“The first thing that made people feel alive was the frequency. But then the media took control and they took all the best DJs and put them on Radio 1. Pirate radio stations and independent record labels are all trying to find the vibration. The vibration of sound and the vibration of life.

“When I’m working with music, I’m working with the vibrations of sound. Whereas with a lot of people, it’s vision. They see a pop band and they want to look like it and move like it because it looks good.

“Now with video, the eye becomes the ruler over the ear. You’ve heard artists before that you would say are absolutely rubbish. But because the tune is catchy and it’s sold to us on Top of the Pops, I’ve ended up singing it.

“Everybody is moving to a beat that’s being played. Look around you at everybody and they’re all moving to a specific beat. I see the way people move and I represent that. It comes off them and I feed off that. They move differently because they hear what I’m doing.

“I play the rhythm here and people in France change the way of France. They interpret it in the way that they walk. It came back to me and I could understand. C’est va bien! Ce va beaucoup!

“I reproduced the frequency in New York. They went crazy. In fact it started to vibrate off all of the girls and all the guys and it started to make a movement until it actually became visual and you could see it in their body language. I would say I worship God through the rhythm.

“Some people got angry about it because they were going into a frenzy and they were losing control and the rhythm was taking over. They wanted to make a statement: ‘You don’t control me’. Being aggressive because that rhythm was taking them and they have no control over it.

“I was hated by the person that had a lot of money and could buy any drum set they wanted to. I was hated. Because they [weren’t] a frequency scientist. They didn’t really listen.

“The thing that was so important to me was muscle memory. I had amazing rhythms anyway because I came from Jamaica and I came from Birmingham. I’ve become a silent master of [the frequency]. It’s only the sound that will change the day.

“We never used samples, we made our own. On the first album, one of the tracks we made used coconuts on my friend’s kitchen floor tiles. Another one we put the microphone in a rubber glove in the bog and flushed the toilet.

“Nature taught me a lot. People are beautiful because they are in their natural surroundings and they are at the calling of nature. They say here’s my hand and here’s my heart. I don’t understand you and what you’re doing, but I like you.

“I have changed the world by playing with sticks on different things that I could find.”

Ninjah and Corporal Clark star in this video made in loving memory of Cardiff legend, The Shaky Hand Man

Image Top: Courtesy of TANTRUM recordings

Huw Williams once called the late, great John Peel a bastard and presided over one of the most overlooked indie bands ever, so is he really coming back for more?

Common consensus is that The Pooh Sticks were well ahead of their time with their raucous, cutesy-pop form of indie that subtly poked fun at the more established acts of time.

The Welsh “band”, formed by Swansea born Huw Williams in late 1987 and really just a duo, were immortalised in The Rough Guide to Rock who expected them to be “reassessed as [an] overlooked gem sometime in the [21st] century”.

Now, Williams has a chance to test out that theory when he plays at this year’s Indietracks festival joining New York headliners The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. It seems, however, that the man who was quoted as calling the late, great John Peel a bastard, does not sees this as a second chance.

“We just weren’t good enough,” says Williams matter-of-factly. “If I meet people now and they’re interested in hearing [our] stuff, there a few tracks I can play [but] there’s some terrible recordings of us,” says Williams. “I can’t believe we were around for seven years … and went to the States and played in Japan. I think we were overrated really.”

Williams even plays down the Peel incident. “I can’t remember whether I said it,” he says. “It was quoted in a very obscure fanzine as, ‘John Peel is a bastard, he deserves the slagging he’s about to get,’ or something like that [but] it’s written as a dream sequence.”

Dream sequence or not, Peel read the quote out on air and The Pooh Sticks appeared to fall out of favour with the DJ who had once been a champion of theirs.

Studio to stage

The Pooh Sticks were formed by Williams and Steve Gregory intending only to be a studio band. In fact, Gregory never played live with the band and will not be present at the Indietracks festival. “Because of the momentum we got and [the] demand for us to play live … we did some shows initially that were really shoddy,” says Williams. “We played with a drum machine, a 17-year-old guitar player and an 18-year-old woman playing bass who had been playing for three months. It was chaotic, but beautiful, but rubbish.”

