Andrew Hickey
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andrewhickey.500songs.com
Andrew Hickey
@andrewhickey.500songs.com
16K followers 550 following 28K posts
That bloke who does that podcast your annoying friend keeps trying to get you to listen to. He/him. Posts every random thought in his head. AuDHD and not many filters. If you're only interested in my podcast you probably don't want to follow.
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andrewhickey.500songs.com
For film, probably The Man Who Laughs.
Books The House at Pooh Corner by default (I've not read many 1928 books despite reading a lot from years around it)
Visual art Escher's Tower of Babel
Music Ellington's The Mooche
youtu.be/BPJ5vNmVL3I?...
Escher's Tower of Babel, an etching of the construction of said tower, viewed from above.
December 9, 2025 at 1:26 AM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Close
A series of replies, all saying "Because he's a cunt"
December 4, 2025 at 10:29 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Just arrived at the Your Party conference. Buzzing!
The infamous photo of the ball pit at DashCon
November 29, 2025 at 12:31 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
No, sadly not. From Francis Rossi's autobiography:
No wonder we were all going mental. Then Alan decided he couldn’t be arsed to fly back from Australia so we could make a promotional video for ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. Promo vids were not the norm yet in the music business. Only a label’s biggest and most sought-after artists would be asked to make one. So it was a prestige thing for us. More than that, it was also a necessity. The ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’ single was one of the biggest hits we ever had. It was huge in about twenty different countries. To expect us to fly around the world doing TV and radio shows in so many places at once just wasn’t feasible. We were mightily pissed off at Alan for not helping us out. These days you could make a video without any of the band in it and no one would bat an eye. But back then in the days before MTV and its ilk, it was all about making an as-live performance video that different TV shows in different countries could play as though you were there live in the studio with them. Alan not being there ruined any chance of that. Until Colin had a brilliant idea: a life-size marionette of Alan, replete with bass guitar. We all laughed and told him to roll another joint. But he was serious and went ahead and had this thing built. Just like a real puppet it dangled from the ceiling with strings. Colin even acted as puppet-master, operating the strings to make Puppet Alan move as though he was playing. We were laughing so much we had to abandon the first few takes. Then we all got so used to it – Colin was doing such a brilliant job making it move – that we forgot it was even there. During tea breaks Colin would place the puppet sitting down in a chair so that when we came back it was like Alan was actually sitting there waiting for us. It was comical but we did worry that programme directors would reject the video as a piss-take. Instead, everyone loved it so much they all played it, including Top of the Pops, and no one even noticed it was Puppet Alan. That video foll…
November 26, 2025 at 5:38 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
My favourite bit of the Lee "Scratch" Perry bio I used as my principal source for this Patreon bonus is just how cordially Perry and Chris Blackwell disagree about "Judgement In A Babylon", which has lyrics like "Chris Blackwell is a vampire" and "He give Bob Marley cancer".
Though many artists acknowledged a debt to Blackwell, others resented his control over the dissemination of Jamaican music and the wealth it afforded him. Yet, had Perry gone too far by calling Blackwell a vampire? Would the Island boss really have been sipping chicken’s blood from a rum glass at the opening of Compass Point in 1977? ‘Well, that’s true,’ said Blackwell. ‘It’s part of a custom in Jamaica, and I’m from Jamaica: when you build a building, you kill a chicken and mix the blood with rum in your mouth – just a little bit – and drop it on the four corners.’ However, Blackwell took exception to the claim that he was ‘sucking the blood of the sufferers’. ‘I don’t agree with it, but if he felt that way at the time, that must have come across to him. Hopefully, what I do is introduce and help promote his stuff.’ ‘He always be a nice man to me and sometimes go over the border to do things for me, but when me call him a vampire, it was the truth,’ said Perry. ‘When me say the truth, me have to say it, don’t care what it cause.’
November 26, 2025 at 1:30 AM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Screenshot of the above post, showing it labelled "Posts a lot: more than 50 times yesterday"
November 18, 2025 at 5:59 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
I was going to object to this, but then I realised I am literally right this second wearing a T-shirt with this image on it
(from www.frasergeesin.com/fashion/unis... should you wish one of your own)
A drawing of a smug man with his arms folded, captioned "You know that popular thing that YOU like? Well I think it's rubbish actually."
