It’s a bit of a shame that that’s all people seem to remember of Paul Hardcastle.  Many years ago I possessed a second-hand Smash Hits tape which had been half taped-over by its previous owner, obliterating Big Fun in favour of various mixes of Hardcastle’s latest singles.  Alongside 19 was Just For Money, this excellent synth track which my naive mind assumed contained samples of Del Boy & Rodney.   After IDing and tracking it down on 12″ many years later, I was surprised to find that the actual samples are (in order of incredulity) Hardcastle himself, Bob Hoskins, and Laurence Olivier.

Worth a listen.

Paul Hardcastle (feat. Bob Hoskins & Laurence Olivier) – Just For Money

This version’s a beta which I whipped together last night, so there are a couple of known issues to be aware of which are detailed on Autowhack’s Shinypixel Labs page.

Dulwich Ukelele Club – There May Be Glory Ahead

(via The Londonist)

The Young Punx – Your Music Is Killing Me

What could be better – or more unexpected – than a Japanese, slightly-too-fast, scratch-filled, electro-house reworking of Pomp and Circumstance (also known as Land of Hope and Glory to you ‘orrible lot)?  Answers on a postcard, but only after you’ve been struck agog by what Armand Van Helden’s Koochy would sound like if it gatecrashed the Last Night of the Proms.

Fantastic Plastic Machine – If You Do, I Do

So here you have it: 26 MP3 files spanning a pick of the last few Hardcore Energy compilations (we’re up to 7 now – blimey), with their own special cover and a ringing endorsement from a man who just can’t let go of those mid-90s memories – me.

Hardcore Energy 2 – The Second Coming

Discogs Entry | Buy it at DJ Download

First up – with the help of another enthusiatic coder – here’s a couple of (admittedly as yet unexciting) proof-of-concept applications running under the OpenLazarus (that’s Pascal/Delphi for people old/mad enough to remember) framework for Maemo 5.  I didn’t do much but test and run these, so here’s the results:

OpenLazarus app running on Maemo 5 using standard widgets

OpenLazarus app running under Maemo 5 using Custom Widgets

…and then there’s what I’ve been fiddling with.  Thanks to the frankly magnificent Wonko from the talk.maemo.org forums, we have a working Java/SWT stack for the phone.  That means that my ShinySlots project can run out of the box and look like this:

You can see that the forced window-size has exposed my slightly-cheating repeating background, and sadly it’s not that performant at the moment, but it works as advertised, and improvements are in hand…

Still: dogged persistence, luck and some mild swearing cobbled together the following:

So, this is DownTheTubes rejigged to work in the new SDK, and running in the “Device Simulator”.  The simulator doesn’t simulate the actual OS, hence the incorrect title and the scrollbars which won’t be there in the actual N900 version (that map is finger-scrollable, y’see.)   Still, work can begin again, although I can’t do any performance testing until PR1.2 is released.  The main thing at the moment is that hoofing a massive bitmap around the screen is rather hard on the processor, though I think I’ve worked around that now.

DownTheTubes can be found on Shinypixel Labs too.

Simple as that, really.  Thought I’d give it a go – come follow me and see what I’ve found.  One wry smile per day almost guaranteed.

The competition’s on our Facebook page, so rifle through your camera, become a fan and upload a pic to donate £5 to charity with no extra effort required.

Applying a bit of creative licence (and whatever I had to hand), here’s a couple of my entries.  I might see if I can climb some trees* during lunchtime.

Santa’s Wish Kingdom @ Westfield Shopping Centre, Xmas

Disney Store, Oxford Street, a busy Saturday

* Unlikely, of course.

1. Lindstrom – Grand Ideas

2. Edvard Hill – Indeed I Am Very Glad To Be Back Home

4. Cliff Wedge – Go Go Yellow Screen

6. Wang Chung – Dance Hall Days (Extended 12″ Mix) [Why? It's miles worse than the 7"]

9. The Vengaboys Megamix by Nick Skitz

10. Q-Tex – E-Creation ’95

15. Skatebard – Data Italia

16. Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’

17. WVKEAF – Jump (12″ Edit) [The link is mislabelled]

20. Terry Wogan – The Floral Dance

The material was for his Russell Howard’s Good News show which’ll go out in a couple of weeks.  From what I heard (and the amount of laughing I and everyone else was doing) it’ll be well worth vegging in front of it when it airs, even if it is hiding on the digital-only BBC3.  Your mother wouldn’t like it.

Dada Life – The Great Fashionista Swindle

This is the original mix – not the (worse) Laidback Luke mix that everyone claims is the original (but isn’t.)

As an aside, here’s what’s been keeping me up all night by rebounding around my head like a squash court:

Edward Hill – Indeed I Am Very Glad To Be Back Home

Aaaaarrgh!

First up is a clutch of traditional old-skool sounding rollers from 1st Science, called the Planet Insanity EP:

Then there’s a Hardcore Lives! new style – some dark J-Tek jungle-esque moods from John Browne.  So, a new style of cover for this one:

As usual, they’re available to buy and download at Hardcore Lives! Records now.

Autowhack 0.3 is now available.

(Usual disclaimer applies.  May turn your cat green, but it’s pretty unlikely.)

There’s also DownTheTubes, which is a little experiment of mine in the world of Maemo 5 development for my Nokia N900.  It’s a map for giving you a tube map and status in a convenient little package; it’s kinda working but nowhere near being finished, but it ‘s got its own page now.

Sash! – Mysterious Times (Spencer & Hill remix)

Taco – Puttin’ On The Ritz

I haven’t actually heard it yet for bandwidth reasons (mobile broadband soon to be ousted by much manlier ADSL), so you and I both will discover what it’s like when it appears shortly.  Here’s a sneak preview of what’s on it:

…and so it is with heavy heart that I wave goodbye to living in W12, and move just down the road to W6, ‘twixt a posh primary school and the A4. Pictures forthcoming soon.

Who would have thought we’d all come such a long way in 10 years, eh?

If there’s one word that can describe a lot of UK house music from the mid-90s, it’s flaccid.  Whilst European ravers pummelled their ears with the massively tuned kick-drums of gabber, British clubbers bopped apologetically to beats that wouldn’t burst a paper bag.  Leading this Charge of the Wet Brigade were The Bucketheads and their tedious anthem The Bomb!

Kenny Dope presents The Bucketheads – The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)

Another grand example of house glued together with irritating sound-effects, The Bomb!‘s repertoire comprises some kind of alarm noise and a clipped sample of some yelping ladies, presumably excited by the tune’s unique percussive stylings of a haddock being slapped against a clothes-horse.  It’s the 9-minute version from the Positiva Classics series that’s forever etched on my brain; it’s not so much the eternal build-up that’s galling – though it’s bad enough – but the let-down when you get there.  4-or-so minutes of wiggling to a frenzied yet random arrangement of the aforementioned three samples should be paid off with a little more than a man with a bugle, and then some more of those three samples.  Not even a vocal lifted from Chicago can lift it for me, guys.  Sorry. Even after recent listening, why people ever liked this remains beyond me.

It’s not all bad news.  Michael Moog took the basic melodic idea, chucked out all the FX, added some more sensitive percussion and released a more satisfying albeit cocktail-loungey version in That Sound.  It has a chunkier if typical Full Intention remix-by-numbers on the flip and is generally worth seeking out if you’re desperate for some of this riff in your life.