John B vs. Glamour For Better "Architechs of DIscotech

Just got back from a meeting with the band's manager and we've figured out the release plans - so I can finally play you a snippet!

I heard about Glamour for Better randomly in my local newspaper (!), the Maidenhead Advertiser, so I checked out their stuff on Myspace and loved it! Got in touch with their managers/label at Ear Candy Music to see if they fancied a remix, I could tell their sound would work great in a John B D&B/electro stylee. Anyway... this is the result of many hours of me in the studio being a mighty remixer of a mighty band ;-)

Click the Play button to listen (obviously...)

We'll be putting it out as a joint venture on Beta/Ear Candy on 12" vinyl, limited edition coloured vinyl, and then full digital mp3 on itunes/beatport etc 2 weeks after the vinyl release date. More news as it happens...

PLEASE COMMENT WITH FEEDBACK HERE TO LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK! ;-)

Still in the studio

Had a very productive few days, been crossing off lingering boring admin tasks one by one, but more importantly, getting some good stuff done in the studio.

Went for a run today, was slow, 34 mins for my usual 4 mile course. My Nike+ thing seems to have lost its calibration settings though, so it thinks I only did 3 - and I know for a fact it was 4 - I've been doing the same route for years. Blah.

Finished watching series 2, part 1 of Heroes last night - thought it was going to be stupid, but was pleasantly suprised. I hope those writers in Hollywood sort out their strike stuff so they can get back to work and do the 2nd part - looks like Syler got his powers back and is going to be badass again. Dr. Suresh and that chearleader, and Petrelli are SUCH TOTAL DOUCHES. Thank god the fate of humanity isn't really down to them...

Ayway - just finishing off yet another new one, called "When the time comes". It's an instrumental D&B track, very minimal and prog/electroey - I guess I've been listening to a lot of deadmau5 lately and it's rubbed off. 

Kept the production really simple, but super tight and technical. So far its on 33 audio instruments, with every sound on its own channel so I could mix it perfectly. I haven't used much audio on this, only about 12 other tracks, but its mainly software instruments rather than dropped in audio files...

Here's a photo of my screen right now for all you g33ks:

Audio in the morning...

Fresh Air

Decided I've been locked indoors, in front of the mac in the studio a bit too much so made an effort to get out and breathe some fresh air this weekend...

Had a quick walk around Braywick park at the weekend, and then a mighty 4 mile walk around Virginia Water with Hayley yesterday - its 4 miles around the lake there, according to the blub, the 'largest man-made lake in the UK'. Nice. 

But they have no bins. I carried my espresso cup with me for all 4 miles. And counted lots of little bags of dog poo people had left by the path. FIX UP VIRGINIA WATER AND GET SOME BINZ!

In other news, I finished the John B vs. Glamour for Better track and it's a monster. AND did a new track on Sunday, called 'Dancing in the Dark' AND got Shaz's new vocals for the big trance/DnB track 'Heroes' so got that finished too... 

I started another new track last night as well, its sounding like a cross between recent Pryda electrohouse stuff, and, erm... me - in a drum&bass electrostep stylee... If you make it to my gigs in Manchester and Linz, Austria this weekend you'll get the premiers...

Clips on here later today too - if you're nice... ;-)

Nice bit of press in Knowledge Mag

If you can ignore the fact that I can't scan things at the correct angle...

Thanks to K Mag for a nice mention in their recent issue (the one with Shimon on the front). Big up!

Word has it my new single "Mr. Freud" has got SINGLE OF THE MONTH in the new Mixmag too...

Number 2 in the Myspace Charts!

Whoohar! Just had a look at the Myspace D&B Charts and your's truly is at NUMBER 2!

AND - Number 5 on the Myspace Electro Charts above people like Gary Numan & Mylo...

Hurrah!

New Tour Video

I've just uploaded a new video podcast, a behind the scenes tour video from when I did a long weekend in Russia/Siberia back in October last year.

