So, that was 2007. Did you enjoy it? Good. I had quite a good year, thanks for asking- here's a highly derivitive rundown of the good and the bobbins from while the Earth's been hurtling round it's most recent lap of the Sun.
Living the Dream:
Robert FitzRoy- The chances are you've never heard of Robert FitzRoy but his is a story that never fails to make me smile. In 1831, FitzRoy set off on an expedition in his ship to chart coastal waters all over the world for the British Government, a job that was to take him 5 years. Knowing he would be away for such a length of time, and unable as a man of gentlemanly stature to spend his time with any of the serfs who would actually be manning the ship, FitzRoy decided to bring a companion with him- someone who fancied a bit of adventure and had no trobule leaving England behind for half a decade. The man would also have to be of a pastoral bent as the expedition was to have a extra agenda of FitzRoy's own- he was determined to find genuine evidence of God's creation of Earth. He was looking, essentially for the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. So he took along a man who had just gained a degree in Divinity from Cambridge University and was about to take up the life of a vicar when FitzRoy came calling.
FitzRoy's ship for this voyage was HMS Beagle and his chosen companion was called Charles Darwin.
This is now my favourite story in history. It happened 176 years before 2007 but I only found out about it this year so it makes the list.
Neon Bible- The Arcade Fire returned this year with their second album- which sounded pretty much like the first album crossed with the end of the world. Other honourable mentions go to half the Arctic Monkey's second album, Simian Mobile Disco and The Hold Steady's 'Boys and Girls in America' which sounds like the best bar-band playing in the best bar in Chicago.
Die Hard 4.0- For THAT scene with THAT car and THAT helicopter and THAT tunnel.
Roque Santa Cruz- Suddenly, a shimmering piece of South American beef has arrived in East Lancashire with all the nonchalant cool of the lead singer of The Strokes smoking oysters. Even on a cold post-Christmas night at the City of Manchester Stadium he still strode round like he was playing footie on a beach with a crowd of pneumatic bronze Amazonian women in dental-floss bikinis looking on admiringly between salsa dances.
Oz and James Big Wine Adventure- This would be the cosiest, middle-England-pleasing smug-cast on television if it wasn't for the latent love-story between the two hosts. On their respective tours of France and California Oz Clarke has been the nervous, eager-to-please, Eurocentric, modern Brit abroad- desperate to show all the locals he meets how much he knows about their culture whilst cooing over their wines, while James May slouches around being suspicious of everything foreign and wearing fetching t-shirts, usually with British motorcycle manufacturers emblazoned across the front. In the end, however, Clarke clearly comes to be fascinated by May's breezy charm and acute intelligence, while James obviously adores Oz for his depth of knowledge and sneaky sense of mischief. It's like Strangers on a Train, but with wine instead of murder.
Having a Mare:
Skins- Bad enough to make a man pine for Hollyoaks: In The City. Filled with the sort of edgy dialogue (lots of naughty words) and racy content (some spliffs, bit of vomiting, occasional tits) that Channel 4 exectuives in their late 30's think makes for cutting-edge teen television. No wonder the kids all watch Scrubs instead.
The Cadburys Gorilla Advert- Yes it was funny the first hundred times but it came dangerously close to making the music of Phil Collins popular again. Stop. Before. It's. Too. Late.
Blade Runner: The Final Cut- Ridley Scott twats about with the adventures of Deckard once again for no apparent reason other than to make it even more obvious that Harrison Ford is actually a unicorn, or something.
Chris Benoit- And to think there are people who say wrestling's fake.
The Sopranos- Fittingly, the best TV show ever went out with the best ending ever. Should be in with the very best things of the year but the sheer joy of a new episode has been sucked out of my world and that's a deep wound to bandage over. Hopefully David Chase won't now pull an Aaron Sorkin and go on to create a spectacularly self-indulgent televisual mis-fire that crushes expectations quicker than it crushes Matt Perry's career.
Saturday, 29 December 2007
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
I'm dead inside. Seriously. Crack open my chest and you won't find a heart in there- just a cold, dark stone with the density of a quasar that would suck you into it's core in a heartbeat. If I had a heart to beat. Which I don't. Emotional intensity is an alien concept to me at the best of times- if I was to become a father on the same day I was cure of head cancer whilst winning the lottery on a space trampoline I'd maybe crack into a giddy smile. Maybe. But I'd probably look as blank as a cow being told knock-knock jokes.
Then Shane Richie happened. Now, Alfie Moon off of Eastenders was never the man who I thought would yank me from my emotional coma- strangely I always thought that when it happened Jesus might be involved. Or Derren Brown. But that's exactly what the cheekiest of cheeky chappies managed on Saturday night at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. That's where you'll find him playing the lead in the musical 'Scrooge' and where, if you'd been there this last weekend, you'd have found me in the stalls having my melon well and truly twisted. Then bent. Then folded in on itself. Then turned into an ostrich. Which was having it's melon bent.
This is because I was drunk. I'd started a few hours earlier in Manchester's resolutely bonkers Christmas market, which smells of a German farm in the middle of a bonfire and where, for a reasonable price, any innocent member of the general public can buy mulled wine which could only be described as 'military-grade'. A small glass of this stuff could power Luton for a week. I had two large ones.
(Before I continue, I should point out this isn't a story about how brilliantly drunk I got and how brilliant brilliant I am for sticking so much booze down my neck. A lot of my anecdotes seem to have that as a feature and it's not a side to my personality I like. The only reason I do it is because the only people worse than those who get spannered then talk about it are people who don't drink, or would tut-tut at those who enjoy a libation or two. If you're one of these people- try this. Get drunk. Get very, very drunk. See what the world's like? Magic, eh? Now sober up. See what the world's like now? Cack, isn't it?)
Anyway, back to the story. Myself and the present missus then joined her family to celebrate her brother's birthday in an Italian restaurant in the company of some luscious red wine, but not before stopping off at the City Arms so I could continute to ingratiate myself with Amy's dad by joining him in drinking ales so real they have soil in them.
So, having survived trial by Bavarian mental-juice, trial by beer and trial by plonk I found myself in the stalls at the Palace as the curtain went up and people started milling about in a Dickensian street scene- fitting really considering the author of the source text. This was fine. I've been to the theatre before and was familiar with it's codes and conventions (I sat in my bit of the building and the loud people in the silly clothes stood on the raised bit at the front and had a bit of a pretend for a couple of hours. Simple.).
Then they started singing.
And I'd forgotten to prepare myself. I should point out that when I've had a bit to drink my train of thought, which is usually prone to more than a little diversion, has a tendency to fly off the rails completely and head for outer space- rather akin to the end of Back to the Future Part III. Therefore, I was at this point pondering which who would win from all the characters on stage if they were to have a game of 'chainsaw darts' when one of them started belting out a tune, which all the rest on stage seemed rather pleased about and joined in.
Then Shane Richie turned up and took charge of proceedings- which essentially entailed more singing when I was just getting used to people talking and then talking when I was expecting more singing. The world, suddenly, was full of drama, excitement and melodic sunshine dispensed seemingly at the whim of simple joy itself.
And what a world it was. It was the world I want to live in, my Xanadu, my Babylon. I saw the light and it's name was Shane Richie.
The next morning I'd sobered up and got a hangover. I stumbled downstairs and put the TV on to be greeted by '20 Greatest Songs From Musicals' on one of the music video channels. I watched for a bit.
About 10 seconds to be precise. Then I put on Soccer AM.
Then Shane Richie happened. Now, Alfie Moon off of Eastenders was never the man who I thought would yank me from my emotional coma- strangely I always thought that when it happened Jesus might be involved. Or Derren Brown. But that's exactly what the cheekiest of cheeky chappies managed on Saturday night at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. That's where you'll find him playing the lead in the musical 'Scrooge' and where, if you'd been there this last weekend, you'd have found me in the stalls having my melon well and truly twisted. Then bent. Then folded in on itself. Then turned into an ostrich. Which was having it's melon bent.
This is because I was drunk. I'd started a few hours earlier in Manchester's resolutely bonkers Christmas market, which smells of a German farm in the middle of a bonfire and where, for a reasonable price, any innocent member of the general public can buy mulled wine which could only be described as 'military-grade'. A small glass of this stuff could power Luton for a week. I had two large ones.
(Before I continue, I should point out this isn't a story about how brilliantly drunk I got and how brilliant brilliant I am for sticking so much booze down my neck. A lot of my anecdotes seem to have that as a feature and it's not a side to my personality I like. The only reason I do it is because the only people worse than those who get spannered then talk about it are people who don't drink, or would tut-tut at those who enjoy a libation or two. If you're one of these people- try this. Get drunk. Get very, very drunk. See what the world's like? Magic, eh? Now sober up. See what the world's like now? Cack, isn't it?)