November 18, 2025 at 1:37 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Possibly, indeed, take to heart the words of the person who only three weeks ago wrote this about OpenAI, a certain @anildash.com
This Thing Needs a Warning Label Here's what's most key for contextualizing the Atlas browser: this is the same company whose chatbot keeps telling vulnerable children to self-harm, and they do, and now a number of them are dead. When those who are in psychological distress engage with these tools, they very frequently get pulled into states of extreme duress — which OpenAI knows keenly well because even one of their own investors has gone off the deep end when over-using the platform. In fact, the user experience feature that OpenAI is most effective at creating is emotional dependency amongst its users, as evidenced by the level of despondency its users showed after the recent release of GPT-5. When users respond to a software update by expressing deep emotional distress, and that they feel like they've lost a friend, you have a profound bug. If there are enough grieving parents who have been devastated by your technology that they can form a support group for each other, then there should at the very least be a pretty aggressive warning label on this application when it is initially installed. Then, at a far less serious level, if this product is going to have extreme and invasive effects on markets and cultural ecosystems without disclosing the mechanisms it uses to do so, and without asking the consent of the many parties whose intellectual property and labor it will rely on to accomplish those ends, then we need to have a much broader reckoning.
November 17, 2025 at 8:33 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Woodchipper solidarity
Me and Patton Oswalt
November 14, 2025 at 3:36 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
blog.kagi.com/assistant-fo...

Interesting how quickly Kagi are trying to pivot and now appeal to the AI-abhorrent among us given that this was them a few months ago.
Choose from a range of leading LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and more. You can switch models mid-thread and explore their performance through our regularly updated open-source LLM benchmark. Choice of models in non-Ultimate plans will be limited compared to our full offering in the Ultimate plan, please see below. Access to your favourite LLMs makes Kagi Assistant mould to your requirements and query customisations, so we feature an array of models for you to choose from.
November 14, 2025 at 5:35 AM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Oh frabjous day, calloo callay! Patreon have announced an upcoming new feature which might (might, not definitely will) actually be useful and solve an actual real problem.
Collab posts – Co-author a post with another creator in your network to get your work in front of a new set of fans.
November 12, 2025 at 6:18 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Yes yes yes, "Like a Rolling Stone", Blood on the Tracks, magnificent late-career renaissance, whatever. Everyone knows it was lyrics like *this* that mean Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize he won.
[Verse 4] Well, my telephone rang, it would not stop It’s President Kennedy calling me up He said, “My friend, Bob What do we need to make the country grow?” I said, “My friend, John; Brigitte Bardot Anita Ekberg Sophia Loren” Country'll grow [Verse 5] Well, I got a woman, five feet short She yells and hollers and screams and snorts She tickles my nose, pats me on the head Rolls me over and kicks me out of bed She’s a man-eater, meat-grinder, bad loser
November 12, 2025 at 2:28 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
The Lib Dem members I know are, almost without exception, among the most decent, principled, and angriest at injustice people I know.
The Lib Dem leadership are, *without* exception, unprincipled craven shits.
This from Caron is absolutely correct though she's much more polite than I could be.
Since the General Election in 2024 we have failed: Disabled people over benefits Immigrants and asylum seekers – the British jobs for British workers response to Starmer’s speech was disgraceful Trans people in many and varied ways since April This latest episode is the icing on a particularly unpleasant cake. Which marginalised group that the right wing tabloid press don’t like are we going to throw under the bus next? We are trying to raise loads of money on being the antidote to Reform and that seems like a ruse because we need to actually oppose Reform and fight the slide into the horrible, divided society they want to inflict on us. The more we acquiesce without fuss the more likely that is to happen. We made much of voting down Farage’s toxic anti human rights bill this week while at the same time inflicting a blow on the human rights of our own members. The less we challenge then on the specifics, the more we enable them to manipulate public opinion. Our local champions at whatever level of government should be speaking up against the dangerous rhetoric we hear from so many places.
November 2, 2025 at 4:39 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Working on the playlist for the episode while also excerpting the clips. Just the songs you'd normally expect for an episode on Creedence.
A screenshot of Tidal, showing part of a playlist, featuring Vince Guaraldi, Jimmy Witherspoon, Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets, Al Jolson, and the Mills Brothers.
November 1, 2025 at 7:43 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
I've never read these books but the interview is tempting me because of the author just not playing the game you're expected to in these things.
As for the second part of the question, it's one of those "what ifs" that regularly astonish me. They demonstrate a misunderstanding of a simple fact: the plot of a book is a sui generis homeostasis, a completely closed and filled system where there is full and unmodifiable equilibrium. A book is not some interactive game with a thousand solutions. In the equilibrium of a book, there is no room for any "what if." There can be no sensible answer to the question "What if the character was abruptly dropped..." because the closed and balanced plot of the book did not anticipate such a thing. Period.
