Whatever happened to...chocolate edition

As Cadburys promotes its new creme egg dairy milk bar it's got me thinking that the chocolate industry is afraid of taking risks. What was the last NEW chocolate bar that you can remember being launched? It's a tough one and I'd have to say it might have been the Nestle Maverick bar from 1997. Since then, it seems that every new release has been on the back of the old Cadbury Dairy Milk (cdm) bars. Certain "new" releases have simply been the withdrawal of an old favourite to be replaced with another cdm flavour. Old favourites have such as caramel and wispa have been withdrawn to be replace by cdm with caramel and cdm bubbly and cdm varieties such as biscuit, mint chip, double choc, wafer and even creme egg have appeared. It just seems Cadbury isn't willing to take the time to come up with and develop new brands beyond the classic cdm. What's even more upsetting is that offshoots of the discontinued bars (such as the fantastic wispa gold) have had no replacement. It isn't just Cadbury who are doing it - Nestle and Mars play the same tricks too - Nestle bring out various updates of aero and kit-kat whilst Mars gets ample use out of the Mars and Galazy lines.

And don't get me started about standardising names. If it was called Snickers everywhere else in the world - why launch as Marathon in the UK?! Same goes for starburst/opal fruits. Turning the classic smarties cylindrical tube to a hexagonal tube - what was that about?

But does anyone remember the following discontinued range of treats:

Vice Versas - white chocolate centres with a brown sugar coating or, well - vice versa. They were supposed to target galaxy minstrels but ended up being cancelled, relaunched years later and then discontinued again...

Pretzel flips - here's an odd one. Salted mini pretzels covered in milk chocolate or white chocolate fudge. They appeared, got us hooked and then vanished into the night.

Cadbury's astros - the supposed alternative to M&Ms. The packaging screamed "cigarette box" and the centre biscuit was very unpleasant if it went soggy.

Cabury jestives - an ordinary chocolate digestive not enough? how about with Cadbury milk chocolate? how about with cdm chunks in the biscuit too. They single handedly turned the world of chocolate-coated biscuit snacks on its head. Just about pipping chocolate hob-nobs to the "best biscuit" prize these have suddenly disappeared to be replaced with very dull regular Cadbury chocolate digestives. Boo!

Still, I'm sure I remember seeing the old Fry's Turkish delight advert on tv in the last couple of years. I'm guessing the old Cadburys fudge adverts won't get that treatment - "a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat." Quite.

PhD - over and out

Most people will tell you that a PhD takes three years. These people are wrong. Even if you were to finish your thesis and hand it in on the last day of the three years (like Matt did) it just won't go away. A few months later there's the viva, then you have to find the drive to do your corrections and get them approved followed by the arduous task of printing and binding multiple copies and finally the trip to submit them. On paper it all sounds like nothing compared to three years of work followed by writing a book, but it's really not that straight forward. A lot of supervisors will push their students really hard during the three years and then leave them to their own devices with the writeup. This means, if you aren't careful it can drag on and on and could even turn into something that just seems like it will never end. After all my issues during my final year, the one thing I clung on to was my determination to have the write up finished by Christmas. I'd seen far too many people not submit until the following summer - even Amy form my group who seemed to have nearly finished writing when she left took 8 months to submit. Thankfully, due to my ruthless efficiency at writing I managed that feat with a good two weeks to spare (in fact, if it hadn't been for a mix up with my supervisor I would have been done and dusted within 5 weeks of leaving). The plan back in September '05 was to start planning the write up over Easter and start writing soon after in the spare hours I had during the day. Those who know me will know what I think about plans...and sure enough Easter came and went with no planning done at all. It got to the start of July and I was starting to get worried as not only had I not started writing, but I hadn't started planning yet. The new plan became to have the literature review done and the rest planned out by the time I left. This time I exceeded expectations and left having completed 4 and a half out of seven chapters. Oh - and the Edison quote from the start - that took a few days of searching to decide on.

Halfway through my second year I was found my life and my chemistry were going pretty well and I told my lab-mate Carl that I wasn't scared of the idea of the viva. He didn't believe me but as the time drew closer I was actually terrified - not of the viva, but about how little work I'd done for it. Once it was done I was sent away with a list of typos and a couple of figures to tweak and 10 days later I had an approved thesis. With "the worst" behind me I took my foot off the gas pedal which was a mistake. I hunted around for the best paper to print on (which is so anal for something that is going to sit on a shelf for eternity). This was where I started to run into problems. The university "insists" on certain standards for the layout of a thesis - all the official guidelines tell us to ensure that our theses conform to BS4821. Unfortunately this standard was withfrawn in the 1990s and there is nowhere on the web that will tell you what the damn thing actually said! The graduate school weren't very helpful either; "we don't have a copy in Durham - Newcastle University library may have a copy." Well that's very helpful. Eventually I just decided to print it the way I'd done it. Thankfully I could get it bound at Birmingham university. Durham must be the only university in the country to not have a binding service. Even the local pronaprint won't touch theses. I mean come on - the library must do a shedload of binding with all the journals it gets not to mention the money to be made from the many thousands of students needed theses, projects, dissertations and reports binding. No wonder Durham seems to be leaking money all over the place. The final hurdle was sorting out the attached CD. I had three different sets of instructions on the requirements for CDs - it's as if the grad school simply forgot they'd already written requirements for CDs and wrote new ones. Twice. Eventually I just picked one and went with it.