Anyway, back to the story. Myself and the present missus then joined her family to celebrate her brother's birthday in an Italian restaurant in the company of some luscious red wine, but not before stopping off at the City Arms so I could continute to ingratiate myself with Amy's dad by joining him in drinking ales so real they have soil in them.
So, having survived trial by Bavarian mental-juice, trial by beer and trial by plonk I found myself in the stalls at the Palace as the curtain went up and people started milling about in a Dickensian street scene- fitting really considering the author of the source text. This was fine. I've been to the theatre before and was familiar with it's codes and conventions (I sat in my bit of the building and the loud people in the silly clothes stood on the raised bit at the front and had a bit of a pretend for a couple of hours. Simple.).
Then they started singing.
And I'd forgotten to prepare myself. I should point out that when I've had a bit to drink my train of thought, which is usually prone to more than a little diversion, has a tendency to fly off the rails completely and head for outer space- rather akin to the end of Back to the Future Part III. Therefore, I was at this point pondering which who would win from all the characters on stage if they were to have a game of 'chainsaw darts' when one of them started belting out a tune, which all the rest on stage seemed rather pleased about and joined in.
Then Shane Richie turned up and took charge of proceedings- which essentially entailed more singing when I was just getting used to people talking and then talking when I was expecting more singing. The world, suddenly, was full of drama, excitement and melodic sunshine dispensed seemingly at the whim of simple joy itself.
And what a world it was. It was the world I want to live in, my Xanadu, my Babylon. I saw the light and it's name was Shane Richie.
The next morning I'd sobered up and got a hangover. I stumbled downstairs and put the TV on to be greeted by '20 Greatest Songs From Musicals' on one of the music video channels. I watched for a bit.
About 10 seconds to be precise. Then I put on Soccer AM.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
I've seen the future and it's terrifying. A newspaper recently featured an article on the "Trolley of the Future" (presumably no-one was busy blowing each other up and stabbing pensioners that day so there was a bit of spare room to fill) that, amongst other things, warns you off buying unhealthy food. Apparently, anything you put in your trolley is scanned by a little black box that can also guide you round the store like sat-nav for the permanently pathetic, and if this little lump of plastic doesn't like what it sees it's not going to be backward about telling your podgy, fat, stupid face to put it back and buy more celery. And get a haircut.
The company behind all this, who go by the chillingly vague name of 'EDS', issued a quote for the piece which ranks as one of the most sinister utterances ever printed in a British newspaper: "It may not stop you putting cream cakes in the trolley but you will be made to think about the decision".
There you go- in the future even a shopping trolley will tell you how to think. Potentially your last vestige of responsibility will be surrendered to an ugly tangle of wire and wheels that spends its time directing you to the salad bar and tut-tutting at the Pringles. If you try to buy fags, it'll almost certainly turn on you as if in a Terry Gilliam animation.
Actually, now I ponder it, this doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Looking after yourself and taking responsibility for your actions is, as we all know, bloody hard work- who hasn't slaved over an iron and a toaster in the morning before slogging it to a job when we all know it'd be much easier to stay in bed and live entirely on a diet of Smirnoff Ice? I recently joined a gym in an effort to get in shape and, in two short months I've replaced a life of injury free slobbishness with one leg that alternates between aches and stabbing pains, the other leg that's given up the ghost altogether, a shoulder that screams with agony in the cold and a back which is flummoxed by such strenuous activity as sitting down. And I'm paying money and giving up my precious time to feel like this! Beforehand I had that cash to spend on my free and easy evenings sitting in front of Freeview eating lard flavour gourmet crisps.
Now I'm pretty sure that if a shopping trolley was forcing me to go through all this punishment at the gym I'd feel much better about it. Sure my self-esteem might be affected by my life being controlled by a metal cart with a wonky wheel but that's a small price to pay for not having to worry that I might be doing the wrong thing. In this situation I just blindly follow the trolley and if it get's anything wrong and I accidentally find myself in hospital or dangling from Gloucester Cathedral dressed as Idi Amin then I can just blame the technology. Then ask it how I get down.
I could do with something like this because the real world confuses me at the best of times. For instance, we have the smoking ban. The basic principle of this, as far as I can gather, is that all smokers in a pub should go outside to suck on the demon weed so that the non-smokers can experience some fresh air. However, if it's fresh air they want, why isn't it the non-smokers who go outside? There, if recent studies are to be believed, they'll find shitloads of it. Meanwhile, we smokers can suckle on Mother Marlboro's tarry teat in the sort of smoggy den we all love. Instead the people who want to breathe clean air are now wafting in the smell of stale beer and chip fat whilst all the smokers are outside polluting Mother Nature with a pack of L&B's.
And that confuses me.
Add to that the music charts, 95% of all television, David Miliband, David Miliband's brother whose name I keep forgetting, mobile phones as ghetto blasters, the colour pink as a cornerstone of male fashion, why Jimmy Page now looks like my Grandma and Cheshire and it's clear to see that a sizeable portion of modern living leaves me clutching at the very edge of understanding like a man drowning in treacle.
No, scratch that- olive oil, not treacle. My trolley says treacle's bad for me.
The company behind all this, who go by the chillingly vague name of 'EDS', issued a quote for the piece which ranks as one of the most sinister utterances ever printed in a British newspaper: "It may not stop you putting cream cakes in the trolley but you will be made to think about the decision".
There you go- in the future even a shopping trolley will tell you how to think. Potentially your last vestige of responsibility will be surrendered to an ugly tangle of wire and wheels that spends its time directing you to the salad bar and tut-tutting at the Pringles. If you try to buy fags, it'll almost certainly turn on you as if in a Terry Gilliam animation.
Actually, now I ponder it, this doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Looking after yourself and taking responsibility for your actions is, as we all know, bloody hard work- who hasn't slaved over an iron and a toaster in the morning before slogging it to a job when we all know it'd be much easier to stay in bed and live entirely on a diet of Smirnoff Ice? I recently joined a gym in an effort to get in shape and, in two short months I've replaced a life of injury free slobbishness with one leg that alternates between aches and stabbing pains, the other leg that's given up the ghost altogether, a shoulder that screams with agony in the cold and a back which is flummoxed by such strenuous activity as sitting down. And I'm paying money and giving up my precious time to feel like this! Beforehand I had that cash to spend on my free and easy evenings sitting in front of Freeview eating lard flavour gourmet crisps.
Now I'm pretty sure that if a shopping trolley was forcing me to go through all this punishment at the gym I'd feel much better about it. Sure my self-esteem might be affected by my life being controlled by a metal cart with a wonky wheel but that's a small price to pay for not having to worry that I might be doing the wrong thing. In this situation I just blindly follow the trolley and if it get's anything wrong and I accidentally find myself in hospital or dangling from Gloucester Cathedral dressed as Idi Amin then I can just blame the technology. Then ask it how I get down.
I could do with something like this because the real world confuses me at the best of times. For instance, we have the smoking ban. The basic principle of this, as far as I can gather, is that all smokers in a pub should go outside to suck on the demon weed so that the non-smokers can experience some fresh air. However, if it's fresh air they want, why isn't it the non-smokers who go outside? There, if recent studies are to be believed, they'll find shitloads of it. Meanwhile, we smokers can suckle on Mother Marlboro's tarry teat in the sort of smoggy den we all love. Instead the people who want to breathe clean air are now wafting in the smell of stale beer and chip fat whilst all the smokers are outside polluting Mother Nature with a pack of L&B's.
And that confuses me.
Add to that the music charts, 95% of all television, David Miliband, David Miliband's brother whose name I keep forgetting, mobile phones as ghetto blasters, the colour pink as a cornerstone of male fashion, why Jimmy Page now looks like my Grandma and Cheshire and it's clear to see that a sizeable portion of modern living leaves me clutching at the very edge of understanding like a man drowning in treacle.
No, scratch that- olive oil, not treacle. My trolley says treacle's bad for me.
Saturday, 1 December 2007
Owners of Porsche 911s do not own Porsche 911s and people from Glasgow are not from Glasgow. If you talk to people from the Empire's second city, they'll never say they're from 'Glasgae' but one of it's many, many districts- Bishopbriggs, Partick, Anderson, Queen's Park, Govan, Pollok, Maryhill and so on and so on- which is confusing if you can only understand one word in three of their thick Scottish brogue to begin with. You start by asking a native for directions to Hampden from Queen Street Station by using the seemingly innocuous "Are you from Glasgow?" and have to spend the next half hour being told how to get to the bit of the city they grew up in, irrespective of whether the stadium is anywhere near it. If you want to find the way to Hampden Park you are, trust me, better off wandering round saying "I'm lost, are you from round here?" and if they say "yes" running away and finding a Norwegian tourist. The level of gerographical pickiness prevelant in this otherwise magnificent city however is nothing compared to owners of a certain German sports car.
