November 17, 2009
Rules.
1. You post a song that makes you happy.
2. You can tag as many people as you want (although by current practice ‘as many people as you like’ appears to mean ‘one person’)
3. Say one thing about the blog that you tag that will make them smile.
I’ve been tagged by the lovely Kippers from Too Much Apple Pie who is, I believe, just behind me.
I will tag Ally because of her inexhaustible supply of crackly vinyl and choice illustration.
November 14, 2009
So The Body Shop have started selling Ice Blue shampoo again, along with lots of other things they discontinued a few years ago, which makes me a very happy bunny although they’re only selling all of these old things for a limited time and then they will withdraw them all EXCEPT the one that wins a poll that they are having in-store. You can vote online here and if you should be passing the body shop anywhere perhaps you could pop in and vote ten or twenty times (or more, I’m easy) for the nice minty blue bottle.
I am aware that The Body Shop is just a part of L’Oreal and no longer the nice feisty independent thing it once was but I don’t care.
November 10, 2009
When I was five one of my friends at school was Canadian, and his dad was still living and working in Canada whilst he was with his mum and sister at school in London, and I went to tea one day after school and was invited to go with them when they visited home at Easter, and I went home and told my mum and dad I was going to Canada with Richard, and they said “Well…” and I went, for a month, and whilst I was quite young and don’t remember every single thing about being there I find I can slip backwards fairly easily to some of it, and I remember snow, an awful lot of snow, and I remember ice hockey and not having a clue what was going on, and I remember being told the passover story, as my hosts were Jewish, and I remember the beginnings of learning to play chess. But most of all I remember Sesame Street, which wasn’t on in the UK at the time and which was entirely new to me, and was just great. And it’s 40 today, so I will wish it well and blow it a kiss and think again of a month in the deep deep snow of the Saskatchewan plains lightened by The Count and Oscar and all.
October 19, 2009
Going through my quota of visits to live shows like there’s no tomorrow I’ve been off to see Franz Ferdinand this evening. Support band, who I managed to catch about half a song of, were good, although I’ve forgotten their name but did realise that one problem support bands often seem to have is an unwillingness to engage with the three minute pop song. Other than that the main event was tremendous. I’m not sure if I’m being a little naive in being impressed with the lighting/imaging/video element of stage shows – I was impressed by the Bunnymen last week but even more tonight, it was great, and I just don’t recall having seen many gigs where people went to those efforts.
The band were absolutely full of energy, played almost everything that I especially wanted to hear and played it astonishingly well, had a nice simple rapport with the crowd, bit cliched sometimes but there you go, and always appeared to be having great fun themselves – it makes a huge difference when bands are obviously enjoying themselves on stage.
Not sure what’s next, I suspect there will be a bit of a gap now, but it’s been nice to get back into gig going.
October 19, 2009
I heard a fantastic theory in the pub at the end of last week and, unlike other fantastic theories heard in the pub at the end of the week, this one continued to work for me when I thought about it again later on. It’s based around a simple matter of shared observation – none of us has ever known a New Romantic, nor have we known anybody who knew a New Romantic.
From this developed the above hypothesis. What if the idea of a pop-culture movement was in fact made up by a handful of people who were really the only ones ever involved? This created some wonderful opportunities for fancy dress. It explains the make up and hair for one thing, as without those we would have realised that the bass player from Visage (yes, I know, I’m hypothosising) also drummed with the Spands and swanned on beaches with Duran Fucking Duran. I think the whole lot was made up by George and Marilyn bored stupid because there were only the regular ten other punters with cloaks to check and once they were in there was nothing to do.
The best thing about this is that it proves that Duran Fucking Duran were not real and can be discounted entirely – in fact it’s clearly the case that it’s them who were rewriting history and us now who are putting things right.
I said twelve, actually of course there is the standard thirteenth man who is at the very least a fellow traveller in just about every youth cult ever.
For Steve Strange, who I am prepared to admit probably exists in some form or other.
October 12, 2009
I may be a year out here, I’m not absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure that it was twenty five years ago today that I got My First Record Player – one that was actually mine and lived in my room as opposed to the family one that I could monopolise. It, most assuredly, wasn’t anything much and it was also, most assuredly, everything. I’d also just bought this so it was the first thing I played on it and, having my own secret share of obsessive compulsiveness which I will general attempt to pass off as ‘tradition’, it’s been the first thing I’ve played on every music playing device I’ve owned since then. And, for the first time, I’m going to see them tonight, a birthday treat of sorts.
October 5, 2009
There is a kind of song so full of soul that years later it shouts out to me still. I hadn’t listened to Armed Forces for an age because of the oh so severely warped nature of my vinyl copy of the album, but finding a CD copy led me straight back to this song. There is something big and glorious about it (I would add in the adjective ‘camp’ but I have an inkling that ‘camp’ is a little like ‘irony’ in being terribly mis- and over- used) in part because of the scale of the production – there are things here that you will hear again on subsequent Costello albums which show us how quickly he was already moving away from the new wave model of the earliest albums. So, a torch song of sorts, a real high point on a very fine album for me, and it’s nice to finally hear it without the yodel through the hills and valleys of the vinyl.
September 29, 2009
I remember being the tiniest little bit unsure of ‘Workers Playtime’ the first time I listened to it and looking at it now I really can’t see why. The only song on the original album that I’m not entirely sure about is ‘Rotting on Remand’ just because it’s a bit obvious – and actually the opening track, ‘She’s Got A New Spell’, would be fairly near the bottom if I were to rank all of Billy’s songs – but everything else on there is assured and confident and clever and straightforward, all at once. I’d heard ‘Valentines Day Is Over’ before at a CND demo – he’d started to play it, stopped, admitted that he’d forgotten the first line, riffed about how if you’re in a band you can always sidle over and ask the drummer, then started over properly – but everything else was new to me.