The Pooh Sticks put off signing to a major label when they first started out because in those days, as Williams puts it, “You would lose a certain amount of credibility.” Eventually though, Williams’s curiosity got the better of him. “I knew that when we signed with a major label that it was all going to go pear-shaped but I just thought it would be interesting to see,” he says.

Their last performance came in the long, hot, Britpop dominated summer of 1995 when they performed a live acoustic session for Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1.

Moving into management

Fortunately for Williams, who now lives near Cardiff with his wife and two boys, the band merely bookends what has been an eclectic and successful career in the music industry. By the time he played that last performance, he was already heavily involved with the management side of the industry.

“I could give you a list of all the groups that supported us like Pulp, the Cranberries … David Gray,” he explains. “It was almost like, go and support The Pooh Sticks and in two years you’re going to be massive. [I was picking the groups] and it occurred to me that I had an ear for that kind of thing.”

During the last few years, Williams has also been involved in a number of projects which include helping to launch the ill-fated XFM radio station in South Wales and now acting as a consultant on the Swansea Creative Hub – an initiative to regenerate the Swansea High Street.

Williams says that all this has meant he sees the band as his hobby once more and this has precipitated the Indietracks performance. “I feel I can just pull it off,” says the 45-year-old. “In 10 years, I’ll be too old and decrepit to do it,” says Williams. “We’re headlining one of the stage[s] and I thought … rather than playing in a pub somewhere, [Indietracks] could be a reasonable place to come back. He adds: “It’s the only one that we’ve announced [though] I am intending to do more.”

Despite this, it is hard to detect any sentimentality from Williams about the band’s comeback, it seems he was just glad to be involved their success the first time around. “There’s good and bad about all of it. Usually, I don’t stick around for the lows, I can see it coming and I’ll move on to the next thing.”

Indietracks will be held in the grounds of Butterley Station between Friday 23 to Sunday 25 July. Weekend tickets: £55 for earlybird available before Friday 7 May, £60 thereafter. Day tickets: £32.50

Image: the perfumegarden.blogspot.com

The current BBC rugby commentator and freelance journalist is now sitting on the other side of the microphone as it were and so it is surprising to hear he took so much pleasure from it.

The moment came after Wales drew with England during the 1983 Five Nations Championship, when Butler was Welsh captain.

Butler takes up the story, “We hadn’t lost at home to England since 1963 and a draw was almost as close to defeat as you can get. We were panned savagely by the press.

“The next game was Scotland away and everybody said we would lose, but we won,” explains Butler. “We went on to beat Ireland and [only just] lost to France. It was quite a sweet feeling and you can’t help but gloat when you meet the journalists afterwards.”

Butler has a slightly different opinion of the press these days. “Once I started working as a journalist I found they were actually quite nice,” he says. “They’re not quite the monsters I thought they were.”

Butler was raised in Newport, South Wales and played rugby at Cambridge University and for Pontypool RFC. He went on to win 16 caps for Wales and captained the side sporadically between 1980 and 1984. His move into journalism came after working for the BBC during his playing days.

“Back in 1984, I was being criticised by a little hardcore of journalists and by then playing had started to become a bit of a chore,” says Butler. “There was a crossover point when I wasn’t looking forward to playing as a release from a mundane job and I liked working for the BBC.”

The pitfalls of journalism

It wasn’t all plain sailing for Butler after that however. In 1988, he left BBC Wales because he felt undervalued. “In the end it turned into a huge anti-climax and I ended up basically making the tea. I stormed out after about three years,” says Butler.

In the end though, that turned into his lucky break. “The Sunday Correspondent were recruiting and all of a sudden, there was a rapid change at BBC Wales. Gareth Davis became head of sport and asked me to go back,” explains Butler.

For former players that cross over into the world of journalism, there are many pitfalls they can fall into and Butler admits that in trying to avoid them, he has sometimes got it wrong.

“Everybody says the greatest obstacle you have to overcome is becoming the person that has to criticise players. You’re so conscious to prove yourself in your new industry, I think you lash out a bit too ferociously,” says Butler.

“I find it quite difficult to be upbeat about Wales doing well [too],” adds Butler. “I overcompensate for what I feel naturally. Luckily, when you have [fellow BBC commentator] Brian Moore alongside you, it gives some balance because he is so English in his outlook.”