I recently got chatting to a chap who has a 911 but insisted that what he actually drives is a Porsche 911 Carrera 4 RS, NOT the standard Carrera RS mind- the Carrera 4 RS. If you're wondering whether it's an original Carrera 4 or from the re-introduction of the Carrera, I'll make everything clear by telling you that the 911 in question was, of course, a Type 993, not a Type 964. And it's got the 3.8l engine but you probably knew that. By the time he'd gone on to point out that his Carrera wasn't a trubo model but had the turbo model's body shell and some other components from that version I'd glazed over like a frozen pond and started to think about Neil Young.
I do this a lot. Canada's finest export occupies quite a lot of my thinking for any man with a reedy voice and massive sideburns and it was strangely fitting that he was now interjecting himself into my mind during a (one-sided) talk about the most complicated model history in motoring. Put simply, like the timeline of the 911, Neil Young's discography is one of life's great unfathomables- currently featuring 33 solo studio albums (19 by himself, 14 with any one of 6 different backing bands), 8 live albums, 3 albums with Buffalo Springfield, 4 with Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, one with The Stills-Young Band and a film score. He also directed a mental comedy film in 1982 in which he performed with post-punk outfit Devo.
As a general rule, he veers between country-tinged mellow work, often with a social/political bent; and feedback-drenched rock-outs that sound like God putting the apocalypse through a knackered amplifier. He demonstrated this most eloquently in just this past year when he released two classic live shows as part of his 'Archive' series- a solo show from Toronto's Massey Hall that's delicate as gossamer and one from the Filmore East with Crazy Horse that's delicate as Lawrence Dallaglio in mating season. They're both from an 18 month period between '69 and '71 when he was essentially pissing genius and churning out an album approximately every 30 minutes.
Every now and again, like any truly great artist worth their salt, Young goes a bit skew-whiff and turns out the sort of bizarre work which polite critics call 'challenging' and honest fans call 'crap'. A few years ago he came over a bit Pete Townshend and made a rock opera called Greendale (tragically, it's not about Postman Pat) while in 1982 he embraced the fledgling technology of synthesisers and vocoders to make 'Trans', an album so bad his record company sued him.
Naturally, I decided it was ripe for reappraisal. First of all, it's important to explain the genesis of this record. Neil Young has a son born with cerebal palsy and, at the time of 'Trans', had realised that he could communicate much better with his child is he spoke to him using a vocoder. Now if I was in this situation I'd get Steven Hawking to do the babysitting but instead Shakey (that's Young's nickname, based on his film directing alter-ego Bernard Shakey) decided that he'd make an album with all this electronic wizardry instead.
Things start going badly wrong on the cover which is a painfully 1980's graphical rendition of a bizarrely retro-futuristic car streaming towards the foreground away from a pinky-orange sunset. It's somehow appears to be made entirely of right angles. Things don't improve much on the inside either as one of the world's great troubadors is reduced to peddling songs with names like 'We R In Control' and 'Computer Cowboy (AKA Syscrusher)' which sound even worse than their titles suggest. There's even a techno remix of an old Buffalo Springfield number- a band about as ripe for an electronic makeover as George Formby or Robert Johnson.
Matters around this album were so shoddy that one song 'If You Got Love' was taken off at the last minute but no-one could be bothered to change the track listing on the original sleeve- leading to one of the few examples of music fans being glad to be short-changed. Young then took such brevity of material to new heights with his next record which took another left turn stylistically by being an album of rockabilly tunes, recorded with a hastily assembled band called 'The Shocking Pinks' and clocking in at less than 25 minutes. The cover features Young in a pink room, dressed in a pink suit, sturmming away on a guitar like Bill Halley gone metrosexual. The album was called 'Everybody's Rockin'.
And it's brilliant.
But that's Neil Young- wilfully changeable, always evolving, constantly looking to try something new, something wierd, something over-the-top or completely unexpected and all the while always making an interesting, and when he's on his game- brutally beautifully, noise. It's made his music endlessly fascinating and makes Young himself a captivating personality. If he was a car designer he'd probably be just as willing to do something silly which hardly anyone else would try. Like making the headlights shine into the car, or reversing the indicator-stalk action. Or, at a pinch, putting the engine in the back.
Just like a Porsche 911.
I recently got chatting to a chap who has a 911 but insisted that what he actually drives is a Porsche 911 Carrera 4 RS, NOT the standard Carrera RS mind- the Carrera 4 RS. If you're wondering whether it's an original Carrera 4 or from the re-introduction of the Carrera, I'll make everything clear by telling you that the 911 in question was, of course, a Type 993, not a Type 964. And it's got the 3.8l engine but you probably knew that. By the time he'd gone on to point out that his Carrera wasn't a trubo model but had the turbo model's body shell and some other components from that version I'd glazed over like a frozen pond and started to think about Neil Young.
I do this a lot. Canada's finest export occupies quite a lot of my thinking for any man with a reedy voice and massive sideburns and it was strangely fitting that he was now interjecting himself into my mind during a (one-sided) talk about the most complicated model history in motoring. Put simply, like the timeline of the 911, Neil Young's discography is one of life's great unfathomables- currently featuring 33 solo studio albums (19 by himself, 14 with any one of 6 different backing bands), 8 live albums, 3 albums with Buffalo Springfield, 4 with Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, one with The Stills-Young Band and a film score. He also directed a mental comedy film in 1982 in which he performed with post-punk outfit Devo.
As a general rule, he veers between country-tinged mellow work, often with a social/political bent; and feedback-drenched rock-outs that sound like God putting the apocalypse through a knackered amplifier. He demonstrated this most eloquently in just this past year when he released two classic live shows as part of his 'Archive' series- a solo show from Toronto's Massey Hall that's delicate as gossamer and one from the Filmore East with Crazy Horse that's delicate as Lawrence Dallaglio in mating season. They're both from an 18 month period between '69 and '71 when he was essentially pissing genius and churning out an album approximately every 30 minutes.
Every now and again, like any truly great artist worth their salt, Young goes a bit skew-whiff and turns out the sort of bizarre work which polite critics call 'challenging' and honest fans call 'crap'. A few years ago he came over a bit Pete Townshend and made a rock opera called Greendale (tragically, it's not about Postman Pat) while in 1982 he embraced the fledgling technology of synthesisers and vocoders to make 'Trans', an album so bad his record company sued him.
Naturally, I decided it was ripe for reappraisal. First of all, it's important to explain the genesis of this record. Neil Young has a son born with cerebal palsy and, at the time of 'Trans', had realised that he could communicate much better with his child is he spoke to him using a vocoder. Now if I was in this situation I'd get Steven Hawking to do the babysitting but instead Shakey (that's Young's nickname, based on his film directing alter-ego Bernard Shakey) decided that he'd make an album with all this electronic wizardry instead.
Things start going badly wrong on the cover which is a painfully 1980's graphical rendition of a bizarrely retro-futuristic car streaming towards the foreground away from a pinky-orange sunset. It's somehow appears to be made entirely of right angles. Things don't improve much on the inside either as one of the world's great troubadors is reduced to peddling songs with names like 'We R In Control' and 'Computer Cowboy (AKA Syscrusher)' which sound even worse than their titles suggest. There's even a techno remix of an old Buffalo Springfield number- a band about as ripe for an electronic makeover as George Formby or Robert Johnson.
Matters around this album were so shoddy that one song 'If You Got Love' was taken off at the last minute but no-one could be bothered to change the track listing on the original sleeve- leading to one of the few examples of music fans being glad to be short-changed. Young then took such brevity of material to new heights with his next record which took another left turn stylistically by being an album of rockabilly tunes, recorded with a hastily assembled band called 'The Shocking Pinks' and clocking in at less than 25 minutes. The cover features Young in a pink room, dressed in a pink suit, sturmming away on a guitar like Bill Halley gone metrosexual. The album was called 'Everybody's Rockin'.
And it's brilliant.
But that's Neil Young- wilfully changeable, always evolving, constantly looking to try something new, something wierd, something over-the-top or completely unexpected and all the while always making an interesting, and when he's on his game- brutally beautifully, noise. It's made his music endlessly fascinating and makes Young himself a captivating personality. If he was a car designer he'd probably be just as willing to do something silly which hardly anyone else would try. Like making the headlights shine into the car, or reversing the indicator-stalk action. Or, at a pinch, putting the engine in the back.
Just like a Porsche 911.
Thursday, 22 November 2007
World of Thursday - 22/11/07
Making life worth living:
- The maker of 'Heroes' apologising for the first half of Season 2: Your go, Aaron Sorkin.
- Sicko: Michael Moore makes us glad to not be American and rather jealous of the French. Features Tony Benn in classic full-on 'rant' mode.
- Setanta Sports: Calzaghe fights, belting Premiership games, earthy Conference football, obsucre European leagues, nice yellow and black colour scheme, a tenner a month and no Ian Wright- the way TV sport should be.
- Puzzleball: Terrifyingly addictive, like Google Earth for OCD sufferers.
