Blogwatch
Welcome...
The Bizarre Medical World Of Dave Weston, a friend of Del whose newly-established blog chronicles his battle with the debilitating effects of liver disease.
Rullsenberg Rules, a Nottingham blogger who has only just appeared on the SWSL radar.
Meanwhile...
Robin reflects on George Best's death and the nature of talent and self-destruction - "I’m not going to judge him. I’ll just marvel at Best’s prodigious ability to reduce the vertical to the horizontal; opposing defenders, beautiful women and ultimately himself".
(Robin's piece is by far the best thing I've read on the subject - and there's been an awful lot written - but do also take a look at the responses to Best's passing on By The Sea Shore and Cheer Up Alan Shearer, where debate ignited in the comments box.)
Elsewhere...
Del underlines the appeal of hunting for vinyl gems in charity shops - "[F]ew things give me more pleasure than filing through a load of battered old vinyl in some forgotten corner of the PDSA shop. Why? Two words, my faithful companion: hunter / gatherer. In this modern world of mobile phones, Nathan Barley and Chocolate Coke, there aren't many opportunities to don a loincloth, clutch a spear in hand and kill some defenseless animal (I tried it once in Luton and was slapped with an ASBO for my trouble. I even had to hand back the scalps. Well..ok... the fake Burberry caps and hoodies. More on that later)".
Mish demands a man for walkies - "If YOU have walking skills and want this EXCITING opportunity of working and adoring in and around the Nottingham area then please contact Miss Mish stating your age and skills. Photo and agent details a must".
Kenny shakes his fist at pesky kids spoiling his enjoyment of 'Flightplan' - "there were not just the inevitable mobile phone calls, but a gang of hoodies marching in halfway through to find their girlfriends; a charming young lady who had what can only be described as a 'Cheryl Tweedy moment' when asked by another girl to keep quiet and a fat lass who tripped over and fell face first into a huge tub of popcorn".
And finally...
Phill introduces his readers to the concept of the Geordiegraph - "The Geordiegraph is a regional variation on the classic polygraph lie detector machine. Featuring the dulcet tones of Jimmy Nail, the Geordiegraph will tell you if the person you are talking to is telling the truth or lying like a dirty faced scoundrel".
Monday, November 28, 2005
Christmas time, mistletoe and whitebait
Hear ye, hear ye! 'Tis the season to be jolly - so if you're in the vicinity of Birmingham be sure to head along to what might well be the final ever A Different Kettle Of Fish night at the Flapper & Firkin on Tuesday 6th December.
The big draw for me are (Hooker), Manchester's answer to Sleater-Kinney, who were forced to pull out of the October date at short notice. The fact that they've played with Katastrophe Wife, Le Tigre, The Donnas and The Gossip should give you a clue as to what they're all about.
Heading the bill are Trash Fashion, who have been described as "serious Fucking Champs type heavy metal guitar action, and some killer Soft Cell basslines" - an intriguing prospect, I think you'll agree.
Also playing are The Pubic Fringe, a Birthday Party influenced punk outfit whose line-up comprises Larry Clitter, Dusty Enclaves, Nazi Sinatra, Anal Ravine and 'Tiny' Gene Pool, and who have been labelled "without doubt one of the strangest bands in Stourbridge" by the Stourbridge News.
Doors are at 7.45pm and it's £3 in.
And if you needed any more persuading, I have it on very good authority that there will also be mince pies. To be honest, I prefer mince and onion, but then you can't have everything.
Hear ye, hear ye! 'Tis the season to be jolly - so if you're in the vicinity of Birmingham be sure to head along to what might well be the final ever A Different Kettle Of Fish night at the Flapper & Firkin on Tuesday 6th December.
The big draw for me are (Hooker), Manchester's answer to Sleater-Kinney, who were forced to pull out of the October date at short notice. The fact that they've played with Katastrophe Wife, Le Tigre, The Donnas and The Gossip should give you a clue as to what they're all about.
Heading the bill are Trash Fashion, who have been described as "serious Fucking Champs type heavy metal guitar action, and some killer Soft Cell basslines" - an intriguing prospect, I think you'll agree.
Also playing are The Pubic Fringe, a Birthday Party influenced punk outfit whose line-up comprises Larry Clitter, Dusty Enclaves, Nazi Sinatra, Anal Ravine and 'Tiny' Gene Pool, and who have been labelled "without doubt one of the strangest bands in Stourbridge" by the Stourbridge News.
Doors are at 7.45pm and it's £3 in.
And if you needed any more persuading, I have it on very good authority that there will also be mince pies. To be honest, I prefer mince and onion, but then you can't have everything.
A tale of two punches
In last night's episode of 'Coronation Street', two punches were thrown in anger - with remarkably different outcomes.
Fiz, fired up into a jealous rage over Molly Compton's stealthy seduction of Kirk, played right into the hands of the baker's daughter by smacking her in the phiz in front of a packed Rovers.
Meanwhile, Nathan (who, like Craig Charles's Lloyd, has been deftly brought into the centre stage from the wings) was sufficiently riled by Ashley's verbal lambasting of his girlfriend Tracey to plant a similar right hook in the face of the butcher's son.
Someone didn't do a very good job with the dubbed-on sound effects, though. Nathan's haymaker seemed to make a dull impact yet supposedly detached Ashley's retina, whereas Fiz's punch was accompanied by a sharp crack yet Molly was left with little more than a bleeding nose and a self-satisfied smirk.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. I should get out more. But at least I wasn't watching 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here', that's all I can say.
In last night's episode of 'Coronation Street', two punches were thrown in anger - with remarkably different outcomes.
Fiz, fired up into a jealous rage over Molly Compton's stealthy seduction of Kirk, played right into the hands of the baker's daughter by smacking her in the phiz in front of a packed Rovers.
Meanwhile, Nathan (who, like Craig Charles's Lloyd, has been deftly brought into the centre stage from the wings) was sufficiently riled by Ashley's verbal lambasting of his girlfriend Tracey to plant a similar right hook in the face of the butcher's son.
Someone didn't do a very good job with the dubbed-on sound effects, though. Nathan's haymaker seemed to make a dull impact yet supposedly detached Ashley's retina, whereas Fiz's punch was accompanied by a sharp crack yet Molly was left with little more than a bleeding nose and a self-satisfied smirk.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. I should get out more. But at least I wasn't watching 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here', that's all I can say.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Three is the magic number
DIRTY THREE / JOSH PEARSON, 21ST NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACADEMY
"Why aren't you all at Arab Strap?", comes the question from the stage. I'll admit to wavering in deciding to be here rather than next door in the Bar Academy, and, surveying the exceedingly sparse Monday night crowd - perhaps 30 at the most at present - it's evident that plenty of people have succumbed to the temptation of hearing "a drunken Scotsman shouting about his sexual indiscretions". It turns out to have been their loss.
The questioning voice belongs to Josh Pearson. They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but you can with Pearson. Take a look at his appearance: wild unkempt hair beneath a stetson, enormous beard, massive metal belt buckle modelled on a ram's skull, cowboy boots. If you sawed him in half, it would read "Texan" right the way through like a stick of rock. It comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that not only is he the son of a preacher man, but he's also spent time working as a ranch-hand.
Pearson used to front Lift To Experience, whose LP The Texas-Jeruslam Crossroads - an extraordinary amalgam of thunderous post-rock and Nick Cave's Old Testament fire-and-brimstone rhetoric - he described as "a concept album about the end of the world where Texas is the Promised Land". His solo material follows along similar lines - tales of sin, redemption and too much whiskey sung in a voice like Mark Lanegan's, deep but somehow angelic too. The final song concludes with the repeated lyric "The devil is on the run / Let's have some fun", and he demonstrates a suitably wicked sense of humour throughout, singing to a former sweetheart "It's the thought of killing you that keeps me alive" in one song and interrupting another to talk about eating Mormons.
My one complaint would be that, as with J Mascis's solo performance at the Social in Nottingham three years back, the sheer volume of the distorted passages of guitar-playing mean that some of the subtleties and intricacies of Pearson's songs are lost. Great to see him onstage, though - some compensation for missing out on witnessing Lift To Experience live.
When Dirty Three emerge, it's evident that some of Pearson's cowboy chic has rubbed off on Warren Ellis, who is currently sporting a sizeable beard. With his long straggly hair, smart shirt and trousers, and slick white slip-ons, he looks like the sort of chap who lives in the woods and is accustomed to surviving on scraps of food pillaged from bins, but has been plucked from his predicament and pimped up on some TV makeover show.
He greets the audience - by now swelled to a still-disappointing 100 at most - and explains his enthusiastic grin with reference to the fact that he has two ancestors that came from Birmingham and that this is the very first time he has visited the city (he's been as close as Wolverhampton before, though - as recently as this time last year, when I saw him playing with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds). One of these ancestors left Birmingham of choice, whereas the other "was asked to leave", having stolen a pair of shoes and a couple of silver spoons. Well, Ellis is Australian, after all - it all adds up. There follow a few moments of indecision when the band ponder what to start with, and then they launch into a raucous tuning-up session that gradually coalesces into a recognisable song, introduced as 'Sea Above, Sky Below'.
I've never heard Dirty Three before, let alone seen them in the flesh, but they really are something quite special. Call them post-rock if you must (an inevitability, really, given their vocalless songs), but they draw upon folk, jazz and avant garde traditions, live up to their name by leaving you feeling as though you've got dirt under your fingernails and are perhaps first and foremost a punk band - at how many Godspeed! You Black Emperor gigs would you expect to see a fistfight break out immediately behind you, as does tonight?
That said, unassuming guitarist Mick Turner never once threatens to become animated, while drummer Jim White - whose percussive invention behind the kit, even down to carefully and repeatedly dropping a drumstick to send it skittering across the snare, is amazing to behold - is a picture of concentration, only rarely breaking into a smile.
Nearly all of the energy comes from Ellis, who, though stood in the main with his back to the audience, is a magnetic presence. His frequently furious style owes much to The Velvet Underground and particularly 'The Black Angel's Death Song', and he attacks his violin with such gusto that several bowstrings snap each song while flailing his right leg out as if possessed. At some points he plucks the violin like a guitar, and at others shouts into the strings.
The set features plenty of material from new LP Cinder, their seventh in 14 years: 'Amy', 'Sad Jexy', and their interpretation of Hungarian fiddler Felix Lajko's 'Zither Player'. Josh Pearson joins them for the latter two, contributing bass and mandolin respectively while smoking a cigarette which comes perilously close to setting fire to his beard. Older tracks like 'Hope' and 'Sue's Last Ride' are also dusted down and greeted with cheers.
What is surprising and incongruous (though pleasantly so), given the melancholy and anger inherent in the music, is that Ellis is so affable if not hilarious between songs. He takes pot-shots at everyone from Iron Maiden to Sting, Phil Collins and Mark Knopfler (who he says he'd thought was Swedish), informs us that "Nine point five out of ten girls prefer combing their hair to Dirty Three than to Robbie Williams" and introduces one song as a Gothic number about when "you open the cupboard and you've got loads of eyeliner but no eyes".
The piece de resistance comes when he explains the solitary song which comprises the encore: "This is a song about listening to Donovan - early records - and taking too much speed ... and taking all the putty out of the windows looking for bugs ... and not being helped by your girlfriend who's screaming that they're coming down the chimney as well"...
If Ellis ever comes to jack in the punk-folk malarkey, then a career in stand-up comedy awaits.
DIRTY THREE / JOSH PEARSON, 21ST NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACADEMY
"Why aren't you all at Arab Strap?", comes the question from the stage. I'll admit to wavering in deciding to be here rather than next door in the Bar Academy, and, surveying the exceedingly sparse Monday night crowd - perhaps 30 at the most at present - it's evident that plenty of people have succumbed to the temptation of hearing "a drunken Scotsman shouting about his sexual indiscretions". It turns out to have been their loss.
The questioning voice belongs to Josh Pearson. They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but you can with Pearson. Take a look at his appearance: wild unkempt hair beneath a stetson, enormous beard, massive metal belt buckle modelled on a ram's skull, cowboy boots. If you sawed him in half, it would read "Texan" right the way through like a stick of rock. It comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that not only is he the son of a preacher man, but he's also spent time working as a ranch-hand.
Pearson used to front Lift To Experience, whose LP The Texas-Jeruslam Crossroads - an extraordinary amalgam of thunderous post-rock and Nick Cave's Old Testament fire-and-brimstone rhetoric - he described as "a concept album about the end of the world where Texas is the Promised Land". His solo material follows along similar lines - tales of sin, redemption and too much whiskey sung in a voice like Mark Lanegan's, deep but somehow angelic too. The final song concludes with the repeated lyric "The devil is on the run / Let's have some fun", and he demonstrates a suitably wicked sense of humour throughout, singing to a former sweetheart "It's the thought of killing you that keeps me alive" in one song and interrupting another to talk about eating Mormons.
My one complaint would be that, as with J Mascis's solo performance at the Social in Nottingham three years back, the sheer volume of the distorted passages of guitar-playing mean that some of the subtleties and intricacies of Pearson's songs are lost. Great to see him onstage, though - some compensation for missing out on witnessing Lift To Experience live.
When Dirty Three emerge, it's evident that some of Pearson's cowboy chic has rubbed off on Warren Ellis, who is currently sporting a sizeable beard. With his long straggly hair, smart shirt and trousers, and slick white slip-ons, he looks like the sort of chap who lives in the woods and is accustomed to surviving on scraps of food pillaged from bins, but has been plucked from his predicament and pimped up on some TV makeover show.
He greets the audience - by now swelled to a still-disappointing 100 at most - and explains his enthusiastic grin with reference to the fact that he has two ancestors that came from Birmingham and that this is the very first time he has visited the city (he's been as close as Wolverhampton before, though - as recently as this time last year, when I saw him playing with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds). One of these ancestors left Birmingham of choice, whereas the other "was asked to leave", having stolen a pair of shoes and a couple of silver spoons. Well, Ellis is Australian, after all - it all adds up. There follow a few moments of indecision when the band ponder what to start with, and then they launch into a raucous tuning-up session that gradually coalesces into a recognisable song, introduced as 'Sea Above, Sky Below'.
I've never heard Dirty Three before, let alone seen them in the flesh, but they really are something quite special. Call them post-rock if you must (an inevitability, really, given their vocalless songs), but they draw upon folk, jazz and avant garde traditions, live up to their name by leaving you feeling as though you've got dirt under your fingernails and are perhaps first and foremost a punk band - at how many Godspeed! You Black Emperor gigs would you expect to see a fistfight break out immediately behind you, as does tonight?
That said, unassuming guitarist Mick Turner never once threatens to become animated, while drummer Jim White - whose percussive invention behind the kit, even down to carefully and repeatedly dropping a drumstick to send it skittering across the snare, is amazing to behold - is a picture of concentration, only rarely breaking into a smile.
Nearly all of the energy comes from Ellis, who, though stood in the main with his back to the audience, is a magnetic presence. His frequently furious style owes much to The Velvet Underground and particularly 'The Black Angel's Death Song', and he attacks his violin with such gusto that several bowstrings snap each song while flailing his right leg out as if possessed. At some points he plucks the violin like a guitar, and at others shouts into the strings.
The set features plenty of material from new LP Cinder, their seventh in 14 years: 'Amy', 'Sad Jexy', and their interpretation of Hungarian fiddler Felix Lajko's 'Zither Player'. Josh Pearson joins them for the latter two, contributing bass and mandolin respectively while smoking a cigarette which comes perilously close to setting fire to his beard. Older tracks like 'Hope' and 'Sue's Last Ride' are also dusted down and greeted with cheers.
What is surprising and incongruous (though pleasantly so), given the melancholy and anger inherent in the music, is that Ellis is so affable if not hilarious between songs. He takes pot-shots at everyone from Iron Maiden to Sting, Phil Collins and Mark Knopfler (who he says he'd thought was Swedish), informs us that "Nine point five out of ten girls prefer combing their hair to Dirty Three than to Robbie Williams" and introduces one song as a Gothic number about when "you open the cupboard and you've got loads of eyeliner but no eyes".
The piece de resistance comes when he explains the solitary song which comprises the encore: "This is a song about listening to Donovan - early records - and taking too much speed ... and taking all the putty out of the windows looking for bugs ... and not being helped by your girlfriend who's screaming that they're coming down the chimney as well"...
If Ellis ever comes to jack in the punk-folk malarkey, then a career in stand-up comedy awaits.
Auton-matic for the people
AUTONS / MARIA SZYRTISZ & THE PYRAMIDS OF MARS / JOSIE WATTS / CHRIS PERRIN, 20TH NOVEMBER 2005, PORTSMOUTH ARTS CENTRE
It takes place on the third floor of Portsmouth City Library. The audience is seated in banked rows. There's an interval. There are platefuls of assorted sweets, and it's a bring-your-own-booze event. This, it is fairly safe to say, is not your average gig.
Held as part of Portsmouth's inaugural film festival, the evening features a bill of music and short films from a whole host of local artists - something of a celebration of the city's arts and music scene.
First up are singer / songwriters Chris Perrin (formerly of Thirst, now fronting Zuma) and Josie Watts, who perform one and two of their own compositions respectively. Both are evidently talented musicians, but the spark just isn't quite there. Watts in particular has a stunning voice, but disappointingly mangles and contorts it into a shape which resembles any number of contemporary coffee-table songstresses - a shame.
