Power to the People

The Edinburgh trip resulted in Mike and I visiting the fabulous Museum of Scotland while Adrian and Noelle went off in search of emergency pants for their daughter. The museum isn’t as glorious as it usually is, with large sections of it closed for work, so what we saw was restricted to the Scottish history exhibit (the Stewart dynasty - ugly and useless monarchs) and the splendid interactive section mainly aimed at younger visitors but splendid for the young at heart.

I spent some time on a simple computer simulation as minster for energy of Lectraland, making decisions about what power plants to build, and which to tear down. I went completely green, and despite urgings from the now returned Adrian to ” go nuclear” simply built wind and tidal turbines, solar and hydroelectic plant. I even tore down one coal-fired power station. The lights stayed on, Lectraland had power, and I did an OK job.

Mike and Adrian both took turns as minister for energy and we all did good jobs according to the sim. Mike went for a complete mix of energy types; Adrian went totally nuclear. I then took another turn, building one nuclear station and staying green for the rest, improving on overall power levels.

The lesson from the sim was clear. Whatever energy strategy you adopt, someone, somewhere will protest about it. If you build wind or marine turbines, the people will complain about them despoiling the landscape or mincing marine wildlife respectively. Go nuclear or conventional, and people will complain about them being built too near to their homes. Go solar and the loss of land area becomes an issue.

Of course, some sites are only suited to particular types of power generation, so protestors about wind power will never usually be faced with a nuclear station being proposed for the same area. This is why small-minded protest groups such as Thwart on the Isle of Wight can afford to object to wind farms, because they know the area will never seriously be considered for something like a nuclear power station. You can imagine the fuss if a nuclear power station were proposed for the Isle of Wight. Thwart prefers to put alternative energy out to sea. Thwart members argue that land-based wind turbines will mince and disturb local wildlife, yet curiously do not then believe that wind turbines at sea will mince seagulls nor that marine turbines will mince sealife. Perhaps it’s because at sea the effects cannot be as easily seen.

Back to the museum, which also had a fun rocket exhibit driven by the gases from hydrolyzed water. You cranked the wheel, creating a current that separated water into hydrogen and oxygen, which were then combined and ignited to fire a model rocket up a wire.

That, and the power sim got me thinking. The biggest issue with alternative energy sources is the fact that they cannot produce energy 24 hours a day all year round. But what if alternative energy sources were used solely to hydrolyze water to form hydrogen and oxygen and the gases stored and compressed also by these energy sources. The erratic nature of alternative energy production becomes less important if it creates a product can be stored.

Hydrogen is the key fuel in current fuel cell technology that creates clean energy for motorised transport. It seems appropriate to use alternative sources of energy to create it.

So what would I do? Build a plant that used solar heat or electricity from alternative energy to distill sea water to remove salt and impurities (if you hydrolyse salt water you produce a rather less desirable gas - chlorine). Sea water is a source of water of which, in general, we are not short (whereas freshwater reservoirs are more required for drinking water). Use alternative energy to hydrolyze that water to produce hydrogen and oxygen, which are stored as useful gases, and use the hydrogen to power fuel cells. Fuel cells generate electricity that can power cars, buses, and potentially even homes. The hydrogen recombines with oxygen in the fuel cell process to produce water. And the salt from the initial distillation process can be used in winter on roads (and if produced to excess is at least a lot safer than nuclear by-products) or returned to the sea, where it is naturally diluted by fresh water from rain or rivers.

The process is not energy efficient. But with the source of energy being sustainable and renewable, this aspects seems rather less important when compared with the ability continually to produce both fuel that can be stored and clean energy.

Will the London Olympics bottle it in 2012?

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics is unfolding in some beauty at present on TV. BBC commentators are, of course, being entirely irritating by politicising about China, views of which you could only be unaware if you’d spent the past year shut in a box. But the spectacle of the opening ceremony is quite something in putting over what China and the Olympics are about.

