This is really quite a shameless blog because a) I have just done an interview I'm really proud of and b) it's with Bat For Lashes who I've been wittering on about to all and sundry for weeks and I would like you to read it and find out about her. You can do that by clicking here.

Oh yeah! And there's a nice little graphic on the homepage which looks rather exciting.

If you can't be arsed with pandering to my ego you should quite definitely still pander to Bat For Lashes, so check out her and her music either at her website or at her MySpazz.

I don't know why people use toe curling as a metaphor for embarrassment. Every single time I've been really, truly embarrassed either my spine has tried to stab me in the kidneys or my brain has wanted to explode just so I don't have to remember the sheer enormity of how small I am currently feeling.

Last night I discovered a whole new level of shame where you are so, totally mortified that it's impossible to even begin to feel embarrassed yet. As Owen Wilson was on strike against the press thanks to the Kate Hudson rumours, I sneaked out of last night's You, Me And Dupree premiere early. With everyone still going the other way up the red carpet, I try and exit as unobtrusively as possible. In doing so, my broken heel slips on the road causing me to trip violently over my own feet and crash land on one knee (imagine a baby giraffe at its first ice disco and you get the picture).

I scramble up as quickly as possible, only to be confronted with the second incarnation of Lolo Ferrari pointed straight at my head. "Are you alright?" ask the biggest breasts I've ever seen. It's Lea Big Brother. Oh God, there are photographers: "CARING BB LEA IN DYSPRAXIC HACK MERCY DASH" flashes before my eyes.

I mutter something useless, congratulate her on, er, being and wish I'd read Heat a bit more throughly, instead of just flicking to the bits about skirts. We grin awkwardly at each other, then she floats off while I slink off trying to cram 6'2 of muppet into a small puddle of person. "Is your knee alright?" shouts a youth from the other side of the carpet. Fucking hell, I'm a stage attraction. I smile sickly at him and say something inane before scampering off to the depths of the Tube.

Everyone has hideously embarrassing moments, yet knowing that doesn't make your own any less horrific. Still, feel free to share yours, then maybe there can be a database of mortification to draw on in times of need. I tried to remember the worst ones, but, thank God, most of them seem to have been successfully suppressed by years of mental conditioning and prescription drugs. Here's the evolutionary scale of embarrassment as loosely remembered by Kat.

Aged 10: Being the only girl in school to actually obey her games teacher and take all her clothes off to use the communal showers. Never trust the word of a PE teacher. Especially not one who looks like Rosa Klebb.

Aged 14: My mother brandishing my childhood Blue Peter badge at London Dungeons and asking the steward in ringing tones whether it would still get me in free.

Aged 18: Acting out a (filmed) scene from Taming of the Shrew at my college day, and, thanks only to some frenzied waving from my college mum, noticing halfway through that my right breast had been on display for a good five minutes.

Aged 21: While filming The Weakest Link, being caught voting off the same people as the bloke standing next to me on by peering over his shoulder. Anne Robinson has a stare that could bore through titanium: I have never lied so badly in my entire life.

Aged 23: Interviewing some stoned public schoolboy sleb for the Q music channel at the Empire Awards, under the impression he was Peter from Narnia.

Kat: "So, you've grown your hair."
Schoolboy: "Yes."
Kat: "Are you all ready for Narnia then?"
Schoolboy: "Oh, no, I'm not doing Narnia."
Kat: (Thrilled at possible exclusive) "But you've all signed up, surely?"
Schoolboy: "No. Im not IN Narnia."
Kat: (Shitshitshitshitshit) "Oh. Well, have a lovely evening."

It was Cedric Diggory from Harry Potter. Oops.

A fortnight ago: Asking The Automatic where The Automatic were at the Kerrang! Day of Rock. A thousand curses on the fact that the digital music revolution means you never see a mugshot, and that all 19-year-old boys look the same.

I hope this makes you feel better about whatever mortifications you might have recently experienced. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm about to go and have a short bout of hysterics in the bathroom.