There follows Top Of The Pomps, a selection of videos shot by Portsmouth-based bands and artists over the past couple of decades. Cranes, beloved of The Cure, and The Beta Band feature, as do surf-skiffle legends Emptifish, shown larking around on the beach. The undoubted show-stealer, though, is the remarkable short film the American art rock band The Residents made for local avant-garde act Renaldo And The Loaf's 'Songs For Swinging Larvae'. Recently screened at the Royal Festival Hall to an amazed audience, it features sinister childsnatchers, sailor outfits and copious quantities of mysterious red liquid. Your guess is as good as mine, but it's certainly one to polarise opinion.
With that, it's time for the interval, and the assembled throng make their way out of the auditorium to sample some of the mysterious - and very alcoholic - red and orange and yellow liquids prepared by DJ Spangly.
The second half of the evening's entertainment kicks off with a special surprise guest appearance from Maria Szyrtisz & The Pyramids Of Mars. Well, when you're a one-man-band and called John, you could do with an arresting stage name. A veteran of the Portsmouth arts scene who once went under the moniker E-Coli, John not only plays but also makes all of his own instruments and equipment (electronic keyboard aside). The one song he plays tonight - featuring keys, tambourine, drums, chimes (played by jerking his right knee), glockenspiel and vocals - sounds like 'War Of The Worlds' as reinterpreted by Chas & Dave. Visuals man Jez - like me witnessing the live Maria Szyrtisz & The Pyramids Of Mars experience for the first time - vows there and then to shoot him a video.
Headline band Autons include amongst their number Tony Rollinson, curator of the event and author of the seminal biography of the Pomepy music scene, 'Twenty Missed Beats'. His co-conspirators also have form - lead singer / guitarist Dave Jones featured in both Screeper and Reinhardt, and guitarist Leon Tricker is better known as electro-art terrorist Qhixldekx.
'Different Eyes' is their impressive opening gambit, Jones's vulnerable yet insistent falsetto a marvel, but neither 'Lamplight' nor new song 'Watery Grave' quite live up to that level. It's with the slower, more reflective 'Maybe' that everything gradually comes together, and a second new song, 'Conspiracy Theory', with its thundering crescendo, maintains the momentum.
It's the last three songs that best illustrate their chameleon nature, however. First Brian Poole aka Renaldo And The Loaf dons a pair of goggles and joins them for a spectacularly stoned take on The Kinks' hippyish 'See My Friend'; then 'Class Traitor', a reworked Screeper club stomper, raises the beats-per-minute count dramatically; and finally the distortion-laden 'Snakes', a paranoid and confrontational gnashing of teeth, brings things to an abrupt conclusion, Tricker's snapped guitar string ruling out the possibility of an encore. Few bands can shapeshift so adroitly, even if it does make for something of a disconcerting experience for the onlooker.
AUTONS / MARIA SZYRTISZ & THE PYRAMIDS OF MARS / JOSIE WATTS / CHRIS PERRIN, 20TH NOVEMBER 2005, PORTSMOUTH ARTS CENTRE
It takes place on the third floor of Portsmouth City Library. The audience is seated in banked rows. There's an interval. There are platefuls of assorted sweets, and it's a bring-your-own-booze event. This, it is fairly safe to say, is not your average gig.
Held as part of Portsmouth's inaugural film festival, the evening features a bill of music and short films from a whole host of local artists - something of a celebration of the city's arts and music scene.
First up are singer / songwriters Chris Perrin (formerly of Thirst, now fronting Zuma) and Josie Watts, who perform one and two of their own compositions respectively. Both are evidently talented musicians, but the spark just isn't quite there. Watts in particular has a stunning voice, but disappointingly mangles and contorts it into a shape which resembles any number of contemporary coffee-table songstresses - a shame.
There follows Top Of The Pomps, a selection of videos shot by Portsmouth-based bands and artists over the past couple of decades. Cranes, beloved of The Cure, and The Beta Band feature, as do surf-skiffle legends Emptifish, shown larking around on the beach. The undoubted show-stealer, though, is the remarkable short film the American art rock band The Residents made for local avant-garde act Renaldo And The Loaf's 'Songs For Swinging Larvae'. Recently screened at the Royal Festival Hall to an amazed audience, it features sinister childsnatchers, sailor outfits and copious quantities of mysterious red liquid. Your guess is as good as mine, but it's certainly one to polarise opinion.
With that, it's time for the interval, and the assembled throng make their way out of the auditorium to sample some of the mysterious - and very alcoholic - red and orange and yellow liquids prepared by DJ Spangly.
The second half of the evening's entertainment kicks off with a special surprise guest appearance from Maria Szyrtisz & The Pyramids Of Mars. Well, when you're a one-man-band and called John, you could do with an arresting stage name. A veteran of the Portsmouth arts scene who once went under the moniker E-Coli, John not only plays but also makes all of his own instruments and equipment (electronic keyboard aside). The one song he plays tonight - featuring keys, tambourine, drums, chimes (played by jerking his right knee), glockenspiel and vocals - sounds like 'War Of The Worlds' as reinterpreted by Chas & Dave. Visuals man Jez - like me witnessing the live Maria Szyrtisz & The Pyramids Of Mars experience for the first time - vows there and then to shoot him a video.
Headline band Autons include amongst their number Tony Rollinson, curator of the event and author of the seminal biography of the Pomepy music scene, 'Twenty Missed Beats'. His co-conspirators also have form - lead singer / guitarist Dave Jones featured in both Screeper and Reinhardt, and guitarist Leon Tricker is better known as electro-art terrorist Qhixldekx.
'Different Eyes' is their impressive opening gambit, Jones's vulnerable yet insistent falsetto a marvel, but neither 'Lamplight' nor new song 'Watery Grave' quite live up to that level. It's with the slower, more reflective 'Maybe' that everything gradually comes together, and a second new song, 'Conspiracy Theory', with its thundering crescendo, maintains the momentum.
It's the last three songs that best illustrate their chameleon nature, however. First Brian Poole aka Renaldo And The Loaf dons a pair of goggles and joins them for a spectacularly stoned take on The Kinks' hippyish 'See My Friend'; then 'Class Traitor', a reworked Screeper club stomper, raises the beats-per-minute count dramatically; and finally the distortion-laden 'Snakes', a paranoid and confrontational gnashing of teeth, brings things to an abrupt conclusion, Tricker's snapped guitar string ruling out the possibility of an encore. Few bands can shapeshift so adroitly, even if it does make for something of a disconcerting experience for the onlooker.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Kung fu fighting
I AM ZEITGEIST / THE INTERNATIONAL KARATE PLUS / STRANGETIME, 18TH NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACTRESS & BISHOP
The gigs are coming thick and fast for fledgling Birmingham band StrangeTime - they played at the Bar Academy barely two weeks ago, and they’ve got another lined up for 15th December – and it’s having a noticeable effect on the performances, this being the slickest and sharpest yet, despite a shake-up to the set and the debuting of a new song, ‘Interference’. No difficulties locating drumsticks this time, and ‘Ex Boyfriend’, performed with gusto, makes for an arresting opening, while ‘Dressing Up’ and ‘Mundane’ (played last) steal the show as usual. Guitarist / vocalist Kate Finch and bassist Tara Hartel might remain static for the most part, but this could easily pass for icy cool as much as for nerves.
Cardiff’s The International Karate Plus, I am reliably informed, are named after a cult classic computer game. I’m imagining it must be quite violent, judging by the evident relish that the threesome set about boxing in our ears. The initial brutality recalls the sadly defunct Mclusky, but as the set gradually calms down (or is it just a matter of acclimatisation?) it’s the unjustly ignored Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi who are brought to mind.* They also look the part – energetic guitarist, tall rangy bassist brandishing his instrument like a weapon, sunglasses-wearing drummer knocking over his mike stand in the heat of the moment but taking the chaos in his stride – and there’s no better lyric than “Everything I like about you, I like about someone else” delivered tonight.
The nominal headliners labour under the moniker I Am Zeitgeist in several ways. Firstly, and most obviously, because it's pretty terrible. Secondly, because there's nothing particularly zeitgeisty or cutting-edge about them. Of course, even if there was, then that'd only be the case for six months to a year, but we could have hoped for something better than competent but rather stale American rock filtered through British (and particularly Manc) indie. It's a shame, because of the three bands they're evidently the most at ease - or perhaps simply the most under the influence of chemical relaxants / stimulants, especially bassist JJ whose grin is just visible beneath his enormous afro.
* Update Since putting this review up online yesterday, I've been in touch with Rich of The International Karate Plus, who informs me that two thirds of the band were once in Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi! Meanwhile, Simon of Sweeping The Nation has made the same point in the comments box. Before seeing them live I knew precisely nothing about them, so I guess that suggests my perceptive faculties are sharper than I thought...
Links:
Pete’s review of the gig, which was the last of the fourteen in his Going Deaf For A Fortnight endurance test
MySpace pages for The International Karate Plus and I Am Zeitgeist
Purevolume page for StrangeTime
I AM ZEITGEIST / THE INTERNATIONAL KARATE PLUS / STRANGETIME, 18TH NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACTRESS & BISHOP
The gigs are coming thick and fast for fledgling Birmingham band StrangeTime - they played at the Bar Academy barely two weeks ago, and they’ve got another lined up for 15th December – and it’s having a noticeable effect on the performances, this being the slickest and sharpest yet, despite a shake-up to the set and the debuting of a new song, ‘Interference’. No difficulties locating drumsticks this time, and ‘Ex Boyfriend’, performed with gusto, makes for an arresting opening, while ‘Dressing Up’ and ‘Mundane’ (played last) steal the show as usual. Guitarist / vocalist Kate Finch and bassist Tara Hartel might remain static for the most part, but this could easily pass for icy cool as much as for nerves.
Cardiff’s The International Karate Plus, I am reliably informed, are named after a cult classic computer game. I’m imagining it must be quite violent, judging by the evident relish that the threesome set about boxing in our ears. The initial brutality recalls the sadly defunct Mclusky, but as the set gradually calms down (or is it just a matter of acclimatisation?) it’s the unjustly ignored Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi who are brought to mind.* They also look the part – energetic guitarist, tall rangy bassist brandishing his instrument like a weapon, sunglasses-wearing drummer knocking over his mike stand in the heat of the moment but taking the chaos in his stride – and there’s no better lyric than “Everything I like about you, I like about someone else” delivered tonight.
The nominal headliners labour under the moniker I Am Zeitgeist in several ways. Firstly, and most obviously, because it's pretty terrible. Secondly, because there's nothing particularly zeitgeisty or cutting-edge about them. Of course, even if there was, then that'd only be the case for six months to a year, but we could have hoped for something better than competent but rather stale American rock filtered through British (and particularly Manc) indie. It's a shame, because of the three bands they're evidently the most at ease - or perhaps simply the most under the influence of chemical relaxants / stimulants, especially bassist JJ whose grin is just visible beneath his enormous afro.
* Update Since putting this review up online yesterday, I've been in touch with Rich of The International Karate Plus, who informs me that two thirds of the band were once in Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi! Meanwhile, Simon of Sweeping The Nation has made the same point in the comments box. Before seeing them live I knew precisely nothing about them, so I guess that suggests my perceptive faculties are sharper than I thought...
Links:
Pete’s review of the gig, which was the last of the fourteen in his Going Deaf For A Fortnight endurance test
MySpace pages for The International Karate Plus and I Am Zeitgeist
Purevolume page for StrangeTime
Dumb and dumber
"Mercury ... is in a corner perfectly aligned with my star. Mercury is no good, so if it's not good, I am going to request not to speak. I'll just wait until next year to talk".
So quoth Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on Sunday, explaining to journalists why he wouldn't answer their questions. I keep on coming back to this, but I can well imagine what Francis Wheen might make of this.
Dubya obviously felt sufficiently threatened in the Village Idiot Of The World Stage stakes, because while on a visit to China he managed to try exiting a press conference through a locked door. Not only that, but he pulled a face that took the whole episode into the realm of high farce. It's OK, George - I think your status is safe.
"Mercury ... is in a corner perfectly aligned with my star. Mercury is no good, so if it's not good, I am going to request not to speak. I'll just wait until next year to talk".
So quoth Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on Sunday, explaining to journalists why he wouldn't answer their questions. I keep on coming back to this, but I can well imagine what Francis Wheen might make of this.
Dubya obviously felt sufficiently threatened in the Village Idiot Of The World Stage stakes, because while on a visit to China he managed to try exiting a press conference through a locked door. Not only that, but he pulled a face that took the whole episode into the realm of high farce. It's OK, George - I think your status is safe.
B is for...
This week's installment of the A - Z Of Music feature is now up online on The Art Of Noise. It's B, but somehow we've all tiptoed around The Beatles and The Beach Boys, which I think makes it all the more interesting. I even resisted the temptation to expound the considerable virtues of Bananarama - not easy, I assure you.
This week's installment of the A - Z Of Music feature is now up online on The Art Of Noise. It's B, but somehow we've all tiptoed around The Beatles and The Beach Boys, which I think makes it all the more interesting. I even resisted the temptation to expound the considerable virtues of Bananarama - not easy, I assure you.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Best. Comment. Ever
It's in the comments box to the Sigur Ros review below, but I thought it was worth reproducing in full here:
"You are wise not to mention Sigur Ros's use of performing animals in their act.
Persons of a sensitive disposition, some with handbags, have found their exploitation of manatees to be strangely disturbing.
This is not to suggest that advanced vertebrates are necessarily and in every case discriminated against when placed on the high wire.
It is simply that aquatic organisms do sometimes encounter breathing difficulties at that altitude.
Stick insects would be a happier choice."
Thank you Alcuin, not least because the revelation of the Icelanders' clandestine (ab)use of manatees helps to explain some of the noises they manage to create on stage and on record.
A whole host of gig reviews to come over the next couple of days - a dearth of performing animals to report, unfortunately...
It's in the comments box to the Sigur Ros review below, but I thought it was worth reproducing in full here:
"You are wise not to mention Sigur Ros's use of performing animals in their act.
Persons of a sensitive disposition, some with handbags, have found their exploitation of manatees to be strangely disturbing.
This is not to suggest that advanced vertebrates are necessarily and in every case discriminated against when placed on the high wire.
It is simply that aquatic organisms do sometimes encounter breathing difficulties at that altitude.
Stick insects would be a happier choice."
Thank you Alcuin, not least because the revelation of the Icelanders' clandestine (ab)use of manatees helps to explain some of the noises they manage to create on stage and on record.
A whole host of gig reviews to come over the next couple of days - a dearth of performing animals to report, unfortunately...
Friday, November 18, 2005
Thinly veiled brilliance
SIGUR ROS / AMINA, 14TH NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACADEMY
Tonight's support act are four unassuming Icelandic sylphs who waft in from the wings to tinker with an assortment of instruments (violins, acoustic guitars, synths, glockenspiels, brightly-coloured plinkety-plonkety children's toys), in the process conjuring up remarkably arresting instrumental folk-and-classical-influenced avant garde music in the vein of less apocalyptic and more pastoral A Silver Mt Zion upon a stage which initially appears much too large for them but which they gradually come to fill.
A band in their own right, Amina are also Sigur Ros's string section. Being let out to play and having full roam of the stage is obviously the source of some pleasure to them, but after a relatively short set concluding with a short, sharp curiously up-tempo electro tune it's back to the day job.
The best part of half an hour passes - hot and sticky amidst the capacity crowd, ambient noise recurrently fading in and out of the speakers in lieu of a DJ's soundtrack - during which time a thin white curtain is pulled across the front of the stage. Then the background music stops, the lights go up, the headliners emerge, and we're off. The curtain, however, remains resolutely in place. No, not some comical 'Spinal Tap' esque instance of mechanical failure, but a deliberate ploy.
Sigur Ros, you see, could be described as pretentious - prog rock alive and well in 2005, though mercifully without capes, lyrics about wizards or the merest hint of Rick Wakeman's presence. Indeed, their innate ridiculousness has preoccupied me before. So how to explain, justify or defend this tactic?
In dramatic terms it creates a literal "fourth wall" between them and their audience that can be ceremoniously removed at a later point.
It perhaps signifies a recognition on the band's part that they're a fairly faceless bunch of musicians, and that it's the music itself that people are here for.
It symbolically shields the audience from the immensity and power of the first song of the set, 'Glosoli', the first track proper on new LP Takk and one which sounds like nothing so much as glacial frottage.
But perhaps most obviously it allows the band to appear as silhouettes, their form and position constantly shifting as the lights behind onstage change, at the same time as providing a "canvas" onto which additional images can be projected.
As 'Glosoli' dies away, however, the curtain draws back and we're suddenly in more intimate contact with them. That's how it stays for the remainder of the set, which is a near-seamless featherbed of stately, gently undulating, occasionally pompous post-rock illuminated by Jonsi's extraordinarily piercing vocals and his penchant for playing his guitar with a violin bow. At an hour and a half long, it's enough for most of the crowd (myself included) to get completely wrapped up in, but perhaps lacking the spark of sheer excitement that might ignite fervent belief in the atheistic onlooker.
That is, until the encore. As the band walk out onto the stage, the curtain edges across once more and they launch into 'Untitled #8', the final track from 2002's ( ). Eight minutes it takes to build to its explosive climax, all restraint now abandoned in spectacular fashion as the drummer, freed from the straitjacket of the main set, attacks his kit with violent relish and a strobed flurry of projected images strikes the curtain. It's a fireworks display a week and a half too late. It's the sort of all-out sensual assault that would put Mogwai and Spiritualized in the shade. And it's an awesome conclusion to a very fine gig.
