Addicted to Facebook

There is a social network,
I think you know the one,
It sucks the joy out of your life,
And robs you of your fun,

I’m hopelessly addicted,
I finally admit,
My days are now spent stalking,
I’m now a stalky git.

For days I will sit clicking,
Through people I don’t know,
Through fancy dress and holidays,
…And willies made from snow,

And then there is the news feed,
That goes on and on …and on,
And down and down I scroll my way,
Until the sun has gone,

And when the moon begins to shine,
And one should go to sleep,
My sidebar fills with small green dots,
And on to chat I seep,

I know I need to get some help,
But don’t know where to look,
‘Cos every time I go online,
I just end up on da book,

And even as I try and write
This silly little rhyme,
A beeping sound alerts me,
Someone wants to talk online,

I remember not so long ago,
Before life was a screen,
And photographs would crease and fade,
And poking was still mean,

But now my only memories,
A thousand drunken friends,
A never ending cycle,
That I never want to end.

Joe x

Our Big Weekend

Hi, This is Adam, writing from a quiet tower in the rarely-used South wing of the OK Mansion. I’m here to get away from the noise of Dave playing his drums in the North wing.

On Friday we had the pleasure of playing the Admiral Big Weekend in Cardiff. It was the first time we had been asked to do the show and we were obviously very excited. We would be sharing a bill with Welsh legends Funeral for a Friend and Attack! Attack!

Previous Big Weekends have featured luminaries like the Lost Prophets and Feeder, this year would also see Dodgy and The Feeling on the bill. It is a great event to be a part of and we were extremely happy to be asked to play.

So we had our new guitarist, Lego Man, who we pretty much dropped in at the deep end. His debut show with us, after a week in the band, was to be on the massive Big Weekend stage in front of the biggest audience that, quite frankly, any of us had ever played to.

Lego Man, to his credit, nailed all the songs we needed (and more) in just a few rehearsal sessions. He performed excellently and we were all very proud of him.

The day of the gig was a bit of a disaster. Lego Man’s garage door was broken and he couldn’t get to his car, or his equipment. We had a warm-up session booked for the day of the gig at Ripe Fruit Studios but Lego Man was having problems. We had a bit of a run through but as we didn’t want to wear ourselves out we mostly sat around trying not to be nervous or get stressed.

By the time Lego Man got to us, after running around half of south Wales to pick up borrowed equipment, it was precisely time for us to leave for the show.

The staff on Friday at the Big Weekend were excellent, they had sorted us out with everything we needed when we got there. Our dressing room was a large tent decked out with tables of fruit, crisps and peanuts, a nice big leather sofa, a full-length mirror and a fridge full of lager, wine and soft drinks.

The backstage compound was quite impressive. It occupied the more attractive part of the green and was set out around the flower beds and paths. The portaloos, directly opposite the dressing room tents were so nice I would have been happy to eat my dinner in there. Next to them was the canteen marquee, where we did have our dinner, which was excellent. It was all top class, the artist relations ladies were extremely attentive and we were basically spoiled rotten.

As we waited for Death Before Sunrise, the opening act of the weekend, to finish their last song the nerves were mounting uncontrollably, I hadn’t seen the crowd yet, as I had been hiding away backstage, but it sounded big. I was terrified.

John Roston, of Swn (who were curating Friday’s festivities) gave us our introduction and we went on to a great reception. The gig went well, many of the people in the audience  had seen us supporting Darwin Deez (also a Swn event) a couple of months ago and had come back for more OK goodness. It was a great crowd, they actually had a mosh pit going on again, which is something I am always amazed to see at our gigs.

We did 30mins of break-neck indie pop, threw ourselves around the stage and had a lot of fun. After the show we were mobbed at the merch stand where we met lots of fans and signed T-shirts, CDs and lots of other random scraps of paper. We had our photo taken with people and basically soaked up lots of praise, our egos swelling by the second. It was an experience we hadn’t had before and it’s going to be very difficult playing gigs in cities where nobody knows us to audiences of ten or twenty.

Here are some links about the show:

BBC Wales Flickr

A nice review also from BBC Wales

Pictures by Nadine Ballantyne

In other news, we will be arranging a 14+ gig at Clwb Ifor Bach very soon. Nothing is confirmed yet but we will announce stuff through Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

We will also be booking more dates in London and the south and hopefully some other cities. Now we have a full line-up again we can resume our efforts to book a few European dates. There is also some possibilities with an American flavour in the pipeline.

So that’s all for now, stay safe and I’ll hopefully see you soon at a show.

Adam xxx

Our new WordPress Blog!

Hello, this is Adam from OK and this is our new WordPress blog. I have set it up mainly because our old blog was on Myspace and, as we all know, Myspace is dying a death. Facebook is our biggest platform at the moment and it doesn’t have a blog function so this is a nice neutral place to write and have slanging matches with the other members of the band.

NEWS

There is lots to report in OK land. As you may know, our guitarist Oliver Miles quit about a month ago. He served under the OK banner for a year during which time we had a lot of fun playing gigs all over the place and recording lots of songs. We are very sad to see him go and we will all miss him.

Our new guitarist is, funnily enough, called Lego Man. His real name is Luke and he is a legend. Lego Man has been working hard at the set and it is sounding fantastic, he has picked up all the songs very quickly. We all think he makes a great addition to the team as he joins the exclusive club of ‘people who have been in OK’. Here is a picture of him:

So we are all set for the Admiral Big Weekend in Cardiff which kicks off tomorrow. We play at 7:30 on Friday, the Swn-curated day. We are on before Attack! Attack! and Funeral For a Friend, which is very exciting. We have put together a full-throttle half-hour which features mostly new material but will include some old favourites from our country-indie days all those years ago back on the farm.

We have some new recordings which we hope will be ready soon, they were done with Jordan Andrews at Ripe Fruit Studios, Cardiff, where we did the Lego single. We’re not quite sure yet what we’re going to do with them, we may hold back and record one more and make it a four-track EP single. The songs that we have done so far are Learning to Drive (the one we normally open with), Indie Feet (the one that normally follows that) and (Here’s to) Never Looking Back (the Woh-ho-ho-ho one). We are discussing the possibility of doing some more sessions and adding Blue in the Face to make it a four-track EP, with the latter as the single from it.

In other news we can confirm that we will have a song featured on the pilot episode of new reality show Cardiff Born, Cardiff Bred. We have not been told which song they are using but we are looking forward to seeing the show which, from the trailer, looks class.

So the future will see us playing more gigs in Cardiff, London and across Britain with some dates in Europe later in the year. Stay tuned for that. We will also be posting lots more stupid flipcam videos as and when amusing or interesting stuff happens.

That’s all for now, remember to join our Facebook fanpage at http://www.facebook.com/pages/OK/81056970025 for all the latest updates and you can follow us on Twitter; @thatbandok

Hope to see you soon,

Adam xxx