That mixture of poetic lyricism and the prosaic everyday – ‘She said kiss me or would you rather / live in a land where the soap don’t lather’ – and the plaintive emotional payoff of ‘The Short Answer’ followed by the big pay off of ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’ (which he seems to rewrite for every new tour and one time came with the great lyric in the middle verses ‘For Doctor Robert Oppenheimer created the atom bomb / but who’s gonna take the blame for BCCI, not Joseph Stalin I’ll tell you that for nothing’).
You can write a track listing for the mini-album that exists within this larger frame – the Mary album…
… and I wonder if, in the manner of Setting Sons, what you end up with here is a concept album that ends up overspilling its concept to fill out the packaging and if that was where my reservations came from.
And I wonder also whether that line at the end of this – ‘We used to be so brave’ – is actually what all of this stuff should be all about.
Billy Bragg – Must I Paint You A Picture (extended version) mp3
September 26, 2009
You know how this kind of thing works, someone plays this and then someone else chips in with that (and then deletes it, and then it mysteriously reappears, and now it’s gone again, *sigh*, ‘r’ in the month?) but as it happens this one is one I was listening to in the way in earlier this week and I was reminded of it again, in a way, by Matthew’s last friday five because one of the records I really remember listening to perched over in the corner of my grandparents living room with stupidly big black headphones on was ‘Rappers’ Delight’ (which is surely about to turn up somewhere else sometime very soon, it can only be a matter of time) and I have a feeling that I was looking for that when I stumbled upon this instead. Where on earth would the late 1970s been without Chic?
September 14, 2009
I picked up ‘Mr Cool’s Dream‘ the other day (bumped up as featured non-fiction in the library display on pop culture books) which is an all but day by day breakdown of the life of The Style Council. I’ve rarely picked up a book which feels so strongly that it should be a website (253 is the obvious one but that was a website before it was a book so doesn’t really count) – it’s a collage of short bits and pieces by various councillors and hangers-on amidst set lists and life in a top people’s recording studio.
What struck me immediately was the note in one of the opening pieces comparing ‘Confessions Of A Pop Group’ with ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’. Now, don’t get me wrong, I served with Don’t Stand Me Down, I knew Don’t Stand Me Down, Don’t Stand Me Down was a friend of mine, you are not Don’t Stand Me Down, but I get the comparison, and I’ve always liked ‘Confessions’, enjoying it far far more than ‘The Cost Of Loving’ which I still think I’ve never listened to all the way through.
It’s a summer album, which makes it perfect for the feel of this week, September warmth, a soundtrack to the desire to be somewhere else. Someone described ‘Interiors’ as a film the studio had to let Woody Allen make – it might not be succesful but he would be the better for having done it. I’d like to think that Confessions is, in a similar way, a fitting end to The Style Council, that it’s this, not the rejected ‘Modernism’ that allowed them to leave with their heads held high – (and certianly not the very dancey but ethically ‘interesting’ Promised Land) and it’s the commercial suicide of most of Side One that I particularly go for, drifting through, rather than the slightly forced poppiness of Side Two.
It’s all about wit, in the end – the message from everyone I’ve read so far in the book is that The Style Council were all about having fun, not being afraid to be a bit clever clever, bending those pretention lines until they break and rejoicing in the rather elegant mess of it all – bringing an underlying lightheartedness to what was still a great deal of singleminded political and personal songwriting.
The Style Council – It’s A Very Deep Sea mp3
The Style Council – The Garden of Eden (A Three Piece Suite) mp3
September 11, 2009
Fellow Americans, citizens of the world: Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or justice to our enemies, justice will be done.
We cannot see inside the head of a terrorist, and yet today we understand clearly what it is he demands. A terrorist demands hate. He demands fear. Above all else, a terrorist demands war.
But a free people does not bend to the demands of terror.
Our friends and family members have died in the thousands, their bright lights of life made suddenly, brutally dark. To the world tonight I say that not one more innocent person will die in the name of this terrorist act. Not one more mother’s son in America. Not one more beloved father in Afghanistan. Not one more infant child in Israel or in Palestine.
To the men and women in uniform I say: We all must hope that your soldiering days are done. Today you are our officers of law and our keepers of precious peace. You have been challenged by a terrible crime and make no mistake, this nation’s hunger for justice is as strong as its love of peace. We look to you, to our police forces and our troops, to the elected representatives of our citizens, and to our friends and allies in the international community, to bring the full weight of law and of human dignity against the wrongdoers and criminals.
America is ever prepared to act, and to act alone if we must. Tonight, we know that we can instead act in concert with every nation on Earth. The citizens of 80 other nations died with our own in New York and Washington. The murder of innocents has been carried not only to America, but to Iran and Saudi Arabia, to Mexico and El Salvador, to Japan and South Korea, to Canada and Great Britain, to India and Pakistan. The world has been stunned into silence, but only to emerge with a voice more unified and sure than ever before in our history.
We will convene a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. We ask for the establishment of a world tribunal with authority to seek out, extradite or arrest and try those responsible for the September 11 attack, and any who conspire to commit similar crimes in the future. We call on our partners and friends within the United Nations to establish an international force to carry out this mandate. Let their work reach with unrelenting certainty into the shadowy world of terror and into the network of criminal finance, but above all else let them reach toward the diplomacy of cooperative effort. We join all the world in our expectation that this mandate will be swift and certain. We have encountered an unprecedented crime against humanity; we demand unprecedented action.
And so to the hawks I say: We salute you.
And to the doves I say: This is your moment. We leave behind us a century of war; we see ahead a century of peace. Already, this new century is stricken by the deepest of challenges. We look to you, to the peace builders, the peace makers and peace keepers, for your wisdom.
