Tape Deck Heart - Album Review

This album review was undertaken as part of the magazine module of the third year BA Journalism course at the University of Winchester.

Photo Credit - Press Counsel PR

The latest offering from Winchester’s own Frank Turner, Tape Deck Heart is not an album that will change the world or change the opinion of his critics. What it is though is a solid collection of songs that show Turner’s maturing as a lyricist and ear for a tune that began to show itself more clearly on previous effort, England Keep My Bones.

Although many of Turner’s songs could be seen as personal, (Ballad of Me and All My Friends, Substitute), the subject matter that makes up the bulk of Tape Deck Heart is much more introspective, dissecting a messy breakup piece by piece in a very detailed way with much more personal information than you’d expect from most artists these days. If you’re not a fan of Turner’s storytelling style and arguably populist themes then this is unlikely to convert you. Album opener Recovery starts with just Turner and an acoustic guitar before breaking into a rip roaring statement of intent, an optimistic start to an album which deals at times with themes that obviously mean a lot to Turner and would resonate with many in his situation.

The lyrical content of Tape Deck Heart is a departure from the thematic approach that Turner took on England Keep My Bones. That album was seen as a love letter to England with tracks like Rivers expunging all of Turner’s clearly heartfelt love for the country he calls home, despite the amount of touring the career he has chosen requires of him. Turner noted in an interview with Asia Life Magazine that “this record isn’t about England at all — I did that last time round. This album is about self-examination, running through your own faults, about change, and about ending. Something like that.”

If Tape Deck Heart is about faults then Tell Tale Signs is its anthem, starting as it means to go on actually naming the woman who caused Turner to feel this way (“God damnit Amy.”) and talking frankly – no pun intended – about the ins and outs of the relationship and its breakdown, it’s a subject that has been touched on before by Turner on previous albums but if you’ve followed his career closely it is most interesting to compare this attitude to songs from a seemingly happier time when Turner was a lot less cynical about relationships and their effect. To Take You Home from 2008s Love Ire & Song showed the wide eyed wonder of a blossoming love whereas Tape Deck Heart is closer to a broken heart album. In an interview on Dance Yrself Clean (their spelling, not mine) Turner describes the album as having “a lot of stuff on this record about loss and failure in relationships, about what happens when something that was supposed to be timeless runs out of time.”

Photo Credit - Brantley Gutierrez

 

Turner does offer some hope for this seemingly hopeless situation and songs like Four Simple Words and the current radio hit Recovery are songs built for Turner’s true home, the festivals and the gig circuit. Like I Still Believe from his previous album, Four Simple Words is built around a simple refrain (“I want to dance”) which is perfectly pitched to get a crowd going in the style of the traditional sing-a-long. This isn’t to say that it is the best song on the album by any stretch, for my money – and it was my money that bought it – the best formed song is The Fisher King Blues, arguably the least directly personal track on the album. Despite the name check for Battersea power station, the song has its heart somewhere in the deep south of America with an honest old style bluesy break down seemingly at odds with the rest of the folk style that is Turner’s trademark.

We are far past the time when it is shocking that Turner, a man who fronted early 2000s hardcore band Million Dead, should be so proficient at a style normally reserved for self styled working class poets like Billy Bragg and it should come as no surprise that the two have become friends, bonded by music and politics, another subject that was Turner’s bread and butter an album or two ago and yet the man who once sang a song title Thatcher F**ked the Kids, politics makes next to no intrusion on Tape Deck Heart, eschewed in favour of the more personal direction he has taken over maybe the last two albums.

No song on the album feels particularly out of place but without the thematic structure that held Turner’s previous album together the album as a whole does not flow quite as well as you would hope. This could be a reflection of music as a whole these days as nobody is making whole albums, only collections of singles and if that is the case then Turner has collected a number of great singles together here. Whether they will become classics remains to be seen but Turner is building a body of work that if not enjoyed then ought to be respected as he moves from angry folk polemicist to simply one of this country’s most interesting wordsmiths working in music today.