This had taken nearly three months from the date of my viva - it should have been done in about a week. I imagined all sorts of grand things happening when I finally submitted my hardbound copies, but all that happened was the lady at the grad school desk simply took them off my and wandered off - I had to call her back just to get a receipt. A bit underwhelming. The thing is, Matt who handed in his thesis to be assesed in September only handed in his hardbound copies about a week before me in the end. My advice to anyone writing up - don't slack off once you get the viva out of the way - I was fairly well organised and it still took me three months to finish up everything - just go for it and finish it off. As it is my PhD has taken me 3 years, 6 months, and 25 days from start to finish (and I still have to sort out all the graduation stuff). I feel really sorry for all the physicists who have had their funding extended to 4 years - if they drag their feet over the write up even a little their PhD will consume half a decade of their life - more if the write up drags on and that's really scary. This is just training, not our life's work!

More advice? Ok - here's something I really wish someone had said to me along the way. Everyone needs to feel special at some point. I guess when you start a PhD you're really excited and feel different from our friends who left university after their degrees, but after a while it seems like everyone around you is doing a PhD too and it can feel like what you're doing is fairly common. I don't have the actual figure, but I hazard a guess that maybe 1% (if that) of the UK population has a PhD - what we're all doing is something amazing that very few people will ever get the chance to do and what you yourself is doing is probably something that a handful of people on Earth will be working on. I hope that gives you some kind of comfort in the struggle ahead.

The sad thing is that even though it's the 21st century, all the British Library will keep is a microfilm record of the title and contents pages. If someone wants a copy, then the BL will have to ring up Durham and some poor gimp will have to go and dig the thesis out of the depository and photocopy it. Wouldn't it have just been simpler for the BL to ask for a copy in PDF format? I know I'm potentially loosing royalty fees by doing this, but if you want a read of my thesis just click the link below.

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Over the last few years I've been as happy as I've ever been, as unhappy as I've ever been and every point in between. I've always managed to get on with my work. I lot of people drop out, a lot of people take an age over the write up and lots more finish and then never want to do the subject again. I am not one of these people.

Unknown Quantity

So as I mentioned a few weeks ago I've been listening to our old Unknown Quantity CDs again. For those that don't know, Unknown Quantity was the name of the band I was in at school. Ever since I was young I was fascinated by the guitar and eventually I started going to a guitar group class after school in Bromsgrove. Unfortunately I was only 10 at the time and I had a full-sized classical guitar so my hands were far too small so I got really frustrated and mostly just messed around with my friend. Once I was going to KES my parents made me take classical lessons which I hated so I never practised. Grade exams were a major stress and eventually I failed grade 2. Initially I thought this was the end of my guitar "career" but a few years later one of my friends at school took up the electric guitar and began playing during lunch periods in the class room. Suddenly I realised that playing guitar didn't have to be about studying and learning pieces I had no interest in. I went back to my classical and with the help of "the internet" I started learning chords and spent a week or so moving from one to another until it became second nature. Two of my friends, James mentioned that he played the drums and Phil subsequently took up the guitar. In a few months we were sitting around and James said "so I suppose we should have a band practice then" and Unknown Quantity was born.
Eventually we found a permanent bassist in another friend, Raj. A little over a month later we were playing our first gig.

The gigs came every so often but over the summer we concentrated on writing our own songs. Thankfully we had Phil, who in addition to being a fantastic singer was fairly adept at writing songs. At the end of August 1998 we booked into Junction 7 studios in Great Bar for three days to record our first CD, The End EP. The name was us trying to be clever as it meant our first releaes would be called The End. We bought 200 CDs and actually managed to sell about 2/3 of them and so the following summer we returned with more ambitious songs for four days. This time around the name caused us some problems. We rejected naming it after a song and other titles suggested were Funky Monks (after the sound engineer Dennis suggested that the backing vocals on the first track sounded like monks) and Snake: 357 (during the recording we were getting our first experience of Snake on the Nokia 5110 and 357 was our best score). It's a good job we didn't go with that 'cos 357 is a rubbish score. Eventually we settled on The Blue EP after the cool (and at the time unusual blue colour of the writing side of the CDs). The gigs kept on coming including one at The Flapper & Firkin the day before Idlewild played there. We also made it into the NME gig listings. A few years ago James and I worked out the tracklist for a "greatest hits" CD and amazingly, the two EP names came together to give The Blend - perfect. The tracks from The Blend are available to download by clicking the links below.