Guilty of taking themselves too seriously? Yes. Pretentious? Probably. Mindblowing? Too damn right.
Link:
My review of Sigur Ros's Takk on the Vanity Project website.
SIGUR ROS / AMINA, 14TH NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACADEMY
Tonight's support act are four unassuming Icelandic sylphs who waft in from the wings to tinker with an assortment of instruments (violins, acoustic guitars, synths, glockenspiels, brightly-coloured plinkety-plonkety children's toys), in the process conjuring up remarkably arresting instrumental folk-and-classical-influenced avant garde music in the vein of less apocalyptic and more pastoral A Silver Mt Zion upon a stage which initially appears much too large for them but which they gradually come to fill.
A band in their own right, Amina are also Sigur Ros's string section. Being let out to play and having full roam of the stage is obviously the source of some pleasure to them, but after a relatively short set concluding with a short, sharp curiously up-tempo electro tune it's back to the day job.
The best part of half an hour passes - hot and sticky amidst the capacity crowd, ambient noise recurrently fading in and out of the speakers in lieu of a DJ's soundtrack - during which time a thin white curtain is pulled across the front of the stage. Then the background music stops, the lights go up, the headliners emerge, and we're off. The curtain, however, remains resolutely in place. No, not some comical 'Spinal Tap' esque instance of mechanical failure, but a deliberate ploy.
Sigur Ros, you see, could be described as pretentious - prog rock alive and well in 2005, though mercifully without capes, lyrics about wizards or the merest hint of Rick Wakeman's presence. Indeed, their innate ridiculousness has preoccupied me before. So how to explain, justify or defend this tactic?
In dramatic terms it creates a literal "fourth wall" between them and their audience that can be ceremoniously removed at a later point.
It perhaps signifies a recognition on the band's part that they're a fairly faceless bunch of musicians, and that it's the music itself that people are here for.
It symbolically shields the audience from the immensity and power of the first song of the set, 'Glosoli', the first track proper on new LP Takk and one which sounds like nothing so much as glacial frottage.
But perhaps most obviously it allows the band to appear as silhouettes, their form and position constantly shifting as the lights behind onstage change, at the same time as providing a "canvas" onto which additional images can be projected.
As 'Glosoli' dies away, however, the curtain draws back and we're suddenly in more intimate contact with them. That's how it stays for the remainder of the set, which is a near-seamless featherbed of stately, gently undulating, occasionally pompous post-rock illuminated by Jonsi's extraordinarily piercing vocals and his penchant for playing his guitar with a violin bow. At an hour and a half long, it's enough for most of the crowd (myself included) to get completely wrapped up in, but perhaps lacking the spark of sheer excitement that might ignite fervent belief in the atheistic onlooker.
That is, until the encore. As the band walk out onto the stage, the curtain edges across once more and they launch into 'Untitled #8', the final track from 2002's ( ). Eight minutes it takes to build to its explosive climax, all restraint now abandoned in spectacular fashion as the drummer, freed from the straitjacket of the main set, attacks his kit with violent relish and a strobed flurry of projected images strikes the curtain. It's a fireworks display a week and a half too late. It's the sort of all-out sensual assault that would put Mogwai and Spiritualized in the shade. And it's an awesome conclusion to a very fine gig.
Guilty of taking themselves too seriously? Yes. Pretentious? Probably. Mindblowing? Too damn right.
Link:
My review of Sigur Ros's Takk on the Vanity Project website.
Blogwatch
Mike is nearly bored to tears by Bob Dylan - "I had primed myself for two possibilities. Based on what I had been told about his past form, either Dylan was going to be electrifying, incandescent, converting me in an instant... or else he was going to be an embarrassing sloppy mess. And I was ready for both. Hey, at least embarrassing and sloppy could be interesting, right? Heroic failures often can be. I've seen enough past-it wrecks in my time to know that. But what I wasn't prepared for was polite, efficient, bloodless blandness. Bar-room boogie. Pub rock. The sort of stuff that might have been all right down the Hope & Anchor in 1975. Think Eric Clapton. Think Dire Straits. Well, quite".
Elsewhere...
Inspector Sands offers us a list of sixteen places in London which don't exist.
By The Sea Shore recalls the time he flounced out of a seminar on the late John Fowles's 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' - "Mr C (I can't remember his name) argued I was wrong and that Fowles was talking about his cock. I countered by suggesting that a man fascinated by his cock would do better by having a wank than wasting his time writing a novel, and surely (and, years later, I still firmly believe this) THE IDEA OF AN IMMUTABLE OBJECT REPRESENTING A PERSON'S STATE OF MIND IS A HIGHLY EFFECTIVE LITERAL DEVICE".
Mish discovers NOT wearing heels has been the cause of her recent leg pains - "I stepped into a pair of high suede boots with a three-inch heel. And almost immediately the pain stopped. I could skip around the house, I could dance and frolic with gay abandon once more! It was truly a miraculous healing and I Beheld The Power Of The Boots with awe".
Robin goes for a less than satisfactory meal - "It's a very English thing, not complaining. I'm sure if I had been on the Titanic and a steward from the White Star Line had rowed alongside our lifeboat and asked 'How’s everything for you, then?' I would have replied 'Fine, thanks' and left it at that. Mel would have undoubtedly muttered something about sending a stiff letter to someone, a letter that would have hit a snag somewhere in the planning stages and never darkened a letter box, let alone anyone's desk".
Betty contemplates English holiday resorts - "South east England has a number of seaside towns where the percentage of the population with glass eyes is 430 times above the national average, and the rest of the population looks like the guests on 'The Jeremy Kyle Show'. Many of the town names end in git: Margit, Westgit, Sandgit".
And finally...
JonnyB has yet more skirmishes with East Anglian wildlife, this time mice - "Acting on advice, I buy two 'humane' mousetraps. They are cunning devices - once the animals get in they cannot get out again, like a rodentine direct debit arrangement with a large mail-order book club. I bait them with a generous chunk of nice malty bread, which should lure them in unless I have found one with gluten intolerance. I then climb stealthily up into the loft, like a Norfolk Steve Irwin".
Mike is nearly bored to tears by Bob Dylan - "I had primed myself for two possibilities. Based on what I had been told about his past form, either Dylan was going to be electrifying, incandescent, converting me in an instant... or else he was going to be an embarrassing sloppy mess. And I was ready for both. Hey, at least embarrassing and sloppy could be interesting, right? Heroic failures often can be. I've seen enough past-it wrecks in my time to know that. But what I wasn't prepared for was polite, efficient, bloodless blandness. Bar-room boogie. Pub rock. The sort of stuff that might have been all right down the Hope & Anchor in 1975. Think Eric Clapton. Think Dire Straits. Well, quite".
Elsewhere...
Inspector Sands offers us a list of sixteen places in London which don't exist.
By The Sea Shore recalls the time he flounced out of a seminar on the late John Fowles's 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' - "Mr C (I can't remember his name) argued I was wrong and that Fowles was talking about his cock. I countered by suggesting that a man fascinated by his cock would do better by having a wank than wasting his time writing a novel, and surely (and, years later, I still firmly believe this) THE IDEA OF AN IMMUTABLE OBJECT REPRESENTING A PERSON'S STATE OF MIND IS A HIGHLY EFFECTIVE LITERAL DEVICE".
Mish discovers NOT wearing heels has been the cause of her recent leg pains - "I stepped into a pair of high suede boots with a three-inch heel. And almost immediately the pain stopped. I could skip around the house, I could dance and frolic with gay abandon once more! It was truly a miraculous healing and I Beheld The Power Of The Boots with awe".
Robin goes for a less than satisfactory meal - "It's a very English thing, not complaining. I'm sure if I had been on the Titanic and a steward from the White Star Line had rowed alongside our lifeboat and asked 'How’s everything for you, then?' I would have replied 'Fine, thanks' and left it at that. Mel would have undoubtedly muttered something about sending a stiff letter to someone, a letter that would have hit a snag somewhere in the planning stages and never darkened a letter box, let alone anyone's desk".
Betty contemplates English holiday resorts - "South east England has a number of seaside towns where the percentage of the population with glass eyes is 430 times above the national average, and the rest of the population looks like the guests on 'The Jeremy Kyle Show'. Many of the town names end in git: Margit, Westgit, Sandgit".
And finally...
JonnyB has yet more skirmishes with East Anglian wildlife, this time mice - "Acting on advice, I buy two 'humane' mousetraps. They are cunning devices - once the animals get in they cannot get out again, like a rodentine direct debit arrangement with a large mail-order book club. I bait them with a generous chunk of nice malty bread, which should lure them in unless I have found one with gluten intolerance. I then climb stealthily up into the loft, like a Norfolk Steve Irwin".
Dis-covered on the flipside
As part of B-sides Week over on Stylus, they've put together a special edition of the UK Singles Jukebox dedicated to B-side cover versions. The piece, which includes contributions by Mike of Troubled Diva and Ian of Fractionals, features The Futureheads, Girls Aloud, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Goldfrapp and McFly amongst many others, but the top ratings go to dearly departed Glaswegians The Delgados for their version of ELO's 'Mr Blue Sky'.
As part of B-sides Week over on Stylus, they've put together a special edition of the UK Singles Jukebox dedicated to B-side cover versions. The piece, which includes contributions by Mike of Troubled Diva and Ian of Fractionals, features The Futureheads, Girls Aloud, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Goldfrapp and McFly amongst many others, but the top ratings go to dearly departed Glaswegians The Delgados for their version of ELO's 'Mr Blue Sky'.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
A sour note
BBC2's documentary series 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop' ended on Sunday with the final installment, devoted to the 90s, a disappointment to me for a number of reasons.
The main one, perhaps inevitably given my prejudices, was the mostly uncritical reflections on the Britpop period. Justine Frischmann, whose band's self-titled first album I really quite liked (especially 'Stutter'), unwittingly summed the phenomenon up by saying it was inspired by a hatred of American bands and a desire to hark back to the English pop tradition. That's precisely why I disliked Britpop at the time - the narrow-mindedness, the shallow jingoism, the insistence on seeing everything through Union-Jack-tinted glasses. Johnny Marr was one of the lone dissenting voices, commenting (I think very astutely) that he saw it as the final flowering of Thatcher's Britain rather than something inextricably associated with the emergence of New Labour.
And, of course, if Britpop was all about "keeping it real" and asserting one's own identity, then why did the frontman of the archetypal Britpop band, Blur, continually persist in affecting Cockneyisms and indulging in - as one talking head put it - "class tourism", most obviously exemplified in the trips to the dogs and the new-found discovery of football? It was forced. And the programme also completely ignored Graham Coxon's passion for American alternative rock, no doubt because it failed to fit the narrative - a narrative which, incredibly, found some intellectual and artistic merit in 'Country House' and its pathetic video.
I was equally nettled by the dismissive statement that grunge was the preserve of the unreconstructed, macho and overtly heterosexual man - a point illustrated with footage of Pearl Jam performing 'Alive' - whereas the sexuality of British rock and pop, by contrast, was more androgynous and confused. So Nicky Wire wore a dress and Brett Anderson made ludicrous statements like "I'm a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience" (for a more positive appraisal of Anderson's contribution to 90s music and culture, see here). But that conveniently ignores the fact that there was another side to grunge - Kurt Cobain wearing a dress, the affiliation and affection he felt with the K Records / Olympia scene and Scottish indie bands like The Vaselines and The Pastels.
Lastly, it would have been good to have had less attention devoted to the Spice Girls - massive though shallow cultural impact that they had - and at least some to the early 90s riot grrrl movement which, if not as significant here as it was in the US (with bands like Bikini Kill and Babes In Toyland), nevertheless mattered at least insomuch as it helped launch the careers of artists like Polly Harvey.
Still, having said all that, it was ultimately an enjoyable and engaging series - a pat on the back for the BBC.
BBC2's documentary series 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop' ended on Sunday with the final installment, devoted to the 90s, a disappointment to me for a number of reasons.
The main one, perhaps inevitably given my prejudices, was the mostly uncritical reflections on the Britpop period. Justine Frischmann, whose band's self-titled first album I really quite liked (especially 'Stutter'), unwittingly summed the phenomenon up by saying it was inspired by a hatred of American bands and a desire to hark back to the English pop tradition. That's precisely why I disliked Britpop at the time - the narrow-mindedness, the shallow jingoism, the insistence on seeing everything through Union-Jack-tinted glasses. Johnny Marr was one of the lone dissenting voices, commenting (I think very astutely) that he saw it as the final flowering of Thatcher's Britain rather than something inextricably associated with the emergence of New Labour.
And, of course, if Britpop was all about "keeping it real" and asserting one's own identity, then why did the frontman of the archetypal Britpop band, Blur, continually persist in affecting Cockneyisms and indulging in - as one talking head put it - "class tourism", most obviously exemplified in the trips to the dogs and the new-found discovery of football? It was forced. And the programme also completely ignored Graham Coxon's passion for American alternative rock, no doubt because it failed to fit the narrative - a narrative which, incredibly, found some intellectual and artistic merit in 'Country House' and its pathetic video.
I was equally nettled by the dismissive statement that grunge was the preserve of the unreconstructed, macho and overtly heterosexual man - a point illustrated with footage of Pearl Jam performing 'Alive' - whereas the sexuality of British rock and pop, by contrast, was more androgynous and confused. So Nicky Wire wore a dress and Brett Anderson made ludicrous statements like "I'm a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience" (for a more positive appraisal of Anderson's contribution to 90s music and culture, see here). But that conveniently ignores the fact that there was another side to grunge - Kurt Cobain wearing a dress, the affiliation and affection he felt with the K Records / Olympia scene and Scottish indie bands like The Vaselines and The Pastels.
Lastly, it would have been good to have had less attention devoted to the Spice Girls - massive though shallow cultural impact that they had - and at least some to the early 90s riot grrrl movement which, if not as significant here as it was in the US (with bands like Bikini Kill and Babes In Toyland), nevertheless mattered at least insomuch as it helped launch the careers of artists like Polly Harvey.
Still, having said all that, it was ultimately an enjoyable and engaging series - a pat on the back for the BBC.
A is for...
Might I be so presumptuous as to suggest that you may be interested in a new weekly collaborative feature that is exclusive to The Art Of Noise? Called The A-Z Of Music, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Go see by clicking here.
Might I be so presumptuous as to suggest that you may be interested in a new weekly collaborative feature that is exclusive to The Art Of Noise? Called The A-Z Of Music, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Go see by clicking here.
Feel good hits of the 15th November
1. 'Milano' - Sigur Ros
2. 'Ode To LA' - The Raveonettes
3. 'Number 1' - Goldfrapp
4. 'Push The Button' - Sugababes
5. 'Welcome To The Jungle' - Guns 'N' Roses
6. 'No Fun' - The Stooges
7. 'White Riot' - The Clash
8. 'Dressing Up' - StrangeTime
9. 'Like A Rolling Stone' - Bob Dylan
10. 'American English' - Idlewild
1. 'Milano' - Sigur Ros
2. 'Ode To LA' - The Raveonettes
3. 'Number 1' - Goldfrapp
4. 'Push The Button' - Sugababes
5. 'Welcome To The Jungle' - Guns 'N' Roses
6. 'No Fun' - The Stooges
7. 'White Riot' - The Clash
8. 'Dressing Up' - StrangeTime
9. 'Like A Rolling Stone' - Bob Dylan
10. 'American English' - Idlewild
Friday, November 11, 2005
"Where once was certainty, let there be doubt"
As always seems to be the case, it takes a few half-hearted or botched attempts to catch the intriguing fare on offer at the Rep for me to finally forge ahead and book tickets before the moment passes. Even then, we nearly missed out on Wednesday, only grabbing tickets on Tuesday and discovering later that evening that friends had found themselves out of luck.
The big draw was Bertolt Brecht's 'The Life Of Galileo', translated by David Hare. Well into its two week run it was still selling out.
The play dramatises the centuries-old dialogue or conflict between religion and science by focussing upon a particularly critical phase in the battle, and upon one individual's role in it. Galileo was instrumental in ensuring the triumph of reason over superstition, but such victories must be fought and won in every generation - as Francis Wheen's 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' and the current debate in the US about the teaching of creationism in parallel with evolution attest.
Though Galileo's ultimate victory is endorsed within the structure of the play, he is by no means consistently venerated. Early on he is shown to be something of a hack, being told of the concept of a rudimentary telescope and then passing the idea off as his own for material gain, and later his recantation of his view that the Earth revolves around the sun, under pressure from the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church, has a devastatingly disillusioning effect on his young disciples.
The play is about more than simply the religion vs science debate, though. It also draws attention to the fact that Galileo's arguments about the solar system had much wider implications - from necessitating an acceptance that human existence is contingent and that we are not at the centre of the universe metaphorically as well as geographically speaking, to the political dimension which suggested that the discovery would liberate the lower classes from the bondage in which they were kept by the Church, subservient to their masters about whom they revolved like the planets supposedly had the Earth. In the early part of the play, too, Galileo's "discovery" of the telescope and the rantings of the University of Padua's Bursar on the need to produce marketable research strikes a particularly resonant chord today, especially for those of us whose research is never likely to reap what is sown in financial terms.