Fans will lap up every note and word but there is not much here for anyone who does not already enjoy Turner’s music. If you didn’t enjoy him as a politically driven songwriter it is unlikely that you will enjoy his more personal direction, regardless of the now seemingly permanent addition of his longstanding touring band The Sleeping Souls, (Florence has her Machine, and Frank Turner has his Sleeping Souls). The mainstream attention that his appearance on the “green and pleasant land” of the pre-Olympics ceremony may have been on Turner’s mind as he wrote and recorded the tracks that make up Tape Deck Heart but if he’s nervous about the fact that he is less of a cult act these days then it doesn’t show on what is a mature offering from a constantly maturing musician.

Photo credit - Ben Morse

Quote attribution: Dance Yrself Clean - Frank Turner interview & Asia Life Magazine - Frank Turner interview

Link to article on WINOL website.

Geoff Williams - Confessional Interview

This is an interview I conducted for the magazine module of the third year of my BA Journalism course at the University of Winchester with cancer survivor Geoff Williams.

Day in the Life of the News - Documentary project

For one of my final university assessments I had to take a day filming in London whilst other teams of my peers on the course filmed at places like Al Jazeera and Five News.

Here is the final edit of those shots.




Filmed and edited by myself, Dael Gornall and Louis O'Brien.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Magazine Editor Interview - Ben Preston Radio Times

For the magazine journalism module in the final year of my BA Journalism degree (I know, final year, crazy!) I was required to interview the editor of my chosen magazine. I chose the Radio Times and its editor Ben Preston. We were then required to edit this interview down to a maximum of 10 minutes and submit it to our blogs, essentially, in case that hadn't become fairly obvious, that is what I'm doing right now, right this second. Give it a watch. (In glorious 1080p HD!!)

 

 Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL Critical Reflection

It’s my final year on Winchester News Online (WINOL), the student journalism behemoth which has taken over my life for the last year and a half. This semester I took on the role of production editor, a role that I had wanted since my first semester when I was a lowly production lackey, sub editing things and sitting on the sound desk. As a whole I am proud of how the bulletin has run and how it has looked. It was pointed out to me the other day that it is rare to have a team on production at the start of a new year that only has one third year student. When I started on production we had Domonique, Justina and Jack all on production overseeing me, George and Dan, so to take a group of complete novices to a fairly well oiled machine I think I have done well.

I wish I had been able to innovate more as production editor; the website has moved forward so much but the bulletin is much the same as it always has been. Together with Dan as news editor we have implemented the ‘Coming Up’ feature most weeks, which broke the show up well, and we also tried a new credits style which threw to the website for the packages that didn’t make it into the bulletin. Only the coming up survived but the first semester with a new team is difficult; you have more chance for innovation in your second semester on WINOL  so I hope the second years will carry our solid foundations forward to really do some innovative things with the bulletin, now that the website has settled down. I feel I was slightly restricted by the studio but we have developed a system which allows us to light presenters better by recording Sport in advance, as the packages are often done on the Monday or Tuesday. If you look at the last bulletin, both Henry and Ali are well lit, not ghostly or even particularly shiny as presenters have been in the past. We tried having the presenter stand up during the headlines, in a similar way to ITV, but with the way our green screen works you don’t get the sense of perspective so that idea was ditched. We have changed our headlines, simplifying them with a new music bed that is easier to edit. We have retained the old Garage Band WINOL theme but the different bed means we can more easily drop stories from the bulletin, even if they aren’t originally in the headlines, by dragging and dropping any story we want into the timeline. In the final bulletin we our presenter sat with a laptop, something we couldn’t have done before as the sports presenter would have been sitting there. The laptop performs no real function but it looks professional and it also gives the presenter something to look up from when moving from VT to the next part of the script.