The way things used to be
The first track on both The Blue EP and The Blend is a pretty short track. Phil left recording the vocals until last to get a more rough, raspy tone and the backing vocals over the second verse and outro were described by Dennis as sounding "like monks". I'm still happy with the funky wah-outro.

Simple minds
A track from The Blue EP that came together from two different ideas - the rocky intro and chorus and the palm-muted verses. The backing vocals and extra guitar overdubs were a result of our experience recording The End EP. This is one song where I'd really like to go back and record a different lead track - more subtle during the verse and faster during the solo. To those that are interested, the effect on Phil's voice in the chorus came from a Zoom 505 pedal with BL-distortion at a gain of 1/30. So, even those cheap multifunction pedals got some use.

Receipt
This is the big one. One of the first songs we wrote. Whilst Phil wrote the lyrics for all the other songs, I pitched the main lyric for this one - If life came with a receipt would you take it back? (at Selly Oak station, 1998). This actually became a fan favourite early on and is still a very good song. When recording The Blue EP we recorded a new version of Receipt with more overdubs and keyboard, but it didn't sound as good as the original - even with the mysteriously loud drum beat at 3.40'.

Nearly
People can say things that ruin songs. My roommate at Trevs told me that someone had ruined the Radiohead song Lucky for him by getting him to associate the line "I'm on a roll" with Thom Yorke standing on a giant loaf of bread. For us it was Dennis with some of his takes on our songs' lyrics. "Nellie? Who's Nellie?" he asked after hearing the chorus of this song where Phil bellows out "Nearly!" A finger picked opening leads to a nice 3 chord progression. I'm still happy with the solo although I should have been more adamant that it be turned up in the mix. "It's REM-like" said Dennis - "needs more balls" says I. We added more to the song afterwards and I still love the non-linear fashion of it.

Without You
This resulted from Phil and James messing around. Phil was playing Climbing up the walls by Radiohead and James kept telling him to "go higher" resulting in the A-D-E-G chorus sequence. This is one of the tracks that underwent the biggest transformation in the studio. Dennis encouraged us to break away from the same sound all the way through the record and as such we played around a lot with this one. The start is the result of hitting the body and necks of our guitars with everything from our hands to coins as well as the use of a Ugandan thumb piano that Phil's sister had lent to us. The lazy-dreamy lead guitar uses a heap of reverb whilst the overdriven guitar effect that comes in on the chorus was achieved by James lying on the floor and plugging in my guitar just as I played the chord. It took a lot of takes as I kept moving my guitar and it's only just occurred to me that it would have been a lot simpler to plug the other end of the lead into the amp instead. Finally the snare drum was given an echo which gave the impression of bats flapping around your head. Thankfully, we learnt to achieve most of these effects when we played live. It's under 3 minutes, but it's almost the perfect angst-song about loss.

Is it real?
After The End EP we took it easy on new songs and by the time we played the Farce & Firkin this was the only thing we had come up with. It's a playful pop song with a catchy start-stop rhythm part. The lead part almost wrote itself, but by the time it came to record the song for The Blue EP I still hadn't completely figured the solo. The one you hear on the CD is largely improvised and ends with a nice harmonising with the bridge-lead part. Unfortunately, for the life of me I can't remember how to play this at all.

Set on you
I longed for us to come up with a song or cover whereby when we played live Raj and James could start off and then I would come on and join in and then finally Phil would arrive. Instead we used the This Life theme as our opening to every gig. The verses of Set on you are based around a chord progression from that theme and the Fraggle Rock-esque chorus came from an idea I had floating around. Dennis' comment: "I will sit on you? What?"

R-song (remix)
This was the first song we wrote together. Phil had come up with the chords and lyrics and at one band practice we tried playing along for about 10 minutes and then pouring over the results listening for parts we liked. Amazingly, the first bit of lead I played was a hit (although it took me a while to remember what I'd actually played). The song became known as Our song as it was the only song of our own and later shortened to R-song. However, at this point we didn't have a bassist so when we played our first gig we simply played the song without bass. When we tried it in the studio it simply sounded wrong and anaemic without the bass so Dennis suggest we loose the drums and make it lo-fi. As a result James recorded a tambourine track and the lead was heavily compressed and lowered to create a very dreamy texture hence the (remix). Unfortunately, Dennis decided to fade the song out despite the fact that it had an ending. There are a lot of other songs that do this, but it's something I don't like - if a song has an actual ending, then let us hear it.

