From The Archive - Carolyn's first Diary entry

My recent thoughts have been filled with visions of people drinking things that are wrong. These terrible visions started a couple of weeks ago when a work colleague seemed unnaturally down when he was forcibly told that he wasn't very good. These black moods continued, causing concern for myself and others, culminating in an offer to go out and get mashed on the Friday night, to get rid of his black thoughts, you see. This didn't happen and it didn't happen the next week either. He trudged home and the sight of his hanging head must have weighed heavy on my mind as that night I dreamed he drank down a botle of hydrochloric acid. 5M, the strong stuff you know. That very same day, I had to laugh out loud when one of my young friends Dom put his hand and announced "I drank bleach" in a proud voice. My initial reaction was to piss myself laughing, and when it occurred to me that maybe he had drank bleach as he has no lenses in his eyes and therefore didn't know what it was, perhaps mistaking it for lemonade, I just laughed harder. When I realised he shares his name with a popular brand of the very same cleaning product he drank, it all made sense so I just smiled and said "good lad" with a benevolent smile. That last bit is a lie, but the rest is true.

From The Archive - The one with the link to the hidden song

I was working on a sort of 'Making the video' type write-up for the Superglider site to accompany the "I've been in an accident" vid the other day, and rambling away tangentially as I do my train of thought took me back to the first band I was ever in. (How I got there is too convoluted and obscure to bother with here). I was 10, and my friend Kamran Javid and I -inspired by a couple of girls in our class who could play "Heart and Soul" (the duet kids everywhere can play)- started writing tunes on the school Casio keyboard. We almost exclusively used the black notes, and we only had three tunes. The first, "Organ Time" I have a recording of that we made in the school hall. It has the sound of kids playing outside in the background and faint birdsong at the start. Our second tune didn't have a title, but I submitted it five years later as a composition for my music GCSE. I got a B. Go figure. The third song we did likewise had no title that I can remember, and never got recorded. It stuck in my head, though, and being reminded of it again the other day I thought that maybe I should record it. So I did. I kept the tune exactly as we wrote it, but I tried to produce it in the way it would have been had record company execs decided that 10-year-old electropop duos were going to be the big thing in '87. Now I can't stop listening to it, though I think it's more through nostalgia than the tune being any good. It's quite sad to hear it now -around the time we wrote it Kamran and I were both pretty melancholy over a girl we both liked who was systematically flirting with every boy in the class. We'd been early targets in her campaign and she'd moved on. I remember waking up one day around this time to "Nothing's gonna stop us now" by Starship on the radio, and being struck from nowhere by this horrible empty feeling and the realisation that after we left for our different secondary schools I'd never see her again. In hindsight our tune is based on the same chord progression. Plagiarism is obviously in my genes. Chris and Carolyn both got the internet this week. Hopefully the next diary will not be mine!

From the Archive - A question of motivation

We performed in public last week for the first time since January. To the casual observer we must appear to be incredibly lazy, but the infrequency of our live appearances is down to a desire to keep them special, for the audience and for ourselves. After a while, even the most heartfelt songs get reduced to a collection of vocal noises and finger movements strung together in the correct sequence if you play them too often and know them too well. The intention is that if you come to see us play, my whole weight is behind the words I'm singing. I won't be going through the motions. How this philiosophy is going to bear up when we have a record out to promote remains to be seen! I'm not sure where this puritanical outlook came from- I can't even remember what my motivation was for starting to play music in the first place. I was too young for it to be a way of getting laid, and the idea that I could get rich from it has never been a realistic one. And yet I still find myself driven to do it. And I love doing it. It just worries me sometimes though that I'm vain enough to think that the world needs to hear my three friends and I setting the minutae of our largely unremarkable lives to music. Answers on the Superglider message board....