If you've already subscribed to my itunes Podcast feed it should be downloading automatically as we speak, so you can watch it on your iPod etc - but its also up here on my YouTube page, and will also be on my Myspace Video Channel and on my Facebook page. 

Ah, the local Maidenhead intern3t cables must love me and my uploading...

Disturbing things you see on domestic Russian Aeroplanes. Part 1

I've just been editing a tour video from October last year, where I did 3 Russian gigs in one weekend - which brought the full horror back of what it's like sometimes on trusty 'ol Aeroflot.

Getting the exit row seat. SCORE!

Spotting you have the 'EXIT ROPE'. EPIC FAIL!

I likeeeee

Just found this, taken in Miami around WMC time last year...

You Like?

From the Vaults...

My first ever DJ booking...

Think my Dad let me put a few tunes on when he'd gone to the toilet or something. If I remember correctly this was at the hotel at Boulter's Lock, for a friend of the family's 50th Birthday or something...

Rock on. I still remember that Phonic mixer, Dad used to use it at the 'Junior Disco' at my primary school when i was 7 - still works today, and I had it in my studio until a few years ago. Nice LEDs.

First run of 2008

Woke up with cocktail flu, courtesy of last night's trip to Maidenhead's finest nightspot Smoky Joe's. Had a fabulous time of course, apart from the new rule that you have to check in your coat. You HAVE to. I think it's an evil plan to stop everyone loitering outside in the smoking area and buy more drinks, and it sucks if your outfit is built around a mighty trendy jacket...

Drunky John B-eye view...

My friend Beth bamboozling a boy into buying shots - which we then inherited as he was too drunk. They're in the fridge at home now, those aftershock things just look like chemistry experiment specimens to me...

Went for the first run of 2008 this afternoon, the sun had come out so I thought I'd brave the outside world. Managed my usual 4 miles in a pretty slow 34 minutes - odd. Oh, and I've added my random Nike+ widget thing to the sidebar here, so you can check out if I've been running enough. It's a cool little gadget plugs into your ipod and connects wirelessly with a pedometer in your shoe that figures out how far you've run, and syncs all the info when you plug your ipod back in...

The pigeons attacked me again.

And I was relieved to see that everyone else's daffodils/tulips are hatching and its not just mine. I was ready to take them back to Amsterdam and get my money back...

Might try to hit the studio tonight, I need to finish off the Glamour for Better remix, but I'm a bit too frazzled right now. Maybe later...

The average John B Weekend in Pictures

Yay for Wednesdays, and a free weekend! Don't get me wrong - I LOVE my job, but for every 2 hours on stage I probably spend 4 or 5 travelling, plus the airport/wierd hotel time. Fun really, but at times a bit frazzling. Hurrah.

60,000 Friends on Myspace!

Whaoh! Just checked up on my myspace account and I've broken the 60,000 friends barrier! Hurrah!

Although, a few thousand of them are probably ringt0ne/pr0n spammer types. Or Dogs...

Turns out they've just introduced a new friend adding function for bands with over 10K friends that can automatically approve friend requests. 

"Hi folks!
In case you are wondering why your friend base grows without receiving any friend requests, we have been working on a new feature that allows bands with over 10,000 friends to automatically approve friend requests to save you some time.
Some bands received this functionality early but in about a week all bands with over 10,000 friends will have the feature. Once the feature goes out to all bands you well be able to turn it on or off in your account settings. - Tom"

Now THAT'S why my friend requests had vanished! I'd began to worry I'd 'fallen off' when in fact Tom has now saved me 20 mins a day at least going through and manually approving all the fans. Excellent. More time to blog...

If you haven't already added me, or even looked at my myspace account, if you're here, you really should - it's www.myspace.com/johnbbeta. Loads of random tour photos as usual, and the video section has all my tour videoblogs - plus you can use the tracks on my music player to make your page look all high brow and full of good taste ;-)

Embarrassing start to the day...

Woken up from fabulous swimming-with-Sea-Lions dream (don't ask) by knock at the door.