We cannot comprehend terrorism, and yet today we understand clearly that its aim is to remake the world. Let us not fulfill the prophecy of terror by providing it with martyrs and justifications. Even as we wipe the blood from our brows and the tears from our eyes, we cannot forget that we are the world’s fortunate citizens. We must take extreme care not to provide the movements we deplore with gratuitous fuel for self-regeneration.
We know that we, too, can remake the world. Let us closely examine our actions on those fertile grounds from which terror grows. Is there more to be done to bring peace and justice to Israel and Palestine? Surely there is. Is there more to be done to ease poverty and suffering in the Middle Eastern nations so rich with oil? Almost certainly, there is. Is there more we can do to hear the reasoned and gentle voices of the many who are struggling to be heard and understood? We cannot doubt that there is.
Let these, too, be our unrelenting pursuit. And let us be clear: These shall be our goals because these are not the goals of terror. Terror demands extremism, fanaticism and war. We will redouble our efforts for peace because we are a people that does not bend, does not buckle in the face of fear.
And so to the doves I say: We salute you. Fellow Americans, citizens of the world, we will meet violence with patient justice — assured of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may he watch over each one of us. Thank you.
With thanks to Adbusters.
September 6, 2009
Billy Liar was the only Keith Waterhouse thing I ever read but since I first read it, aged about 15, it’s been one of my favourite books. I’ve always identified far too closely with Billy and I always particularly love the end, where everything’s changed and nothing’s changed. I love the fact that the only epiphanies Billy has before that end are the ones that are foisted upon him, and he can smack his head and say ‘oh yeah’ – a Holden Caulfield who is just that little bit more grown up and ultimately in touch with the world that Holden is always too young to understand. And I love the quiet lives apparently being played out all around him, with the obvious undercurrent thought always there, how many of them are just billy liar’s too?
August 20, 2009
Nothing much to see here – I suspect I will get back to a few things a week once school rolls around, although I don’t really know, but I’ve had nothing to say all summer. For now, just because I’m sat here, late, various bits of stuff to do that need avoiding, I thought of this, a song that was part of me getting better around this time last year, which I’ve always thought is a very lovely song – it’s light and airy and simple and soft, the guitar is allowed to sing along with the voice. Simon and Garfunkle sang some rough tough old songs but some quiet and positive things too and this is one of those.
It’s also an opportunity to post ‘the two songs most unlikely to turn up as a double act’ by playing the whole of the song I played on the podcast this week for ‘The Arse’ as part of the journey around the body – Tim was nice and faded it out half way through, but you can listen to it in all of its thirteen and a half minutes of glory here. I was stuck on what to play until somebody reminded me of the worse arse joke in the world and, lo, there was the worst song in the world to go with it.
Simon and Garfunkle – For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her mp3
Alien Sex Fiend – Drive My Rocket Up Uranus mp3
July 30, 2009
Thoughts of Alf, I think, have sent me back into 80s blue-eyed-soul territory and this lot, who I started to write a post about once upon a time somewhere else but never quite got around to the writing bit. The name came from the surname of the three brothers (and, funnily enough, from the middle name of the unrelated one) but in a marvelously playful way they managed to back this up with a good number of references in their song titles, nodding perhaps towards soul’s debts to gospel whilst at the same time writing performing in that 80s socio-political antiestablishment context. I love the wiki description of them as ’sophisti-pop’ -I want to be that, can I have it on my headstone?
They have been and gone a number of times, one of the christian brothers died young, but they are still around as a band, performing and recording and re-releasing. The first of these is my favourite of their songs, although it was a live version of this on, I think, Friday Live, which first made me really listen to them which I’ll find and post later if I can.
The Christians – Save A Soul In Every Town mp3
The Christians – Born Again mp3
The Christians – Forgotten Town (12″ Dub Remix) mp3
July 21, 2009
I’ve stolen borrowed a nice macbook from work for the summer and so I’m sitting here with a slightly unfamiliar iTunes library. It’s worryingly full of kind of popgoth stuff, I can see who’s been using this over the last year or so. It has this on it too, though, which I don’t think I’ve listened to for ages although I know I have the original 7″ single tucked away in the cupboard over there. Not only was this another string to the bow (least appropriate metaphor in the world ever?) for Vince Clarke, it was a beautiful debut single, electronic minimalism coupled to Alison Moyet’s incredible voice and a song bursting with restraint and want. It was a strangely appropriate song for the Flying Pickets to turn up with that acapella cover – and I could say something about that but there’s the usually very fine piece on it already at Popular.
Wonder if you’ll understand / It’s just the touch of your hand / behind a closed door…
I wonder if there are many musicians who have shown more of a golden touch over a range of groups etc than Vince Clarke – it’s the kind of thing you expect from a producer, maybe, but his role as a musician in so many fantastic projects (and I’d certainly include Erasure within this, I have an Erasure post which has been burning a hole in my pocket for months that I’ve just never quite got around to sorting out) is incredible. I will seek out some of those collaborations, I think, for some more of this (Martyn Ware! Paul Quinn!)
July 20, 2009
How long does it take for somebody to move from new and interesting and reasonably individual to being anodyne and bland and clearly, clearly designed by a committee heading straight for the lowest common denominator (‘yes, swearing is definitely a Merit here, hits a key section of the target demographic right on their rightclick’). When I look at it there is this nagging voice in my head saying ‘but it’s satire, surely it’s satire, don’t be so up yourself about it’ but if it is then the horribly ubiquitous ‘I Don’t Know’ (or to give it its fitting shop background muzak name, ‘I Don’t Bleep Know’) is a terrible failure as satire, because it’s so fucking obvious (we’ve been here before somewhere down below with The Streets, and with Bloc Party – ‘What’s that? You want you second album to be about the way you’ve dealt with the fame you’ve encountered from your first album? What a wonderful idea!’). This kind of thing can be done, Weller did it perfectly well back in the tender days of the trio, but when it’s done badly, god it’s awful, and this is awful, and it’s worse than that because those first songs were nothing at all like this, Lily Allen was, for a little while, a glorious musical incarnation of Emily Lloyd running and skipping down the boardwalk shouting ‘up your bum’ (with all of the family ties that she had too, come to think of it) but then… well, maybe that was a better analogy than I’d imagined. I’ll get my coat.