...When I was waiting for my (brilliant) bath to fill with enough hot water to pose as a Thames Water ad, I emailed Joan As Police Woman about the game (see post below). God bless.

wow
that is totally amazing
i like joan as nursey nurse

that is completely sick!

i did have a great time at spitz, as always!

it's a great room always filled withh great people!

thanks for lettting me know about the new found careers
i'll have something to look forward to in middle age!!

xo
joan
JxAxPxWx


Amazing! MySpazz needs more lovely people. There are quite a lot, but more are always a good thing.

Music is the food of love, the greatest good that mortals know, the speech of angels

People write an awful lot of shit about music, just as they do about love and romance. John Donne hit the nail on the head with the latter (“I am two fools I know, for loving and for saying so in whining poetry”) and Jacques Attali got it with the former: “Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.”

What with the weather doing all sorts of ridiculous things and making my brain go all over the place, I’ve been thinking about emotive causes and wondering about the state of music, its being rather than whether I actually like the new Scissor Sisters single. How people use it for one.

The “society of repetition” is XFM in the morning, and I’m fine with that. I can’t cope with how horrible BBC7’s breakfast comedy choices are, Radio 4’s too dry on weekdays, 6Music’s DJs bore me back to sleep – but Auntie La La makes me happy. The X List stuff’s familiar enough for me to get onto autopilot without controversy, but the new stuff! Grumble grumble, identikit new stuff. I don’t feel like I’m learning anything about what’s being released. It’s all a bit boring. Someone wrote something about the Young Knives’s quite excellent new single, along the lines of “Well yes, this is incredibly good but we’ve heard all we need to from this sort of tune and how long until the death knell sounds?”

Repetition, imitation, flattery, similarity. How do you break away? Everyone seeks innovation (on the surface at least) but really it’s just looking for a recipe: how do I make myself cool/ saleable/ viable/ hip/ desirable?

I can’t think of any better image of the society of repetition than the Tube, now inextricably linked to music. Same journey everyday, you do it in your sleep. If you’ve never been to Brixton Tube, they pipe classical music through the entrance hall to stop loiterers, fighters and twats causing trouble. It never stops. 9am, you’ve still got Vivaldi soundtracking the united clomp towards the Oyster readers.

After Sunday’s immense storm had stopped threatening my flat’s ageing windows, my girls and I went our separate ways on the Tube. “Mate, this is a fit tune,” said the Orchestral Blonde approvingly, she and the Singer wandering down the escalators and singing The Dance Of The Hours like it was ‘Maneater’. “I’d want to hang about and listen to it all.”

I love that idea. How well would Brixton’s strategy go if a busload of classical music fans got lost en route to the Proms? They’d just stand there, wigging out on the accelerandos and going, “Oh wait…this is the really good bit. Yeah! God, aren’t Kodaly’s principles the shit?”

It’s probably a good thing the weather is so horrid at the moment because it’s made my head more receptive to music for music’s sake rather than as a “Oh what’s this then?” opt-in. After a day of attempted blagging (I am the world’s most horrible blagger – I can’t do it at all) I managed to get on the list to see the utterly marvellous Joan As Police Woman at the last of her monthly residencies at the Spitz.

(This has started a wondrous new game whereby you give Joan As Careers Adviser a whole new career with each mention.)

I texted OIR while I was there. She came to the gig at Wireless and almost had to be carried out of the tent afterwards. “We must go to see her at Hammersmith in September” I wrote.

“Oh My God. Absolutely. Album is great but lacks The Thing.”

“What thing? Passion?”

“Yes.”

People change on record. It’s strange. While Joan As Nursery Nurse is absolutely mind numbingly, brain crushingly brilliant live – to the extent it didn’t matter a jot not being able to see her play because hearing was enough – Bat For Lashes (who I’ve never seen live) almost crippled me yesterday with two minute samples alone.

