Britain’s biggest doyle...
Current mood: mischievous
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Following two bulletins, launching abuse at semi-well-known British tosspots, I've decided that we don't give our celebs enough abuse... Steve McLaren was my first subject of abuse... yes, being England manager he's well known. Here's what I said about him...

Because this fucking mong doesn't work here anymore.



Yet another classic "go 1-0 up and sit on our rather shaky lead" style performance which made him such a firm fan favourite here, followed by "oh shit, we're losing... have we got any extra strikers on the bench". Unfortunately Steve, that one got sussed out by Sevilla in 2006.

My second subject matter was James Spencer.
Who?
James Spencer.
Who?
You know, that bloke from Channel 4's Location Location Location.
Ah, right, yeah... NO.

Why is this man a celebrity... or is he? Well he's celebrity enough to be able to anounce to the entire UK which town is the worst to live in and which is the best... surely that must be like The Queen's job or summat... or the Prime Minister's at least but then again good old Gordon Brown was probably too busy bollocksing the Labour Party up even more than Uncle Tony did. Anyway I digress. Here's what I said.
So i decided to watch Location Location Location to watch them berate our beautiful little industrial town on the North East coast, buried beneath the shadow of our beautiful Eston Hills and North Yorkshire Moors and I realised that I may... just may have found THE smarmiest, smuggest twat in the entire United Kingdom.
The way he went from town to town making personal insults about their residents was appalling. His favourite was picking on towns that had a high percentage of overweight people.
I wonder if he's just getting his own back for the amount of times that his wavering hairline's been pointed out.
Phil Spencer you are officially BRITAINS BIGGEST MONG!



Which brings me to the point and purpose of this blog.
Who in your opinion is Britains biggest doyle and why? Male or female... or unconfirmed, it doesn't matter. If anyone can be arsed sending them in then I'll compile a top 20 down based  on your votes...

I mean, who is more qualified than us to compile this list than us? We put up with these blithering idiots in our newspapers, on our TV's and on our radios on a daily basis... and Mr.Spencer (above) feels that he is more than qualified to judge the people within the "20 worst towns" of this country and the towns themselves without having actually lived in any of them.

Guess who gets my vote...

Currently listening : Tango in the Night By Fleetwood Mac Release date: 25 October, 1990

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Alabama 3 and this Saturday
Current mood: tired
Category: Life

Well the week has begun in stylish fashion. Within the first waking hours of Monday I'd been contacted by the local constabulary (that's the coppers to you and me) and gotten myself tickets to go and see Alabama 3 with Macca and Chris on the evening.
Due to said Alabama 3 gig I was a tad hungover and "missed" my appointment at the brand spanking new Middlesbrough Police Station an in missing that, I missed my chance to become a prosecution witness in a case against one of my best friends. As you can probably tell... I REALLY wanted to be a witness.
Anyways, Alabama 3... the second best band I will have the privelage of listening to live this week, were awesome. They played for over 2 hours and the did "The Soprano's Song".
When we left Carling Academy, Newcastle was full of pillocks... nothing new there then. Back to Middlesbrough... and there's this really annoying high pitched noise that I've only heard described in the past as "frequency". It was going on all night. Now if you're lucky enough to have hearing that's strong enough to hear these horrid high pitched shrieking sounds, you feel my pain. The rest of you are lucky bastards. It's still fookin going on now. I think it's over at ICI or summat.
Anyways, the best band I'll have the honour of hearing live this week. Why of course it's Secret Signal, 9PM, Saturday, Middlesbrough Empire. Where instead of Discoing on the Dancefloor we'll be Samba-ing on the Stage... or something like that. Print a flyer off our main profile page and get in half price.
In the meantime I'm off to polish up on my disco shapes in the process of dodging bouncers whilst flyering for said gig.

And there ends another rant of higgeldy-piggeldy bollocks that's wasted 10 minutes of your life and taught you nothing.

Jake
x

Currently listening : Hit By Peter Gabriel Release date: 04 November, 2003

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How f**ing bizarre was that? Why you should never say never
Current mood: jubilant
Category: Music

3 years ago I left Scarborough. I'd lived there for 2 years to study. I hated the place. I hated the weather. I hated the night-life. I hated the fact that to get back to Middlesbrough it took 2 and a half hours on a bus to make a 46 mile journey. When I left I swore that I'd never go back. Too many bad memories etc etc...