November 1, 2025 at 4:59 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
I am very, very, very glad that after fifteen years of Big Yud having a pernicious influence on the world and being one of the direct causes of our current descent into fascism, some mainstream media is not just noticing his existence but actually pointing out how batshit and harmful he is.
Peter Thiel, who has said that “regulating AI hastens the antichrist”, provided early funding for Yudkowsky’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Dominic Cummings is a big fan. Elon Musk and Grimes bonded over a joke about Roko’s Basilisk, a concept that originated on Yudkowsky’s forum LessWrong. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has suggested that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. His direct intellectual children include an amateur sex researcher (who was also Nate Soares’s partner and is the first person thanked in the acknowledgements) and a vegan-Sith death cult. All the worst people in the world already love this guy, and the plan with If Anyone Builds It seems to be to sane-wash him for the airport books crowd, sanding off his wild opinions (no talk of nuclear strikes on data centres this time) and associations with truly awful people. To anyone picking the book up in Waterstones or WHSmith, he will look like any other middlebrow author: the unsubtle art of very much giving a fuck about artificial general intelligence.
October 28, 2025 at 10:30 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Like they're actually doing a "I bet those wokes would make Anne Frank into a pansexual Latina" thing, they're trying to satirise the very thing the Daily Mail is taking them seriously for doing.
Our musical satire imagines what happens when a progressive community theater company decides, you know what, maybe now is not the time for us to center these privileged, straight, white European Jews (who spent three years in an attic, hiding from Nazis). And so, in an effort to make our world a better place, this heroic fictional theater troupe transforms Anne Frank’s true story into an intersectional, multiethnic, genderqueer, decolonized, anti-capitalist, hyper-empowering Afro-Latin hip-hop musical. And you, the audience, have the privilege of witnessing it.
October 26, 2025 at 8:50 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
You're right. I don't believe it.
Screenshot of the cbsnews.com mobile page, with the top story being the protests.
October 18, 2025 at 7:06 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Literally just encountered this as well, in a book published last year (Opus by Gareth Gore, on Opus Dei)
To unlock one door, while the directress in charge of the numerary assistants had the key for the other. It was a foolproof system designed to create a hermetic seal between the two residences. Mixing of genders was strictly prohibited -- although they
October 17, 2025 at 7:51 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
John Fogerty's autobiography, the TL:DR version
Father Ted saying "And now we move on to liars..."
October 5, 2025 at 8:04 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
These high-profile guest appearances marked a crossing of the Rubicon. Spinal Tap had slipped into the real world. In 1992, the band booked a spring-summer “shed tour” of big outdoor venues. As a warm-up, they jumped into the deep end, performing before an audience of 72,000 at Wembley Stadium as a featured act in the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness. Tap found themselves on a bill that included not only the surviving members of Queen, but David Bowie, Annie Lennox, George Michael, Elton John, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Def Leppard. Tap’s parallel universe was being subsumed by the actual universe. And this was no black-hole type of thing. They were sharing a stage with real rock icons. The band’s appearance at the Mercury tribute started off well. A team of sexy young women in shorty beefeater costumes rolled out a red carpet that led to the stage. The guys strode out in crowns and ermine-trimmed coronation robes. After the beefeaterettes stripped them of their regalia, Tap was set to launch into a fist-pumping rendition of “The Majesty of Rock.” But fate held other ideas—and they came in the form of a classic Spinal Tap moment. “There was no sound coming out of my amp,” recalls Chris. “It wasn’t working. So we had this long, really scary delay. The crew was slow to move on the issue because they thought we were doing some kind of bit. We weren’t. Harry and Michael had to work the crowd for over three minutes. It felt like two years. They ended up rewiring my guitar through a different amp that had none of my effects. So I was basically lost. There were times where I just stopped because I didn’t even know where I was.” Fortunately, the rest of the tour went smoothly. The reaction was so positive that it was sort of confusing. “Playing these bigger venues, with thousands of people showing up, it didn’t always make sense to me,” says Chris. “Why are they here? Why are they cheering so hard? I think in some cases, they felt like they were in t
September 21, 2025 at 1:02 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Actually Volman's "autobiography" really isn't. It's pretty much entirely a story made up of quotes from everyone *other* than Volman about his life. It's all like this. A very useful book if you're interested in the Turtles/Zappa/Flo & Eddie/the music industry, but not really "written" by him.
