Nick from the Glenn List recorded this in Sheffield last weekend, commenting that he sings it every night to his daughter! Aww. (Nick does, not Glenn.) I had heard Glenn was playing a lot of his solo UK gigs with Simon, but it was hard for me to picture. Now I get it!
This is lovely; enjoy it!
Thank you, Nick.
One of the reasons my old site wasn’t working out as well for me after the initial 8 or 9 years was that my computer was from the Paleolithic Era, and would not play streaming video. This meant that not only was I missing out on things like this (thank you Mr. Tilbrook, that’s just what I needed this morning!), but I could not watch ANY YouTube.
I’ll just pause here to allow the gasps of horror (and perhaps the odd stray tear) to subside…
Yes, it wasn’t really a life worth living, and worse yet it made me an increasingly incompetent webmistress for the Unofficial Glenn Site! I couldn’t listen to most of the interviews, because even the radio ones were often done in video by the final year. So all I could do was link to them and say, “See what you think!” That kind of took the wind out of my News Page writing sails, since I prefer to give my opinion on, well, everything.
But thankfully I finally have a brand new MacBook, and the world of online video is now my oyster! (I’d blog more often, but I pretty much do YouTube 24/7 now…sorry.)
So, what this somewhat longwinded introduction is leading up to is the simple fact that to me FluffersTV is a new thing!
WOW. Wow, wow, wow! Somebody is really fricking good at making those videos!! I mean they look so casual, off the cuff, and fluffy, but look more closely and you’ll see they’re really works of fine art. The camera angles, the composition of the frames, which moments get filmed, and the tight and precise way they’re cut together all look deceptively simple. The songs always fit perfectly, the dialogue snippets are added seamlessly and with great effect, and I have to say that some of the tracks I was less enthusiastic about have been shown to me in a new and improved light. It is simply impossible not to love something presented in such a contagiously fun manner!
There isn’t room for a dull nanosecond in something as short and upbeat as the Fluffers vids, but that just doesn’t seem to be a problem for the videographer. And best of all, he or she seems to really understand and capture the essence and personalities of all the band members and all the songs, weaving everything together to show the viewer how they truly are one and the same: It is clear that Glenn and the Fluffers wrote and performed the songs, and it’s clear that they put a lot of themselves into their music. It may sound trite (to me it sounds understated!), but the result is that the whole really is far greater than the sum of its parts.
So, who is this incredibly talented person who can actually make me like Glenn’s music even more?
I had to find out, so I put on my snoopiest librarian glasses and wrote to the one person who must know. David wasted no time in informing me that it is none other than Simon Hanson!! Dude, you’ve been hiding your (other) light under a bushel!
Long may FluffersTV continue!
Glenn just toured the US, and is now finishing up a major UK tour. If you went to any of those shows, you probably know that he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for the Love Hope Strength Foundation! He had an incredibly difficult time, which he’s been candid about onstage and off.
Looks like a right bugger even from this distance!
I asked Glenn in Portland, just days after the climb, why it had been so much more difficult than the Mount Everest trek he undertook for the same charity in 2007. He told me the main factors were that the altitude sickness had hit him much harder, and also he hadn’t trained this time.
Doing a little googling on my own I found sites like “Training Tips For Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro“, where potential climbers are informed:
Altitude sickness affects people randomly, and a person might not suffer from it on one climb and then get hit hard the next time on that same route.
This is exactly what Glenn said, and didn’t know before he went; it’s totally unpredictable, but he hadn’t worried because he’d been fine on Everest. The web site goes on to say:
Of course, increasing your general level of fitness will go far to avoid compounding possible altitude sickness with general fatigue.
Poor Glenn! But in the end the whole team did make it to the top, raising crucial funds and awareness for a local cancer hospital. Glenn talks about the gruelling climb in this recent interview on
He also discusses a topic of much interest on the Glenn List: his new short hair! He explains that he had pictured a sort of George Clooney look, but he feels he came out more on the side of Bobby from King of the Hill!
What do you think, folks? A or B?
Well, I like the new do, and I think the Bobby reference is way out of line. But this particular Bobby moment does put me in mind of this video from FluffersTV!
David has advised me that short posts are the way to go with a blog. Well, clearly I’m no good at that, so I will leave you with a lovely image of Glenn and some Maasai people hanging out once he had gotten off that cursed mountain. Good to see a smile on his face!
Hello everyone in Squeeze/Glenn land!
I’m back! I know, it’s weird. Here’s what happened…
I closed my site at Babylonandon.com last February largely because I didn’t have the time to keep the whole thing up to date the way I would like to. (See my previous entry, which is actually the goodbye letter I posted on my news page at the old site.) I was sad about it, but I felt like it was the right decision.
Fast forward to last week: I got an email from David Bailey of Packetofthree.com saying he was revamping his whole site, and would I take a look at the beta page? I clicked on over here, and what did I find? David had MADE me a blog. It was already here–all I had to do was type!
So I’m giving it another go. No more HTMLing for me, I will be here on a strictly babble-only basis! Perfect.
See you here!
This is the last post I ever made on the news page at The Unofficial Glenn Tilbrook Site.
Hello everyone!
Well, it has been almost a year now since I last seriously considered closing the site, and I have only done one update! I guess it is time to face up to the fact that I am never going to get back to working on it on a regular basis. It’s hard to take it down because it represents so many good times, and it has meant a lot to me, but I don’t want to just leave it here to get completely irrelevant (some would argue it’s too late for that! haha).
So much has changed since I opened it back in 2000! Back then, this was pretty much the only source of audio and video stuff on the web for Glenn and Squeeze. Now almost anything you could ever want to see is on YouTube! Plus, Glenn and the Fluffers are making their own videos direct to you, streaming from Glenn’s MySpace and FaceBook pages! It doesn’t get any better than that.
When I first began reporting news here, Glenn was just starting out with his solo career, and he didn’t even have an official site. His first solo album wouldn’t be released for nearly a year! But I knew he could do it, and that it would be great. Now he’s been touring solo and with the Fluffers for almost a decade, and Squeeze have even reformed! It’s been an amazing thing to witness my favorite musician make that journey.
I had so much fun with this site! However, it could never have been anything like the success it was without hundreds of contributions from you guys in the form of photos, videos, radio interviews, etc. Not to mention all the news and quotes I gleaned from the Glenn List! I did the HTML and the ‘babbling’, but you all really made this site come alive. Thank you so much!
The biggest thanks, of course, has to go to Glenn himself! There would be no site at all if it wasn’t for his tremendous talent and awesome life’s work in music, which inspired the whole thing to begin with. On a personal level, Glenn has never been anything but incredibly supportive of the site, and extremely kind and generous with me. I didn’t know him at all before I built this site, and would happily have done it on the strength of his career alone, but lucky me! Upon meeting him he turned out to be a super nice guy, and someone I am proud to call a friend.
So it’s a fond farewell to The Unofficial Glenn Site. I’ll take it down sometime in the next few months (once I figure everyone’s had time to take a last look if they want to). I’ll see you on the Glenn List and at the gigs!
Corina