So much for the play - what about the performance? Well, outgoing artistic director Jonathan Church's production isn't that spectacular (neither is Ruari Murchison's set, for that matter), hampered in particular by the inability of the lead actor, the well-established and well-respected thesp Timothy West, to remember his lines - a fact noted by another blogger to witness the production, earlier in its run. Admittedly he carries nearly the whole weight of the play on his shoulders, and at times his mumblings convey a vexed, scatty and bumbling scientist rather well, but they occur far too often for it to be intentional and often it's simply seat-squirmingly awkward to watch. In the second half there was a marked improvement, but for one of my theatre-going accomplices West's performance came perilously close to blighting the whole night.
As always seems to be the case, it takes a few half-hearted or botched attempts to catch the intriguing fare on offer at the Rep for me to finally forge ahead and book tickets before the moment passes. Even then, we nearly missed out on Wednesday, only grabbing tickets on Tuesday and discovering later that evening that friends had found themselves out of luck.
The big draw was Bertolt Brecht's 'The Life Of Galileo', translated by David Hare. Well into its two week run it was still selling out.
The play dramatises the centuries-old dialogue or conflict between religion and science by focussing upon a particularly critical phase in the battle, and upon one individual's role in it. Galileo was instrumental in ensuring the triumph of reason over superstition, but such victories must be fought and won in every generation - as Francis Wheen's 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' and the current debate in the US about the teaching of creationism in parallel with evolution attest.
Though Galileo's ultimate victory is endorsed within the structure of the play, he is by no means consistently venerated. Early on he is shown to be something of a hack, being told of the concept of a rudimentary telescope and then passing the idea off as his own for material gain, and later his recantation of his view that the Earth revolves around the sun, under pressure from the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church, has a devastatingly disillusioning effect on his young disciples.
The play is about more than simply the religion vs science debate, though. It also draws attention to the fact that Galileo's arguments about the solar system had much wider implications - from necessitating an acceptance that human existence is contingent and that we are not at the centre of the universe metaphorically as well as geographically speaking, to the political dimension which suggested that the discovery would liberate the lower classes from the bondage in which they were kept by the Church, subservient to their masters about whom they revolved like the planets supposedly had the Earth. In the early part of the play, too, Galileo's "discovery" of the telescope and the rantings of the University of Padua's Bursar on the need to produce marketable research strikes a particularly resonant chord today, especially for those of us whose research is never likely to reap what is sown in financial terms.
So much for the play - what about the performance? Well, outgoing artistic director Jonathan Church's production isn't that spectacular (neither is Ruari Murchison's set, for that matter), hampered in particular by the inability of the lead actor, the well-established and well-respected thesp Timothy West, to remember his lines - a fact noted by another blogger to witness the production, earlier in its run. Admittedly he carries nearly the whole weight of the play on his shoulders, and at times his mumblings convey a vexed, scatty and bumbling scientist rather well, but they occur far too often for it to be intentional and often it's simply seat-squirmingly awkward to watch. In the second half there was a marked improvement, but for one of my theatre-going accomplices West's performance came perilously close to blighting the whole night.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Blogwatch
Welcome...
I Look Ill (via Casino Avenue)
Welcome back...
Agnes, back after a short hiatus
Michelle, back after giving birth (Black Dove has consequently mutated into "Black Dove: The Pushchair Years" - a companion blog to Speaking As A Parent, perhaps?)
Mish, back after an operation and a period of recovery in the wilds of Scotland - "As you may have guessed, I don’t look out upon a vista of green sward with a sigh of bucolic happiness. I stumble and slide around with little shrieks of fear upon un-tarmaced paths and wonder What I’m Treading In. I expect in-breds with shot guns and interesting dentistry to be around every corner and I lie quaking in my bed, with the covers over my head, dreading the darkness, hating the silence and expecting the wolf-red devil eyes to press up against the windows every time I open the curtains".
Meanwhile...
Pete embarks upon his Going Deaf For A Fortnight project - fourteen gigs in fourteen days - and, in the write-up for last night's Jug of Ale gig, he manages to be even more scathing about local bands than me - "I found myself realising why no-one goes to gigs unless they know the band - you're suddenly find yourself at the whim of people who can play guitar but have no idea what a guitar is really for".
Reluctant Nomad recalls the time he was stopped at customs in possession of a banned book, 'The Exorcist'.
Jonathan begins a new series presenting us with the "sleeve notes" he wrote to accompany a mixtape he made for a friend, "30 Songs - An Indiepop Odyssey". (The series will also be appearing on The Art Of Noise, Jonathan being the newest contributor.)
Swiss Toni goes to see / endure KT Tunstall - "a tiny, Scottish Rowley Birkin" - and somehow resists the temptation to top himself.
Backroads relates an everyday tale of illegal mink immigration - just as well we've got someone prepared to write about this kind of thing given JonnyB's (very quiet) announcement that he'll be leaving the Village temporarily.
JonnyB's Vegetable Delivery Lady gets her own blog and wastes no time in revealing her true feelings for him - "It is important to avoid a scene. Much as I loathe delivering vegetables to this pervert and would love to tell him what I really think of him on my last day, I just want to get out of here alive and not end up locked behind a bookcase or something".
Betty speculates as to what happened to the Famous Five - "I prefer not to detail what happened to the shadowy figures of Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin. Suffice to say that their allegiances during World War Two were rather suspect, and there was a long trial a few years back at great expense to the taxpayer".
Paul contemplates whether his new camera phone has made him a coprophile.
And finally...
Blogwatch not enough for you? Then get over to Troubled Diva, where Mike's started up an interactive Post Of The Week feature. Bigger, bolder and better than anything you'll find here, that's for sure. Good to see SWSL favourites Musings From Middle England, JonnyB's Private Secret Diary and Little Red Boat nominated. The verdict is here.
Welcome...
I Look Ill (via Casino Avenue)
Welcome back...
Agnes, back after a short hiatus
Michelle, back after giving birth (Black Dove has consequently mutated into "Black Dove: The Pushchair Years" - a companion blog to Speaking As A Parent, perhaps?)
Mish, back after an operation and a period of recovery in the wilds of Scotland - "As you may have guessed, I don’t look out upon a vista of green sward with a sigh of bucolic happiness. I stumble and slide around with little shrieks of fear upon un-tarmaced paths and wonder What I’m Treading In. I expect in-breds with shot guns and interesting dentistry to be around every corner and I lie quaking in my bed, with the covers over my head, dreading the darkness, hating the silence and expecting the wolf-red devil eyes to press up against the windows every time I open the curtains".
Meanwhile...
Pete embarks upon his Going Deaf For A Fortnight project - fourteen gigs in fourteen days - and, in the write-up for last night's Jug of Ale gig, he manages to be even more scathing about local bands than me - "I found myself realising why no-one goes to gigs unless they know the band - you're suddenly find yourself at the whim of people who can play guitar but have no idea what a guitar is really for".
Reluctant Nomad recalls the time he was stopped at customs in possession of a banned book, 'The Exorcist'.
Jonathan begins a new series presenting us with the "sleeve notes" he wrote to accompany a mixtape he made for a friend, "30 Songs - An Indiepop Odyssey". (The series will also be appearing on The Art Of Noise, Jonathan being the newest contributor.)
Swiss Toni goes to see / endure KT Tunstall - "a tiny, Scottish Rowley Birkin" - and somehow resists the temptation to top himself.
Backroads relates an everyday tale of illegal mink immigration - just as well we've got someone prepared to write about this kind of thing given JonnyB's (very quiet) announcement that he'll be leaving the Village temporarily.
JonnyB's Vegetable Delivery Lady gets her own blog and wastes no time in revealing her true feelings for him - "It is important to avoid a scene. Much as I loathe delivering vegetables to this pervert and would love to tell him what I really think of him on my last day, I just want to get out of here alive and not end up locked behind a bookcase or something".
Betty speculates as to what happened to the Famous Five - "I prefer not to detail what happened to the shadowy figures of Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin. Suffice to say that their allegiances during World War Two were rather suspect, and there was a long trial a few years back at great expense to the taxpayer".
Paul contemplates whether his new camera phone has made him a coprophile.
And finally...
Blogwatch not enough for you? Then get over to Troubled Diva, where Mike's started up an interactive Post Of The Week feature. Bigger, bolder and better than anything you'll find here, that's for sure. Good to see SWSL favourites Musings From Middle England, JonnyB's Private Secret Diary and Little Red Boat nominated. The verdict is here.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Things I Have Learned From / Noticed In A Two Day Old Copy Of The Independent
Because this site is nothing if not up-to-the-minute and topical.
1. The front page is emblazoned with the headline "Cracktown, UK" above a picture of a big pile of crack cocaine. "Cracktown"? That sounds like where Big Ears would take Noddy for his stag do. Actually, it's Ilkeston in Derbyshire, a fact that takes on particular significance for me as it's the place that a couple of friends call home. "The majority of clients we see are using crack as a treat on payday", says drugs counsellor Karen Hancock. Though the article might initially seem like Daily Mail type scaremongering, it's not written in the sort of judgemental and hysterical tone you'd expect from Dacre and co.
2. There's evident relish in the reporting of Sun editor Rebekah Wade's arrest for assault (the Sun, meanwhile, managed to keep almost completely quiet on the subject - perhaps they'd been taking tips from MUTV?). The fact that Steve McFadden's ex was also arrested for an attack on him seems rather suspicious - offer her some money to deflect attention away from yourself, did you Rebekah? Or did the BBC offer the pair of you money to get the Mitchell brothers back in the news following their shameless rating-chasing return to 'EastEnders'? Thing is, they don't exactly come out of it with their hard man images intact, do they?
3. Apparently the Pope has changed his tailor and it's caused quite a furore. Fascinating I'm sure, but do that and the aforementioned story about Ms Wade really merit being placed ahead of the piece about Labour's skin-of-their-teeth Commons victory over the proposed anti-terror legislation? I think not.
4. Respect MP George Galloway missed the ballot (which Labour won by one vote) "because he was in Ireland for a performance of his one-man show" entitled "An Audience With George Galloway MP". Far be it from me to suggest that the man's a self-serving egotist. In any case, I imagine "An Audience With Lily Savage" would have been much more entertaining.
5. The MTV Europe Awards were presented by Borat Sagdiyev, "the spoof television presenter played by the risque comedian Sacha Baron Cohen". Risque? Comedian? What year do the Independent think it is? They'll be bigging up Avid Merrion next.
6. If, like me, you live in Birmingham, you can sleep soundly now - Babu the red panda has been found and taken back his home at Birmingham Nature Centre. Looking more like an overgrown tree-dwelling stoat than a panda, Babu was spotted in Holders Lane Woods. No idea where that is exactly, but I'm guessing from the caption beneath the accompanying picture - "Babu the red panda spent four days living alone in the wilds of Birmingham" - that it must be somewhere near Lozells. After four days he was no doubt ecstatic to be returned to captivity.
7. A nauseatingly fawning article about Damon Albarn. "The man who blurs boundaries"? Hmm. Am I the only person who really dislikes Gorillaz?
Yet to read (yes, yes, I know - two days after the event): an interview with New Yorkers The National (much talked up in certain quarters) and a special pull-out feature by Jonathon Porritt entitled "How Capitalism Can Save The World".
OK then, I know what you're thinking: "I should have just stuck with Musings From Middle England for this kind of thing..."
Because this site is nothing if not up-to-the-minute and topical.
1. The front page is emblazoned with the headline "Cracktown, UK" above a picture of a big pile of crack cocaine. "Cracktown"? That sounds like where Big Ears would take Noddy for his stag do. Actually, it's Ilkeston in Derbyshire, a fact that takes on particular significance for me as it's the place that a couple of friends call home. "The majority of clients we see are using crack as a treat on payday", says drugs counsellor Karen Hancock. Though the article might initially seem like Daily Mail type scaremongering, it's not written in the sort of judgemental and hysterical tone you'd expect from Dacre and co.
2. There's evident relish in the reporting of Sun editor Rebekah Wade's arrest for assault (the Sun, meanwhile, managed to keep almost completely quiet on the subject - perhaps they'd been taking tips from MUTV?). The fact that Steve McFadden's ex was also arrested for an attack on him seems rather suspicious - offer her some money to deflect attention away from yourself, did you Rebekah? Or did the BBC offer the pair of you money to get the Mitchell brothers back in the news following their shameless rating-chasing return to 'EastEnders'? Thing is, they don't exactly come out of it with their hard man images intact, do they?
3. Apparently the Pope has changed his tailor and it's caused quite a furore. Fascinating I'm sure, but do that and the aforementioned story about Ms Wade really merit being placed ahead of the piece about Labour's skin-of-their-teeth Commons victory over the proposed anti-terror legislation? I think not.
4. Respect MP George Galloway missed the ballot (which Labour won by one vote) "because he was in Ireland for a performance of his one-man show" entitled "An Audience With George Galloway MP". Far be it from me to suggest that the man's a self-serving egotist. In any case, I imagine "An Audience With Lily Savage" would have been much more entertaining.
5. The MTV Europe Awards were presented by Borat Sagdiyev, "the spoof television presenter played by the risque comedian Sacha Baron Cohen". Risque? Comedian? What year do the Independent think it is? They'll be bigging up Avid Merrion next.
6. If, like me, you live in Birmingham, you can sleep soundly now - Babu the red panda has been found and taken back his home at Birmingham Nature Centre. Looking more like an overgrown tree-dwelling stoat than a panda, Babu was spotted in Holders Lane Woods. No idea where that is exactly, but I'm guessing from the caption beneath the accompanying picture - "Babu the red panda spent four days living alone in the wilds of Birmingham" - that it must be somewhere near Lozells. After four days he was no doubt ecstatic to be returned to captivity.
7. A nauseatingly fawning article about Damon Albarn. "The man who blurs boundaries"? Hmm. Am I the only person who really dislikes Gorillaz?
Yet to read (yes, yes, I know - two days after the event): an interview with New Yorkers The National (much talked up in certain quarters) and a special pull-out feature by Jonathon Porritt entitled "How Capitalism Can Save The World".
OK then, I know what you're thinking: "I should have just stuck with Musings From Middle England for this kind of thing..."
Tainted love
Because Betty has suggested that BBC2's 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop' is reviewed here weekly, and I can't let down my public. Even if I did only manage to catch the second half of this week's installment.
That was a bit of a relief, actually - meaning, as it did, that I missed most of the New Romantic prancing and preening (though a sighting of Adam Ant would have been welcome). As in the two previous episodes of the documentary, the subject was the intersection of pop music and culture with issues of sexuality and the wider political world. Covering the 1980s, the programme flitted from band to band - this week, everything from Divine to The Smiths with the likes of Wham!, Eurythmics, Spandau Ballet and Pet Shop Boys in between - at an unnervingly quick pace, but there was still much to enjoy, not least the focus upon the exploration of gay identity and sexuality (or its concealment) within the pop culture of the 1980s, and the impact of AIDS upon that culture.
It was also well worth switching on for the extraordinary footage of Morrissey playing live and being hugged by a succession of overwhelmed and obsessed male fans who had clambered up onto the stage - extraordinary at least in part because the notorious misanthrope appeared to tolerate it.
Because Betty has suggested that BBC2's 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop' is reviewed here weekly, and I can't let down my public. Even if I did only manage to catch the second half of this week's installment.
That was a bit of a relief, actually - meaning, as it did, that I missed most of the New Romantic prancing and preening (though a sighting of Adam Ant would have been welcome). As in the two previous episodes of the documentary, the subject was the intersection of pop music and culture with issues of sexuality and the wider political world. Covering the 1980s, the programme flitted from band to band - this week, everything from Divine to The Smiths with the likes of Wham!, Eurythmics, Spandau Ballet and Pet Shop Boys in between - at an unnervingly quick pace, but there was still much to enjoy, not least the focus upon the exploration of gay identity and sexuality (or its concealment) within the pop culture of the 1980s, and the impact of AIDS upon that culture.
It was also well worth switching on for the extraordinary footage of Morrissey playing live and being hugged by a succession of overwhelmed and obsessed male fans who had clambered up onto the stage - extraordinary at least in part because the notorious misanthrope appeared to tolerate it.
Take the rough with the smooth
THE LIGHT ERA / JETLAG / AUGUSTINE / STRANGETIME, 3RD NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM BAR ACADEMY
Early in the evening it may be, but the Bar Academy is disappointingly sparsely populated. It's also very dark. So dark, in fact, that late additions to this Catapult Club night bill StrangeTime run into difficulties before they've even begun their set. "John can't find his drumsticks, laughs vocalist / guitarist Kate Finch, before adding, "They're black". Their goth credentials enhanced, they launch belatedly into 'Mundane'. Thereafter the set takes a familiar shape with which the band are evidently increasingly comfortable, the longer slower songs spiked by the unfussy and brutal PJ Harveyesque punk of 'Dressing Up' and 'Ex Boyfriend'. It's when they have that fire in their bellies and in their eyes that they're at their best.
On their website, Augustine claim to have been influenced by The Smashing Pumpkins. They've got a point. Frontman Jody Wyeth has been so influenced by them that he's the spitting image of Billy Corgan. Unfortunately Wyeth shares Corgan's fondness for faux-naive lyrics about being a "little boy", the sort of lines that make you want to grab the Pumpkins man by the collar and tell him to grow up and stop sucking his thumb. Wyeth's voice is perhaps as much an acquired taste as that of Corgan, though mainly because it's a little off-key. Musically, however, Augustine are quite something - an emo-influenced Bends-era Radiohead, with lashings of deliciously scrawling guitar courtesy of John Wallace. The songs don't always match up to the scale of their ambitions, but those ambitions are laudable, particularly given what comes next.