July 15, 2009
JC has a ‘random CD single’ post today which made me think of this, a single bought one saturday morning for pennies from the ex chart singles in Virgin – I’d heard the name of the band from an imaginary friend somewhere else although I didn’t know any more about them than that. There’s something wonderfully, pleasingly monotonous about it (god, are we back on chillout music?) – the dragging beat and simple melodies playing around it, the voice that can’t entirely be bothered until the chorus and then only to say that he can’t entirely be bothered. This is another thing too, similar to ‘Girlyman’ the other week, where I’ve never actually gone off to find anything else by them, but I like this a lot…
July 14, 2009
A quick burst of noise, and why not. Quiet noise, mind – a couple of acoustic versions which I think of as the ‘proper’ versions of these two songs – I didn’t hear them first, before the original ones, but I’ve heard them most and like them a lot more than the busier album/single versions elsewhere. The Beautiful South are very good at that thing of being quiet and calm and filthy and bitter and everything all at once.
The Beautiful South – Don’t Marry Her (acoustic) mp3
The Beautiful South – Perfect 10 (acoustic) mp3
July 9, 2009
This week’s contrast podcast carries on the journey around the body and has reached the eyes – go here for a gander. There are a few songs I thought about playing before I settled on the Pogues song that I did play, which didn’t turn up from anybody else so I thought I’d give them an outing here – spot the theme? I have strangely happy memories of World of Sport, Dickie Davies’ terrible hair and the odd sports that would turn up (which I would guess are now staples of the cable sports’ channels – Acapulco Diving? Ice Speedway? The once a year 8 minutes of American Football with no explanations at all which treated it as thought it were just a big all-in-together fight?) and the wrestling, obviously (wrestling highlight? Being chased across the auditorium by a yelling ‘Cry Baby’ Cooper after jeering at him when he’d lost a bought at Winchester Rec). I spent a holiday with Gary Gilmore, lying on the beach doing nothing but reading ‘The Executioner’s Song’ (there’s something about big Norman Mailer books – I’ve read that a couple of times, Oswald’s Tale a couple of times, and I’m still eagerly awaiting volume 2 of Harlot’s Ghost, despite the fact that Mailer is now dead and the book doesn’t appear to exist). And I’m without any memories of Bette Davis, which is something I guess I should remedy sometime soon.
Half Man Half Biscuit – Dickie Davies’ Eyes mp3
The Adverts – Gary Gilmore’s Eyes mp3
Kim Carnes – Bette Davis’ Eyes mp3
July 6, 2009
Back in the day, sometime in the first years of this century when I wasn’t listening to anything much, somebody made me a ‘chillout’ compilation tape – I have a feeling it was just a cassette made straight from a compilation CD. I hated it, couldn’t understand or see the point at all, it was weak and wet and it went nowhere and it was somehow hookless, didn’t catch you, did nothing to draw you in deeper. Even when I wasn’t playing, it struck me as music to switch off to and disengage from and I couldn’t see the point of that at all, not even in some silly shallow way.
I don’t have a ‘chillout’ playlist, but I have a ‘floating’ one – not a list that changes, comes and goes like the tide, but a list of songs to float away with, and this I think is my favourite song on that list. I played it on here before, when it came up on random about a year ago, and I think then it was the first time I’d listened to it since forever, but it’s been an absolute regular since then. Why disengage when instead you can use and abuse music to submerge into yourself? This song lets you float on the water, but you’re not in some pool, sun shining, drink waiting on the side, you’re all at sea, and the waves rage high and deep, and there is an almost endless nothing beneath you, and there be monsters, and you will be tossed up and down and around by the passion of it all, and if you look then you may not make it out to the other side such is the terror of the experience from the inside… but keep your eyes closed, and allow the sea to take you, and trust in the run of your emotions, and you’ll eventually be tossed on some further shore somewhere, for sure, all the better for the voyage and willing yourself to repeat it.
July 5, 2009
This is still possibly my favourite sunny day wander down the towpath let my mind wander of a song. It turned up happily I remember on my favourite compilation tape, it is a lovely cover that is even better than the lovely original (hands up who else gets nervous in conversations about these things because they’re not absolutely down on the pronounciation of ‘Isley’?) and just as good as any of that the copy I have is on this gorgeous original ‘Sound Of Young America’ Motown release. And I thought of playing it today just as it got cooler again and started to rain – it’s summer somewhere, surely.
(my vinyl rip was all treble and crackle, I’ve replaced it with a better mp3)
July 3, 2009
Without really thinking about it I found myself making up contrast podcast themes and intros for songs I was listening to at random the other day, and I’d like to think that a few of them might turn up at one time or another but this one seems more than unlikely given that it’s not too long since we had ’sleep’ as a theme. I listened to this and remembered Mil Millington’s ‘Angry Bed Positions’ -
Angry Position 2 -Think of it as a ‘K’. One person is in the standard half-’X’ shape (facing away) and the other is a rigid ‘I’; lying supine, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Here you lose points for style if the ‘I’ person doesn’t let out frequent sighs and snorts in an attempt to get the Half-’X'-er to ask, ‘Gfff… What is it?’