Bat For Lashes is the brainchild of singer-songwriter Natasha Khan and I will have an interview with her up soon. You shouldn’t care about that, although she is fascinating and funny. You should care about the fact that this girl holds music in the palm of her hand. It’s the most visceral, painful, glorious sound you will hear this year. It’s like having your liver pulled out through your heart because rather than having someone instruct you in what you should be feeling, you feel it regardless. It’s emo for people who have emotions, not haircuts.

Stop, come back. Not emo like that. There’s nary a guitar in sight, rather violins, pianos, spooky melodies and tunes that make you stagger with every loss you’ve ever felt. These songs aren’t about the process of heartbreak, or joy, or grief, but the all-encompassing feeling itself. This is why listening to it is such a nagging, wonderful experience (I had tears pricking my eyes for the entirety of yesterday morning). It’s guttural, story-filled and marvellous, with every key change or note that ever made you go “Oh!” at the perfection of it all. That’s what she writes, that what she plays.

In this weather, with my head all over the place, I need that. We all do, a little bit. It stops us thinking that feeling lost occasionally is a bad thing. We need to give into it more, and admit that not everything’s clear-cut all the time.

Just in case you're one of the four people left in the world, here is what just might be the greatest video I've seen IN AGES. I sent it to Mother Brown to give her keep fit class some tips.

I don't know what the hell's going on with this inferenal blog but it's all broken so bear with me while I try and fail to fix it.

Oh yes. And Little Miss Sunshine = Miss Contweeniality.

My favourite Kat-pun EVER.

I read Kerrang! for years. Literally, I moved right on just before Select folded and ate it up. Loved the writing (still do), loved the fact it was speaking directly to me, even when it was on about some Tazmanian death metal band with a fondness for white slavery. I did work experience there a year or two ago and got utterly terrified by the German woman who told me off for tapping my foot. Apparently the vibrations went through the floor and over into her leg.

I don't buy it now just because my rock taste isn't really theirs anymore (more flim-flam than arrgh, also we get it free in the office) but I am ludicrously excited to be going to the Day of Rock gig on Thursday. It's on a roof top! With a barbecue! There will be rockstars! Sort of. I refuse to count either The Automatic or Charlie Fightstar as rock stars, but there will be Angela Gossow and members of SiKTH which should be hilarious. Ooh, and that kid from Bring Me The Horizon with the world's craziest tattoos. I'm looking forward to that: 18 my arse, he clearly started getting them well before his GCSEs.

Ooh, it's like all my 19-year-old dreams in one handy afternoon. I have to be a video camera person in exchange, but as long as I don't drop it, everything should be just dandy.

"Perhaps you could use the Velcro hand strap technique – that’s my professional advice," said PR Polly.

I'm totally down with that.

YEEEEEEAAAAAHHHH!

I'm interviewing Dot Allison just before this all kicks off. The dichotomy between the two should be tremendous.

Having nearly fallen asleep at the bus stop at gone 1 this morning, I crawled onto the 88 and settled into the back with my book. An old man and his rent boy came and sat opposite me. The old boy wore a good-ish suit and these weird shoes that weren’t trainers or loafers, not really anything. Anonymous, brown rubber shoes. His boy had the reddest eyes I’d ever seen, rips along the side of his otherwise spankingly white trainers and a very unfazed, placid expression. Occasionally the old boy would say something in passing and the boy would tilt his head momentarily, but otherwise they just sat and waited nonchanantly for time to pass until they got to Stockwell.

I have nothing to say on the subject of rent boys. It’s not something that has ever really appeared in my head before. Those two words together always put me in mind of some kind of early-90s dance group.

If I get any poorer, I’m going to have to find a second job. But hey, aren’t we all? People are skint: this is not news. “People are a lot more skint than me, people are a lot less,” chunters The Guardian. To hell with that: none of them are me and for the absolute present I am sitting squarely in the land of “Aaargh! Fucking HSBC offering me graduate loans!” egotism.