Making euthanasia worth trying:
- The i-Phone advert: "This is how you play your music. This is how you watch videos. This is how you send a text to more than one person... hang on, it can't do that. This is how you picture message... oh, can't do that either. This is how you look like a techno-twat"
- The Hoosiers: Seriously? I mean, seriously? It's not a big joke? Is this what Chris Morris has been up to?
- "You have been bitten by a vampire" on Facebook: No I haven't. Fuck off.
- England being bobbins: Admit it, you knew we were going to lose the moment you saw McLaren under that umbrella.
- SoCo: No, it's called Southern Comfort. And it tastes crap.
- The maker of 'Heroes' apologising for the first half of Season 2: Your go, Aaron Sorkin.
- Sicko: Michael Moore makes us glad to not be American and rather jealous of the French. Features Tony Benn in classic full-on 'rant' mode.
- Setanta Sports: Calzaghe fights, belting Premiership games, earthy Conference football, obsucre European leagues, nice yellow and black colour scheme, a tenner a month and no Ian Wright- the way TV sport should be.
- Puzzleball: Terrifyingly addictive, like Google Earth for OCD sufferers.
Making euthanasia worth trying:
- The i-Phone advert: "This is how you play your music. This is how you watch videos. This is how you send a text to more than one person... hang on, it can't do that. This is how you picture message... oh, can't do that either. This is how you look like a techno-twat"
- The Hoosiers: Seriously? I mean, seriously? It's not a big joke? Is this what Chris Morris has been up to?
- "You have been bitten by a vampire" on Facebook: No I haven't. Fuck off.
- England being bobbins: Admit it, you knew we were going to lose the moment you saw McLaren under that umbrella.
- SoCo: No, it's called Southern Comfort. And it tastes crap.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
My PlayStation 2 is a wonderful, wonderful thing. The ugly black box may be getting a little long in the tooth now but with it I've been able to pretend to be a world class golfer, take Blackburn Rovers to European glory with myself in attacking midfield and become a criminal kingpin in variations of L.A. and Miami. I've been able to act like a swordfighting prince in ancient times, a bounty hunter in the future and, in a roundabout way, a music-lover from the mid-to-late 20th Century
That last one can't really be credited to Sony though. The reason it's there is that I always listen to music when I play video games, in-game music still being by-and-large dreadful as most games are programme by the famously barmy Japanese, and the only thing that's left working on my stereo is the record player. Therefore in a world marching ever onward into downloads and i-Pods I'm stuck with the snap, crackle and pop of vinyl.
It's a whole new world, albeit a pre-exisitng old one.
I should point out that I'm not going to get into a debate about whether things sound better on a disc of black plastic- that's the sort of debate best left to music lovers who drink beer with soil in it- but what is worth addressing is the amount of work that needs to be put in to listening music this way, rather than with CDs or flashy little boxes that store more songs than even John Peel could ever have been arsed listening to.
For example, if I decide to have a trawl through my collection of 7" singles then every couple of minutes I have to get up, flip to the B-side and set the needle in motion again or, even worse, get the next record out of it's sleeve, put the previous one back in it's home, then get the turntable going again- only to repeat the whole process moments later. Listening to just a few of my turn-of-the-80s post-punk collection whilst playing and pausing a game of Pro Evo 5 can stretch a single match so long that, in the equivalent time, someone listening on a computer could digest a whole album, download the follow-up, and the album after that, listen to them both and still fit in a couple of happy-slapping videos on YouTube to break things up a bit.
Things aren't much easier with albums either. If I fancy hearing Fleetwood Mac committing career hari-kari on 'Tusk' I still have to flip sides every 15 minutes or so and when I move onto record two I have to contend with the double inlay sleeves that won't quite let the disc come out and won't quite let the last one go back in again.
And to be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. I may be from the last generation to grow up giving a toss about albums and not just alve to download a bunch of dispirate songs of i-Tunes and make finely tuned mood-specific playlists with titles like 'Top Choons' and 'Post-Masturbation Comedown Sessions'. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks to my current listening situation, I've come to the conclusion that downloads won't kill the album as an artform- because CDs already have. When the world was stuck on vinyl an album had a time limit of around 40 minutes, unless a band made a double but at least that was a clear sign that they'd disappeared up their own arses and you might as well just listen to 'A Hard Day's Night' instead. This was a perfect timescale and an album of 8 or 9 good songs was seen as perfectly adequate if that's all the songwriters could find the time to write- a reasonable attitude to have in a decade in which there was an awful lot of drugs, nudity and being impressed by Peter Cook to get into a day. And you couldn't skip any of the tracks so they had to be listenable, on pain of your fans ripping the needle off and putting something better on instead. Side 2 of The Rolling Stones' 'At Her Satanic Majesty's Request' could feature the greatest music ever recorded by man but no-one's even got past track 3 to find out.
Then the head of R&D at Sony came up with the compact disc and decided it should be able to hold Beethoven's 5th Symphony, all 80 minutes of it, and suddenly musicians had a lot more space to play with without giving the game away that they were even letting the keyboard player write some songs. And every album since, even the very best of the very best, has had at least one track of utter bobbins etched across it.
'Digsy's Dinner', 'Revol', 'The Rolling People', 'Diesel Power', 'Pencil Skirt', 'Don't Tread On Me', 'New Orleans Instrumental No. 1', 'Voyager', 'Piku'- all on great albums, all cobblers. There must have been a law passed insisting on at leat one rubbish song appearing on a CD- how else to explain The Stone Roses' going all backwards with 'Don't Stop' or Radiohead giving it some Steven Hawking on 'Fitter/Happier'?.
Even worse, the last few years have seen a rash of bands so unprepared for an entire CD of their own work that they've gone back to the pre-Beatles attitude of seeing an album as simply some good hit singles surrounded by filler that frankly reeks of a producer on full-time turd polishing duties. Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs, The Fratellis, Jet, The Twang, Enter Shikari- couple of decent singles then it's "Quick, write some songs- the tea-time slot at Glastonbury's free!". The Kooks haven't even bothered with the decent singles.
Now, with the advent of downloading as the most convenient way to get hold of new music, they can just toss out two good songs every year or so and put them online independently- thereby saving the rest of us from the tune that the drummer came up with on a rainy dinnertime at school and has since added a harmonica solo and some breakbeats to.
And since they won't release any of it on vinyl, I won't have to listen to it either.
That last one can't really be credited to Sony though. The reason it's there is that I always listen to music when I play video games, in-game music still being by-and-large dreadful as most games are programme by the famously barmy Japanese, and the only thing that's left working on my stereo is the record player. Therefore in a world marching ever onward into downloads and i-Pods I'm stuck with the snap, crackle and pop of vinyl.
It's a whole new world, albeit a pre-exisitng old one.
I should point out that I'm not going to get into a debate about whether things sound better on a disc of black plastic- that's the sort of debate best left to music lovers who drink beer with soil in it- but what is worth addressing is the amount of work that needs to be put in to listening music this way, rather than with CDs or flashy little boxes that store more songs than even John Peel could ever have been arsed listening to.
For example, if I decide to have a trawl through my collection of 7" singles then every couple of minutes I have to get up, flip to the B-side and set the needle in motion again or, even worse, get the next record out of it's sleeve, put the previous one back in it's home, then get the turntable going again- only to repeat the whole process moments later. Listening to just a few of my turn-of-the-80s post-punk collection whilst playing and pausing a game of Pro Evo 5 can stretch a single match so long that, in the equivalent time, someone listening on a computer could digest a whole album, download the follow-up, and the album after that, listen to them both and still fit in a couple of happy-slapping videos on YouTube to break things up a bit.
Things aren't much easier with albums either. If I fancy hearing Fleetwood Mac committing career hari-kari on 'Tusk' I still have to flip sides every 15 minutes or so and when I move onto record two I have to contend with the double inlay sleeves that won't quite let the disc come out and won't quite let the last one go back in again.
And to be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. I may be from the last generation to grow up giving a toss about albums and not just alve to download a bunch of dispirate songs of i-Tunes and make finely tuned mood-specific playlists with titles like 'Top Choons' and 'Post-Masturbation Comedown Sessions'. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Thanks to my current listening situation, I've come to the conclusion that downloads won't kill the album as an artform- because CDs already have. When the world was stuck on vinyl an album had a time limit of around 40 minutes, unless a band made a double but at least that was a clear sign that they'd disappeared up their own arses and you might as well just listen to 'A Hard Day's Night' instead. This was a perfect timescale and an album of 8 or 9 good songs was seen as perfectly adequate if that's all the songwriters could find the time to write- a reasonable attitude to have in a decade in which there was an awful lot of drugs, nudity and being impressed by Peter Cook to get into a day. And you couldn't skip any of the tracks so they had to be listenable, on pain of your fans ripping the needle off and putting something better on instead. Side 2 of The Rolling Stones' 'At Her Satanic Majesty's Request' could feature the greatest music ever recorded by man but no-one's even got past track 3 to find out.