You can check all of the angry bed positions here
June 30, 2009
There are lots of songs, more than I can think of just now, that I used to listen to a lot and then for one reason or another just haven’t listened to for ages. I spotted one last night, flicking through a list of artists to find some recently acquired things. This was, I think, one of the earliest things I downloaded back in the day, knowing nothing about it other than its name and that it was available. I think it’s a wonderful song, though – country/folky-but-not-quite, resigned and determined, quiet and clear.
There’s something else about this, which is that there are quite a few cases, and it seems to be particularly true of things I found when I started finding music online, where I only know one song by a band, which I like very much but never seem to go looking for more. Happy with what I have of them? Worried that I won’t like anything else by them as much? Don’t know. I do kind of look around to see if other people are recommending the band or other things by them and I don’t remember seeing anyone else write about these for ages and ages. Anyway…
Girlyman – Young James Dean mp3
Additional – the news that the O2 and AEG are offering people ’souvenir tickets’ instead of refunds for the Jackson concerts. Gotta laugh.
June 26, 2009
I wrote a comment on the Guardian’s ‘Open Thread’ discussing Michael Jackson’s death and how he would be remembered – nothing too out there, just the obvious comment that once somebody has used their position of wealth and power to buy off serious criminal allegations and make the proceedings go away they really should be thought of as being off the team. It was removed as innapropriate by the moderator. I made a second comment, on how hagiography was fine but maybe he may not have been quite such a figure to be looked up to, and maybe that was the real lesson of this, that celebrities seem to think that they can act from a position of power, that they can get away with absolutely anything and we won’t care. That was removed too – not noted as ‘removed by a moderator’, just struck out, as though it had never existed at all.
So now I’ll write the same over here – that I like The Jackson 5 a lot, like Off the Wall very much and can see how significant an album Thriller is and always will be. But I don’t understand how people can gloss over his behviour since then.
It’s often said (and it’s said repeatedly on that Guardian thread) ‘well he had such a terrible upbringing, trying to cope with that father and all that fame and living in the public eye, you have to make allowances’.
I’ve just finished reading a book about children who kill other children, and the section of that which struck me the most was the section on Mary Bell, who as a 12 year old killed two younger boys. There’s no doubt that Mary Bell was brought up to a life of horror, raped and abused repeatedly by the clients of her mother, who was a prostitute. There’s no doubt at all either that the public’s view of Mary Bell is that she was, is and always will be a vicious monster who deserves nothing but contempt, and that there can be no mitigation in her background that might change this. There’s a message to Venables and Thompson in this – start singing and dancing now, whilst you still have a chance.
I’m not trying to make a direct comparison here – I’m not suggesting he’s been running around killing children on the sly – but Jackson paid over twenty million dollars to make child abuse allegations go away before they reached legal proceedings – and he did it in public. (I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to speculate about the amount of money he might have paid along the way which served its purpose and kept other allegations of abuse out of the public eye completely, but I wouldn’t rely on that here.) When you start throwing around your wealth and power to make sure that the rules and standards of society don’t apply to you, well, then you’re no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, let alone to our affection and support. Once you think that you’re so different, that real life is happening somewhere else and you’re above it all and you do as you please, well, then you’re no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, let alone to our affection and support.
We foolishly think that people out there, people who run things and who live off a hundred thousand times what we do because an accident of economic design favours and values them in a way that it will never value us, people who run the businesses that employ us, sit in the parliaments and seats of government and legislate for us, adminster our mortgages, savings and pension funds – we foolishly think that they must see our world as we do, that they are, fundamentally, people like us. We imagine it’s reasonable that they should be treated in the same way as we would expect to. We imagine they would want to behave in ways that we consider reasonable to other people, and to us. Fools that we are.
There’s only one person to play records by today.
June 25, 2009
It’s CD swap time at the Contrast Podcast – if you go here you can listen to the first part of the exercise. I get to go first and last this time – my job was to put together a CD themed in some way around the letter ‘A’ and wing it on its way to Greer at A Sweet Unrest for her to choose from and then to be blessed with a Zombie party from Chris at Culture Bully which I could choose from to round off next week’s Part 2.
I made an Artists Against Apartheid CD, drawing heavily on the posts about their (and our) day out in London back in the summer of 1986 which you can find somewhere there down the page. I thought I’d add a couple of tracks to that on here, one from the CD I made for Greer and one extra one, both from the album ‘Not Just Mandela’ which I’ll revisit over the next week or so with some other bits and pieces (although it’s interesting that a big part of the line up, Billy Bragg, The Neurotics, Atilla the Stockbroker, make this feel a bit like a companion album to Wake Up!) (what do you mean, what’s Wake Up!?)
And those men who scorned us when we asked why it was absolutely necessary to invade Iraq and Afghanistan were sat in power in the Reagan’s White House in the 1980s perfectly happy with apartheid and their friends the South African white government.
The Internationalists – Every Fifth Man Is Guilty mp3
The Neurotics (with Billy Bragg) – Africa mp3
(The reports of Michael Jackson’s death arrived half way through writing this. I have extremely ambivalent feelings about him. I’m very sorry for the loss of the wonderful performer he once was, but I’ve been sorry about that for years).
June 22, 2009
I’m just coming to the end of another trashy pulp novel and it occurs to me that I haven’t read any fiction that isn’t trivial and silly for ages, and in fact that the one thing I’ve picked up, which I wanted to read for a long time and then finally stumbled across a copy of, was some Haruki Murakami, but after about fifty pages I just put it down because I couldn’t see the point. Too much stuff about people and how they understand and misunderstand each other and not enough exploding helicopters. I think perhaps I’ve lost my sense of empathy.
June 20, 2009
The most astonishing thing I’ve stumbled upon this evening, or perhaps ever, is that I am now cited as a reference for something on Wikipedia, and not by me, neither. I refer you to this page on Michael Stewart, which cites this post amongst its sources. Hurrah! How about some late night supersuper dancey songs with the word ‘reference’ unnaccountably included in them?