Butler would never accuse a player of lacking passion however. “It riled me [as a player], this accusation levelled that you somehow went out lacking the necessary passion for the job. The journalists cannot have had any inkling about what playing for your country is,” says Butler.

Climbing for charity

Butler’s next project is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with 14 Welsh rugby captains to raise funds for Velindre Cancer Hospital’s Stepping Stones Appeal in September.

Butler has started a fitness programme in preparation for the assault. “I’m jogging up the Black Mountains at my very own slow pace,” says the 52-year-old who admits he is finding it difficult. “If you go up [the Black Mountains] you will see a mountain stream of pure sweat there, that’s me.”

Butler has no plans to retire any time soon. After presenting the historical series Wales and the History of the World aired on BBC 1, he has been involved in a variety of different projects. This year he plans to do another history series for BBC Wales and be involved in the BBC’s coverage of the Ryder Cup in October.

“I never imagined in my wildest dreams at 22 playing rugby that in 30 years time I would still be involved in rugby as a career,” he says. “You can only extract so much out of one thing so these projects offer me something different to do.”

Butler adds: “Nothing beats playing, but broadcasting and journalism is a hoot.”

You can donate to the Stepping Stones Appeal in support of Eddie’s climb through just giving.

Eddie Butler in action for the BBC

“Somebody came to see me when I was in hospital saying… that most disabled people end up going home sitting in a corner doing jigsaws. That Christmas my mum bought me a set of jigsaws and I thought ‘oh no here we go!’”

Barrie Maskell may be a no nonsense Yorkshireman, but he was a big player in the world’s most glamorous sport. When future Formula 1 champion James Hunt was earning himself a reputation for crashing so often that he was given the moniker “Hunt the shunt,” Barrie was dicing with, and regularly beating, both him and another future Formula 1 champion, Niki Lauda in the British Formula 3 championship.

Barrie racing his BT21B in 1968

He won 73 races in a car racing career that began in the late 1960s, but in 1993, everything changed after he fell out of a tree in the garden of his West Yorkshire home.

“I ended up in hospital and decided that was the end of me life,” he says reflecting on the time immediately after the accident. Fortunately for Barrie, another disabled racer, Marc Haynes, was taking his first exploratory steps into gaining a race licence at the time.

Barrie takes up the story: “Somebody brought me a [magazine] and there was a picture of Marc right at the back, and it was saying he was hoping to race. The RAC said that they weren’t allowing disabled people to race and I think Marc threatened to take them to the court of human rights. [The RAC] set-up a department that looked into it and granted Marc a licence.” – must ring the RAC/MSA to make sure this is correct as it is potentially defamatory…

This moment proved to a be a watershed for Barrie as he realised that he too would be able to compete and continue doing what he loved. He set his sights on becoming a “disabled, pensioner that races.” However, the RAC’s ruling didn’t open all the doors that he and other would-be disabled motorsport competitors would have liked.

The difficulties

Despite Marc’s success, Barrie was met with scepticism. “I actually showed [the magazine article] to the Chief Surgeon and he looked at me and said: ‘Well it’s a very dangerous sport’,” says Barrie. “I followed it through and I had to get a medical officer to sign [the] application, and he said, ‘Oo, I wouldn’t do that, it’s far too dangerous’. I said, ‘Look, I’ve been motor racing for 30 years and I broke my back because I fell out of a tree’.”

Fortunately, Barrie was able to convince a more sympathetic medical officer to sign for him, but that wasn’t the end of his worries. “Marc offered me the same hand controls system that he used, a fly-by-wire thing. It cost about £45,000 so I just couldn’t. It took me a year to develop mine. It cost about a tenner,” adds Barrie with a laugh.

His system used compressed air rather than electrical signals to operate the controls which meant that the cylinders had to be constantly adjusted throughout the race. Barrie says that mentally adapting to using hand controls was easy. “When I first went out, I got to the end of the drive and went to brake with my hands.”

“Can you at least bring me a cup of tea?”

