I used to ride my bike home from Wetherspoons after doing the night shift. I was writing loads of stories from back in Chelmsford. I haven’t actually got a drum kit at the moment, but when I have a kit I’m gonna learn more and hopefully get a bit better. It was the first song I played drums on, but Noah played drums on the final version that’s on the record. I was messing around with that for a bit, and then I came up with a guitar line. That gospel vocal sound at the start is actually like keyboard setting on Logic, and you play it in different octaves. We hit up Mario C as well, he was on the Beastie Boys’ records and he helped get some of these songs to sound right and authentic. We got on really well and he understood the sound I was going for. I worked with Jason Cox on 'Move', he worked on the first Gorillaz record and Demon Days. Me and Noah worked on the lyrics, and then we all jammed together. After that little idea happened in the car, I sat in Noah’s house while everyone else was down at the studio. We picked up a guitar from a friend’s house and then I just started playing this chord sequence. I was with the band and we were just all messing around in the back of Noah’s car. That song was kind of an accident, which we made literally a week before handing in the record. It’s cool to work with people like them because they obviously know a lot about music.
![this could be my big break out the chorus line this could be my big break out the chorus line](https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/esolano-eportfolio/files/2017/04/nypl.digitalcollections.acfeeb2d-7df4-4ce7-e040-e00a180644aa.007.w.jpg)
It’s got Nick Hodgson from Kaiser Chiefs playing drums as well. Graham Coxon plays guitar on it, he’s wicked and I spent a day with him in the studio. 'Laidback' is just a sad love story isn’t it? I wanted to make a really British love song. We also recorded the drums through a Neve desk from the 70s which had a really cool history to it. They’d drawn loads of stuff on their gear, like you could see Ad Rock’s tag on the 808. I went out to New York with our drummer Noah Booth to record at the Beastie Boys’ Oscilloscope Studio, and we used the same guitars and drum machines that they used on their records.
![this could be my big break out the chorus line this could be my big break out the chorus line](http://cdn-images.playbill.com/ee_assets/Aiken/dd/never/thommie10489675_10152711504264004_8553669616426237711_n1.jpg)
I also had a guy called Junior Dan come in and play bass on the verses. I got some help from Damon Albarn on the chorus and he played some keyboards on it too. Eventually I managed to get them back so I could carry on working on it.
![this could be my big break out the chorus line this could be my big break out the chorus line](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6ee3b9_69ae75bc0c2285fd57519f0dbfcdad91.jpg)
![this could be my big break out the chorus line this could be my big break out the chorus line](https://d20ohkaloyme4g.cloudfront.net/img/document_thumbnails/9122437840d938c9c4da9a404e688cb6/thumb_1200_1553.png)
I had the whole song together apart from the chorus, and then my laptop broke halfway through making it, so I didn’t have the stems for it for a long time. Out on August 11th, it's a remarkable document of promise coming into fulfilment, something that speaks honestly and directly about some of the most important issues facing young British people today.Ĭlash invited Ratboy to break the album down, track by track. But, Crogan concludes, games can play with, as well as play out, their underlying logic, offering the potential for computer gaming to anticipate a different, more peaceful and hopeful future.The Essex songwriter has built his following gig by gig, song by song, watching the crowd's feverish reaction grow as each night passes.ĭebut album 'SCUM' is set to be a marker of sorts, a collection of life-changing events from the past 18 months. He then examines specific game modes and genres in detail, from the creation of virtual space in fight simulation games and the co-option of narrative forms in gameplay to the continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities and the potential of experimental or artgame projects like September 12th: A Toy World and Painstation, to critique conventional computer games.ĭrawing on critical theoretical perspectives on computer-based technoculture, Crogan reveals the profound extent to which today’s computer games-and the wider culture they increasingly influence-are informed by the technoscientific program they inherited from the military-industrial complex. military’s development of the SIMNET simulated battlefield network in the late 1980s. Air Force’s attempt to use computer simulation to protect the country against nuclear attack, and the U.S. Gameplay Mode situates computer games and gaming within the contemporary technocultural moment, connecting them to developments in the conceptualization of pure war since the Second World War and the evolution of simulation as both a technological achievement and a sociopolitical tool.Ĭrogan begins by locating the origins of computer games in the development of cybernetic weapons systems in the 1940s, the U.S. To understand their place in contemporary culture, Patrick Crogan argues, we must first understand the military logics that created and continue to inform them. From flight simulators and first-person shooters to MMPOG and innovative strategy games like 2008’s Spore, computer games owe their development to computer simulation and imaging produced by and for the military during the Cold War.