Gladys Night and the Pips – Here Are The Pieces Of My Broken Heart (Different Reference Mix) mp3
The Originals – Why When Love Is Gone (Single Reference Mix) mp3
June 19, 2009
I went to see Billy Bragg last night, horrifyingly having to leave before the end (babysitters, I ask you) but it was still a wonderful show – I went in worried there was going to be a lot of Mr Love and Justice which I’m not generally speaking a fan of, to be honest, but there wasn’t, it was almost a ‘write yourself a dream playlist’ night. And they played ‘What’s Going On’ (the album) whilst we waited. The one strange thing, although it worked perfectly well after the first shock of it, as that we were all sat around tables laid out on the floor of the civic hall – it was strangely civilised, even if the first thing Billy said when he came on was “So are you all just gonna sit there and look at me or what!”.
He was supported by Otis Gibbs who made me think of seeing Billy supported by Ted Hawkins several times back in the day, and that, of course, is a huge compliment to Otis Gibbs who was very very good indeed. His site is here and is full of goodies (“I come not in consumerism but in fellowship – if you head over to my place you’ll find lots of songs you’re welcome to for free”) but he finished with this one as a taster for you here…
Otis Gibbs – I Wanna Change It mp3
And then Billy played and talked and talked and played – the horrors of bumping into Alistair Darling in the BBC’s green room, the even greater horrors of George Osborne walking in next, shouting ‘Billy Bragg!’ and starting to sing ‘A New England’, life and love and on and all. He played Levi Stubbs Tears and The Warmest Room and World Turned Upside-Down and Ideology and The Saturday Boy (“I don’t try and sing the trumpet solo at the end anymore because market research has shown that a Billy Bragg fan will automatically hear it in their head anyway”) and Brown to Blue and Greetings to the New Brunette and Sexuality, and I had to go just after he played this which is the only song on love and justice that really really does it for me, but then it was around for a couple of years before that album came out, so I don’t really think of it as belonging to there. And a live version of The Saturday Boy too, from a couple of years back, as it’s so lovely.
Billy Bragg – I Keep Faith (live) mp3
Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy (live) mp3
June 14, 2009
I know that songs have their own contexts, their own lives, but as well as living in their worlds it interests me that they live in ours, and it’s us that give them meaning, introducing them to friends they may not otherwise have met and forcing strange connections and arranged marriages. Songs that give you a snapshot of then as well as letting you deeper into now, and even a glimpse of the future, how wide it is, how deep it is, how much of it is mine to keep. And how do we treat this gift? Do we concentrate on the happy times whilst eternity fails to go by? Can we fail to remember that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes? This is a playlist, in the telegraphic, schizophrenic sense of the word, of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. – The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager Part 1 mp3
Elvis Costello – Tomorrow’s (Just Another Day) mp3
Billy Bragg – As Long As You Hold Me mp3
The Trashcan Sinatras – It’s A Miracle mp3
R.E.M. – Nightswimming mp3
June 11, 2009
My nicely repaired iPod has decided not to be nicely repaired and is going back to be looked at again. I thought when I got it back last time about doing some kind of ‘top 25 most played’ post although my top 25 most played is a very mixed bag indeed. It’s thrown by the fact that this is, I think, my fourth mp3 ‘library’ for one reason or another, so stuff that was up at the top once upon a time has disappeared competely, and by the fact that I’ve deleted once oft-listened to songs and reset playcounts to bury things in the crowd on this one.
Today is such a lousy day though for all of those usual reasons and more that I end up not being able to stop myself from playing this, hanging on in the top 25 despite not having listened to it for ages, although it soundtracked a lot of last year. It’s big and angry and loud and all and even now sometimes it’s nice to have this kind of release.
June 10, 2009
I got a sudden and unexpected visit from my uncle yesterday – he had some business around here, he’d be in town by about 9pm, did I fancy a curry? We went out and ate far too late and ordered so much that I couldn’t finish the leftovers at lunchtime today.
He was probably my first source of other music – I wrote onceuponatime about getting a copy of The Specials’ debut from him, and I quietly liberated all sorts of interesting things from him over the years. He was a club DJ – the kind of small town club which was all young men and women on the prowl, lager spilled and trouble in the taxi queue. It was the end of the seventies and on from there and it was, I’m sure, not a million miles away from Saturday Night Fever (because it’s not a million miles from New York to Essex, now, is it?) I asked him one time what his most requested record was and he said it was this – one of those things I’m sure I could have always sung the title to but that was about it. I’d be astonished if he meant anything other than the Roni Griffith version, but I found The Ronettes’ one knocking around too and couldn’t resist.
The Ronettes – The Best Part of Breaking Up mp3
Roni Griffith – The Best Part Of Breaking Up mp3
June 8, 2009
… I suppose the Tory vote barely went up at all – and the projections from this to a general election only give them a single figure majority…and at a similar time in the late 90s Labour spent a year with predictions of 100 plus majorities that were routinely scorned, so we’re not quite condemned to them yet…
… and the green party doubled their vote, and backed that up with big council wins all over the place…
… but this is the most depressing election vote that I can remember, and I can remember 1983 pretty clearly, and 1992 very clearly indeed. Fuckers – if you are one of those stupid pieces of shit who decided to ‘put the cat amongst the pigeons’ with your violent and spiteful vote, I hope you stand up and let people know,I hope you stand up and tell us that you’re a nasty little racist these days, dont you know, so those of us around you know exactly what to despise you for and we can all make sure we have nothing more to do with you.