Aside from WINOL we had quite a few large scale projects which we hoped would really show what we’ve learnt and how big WINOL has become. We started with the BJTC awards. Henry organised us into a team before we had even started on WINOL and despite some people having never worked with the equipment before, we put on a show that impressed the BJTC and hopefully worried our rivals. On the subject of rivals we had never really had a true rival that we could hold our work up against before; we talk about Westminster and occasionally Southampton but this year we took the success of Goldsmith’s and their East London Lines website as a direct challenge to us, causing us to really put work in to gaining a higher Alexa ranking on our website in both the UK and Worldwide. We were a long way behind them at the beginning of the semester but with the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner Debate, the American Election and our week of daily 99 second news we were able to direct a lot of traffic to our site. Also, when plugging the bulletin on Facebook, Twitter and other social media we used to send our viewers to YouTube rather than the site, meaning we got a lot of views but the site suffered. This year though I was part of the decision to send people to the site for the bulletin, which meant a slight drop in viewers as it is a different system but increased the traffic for the site. At the end of my time as production editor  WINOL was the top student journalism site in the country as shown in the Alexa rankings where we were 479,411[1] in our global rank and 10,333[1] in our UK rank; over 10,000 places ahead in the UK rank of our nearest rivals in this country, the aforementioned East London Lines. This is to be commended and I think everyone on the team should be proud of this achievement now that we can confidently call ourselves the best student journalism and definitely the most widely viewed in the country. Special mention goes to Sam, website editor, who has overseen the change and Jason who has helped engineer it by taking us through the transition to the seemingly simpler WordPress system.

Another project we undertook was the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner Debate (HPCC), planned by our main politics reporter Louis O’Brien. In the weeks building up to it we had a lot of planning sessions; details changed, venues changed, and the university got involved but we were fairly confident that we could pull it off. All the third years involved were veterans of November 30^th and me, Henry, Ewan, Flick and Sam were involved in the memorial service last year at a school, a job given to us by a professional production company so we knew we could do it. The scale of the event though was much larger as we had six candidates to look after and host, BBC South’s Alex Forsyth. We also had an audience of around 300 packed into the Stripe auditorium; add this to the online audience, streaming the event live on UStream and it was one of our most successful events. My role on the night was as a sort of director or perhaps a floor manager; there’s not much we could do about talkback and the like and Henry was running the camera output from the tricaster, although he had to rely on his camera people to give him good shots to choose from. It fell to me to time answers and try to keep Alex Forsyth informed as to whether she needed to hurry someone along or whether a candidate had longer for their opening statements. This was a big responsibility but fortunately Alex was a fantastic host and I hope that she appreciated my help.

The American elections saw us attempt to cover another big event, evolving from when WINOL covered the General Election in 2010 and attempting to do the same but on a much larger scale. It became obvious that this wouldn’t be possible, the programme would need to be a different kind of show and after changes and confusion from an organisational point of view we had a programme that would be two hours long, streamed live like the HPCC debate and that took the form of a discussion show with guests and experts, trying to argue over who would win the elections. The show was to be broadcast from nine o’clock but not in the contingency plan was the prospect of Obama winning before we went to air. This showed a real lack of planning but cannot be solely blamed on Ali as the head of the project. We should have encouraged Ali to involve other people in the plans sooner but other projects got in the way. On the day we came in and Ali was asking if we could take the show down to a 15 minute bulletin, the same length as a normal WINOL but I knew this wouldn’t be possible. A two hour long show had been promised and that was what we were going to put out. I was director for the whole two hours and it was a very steep learning curve. I volunteered to direct the show since no one else seemed like they wanted the job, despite having only directed one WINOL before;  that gave me more experience than some but it was still a lot of pressure. I think if you compare my directing style during the two hours (which was frantic at best) to my directing during the bulletin that afternoon where it was decided I would also take the helm, I was a much more accomplished director, keeping everyone in the gallery informed as well as the presenter who often feels a little bit lost and alone in the studio. I think the whole experience taught me a lot about directing and has shown me that it is something I would really like to pursue; nothing on WINOL, except perhaps occasionally turning my hand to presenting, has given me a greater buzz than being in control of that gallery.