So what will London do in 2012? Culturally, apart from that 16th century dude Shakespeare, the UK is dead, having by and large lost its identity and lost its way in drink and drugs. In four years’ time, therefore, we will see the following. A modern art display of sheep pickled in lager and flags made from dishevelled bedclothes will give way to four thousand ladettes tanked up on lager, who will vomit in unison, creating a brief but rapidly changing pattern of puke on the arena floor. They will be replaced by four thousand lads, also tanked up on lager, who will fight before performing, smashing a rainbow array of coloured bottles before giving their neighbour one with the pointy ends. The Metropolitan Police will then charge into the arena, scattering all and sundry, before shooting someone in the audience six times on the grounds that they look a bit shifty and may be a terrorist. The pooling blood will congeal into the pattern of the Olympic rings…

No one at the BBC will whisper about the nimbyism that is stifling the introduction of alternative power sources; that even stratospheric fuel price rises are not curbing the nation’s hunger for energy or its use of private cars; that a nuclear solution to short-term energy needs creates a vile poison for the land that lasts for millennia; that 40-odd days to hold someone without charge, nor the fact that the police are prone to shoot first and ask questions later is not in some way breaching human rights; to invade other countries on the grounds of questionable intelligence is perhaps suspect morals; and that a first-past the post system is actually a far cry from proper representation of the voting public.

If the West was really outraged and indignant about China’s approach to energy and pollution, why doesn’t it complain about that whopping great Olympic torch that going to burn night and day for 16 days…

Edinburgh, Claymore and the 69 position

Meadowbank Stadium in Edinburgh beckons. On 2 August it is the location of Claymore, the annual wargames show run by the South East Scotland Wargames Club. How much longer the show is held there is in question owing to plans to demolish and redevelop the stadium, but that’s a story for another entry.

I like Claymore. Scottish wargamers seem very friendly and always pleased that someone from as far south as I am makes it up each year. I usually travel by train, which is convenient because after the short link service from the ferry at Lymington Pier to Brockenhurst, in the New Forest, I can stay on one train all the way to Edinburgh Waverley. No changes, no hassle: the worst part is hefting two bags full of lead soldiers over the footbridge at Brockenhurst on the outward journey.

Since the change of franchise, however, the train journey is not as convenient. Virgin used to run the cross-country service all the way, and there used to be more choice of trains with only the one change at Brockenhurst. Now Cross Country holds the franchise from Bournemouth to Birmingham, plus the slow east coast route from Birmingham to Edinburgh, and the choice for travellers like me has got worse. I liked the Virgin service. I could choose to go via either the fast west coast route which is an hour faster than the east coast route - the west coast route passes through the striking scenery around the Lakes and Carlisle - or pick the leisurely east coast route that has the awesome coastal views in southern Scotland.

And I could make feeble jokes about taking a Virgin all the way to Edinburgh and back.

I used the Cross Country service to travel to Edinburgh in May, and thought it slow and inconvenient, because I had to travel later on the way up, and earlier on the way home to minimize the changes. It has made me think about how I attend Scottish wargames shows.

Still, no such worries for Claymore. Mike, one of two friends from school with whom I am still in touch, and the owner of Black Hat Miniatures, has a stand at Claymore this year and because he can drive (I can’t) is taking a Transit up. I am tagging along in my usual role as navigator and loader/unloader, and to remind Mike to take breaks. It’s a real bonus because I can take a huge amount of stock to the show, and while I recoil at the thought of the cost of diesel for the trip, that’s offset against the 40 quid of taxi fares and a train fare of around 130 quid that I’d be looking at to do the show the way I usually do.

The real bonus of the Scottish shows is that I get to see friends Adrian and Noelle, who fortunately moved to Edinburgh some years ago and provide a comfortable base in Morningside. While I mourn their moving from Southall, west London, because it deprives me of the fantastic vegetarian curries available there, their Edinburgh base is even better. This is particularly so for Claymore as it coincides with the first week of the Edinburgh Festival, and Edinburgh simply buzzes.

So how do we get to the 69 position? It’s simply because with the arrival of Mike and myself in Edinburgh, the old Hoobie Quiche (the mythical hobby clique) of the 1980s roleplaying fan scene reaches pretty well the most critical of critical masses as the city is littered with the ageing shambling mounds that were once pert and trim roleplaying geeks. OK, pert, trim and spotty. We’ve all got older, greyer, married or gayer.

The 69-meet, a gathering of beer-swilling pert, trim and  - well, you get the picture - used to take place at the Sun in Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, a pub that used to boast it had 69 real ales on its list. The pub transformed, tragically, into an Irish theme pub; no-one has been back: the meet has moved on. The 69-meet was probably, definitely, not instigated by the young handsome and bouncing Trevor Mendham; I honestly can’t remember anything straight in this regard, except that Trevor will deny everything, and that Trevor hates real ale and only drinks lager. The choice of The Sun was always a perverse one for him as it served probably the worst lagers in the world.