What comes next is Jetlag, and - there's no other way of saying this - they are awful.* Serving up a soporific sub Chili Peppers stodge that starts off badly and hardly improves, they do themselves no favours by including a cover of 'No Woman No Cry' that morphs into a reggae rendition of Green Day's 'When I Come Around' (y'know, from back when Billy Joe Armstrong and co were just green-haired dweebs writing songs about wanking rather than about the political disenfranchisement of youth and US foreign policy). Listening to Jetlag, then - about as pleasurable as suffering from the condition after which they are named.
The Light Era aren't really much better. Much more focussed and slick in what they do, yes, but utterly identity-free and unable to conjure up even the ghost of excitement in yours truly. Airbrushed and Americanised MOR indie songs with titles like 'Gotta Find A Way' and 'She Is Everything' (straight out of the James Blunt School of Profundity) is their thing, and that of many of those assembled. Oh well, I shrug my shoulders and make my way downstairs, bemused by the topsy-turviness of the bill.
* A self-defensive post-script inspired by a recent conversation with Kenny and Andy. Contrary to what you might think, I don't enjoy tearing into local bands, or bands that are just starting out (of course, it's a different matter when it comes to the big hitters - they're fair game to be shot at). In fact, I respect anyone who has the guts to get up on stage and play songs which they have written and to which they are very intimately and emotionally attached, just as I admire anyone with the courage to try their luck as a stand-up comedian in front of an audience demanding to be entertained.
It's just that I'm something of a born critic, and I find it hard to compromise and bite my tongue, honesty all too often getting the better of me. So what remains to be said is that I genuinely mean no personal offence by these sort of reviews - I just call it as I see it. Ultimately it should all appear in parentheses and be prefaced with that old blogger's get-out clause: "in my humble opinion". And, of course, the comments box and email address are there for you to tell me to dismount from my tall steed.
THE LIGHT ERA / JETLAG / AUGUSTINE / STRANGETIME, 3RD NOVEMBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM BAR ACADEMY
Early in the evening it may be, but the Bar Academy is disappointingly sparsely populated. It's also very dark. So dark, in fact, that late additions to this Catapult Club night bill StrangeTime run into difficulties before they've even begun their set. "John can't find his drumsticks, laughs vocalist / guitarist Kate Finch, before adding, "They're black". Their goth credentials enhanced, they launch belatedly into 'Mundane'. Thereafter the set takes a familiar shape with which the band are evidently increasingly comfortable, the longer slower songs spiked by the unfussy and brutal PJ Harveyesque punk of 'Dressing Up' and 'Ex Boyfriend'. It's when they have that fire in their bellies and in their eyes that they're at their best.
On their website, Augustine claim to have been influenced by The Smashing Pumpkins. They've got a point. Frontman Jody Wyeth has been so influenced by them that he's the spitting image of Billy Corgan. Unfortunately Wyeth shares Corgan's fondness for faux-naive lyrics about being a "little boy", the sort of lines that make you want to grab the Pumpkins man by the collar and tell him to grow up and stop sucking his thumb. Wyeth's voice is perhaps as much an acquired taste as that of Corgan, though mainly because it's a little off-key. Musically, however, Augustine are quite something - an emo-influenced Bends-era Radiohead, with lashings of deliciously scrawling guitar courtesy of John Wallace. The songs don't always match up to the scale of their ambitions, but those ambitions are laudable, particularly given what comes next.
What comes next is Jetlag, and - there's no other way of saying this - they are awful.* Serving up a soporific sub Chili Peppers stodge that starts off badly and hardly improves, they do themselves no favours by including a cover of 'No Woman No Cry' that morphs into a reggae rendition of Green Day's 'When I Come Around' (y'know, from back when Billy Joe Armstrong and co were just green-haired dweebs writing songs about wanking rather than about the political disenfranchisement of youth and US foreign policy). Listening to Jetlag, then - about as pleasurable as suffering from the condition after which they are named.
The Light Era aren't really much better. Much more focussed and slick in what they do, yes, but utterly identity-free and unable to conjure up even the ghost of excitement in yours truly. Airbrushed and Americanised MOR indie songs with titles like 'Gotta Find A Way' and 'She Is Everything' (straight out of the James Blunt School of Profundity) is their thing, and that of many of those assembled. Oh well, I shrug my shoulders and make my way downstairs, bemused by the topsy-turviness of the bill.
* A self-defensive post-script inspired by a recent conversation with Kenny and Andy. Contrary to what you might think, I don't enjoy tearing into local bands, or bands that are just starting out (of course, it's a different matter when it comes to the big hitters - they're fair game to be shot at). In fact, I respect anyone who has the guts to get up on stage and play songs which they have written and to which they are very intimately and emotionally attached, just as I admire anyone with the courage to try their luck as a stand-up comedian in front of an audience demanding to be entertained.
It's just that I'm something of a born critic, and I find it hard to compromise and bite my tongue, honesty all too often getting the better of me. So what remains to be said is that I genuinely mean no personal offence by these sort of reviews - I just call it as I see it. Ultimately it should all appear in parentheses and be prefaced with that old blogger's get-out clause: "in my humble opinion". And, of course, the comments box and email address are there for you to tell me to dismount from my tall steed.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
A sense of perspective
Sunday night was, as seems to be the way these days, a haven of decent programming. Not only did we have the pleasure of the second episode of 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop' (see below), but C4 offered up 'Great British Islam', another engaging hour-long documentary.
The film, set against the backdrop of the July bombings, followed Sun journalist Anila Baig as she sought to uncover and explore the historical interconnections between Britain and Islam. The fact that close and peaceful relations can be traced back hundreds of years provides some much-needed perspective for the recent opening-up of major fault lines within British society, and this was the programme's most valuable argument. The contribution of Muslims to British history and society was underlined (albeit occasionally superficially), and (amongst other things) I was amazed to discover that there has been a Yemeni community based in South Shields for around the last hundred years.
It wasn't perfect, though. An hour-long one-off, it was consequently rather rushed and glib. What's more, the burning of Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' in Bradford in 1989 was presented favourably as a self-confident expression of identity rather than as the hate-filled act of "intellectual hooliganism" which it was (I think) rightly portrayed as in certain quarters of the media - such inflexible, intolerant and self-righteous dogmatism is no more laudable than that of Bush and the Christian Right, and is what ultimately stands behind the terrorist atrocities in London.
Sunday night was, as seems to be the way these days, a haven of decent programming. Not only did we have the pleasure of the second episode of 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop' (see below), but C4 offered up 'Great British Islam', another engaging hour-long documentary.
The film, set against the backdrop of the July bombings, followed Sun journalist Anila Baig as she sought to uncover and explore the historical interconnections between Britain and Islam. The fact that close and peaceful relations can be traced back hundreds of years provides some much-needed perspective for the recent opening-up of major fault lines within British society, and this was the programme's most valuable argument. The contribution of Muslims to British history and society was underlined (albeit occasionally superficially), and (amongst other things) I was amazed to discover that there has been a Yemeni community based in South Shields for around the last hundred years.
It wasn't perfect, though. An hour-long one-off, it was consequently rather rushed and glib. What's more, the burning of Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses' in Bradford in 1989 was presented favourably as a self-confident expression of identity rather than as the hate-filled act of "intellectual hooliganism" which it was (I think) rightly portrayed as in certain quarters of the media - such inflexible, intolerant and self-righteous dogmatism is no more laudable than that of Bush and the Christian Right, and is what ultimately stands behind the terrorist atrocities in London.
Quote of the day
"It was a middle class idea with working class actors".
Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp with a surprisingly insightful and incisive observation about punk in the second installment of BBC2's documentary series 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop'. Presumably brother Martin was too busy flogging sofas for SCS to comment...
As I'd anticipated, the programme, focussed on the 70s, touched on much of what forms the subject matter for one of my two current reads, Jon Savage's 'England's Dreaming', in setting punk into its social and historical context (albeit in a much swifter and less sophisticated fashion). David Bowie it was, however, who emerged as the real star, his chameleon-like appearance celebrated as of enormous significance in pushing the boundaries of what pop music could do. Perhaps equally unsurprising was the fact that Rick Wakeman came across as a curmudgeonly up-himself arsehole.
"It was a middle class idea with working class actors".
Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp with a surprisingly insightful and incisive observation about punk in the second installment of BBC2's documentary series 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop'. Presumably brother Martin was too busy flogging sofas for SCS to comment...
As I'd anticipated, the programme, focussed on the 70s, touched on much of what forms the subject matter for one of my two current reads, Jon Savage's 'England's Dreaming', in setting punk into its social and historical context (albeit in a much swifter and less sophisticated fashion). David Bowie it was, however, who emerged as the real star, his chameleon-like appearance celebrated as of enormous significance in pushing the boundaries of what pop music could do. Perhaps equally unsurprising was the fact that Rick Wakeman came across as a curmudgeonly up-himself arsehole.
(Nice day for a) white wedding
Soap opera weddings. They fall into two categories - blissful affairs calculated to tug on the heartstrings, or calamitous car-crashes which almost invariably feature one partner being left jilted at the altar. Yawn.
Which is why tonight's second episode of 'Coronation Street' made for such joyous viewing, Cilla and Les's nuptials proving to be anything but predictable. The writers pulled out all the stops in aiming for high farce, and it worked a treat - from Cilla breaking the Barlows' window with Joshua's tricycle to get at a bouquet she couldn't afford to pay for and the marriage party fleeing the "borrowed" church in the nick of time as the vicar arrived back unexpectedly, to Les smashing up all the couple's wedding gifts thinking he was trashing Status Quo's dressing room. The only predictable thing about it was that the whole shebang concluded with the entire room gyrating away to 'Rockin' All Over The World', Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi like Les himself wearing neck braces.
Some of the stuff that has passed itself off as comedy in recent years wouldn't be fit to lick the boots of an episode like that. And the Quo's stoned roadie should be given a permanent role in the soap this instant.
Soap opera weddings. They fall into two categories - blissful affairs calculated to tug on the heartstrings, or calamitous car-crashes which almost invariably feature one partner being left jilted at the altar. Yawn.
Which is why tonight's second episode of 'Coronation Street' made for such joyous viewing, Cilla and Les's nuptials proving to be anything but predictable. The writers pulled out all the stops in aiming for high farce, and it worked a treat - from Cilla breaking the Barlows' window with Joshua's tricycle to get at a bouquet she couldn't afford to pay for and the marriage party fleeing the "borrowed" church in the nick of time as the vicar arrived back unexpectedly, to Les smashing up all the couple's wedding gifts thinking he was trashing Status Quo's dressing room. The only predictable thing about it was that the whole shebang concluded with the entire room gyrating away to 'Rockin' All Over The World', Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi like Les himself wearing neck braces.
Some of the stuff that has passed itself off as comedy in recent years wouldn't be fit to lick the boots of an episode like that. And the Quo's stoned roadie should be given a permanent role in the soap this instant.
Pretty damn good
My review of The Raveonettes' latest LP Pretty In Black is now up on the Vanity Project site. Once I'd got over the fact that, unlike previous offerings, it doesn't feature any hurricane-strength guitar, it very soon revealed itself to be a joy - one which, it has to be said, has probably proved more lasting than the instant pleasures of Franz Ferdinand's second album.
My review of The Raveonettes' latest LP Pretty In Black is now up on the Vanity Project site. Once I'd got over the fact that, unlike previous offerings, it doesn't feature any hurricane-strength guitar, it very soon revealed itself to be a joy - one which, it has to be said, has probably proved more lasting than the instant pleasures of Franz Ferdinand's second album.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Sally sallies forth
More sad news from the Low camp - bassist Zak Sally has left the band. The departure seems to have been amicable enough, but Sally's comment that "I can no longer be a member of the band" suggests all is certainly not well.
That said, founding members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have already named Sally's replacement as Matt Livingston and announced: "We plan on touring in 2006 and working on writing more music". Reason for some optimism? Perhaps, if Sparhawk can overcome his mental health problems - and I sincerely hope he can and they carry on, as this year's The Great Destroyer LP appeared to herald a whole new direction for the band.
(Thanks to Ian for the link.)
More sad news from the Low camp - bassist Zak Sally has left the band. The departure seems to have been amicable enough, but Sally's comment that "I can no longer be a member of the band" suggests all is certainly not well.
That said, founding members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have already named Sally's replacement as Matt Livingston and announced: "We plan on touring in 2006 and working on writing more music". Reason for some optimism? Perhaps, if Sparhawk can overcome his mental health problems - and I sincerely hope he can and they carry on, as this year's The Great Destroyer LP appeared to herald a whole new direction for the band.
(Thanks to Ian for the link.)
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Blogwatch
(As officially endorsed by Troubled Diva!)
Belated birthday wishes to Musings From Middle England, now firmly established as one of my daily must-reads. Apparently we had been spared a post about "the day I was in the supermarket at 7.30 am and stumbled on a man and woman engaged in what used to be called 'heavy petting' next to the Dairy Products" - well, no longer.
Meanwhile...
Vaughan contemplates the ins and outs of taking revenge - "I never used to understand that particular proverb - 'revenge is a dish best served cold' - until I discovered how people plan their revenge meticulously, down to the last detail. Then it began to make sense. Revenge isn't a dish BEST served cold - it just happens to have gone cold because it's been standing around in the kitchen too long being fussed over and having a ridiculous array of garnish added to it".
Elsewhere...
Mike of Troubled Diva transcribes his mother's account of her childhood, which is full of fascinating detail - "I was born in Harrogate because my mother's parents were living there at the time and the Blitz was causing havoc in London. My father's Chambers were at 5 Crown Office Row, which had probably been damaged when a bomb had fallen on Crown Office Row on 25th September 1940. Another bomb fell on the day of my birth, putting Chambers out of action completely, and his barrister's wig, still in its metal box but squashed flat, was rescued from the ruins: when the box was prised open, the wig sprang back into its original shape".
Alex reviews Instal '05, a festival of experimental music held in Glasgow - "Instal is always a great, horizon expanding experience, which I would recommend so long as you're not of a nervous disposition or think that music has to have a tune or anything. It does leave you craving sunny melodic pop songs for about a week afterwards, though".
Swiss Toni is none too impressed by the Observer Music Monthly's cover story on Pete Doherty - "Doherty seems to have been completely swept up with the glamour and the fame that his notoriety is bringing him (not to mention the supermodel girlfriend). He is no doubt fascinated by the romantic notion of himself as the latest in a long line of doomed artistic geniuses, and is revelling in the attention. For their part, the press (and I include broadsheets like The Observer here) are just waiting for the perfect end to the story: Doherty dying of an overdose. When that happens they can then cover the candlelit vigils that will be held by his devastated young fans. It's like watching a car crash"
Kenny presents us with a bumper Album Review Compendium - Part One (The White Stripes, Idlewild, Saint Etienne, The Magic Numbers, Emiliana Torrini, Engineers, Barbara Morgenstern & Robert Lippok) is here and Part Two (Editors, Clor, Malcolm Middleton, Jill Sobule, The Havenots, The Rakes, Stars) here.
Betty offers us some facts about herself - Part One is here, Part Two here and Part Three here. My favourite? "I was born on July 2nd, the day Marlon Brando died, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones' corpse was found floating in a swimming pool in mysterious circumstances and Ernest Hemingway committed suicide. How many bad omens do you want?".
And finally...
JonnyB chronicles his refreshing break with the LTLP and in so doing pens the finest sentence of the week (and quite possibly any week) - "From some unspecified overseas location, she had the air of one who had been promised an interesting and lucrative job in the sex industry only to find herself being forcibly trafficked into the provincial hotel reception business". THAT's what we miss, and THAT's why he shouldn't leave us on our own again.
(As officially endorsed by Troubled Diva!)
Belated birthday wishes to Musings From Middle England, now firmly established as one of my daily must-reads. Apparently we had been spared a post about "the day I was in the supermarket at 7.30 am and stumbled on a man and woman engaged in what used to be called 'heavy petting' next to the Dairy Products" - well, no longer.
Meanwhile...
Vaughan contemplates the ins and outs of taking revenge - "I never used to understand that particular proverb - 'revenge is a dish best served cold' - until I discovered how people plan their revenge meticulously, down to the last detail. Then it began to make sense. Revenge isn't a dish BEST served cold - it just happens to have gone cold because it's been standing around in the kitchen too long being fussed over and having a ridiculous array of garnish added to it".
Elsewhere...
Mike of Troubled Diva transcribes his mother's account of her childhood, which is full of fascinating detail - "I was born in Harrogate because my mother's parents were living there at the time and the Blitz was causing havoc in London. My father's Chambers were at 5 Crown Office Row, which had probably been damaged when a bomb had fallen on Crown Office Row on 25th September 1940. Another bomb fell on the day of my birth, putting Chambers out of action completely, and his barrister's wig, still in its metal box but squashed flat, was rescued from the ruins: when the box was prised open, the wig sprang back into its original shape".
Alex reviews Instal '05, a festival of experimental music held in Glasgow - "Instal is always a great, horizon expanding experience, which I would recommend so long as you're not of a nervous disposition or think that music has to have a tune or anything. It does leave you craving sunny melodic pop songs for about a week afterwards, though".