Then the head of R&D at Sony came up with the compact disc and decided it should be able to hold Beethoven's 5th Symphony, all 80 minutes of it, and suddenly musicians had a lot more space to play with without giving the game away that they were even letting the keyboard player write some songs. And every album since, even the very best of the very best, has had at least one track of utter bobbins etched across it.
'Digsy's Dinner', 'Revol', 'The Rolling People', 'Diesel Power', 'Pencil Skirt', 'Don't Tread On Me', 'New Orleans Instrumental No. 1', 'Voyager', 'Piku'- all on great albums, all cobblers. There must have been a law passed insisting on at leat one rubbish song appearing on a CD- how else to explain The Stone Roses' going all backwards with 'Don't Stop' or Radiohead giving it some Steven Hawking on 'Fitter/Happier'?.
Even worse, the last few years have seen a rash of bands so unprepared for an entire CD of their own work that they've gone back to the pre-Beatles attitude of seeing an album as simply some good hit singles surrounded by filler that frankly reeks of a producer on full-time turd polishing duties. Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs, The Fratellis, Jet, The Twang, Enter Shikari- couple of decent singles then it's "Quick, write some songs- the tea-time slot at Glastonbury's free!". The Kooks haven't even bothered with the decent singles.
Now, with the advent of downloading as the most convenient way to get hold of new music, they can just toss out two good songs every year or so and put them online independently- thereby saving the rest of us from the tune that the drummer came up with on a rainy dinnertime at school and has since added a harmonica solo and some breakbeats to.
And since they won't release any of it on vinyl, I won't have to listen to it either.
Tuesday, 20 November 2007
My morning commute usually begins at 7am and this presents a problem. The only radio station I'll listen to is Radio 2 as it's the only one that isn't desperate to sound like your cooler mate (except Radios 3 and 4 but they're so middle-class you may as well soundtrack your drive to work with people dogging) and this means I have to find some music to occupy the half hour before Terry Wogan comes on with his neat brand of whimsy and bordeline filth. I refuse to listen to the last 30 minutes of Sarah Kennedy as she usually blabbers away like that Auntie everyone has who reads the Daily Express and spends family occasions having a compound nervous breakdown whilst getting spannered on Malibu.
Therefore I've got to find a CD to put on to fill that time (and the occasions Wogan plays something dreadful like Wet Wet Wet) and that's quite a decision to be faced with that early in the day. This morning is wasn't so hard as I was feeling a bit nihilistic so it was an obvious choice to put on Iggy and The Stooges' 'Raw Power' and play it at the volume of a shuttle launch- however it's more common to find me at 7am to be barely alive, let alone awake, and with my actual mood still to be decided.
So whatever tunes I put on are going to have a pretty big say in how I feel for the next few hours and, for someone who can easily spend a good indecisive hour deciding what to have from a Chinese chippy, that's far too much responsibility resting on my shoulders at any time of day, never mind when it's still dark.
I can't really face playing any dance music at that point in the morning as I'll spend till lunchtime hearing phantom beeps and whistles while my heartrate will be equivalent to that of a nervous gerbil's. Anything acoustic would be far too maudlin and I'd slash my wrists somewhere near Charnock Richard services and most soul CDs in my car veer from ecstatsy to the depths of despair and back again in about four songs which is far more of an emotional range that I could even manage in a fortnight.
Only last week I optimistically auditioned Neil Young's new album for the job but it's got two 18 minute tracks on it and when I'm still trying to get my compus to be mentis at such an early hour they're likely to make me believe that my Saxo's become a time machine. I could listen to some of his earlier work but, for all his genius, he does possess a voice that could depress Ken Dodd and that's not going to help things if I'm sat in traffic jam or constantly getting cut up by Audis.
Things got even worse when I tried out 'Love' by The Beatles, which is essentially a mash-up of loads of the Fab Four's songs in a bit of a 2 Many DJ's stylee. This, frankly, is and was unnecessary and twisted my melon to such an extent that, even as I stared at the CD case, I began to be convinced that it couldn't possibly exist and that my actual experience of reality was merely a figment of someone else's imagination. Someone else who doesn't like me very much. I had this thought at 7.17am which is really a bit soon in the day to be questioning your own existence.
I gave Prince a go but, without getting graphic, after getting rid of the morning glory a man wakes up with he hardly wants to be confronted with another one at 80mph on the M6. And pretty much everything else in my record collection proved to be unsuitable in some way or another so I decided I'd listen to talk radio instead. So I put Five Live on, heard Nicky Campbell and, after a stream of fair-to-moderate profanity, went straight back to hunting through the CDs again.
And I think I've figured the problem out. I'm pretty sure no music is recorded at 7am by people who've only just got out of bed and only have drinking as much Guinness as possible at lunchtime to look forward to. Therefore, there's nothing especially designed for the early morning commute and surely that's a massive market being missed- especially as the music industry's having a pretty tough time at the moment with the combination of illegal downloads and all new bands being rubbish.
All you'd need is something a little downbeat, not too loud, but with a sense of brightness in there just to get you going. It'd be mid-tempo, with lyrics you don't have to think about too much and all played on real instruments. Everything would be 3 or 4 minutes long and everything would be... nice. It'd be comfortable, safe.....
Hang on....
I think I just figured out why REM are popular.
Therefore I've got to find a CD to put on to fill that time (and the occasions Wogan plays something dreadful like Wet Wet Wet) and that's quite a decision to be faced with that early in the day. This morning is wasn't so hard as I was feeling a bit nihilistic so it was an obvious choice to put on Iggy and The Stooges' 'Raw Power' and play it at the volume of a shuttle launch- however it's more common to find me at 7am to be barely alive, let alone awake, and with my actual mood still to be decided.
So whatever tunes I put on are going to have a pretty big say in how I feel for the next few hours and, for someone who can easily spend a good indecisive hour deciding what to have from a Chinese chippy, that's far too much responsibility resting on my shoulders at any time of day, never mind when it's still dark.
I can't really face playing any dance music at that point in the morning as I'll spend till lunchtime hearing phantom beeps and whistles while my heartrate will be equivalent to that of a nervous gerbil's. Anything acoustic would be far too maudlin and I'd slash my wrists somewhere near Charnock Richard services and most soul CDs in my car veer from ecstatsy to the depths of despair and back again in about four songs which is far more of an emotional range that I could even manage in a fortnight.
Only last week I optimistically auditioned Neil Young's new album for the job but it's got two 18 minute tracks on it and when I'm still trying to get my compus to be mentis at such an early hour they're likely to make me believe that my Saxo's become a time machine. I could listen to some of his earlier work but, for all his genius, he does possess a voice that could depress Ken Dodd and that's not going to help things if I'm sat in traffic jam or constantly getting cut up by Audis.
Things got even worse when I tried out 'Love' by The Beatles, which is essentially a mash-up of loads of the Fab Four's songs in a bit of a 2 Many DJ's stylee. This, frankly, is and was unnecessary and twisted my melon to such an extent that, even as I stared at the CD case, I began to be convinced that it couldn't possibly exist and that my actual experience of reality was merely a figment of someone else's imagination. Someone else who doesn't like me very much. I had this thought at 7.17am which is really a bit soon in the day to be questioning your own existence.
I gave Prince a go but, without getting graphic, after getting rid of the morning glory a man wakes up with he hardly wants to be confronted with another one at 80mph on the M6. And pretty much everything else in my record collection proved to be unsuitable in some way or another so I decided I'd listen to talk radio instead. So I put Five Live on, heard Nicky Campbell and, after a stream of fair-to-moderate profanity, went straight back to hunting through the CDs again.
And I think I've figured the problem out. I'm pretty sure no music is recorded at 7am by people who've only just got out of bed and only have drinking as much Guinness as possible at lunchtime to look forward to. Therefore, there's nothing especially designed for the early morning commute and surely that's a massive market being missed- especially as the music industry's having a pretty tough time at the moment with the combination of illegal downloads and all new bands being rubbish.
All you'd need is something a little downbeat, not too loud, but with a sense of brightness in there just to get you going. It'd be mid-tempo, with lyrics you don't have to think about too much and all played on real instruments. Everything would be 3 or 4 minutes long and everything would be... nice. It'd be comfortable, safe.....
Hang on....
I think I just figured out why REM are popular.
Monday, 19 November 2007
Was There Then
Ten years is an awfully long time. The Beatles' entire recording career lasted barely eight years, not much less time than it took for mankind to go from tentatively orbiting Earth to setting foot on the Moon. World War II spanned a mere six years and, once it had finished, it took West Germany nine short years to see it's sins forgiven and recover enough to win the World Cup. A lot can happen in less than a decade- four Scousers can change the world, man can touch the face of God and the sins of an entire nation can heal.
So why does 'Be Here Now' still hurt?