And so the 69-meet resurfaces. Saturday 2 August is the date (same day as Claymore), the time is 8.30pm-ish, and the venue is The Morningside Glory in Edinburgh. It may move possibly to The Waiting Room, because one thing I have learned is that Scottish draught beer is in general vile, with all the appeal of iron filings dissolved in rat’s piss, and thus going to one Scottish pub only leads to a rapid move to another in the hope of finding something drinkable. Watch out for fat grey-haired buggers talking about elves, trolls and the state of the games industry: they are not the Hoobie Quiche.

Tomato-free for one month

Since the realization after the IW Festival that tomatoes are probably doing me no good, I haven’t touched them. It has been hard, as tomato-based sauces feature highly in my preferred Italian and Indian recipes, but the results have been striking. The cracked skin on my palms has healed over, and while still not soft and lovely (eczematic skin never seems to heal neatly), it’s so much better than it was a month ago that I really feel quite chipper. I still owe my relief to Glaxo for producing Betnovate and to Steifel for Oilatum Cream, but I have hopes that I can cut down on the former, because it’s the steroid that one step away from the ultimate and final step of Dermovate (there is nothing stronger).

So how have I coped food-wise? Well pesto (I make it without parmesan) or roasted peppers have taken the place of tomatoes as a base sauce for pasta or pizzas. I’m still suspicious of peppers, but excluding them would mean abandoning the fiery sensation of chilli for ever. As this year I’m growing my own habanero, jalapeno and Scotch bonnet chillis, an allergy to peppers would make my greenhouse redundant. And while I can go tomato-free and dairy-free, chilli-free might be a step too far.

“She who is worshipped” bought home lamb mince, hoping for the delicate minced lamb curry that we like so much. I turned it into sheek kebabs, flavoured with ginger, green garlic, fresh and ground coriander and cumin, and cooked on a steel skewer over a barbecue. No tomatoes were harmed in the making of this dish.

I still have to work round other dishes. A tomato-free and dairy-free lasagne may be a challenge, but I’m looking forward to it. And I suspect Chinese and Thai dishes may start to predominate in the kitchen - but that will be no loss.

True Friendship

My sister in law Frances has polycystic kidneys. Her best friend Hilary, who lives in Australia, last week flew the 10,000 or so miles to the UK to donate one of her kidneys. Both are currently in hospital recovering from the operation, which took place during National Transplant Week.

The story made the front page of the Western Daily Press (www.thisisbristol.co.uk - link updated 20 July), and you can read it in full online. It is a truly heart-warming story and, unless you are a steel-hearted monster, may have you reaching for a box of tissues.

I was struck by Hilary’s unselfish nobility of action, and by the strength of support of her own family, who I met at the weekend. It’s a tale, I’m sure, that gives us all cause to reflect on the value of true friendship, and on what we would do for our own friends.

I Will Not Ever Never Eat A Tomato

I suffer from eczema and have done so from birth. It has never been that bad except as a baby, and from youth to the late 40s has been a patchy condition that affects different parts of me seemingly at random. I have never been able to identify the cause, and as a result have been on various, increasingly potent steroidal creams for as long as I can remember.

Despite the misery eczema causes, I always thought myself lucky. Schoolfriend Simon Longprice, with whom I fondly remember playing rudimentary board wargames such as Tri-tactics and Dover Patrol, was covered in eczema, and his daily life must have been dire. Unfortunately, as a child who moved around depending on my father’s job, I lost contact with Simon long ago; I sincerely hope he has done better than me in coping with this skin condition.

The root of my eczema has to be an allergy, and I’ve spent a good many years trying to identify potential sources. In the process I’ve discovered an intolerance of dairy produce, and a switch to a largely non-dairy diet has helped in some ways - but not with the eczema. I love cheese, but cutting it out and switching to soya milk has stopped then outbreak of spots that continued well past adolescence, and the unwelcome farting that I always associated with Indian food and lentils, but seems more linked to yoghurt as a cooking sauce. Funnily enough, I can eat cheese as long as it is cooked in a fondue; somehow heat and wine must break down whatever it is in cheese that makes it indigestible. Unfortunately, drinking wine and eating uncooked cheese does not work.