Barrie was able to do what he loved, though being disabled meant that certain things were incredibly difficult for him. He is able to look back on them with a sense of fun however. “I had a funny story at Oulton Park,” says Barrie. “I went off in the practice in the wet and I missed a gear-change and I ended up in the [tyre] barrier. All the tyres came down and sort of fell on top of the car and what-not and the marshal ran round, opened the door and he says, ‘Get out!’ I said, ‘I can’t’. He asked if I was hurt and I said, ‘No, I’m disabled’,” laughs Barrie.

“His face was a picture,” continues Barrie. “He said to me, ‘We’re trained for it,’ and two guys came over and lifted me out onto the tyres and the guy in race control said, ‘Oh God, Barrie’s off, he’s disabled,’ and they stopped the session and sent the ambulance out for me. [The marshal] came to see me afterwards and he said, ‘I’ve been marshalling for over 30 years and that just threw me.”

However, the other problems that Barrie faced were much more mundane than high-speed accidents on a wet track. “It’s difficult to look at the timetable for a race and scrutineering is at eight o’clock, with practice at nine, so you have to be up really early. Then there’s no loo, so you have to plan to go to the loo and you have to plan backwards,” explains Barrie.

“After the race, you go into what they call “Parc Ferme” for 30 minutes [because] you’re not allowed to take it back after the race so you can fiddle with it,” says Barrie. “It’s fine if you’re not in a wheelchair because everybody gets out of the car and buggers off, and I’m suddenly left sat in a bloody hot car for 30 minutes.”

At Snetterton, I spun off and I thought there is actually no point going into “Parc Ferme” because I’m bloody last, so I went straight into the paddock,” laughs Barrie. “The marshal came over and they all went off on one, ‘You disobeyed a marshal’ and all the rest of it. I said, ‘Look, can you at least bring me a cup of tea’.”

Despite, these things sticking in Barrie’s mind, the most important thing to him was the fact that he had achieved what he set out to do. “We weren’t the most successful,” he says. “I think the best result I ever had was seventh at Oulton Park, but normally I was at the back, you know, 20th out of 30, but it was just the fact that I was able to do it”

Barrie (far left) keeps an eye on the owners of his old Chevron B9 Formula 3 car

The company that made it all possible…

GuidoSimplex has been developing hand controls for disabled drivers since the 1950s and paved the way for disabled competitors in motorsport. Marc Haynes was the first person in the UK to use their hydraulic clutch system on a road car. This technology was later used on his race car.

“I was driving round for the first ever time in a manual car, because of course, before that it had been always been an automatic,” says Marc. “I’d felt that had held me back from motor racing [because they] sap power from the engine and it makes gear changing generally quite slow, and it doesn’t enable you to have the correct revs in the correct point in time.”

The GuidoSimplex system uses two controls grouped around the steering wheel (see above). The right-hand control operates the brakes and the pull-ring on the back of the steering wheel operates the accelerator. On other cars, a push-ring may be used instead.

The gears are changed as normal through the gear stick, but the clutch is operated by a button on the stick. Barrie Maskell’s controls were laid-out in a similar manner despite being a different system.

The Pararallying company that used to be run by Dave Hawkins in Lincolnshire also used cars fitted with the system.

A competitor tries out Pararallying’s Vauxhall Astra

Dave Hawkin’s company had a very relaxed atmosphere

The team gave me a fantastic opportunity to speak to members of all the different departments and view the entire process of how the weekly magazine is put together in such a short space of time.

I spent one day with the online team writing a number of articles from original interview including Norbert Haug’s opinion on the new engine regulations and Michael Schumacher’s comeback, Max Mosley accusing Ferrari boss Montezemelo of being weak and South African racing driver Adrian Zaugg signing to join the Auto GP series.

I also spent a day with the national editors and was commissioned to write a feature about the Formula Ford team owner Cliff Dempsey. It was an absolute pleasure to speak to Dempsey and the resulting feature was published in this week’s issue on pages 82 and 83.

I had a fantastic week and it was particularly interesting to sit in on the morning conference for the entire Guardian publication.

While I was there I put together listings, contributed to smaller features such as the “Booking Now” and “The Populist” columns, subbed features and listing pages, and wrote a number of preview pieces.

“Make good use of bad rubbish” may have been coined by the Wombles’s creator, Elisabeth Beresford, over 40 years ago but it is arguably even more relevant now as the UK faces a waste crisis.