I find it a nagging insult that those who ‘entertain’ on the telly get paid squillions, and people doing the same (loosely) in newspapers do also and b2b (even looser) ditto, but anyone else – like consumer magazine writers, editors, online writers, fanzine writers – get fuck all. For Christ’s sake. Having spent last week ranting on about how proud I am of all my friends for taking unpensioned creative jobs, I’m now sleepily furious about having just worked out that, in order to insure my possessions, I’m going to have to adopt a nigh on monastic attitude to seeing my friends. On the bright side, this means that RBT is finally getting dragged round tomorrow night to watch Grease 2.

Death From Above 1979 have split up, which is a bit of a shame. The DJourno points out that the rather wonderfully named Canser de Ser Sexy have a song called ‘Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above’ which is currently tickling my ears. It’s just making me feel a bit sad really. It’s not so much about the band, who I enjoyed but wasn’t totally ravished by.

It’s partly because it’s one of those scutty days where I haven’t had nearly enough sleep, the weather’s horrid, I’m wearing a jumper and feeling proper Octobery. October is all well and good when you have lovely leafy fields to stride around in clutching at Labradors on the end of bits of string, but in London it does rather suck. Blank days blend into one and it’s hard to feel any kind of joy or energy, and that’s not even S.A.D., it’s just Britain’s weather being dull. Hey you! The three Americans I know are reading for some reason! Got weather? Or got summer? I swore off summer when I was 17 because it made me feel even more breathtakingly white than usual. I’ve stopped such silliness now.

Well, one band who aren’t splitting up are Girls Girls Girls, two members of which I bumped into at a comedy/theatre thing in Camden last night. I clocked the keyboard player onstaqe and thought “I was SO at university with you.” They claim to be a pop band. This is of course nonsense, as it’s far too high concept to be anything even vaguely approaching pop, (and don’t start on high concept pop either or There Will Be Consequences) but seeing as their previous incarnations took a rather stern view towards modern life through searingly witty lyrics, I suppose it rather is, by their standards. ‘South America’ has some really sharp harmonies on it and it’s all very upbeat and slightly Buzzcocks.

Ed and Jeremy were particularly nice to talk to which was surprising: one thing I hate about bumping into people you never really knew very well is having to do the chat thing and finding that one or the other of you are darting to get away. It was generally good, I did not dart, Jeremy smoked cigarettes, Ed took pictures, MySpazz’s were talked of.

The one downer of this very long Sunday evening was that my 21st birthday present fell off my finger somewhere in Camden. Plus ca change.

I saw someone being arrested last night. I don’t know why that surprised me so much: I’ve lived on the outskirts of Brixton for over a year for god’s sake, it’s a miracle I haven’t witnessed crackdown at dawn.

I was toddling along Victoria wondering why I wasn’t a hell of a lot drunker than I rightly should have been after so much vodka, when I walked through the barriers and smack into the middle of this tall guy in a lumberjack shirt arguing with some yellow fluoro-policemen.

I had no idea what was going on, but they’d obviously being at it for a while. It was heated. They told him to calm down – he didn’t, for whatever reason. They then leapt on him, got his head right down and forced him to the floor. “STICK OUT YOUR ARM!” one of them bellowed. I couldn’t even see if his arm was out or not because he was covered in yellow, but he wasn’t shouting anymore.

A girl clutching a guitar case was crying something unintelligible at the pile of bodies. A female police officer took her to one side and looked like she was explaining, matter of factly. Maybe not a girlfriend then. When something bad happens in London, you usually get a crowd of gawkers, making sure it’s not them. This time people stood there in silence, like a Greek Chorus. A muffled voice from the pile announced he was arresting the man and there was a glint of handcuffs.

One of the policemen stood up and took off his helmet. He was just a baby, only 18 or 19, grinning shyly at nothing in particular. You could tell he was buzzing, thinking: “OK, that was pretty fucking cool!” like I did after I went to my first press conference.

(Everyone downs on policemen. Within my fluffy, safe middle-class world that’s mostly because we have Guardian ideas of liberalism, or we do illegal things and they spoil our fun. But they got the bastards who mugged my housemate, so there.)