In our final week of WINOL we decided we would have a daily news update in the style of BBC Three’s 60 seconds. It was to be called 99 news and a unit was put together to produce the bulletins, whilst I stayed focused on putting out our final bulletin of the semester and my final bulletin altogether. The show was very polished and made its one o’clock deadline every day bar the Monday. It gives us the distinction of being the only student run organisation to boast daily news broadcasts, most journalism courses only do one news day a term, and not only do we do WINOL weekly but we now have a pretty viable plan for daily news updates which I personally think could be carried forward into next semester. I also got involved with the radio, being a regular newsreader during WINOL’s Tuesday takeover as it was called. I really like radio as a medium and was quite glad to get some experience, no matter how small, on my CV before I left.

I would have liked to direct the final week of WINOL but it is no longer about us, the third years, it is about passing the torch so to speak to another team of hopefully bright young things who will continue to build upon the solid foundation I think we have laid out. I worry a little about production because although I encouraged members of my production team to get training on lighting, made sure they were officially studio trained and to learn things like the tricaster, I’m not sure this ever happened. And with many of them wanting to try their hand at news or sport next semester before deciding where they really want to be on WINOL, I worry that not many people will have the production skills I taught to my group, who have been a superb help and very good at following instructions. The main worry for me at the start of the semester was how I would cope with the added pressure of having a team of people working under me, and I think I was able to cope a lot better because of the quality of the team. They all had a chance to direct except Nicole who would have been director in the last week if she hadn’t had to disappear due to a problem at home. However I am pleased to say that Ben did a great job, learning a lot over the intervening weeks between that and the first WINOL which he also directed. It was criticised by some that I let a second year direct the first couple of weeks but I think throwing them in at the deep end was necessary to give them the fear that all journalists should live by. I am therefore extremely happy with how this term has gone and how my time as production editor has come to a close. Long may WINOL’s dominance continue.

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[1] Alexa rankings correct as of 13^th December 2012

FOI not MOI - Investigative Journalism

I don't even know if the joke in the title is funny... or even a joke. But this is the last blog of this semester so let's get into it and get it over with.

In journalism the news agenda is not set by the journalist; we do not decide what to write about. In investigative journalism though the point is that the story should not be on the agenda. For an example from WINOL look at a story from the start of my second year where Julie Cordier investigated how many Hampshire police officers had previous convictions. You can view the story on YouTube here but the important thing here is that police officers with convictions was not a topic on the agenda, it was just a story that Julie had basically made up and then used the system of FOI requests to back it up and get the information she needed to make the story work. Often, investigative journalism is close in form to gonzo or presenter led journalism. During the lecture, Chris gave us an example where this was the case with his book True Blue. It wasn't something on the news agenda that they went to investigate and it is presenter led or more likely gonzo. If you're still unsure about investigative journalism then it is important to remember the big things in the history of the form like Emile Zola's famous J'Accuse or the investigation into the convictions of the Birmingham Six. Miscarriages of justice are the things that journalists will most often look to investigate because the reasons behind them can often be very much in the public interest, a corrupt government, a conspiracy; all good journalism topics. It was good to have a lecture on this subject as it directly influenced my thoughts about my FYP which is on the Innocence Project. For people who haven't heard of it or if I haven't written about it before, the Innocence Project was started in America for prisoners on death row who were still pleading not guilty despite many trials and appeals. It eventually was transferred over here and now university courses (mainly in law) can take on cases from prisoners in the UK who are still imprisoned for crimes they claim they didn't commit.