As Margaret Eaton of the Local Government Association says: “Britain is the dustbin of Europe, with more rubbish thrown into landfill than almost any other country.”

In Wales, it is estimated that the 15 landfill sites in the country will become full within eight years. More importantly though, the thousands of tonnes of rotting rubbish that already sits in landfill sites produce methane which is 23 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.

Evidently landfill should no longer be used, but what are the alternatives?

Incinerators

One option is to use incinerators. Applying thermal treatment to waste can reduce its volume by 90 per cent and weight by 60 per cent and uses less space than landfill. The heat and gas that is released during the process can be used to produce electricity.

However, this technology is still very inefficient. Equally, the dioxins produced from the treatment cause acid rain and the toxic ash created by the process still needs to be put into a landfill site.

This has meant that there has been protests against various projects in Wales, most recently the proposed facility at Trident Park in Cardiff Bay. Paul Redding, an expert in environmental waste management and a lecturer at the University of Wales in Cardiff (UWIC), says that the “spectre of cancer” from airborne particles scares people.

Incinerators also tend to be private projects so the developers try to ensure that a certain amount of waste is produced. Creating a demand for waste is certainly not the way forward.

Put simply, incinerators are the worst waste disposal option for the environment.

Anaerobic Digesters

Another option is to use anaerobic digesters. These use bacteria to process organic matter such as paper, food, compost and wastewater. The gas and liquor produced can be used to make electricity, or as transport fuel and fertilizer.

Anaerobic digesters are effective, as Kevin Monson, Sandra Esteves and Alan Guwy from the University of Glamorgan, concluded in their review of the technology in 2007: “Barriers to further implementation [of anaerobic digesters] in the UK are policy-related rather than technical.”

But even if policy was changed, anaerobic digesters are not able to process all the waste that an average household produces, let alone the industrial waste that often goes to landfill.

Towards zero-waste

The best thing to do therefore has to be to produce less waste to ensure that expensive and potentially harming methods of disposal are used less.

This has already been tried with much success in St Arvans, a small village in Monmouthshire. St Arvans’s zero-waste pilot scheme was launched in June 2007 and items such as batteries and ash were sorted into separate boxes by the residents at source and collected by an independent organisation called Monmouthshire Community Recycling.

Lou Summers, who was involved from the very beginning, said that few things couldn’t be recycled: “The only thing they were just looking at, in the end, was soft plastics. Everything else was taken away.”

Critically, Lou says that her family also began “pre-cycling” – buying products that used less packaging. With everyone in the village doing the same, they would have been able to continue diverting 77 per cent of their residual waste to be recycled. This translated as St Arvans’ residents saving 43 trees every month.

However, the scheme has been cancelled because of the cost and Monmouthshire Community Recycling ceased to exist on 27 November 2009. The council said that the binmen could do the recycling instead.

So what now?

Investment in new technologies is needed, but the main focus should be on reducing waste. The wombles of St Arvans have demonstrated that “zero-waste” should be an attainable goal if the government was willing to fund other projects.

Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, has backed alternative waste disposal methods, saying: “We must … only landfill things that have absolutely no other use.”

However, although responsibility for the effective disposal of waste lies partly with the government and councils, it also lies with all of us to buy goods with less packaging and recycle everything we can.

If you bought the issue for the week starting 14 April 2010, you would have seen the article I wrote on the new Ferrari 599 GTO on page 12. It was also the top story on the Autocar website:

Below are the other stories that I wrote for the website during the week:

Dramatic sales increase for Toyota; VW Polo is World Car of Year; Land Rover sets sales record; Hummer supporters rally round; Fewer cars on UK roads; Briatore hints at F1 return; Renault’s four-week road trip and my personal favourite: Blind land speed record broken…

Keep up-to-date with all the lastest car news with Autocar’s Twitter feed.

Just arriving at the gates was enough to turn my stomach into knots with excitement. It was a hot, sticky day in the middle of summer and although the journey had been relatively short, I was desperate to be out of the confines of the car.

We turned into the car park, and already the sound coming through the open windows and sunroof was deafening. When I stepped out of the car, I was hit by a solid wall of whining and roaring engines and the intoxicating smell of unburned fuel vapour and shredded rubber.