It's been ten years since Oasis released the most anticipated album in a generation and comprehensively underwhlemed everyone with twelve songs bloated by guitar tracks and dripping with finest Colombian mental dust. As a 16 year old in Blackburn, already au fait with the ghosts of music past, I'd clung to Oasis as my band, my music and felt exactly like everyone had done in the summer of '67 when they got Sgt. Pepper home from the shops- I was ready for a defining moment...
And I got 'The Phantom Menace'. A piece of work eternally doomed to be suffocated by it's own hype- so many people with so many expectations that not even Jesus and his trampoline act could come close to being good enough. In the years since, Oasis have remained Britian's biggest live draw, and Liam and Noel have entered the pantheon of national treasures but each successive album has been greeted with more than a touch of suspicion and the troubling notion that they're going to embarass us all over again. Even more than 'Morning Glory', which sold seventy squillion copies, and 'Definitely Maybe', which might just be the best album ever, 'Be Here Now' is the defining moment in Oasis' history.
This might explain why recently, with what could best be described as reluctant curiosity, I plucked it from my CD rack, slipped it into my Saxo's stereo, and spent 70 minutes of a Tuesday morning commute listening to, frankly, the most extraorinary and daft album on the planet.
An hour and ten minutes to get through 12 songs (or, to be precise, 11 songs and a reprise) may seem a tad excessive but then again it takes 2 minutes for the first tune 'D'Yer Know What I Mean?' to kick in. By the time it does, we've already had a jumbo jet, morse code and snatches of backwards vocals before the song arrives accompanied by the best drum noise ever. Sure enough the song's great- grandiose and bonkers in equal measure- but just listen to those skins! It sounds like Alan White and his kit are falling down the stairs! He stops tumbling for a sec whilst Noel plays a nice little wah-wah solo before setting off again towards the basement where we find the loudest apology in human history.
'My Big Mouth' arrives with a rush of several thousand guitars and feature the best middle-8 in Oasis' career. It's all about Noel apologising for constantly being controversial- though it doesn't really sound like he's sorry as Liam sings it like he's wired to the National Grid. It's a belter of a vocal that begs the question why we should ever again tolerate the chap from Snow Patrol who always sounds really nervous. So we're two songs in, two rocking bastard songs no less, and then the album plays it's masterstroke- the worst song ever.
'Magic Pie' is unequvocally shit beyond anything ever achieved in the name of music and should therefore be owned by everyone and listened to regularly. It's ponderous, Noel's vocal is awful, it's full of daft mellotron effects and the lyrics quote a Tony Blair speech. In short, it's incredible. And safe in the knowledge that you'll never here anything as bad ever again, you can now get on with the rest of the album with a certain sense of comfort.
Over the middle section of the album 'Stand By Me' rips off 'All The Young Dudes' so brazenly you feel like buying it a drink, 'I Hope, I Think, I Know' is the sound of Liam in a chariot race and 'The Girl In The Dirty Shirt' features the most romantic and touching use of the phrase 'Get your shit together' ever uttered. Then Johnny Depp shows up. Jack Sparrow's appearance on slide guitar is actually the second most notable feature of 'Fade In/Out', paling into insignificance beside an astonishing primal scream fron Noel three minutes in. So powerful is this scream that it's one of life's great pleasures to get into someone's car with a CD player, whack up the volume, fast forward to just before the right moment and then turn the ignition off. Then when the owner of the car next gets in and turns the key they'll be treated to Noel's lungs escaping at about 30,000 decibels. I guarantee they'll poo themselves. And it'll be runny too.
Following that, 'Don't Go Away' is rather sweet, the title track is boogieliscious with reliably dreadful lyrics and 'All Around The World' is so long it's proabably still being recorded in a studio somewhere. Last of all (reprise aside) is 'It's Getting Better, Man!!', the great forgotten gem of Oasis' career. There's four minutes of the sort of ecstatic drunken guitar pop that no-one does better, then a solo that builds and builds and builds before the Gallaghers start swapping vocals while the band clatters on around them into infinity. It sounds like the best night out you've ever had.
Then, after the orchestral reprise of 'All Around The World', that's pretty much it. It's massively flawed in places and it's far too long but, like Apocalypse Now, it's the result of too much money, too many drugs and more ego than both of those combined- and it's all the more fascinating for it. In fact, all that's missing is the Indonesian army giving a helping hand.
Unless that's them on backing vocals.
So why does 'Be Here Now' still hurt?
It's been ten years since Oasis released the most anticipated album in a generation and comprehensively underwhlemed everyone with twelve songs bloated by guitar tracks and dripping with finest Colombian mental dust. As a 16 year old in Blackburn, already au fait with the ghosts of music past, I'd clung to Oasis as my band, my music and felt exactly like everyone had done in the summer of '67 when they got Sgt. Pepper home from the shops- I was ready for a defining moment...
And I got 'The Phantom Menace'. A piece of work eternally doomed to be suffocated by it's own hype- so many people with so many expectations that not even Jesus and his trampoline act could come close to being good enough. In the years since, Oasis have remained Britian's biggest live draw, and Liam and Noel have entered the pantheon of national treasures but each successive album has been greeted with more than a touch of suspicion and the troubling notion that they're going to embarass us all over again. Even more than 'Morning Glory', which sold seventy squillion copies, and 'Definitely Maybe', which might just be the best album ever, 'Be Here Now' is the defining moment in Oasis' history.
This might explain why recently, with what could best be described as reluctant curiosity, I plucked it from my CD rack, slipped it into my Saxo's stereo, and spent 70 minutes of a Tuesday morning commute listening to, frankly, the most extraorinary and daft album on the planet.
An hour and ten minutes to get through 12 songs (or, to be precise, 11 songs and a reprise) may seem a tad excessive but then again it takes 2 minutes for the first tune 'D'Yer Know What I Mean?' to kick in. By the time it does, we've already had a jumbo jet, morse code and snatches of backwards vocals before the song arrives accompanied by the best drum noise ever. Sure enough the song's great- grandiose and bonkers in equal measure- but just listen to those skins! It sounds like Alan White and his kit are falling down the stairs! He stops tumbling for a sec whilst Noel plays a nice little wah-wah solo before setting off again towards the basement where we find the loudest apology in human history.
'My Big Mouth' arrives with a rush of several thousand guitars and feature the best middle-8 in Oasis' career. It's all about Noel apologising for constantly being controversial- though it doesn't really sound like he's sorry as Liam sings it like he's wired to the National Grid. It's a belter of a vocal that begs the question why we should ever again tolerate the chap from Snow Patrol who always sounds really nervous. So we're two songs in, two rocking bastard songs no less, and then the album plays it's masterstroke- the worst song ever.
'Magic Pie' is unequvocally shit beyond anything ever achieved in the name of music and should therefore be owned by everyone and listened to regularly. It's ponderous, Noel's vocal is awful, it's full of daft mellotron effects and the lyrics quote a Tony Blair speech. In short, it's incredible. And safe in the knowledge that you'll never here anything as bad ever again, you can now get on with the rest of the album with a certain sense of comfort.
Over the middle section of the album 'Stand By Me' rips off 'All The Young Dudes' so brazenly you feel like buying it a drink, 'I Hope, I Think, I Know' is the sound of Liam in a chariot race and 'The Girl In The Dirty Shirt' features the most romantic and touching use of the phrase 'Get your shit together' ever uttered. Then Johnny Depp shows up. Jack Sparrow's appearance on slide guitar is actually the second most notable feature of 'Fade In/Out', paling into insignificance beside an astonishing primal scream fron Noel three minutes in. So powerful is this scream that it's one of life's great pleasures to get into someone's car with a CD player, whack up the volume, fast forward to just before the right moment and then turn the ignition off. Then when the owner of the car next gets in and turns the key they'll be treated to Noel's lungs escaping at about 30,000 decibels. I guarantee they'll poo themselves. And it'll be runny too.
Following that, 'Don't Go Away' is rather sweet, the title track is boogieliscious with reliably dreadful lyrics and 'All Around The World' is so long it's proabably still being recorded in a studio somewhere. Last of all (reprise aside) is 'It's Getting Better, Man!!', the great forgotten gem of Oasis' career. There's four minutes of the sort of ecstatic drunken guitar pop that no-one does better, then a solo that builds and builds and builds before the Gallaghers start swapping vocals while the band clatters on around them into infinity. It sounds like the best night out you've ever had.
Then, after the orchestral reprise of 'All Around The World', that's pretty much it. It's massively flawed in places and it's far too long but, like Apocalypse Now, it's the result of too much money, too many drugs and more ego than both of those combined- and it's all the more fascinating for it. In fact, all that's missing is the Indonesian army giving a helping hand.
Unless that's them on backing vocals.
Wednesday, 19 September 2007
I've been persuaded, for reasons I can't quite fathom, to jump over here to Blogspot and so I have.
Hello.
