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.
Thursday, 22 November 2007
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.
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