Swiss Toni is none too impressed by the Observer Music Monthly's cover story on Pete Doherty - "Doherty seems to have been completely swept up with the glamour and the fame that his notoriety is bringing him (not to mention the supermodel girlfriend). He is no doubt fascinated by the romantic notion of himself as the latest in a long line of doomed artistic geniuses, and is revelling in the attention. For their part, the press (and I include broadsheets like The Observer here) are just waiting for the perfect end to the story: Doherty dying of an overdose. When that happens they can then cover the candlelit vigils that will be held by his devastated young fans. It's like watching a car crash"
Kenny presents us with a bumper Album Review Compendium - Part One (The White Stripes, Idlewild, Saint Etienne, The Magic Numbers, Emiliana Torrini, Engineers, Barbara Morgenstern & Robert Lippok) is here and Part Two (Editors, Clor, Malcolm Middleton, Jill Sobule, The Havenots, The Rakes, Stars) here.
Betty offers us some facts about herself - Part One is here, Part Two here and Part Three here. My favourite? "I was born on July 2nd, the day Marlon Brando died, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones' corpse was found floating in a swimming pool in mysterious circumstances and Ernest Hemingway committed suicide. How many bad omens do you want?".
And finally...
JonnyB chronicles his refreshing break with the LTLP and in so doing pens the finest sentence of the week (and quite possibly any week) - "From some unspecified overseas location, she had the air of one who had been promised an interesting and lucrative job in the sex industry only to find herself being forcibly trafficked into the provincial hotel reception business". THAT's what we miss, and THAT's why he shouldn't leave us on our own again.
Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll
Sunday saw the first installment of a new four part documentary series on BBC2 entitled 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop', and rather good it was too.
Beginning in the 1950s with the advent of British rock 'n' rollers like Billy Fury and moving on to consider The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimmy Hendrix amongst others, the programme traced the way in which pop impacted upon culture (and particularly gender and sexuality) and vice versa.
There was much to enjoy, not least the odd assortment of talking heads - everyone from Cilla Black to Yoko Ono - and the original footage of gigs like The Stones' triumphant 1969 Hyde Park show, a few weeks before the nightmare of Altamont. It was fascinating to learn that the whole industry in Britain was set in motion by a few ambitious and flamboyant entrepreneurs with an eye for a pretty face (the music business consequently becoming one of the only spheres of life in which attitudes to homosexuality were more liberal), as it was to hear how the carefully construction and manipulation of stars' public images is not at all a new phenomenon.
What emerged was a sense of the profound radicalism of songs overtly about sex and of men having long hair and wearing make-up, a radicalism which has dissipated. By wearing dresses on stage in the early 1990s, Kurt Cobain and Nicky Wire weren't so much being radical as harking back to a time when such gestures were novel and had a much bigger impact.
Certainly the next three episodes promise much.
The broader theme of the series - how music influences society and culture, and vice versa - is one on which I've been focused of late, as I've made my way into 'England's Dreaming', Jon Savage's dense chronicle of The Sex Pistols and the British punk explosion. Malcolm McClaren actually appeared in 'Girls And Boys', and the night of the programme I read a section of the book in which Savage quotes McClaren enthusing about Billy Fury's manager Larry Parnes, in Savage's words "the most outrageous, flamboyant Rock 'n' Roll impresario of them all" and "the creator of what we today understand as the English music industry". Thus far, 'England's Dreaming' has been a gripping if occasionally bewildering read.
Sunday saw the first installment of a new four part documentary series on BBC2 entitled 'Girls And Boys - Sex And British Pop', and rather good it was too.
Beginning in the 1950s with the advent of British rock 'n' rollers like Billy Fury and moving on to consider The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimmy Hendrix amongst others, the programme traced the way in which pop impacted upon culture (and particularly gender and sexuality) and vice versa.
There was much to enjoy, not least the odd assortment of talking heads - everyone from Cilla Black to Yoko Ono - and the original footage of gigs like The Stones' triumphant 1969 Hyde Park show, a few weeks before the nightmare of Altamont. It was fascinating to learn that the whole industry in Britain was set in motion by a few ambitious and flamboyant entrepreneurs with an eye for a pretty face (the music business consequently becoming one of the only spheres of life in which attitudes to homosexuality were more liberal), as it was to hear how the carefully construction and manipulation of stars' public images is not at all a new phenomenon.
What emerged was a sense of the profound radicalism of songs overtly about sex and of men having long hair and wearing make-up, a radicalism which has dissipated. By wearing dresses on stage in the early 1990s, Kurt Cobain and Nicky Wire weren't so much being radical as harking back to a time when such gestures were novel and had a much bigger impact.
Certainly the next three episodes promise much.
The broader theme of the series - how music influences society and culture, and vice versa - is one on which I've been focused of late, as I've made my way into 'England's Dreaming', Jon Savage's dense chronicle of The Sex Pistols and the British punk explosion. Malcolm McClaren actually appeared in 'Girls And Boys', and the night of the programme I read a section of the book in which Savage quotes McClaren enthusing about Billy Fury's manager Larry Parnes, in Savage's words "the most outrageous, flamboyant Rock 'n' Roll impresario of them all" and "the creator of what we today understand as the English music industry". Thus far, 'England's Dreaming' has been a gripping if occasionally bewildering read.
Sweet sixteen
Issue #16 of Skif's marvellous Vanity Project fanzine is out now, complete with very minor contributions from him and me. The cover star is cantankerous git Russell Crowe, and the issue packs its usual punch, featuring:
Interviews: Itamar Ziegler
Label profiles: Moshi Moshi
Album reviews: The Fiery Furnaces, Ian Brown, Deerhoof, Scout Niblett, Ween, The Rogers Sisters, The Young Gods, Bardo Pond, Oceansize, Architecture In Helsinki, Bearsuit, Red Letter Day
Single reviews: The White Stripes, The Decemberists, Stereolab, MIA, Cherubs, Aberfeldy, Battle, Helen Love, King Biscuit Time, Film School, This Et Al
Live reviews: Devendra Banhart, Laura Cantrell, Misty's Big Adventure, Luminescent Orchestrii
Head thisaway to read it all online or to find out how to procure yourself a paper copy.
On the subject of reviews, my thoughts on The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank (Project)'s performance at the Flapper & Firkin earlier in the month are now up on the band's site. And that's not all. Following an exchange of emails with guitarist Kirk, I can now bring you an exclusive revelation: "I think Graham Parsnip is our collective drunk mind, although he is becoming more and more elusive and only really hard drinking reveals the blighter nowadays". Remember - you read it here first.
Issue #16 of Skif's marvellous Vanity Project fanzine is out now, complete with very minor contributions from him and me. The cover star is cantankerous git Russell Crowe, and the issue packs its usual punch, featuring:
Interviews: Itamar Ziegler
Label profiles: Moshi Moshi
Album reviews: The Fiery Furnaces, Ian Brown, Deerhoof, Scout Niblett, Ween, The Rogers Sisters, The Young Gods, Bardo Pond, Oceansize, Architecture In Helsinki, Bearsuit, Red Letter Day
Single reviews: The White Stripes, The Decemberists, Stereolab, MIA, Cherubs, Aberfeldy, Battle, Helen Love, King Biscuit Time, Film School, This Et Al
Live reviews: Devendra Banhart, Laura Cantrell, Misty's Big Adventure, Luminescent Orchestrii
Head thisaway to read it all online or to find out how to procure yourself a paper copy.
On the subject of reviews, my thoughts on The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank (Project)'s performance at the Flapper & Firkin earlier in the month are now up on the band's site. And that's not all. Following an exchange of emails with guitarist Kirk, I can now bring you an exclusive revelation: "I think Graham Parsnip is our collective drunk mind, although he is becoming more and more elusive and only really hard drinking reveals the blighter nowadays". Remember - you read it here first.
Quote of the day
"What I'd want to know as a Daily Mail reader is how will it affect house prices?"
Will Self on avian flu on Friday's edition of 'Have I Got News For You', which also featured guest presenter Michael Aspel giving a Turner Prize nominee the finger and the revelation that Thomas Hardy's heart was eaten by a cat - posthumously, I might add. Hang on, I thought - that's the sort of thing I watch 'QI' for.
"What I'd want to know as a Daily Mail reader is how will it affect house prices?"
Will Self on avian flu on Friday's edition of 'Have I Got News For You', which also featured guest presenter Michael Aspel giving a Turner Prize nominee the finger and the revelation that Thomas Hardy's heart was eaten by a cat - posthumously, I might add. Hang on, I thought - that's the sort of thing I watch 'QI' for.
Feel good hits of the 25th October
1. 'Somewhere In Texas' - The Raveonettes
2. 'Vampire / Forest Fire' - The Arcade Fire
3. 'I'm Your Villain' - Franz Ferdinand
4. 'Freakin' Out' - Graham Coxon
5. 'Chinese Rocks' - Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers
6. 'Apply Some Pressure' - Maximo Park
7. 'The Good Ones' - The Kills
8. 'Scrabble' - The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank (Project)
9. 'Race' - Tiger
10. 'Interstate 5' - The Wedding Present
1. 'Somewhere In Texas' - The Raveonettes
2. 'Vampire / Forest Fire' - The Arcade Fire
3. 'I'm Your Villain' - Franz Ferdinand
4. 'Freakin' Out' - Graham Coxon
5. 'Chinese Rocks' - Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers
6. 'Apply Some Pressure' - Maximo Park
7. 'The Good Ones' - The Kills
8. 'Scrabble' - The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank (Project)
9. 'Race' - Tiger
10. 'Interstate 5' - The Wedding Present
Saturday, October 22, 2005
In her own write
(If you've come here, rejoiced at the appearance of new content but were hoping for reflections on the new Arab Strap album or the last episode in the second series of 'Nighty Night', then please excuse this - an indulgence, but one that might possibly be of some wider interest.)
It must be one of the principal reasons for the difficulties the Post Office has faced in recent years: the decline in letter-writing, in direct proportion to the rise in the popularity of email. Does anyone really write letters anymore? Proper letters, conveying sentiment and emotion, rather than merely formal communiques?
Of course, such missives are still sent, but emails are a transient and ephemeral form that most often bloom for a day and are then erased - another symptom of our throwaway culture.
What's remarkable about reading Virginia Woolf's 'Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters' - an edited and condensed single volume drawn from the multi-volume 'Complete Letters' but with a few new discoveries thrown in as titbits for the completist - is not simply the fact that one person could write so many letters in their lifetime, but that so many survive, saved for posterity by her correspondents and ultimately published for a much wider audience. In one letter she claimed: "I'm writing, though I've nothing to say. How was it that in such circumstances our ancestors at once wrote such letters as could be printed verbatim?". As if to emphasise the irony, this particular letter is reproduced in its entirety.
What's also striking are her frequent references to volumes of letters that she herself devoured and enjoyed. Such volumes were read just as we might breeze through an airport novel. Of course, her being an inveterate reader, the references to works of fiction are even more numerous, as are such eminently quotable and aphoristic pronouncements on the genre itself as "literature is the only spiritual and humane career" and "very few people have the brains to write a really BAD novel; whereas anyone can turn out a respectable but dull one".
In many letters Woolf reflected upon and sought to explain her own fictional practice, often adopting a defensive and apologetic tone which may be disingenuous but which hints at a degree of insecurity. One preoccupation was with the difficulty of finding the right words and articulating herself adequately (a subject which some of you will know is close to my heart...). She told her sometime lover Vita Sackville-West: "I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible". And elsewhere: "one's sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the sea".
If her defensiveness about her own writing suggests a lurking insecurity, then so does her frequent belittling of and acerbic commentary upon her contemporaries. "There's not a single living writer (English) I respect", she once declared, and countless writers find themselves in the firing line, including D H Lawrence ("a cheap little bounder ... a genius, but not first rate") and James Joyce.
Turned down by publishers all over Europe, Joyce approached Woolf and her husband Leonard in the hope that their publishing firm, The Hogarth Press, might publish 'Ulysses'. Virginia, however, was decidely unimpressed, and - amusingly - not only artistically: "First there's a dog that p's - then there's a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject - moreover, I don't believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes". Later, when she actually read the work properly (it having eventually found a publisher in Paris, the capital of the "dirty books" trade), she opined: "my impression, after 200 out of 700 pages, is that the poor young man has only got the dregs of a mind compared even with George Meredith. I mean if you could weigh the meaning on Joyces page it would be about 10 times as light as on Henry James'".
Some of the attacks are even more personal, and more entertaining in their spitefulness. Of the poet and novelist Elinor Wylie, she wrote: "I expected a ravishing and diaphanous dragonfly, a woman who had spirited away 4 husbands, and wooed from buggery the most obstinate of his adherents: a siren; a green and sweetvoiced nymph - that was what I expected, and came a tiptoe in to the room to find - a solid hunk: a hatchet minded, cadaverous, acid voiced, bareboned, spavined, patriotic nasal, thick legged American". A marvellously bitchy put-down, if ever I saw one.
To read these letters is to be transported into the heart of early twentieth century literary and artistic culture. Woolf is something of a namedropper, but this isn't simply gratuitous - she really was at the centre of things, perpetually entertaining the great and the good, or being entertained by them. T S Eliot, author of probably the most significant poem of the last century, is laughingly but affectionately referred to as "poor Tom".
Woolf's first impressions of 'Ulysses' might suggest a stiff-backboned Victorian attitude towards matters sexual and scatalogical, but the Bloomsbury circle of artists and writers of which she was a part was defined in part by the social unconventionality of its members' private lives. Woolf herself indulged in a lesbian affair with the married Vita Sackville-West, while her sister Vanessa first married one painter, Clive Bell, then had a lengthy affair with another, Roger Fry before spending the rest of her life co-habiting with a third, Duncan Grant, her lover but also "basically homosexual". Even more remarkable was the bizarre love triangle involving Woolf's close friend, the biographer Lytton Strachey. A gay man, he lived with Dora Carrington, a woman who was infatuated with him. Carrington married Ralph Partridge (who worked for Hogarth Press) despite not loving him as he did her, and while the three were living together Strachey developed an unrequited passion for Partridge. If the writing team behind 'EastEnders' want some ideas for how to revive their flagging soap, then they could do worse than read a biography of Bloomsbury.
The Bloomsbury set, and Woolf in particular, have often been accused of being apolitical, but one thing that emerges from these letters is the extent to which Woolf was involved in political matters (even if mainly by virtue of association - Leonard was deeply interested in politics and stood as a Labour candidate). The letters detailing the National Strike suggest a flurry of frenzied activity on behalf of the striking workers, even if the motives weren't entirely altruistic, Woolf expressing a very middle-class annoyance at being inconvenienced. "We're going to have a strike dinner and drink champagne with Clive, the Frys and other spirits", she claimed. The original champagne socialists, it would seem.
On other occasions, however, her snobbery is rather more difficult to stomach. On a visit to the University of Manchester, she sniffily described the professors as "provincial, smug, destitute of any character, hopelessly suburban, yet trying to live up to the metropolitan intellect (me, I mean) which they can't do".
Though Woolf spent much of her time in London, she and Leonard also owned a house in “the provinces” (in Sussex), and they did on occasion visit other parts of the country. One trip to my home county of Northumberland inspired the following comments to her sister: "We have struck about the most beautiful country I've ever seen here. Except that it has no sea, I think it is better than Cornwall - great moors, and flat meadows with very quick rivers. We are in an Inn full of north country people, who are very grim to look at, but so up to date that one blushes with shame. They discuss Thomson's poetry, and post impressionism, and have read everything, and at the same time control all the trade in Hides, and can sing comic songs and do music hall turns - in fact the Bloomsbury group was stunted in the chrysalis compared with them - But why did you never prepare me for the Scotch dialect, and the melodious voice which makes me laugh whenever I hear it?". How times change. Somehow I get the feeling that if you were to walk into a pub in Ashington or Blyth, post-impressionism wouldn’t be the subject of discussion – though those present might well be “very grim to look at”.
Enjoyable though reading the volume is, it can also be an unsettling experience – not least when you stumble across passages which eerily foreshadow what is to come. In 1937 she told a correspondent: "We were on the front at Seaford during the gale ... The waves broke over the car. Vast spouts of white water all along the coast. Why does a smash of water satisfy all one's religious aspirations? And its all I can do not to throw myself in - a queer animal rhapsody, restrained by L[eonard]". Four years later, at the age of 59, she filled her pockets with stones and threw herself into the River Ouse.
There’s also the uneasy sense of eavesdropping on private correspondence, reading something that was meant for one person’s eyes alone – a sense exacerbated by Woolf’s own comments. To Lady Ottoline Morrell she wrote: "Do you think people (I'm thinking of Lytton and Walpole) do write letters to be published? I'm as vain as a cockatoo myself; but I dont think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the tea pot". Ironically, the metaphor itself betrays the thought and care that has gone into the writing and perhaps suggests a disingenuousness, but elsewhere she reacted with horror to the possibility of her letters being made public: "Talk of my obstinacy and folly in not liking my letters to be quoted! I wrote one, casually, to an unknown but accredited American the other day, hinting at a mild literary scandal. She replies that she gave it to a friend of hers who is publishing it in The Atlantic Monthly! So thats why I write 'Private', or should, in future".
And that’s why the very last line of her suicide note to Leonard reads: "Will you destroy all my papers". Thankfully for many readers, myself included (as well as countless literary critics), he and others chose to disregard her last wish.