Apart from this shift, two other interesting things have happened to me in the last couple of days. Number one, I have been 'tagged' in the blog of a friend and number two, I've done some research and found out what it means when you have been 'tagged' in the blog of a friend. Apparently, it's the 21st Century's equivalent of the throwing down of a gauntlet, a challenge to a peer. Sort of. Personally I think it's a much better idea than the gauntlet throwing as I always lost my gloves as a kid and it would therefore be reckless of me to start lobbing them around whenever I fancied mixing it up with anyone.
Anyway, cutting to the chase, what I have to do is called a 'meme'. Now these are usually the sort of things I avoid as they're invariably a list of inane personal questions in which the only thing that becomes obvious about the answeree is the ratio between how much they want to get some sex and how little they're actually getting. And what socks they had on last Wednesday.
This one, however, actually appears to involve a bit of thought and imagination. I'm already aware of the questions involved from reading a couple of other efforts and it seems to be an updated version of an English literature GCSE paper which traditionally involved trying to pretend that Shakespeare wasn't a racist despite Shylock's twin pursuits of money lending and skinning gentiles. Not meaning to brag, I did very well on my English Lit. GCSE (sample quote "Shakespeare was not racist as all Jews like killing and debt collection, and how come in the entire play he never mentions that Venice has canals- you'd think that would come up somewhere wouldn't you?") so, with a the best of intentions, I shall plough on.
First, select your ten fictional characters (from any medium) by whichever method you like best. Then answer the questions below.
1. Rob Gordon (High Fidelity)
2. Josh Lyman (The West Wing)
3. Peter Carter (A Matter Of Life And Death)
4. John McClane (Die Hard)
5. Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read (Chopper)
6. Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
7. Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice)
8. John Holman (The Fog)
9. Marty McFly (Back To The Future)
10. Rattigan (Basil: The Great Mouse Detective)
As you may be able to tell, I selected my choice via the method of being a white, middle-class man and I think I've not done too bad really. They run the full gamut from human to ghost (sort of) to rat with plenty of crime fighters, air force pilots and time-travellers thrown in for good measure. Although now I look again they are all blokes. Never mind.
And now, like an episode of Top Gear, but for characters with no relevance to each other whatsoever, we'll set them a series of challenges.
1. Divide the list up by even and odd. Which group of five would make a better Five Man Band (like a Power Rangers team)? Who would you slot in each position: Leader, Lancer (second-in-command), Big Guy, Smart Guy, The Chick? If you think the team would be improved by swapping one character between the even and odd groups, which ones would you switch?
Team A - Rob Gordon, Peter Carter, Chopper, Beetlejuice, Marty McFly
Team B - Josh Lyman, John McLane, Tony Soprano, John Holman, Rattigan
Right then, Team A. Peter Carter's military background and rank makes him the best choice as leader, whilst I'm going to put Chopper in as his second-in-command. They'll be like Mainwaring and Wilson from 'Dad's Army', though with a greater prevelance for shotguns and cheating death. Rob Gordon's the obvious pick for Smart Guy, particularly if their mission involves vinyl records or having shit girlfriends, which leaves Beetlejuice and McFly duking it out over Big Guy and The Chick- so we'd better get J. Fox fitted up for some gingham.
Team B, meanwhile, is swimming in testosterone combining a political alpha-male, an invincible cop, a gangland boss, the only man to survive and become immune to a fog that sends people nuts and a rodent voiced by Vincent Price. It's between Soprano and Ratigan for leader, but I think Lyman would throw his weight behind the New Jersey mobster which get him elected as Leader and install Josh as Lancer. Holman takes Big Guy as McLane is better with a one-liner and therefore is the Smart Guy which leaves Rattigan as the chick- and that goes to show just how cruel losing an election can be.
If Chopper and Rattigan were swapped, the testosterone levels in Team B may actually melt the polar ice caps completely but then you'd have the perfect team in place to deal with the oncoming floods- particularly if we got the opportunity to see Chopper and McLane rucking with an upset polar bear thats just seen it's house turned into a puddle.
2. Gender-swap 2, 8 & 10. Which character would have the most change in their story arc? Which the least? Would any of these characters have to have a complete personality change to be believable as the opposite sex?
That'd be Josh Lyman, John Holman and Rattigan totally getting their two-X-chromosones on. All would be believable as women except Rattigan who, being voiced by Vincent Price, would have to get a woman with a suitably posh-yet-sinister accent to take over those duties and, at the moment, the only person I can think of who'd be up to the job would be Madonna. So, in summary, Lyman and Holman would remain the same, Rattigan would become infinitely more terrifying (and more pretend-Jewish).
3. Compare the matchups of 1 & 8 and 5 & 9. (Ignore canon sexual preferences for the moment.) Which couple would be more compatible? Which couple would be more plausible to people from either principal's home culture?
Rob Gordon and John Holman.
'Chopper' and Marty McFly.
I think that the first two would be the most compatible and most plausible. They're both white, middle class men with a history of relationship porblems with the ladies (either childlish self-obssession or the missus trying to kill them having been sent mental by fog) so a bit of jacksie-jousting might be the best thing for the pair of them. Certainly I don't think they'd be too implausible to their mates if they were understanding enough.
'Chopper' and Marty McFly would, however, be a hell of a lot more fun. I could spend ages here telling you how but, for once, I'm going to leave it to your imaginations. Go on. I can't be expected to do all the work round here. Let me know what you come up with.
4. Your team is 3, 4 & 9. The mission consists of a social challenge, a mental challenge and a physical challenge. Which team member do you assign to each challenge?
Peter Carter - Social challenge- what with him being the only man in film history to cheat death simply via the means of being suave and having a fetching 'tache.
John McLane - Physical challenge- unless the mental challenge involved aircraft that need destroying
Marty McFly - Mental challenge- Anyone who's been chatted up by his mum and kept his marbles is obviously well put-together upstairs. Or from Devon.
5. 7 becomes 1's boss for a week in some plausible fashion. How's their working relationship?
Now Nick Hornby's a very good writer and Steven Frears a fine director, particularly when he has the talents of John Cusack at his disposal. But both the book and film of 'High Fidelity' will forever more seem like missed opportunities for not having Michale Keaton's finest work turn up to boss the place for seven days.
I would imagine their working relationship would eventually flounder as Rob will have been socially castrated in a sense by being usurped in his own shop which will leave him feeling depressed and vulnerable whilst Beetlejuice is a mentalist dead bloke.
6. 2 finds him/her/itself inserted into 6's continuity. As far as anyone other than 2 or 6 is concerned, they've always been there. What role would 2 be presumed to have had in 6's story, and could they fit in without going wonky?
If Josh Lyman had always been in The Sopranos continuity he'd last till about halfway through episode 1 before being whacked for being from Connetticut. And Christopher would try to make Donna his goumad which could only end badly.
7. 3 and 5 get three wishes. The catch is that they have to agree on all three wishes before they get the benefits of any of them. What three wishes would they make?
What three possible wishes could bring Pater Carter and 'Chopper' together. I can only think of the following:
- An end to all war
- But not gang wars
- Someone to actually make sci-fi family drama 'Kramer vs Terminator'
That may be me more than them speaking in the last one.
8. 1 and 2 are brainwashed by a one-time artifact that works even on people immune to mind control to attack and kill 4. They keep their normal personality, skills and competence level, except any Code vs. Killing has been turned off. Can 4 survive? How?
Can 4 survive?! It's John Mclane! Even if 1 and 2 were God and Vladimir Putin he'd still be the only one breathing by the credits.
9. 6, 7, 9 & 10 must help an orphanage full of small and depressed children have a merry Christmas. Who does what, knowing that at the very least the kids will be expecting a visit from Santa?
Well Tony Soprano would play Santa, McFly would be his little helper, Beetlejuice would be responsible for the entertainment and Rattigan would get the orphanage shut down by Environmental Health. Which'd probably upset a few of the orphans but at least they'll have got a sawn-off from Saint Nick.
10. 3 and 8 are challenged to circumnavigate the Earth in eighty days or less, using only forms of transportation invented before 1900. Can they do it, or will they be fatally distracted by sidequests or their own personality conflicts?
This would essentially by exactly like the original film version of 'Around the World In Eighty Days' as David Niven didn't take much of a leap from Peter Carter to arrive at Phileas Fogg. However, instead of the diminutive Mexican Cantinflas doing the Passepartout duties it's John Holman- a government worker whose life is turned upside down when he alone has to fight through London after it's residents have been sent destructively mad in pursuit of some mind-bending fog.
Which would be a bit of a change.
They'd be fine, by the way- Niven would rise above any situation with a fiddle of his 'tache while Holman's inventiveness and hardened edge would stand them in good stead in a tight spot. But instead of doing that, and indeed any of the situations above, why don't we have something much, much better?
Just imagine this- Adam Sandler plays a firefighter who has to pretend to be gay....
Hello.