Back to the lecture though and Chris then went on to talk about a lady who is a hero to journalists although you may not have heard of her. Before our newsroom got a revamp her picture was on the wall but her story is worth more than that. Veronica Guerin was a journalist in Ireland during 'the troubles' who began investigating the crime lords of Ireland when no one else would. It was when she began to investigate drug dealers that she began to receive several death threats; shots fired into her home, a gunman at the door, threats over the phone. Her murder was an attack on democracy and the real irony is that two days after her death she was due to speak at a conference in London where her topic was "Dying to Tell the Story: Journalists at Risk." It wasn't the first time a journalist had been killed while investigating a story and it won't be the last but Guerin's story is one that should inspire rather than deflate us. Her pioneering work almost certainly did more to highlight the issue of drug crime in Ireland and whilst it cost her her life, her work will never be forgotten.

FOI requests are not just for journalists and can be made by anybody, yes YOU unsuspecting reader who wasn't prepared for me to address them directly. Websites like whatdotheyknow.com allow you to browse and make your own requests which could be responded to if you ask in a particular way. The people on the end of those requests will do everything they can to avoid answering so you need to be specific and you need to be prepared for disappointment. Two reporters over the last semester of WINOL had a huge amount of FOI requests out, submitted over the summer and despite their hard work were unable to make any of them work and these are our best reporters. Sometimes you're not asking the right questions or the idea just isn't going to turn up anything interesting.

This might be my last blog for a while apart from the WINOL Critical Reflection which should be above so...

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Channel 5 bulletin - notes

Geoff Hill, the editor of Channel 5 news is coming in to be our guest editor for WINOL tomorrow and he kindly asked us to 'debrief' his 5 o'clock bulletin, the same way that he will debrief our bulletin tomorrow.

So without further ado, the bulletin started with the presenter in vision before going to the top story headline, floods. The floods got a really rather large amount of coverage considering the bulletin is only about 22 minutes long, but we'll come to that later. The quote from David Cameron in the heads was rather weak but I understand why it was used. We've had a lot of trouble over the last few weeks ourselves with using upsot in the heads just for the sake of using it, sometimes ending up with an unnecessary quote. Having Cameron on location at the floods though makes using him an absolute necessity.

We had the opening graphic after that which was a little jarring to some of us since we tend to run the graphic before our headlines; it does help to break things up though and the opening graphic is a hell of a lot nicer than ours. It wouldn't hurt our programme to have a team dedicated to that kind of thing, it really shows how useful having a graphics team is later on in the 5 news bulletin.

The next headlines were about the Noro Virus, Nadine "I'm an MP get me out of here" Dorries, the funeral of an actor in Coronation Street and the announcement of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist. Based on Channel 5s other programming it is easy to see why rather tabloid stories such as Nadine Dorries and the Corrie star were covered in the way they were. The grab from Chris Hoy was odd and I'm assuming the freeze and style of "find out what they had to say" is an editorial choice that is used regularly.

I quite liked the set which sadly we don't have the luxury of (yet!), the second years will do in our lovely new studio though. But I wasn't sure about having the presenter standing throughout the whole bulletin. The convention I've seen in a lot of news is standing during headlines and seated behind a desk for the actual bulletin, something we've tried to replicate but again, the lack of a set makes it look odd.

The bulletin then went into its first story which was arguably its second story as well with two live OBs to reporters on location. It's always really good to get a live OB and especially in a story like this where it really matters about having people on location for updates. With our team it's often difficult to do that and we were, without putting it strongly at all, extremely disappointed not to get our OB from the student demonstrations in London last week, something that would be inexcusable on a national news broadcast. I liked the map graphic in the first flood package; some people I talked to thought it went on a little too long but I think with the information it was pitched about right and helped to illustrate a story where the pictures will be very good but very samey. My favourite part of the package though was the lovely bit of natsot at the end; it was the perfect way to end it and from a production point of view an absolute godsend as it means you can make sure there are no black holes when cutting from the VT to the presenter. The second flood VT however was possibly unnecessary. It's great to hear from reporters across the country but whilst the reports had slightly different focuses, I can't help feeling that the stories could have been combined. The footage from the RNLI was a nice touch though as it helped the package feel vital and current and the leisure centre vox pops were well pitched; having real people comment on this story when it is about real people is the most important thing. I did find the interviews a little odd however as the reporter was still very much in shot, or at least the back of her head was, and presumably this was a stylistic point as it was a recurring feature throughout the bulletin. Something I think I liked but did at first amuse me was the interview with the man, still in his house, leaning out of the window. It was quite jarring visually at first but how else would you have filmed it? Would you have gone tighter and been accused of TV fakery since it would have appeared that he was on the ground floor? It did help give that sense of people being trapped in their own homes though and that set the right tone for the package.