We headed down to Scarborough this weekend to see local boys DARTZ! in action on the main stage at the Beached Festival. DARTZ! were indeed good. After DARTZ! we went and drank ourselves silly... par for the course and then out of the blue we were offered a slot headlining the second stage on the Sunday evening. We obviously took up the offer but unfortunately (or fortunately whichever way you look at it) had to play an acoustic set due to other Secret Signal-ees having "commits" (that's commitments to ordinary folk like you and I). So we wandered over after watching Kharma 45 and One Night Only (who we'll be supporting very soon ) and blagged a couple'o'guitars and did the biggest blag we've ever done. Playing on a beach facing out to the North Sea was a bit of a mint experience... later, after Alabama 3 had headlined the main stage a group of us stood on stage and watched a meteor shower. Twas a beautiful way to end a class weekend... 2 years in a place with nothing to show was totally eclipsed in 2 days. The moral to this unstructured higgledy piggledy bit of writing (if there is one) is don't ever rule anything out. Oh and the reason the writing is (more) unstructured in this blog is because my head is still in pieces from a lack of sleep and a slight indulgence in drink last night.

Anyways. Photos from Beached coming soon.
Gig at Spensleys in Boro 10PM Friday. £1 in.


Lurrrrrrve
Jake
Secret Signal
x

Currently listening : La Peste By A3 Release date: 24 October, 2000

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What we've been listening to this week
Current mood: tired
Category: Music

lizz
favourite track/breaking the broken by sparta
favourite album/porcelain by sparta

jake
favourite track/kill the director by the wombats
favourite album/love it when i feel like this by the twang

macca
favourite track/smokers outside the hospital door by editors
favourite album/love it when i feel like this by the twang

chris
favourite track/kill the director by the wombats
favourite album/love it when i feel like this by the twang

Currently listening : Love It When I Feel Like This (Spec) By Twang Release date: 07 June, 2007

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A Secret Signal Raffle
Current mood: mischievous
Category: Music

Following the amazing events of saturday I've decided to have the whacky/crazy/zaney idea of having a secret signal raffle. once a week we're going to draw a number between 1 and the end of our friends list out of a hat... it'll be a big hat because we have nearly 2000 friends but a hat none the less (i shall buy it from one of those special shops that sell MASSIVE clothes, like what I could have ended up shopping at!)
Enough digressing.
What we'll do is draw a number out and whichever friend that number corresponds to on the big friends list (ie Tom would be number 1) will get an email from us. We will require a reply within the week to claim your prize and we'll sort you out! Marvellous.

So now we've moved up the bill... we are no longer warming up for the raffle kids... we ARE the raffle. check it!

Jake
x

Currently listening : Love It When I Feel Like This (Spec) By Twang Release date: 07 June, 2007

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lessons in how to turn a gig into slapstick comedy
Current mood: okay
Category: Music

So Saturday we made our return to the stage at the Linthorpe Festival with our current new drummer, Glenn. Within our  practices we'd manage to resurrect 4 songs and we decided to play a couple of acoustic covers.

Rehearsal
To begin your slapstick comeday gig you must have a full band rehearsal which ends 2 hours before you are DUE to go onstage. You MUST snap the thickest string on your bass. You MUST remove all strings ready for re-stringing and then you MUST lose aI've screw from the bridge (the bit where the strings come out of).
Well I managed all of that. Ran around music shops lookin for reacements and I had to phone a mate to borrow his bass.
Note: I also left the nut that the screw holds in place in one of the music shops. You can't buy single ones so I now get the pleasure of calling Yamah and asking for a new set of nuts!

5PM
So all this has happenned. I've still had time to straighten the famous hair (or rather Lizzhas cos I can't do it meself) and we're on our way to the Dorman's Club Field, making really good time (4.15PM still 45 minutes til stage time) and my phone rings.
"Ste?"
"Yeah?"
"Where are you?"
"Why? We're on our way, we aren't on until 5"
"We want you on now, we're ahead of schedule"

Gig
So we get there and etc etc. surprisingly my electro acoustic guitar doesn't want to work so that's one guitar in the acousti segment being replaced by bass. At least we didn't have to walk accross the mud. The stage has been moved from the field to the car park.
We took to the stage and I opened with a "hello carpark" - it got a laugh and that was the highlight of our performance. Musically it wasn't too bad I suppose but bits were falling off the drum kit. Guitars constantly de-tuning meaning I got to waffle on into the microphone about nowt for extended periods of time. We had a string snap on Macca's guitar and he'd somehow left his spare in the rehearsal room... so I talked more crap about this honestly being our usual professional stage show while Macca ran about asking to borrow a guitar from the other band.