3 THE TURTLES MICHAEL THOMAS When the British Invasion started, The Crossfires were playing surf music, and then they changed it—they changed their persona and their group and everything else. They sort of reincarnated themselves and became The Turtles. HOWARD KAYLAN About two months after quitting school, the band had pretty much run its course, and I felt like a real moron. Al had a wife and a child, and he couldn’t subsist on $125 split six ways, which is what we got playing at the Revelaire Club. If it was one night a week, we made $125. If we did two, we doubled our salary. It was very, very pathetic. We all knew that it couldn’t continue. We had a meeting backstage at the Revelaire, and we drew up a paper of resignation that I was to take upstairs to Bill Utley, and on my way up to take the note, I was stopped by two bearded clowns in suits who had no business being at the Revelaire Club whatsoever. They had heard us perform. More specifically, they had heard us perform the newest hits of the week, which is what we were doing at that point. And two weeks previous, The Byrds had released ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ So, two weeks into The Byrds’ career, we’re at the Revelaire Club, Al Nichol has now purchased a twelve-string guitar. A cheap one. It wasn’t a Rickenbacker, it was a Danelectro. It was cheesy sounding, but it had a twelve-string sound of its own, and it was affordable. AL NICHOL All of us were totally into the band—there was nothing else on the side. That’s where all our attention was, but unfortunately, after a while, it just wasn’t making enough money. I’d gotten married and had a kid coming. Don Murray was married and had a kid on the way, too. None of us were making enough, and we didn’t see any way of making more out of the band. So, we just decided to end it. All this came down at one crucial point. We were ready to call it quits, and then we were approached by Reb Foster and Bill Utley, who said, ‘I got a couple of guys from Liberty Records, an…
September 6, 2025 at 1:41 AM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Penn Jillette wrote this in the foreword to Howard Kaylan's autobiography, and I think this sums up why Volman (the one Penn looked like) and Kaylan were important.

RIP The Phlorescent Leech
Boston 1971: The most important concert of my life and there were the Turtle guys onstage with the man who had taught me to love twentieth-century classical music and real literature. And one of the Turtle guys wasn’t rock ’n’ roll skinny like I wasn’t rock ’n’ roll skinny, and he had hair just like mine, long but not hip. Children in my school had said I looked like the fat guy in the Turtles with the long hair and glasses, and there he was, with the other Turtle guy, both singing their asses off with Frank Fucking Zappa. Did this mean I had to like these Turtles? Years later, brilliant voice actor Billy West would say, “There’s one show business.” I didn’t have those words for it then, but Frank Zappa, Howard Kaylan, and Mark Volman taught me that there was only one showbiz that night in Boston. These lightweights were onstage with the heavyweights and they were doing the best show I would ever see. Their voices were beautiful. The music was hard, and they were still having fun. Some of the jokes were very serious and over my head (what the fuck was going on singing in German about a sofa?). Some of the jokes were just stupid jock cock jokes that I would sneer at in my school. It was all mixed together. It was a show that was smart and stupid, heavy and light, beautiful and more beautiful. They were doing a show with cheesy jokes, and it was also art. How could that be? It wasn’t stuffy—it was funny, entertaining, showbiz, vaudeville, and fun, and it still had content. Those turtlefucking Mothers with those motherfucking Turtles. They did “Happy Together” in this Mothers show, and it was a really good song. And the music was more sophisticated than I had ever thought. Those perfect AM voices doing art. I loved hearing something I knew from the radio in a smarty-pants show. Were they making fun of it? Yes. Were they also playing it for real? Yes. Were they playing it because it was fun? Yes. My view of showbiz and art came together. It was that moment, during that show in Boston, that the line between showbiz and art was erased for me. If Turtles could be Mothers, maybe a hick juggler could speak his heart in a magic show. I drove back to Greenfield and now did my best to look as much like the Phlorescent Leech as I could. When people said, “You look like that guy,” I said, “Yeah, the guy in the Turtles, he’s also in the Mothers now.” I was proud of being in showbiz and I was proud of how I looked, and I knew what I wanted to do in life. That’s a lot to learn from a couple of Turtles.
September 5, 2025 at 6:57 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
@elsawilliams.bsky.social just forwarded me this. Apparently I was in the Sunday Times culture section this weekend.
Photograph of a newspaper. Impossible to read without zooming in but one of many short sections is recommending my podcast.
September 2, 2025 at 9:15 PM
andrewhickey.500songs.com
Was going to say this was Sara's mentions, but in fact Snoopy is being significantly more reasonable.
A Peanuts cartoon. Snoopy typing a letter. "Gentlemen, regarding the recent rejection slip you sent me. I think there might have been a misunderstanding. What I really wanted was for you to publish my story, and send me fifty thousand dollars."
September 2, 2025 at 3:02 PM