Back on track
There are some songs that have a moment - a split second where the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The bit in Fix you by Coldplay where the drums and piano come in on the outro is a good example. Back on track is the song on The Blue EP that has our "moment". At 2.19' the smooth overdriven guitar chords make way for a return to the picking melody of the intro, but heavier complete with the pacing drumbeat. That makes no sense, but you'll understand when you hear it. James and I spotted (heard?) the potential when we were listening to one of the many run-throughs and worked on making it really stand out. In the studio, Phil decided to add the keyboard parts that we'd never really heard as a part of the song and, unlike the remix of Receipt, they worked really well. The end of the solo has got one of those "what happened there?" moments where the note is cut and then reappears as a harmonic. When planning set lists for gigs we always put Back on track after several quieter songs as it was a way of getting back on track with the heavier songs. One of my favourites.

The End
Title track from The End EP and in my opinion a bit of a mess. How I know that is because most of my lead part was improvised from basic ideas. Lyrically too I don't think this was among our best. The thing I do love though is Phil's guitar tone. The studio had an old Marshall 4040 stack, but Phil had just acquired a Marshall jtm610 - a 60w valve amp with 3 10" speakers. We nicknamed it "the big one" as it was absolutely massive. In the lull after the first chorus you can hear it sustain the rhythm guitar before it suddenly roars back into life at 2.08 - one of our favourite "moments" from The End EP.

Touch
This is the song that shows how far we'd come in the year since The End EP. Although Phil had the first ideas for the song in 1998 (I first heard the basic idea after the ridiculous "challenge of management" course we went on). Over the year it evolved with James creating the drums from a sequencing program we bought for him. Although we used minidisc to carry the track to the studio we had to use the old-fashioned 3.5mm jack cable to get it on and off the MD in the first place so we were a bit anxious about whether it would be good enough quality. Thankfully Dennis gave it the thumbs up and we were in business. Originally there was supposed to be a slide guitar part over the second verse, but the action on our guitars was too low and it just sounded awful. The remnants of this can be heard behind the "I am there" line. Dennis nearly (Nellie!) ruined the song again by saying "Posh girls don't say 'I'm cuming,' they say 'I'm there'" - thankfully I managed to get past that. The lead part in the second verse is based on REMs Drive the unfortunate triangle beat at the end (which we hated pretty much straight away) was our homage to OK Computer. Even the "yip-yip-yeah"s are likeable and the effect on Phil's voice is a "bathroom reverb". This song is by far my favourite - it sounds different and adventurous and for once I was actually fascinated by the lyrics. Depending on how you read them the song takes on radically different tones. Taken at face value the lyrics such as "I would reach for the sky, but I couldn't touch you" conjure up the impression of a love song, but if you dig a little deeper, it can also take on a much creepier interpretation as a song about stalking; "when your world falls apart...I am there." I guess the meaning depends on your outlook, but I frequently flit between the two ideas.

Fade Away
This was Phil's pet solo project. He wrote and performed it himself and was keen to use multiple vocal tracks to harmonise which led to much more on The Blue EP. In fact, when playing live, the rest of the band sometimes joined the audience for this song. Dennis' comment to the line "You shattered my fears" was "what was that? You shat on my face?"...


There are so many more memories - manhandling Phil's "big one" around (it was the heaviest thing known to man), arriving at the Bromsgrove battle of the bands (with James covered in Disney plasters) to find most of the crowd consisted of people wearing hoodies with slogans such as "I am the god of fuck" and thinking "oh dear...", meeting the PA guy at a gig who introduced us to his assistant whose first contribution to the conversation was to break wind very loudly (we may have gone to KES, but we weren't above fart jokes), the really nerdy time vs rock graphs we use to draw when planning set lists (OK this was normally me and Phil) and that's before all the tales from the studio such as Phil walking through Birmingham with £400 in his shoes (Dennis wanted cash payment and Phil was afraid of getting mugged) and the time we first went to look around the studio; Dennis told us that he had helped other bands out and gave us the example of a band who had the lyric "there's a knock at the door" followed by a few snare drum hits. Dennis told us he'd convinced them to change the lyric to "there's a door at the knock" to "shake things up a bit" which seemed ok to us. Then about two hours later we suddenly though "What?!?" The biggest thing though was the end of the first day at the studio when we went into the sound booth to hear what we'd done on Receipt. Upto this point we'd only heard ourselves via a tape recorder that changed the pitch on playback and had an auto-levelling microphone (so when the drums came in the volume of the other instruments went down) and even just hearing the basic track (drums, bass and one guitar) was absolutely amazing. We knew we'd done something special as it sounded not only amazing, but very professional too. A little known fact is that Receipt and Without you made it into the mp3.com top100 (with Without you reaching #52).

Sadly we haven't actually played together since we recorded The Blue EP as we've been scattered around the country ever since. Next year however I'd love to get back together and play a gig in August/September to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of The End EP. Whether or not this happens remains to be seen.