Moments later, I clambered up the steep grass viewing bank, clawing rapidly at the cracked and hard mud in order to propel myself to the top quicker. The noise had heightened my senses and complemented what I saw on the circuit when I first caught sight of the cars.

Despite all the other sensations such as the smell and the speed, later that night, when I tried to get to sleep, I could still hear the sounds of the cars in my head.

However, as the drive for a reduced carbon future ushers in a new era of clean and quiet racing cars, my experiences may not be shared by other first-timers at the racing circuits around the world.

Eerie silence…

The worry is that future alternatives to racing cars with internal combustion engines will be completely silent. Certainly Audi’s extremely successful Le Mans winning prototypes that run on bio-diesel are eerily quiet as they pass you at over 200mph on the Mulsanne straight at the La Sarthe circuit. Equally, the diesel SEAT Leons that have run in the the World Touring Car Championship and British Touring Car Championship caused problems for their drivers as they initially struggled to hear when they needed to change gear.

Compare the sound of the first two cars with the noise made by the Audi R15 (the third car to go past) in this clip from Le Mans in 2006

Nobody wants to go and watch racing cars that sound like milk floats. Noise is an absolutely fundamental part of motorsport. The action on the circuit is fascinating by itself, but unless it is accompanied by the screaming or howling soundtrack of a high-performance racing engine (or similar), it doesn’t quite feel right. Fortunately the industry appears to be aware of the needs of the spectators.

Pod Racing

A computer generation of what the iRACER will look like on the racing circuit

At the beginning of February, kit-car maker Westfield unveiled plans for their iRACER concept. The vehicle will be powered by two motors delivering 80bhp each and will be limited to 110mph. Starting in 2011, Westfield hopes to race it in the “Sports EV” category of the new Electric Vehicle Cup series, which is the world’s first motorsport category to only use zero emission electric cars.

Dr. Paul Faithfull, the iRACER project manager, says that engineering the car to sound appealing to the spectators has been integral to its development. “The reasoning behind generating noise is that a part of motorsport is the aural experience. If the cars are totally quiet, then you lose a whole chunk of the experience. We know that because we’ve run at tracks our European homologated cars next to our race cars, there’s a huge difference in the sound and ultimately the spectacle.”

Generally speaking, industry research has gone into making alternatively propelled vehicles as quiet as possible. “The motor supplier has now engineered the motor to be completely quiet, which is fine for the road cars, but we don’t want that for the track,” says Paul.

“We are putting that investment into something that you could engineer to make noise, to see if we can make them, not as noisy as possible, but appealingly noisy,” adds Paul. “It’s… about making it sound good rather than making them sound like… a dustbin.”

This is not as difficult as it might seem, however. Paul explains: “The beauty about an electric motor is that if you don’t suppress the noise, it will sound like a high-speed turbine. It still has a raw engineering sound like a normal engine has.”

Testing the iRACER at the Westfield factory

It is also not just the engine that can be engineered in this way. “We are looking at things like what tyres you can use, to get road noise,” says Paul. Perhaps most interesting though is the use of other parts of the car that would not normally make noise: “We have designed the bodywork to create an area of high pressure which can be used to drive the device to produce a noise,” says Paul. “You can [also] take that pressure and force it through something [to make] a whistle.”

So what are they hoping the completed car will sound like? “The target noise, or the noise that we mooted as being the noise that we would ideally achieve was the same noise of the pod racers in Star Wars: Episode 1,” says Paul. “It’s obviously been engineered to appeal to young kids.”

If that is the future sound of motorsport, then there is definitely no need to worry that the first aural experience that young racing fans will not be as striking as everybody else’s was.

The first run of the iRACER in January, 2010

This month, we have exclusive interviews with two of the most influential women in the campaign for a better world: Emily Hunter, the daughter of Greenpeace founder Robert Hunter, and Tamsin Omond, the former activist who is hoping to be elected as an MP at the upcoming general election.

Also this issue,  the style team has done another fabulous fashion shoot which will give you some great tips in time for Spring and we spend the day with Mark Boyle – the man who has been living without money for the past 15 months.

You can view the magazine online.

Follow the progress of issue three on Twitter @ivymagazine and log onto our website to see more photographs, videos and pictures from the first three issues.