Open front door, in bathrobe, with complete bedhead, which in my case is usually a very unkempt mohawk variation, and creases still on my face from the pillow etc. At least no leftover makeup today though.

Its the nice Polish Tescos delivery man.

Girlfriend comes to see what's up, wearing not very much.

"There's just one substitution today sir"

"Erm. Ok..."

Great. Now the Tescos dude thinks we just eat Tesco Value 8p Yoghurt, drink wine and shag. I'll have to go back to leaving the house and actually going to the supermarket...

Can anyone translate this?

My German only works after a nice bottle of Reisling...

John B Live Dates Diary

Just updated my myspace page gig listings bit so thought I'd copy the image in over here. 

Looks like I'm free this weekend, which is ACE - I'll be able to do something normal not involving airports, hotels and lack of sleep - hurrah! 

Think I've got a Birthday party to go to on Friday, then probably back to Maidenhead to drop by my mate Linus' D&B event Bassment. They've got Break playing, last time I saw him was randomly a few weeks ago at Heathrow on the way to Switzerland with Silent Witness, and then bizarrely LTJ Bukem, Conrad AND Skibbadee. If we'd known beforehand we should have gone all Judge Jules and got a nice private jet... (We're all super rich in D&B and can afford such simple luxuries). 

OMG just remembered the coat Bukem had on. Legendary. Should have taken a photo indeed. He looked like a very warm, slightly Russian, stylish, pimp. Although I loved THAT giant silver Tommy Hilfiger one from the Logical Progression days (yes I can remember back that far) this one killed it. I'm going to have to find his tailor... If I hadn't been so drunk at Swerve last week I'd have remembered to ask him ;-)

The New Single "Mr. Freud" & "Red Sky"

Had a chat with the distributors today and got some news on the next release on my label, and the first JOHN B single I've done since Stalking You On Myspace

The release date has been pushed back 2 weeks because of ordering issues with the major chain stores over the Christmas holidays, so official release dates are February 11th for the Vinyl, and Digital will be 2 weeks later on February 25th (the idea of that is to encourage/support the vinyl buyers out there).

The artwork is ACE - thanks to my genius designer Ricky at Trickartt. It's designed to look like a really old 5 1/4" floppy disk, like we used to have on the BBC micros at school and super old Apple Macs... I think these things could hold 512K or something MASSIVE like that... ;-)

In case you haven't heard them yet:

John B "Mr. Freud" (BETA 019)


John B feat. Shaz Sparks "Red Sky" (BETA 019)

First Photos from Kiev on Friday

Just found these at: http://topdj.ua/photos/12247/ taken by our reader "BadBwoy" - from my gig at Forsage Club in Kiev, Ukraine on Friday night (with Ed Rush, Rhymetime & Wilchild).

More here:

http://nightlife.ua/gallery/showgallery.php?cat=890
http://wadiman.io.com.ua/album86358_0

http://topdj.ua/photos/12244/
http://jeans.invaders.com.ua/events/62621

HEAVY!

PS if any of you guys were at the party, or know where the rest of the professional photos are, please get in touch so I can get them to upload here, and to my myspace, facebook and flickr accounts... SPASIBO!

Oh dear...

It was only a matter of time...

As seen in the front row at my gig in Boston

This year. 

I swear.

I guess I'm gona have to try harder on the hair front...

Sixth Sense Depriving me of sleeeep

Watched the Sixth Sense last night on ITV, figured I deserved an hour or 2 of not actually doing something music related. Big Mistake. When I eventually got the courage to try to sleep I kept on thinking this woman was wandering around in my house:

Bizarre really, its not that much of a scary movie and I get the whole thing about the ghosts not being out to get you, for the majority of the time at least. The freaky thing that got me though, was JUST as I'd closed my eyes and sorta said to myself "chill out, ghosts don't want to bother YOU" MY BLOODY CAR ALARM WENT OFF. This is a 2am. So I had to run out in the road to see what was up. Nothing. Then I woke up at 5am feeling a bit freaked out again. 