The IW Festival this year put me on another trail for food allergies. My hands actually got better after the festival and during the following week. Looking back at what I ate, I realized the one vegetable I didn’t eat in anything like my usual quantities was tomato - there must have been one slice in one of the burgers, and that’s it. I’d also avoided orange juice, because I’d been on more exotic smoothies instead for the weekend’s healthy fruit intake.

I had a word with my mum. I talk pretty well every week to keep in touch, making up for years of not being in touch other than to say I was coming home from digs with my laundry. I asked if she’d had any cravings while pregnant, and the answer was sort of what I’d expected: tomatoes and oranges. A doctor friend with a nut allergy had a mother who ate nuts excessively during pregnancy, and it made me wonder whether there is any connection with allergies and pre-natal diet. No doubt some scientific study has already looked into this.

So since the festival I’ve been avoiding tomatoes and oranges. There has been an improvement, and the eczema is becoming manageable with just emollients. This isn’t proof, as I may have overlooked something else that changed, but what I have to do is work out whether any other member of the family Solanaceae - which includes the potato, capsicums and the aubergine - is also responsible. So far the potato seems innocent as this year’s crop of new potatoes in the garden has as usual proved delicious and seems to have had no ill effects.

My long-suffering friends, however, will probably despair of me. My favourite salad - tomato and mozzarella - is doubly out of my diet. And it looks bleak for spaghetti bolognese, lasagne and pizza. Though I have been experimenting with pizza substitutes using a thin covering of pesto as a base sauce with some success.

The thought of linking pre-natal diet with childhood dietary problems comes during the same week that scientists have discovered, in a study on rats, that mothers who eat junk food pass on a preference for junk food and a tendency to obesity in their young. They naturally pointed to the need to eat fruit and vegetables to counter this tendency: what they should have advised was to eat a balanced diet to avoid an imbalance of any one foodstuff - not necessarily junk food - affecting the next generation.

Adventures in the Garden

I play with toy soldiers. I’ve done so since I was 12 - it was model aircraft kits before then - and on the verge of 48 I still see no reason to stop. I recently picked up a copy of Sharp Practice, a set of Napoleonic skirmish wargames rules from the Two Fat Lardies, with a view to playing some more maneagable, fun games as a break from the serious stuff.

I usually play with 15mm figures, which are not really suitable for skirmish games, so I started to look around at other options. One was to use 28mm metal figures for the tabletop; another, to use Playmobil figures, as favoured by the likes of evilcheesescientist and the Garden Wargaming site. But then an announcement from plastics kit and figure maker Italeri caught my eye: new 1/32 scale (54mm) Austrian and French infantry for the Revolutionary and early Napoleonic wars. These are not too expensive, at potentially less than 80p for a figure, with cavalry no more than twice the price depending on the supplier. And they’re ideal for use in the garden, once equipped with a lawn spike, allowing me to make use of the half an acre in front of the house that otherwise only gets mown.

I’ve painted up some already as trial figures, with the first attempt at a lawn spike illustrated above. The flat-headed galvanized nail is too short for the length of my grass , and won’t be able to cope with the longer grass I’ll be leaving as changes of terrain, sculpted by the lawnmower. So I have to get some two-inch nails.

The figures are given a basic paint job and then both varnished and shaded using Army Painter Quick Shade. Army Painter is in effect a coloured varnish that pools in crevices of a figure, automatically shading it. It is not a craftsman’s tool. To work well it needs figures on which the sculpting detail is exaggerated: on smooth or small figures, it tends to give an even mucky brown coloration. It largely works on the Italeri 1/32nd figures, though not perfectly (close-up view below). However, because these troops are intended for the garden, I don’t intend doing much touching up to get them to look pristine.

What I have to do now is finish painting up the box of 16 Austrians, and then move onto the French infantry. I have already ordered French cavalry and artillery, and some later period Austrians, and am keenly awaiting the release of the French supply wagon set, which will form the basis of many scenarios. 

Eyes Right…

Way back in 1999, I started my business, Fighting 15s, as a wargames figures painting service, painting to commission. It did quite well and actually earned me a reasonable amount of money that supplemented my income as a freelance sub-editor, largely working on trade magazines. About four years ago, however, my eyes went, for want of a better word, poot!, and my working world fell about me in tatters. First, I couldn’t see computer screens well enough to edit, and I largely blamed it on the fact that the freelance almost always gets the ropiest computer monitor. And then I stopped being able to focus and to concentrate on the toy soldiers I enjoyed painting.