Apart from this shift, two other interesting things have happened to me in the last couple of days. Number one, I have been 'tagged' in the blog of a friend and number two, I've done some research and found out what it means when you have been 'tagged' in the blog of a friend. Apparently, it's the 21st Century's equivalent of the throwing down of a gauntlet, a challenge to a peer. Sort of. Personally I think it's a much better idea than the gauntlet throwing as I always lost my gloves as a kid and it would therefore be reckless of me to start lobbing them around whenever I fancied mixing it up with anyone.
Anyway, cutting to the chase, what I have to do is called a 'meme'. Now these are usually the sort of things I avoid as they're invariably a list of inane personal questions in which the only thing that becomes obvious about the answeree is the ratio between how much they want to get some sex and how little they're actually getting. And what socks they had on last Wednesday.
This one, however, actually appears to involve a bit of thought and imagination. I'm already aware of the questions involved from reading a couple of other efforts and it seems to be an updated version of an English literature GCSE paper which traditionally involved trying to pretend that Shakespeare wasn't a racist despite Shylock's twin pursuits of money lending and skinning gentiles. Not meaning to brag, I did very well on my English Lit. GCSE (sample quote "Shakespeare was not racist as all Jews like killing and debt collection, and how come in the entire play he never mentions that Venice has canals- you'd think that would come up somewhere wouldn't you?") so, with a the best of intentions, I shall plough on.
First, select your ten fictional characters (from any medium) by whichever method you like best. Then answer the questions below.
1. Rob Gordon (High Fidelity)
2. Josh Lyman (The West Wing)
3. Peter Carter (A Matter Of Life And Death)
4. John McClane (Die Hard)
5. Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read (Chopper)
6. Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
7. Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice)
8. John Holman (The Fog)
9. Marty McFly (Back To The Future)
10. Rattigan (Basil: The Great Mouse Detective)
As you may be able to tell, I selected my choice via the method of being a white, middle-class man and I think I've not done too bad really. They run the full gamut from human to ghost (sort of) to rat with plenty of crime fighters, air force pilots and time-travellers thrown in for good measure. Although now I look again they are all blokes. Never mind.
And now, like an episode of Top Gear, but for characters with no relevance to each other whatsoever, we'll set them a series of challenges.
1. Divide the list up by even and odd. Which group of five would make a better Five Man Band (like a Power Rangers team)? Who would you slot in each position: Leader, Lancer (second-in-command), Big Guy, Smart Guy, The Chick? If you think the team would be improved by swapping one character between the even and odd groups, which ones would you switch?
Team A - Rob Gordon, Peter Carter, Chopper, Beetlejuice, Marty McFly
Team B - Josh Lyman, John McLane, Tony Soprano, John Holman, Rattigan
Right then, Team A. Peter Carter's military background and rank makes him the best choice as leader, whilst I'm going to put Chopper in as his second-in-command. They'll be like Mainwaring and Wilson from 'Dad's Army', though with a greater prevelance for shotguns and cheating death. Rob Gordon's the obvious pick for Smart Guy, particularly if their mission involves vinyl records or having shit girlfriends, which leaves Beetlejuice and McFly duking it out over Big Guy and The Chick- so we'd better get J. Fox fitted up for some gingham.
Team B, meanwhile, is swimming in testosterone combining a political alpha-male, an invincible cop, a gangland boss, the only man to survive and become immune to a fog that sends people nuts and a rodent voiced by Vincent Price. It's between Soprano and Ratigan for leader, but I think Lyman would throw his weight behind the New Jersey mobster which get him elected as Leader and install Josh as Lancer. Holman takes Big Guy as McLane is better with a one-liner and therefore is the Smart Guy which leaves Rattigan as the chick- and that goes to show just how cruel losing an election can be.
If Chopper and Rattigan were swapped, the testosterone levels in Team B may actually melt the polar ice caps completely but then you'd have the perfect team in place to deal with the oncoming floods- particularly if we got the opportunity to see Chopper and McLane rucking with an upset polar bear thats just seen it's house turned into a puddle.
2. Gender-swap 2, 8 & 10. Which character would have the most change in their story arc? Which the least? Would any of these characters have to have a complete personality change to be believable as the opposite sex?
That'd be Josh Lyman, John Holman and Rattigan totally getting their two-X-chromosones on. All would be believable as women except Rattigan who, being voiced by Vincent Price, would have to get a woman with a suitably posh-yet-sinister accent to take over those duties and, at the moment, the only person I can think of who'd be up to the job would be Madonna. So, in summary, Lyman and Holman would remain the same, Rattigan would become infinitely more terrifying (and more pretend-Jewish).
3. Compare the matchups of 1 & 8 and 5 & 9. (Ignore canon sexual preferences for the moment.) Which couple would be more compatible? Which couple would be more plausible to people from either principal's home culture?
Rob Gordon and John Holman.
'Chopper' and Marty McFly.
I think that the first two would be the most compatible and most plausible. They're both white, middle class men with a history of relationship porblems with the ladies (either childlish self-obssession or the missus trying to kill them having been sent mental by fog) so a bit of jacksie-jousting might be the best thing for the pair of them. Certainly I don't think they'd be too implausible to their mates if they were understanding enough.
'Chopper' and Marty McFly would, however, be a hell of a lot more fun. I could spend ages here telling you how but, for once, I'm going to leave it to your imaginations. Go on. I can't be expected to do all the work round here. Let me know what you come up with.
4. Your team is 3, 4 & 9. The mission consists of a social challenge, a mental challenge and a physical challenge. Which team member do you assign to each challenge?
Peter Carter - Social challenge- what with him being the only man in film history to cheat death simply via the means of being suave and having a fetching 'tache.
John McLane - Physical challenge- unless the mental challenge involved aircraft that need destroying
Marty McFly - Mental challenge- Anyone who's been chatted up by his mum and kept his marbles is obviously well put-together upstairs. Or from Devon.
5. 7 becomes 1's boss for a week in some plausible fashion. How's their working relationship?
Now Nick Hornby's a very good writer and Steven Frears a fine director, particularly when he has the talents of John Cusack at his disposal. But both the book and film of 'High Fidelity' will forever more seem like missed opportunities for not having Michale Keaton's finest work turn up to boss the place for seven days.
I would imagine their working relationship would eventually flounder as Rob will have been socially castrated in a sense by being usurped in his own shop which will leave him feeling depressed and vulnerable whilst Beetlejuice is a mentalist dead bloke.
6. 2 finds him/her/itself inserted into 6's continuity. As far as anyone other than 2 or 6 is concerned, they've always been there. What role would 2 be presumed to have had in 6's story, and could they fit in without going wonky?
If Josh Lyman had always been in The Sopranos continuity he'd last till about halfway through episode 1 before being whacked for being from Connetticut. And Christopher would try to make Donna his goumad which could only end badly.
7. 3 and 5 get three wishes. The catch is that they have to agree on all three wishes before they get the benefits of any of them. What three wishes would they make?
What three possible wishes could bring Pater Carter and 'Chopper' together. I can only think of the following:
- An end to all war
- But not gang wars
- Someone to actually make sci-fi family drama 'Kramer vs Terminator'
That may be me more than them speaking in the last one.
8. 1 and 2 are brainwashed by a one-time artifact that works even on people immune to mind control to attack and kill 4. They keep their normal personality, skills and competence level, except any Code vs. Killing has been turned off. Can 4 survive? How?
Can 4 survive?! It's John Mclane! Even if 1 and 2 were God and Vladimir Putin he'd still be the only one breathing by the credits.
9. 6, 7, 9 & 10 must help an orphanage full of small and depressed children have a merry Christmas. Who does what, knowing that at the very least the kids will be expecting a visit from Santa?
Well Tony Soprano would play Santa, McFly would be his little helper, Beetlejuice would be responsible for the entertainment and Rattigan would get the orphanage shut down by Environmental Health. Which'd probably upset a few of the orphans but at least they'll have got a sawn-off from Saint Nick.
10. 3 and 8 are challenged to circumnavigate the Earth in eighty days or less, using only forms of transportation invented before 1900. Can they do it, or will they be fatally distracted by sidequests or their own personality conflicts?
This would essentially by exactly like the original film version of 'Around the World In Eighty Days' as David Niven didn't take much of a leap from Peter Carter to arrive at Phileas Fogg. However, instead of the diminutive Mexican Cantinflas doing the Passepartout duties it's John Holman- a government worker whose life is turned upside down when he alone has to fight through London after it's residents have been sent destructively mad in pursuit of some mind-bending fog.
Which would be a bit of a change.
They'd be fine, by the way- Niven would rise above any situation with a fiddle of his 'tache while Holman's inventiveness and hardened edge would stand them in good stead in a tight spot. But instead of doing that, and indeed any of the situations above, why don't we have something much, much better?
Just imagine this- Adam Sandler plays a firefighter who has to pretend to be gay....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)