June 3, 2009
Strangeways Here We Come came out the day before I started at University in 1987 and one of the major preparatory tasks before going away was to know it backwards already by the time I got there. There are lots of great songs on there, even within the context of The Smiths’ catalogue - in fact just about the only one I’m not sure about is ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ which has always sounded to me like the kind of thing a Smiths parody band would sing on a dodgy sketch show. I love the bile of ‘Unhappy Birthday’ and the high camp feel mixed with absolute deadly seriousness of ‘Last Night I Dreamt…’, the ‘look no guitars’ of the opening and the rush and push of ‘death at one’s elbow’ leading to the quiet plaintive coda of ‘i won’t share you’. And I know it gets written down a little as something musically too simple but I really love ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’ with a perfect mixture of contempt for the industry they were leaving and respect for the fanbase they weren’t.
I think I like this best of all though, even more than the very very good ‘I started something I couldn’t finish’. Maybe the gloom and doom on this was even better than the bounce in the music of ‘i started something’ for me, sat in my new room on my new bed on my own, hearing noises all around but nobody quite venturing out yet. Love, peace and harmony, anyone?
June 1, 2009
Tom’s long slow comfortable screw through the history of Britain’s Number Ones has reached David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’, (April ‘83, since you’re asking) which is a troubling record in all sorts of ways, I mean, how hard is he trying in order to make it sound like he’s not really trying, he’s just effortlessly hitting the mainstream because he can if he chooses to, but just try and not like it, try and not feel that little kick when the intro starts. Maybe he (and the kids) just deserved the trust fund. Anyway, it made me remember that this was always my favourite song from that time in David’s being, and made me think of having another read of this great book (a fantastic history of popular music through the seventies and eighties in the form of an epistolary* novel), and what a lovely summery record this is, in its own way, more let go and just having fun than Britain’s Number One.
* “That’s a nice hat – Saint Peter wrote the epistles to the apostles wearing a hat like that”
May 25, 2009
I swore for a long time that I would leave wikipedia well alone, not get involved, I know about my liability to be sidetracked and there was just too much to do there if you’d ever start – but then I started tinkering the tiniest little bit, often just with stuff we’ve been doing in class, some detail about a particular film. Anyway, flicking around on wiki tonight, just looking for things as they occurred, and I ended up on Phill Jupitus’ page and was surprised to find there was no reference to available Porky the Poet recordings, so on it went and then a link on there sent me to tinker with something else, and so I thought I should get out of there and come here instead.
May 23, 2009
Lovely new commenter Steve, writing about ‘High Land Hard Rain, says…
I think we need to doff our collective caps to legendary electro pop producer Mike Mansfield (yes, he of New Musik..remember ‘Living By Numbers’ from 1980?) who transformed the album version of WOTW into another beautiful, altogether different noise. Respect Mike. Check out Living By Numbers and you’ll hear the origins.
New Musik – Living By Numbers mp3
May 22, 2009
I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of weeks trying to listen to the new Maximo Park album and failing because I just find so frustratingly and disappointingly dull (the curse of the difficult third album? it doesn’t have to be this way but it happened to Bloc Party too, I think), and so giving up on it and instead enjoying The Liberty of Norton Folgate by Madness which is brilliant, a modern life in London album with lots of great songs. But I’m not going to play anything from it because I can’t see anything much from it out there and don’t want to get moaned at, and you should go and buy it anyway. A few dancey Friday numbers?
Madness – Believe Me mp3
Madness – Shut Up mp3
Madness Bed and Breakfast Man mp3
May 20, 2009
In amongst the complete fucking nonsense of MPs expenses (already well dealt with by Drew and Simon, amongst others no doubt) one of the miserable conclusions is that, with elections in a few weeks (for local authorities and for the European Parliament) the electorate will demonstrate their mistrust and disdain for Westminster by going to the minor parties and most obviously to the BNP. One of the great unreported things of the last week or so (from what I’ve seen – I don’t read every paper or watch every news bulletin but I keep up on line fairly thoroughly) is the massive extent of the grassroots campaign against the fascists that is going on. At the end of last week every station I went through was flooded by Hope Not Hate activists leafletting and giving out papers, posters, badges and more – and everyone was going up and talking to them and taking the material they had to offer. They were all around town on Saturday, with t-shirts and posters to back up all of their other material. Nature has even stepped in around here and made a tree fall on the banner in the BNP candidates back garden. There are good things going on out there, even if the media are completely ignoring them and concentrating on the shits in Westminster.
That doesn’t mean that I feel anymore confident about what will happen on June 4th. These elections are held on a PR system that I kind of understandish, and looking back at the last elections the lowest vote that actually got somebody elected was just under 8%, for the Green Party in London and in the South East (which elect the largest number of MEPs and so it makes sense that this is where a smaller vote would get you in). In the other regions the lowest winning vote was around 12%. This is an awful lot more than the BNP were polling anywhere at the time. At the same time, though, the contempt that Westminster has put itself in means that there does feel like there is a big protest vote looking for somewhere to go.
And this is where the media has a duty to step in and talk about what the BNP actually support, because their leaflets and broadcasts make a big attempt to sound reasonable – and I have started to hear people, osentsibly normal looking ordinary people, out and about around the place start to say that you know, they do make a certain amount of sense.
* Rape can’t be thought of as a crime. Women like sex, in the same way that women like chocolate. Forcing sex on them should be thought of like forcing chocolate on them.
* Mixed race marriages mongrelise the white race and should be outlawed.
* If you’re black you’re not British. Just because a dog is brought up in a stable it doesn’t make him a horse.
* AIDs is a friendly disease because blacks, gays and drug users have it.
There is an awful lot more where that came from – this party who are concerned with ordinary people, who are not corrupt like other politicians, who are simple and honest and tell it like it is. I think the mainstream press won’t tell it like it actually is becuase, on the one hand, they’re busy stage managing the expenses case so that it appears to be something the Labour party have done and on the other they’d rather like the BNP to do well as another stick to beat the Labour government with. (Just so we’re clear, I’m not a fan of either MPs drawing insulting and absurd expenses or of the Labour party, but I can still call a press conspiracy when I see one).
