The Bad Penny (beta)

Cheers to Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants for sending along the second submission to the Bad Penny’s new “Guilty Pleasures” series. He took a bit of an abstract approach to the task, mostly naming general concepts instead of specific temptations (aside from fish and chips).

Moxham has a new solo record, Personal Best, which marks the first one he’s put out on his own Habit label. One of the busier bees in Cardiff, Wales, he’s also still playing YMG gigs (in support of Domino Records’ re-release of their catalog a few years back); is singing Leonard Cohen and Abba covers in a local choir; and is planning another solo record that’ll feature traditional instruments instead of samples.

Here’s a taste of Personal Best:

• Bad Penny download: Stuart Moxham’s “Autumn Song”

And here’s his thoughtful entry to “Guilty Pleasures”:

Love: It all comes from God, and we are here to give it free passage, OK?

Art: The greatest human achievement – science is the measuring of God’s creation; both are wonderful, two sides of the same coin actually, but a spiritual reaction to beauty, the innate urge to record or evoke life, defines us as a species. Architecture does it for me.

Fish and Chips: Food and cooking, generally, actually – and drinking, of course; but really good fish and chips once in a while (a rare commodity in multi-cultural Britain nowadays, but I found some at Jack’s in Uxbridge yesterday) with a good cup of “Builder’s” tea – Baronial!

Creativity: Making a dinosaur out of modeling clay as a 4-year-old in school, writing a song, building a shelving unit out of scrap timber from your shed or making up a lullaby for your baby; it’s all good.

Good Sex: This could have been included in “Creativity.” For me, the mutual enjoyment of the intimate truth, with a woman I love, beats even fish and chips. Really!

Money: An abstract substitute for the much trickier system of an exchange of skills/goods, it basically depends on trust. (Certainly in Britain since we abandoned the Gold Standard in 1951.) Money allows us to live fuller lives than if we had to barter our pathetic individual talents for everything we need. I got involved in a cash-free community scheme once but nobody wanted a song written – the plumber was swamped though.

The Past in the Present: We live on the infinitesimal interface between the reality of the past and the abstraction of the future; so, arguably, the past is all we have because the present and the future don’t exist. I love the comfort of the continuity of the past – the more distant the better and, therefore, all evidence of it.

Writing: Lists, songs, poetry, prose, e-mail interviews, letters to relatives, SMS texts, cheques. I’m addicted.

Procrastination: I’m addicted to the thrill of postponement. (See: “Good Sex.”)

Aging: It’s so wonderful to be comfortable in one’s world and in one’s skin – both things the absence of which really bug you as a youth, when you don’t even have a concept of them.

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Other Bad Penny features:

• Guilty Pleasures: Humanfly On Prince, Blur, Ice Cube, More
• Revising History: Mike Watt On John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, More
• Revising History: Kathryn Williams On Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter, Björk’s Homogenic, More
• Cover Me: Cassorla
• What You Readin’ For?: Climber On ‘Moby Dick’
• Great Debate: TV Buddhas On Supermarket Lunches Vs. Eating Out
• Memento: Winterlings’ Autumn Harvest

This entry was posted on 10/11/2010 at 9:58 am and is filed under Features, Guilty Pleasures, Interviews with tags Stuart Moxham, Young Marble Giants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.