And finally
No matter what went wrong, Chris always has to upstage everyone in the slapstick stakes. He managed to hit his (top) keyboard so heavily that it bounced up off the rack and onto the floor... but not before it hit his bottom keyboard and... yes wait for it... turned the volume knob down to 0 on it's way down. Genius.

It was when we came off stage and there was some feller on stage reading out names and giving out prizes that we realised that... we were infact the support act for the raffle...

Currently listening : Love It When I Feel Like This (Spec) By Twang Release date: 07 June, 2007

5:36 AM - 11 Comments - 9 Kudos - Add Comment

Here's to old friends... and new ones.
Current mood: cheerful

A fairly sensible one this week.
As our dearest myspace friends you will most probably know of the recent departure of Paul from Secret Signal, so I felt that before we move onwards and upwards that it is time to put my thoughts into writing.

Secret Signal - the last year especially has been a bit of a topsy fookin weird time, which is about par for the 9 years I've spent playing in a band with Paul, from our early ventures in school as Horizon through to The F and the mocking we took. We always had the belief that we could creat a few tunes that people would actually like.
Since our first headline slot at Club NME last June (where we died on our arses) we have been through a 6 month period of rehearsals and writing in a barn just outside of Sunderland (and fook me it was baltic up there in the winter), we returned to the stage with headline shows at NME and The Cornerhouse. We said hello to our new singer, Lizz. We said hello and goodbye to a guitarist, John. We've had more press and kudos in the last 4 months than we managed to garner in the last 4 years. We released a single with a launch party in a packed out venue. We shed tears constantly for the 3 days between Paul telling us he had to leave us and playing his final show. We played at Middlesbrough Music Live. THAT was a mental show and an amazing way for Paul to go out.

We've made so many new friends along the way in the last year through Secret Signal. From Kiwi at the NME show in January to those lovely people from The Chapman Family (who played with us the day we died at NME). Aswell as (roll call) Sir Phillip Weller, Gaz Wood, Ash and shit loads more of you.
The main reason for writing this really is to thank our old friends for sticking by us while we've been a bit rude trying to sort shit out, Kev and Rooksie especially and to thank our new friends for supporting us at Music Live and the Love You Better single launch the way you did... and for partying with us the empire every saturday.
We do really love you (better)

Jake

Currently listening : Kill the Director By Wombats Release date: 28 June, 2007

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Something what our friend Kev wrote about us
Current mood: sad
Category: Music

written as a bulletin by our good friend Kev Naylor. I thought it deserved saving. Jake

You may have all been aware of my ad campaign in the last week for the Secret Signal gig tomorrow but the news has broken today that Paul will no longer be playing with the band as of the end of tomorrow afternoon.

So this is a bit more than a plug....

Growing up alongside them since the very formation of the band 9 years ago I have known Paul has always been one of the central characters of the band and tomorrow truly will be the end of an amazing era. The band started out as being touted as 'jokes', had countless setbacks and fall outs in the past but in the last year they have finally made that deserved breakthrough.

Tomorrow, some people could well say that this is another setback?

But I say its not, such is the evolution of this great local band that they are in the position of 'as one door closes many more open'.

Tomorrow is the end of an era yes, but it is yet another step in the incredible evolution of Secret Signal, who following the gig will be saying farewell to an old friend and Hello to the big adventure that is about to be set upon them.

So it will be sad yes and for the old friends who are there it will be emotional. But after they strike the last chord tomorrow and a new era begins, it is just another step towards glory that has had many bumps along the way.

I invite you all at 3.30pm tomorrow at the 'red' stage outside the Registary office in Boro to see the closing of one chapter and the continuation of the evolution of Secret Signal.

Goodbye Paul and Thank You

1:36 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Beauty and the Beast - cheeky c***

So Phil Weller has previewed our music live appearance over at the Gazette.
Check it out.

Click here to read it

Currently listening : Zenyatta Mondatta By The Police Release date: 25 October, 1990

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More Evening Gazettieness
Current mood: awake
Category: Music

Joining Captain Phoenix tonight are Teesside's top dance-rock rebels SECRET SIGNAL (pictured), whose new single Love You Better (Disco Girl) is out now.

The five-piece have just started a snowball roll, heading out to clubs around the North, armed with a tight set of insanely catchy tunes, fronted by the lovely Lizz and scarf-wearing Jake Radio. Check them out.

Currently listening : Kick By INXS Release date: 25 October, 1990

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