Author Archives: Alex

Say Yay! to Yeasayer

Not sure how it’s taken me until now to notice them but I’ve used the last three tracks of my emusic month on Yeasayer’s debut album All Hour Cymbals. It’s really rather good, certainly I now have my first new favourite band of 2008.

All very dreamy and clearly something of a post Beirut band in production at least, this is wordly stuff especially Wait For The Summer, which you may find by hunting around a bit. I wonder what the remainder of the album is like…

Fortunately you too can hear two of those tracks by just going to the band’s website, much as I hate hot-linking (die Torchwood fans!) – I must point you straight at 2080 as the best of the lot to try.

My kinda westway

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I have a dream. A dream that one day I could hop on my bike, nip up onto some elevated cycleway, get up to 20mph and just keep going, thusly reaching my aunt’s place in Leytonstone in less than an hour. Apparently, this dream isn’t quite as mad as it sounds, because someone’s looked at doing something similar in Toronto. Also, right now Ken Livingstone (in full uh-oh election year mode) has mooted a transformation of cycling here with 12 “cycling motorways”, which alas have been welcomed by Freight and motorist organisations as a way to clear cyclists out of the way.

Just imagine it, take all the money you’d spend on something like Crossrail (£12bn+?) and for maybe £1bn we could have a suspended cycleway running east to west – maybe even far enough to get people to beyond the M25. It would be revolutionary, it would be different and it would change London totally. The more I think about it the more I like the idea. After all, what surer way is there to get people to travel in a zero-carbon method?