Fate had been cruel enough to strip me of reliable use of the one sense that allowed me to work and that permitted me to enjoy my work. I carried on, though. My sub-editing got worse and worse because I stopped being able to see spelling mistakes or even notice missing words; my figure painting just stopped. I was lucky in that a non-reading production job cropped up with the late Games International magazine, and that a financial group of magazines clearly still thought that I was better than other freelance sub-editors. But the rest of my editing work dried up.

I spent two years going for tests at the children’s section of the eye department at St Mary’s Hospital in Newport - the bit that tends to look after children with lazy eyes. It didn’t help me get better, but told me what I knew: that my eyesight was variable and unpredictable in how much it changed from test to test. Eventually I was told my sight had stabilized enough to warrant a prescription for new glasses with stronger prisms: prisms in essence kick your line of sight inwards or outwards so that both eyes focus on the same spot.

The new glasses were great for general use, but I still couldn’t concentrate at reading distances. And that meant no reading, no editing and worse no painting.

About two months ago, I started changing the way I work. Rather than work till everything is done, I set myself a financial target. If I pack orders equal in value to that target, which is based on my annual average for a day, I stop work and go and do something in the house or garden. After a few weeks I decided I felt like painting toy soldiers again, and resolved to paint for an hour or so if I felt like it in the evening. I actually managed to complete some units and finish a commission that I had stopped two years earlier. In short, I stopped working myself all hours of the day and began to relax more.

Last week I felt so great I tried using my old, weaker glasses. They appear to be sufficient, and the newer glasses seem too strong all of a sudden. For the Isle of Wight Festival I even managed to wear only non-prescription sunglasses for the event, with none of the headaches I usually suffer. This week, optically I feel great, and almost hopeful that everything has returned to normal.

I’m not going to push it. Painting when I feel like it is very much the order of the day. I doubt if I can ever again manage to paint for longer than two hours. But it’s absolutely great to be able to do something that I love again.

The Green Side of the Isle of Wight Festival

Much was made this year of the greener aspects of the IW Festival, though this largely seemed to consist of advice that it was possible to hire a bike and cycle from the ferry to the site. With this in mind it would have been handy to identify on the festival map where bikes could be safely left for the duration.

I can’t comment on the camp site, but there was the usual bike rack tucked away at the festival’s Medina High School entrance. I was there early each day so never had a problem finding a free space, but late arrivals would have been pushed. And that always leads to the fear that someone is going to double up on the spaces and chain your bike to their own. In short, the festival needs more bike racks, more clearly identified, and more clearly promoted.

As posted earlier, I initially cycled from Freshwater where I live to friends at Wootton, some 15 miles. On festival days I cycled in along the old railway line that picks up from the Havenstreet steam railway, joins the footpath/cycle route at the crematorium, and then conflicts with pedestrians all along Racecourse to the festival site. It takes just under 15 minutes - walking last year late at night took the best part of an hour, so cycling makes sense.

None of the marshals had the faintest idea where the bike racks were, and there was even one sign pointing in the wrong direction. It wouldn’t have taken much to pass on this information in their pre-event briefing.

On site, paper cup recycling was very much in evidence, with the sensible 10p refund per cup returned to points by the bars. Not everyone, of course, could be bothered, and plenty of enterprising young children made minor fortunes over the weekend by scavenging the ground and bins. I thought there was definitely a cup shortage on the ground this year, so the initiative in part worked, and probably accounted for the bottle-only barrage during The Kooks’ set on Sunday. It’s at time like that you simply hope for the best that the resulting shower of liquid is only beer or water…

Purple bins were marked for plastic bottles; red for mixed recyclables: both were used indiscriminately. The best initiative would be to match the cup-collection plan by having a similar one for bottles.

I approved of the wooden cutlery in evidence at food stalls, and of Smooth Criminals’ plastic-free paper cups that were 100 per cent compostable. If the festival used the same compostable cups for beer and cider, rather than what appear to be the usual non-recyclable composite paper and plastic cups, then the cups wouldn’t have to go off to be burned.