(If you've come here, rejoiced at the appearance of new content but were hoping for reflections on the new Arab Strap album or the last episode in the second series of 'Nighty Night', then please excuse this - an indulgence, but one that might possibly be of some wider interest.)
It must be one of the principal reasons for the difficulties the Post Office has faced in recent years: the decline in letter-writing, in direct proportion to the rise in the popularity of email. Does anyone really write letters anymore? Proper letters, conveying sentiment and emotion, rather than merely formal communiques?
Of course, such missives are still sent, but emails are a transient and ephemeral form that most often bloom for a day and are then erased - another symptom of our throwaway culture.
What's remarkable about reading Virginia Woolf's 'Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters' - an edited and condensed single volume drawn from the multi-volume 'Complete Letters' but with a few new discoveries thrown in as titbits for the completist - is not simply the fact that one person could write so many letters in their lifetime, but that so many survive, saved for posterity by her correspondents and ultimately published for a much wider audience. In one letter she claimed: "I'm writing, though I've nothing to say. How was it that in such circumstances our ancestors at once wrote such letters as could be printed verbatim?". As if to emphasise the irony, this particular letter is reproduced in its entirety.
What's also striking are her frequent references to volumes of letters that she herself devoured and enjoyed. Such volumes were read just as we might breeze through an airport novel. Of course, her being an inveterate reader, the references to works of fiction are even more numerous, as are such eminently quotable and aphoristic pronouncements on the genre itself as "literature is the only spiritual and humane career" and "very few people have the brains to write a really BAD novel; whereas anyone can turn out a respectable but dull one".
In many letters Woolf reflected upon and sought to explain her own fictional practice, often adopting a defensive and apologetic tone which may be disingenuous but which hints at a degree of insecurity. One preoccupation was with the difficulty of finding the right words and articulating herself adequately (a subject which some of you will know is close to my heart...). She told her sometime lover Vita Sackville-West: "I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible". And elsewhere: "one's sentences are only an approximation, a net one flings over some sea pearl which may vanish; and if one brings it up it wont be anything like what it was when I saw it, under the sea".
If her defensiveness about her own writing suggests a lurking insecurity, then so does her frequent belittling of and acerbic commentary upon her contemporaries. "There's not a single living writer (English) I respect", she once declared, and countless writers find themselves in the firing line, including D H Lawrence ("a cheap little bounder ... a genius, but not first rate") and James Joyce.
Turned down by publishers all over Europe, Joyce approached Woolf and her husband Leonard in the hope that their publishing firm, The Hogarth Press, might publish 'Ulysses'. Virginia, however, was decidely unimpressed, and - amusingly - not only artistically: "First there's a dog that p's - then there's a man that forths, and one can be monotonous even on that subject - moreover, I don't believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes". Later, when she actually read the work properly (it having eventually found a publisher in Paris, the capital of the "dirty books" trade), she opined: "my impression, after 200 out of 700 pages, is that the poor young man has only got the dregs of a mind compared even with George Meredith. I mean if you could weigh the meaning on Joyces page it would be about 10 times as light as on Henry James'".
Some of the attacks are even more personal, and more entertaining in their spitefulness. Of the poet and novelist Elinor Wylie, she wrote: "I expected a ravishing and diaphanous dragonfly, a woman who had spirited away 4 husbands, and wooed from buggery the most obstinate of his adherents: a siren; a green and sweetvoiced nymph - that was what I expected, and came a tiptoe in to the room to find - a solid hunk: a hatchet minded, cadaverous, acid voiced, bareboned, spavined, patriotic nasal, thick legged American". A marvellously bitchy put-down, if ever I saw one.
To read these letters is to be transported into the heart of early twentieth century literary and artistic culture. Woolf is something of a namedropper, but this isn't simply gratuitous - she really was at the centre of things, perpetually entertaining the great and the good, or being entertained by them. T S Eliot, author of probably the most significant poem of the last century, is laughingly but affectionately referred to as "poor Tom".
Woolf's first impressions of 'Ulysses' might suggest a stiff-backboned Victorian attitude towards matters sexual and scatalogical, but the Bloomsbury circle of artists and writers of which she was a part was defined in part by the social unconventionality of its members' private lives. Woolf herself indulged in a lesbian affair with the married Vita Sackville-West, while her sister Vanessa first married one painter, Clive Bell, then had a lengthy affair with another, Roger Fry before spending the rest of her life co-habiting with a third, Duncan Grant, her lover but also "basically homosexual". Even more remarkable was the bizarre love triangle involving Woolf's close friend, the biographer Lytton Strachey. A gay man, he lived with Dora Carrington, a woman who was infatuated with him. Carrington married Ralph Partridge (who worked for Hogarth Press) despite not loving him as he did her, and while the three were living together Strachey developed an unrequited passion for Partridge. If the writing team behind 'EastEnders' want some ideas for how to revive their flagging soap, then they could do worse than read a biography of Bloomsbury.
The Bloomsbury set, and Woolf in particular, have often been accused of being apolitical, but one thing that emerges from these letters is the extent to which Woolf was involved in political matters (even if mainly by virtue of association - Leonard was deeply interested in politics and stood as a Labour candidate). The letters detailing the National Strike suggest a flurry of frenzied activity on behalf of the striking workers, even if the motives weren't entirely altruistic, Woolf expressing a very middle-class annoyance at being inconvenienced. "We're going to have a strike dinner and drink champagne with Clive, the Frys and other spirits", she claimed. The original champagne socialists, it would seem.
On other occasions, however, her snobbery is rather more difficult to stomach. On a visit to the University of Manchester, she sniffily described the professors as "provincial, smug, destitute of any character, hopelessly suburban, yet trying to live up to the metropolitan intellect (me, I mean) which they can't do".
Though Woolf spent much of her time in London, she and Leonard also owned a house in “the provinces” (in Sussex), and they did on occasion visit other parts of the country. One trip to my home county of Northumberland inspired the following comments to her sister: "We have struck about the most beautiful country I've ever seen here. Except that it has no sea, I think it is better than Cornwall - great moors, and flat meadows with very quick rivers. We are in an Inn full of north country people, who are very grim to look at, but so up to date that one blushes with shame. They discuss Thomson's poetry, and post impressionism, and have read everything, and at the same time control all the trade in Hides, and can sing comic songs and do music hall turns - in fact the Bloomsbury group was stunted in the chrysalis compared with them - But why did you never prepare me for the Scotch dialect, and the melodious voice which makes me laugh whenever I hear it?". How times change. Somehow I get the feeling that if you were to walk into a pub in Ashington or Blyth, post-impressionism wouldn’t be the subject of discussion – though those present might well be “very grim to look at”.
Enjoyable though reading the volume is, it can also be an unsettling experience – not least when you stumble across passages which eerily foreshadow what is to come. In 1937 she told a correspondent: "We were on the front at Seaford during the gale ... The waves broke over the car. Vast spouts of white water all along the coast. Why does a smash of water satisfy all one's religious aspirations? And its all I can do not to throw myself in - a queer animal rhapsody, restrained by L[eonard]". Four years later, at the age of 59, she filled her pockets with stones and threw herself into the River Ouse.
There’s also the uneasy sense of eavesdropping on private correspondence, reading something that was meant for one person’s eyes alone – a sense exacerbated by Woolf’s own comments. To Lady Ottoline Morrell she wrote: "Do you think people (I'm thinking of Lytton and Walpole) do write letters to be published? I'm as vain as a cockatoo myself; but I dont think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the tea pot". Ironically, the metaphor itself betrays the thought and care that has gone into the writing and perhaps suggests a disingenuousness, but elsewhere she reacted with horror to the possibility of her letters being made public: "Talk of my obstinacy and folly in not liking my letters to be quoted! I wrote one, casually, to an unknown but accredited American the other day, hinting at a mild literary scandal. She replies that she gave it to a friend of hers who is publishing it in The Atlantic Monthly! So thats why I write 'Private', or should, in future".
And that’s why the very last line of her suicide note to Leonard reads: "Will you destroy all my papers". Thankfully for many readers, myself included (as well as countless literary critics), he and others chose to disregard her last wish.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Thursday, October 13, 2005
"Un, deux, trois, it's tractor love!"
51 BREAKS / WHEN BEARS ATTACK / THE GRAHAM PARSNIP LIQUIDISER TORTURE THINK-TANK (PROJECT), 11TH OCTOBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM FLAPPER & FIRKIN
So, The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank (Project), a band who have been labelled "the thinking man's Chas and Dave". As you might have surmised, they're not entirely serious - part Cardiacs, part I, Ludicrous and part 'Monty Python'.
'Blackadder'-inspired opener 'The Baby-Eating Bishop Of Bath & Wells' sets the tone for a set heavy on material from their Bordering On Pretentious LP. We're treated to songs about the Rowley Regis earthquake ("3.2 on the Richter scale!"), eating fruit to raise one's sperm count, and "the dark art of Scrabble", the latter culminating in the repetition of the line "Let me put 'quizzical' on a triple word score" to the tune of Olivia Newton John's 'Let's Get Physical'.* The undoubted highlight, though, is 'Tractor Love', a tale of agricultural-based lust which, in its references to erections, suggests that the penile problems alluded to in other songs can be overcome given the right stimulus.
But who exactly IS the mysterious Graham Parsnip? Is it the pony-tailed shirtless drummer? Is it the guitarist who laughs his way through the set? Is it the vocalist, dressed as though fresh from a hard day at the bank and leaping around in the crowd pretending to be a trout? Is it the bassist / keyboardist, clad only in grey socks, Phil Collins T-shirt and enormous green underpants? Or is it none of them? And does it matter?
Another question to ponder: is it foolhardy to take potshots at a band called When Bears Attack, one of whose songs, er, bears the title 'Rock Critic In A Pool Of Blood'? Oh well... They're really not very good. In fact, they're an unmitigated mess, veering wildly from straightforward punk into ska and indie, swerving from the lugubriously personal to Graham Parsnip-esque daftness, without any semblance of individual identity. Redeeming features? Well, there are some neat horn touches, and the bespectacled vocalist gives it absolutely everything, channeling attention away from his mostly static band members and coming across like Nicholas Lyndhurst on PCP. Now there's an image for you.
I've been rueing the fact that (Hooker), Manchester's answer to Sleater-Kinney, had to pull out of their headlining slot, and unfortunately their replacements 51 Breaks offer precious little in the way of consolation. If I had to pinpoint three things that immediately inspire me to take a dislike to them, it would be the bassist's Kasabian T-shirt, the guitarist's John Squireisms and, most significantly, the vocalist / keyboardist's gratingly Americanised James Blunt impersonation. The set is bookended by uptempo Stone Roses style indie, but it's the tracks which occupy the middle portion that suggest they know which way the money lies - ponderous piano-led power ballads that Keane wouldn't kick out of bed. Fair play to them, though - they do it very effectively, and who am I to stick the boot in? I'm not really paying much attention anyway, being mostly preoccupied with thoughts of passionate trysts with farmyard machinery.
* Call me pedantic, but being a bit of a Scrabble buff myself I thought I should point out that the word 'quizzical' contains two 'z's, and therefore cannot be played in a game featuring only one 'z' tile...
Other reviews: Parallax View, Andy Pryke
51 BREAKS / WHEN BEARS ATTACK / THE GRAHAM PARSNIP LIQUIDISER TORTURE THINK-TANK (PROJECT), 11TH OCTOBER 2005, BIRMINGHAM FLAPPER & FIRKIN
So, The Graham Parsnip Liquidiser Torture Think-Tank (Project), a band who have been labelled "the thinking man's Chas and Dave". As you might have surmised, they're not entirely serious - part Cardiacs, part I, Ludicrous and part 'Monty Python'.
'Blackadder'-inspired opener 'The Baby-Eating Bishop Of Bath & Wells' sets the tone for a set heavy on material from their Bordering On Pretentious LP. We're treated to songs about the Rowley Regis earthquake ("3.2 on the Richter scale!"), eating fruit to raise one's sperm count, and "the dark art of Scrabble", the latter culminating in the repetition of the line "Let me put 'quizzical' on a triple word score" to the tune of Olivia Newton John's 'Let's Get Physical'.* The undoubted highlight, though, is 'Tractor Love', a tale of agricultural-based lust which, in its references to erections, suggests that the penile problems alluded to in other songs can be overcome given the right stimulus.
But who exactly IS the mysterious Graham Parsnip? Is it the pony-tailed shirtless drummer? Is it the guitarist who laughs his way through the set? Is it the vocalist, dressed as though fresh from a hard day at the bank and leaping around in the crowd pretending to be a trout? Is it the bassist / keyboardist, clad only in grey socks, Phil Collins T-shirt and enormous green underpants? Or is it none of them? And does it matter?
Another question to ponder: is it foolhardy to take potshots at a band called When Bears Attack, one of whose songs, er, bears the title 'Rock Critic In A Pool Of Blood'? Oh well... They're really not very good. In fact, they're an unmitigated mess, veering wildly from straightforward punk into ska and indie, swerving from the lugubriously personal to Graham Parsnip-esque daftness, without any semblance of individual identity. Redeeming features? Well, there are some neat horn touches, and the bespectacled vocalist gives it absolutely everything, channeling attention away from his mostly static band members and coming across like Nicholas Lyndhurst on PCP. Now there's an image for you.
I've been rueing the fact that (Hooker), Manchester's answer to Sleater-Kinney, had to pull out of their headlining slot, and unfortunately their replacements 51 Breaks offer precious little in the way of consolation. If I had to pinpoint three things that immediately inspire me to take a dislike to them, it would be the bassist's Kasabian T-shirt, the guitarist's John Squireisms and, most significantly, the vocalist / keyboardist's gratingly Americanised James Blunt impersonation. The set is bookended by uptempo Stone Roses style indie, but it's the tracks which occupy the middle portion that suggest they know which way the money lies - ponderous piano-led power ballads that Keane wouldn't kick out of bed. Fair play to them, though - they do it very effectively, and who am I to stick the boot in? I'm not really paying much attention anyway, being mostly preoccupied with thoughts of passionate trysts with farmyard machinery.
* Call me pedantic, but being a bit of a Scrabble buff myself I thought I should point out that the word 'quizzical' contains two 'z's, and therefore cannot be played in a game featuring only one 'z' tile...
Other reviews: Parallax View, Andy Pryke
Blogwatch
Welcome...
An Itinerant Scholar In Brighton is the brand spanking new blog of FinDeSiecle. An SWSL associate newly resident in Brighton and studying for a PGCE, he's an inveterate reader, film buff and user of words like "littoral".
Meanwhile...
Jonathan updates us on The Tale Of The Mysterious Parka - "What I reckon is this; some modern day Mancunian Arthur Daley has found himself lumbered with an Ancoats warehouse full of slightly ragged old Parkas, and hit upon a novel way of getting them shifted - just send them out to random unsuspecting individuals, and, by way of a mysterious note in the ticket pocket, elicit a bit of curiosity".
Elsewhere...
Kenny salivates eloquently over Ladytron (now there's an image he'd like...) - "For encore, we get 'The Last One Standing', slightly slower of tempo but with an undeniably catchy chorus and plenty of soaring 'aaah-AAAHs' for Helen to tease her tonsils around. This is followed, inevitably, by 'Seventeen', a song of such simple but unutterable genius (and Dead Kenny never uses the word genius lightly) that Lennon and McCartney would have drunk each other's piss to have written it. Helen and Mira join each other at the middle of the stage for some slinky, synchronised moves as they deliver the devastating lines of a tune that acts like a serotonin virus that just keeps on giving".
Pete is equally enthusiastic about alt-country duo Believers - "As is usual, they arrived without fanfare, said their hellos, picked up their guitars and started playing. From the very first note, me and my elderly companions looked at each other in acknowledgement that we were about to witness something special. There is something about seeing two people armed only with acoustic guitars, absolutely hypnotise a room, hold it spellbound. The guy, as mentioned, had cool stamped through him like a stick of rock, but he was cool, not cold and in any case his partners warmth would thaw all but the iciest of rooms".
Simon gets his teeth into the week's Top 40 - "Ricky Martin - 'I Don't Care'. Now there's a hostage to fortune title. The problem with Martin, as evidenced by the type of promo he's been doing, is that he now needs to be aimed at an older audience because he's been so long away kids are going to go 'sorry, Livin' La what?'".
Betty makes a discovery - "Not turning up at events that I've been invited to and therefore annoying people is quite enjoyable".
Alan goes to a Jack The Ripper conference in Brighton and meets Jeremy Beadle - "Very approachable, a great pisstaker (my favourite type of person), and over the course of the weekend obviously a lot of folk staying at the hotel approached him for autographs and photos, he could not have been nicer or done more for any one of them".
Pete reviews Joss Whedon's 'Serenity' - "Compared to the vast majority of movies featuring space ships that get a wide cinematic release it was a fucking masterpiece of modern movie making and that I was expecting more says a lot, not just about the state of films generally but about Joss Whedon's potential".
Alex defends his excitement at the prospect of having beans on toast for tea - "Honestly, I'm not some troglodyte, Loaded-reading, nu-sexist 'lad' who thinks that cooking is woman's work and who never learned to do anything more than work a can opener and a microwave. Seriously. I can cook. I like to cook. I lived alone for the best part of three years and while, yes, I did give custom my local chinese and indian takeaways, they did not provide more than a fraction of my total diet, and nor did the microwave".
The Girl recalls how watching a contortionist in the company of her parents led to acute embarrassment (NSFW).