Another policewoman turned round. “Right, you can all go downstairs now,” she said briskly. We did, like a factory line: Chorus exits straight down the escalators and job done.

I sat down and started scribbling down what had happened so I could think about it later. The guy next to me must have been reading it. “Did you see that?” he asked. He’d gone down the escalator just as I’d come in. He was deaf, fiercely expressive and with good speech and together we pieced together what must have happened.

”Do you think the police were right?” he asked, over and over. “God knows,” I said, “I didn’t see what happened before. They must have had reason” “He looked drunk,” he said, miming a glass and making ‘good grief’ eyebrows. “The girl bumped into him with her guitar case and he kicked off.” I think this is what he said. I had to ask him to repeat himself and felt like I did when I went to Germany aged 12 and had to go shopping: really thick.

”Have you always been deaf?”

“Yeah, since birth. I learned to speak by reading lips. That’s how I hear.” Laughs. “You’re difficult to understand.” Fair point: when I’m excited I speak like a typewriter.

I spoke more with my hands and eyes, less and more clearly with my mouth. “I don’t know much,” I said, trying to excuse my puny language against his. ”ABC on the fingers. My name is Kat.” Fingers in towards the chest, push out from lips, then your own movement for your name.

An enterprising school teacher of mine called Miss Simms – sarcastic to the point of godliness – decided that instead of dossing around in the half-hour we had to take the register in the mornings, we’d learn sign language. We did it for a year –alphabet, basic phrases, names – and then swapped form tutors so we never did it again.

I’d always kind of regretted it, if only because I knew there’d be one day when I’d meet someone who was deaf and it would be nice to communicate with them in their own language rather than lip reading. Hey, I did.

Earlier that evening, The Journalist and I were talking about communication and language.

”I want to be fluent in Japanese and Welsh by the time I die,” he said. It might have been German, I can’t remember.

”I really hate the fact I’m losing my languages,” I said, doing absolutely nothing about it.

I screwed up my first two years at university. It was only when I got away from there, to France, to Italy, that it finally clicked why I was still studying and it wasn’t so I could discuss La Princesse de Clèves. It’s so that you can talk about comics with people you meet at house parties, or piss around telling stupid jokes. It’s getting a proper insight into a different culture and realising that everyone has something in common, even when they think they’re entirely different. Even if it’s something as mundane as queuing up to buy stamps.

Language is brilliant. Music is language. Communication is everything.

“We’re so useless at communication,” said The Journalist, rolling his eyes as if to encompass the entire UK.

We are. But at least we’re trying to be useless in languages other than our own, to speak to people outside out own, little worlds.

Electro. Geddit? Sigh.

As I sit here gazing at all the glory that the Cyber Candy shop in Cov Garden is capable of giving (Pretzel Flipz! Yes! The white ones!), I'm reckoning that I need to make some mates Stateside. The eternally gorgeous and cool Goldfrapp (learn some new dances ladies! Like, a year ago!) are releasing a remix album called 'We Are Glitter' on October 17, but very meanly they're only doing so in the States.

This is crap because I've heard some of the remixes and they're ace, plus I love The Shortwave Set and can only imagine what wonders their charity shop-thieving antics would wreak upon 'Satin Chic'. Oh, and the tremendous T. Raumschmiere is doing 'Lovely 2 C U', and as his 'Train' remix was pretty cool and he's basically a god, that will be great.

Oh! And that Flaming Lips single will be released on August 14 I think which will be brilliant. I think the 'Slide In' remix is by the other DFA and not DFA 1979 which is what I always think of when I see DFA, and makes slightly more sense, although it would be amazing if they did something like that. Hardcore. Gorgeous.

Enough thinking. More Cyber Candy sweets.

Le tracklisting:

Satin Chic (Bombay Mix by the Shortwave Set)
Lovely 2 C U(T. Raumschmiere Remix)
Ooh La La (Benny Benassi Remix Extended)
You Never Know (Mum Remix)
Satin Chic (Through the Mystic Mix, Dimension 11 by The Flaming Lips)
Number 1 (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke Main Remix)
Fly Me Away (C2 Rmx 4)
Ride A White Horse ( FK- EK Vocal Version)
Slide In (DFA Remix)

Bonus Track:
Strict Machine (We Are Glitter Mix)

Hope you're dandy, if not as full of sweets as me.