The waste is largely off to the Island’s new waste-to-energy plant. This is laughably called recycling by the local authority, when what it actually means is that it minimises the impact of the materials on landfill. The waste-to-energy plant merely gets a second and final use out of materials that could otherwise be properly recycled by turning them into other items - such as turning PET bottles into fibre for weaving, for instance. Burning waste without first re-using it is not really recycling.

Finally, there was BT’s wind turbine for charging phones in its chill zone. If the blades turned all weekend, I’d be surprised. It was poorly sited on a low mast right next to trees on the river bank, whereas turbines actually need a clear site with as few objects as possible that create air turbulence. Solar energy using photovoltaic panels is a far better bet on the Island during the hours of light. I have both a turbine and PV panels at home, and I know which produces more usable energy in a built-up environment. A bank of solar panels would have been far more impressive.

Solo needs to take much of the above on board to make the festival truly green. However, the biggest battle will always be getting people who can’t be bothered to stick the right waste in the right bins. People who, filled with alcohol, can’t tell left from right and up from down…

Sunday summary, IW Festival 2008

It’s Tuesday, and I am recovered enough to finish entries about the festival with a short summary of Sunday. A “Happy Father’s Day” text from Jimjams woke me to get to the festival in time for Proximity Effect - another of the Island’s young bands - on the main stage, and breakfast at the Smooth Criminals smoothie bar. The Smooth Criminals is a regular stopping point of a festival morning. A vegan Jungle Juice got me going, and another customer commented that it sounded healthy. After the alcohol unit count of the day before, it had to be.

I caught the last of Sondura (another avalanche of sound type metal band) in the Big Top, stayed for Hogg, and then back to the main arena for Newton Faulkner. Faulkner provided a breath of air for the day, with immense talent coupled with humour and wit, thus entertaining on several levels. I’d have never bought his album before this point, but now it seems a must buy for the collection.

Back to the Big Top for the end of Gweido, and the whole Arcadian Kicks set (see earlier entry), and then it was main arena time for the rest of the day with Starsailor, James, The Kooks and finally The Police. The Kooks were the only one of four to disappoint, if only because after two well-known numbers it was just another lot of indie band noise that probably meant something to the fans. Jimjams loved them.

I hadn’t seen James for years, last showing interest in them around 1990. But they were polished and tuneful, and I recognised some of the set.

The Police were the only headlining act of the weekend to live up to their billing. Competent, polished music that covered all the well known songs and a few I never knew existed. I have never been a fan of the group, but the set closed the weekend wonderfully, and with five numbers in two encores they went down well. It was even possible to get close and revel in the atmosphere of the occasion. Jimjams didn’t hang around for them, however, and snuck off to Feeder in the Big Top.

About my only disappointment with the event as a whole was that it continues to be dominated by old, wrinkly performers. Was there really no one better than the Sex Pistols - a group that dismayed old and young alike - for the Saturday? Better to have the Sugababes, who packed out the Big Top and well beyond on the Saturday, yet on appearing on stage seemed surprised, saying that they didn’t know how many people would turn up. For goodness sake girls, you’re a top-selling girl group!

Sunday also proved to be day of the jerkwad, with one fat drunk objecting to how I looked. I have to wear gloves at these events because the grass aggravates my eczema (I go stuffed full of antihistamines too and have to avoid food with dairy products). OK, it makes me seem freakily Michael Jackson like, but most people assume I just have cold hands. Drunks, of course, have no subtlety. And there was the pettiness of some man defending his patch of festival soil, saying I had to go round and actually putting his arms out to stop me going straight through to my friends who were just in front of him. As I said, day of the jerkwad.

The bad weather held off, with just a few spots of rain on the last night.  And allergic reactions aside, it was a great three days. Can’t wait for next year.

Sundays stats: Cigarettes: 0; units of alcohol: 8 plus more unknown whiskies. Food eaten: vegan Jungle Juice (Smooth Criminals), lamb tagine (Dunsbury Lamb, again - so good I had to eat it twice), felafels. Jerkwad count: 2 (1 more than last year). Bands liked: Proximity Effect, Newton Faulkner, Arcadian Kicks, James, The Police. Disliked: The Kooks. Wish I could have seen: Scouting for Girls.

The Arcadian Kicks: http://www.myspace.com/thearcadiankicks

Proximity Effect: http://www.myspace.com/proximityeffect

Hogg: http://www.myspace.com/hogg