And finally...
Long Suffering Wife, er, suffers after ingesting copious quantities of Thatchers Cheddar Valley cider in The Anchor on Saturday evening. An evil and corrupting influence? Moi?
Welcome...
An Itinerant Scholar In Brighton is the brand spanking new blog of FinDeSiecle. An SWSL associate newly resident in Brighton and studying for a PGCE, he's an inveterate reader, film buff and user of words like "littoral".
Meanwhile...
Jonathan updates us on The Tale Of The Mysterious Parka - "What I reckon is this; some modern day Mancunian Arthur Daley has found himself lumbered with an Ancoats warehouse full of slightly ragged old Parkas, and hit upon a novel way of getting them shifted - just send them out to random unsuspecting individuals, and, by way of a mysterious note in the ticket pocket, elicit a bit of curiosity".
Elsewhere...
Kenny salivates eloquently over Ladytron (now there's an image he'd like...) - "For encore, we get 'The Last One Standing', slightly slower of tempo but with an undeniably catchy chorus and plenty of soaring 'aaah-AAAHs' for Helen to tease her tonsils around. This is followed, inevitably, by 'Seventeen', a song of such simple but unutterable genius (and Dead Kenny never uses the word genius lightly) that Lennon and McCartney would have drunk each other's piss to have written it. Helen and Mira join each other at the middle of the stage for some slinky, synchronised moves as they deliver the devastating lines of a tune that acts like a serotonin virus that just keeps on giving".
Pete is equally enthusiastic about alt-country duo Believers - "As is usual, they arrived without fanfare, said their hellos, picked up their guitars and started playing. From the very first note, me and my elderly companions looked at each other in acknowledgement that we were about to witness something special. There is something about seeing two people armed only with acoustic guitars, absolutely hypnotise a room, hold it spellbound. The guy, as mentioned, had cool stamped through him like a stick of rock, but he was cool, not cold and in any case his partners warmth would thaw all but the iciest of rooms".
Simon gets his teeth into the week's Top 40 - "Ricky Martin - 'I Don't Care'. Now there's a hostage to fortune title. The problem with Martin, as evidenced by the type of promo he's been doing, is that he now needs to be aimed at an older audience because he's been so long away kids are going to go 'sorry, Livin' La what?'".
Betty makes a discovery - "Not turning up at events that I've been invited to and therefore annoying people is quite enjoyable".
Alan goes to a Jack The Ripper conference in Brighton and meets Jeremy Beadle - "Very approachable, a great pisstaker (my favourite type of person), and over the course of the weekend obviously a lot of folk staying at the hotel approached him for autographs and photos, he could not have been nicer or done more for any one of them".
Pete reviews Joss Whedon's 'Serenity' - "Compared to the vast majority of movies featuring space ships that get a wide cinematic release it was a fucking masterpiece of modern movie making and that I was expecting more says a lot, not just about the state of films generally but about Joss Whedon's potential".
Alex defends his excitement at the prospect of having beans on toast for tea - "Honestly, I'm not some troglodyte, Loaded-reading, nu-sexist 'lad' who thinks that cooking is woman's work and who never learned to do anything more than work a can opener and a microwave. Seriously. I can cook. I like to cook. I lived alone for the best part of three years and while, yes, I did give custom my local chinese and indian takeaways, they did not provide more than a fraction of my total diet, and nor did the microwave".
The Girl recalls how watching a contortionist in the company of her parents led to acute embarrassment (NSFW).
And finally...
Long Suffering Wife, er, suffers after ingesting copious quantities of Thatchers Cheddar Valley cider in The Anchor on Saturday evening. An evil and corrupting influence? Moi?
Monday, October 10, 2005
Things I Have Learned From / Noticed In A Three-Week Old Issue Of NME, Having Not Read It For Ages
About time I acquainted myself with what's down with The Kidz, I thought - and so it was to NME that I turned. Never mind that you could have got a better dissection of the issue on No Rock & Roll Fun three weeks ago...
1. A message from editor Conor McNicholas: "WELCOME TO YOUR NEW NME! You'll notice that NME looks different this week. That's because we've been making loads of improvements all the way through the mag". Forgive me for saying this, Conor, but don't you trot out that breathless froth every fucking week? Accompanying the message is a picture of Mr (or should that be Master?) McNicholas, looking as big-conked and gawky as ever.
2. Alex Kapranos has quite incredible teeth.
3. Ian Brown has stepped in to sponsor London non-league side Chiswick Homefields. And I imagine that every single member of the team, from 1 to 11, is a better singer than King Monkey.
4. The Futureheads and Bloc Party bassist Gordon Noakes are among those involved in a John Peel charity single, a cover of The Buzzcocks' 'Ever Fallen In Love'. The single's to be released on 21st November with all proceeds going to Amnesty International. Marvellous.
5. Irish band Red Organ Serpent Sound, now signed to Vertigo, have just released their debut single, the excruciatingly titled 'In Search Of Orgasmuz'. Having seen them play with The Fiery Furnaces and Sons & Daughters last year, I won't be buying it.
6. Kasabian's Serge Pizzorno on the band's hopes for their second LP: "We're just going to try and make that Stones / Floyd record that you can't deny is a great album, whether you like us or not". Well, by the sounds of it I'm likely to be able to deny it, Serge.
7. Rick Parfitt of Status Quo talks to Peter Robinson about the band's past: "It was all projectors in those days, and we'd project pornos onto the side of a white building. And we'd just lie there on the bed, collectively wanking. It didn't help when you were in your vinegar strokes if someone told you a joke. But that's all part of being mates in a rock band". I remember seeing Parfitt on BBC1's 'East Midlands Today' a couple of years back - he was being treated for Repetitive Strain Injury by Leicester City FC's physio. He claimed it was because of playing the same chords over and over again, but now I'm not so sure...
8. A guide to the free CD (the real reason I crossed the newsagent's palm with silver). The theme? "The soundtrack of your summer". The reason? "According to the results of our readers poll, 2005 really WAS the greatest summer ever for live music". Nice to see the magazine's continuing to encourage a startling lack of perspective. How many summers of live music have the majority of NME readers witnessed? Not many is my guess.
9. A band called The Arctic Monkeys seem to be the current can-do-no-wrong Next Big Thing. "There haven't been so many people trying to stuff into a tent at Reading since Foo Fighters in '95". I've never heard of 'em. Their contribution to the CD is 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco'. The merest whiff of Franz Ferdinand, but the almighty stink of The Kaiser Fucking Chiefs and their odious Britpop revivalism, plus a singer who sounds EXACTLY like Tony Wright of Terrorvision. It is rubbish. Rubbish name, too.
10. Ronnie Vanucci, drummer with "cover stars" The Killers, IS Johnny Knoxville.
11. The Killers' Brandon Flowers: "There are so many bands who write bullshit, and I don't know how they can play it every night without being embarrassed". Exhibit A, m'lud: 'Indie Rock 'N' Roll'.
12. Sweet relief - a pleasantly combative "interview" with Noodle of Gorillaz, whose cage is rattled entertainingly by Rob Fitzpatrick. At one stage she is goaded into declaring: "Gorillaz have never released anything musically, visually or in any other medium that has been anything less than superlative". I'd like to think there's an element of sarcasm in there...
13. A full page feature on Kanye West's declaration during the Hurricane Katrina telethon that "George Bush doesn't care about black people". No new quotes. Why not make it the main news item, rather than tucking it away deep in the magazine? Might it not be more worthy of inclusion there than, say, the massive picture of West with Franz Ferdinand behind the scenes on 'Friday Night With Jonathon Ross'?
14. Yet more slavvering over The Stone Roses and Spike Island. Yawn.
15. The new 'Help' album, 'Help: A Day In The Life', features new tracks by Radiohead, Maximo Park, Bloc Party, The Coral, The Magic Numbers and The Go! Team. Unfortunately, it also features Belle & Sebastian, Coldplay, Razorlight, Keane and The Kaiser Chiefs, the latter performing a cover of 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. For every swing a roundabout, eh? But then it's all for charidee - surely that can be the only reason for rating it a 10?
16. The new Ladytron LP Witching Hour makes Pete Cashmore want to have sex. A sweaty red-faced NME hack - what an unpleasant image.
17. "Tracks"? Of course, no "Singles" anymore. The Go! Team are acclaimed as "the most unabashedly fun band in Britain" - true enough. 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' by The Arctic Monkeys - them again - pips 'Bottle Rocket' for the accolade of Track Of The Week. If it's anything like as bad as 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco' then that's a travesty. And they're signed to Domino?! What are they doing dirtying their hands with this sort of dross?
18. A new (to me) NME Classic Single Of The Week feature - 'The Weeping Song' by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, released in September 1990. "an, uh, audacious choice of 45 ... this is really an expensive folly considering the kind of people who will decide the fate of it on-air". 45s? The possibility of serious airplay for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds? Very puzzling for the majority of readers, I imagine.
19. The Duke Spirit are the stars of another new feature, Pub NME, in which a band plays a couple of low-key pub gigs. They already had Club NME, you see, so this is really clever (even though it makes for a pretty damn dull feature). A biscuit to Mr McNicholas or whoever came up with it.
20. ... and we're into the live adverts. Oh look, Kim Gordon was obviously left feeling so dirty by Sonic Youth's appearance at the V Festival that she was intent on making amends by collaborating with Tony Oursler and Phil Morrison on a film called 'Perfect Partner' at the Barbican, live soundtrack supplied by her, bandmates Jim O'Rourke and Thurston Moore and others. Normal service is resumed, then.
21. The Recommender - another new feature, and one we like. This week, it's Paul Smith of Maximo Park telling us he's been listening to everything from Joanna Newsom to Broadcast via The Blue Nile, Scott Walker and John Cage. His main tip are Field Music, who have Futureheads / Maximo Park connections: "They've recently made a gorgeous debut album which is sort of like chamber pop with strings". Sounds very pleasant indeed. And he also 'fesses up to a love of Prefab Sprout's Swoon. Oh dear, it was all going so well.
Postscript: a Guardian interview with The Arctic Monkeys that Jonathan's already commented on. It seems the name was used by one of their dad's bands in the 1970s - that doesn't make it any better, though. Their Sheffield origins would explain the Terrorvision thing. Frontman Alex Turner on 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor': "It's a bit shit. The words are rubbish. I scraped the bottom of the barrel. It could be a big song, like. But I'd hate to be just known for that song because it's a bit ... crap". Well, why release it then?! Try harder not to be crap! And if we are going to suffer the misfortune of you sticking around for the foreseeable future, please try harder not to be this fucking dull and say-nothing in interviews.
About time I acquainted myself with what's down with The Kidz, I thought - and so it was to NME that I turned. Never mind that you could have got a better dissection of the issue on No Rock & Roll Fun three weeks ago...
1. A message from editor Conor McNicholas: "WELCOME TO YOUR NEW NME! You'll notice that NME looks different this week. That's because we've been making loads of improvements all the way through the mag". Forgive me for saying this, Conor, but don't you trot out that breathless froth every fucking week? Accompanying the message is a picture of Mr (or should that be Master?) McNicholas, looking as big-conked and gawky as ever.
2. Alex Kapranos has quite incredible teeth.
3. Ian Brown has stepped in to sponsor London non-league side Chiswick Homefields. And I imagine that every single member of the team, from 1 to 11, is a better singer than King Monkey.
4. The Futureheads and Bloc Party bassist Gordon Noakes are among those involved in a John Peel charity single, a cover of The Buzzcocks' 'Ever Fallen In Love'. The single's to be released on 21st November with all proceeds going to Amnesty International. Marvellous.
5. Irish band Red Organ Serpent Sound, now signed to Vertigo, have just released their debut single, the excruciatingly titled 'In Search Of Orgasmuz'. Having seen them play with The Fiery Furnaces and Sons & Daughters last year, I won't be buying it.
6. Kasabian's Serge Pizzorno on the band's hopes for their second LP: "We're just going to try and make that Stones / Floyd record that you can't deny is a great album, whether you like us or not". Well, by the sounds of it I'm likely to be able to deny it, Serge.
7. Rick Parfitt of Status Quo talks to Peter Robinson about the band's past: "It was all projectors in those days, and we'd project pornos onto the side of a white building. And we'd just lie there on the bed, collectively wanking. It didn't help when you were in your vinegar strokes if someone told you a joke. But that's all part of being mates in a rock band". I remember seeing Parfitt on BBC1's 'East Midlands Today' a couple of years back - he was being treated for Repetitive Strain Injury by Leicester City FC's physio. He claimed it was because of playing the same chords over and over again, but now I'm not so sure...
8. A guide to the free CD (the real reason I crossed the newsagent's palm with silver). The theme? "The soundtrack of your summer". The reason? "According to the results of our readers poll, 2005 really WAS the greatest summer ever for live music". Nice to see the magazine's continuing to encourage a startling lack of perspective. How many summers of live music have the majority of NME readers witnessed? Not many is my guess.
9. A band called The Arctic Monkeys seem to be the current can-do-no-wrong Next Big Thing. "There haven't been so many people trying to stuff into a tent at Reading since Foo Fighters in '95". I've never heard of 'em. Their contribution to the CD is 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco'. The merest whiff of Franz Ferdinand, but the almighty stink of The Kaiser Fucking Chiefs and their odious Britpop revivalism, plus a singer who sounds EXACTLY like Tony Wright of Terrorvision. It is rubbish. Rubbish name, too.
10. Ronnie Vanucci, drummer with "cover stars" The Killers, IS Johnny Knoxville.
11. The Killers' Brandon Flowers: "There are so many bands who write bullshit, and I don't know how they can play it every night without being embarrassed". Exhibit A, m'lud: 'Indie Rock 'N' Roll'.
12. Sweet relief - a pleasantly combative "interview" with Noodle of Gorillaz, whose cage is rattled entertainingly by Rob Fitzpatrick. At one stage she is goaded into declaring: "Gorillaz have never released anything musically, visually or in any other medium that has been anything less than superlative". I'd like to think there's an element of sarcasm in there...
13. A full page feature on Kanye West's declaration during the Hurricane Katrina telethon that "George Bush doesn't care about black people". No new quotes. Why not make it the main news item, rather than tucking it away deep in the magazine? Might it not be more worthy of inclusion there than, say, the massive picture of West with Franz Ferdinand behind the scenes on 'Friday Night With Jonathon Ross'?
14. Yet more slavvering over The Stone Roses and Spike Island. Yawn.
15. The new 'Help' album, 'Help: A Day In The Life', features new tracks by Radiohead, Maximo Park, Bloc Party, The Coral, The Magic Numbers and The Go! Team. Unfortunately, it also features Belle & Sebastian, Coldplay, Razorlight, Keane and The Kaiser Chiefs, the latter performing a cover of 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. For every swing a roundabout, eh? But then it's all for charidee - surely that can be the only reason for rating it a 10?
16. The new Ladytron LP Witching Hour makes Pete Cashmore want to have sex. A sweaty red-faced NME hack - what an unpleasant image.
17. "Tracks"? Of course, no "Singles" anymore. The Go! Team are acclaimed as "the most unabashedly fun band in Britain" - true enough. 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' by The Arctic Monkeys - them again - pips 'Bottle Rocket' for the accolade of Track Of The Week. If it's anything like as bad as 'Fake Tales Of San Francisco' then that's a travesty. And they're signed to Domino?! What are they doing dirtying their hands with this sort of dross?
18. A new (to me) NME Classic Single Of The Week feature - 'The Weeping Song' by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, released in September 1990. "an, uh, audacious choice of 45 ... this is really an expensive folly considering the kind of people who will decide the fate of it on-air". 45s? The possibility of serious airplay for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds? Very puzzling for the majority of readers, I imagine.
19. The Duke Spirit are the stars of another new feature, Pub NME, in which a band plays a couple of low-key pub gigs. They already had Club NME, you see, so this is really clever (even though it makes for a pretty damn dull feature). A biscuit to Mr McNicholas or whoever came up with it.
20. ... and we're into the live adverts. Oh look, Kim Gordon was obviously left feeling so dirty by Sonic Youth's appearance at the V Festival that she was intent on making amends by collaborating with Tony Oursler and Phil Morrison on a film called 'Perfect Partner' at the Barbican, live soundtrack supplied by her, bandmates Jim O'Rourke and Thurston Moore and others. Normal service is resumed, then.
21. The Recommender - another new feature, and one we like. This week, it's Paul Smith of Maximo Park telling us he's been listening to everything from Joanna Newsom to Broadcast via The Blue Nile, Scott Walker and John Cage. His main tip are Field Music, who have Futureheads / Maximo Park connections: "They've recently made a gorgeous debut album which is sort of like chamber pop with strings". Sounds very pleasant indeed. And he also 'fesses up to a love of Prefab Sprout's Swoon. Oh dear, it was all going so well.
Postscript: a Guardian interview with The Arctic Monkeys that Jonathan's already commented on. It seems the name was used by one of their dad's bands in the 1970s - that doesn't make it any better, though. Their Sheffield origins would explain the Terrorvision thing. Frontman Alex Turner on 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor': "It's a bit shit. The words are rubbish. I scraped the bottom of the barrel. It could be a big song, like. But I'd hate to be just known for that song because it's a bit ... crap". Well, why release it then?! Try harder not to be crap! And if we are going to suffer the misfortune of you sticking around for the foreseeable future, please try harder not to be this fucking dull and say-nothing in interviews.
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