On a separate note, I couldn't quite work out if the bulletin was being filmed on a full set with a screen behind it, or whether it was a green-screen with the strange desk type thing protruding from the floor.

Regardless, the next story was the return of our favourite winter illness, the noro virus. It comes around every year and nobody is particularly surprised so having it is a bit of a non-story; it sort of has to be covered though although the slightly eerie music made it seem more like a plague rather than a sickness bug. I've had the noro virus a couple of years ago, just after Christmas actually and whilst it was horrible, the only real side effect was not being able to eat ALL of the mince pies in the world. Again the reporter was in shot during the interview which I addressed above but the graphic this time, whilst well done, was a little hard to take in. It was very number heavy graphic and I actually found it rather hard to take in all the information and I couldn't tell you what any of the statistics were now. It was similar with the Eon power OOV. I know it was something about paying compensation but I can't for the life of me remember anything about the story, it wasn't visually interesting so I just switched off. Unfortunately this is often the case with OOVs as they are the bottom feeders of news. If a story fails, it becomes an OOV and so that may reflect why the pictures were dull.

Nadine Dorries was next and it was a rather odd story all round. First of all, the fact that Dorries was even in the 'celebrity jungle' is weird but then the story was essentially her coming home to see if she would still have a job as an MP but didn't really have any footage of her. A few pictures were used but it cut to the political editor for comment that didn't add much. We were told that Nadine Dorries was in a part of Westminster that didn't allow cameras; well why didn't we see her in a bit that did? It seemed like covering the story for the sake of covering it. If it hasn't got pictures then should it go in? It is quite often the same dilemma we face on WINOL with our news editor agonising over a story that isn't visually interesting but is important. It's rather comforting to know that the professionals face similar problems to us. We must be doing something right.

It was great to see a 'coming up' as it is something we've been trying to implement over the last few weeks with varying degrees of success. Also, on Channel 5 you have the perfect place to put your coming up, just before the adverts. I did find it a little odd though that coming out of the adverts we were reminded of the floods but nothing new was really added. I know the BBC sometimes repeats their headlines in the same slot as the coming up was played so it is a convention and obviously coming out of the adverts it might be necessary to remind viewers of what's gone, something we fortunately don't have to worry about.

The Yasser Arafat story was well dealt with considering it had to be mostly archive footage. They were the only interviews as well not to feature the back of the reporter's head so why didn't we go a bit closer on the interviewee's faces? It might just be my own personal preference. The Coronation Street star funeral was a little oddly pitched; obviously it is aimed at the Channel 5 audience but I think despite the person's celebrity status, it felt strange to be sort of intruding into people's grief.

It was nice to break up the show again with another OOV and the pictures were pretty great so anyone not interested in Corrie actors no longer with us would have been suitably woken up by a burning crane. I certainly was.

And finally (see what I did there?) we had the BBC Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) package which I really enjoyed as the vox pops helped make it the light story it is. Nobody, well it's unlikely anyway, will get angry about the SPOTY awards so the tone was about right for a piece like this. It was a little odd though considering I don't think we saw the face of the reporter that we had the back of their head again. It made it look like we weren't allowed to see their face. It might not have registered on an audience that wasn't full of aspiring journos.

Overall though it was a very enjoyable broadcast and as a person who is traditionally a BBC News viewer it is interesting to see 'how the other half live' so to speak. I look forward to hearing what Geoff has to say about our bulletin tomorrow.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.