Must have been those nachos.

New Hair

Took this before the show in Kiev on Friday night...

Whaddaya think?

The Mighty John B + MDF = DECKSTAND!

I promised these a while back but never got round to it so here you are...

Back in August I was trying to tidy up the house a bit, and sort out my living room, especially the area where I have my decks and computer just for random internetty stuff. It used to just be on a crappy looking wallpaper pasting table with a sheet over it, so I decided it was time to seize the moment and make one, to my specifications, myself - with alpha-manliness and lots of power tools. My girlfriend helped paint it though, so its not totally manly...

Its pretty simple really, I just measured out the dimensions I needed and the guys at Homobase precut the MDF board for you for free which saved a shedload of time, then I just did lots of drilling and screwing and reinforcing etc. This thing is SOLID.

You may now marvel at the spectacular John B home-made deckstand thingie (and don't have a go at me for having a Behringer mixer!):

The Mighty SpecDrum!

A bit random, but I thought I'd share a special moment with you... One of my myspace friends randomly messaged me this morning saying he'd got his hands on a Specdrum - and all the memories came flooding back. I think I can honestly say the SpecDrum was my first ever experience of Drum programming, or even sequencing. I had a little Spectrum 48K (not the ZX, mine was a bit better) with the SpecDrum adapter plugged in the back, and then the sound connected up to my mum's old wireless radio, a battery powered one with only one speaker! Hah!

I think I was still in primary school at the time (so even younger looking than that last picture) so only about 8 - and used to just sit there making beats. No, literally, JUST beats. The thing had 8 drum sounds that you loaded into the memory off the cassette, and it could only play 3 simultaneously. But it was ace. 

Behold, the mighty SpecDrum!

That was then...

1988...

2008...

What happened?! LOL

My January Chart for Beatport. Oooh La La!

Just a quick entry here in case you missed this. I've been talking to the Beatport guys a lot over the last few weeks seeing as they're currently in the middle of uploading my WHOLE back catalogue to their system, so you lot can happily buy my lovely mp3s - but anyway, they asked me to do a quick top 10, of my favourite tracks up there, so here it is:

Click here to check out John B's Mighty Jan 2008 Beatport Chart!

RIP Bachelor Mouse

So... I was clearing out some old junk from the loft in the summer, and a little pile of clothes I'd been stashing up there, off eBay, ready to customise in a New Romantic RoboDnB stylee had been shredded up by a mouse/mice and they'd done lots of little poos and wees around there. Gross. And they wrecked my madonna shirts. Have never seen any running around so I'm assuming it was a batchelor mouse, but still, given the history of batchelors in this house I don't want a giant family of mini-mouses running around eating my records and drinking my wine - so I got some traps off eBay, supposidely humane, but now it turns out not, they just LOOK that way - and well, he was no more. Thought that was the end of the chapter, until last week - batchelor mouse number 2 has sadly been trapped while eating my tescos finest mature cheddar in the other one. RIP bachelor mouse.

I put old Christmas cake in the other traps, but hope that was the last of them - the mighty New Year Loft cleansing will indeed prove weather he sperminated any lady mice and set up home next to my old Apple Mac boxes and unused fluoro pink legwarmer boxes...

Photos from Kiev

So here's a few more photos from Ukraine, taken on my iphone and from my .mac mobile photos gallery. Just figuring out the best way to publish them onto here...

Frozen river in Kiev:

Ed Rush & MC Rhymetime in dispair at our 4 hour delay in Kiev :-(

Wildchild checking out the hotel, after 3 hours sleep...

Trollies.

Metalheadz sticker spotted on the inside of a toilet cubicle door in the BA Business Class Lounge at Heathrow... OWN UP GOLDIKUSSS!

Backstage being interviewed for Ukranian MTV and some other TV station. The interviewers didn't even seem to know what D&B was, and left before any of us started playing!

Waiting for cold, but still nice, Beef Stroganoff.

No Bullfighting in the Bar WTF

Blurry Photo before I went on the decks...