---A hormonal, Hallmark Channel wobble about friends. Sorry.---

I had some folks over for dinner on Sunday. I really love that, because if you have a house party then you never end up talking to everyone because you’re the host and either a) get incredibly drunk and fall over b) are hungover, stay sober and fuck everything up or c) everyone stands around looking a bit nervous going “Ooh, this is a nice flat, I’d better try not to break anything.”

My problem is that I go, “Wow! I know some really brilliant people and wouldn’t it be nice to put them all in a room and let them meet each other,” and then get a bit disappointed when it doesn’t work like that. There were six of us this time, which was an eminently sensible number. Last time there were 11 which was a bit hectic and people inevitably ganged up into One End and Other End for conversation.

I looked around at one point and got hopelessly happy. “You’re all amazing!” I cried, like I’d only just noticed. “Look at you! You’re all doing amazing things and are just amazing people!” I wasn’t that drunk. I made a point of not drinking at my usual “Wow, this is exciting and isn’t this delicious?” rate because that ends badly. So I got to fully take in this wonderful bunch of people that I’d brought together and go all misty-eyed.

See, I went to a milk-round university where Things are Expected of you, if only for the exit stats to go in the prospectus. When I went to the careers fair in my final year, there was one journalism table for a local paper, no BBC or anything exciting unless you consider investment banking and the armed forces to be the pinnacle of creative expression. I vaguely thought about going into the Navy when I was 15, mostly because CCF was mandatory at school and I didn’t mind sailing. Their stall basically taught me that I was extremely foolish when I was 15 and you don’t get to do any sailing at all when you’re stuck on a battleship.

The point is that anyone who wanted to do something out of the “ordinary” didn’t really get any advice, so you had to make it up as you went along. Looking round at my friends who’ve carved out their own paths and built on their talents and done exactly what they want is really quite wonderful, especially when careers tutors now seem to go into meltdown when you say you don’t want to work in the Civil Service

I feel incredibly lucky that I've ended up doing what I am now - I am incredibly lucky. There was a great website I wrote for at university which let me make lots of mistakes, write vast amounts of self-indulgent tripe, and got it into my head that I should really nix the whole idea of acting and see if I could focus my mind for long enough to properly pursue writing. I'm horrible at interviews. I vaguely remember ranting about Kerrang! to my future journalism tutor, and went and got depressed-drunk with my brother afterwards. They let me in, eventually, and I fell in love with Wales.

I'm babbling. This is because I am so proud of what us, of what people are doing contrary to the roads laid out for us as children/teenagers/students, the ones that said you shouldn't take a risk because you might end up without a pension, and that's leaking into everything else. Not one of them is letting life pass them by, whether it's what they do outside of 9-5, or what they do 9-5, or instead of it altogether, and that makes me quite giddy.

Myrtle Smoak, doing exactly what she wants and getting involved with crazy political antics in Berlin. OIR, for constantly challenging herself and everyone around her. Opera Cat, for being so patient and reaping the rewards as a result. RBT and the Journalist for constantly making me kow-tow to their writing skills. Brian for the art, the music, everything. Orchestral Blonde, for kicking the arse out of Customs, violins and humour. BDQ for networking her way into wealthy schoolboys. Michael and Corinne for writing about pop stars and morris dancing, and Canadian bears. My housemates, for pissing off to NYC, or doing stand up comedy, while they're grappling with carving out careers in law. Fucking hell.

You don’t know these people, but you know people like them. Aren’t they ace?

All my friends are incredible, silly, ridiculous, lovely people. I imagine, and hope, that all yours are as well. Let’s write them a letter shall we? Or have them round for dinner. Then you get to look at them, and hug them, and if you’re a bit hormonal you can write silly, flowery blogs about them later.