontinent rhino throwing a disco in it. That means a temporarily extended deadline of When I Get Home From Work Tomorrow, though I'll be making a note of the voting before I leave for work in the morning.)

OK, so week 4 is here, the first week where some of us got to choose our own categories.

So let's play a game: Given that someone in each group selected the category as they presumably think they've got a good song in that category. See if you can guess who chose which category based on the songs picked for that category...

Malc

Malc

I'm going for Nirejhenge choosing motorhead, Scarysheep3000 choosing James Brown, I'll skip group C as I know what I picked, and Sheepeh going for Chuck Berry.

Malc

Motorhead is currently winning so it's pretty obvious it's not my choice.

Though if you look at the track record of some of the contestants and also the way they entered, you can possibly see certain trends. For example, Mimi has always used a youtube link and always scored very highly. Thus I'd suggest motorhead as her entry. I've been considering Breath of Life as a Mark X entry but I know he's more of a Pet Shop Boy. Nothing else seems to fit though. Only other thing potentially likely is the GoGos but I'm just not sure. None of them are 60s chansons so it's hard to tell..

Based in Mimi's Bangles entry I had considered her to have uploaded the Gogos but the fact that it was just an mp3 upload put me off.

Thats like reading a Mafiascum posting...

This could end up a bit like the lookalike line-up round on last week's "...Buzzcocks".



Bah. I can't really play in the spin-off ident-o-thon (because I already know who picked everything, obv), but I will make the point that where singles have been picked, the videos are easy to find on YouTube, and therefore the links sent to those. Where album tracks are picked, they're less likely to be on YouTube, so they're uploaded instead.

See I'm just using the idea that Mimi always scores highly and her behaviour out of 4 rounds has always been to pick a youtube link, rather than upload. Ace of Spades is a youtube link AND it's scoring highly so that what lead me to believe it could be hers. Might not be of course. I still reckon the Gogos have a possibility of being her choice. Or is it? Or IS it? Or is IT? Or IS IT? etc..

Is Grim...'s mp3 player thing knackered? I'm trying to upload my song for tomorrow (as I'll be on planes for most of the day then) but it's not loading for me.

I did one about an hour ago and it loaded fine.

Not working for me either. Craster broked it!

http://www.fullonrobotchubby.co.uk/playa2/ is giving me a blank page in Firefox and a DNS error in IE. Oddly, http://www.fullonrobotchubby.co.uk/ loads ok.

I blame free wireless in this hotel. EDIT: or Craster.

And the song I want to do isn't on Youtube. Arses.

I've notified Grim... of the issue. Hopefully, he'll have the spare time to sort something, providing something simple like a slightly loose wire is to blame. If it's something more complicated (like, I don't know, the entire west wing of the internet being on fire), then if anyone hoping to upload a track could PM me with their choice, and I'll see what I can do.

Seems to be working now. Thanks Grim...!

I officially did nothing!

Well it worked!

I would like to thank Plissken for choosing the topic, "songs for driving through a deserted city at 3 am." It has made me listen to every song I have heard with this in mind, and I have enjoyed it!

It would be nice to get some feed back from the topic choosers of more subjective topics as to how well the entered songs fit the chosen category in their opinion.

I liked Plissken's choice of theme. I'd like to have more themes that are actually a theme rather than things which can cover many different styles.

I had intended to try writing some music to cover this but I couldn't get it done in time. And I'm not skilled enough with the guitar to do it how I want, probably.

I thought the point was that they had to be able to cover many different styles. I'm hardly going to be able to enter a decent track if the theme is 1940s Opera.

I'd say that themes should be applicable to many different styles, but that the "driving at 3am" topic easily fits with that. As the selection of songs nominated so far will prove.

I'd much rather every week's theme was "German Loungecore 1966-1974" because it's a genre I've gone mad for lately, but I can't see anyone else going for it.

Well okay, let's put it another way. I'd like to have some way of judging how much a song is applicable to the theme chosen. Rather than say "songs with the letter a in them" as there's no real way of judging how good it is at including the letter A. (Unless it's a track by TMBG).

It might not necessarily be the most populist song that wins but the one that is the most clever to fit to the theme. Or at least that's the way I'd like to do it. It's probably never going to work that way as people will just vote for nice songs regardless but hey. idduzzntrlymadder

I wasn't expecting TV themes (unless they'd been released as singles) in my songs inspired by children's characters, but both Dangermouse and the pink panther were worthy inclusions.

Malc

Or maybe next time we do this, if there is such a thing, included two polls. One for favourititist song, and the other for the song you feel meets the theme bestest.

I was well pissed off when I realised I had a chance to pick a theme and couldn't

It was "cold".

You don't need to make excuses.

Interesting update. And hopefully one that those monitoring this thread will notice, which is why I've not posted it in a new thread. Here's something I foolishly hadn't considered before now...we don't know the identities of the people going through to the next round until Wednesday, as per the rules.

The next round (i.e. the 1st knockout round) would otherwise be scheduled to start on Wednesday. Except! That doesn't give anyone any time to pick their songs...essentially, I've messed up. With this in mind, and I'll PM this out to the relevant people, there'll be a one-week grace period to pick the songs for the first knockout round.

In the meantime, I suppose I'd better dance like an organ grinder-owned monkey in order to keep everyone's attention. Bah, I'd so hoped I'd worn this monkey costume for the last time, too.

Or everyone PM's you a song now, and then you only use those that qualify?

Malc

As the 'regular season' is pretty much over, I'd like to constructively criticise they way its gone.

I've enjoyed it, though it has felt to me like I was always stuck in 'middle ground' not good enough to score points, too good to get to pick a theme. Which kinda sucked. It felt like I wasn't progressing most of the time, (7 of the 9 weeks, fact fans) which sort of ground me down towards the end.

My criticism is that I only got points when I picked a massively popular song that wasn't necessarily to my taste eg. I came 1st when I used a radiohead track.

I suspect a lot of people voted on what they already knew the title of, rather than listening to them all. Hopefully this will change for the knockout round when there's only a few songs to listen to.

I'm shit and have missed 2 lots of songs as I am a twat I had a good one aswell for Chrissymas-not a traditional song, but one with much meaning for me

Good idea, I'll get onto that in a bit. The tricky bit is finding out everyone's newly festive usernames to put into the PM boxes.

re: The feedback comments - I agree with the statement that the scoring system could have been better. If there's a Song Wars 2.0, I'll certainly change it so more points are scored, and so things remain interesting. Possibly with having more people per group, and the top four going through, and the top six in the weekly vote or so getting points.

The practice of people voting for songs they already know certainly seems to have been common, especially as time goes on. There have been weeks where the YouTube videos listed have been unavailable (mainly due to them being un-embeddable, in a couple of occasions due to me being bad at copy-pasting the codes over), and yet the songs had got a load of votes by the time the clips were fixed. This isn't really in the spirit of the Song Wars, and will need to change. Clearly, there's no way to stop people voting for songs they already like (and nor should there be), but to use the suggestion of whoever suggested it in the initial planning stage, putting up links with no information on what the song or artist are would be an idea here. That's still going to make the voting a bit complicated ("Damn, was that song I liked fourth-best Song Three or Song Four? I'll have to listen to them all again"), but probably the better option.

That'll mean people will have to be more careful when selecting tracks, only selecting YouTube vids that allow embedding, and preferably (for me) sending links in the forum-friendly...



...format.

Any other feedback welcome, folks.