So speak up about the BNP, please, as you go abour your business. Challenge anyone, even a complete stranger, who you overhear talking about them in anything other than a challenging way. Publicise your views – posters, badges… and don’t let them get away with this nonsense.
May 8, 2009
There is a short answer to all of this which you can jump to at the end, if you want.
The long answer is that sometimes a song comes along which lights up all the bulbs on Melody FM despite the fact that it has no business being relegated to the pits of hell (lighthouse family division) but is in all sorts of ways a really good song. There are a number of people over the years who have managed this. Sade, I think, is the most obvious one – she shipped copy after copy of Diamond Life as people walked out of the door of Smiths with that, Picture Book and Brothers In Arms but she is better than that company, smooth, yes, but sweet and harsh and cool all at once too.
And this is another of those, this is is a record which was suddenly absolutely everywhere all of the time, backing music in supermarkets and a solid staple for Radio 2 back before that window where Radio 2 was briefly the place to be (some time when the audience felt too grown up for Radio 1 and before Digital stations came along in numbers, I guess), and all around the bars whilst I was a student again at the turn of the century, training to teach, but its ubiquity was not a bad thing because it’s a song I can find I can listen to and listen to – the swooping up of the first chord crashing straight into the vocal, her gloriously rough as fuck voice and the emotional acceleration as the song moves towards the end, it’s all good stuff.
I think sometimes, and I think it was probably most true with Sade, that these people are One Of Us – even if they are grasped by the heart of the mainstream we don’t really believe that they belong there, don’t believe that they would choose to be there, if they had a choice, they would be on the backstreet with us because the backstreet’s where we all belong.
The short answer, of course, is that I really like this song and that’s just that.
May 4, 2009
I’m bang in the middle of a big fat lump of ‘can’t be arsed’ at the moment, although not in a particularly bad way, if you see what I mean. Listening to almost nothing (iPod due back very soon, something like normal service may well be restored then) but one of the things that occurred to me to listen to again this morning, whilst thinking about the film exam my students have next week, was this, because Ferris Bueller is one of the exam films (why didn’t I get to do exams on Ferris Bueller? Life is not fair) and this is a very lovely piece of the soundtrack.
The Dream Academy – Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want mp3
And then, very hapharzardly, this happened to come on next and isn’t it lovely too?
Chris TT’s website is here, and if you should be of the London persuasion today he’s playing at the Mayday gathering in Trafalger Square at 2ish this afternoon.
April 25, 2009
This is, I suspect, one for those who were fans of the King Crimson post a few weeks ago.
Not listening to an awful lot at the moment and then wandering around shopping I heard this guitar riff and thought blimey, well, yes, I could pretend but the fact is I do rather like that song and that riff! And then I think it turned out not to be this but to be that Lennie Kravitz thing instead, which I am, frankly, less keen on. But this is good, really good, who’d a’thought it?
April 24, 2009
I spent a couple of hours at the key stage two disco with my seven year old daughter last night and listened to absolutely nothing at all that I would ever choose to listen to. Nothing. I couldn’t even tell you what they played other than it was all pop-pap-r&b-bollocks save that in the middle, for the boys and as a bit of an alternative, Metallica’s ‘Rockstar’. Why? Why do we allow this to happen? How can we stand by and allow it to happen? WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? IS NOBODY THINKING OF THE CHILDREN!!!
My 11 year old has spent this week making a playlist for her birthday party this weekend, lets have some of this instead, for, as Doctor Robert would say….
Lemon Jelly – Nice Weather For Ducks mp3
The Concretes – Seems Fine mp3
Belle and Sebastian – Scooby Driver mp3
Elastica – Waking Up mp3
Blondie – Sunday Girl mp3
April 23, 2009
All of the usual bollocks about the effects of higher tax rates were trundled out last night in response to the budget raising the top rate of income tax to 50%. Brain drain time, how unfair look how we’re being hit, disincentivising and robbing us of entrepreneurial spirit and, as we are constantly told, it’s also ineffective because the rich are highly skilled at arranging their affairs to avoid taxation.
Tax systems redistribute income. The choice we always have to make is a simple one – do we want to take money away from poorer people and give it to richer people, or do we want to take money away from richer people and give it to poorer people. At heart it’s that simple.
One of the biggest lies about Thatcher’s governments through the 80s was that they were a tax-cutting crew. This was just untrue – they cut taxes hugely, enormously for the wealthy, slashing top rates and creating enormous schemes to benefit those with lots of money and let them keep it, but Thatcher’s governments paid for this by increasing the tax burden on the less well off – if you were a standard rate tax payer you paid more in tax under Thatcher than you had done before – a tax rising government for the vast majority of people. She did this by relying on the mendacious press and the fucking stupidity of the rest of us who would look at a cut in the headline rate of income tax and think that this meant we were paying less tax – and never underestimate the fucking stupidity of the rest of us, we fell for it, ignoring changes to allowances, national insurance, VAT and duty which all fell more heavily on the less well off.
What happens when you take money from the poorer sections of the population and give it to the richer? They create stupid housing booms and huge boosts in conspicuous consumption. The idea is the one promoted by Reagan and Thatcher through the late 70s and early 80s, of the supply side – essentially if you give the cows more hay to eat then eventually there’ll be more shit for the birds. But it doesn’t work and it never has.
Should we feel sorry for the wealthy hit with this excessively high tax rate? Firstly you need to remember that we have a graduated tax system – you don’t pay 50% on all of your income, you only pay 50% on the money you earn over and above £150,000. Secondly, it’s worth remembering just how much money £150,000 is – over six times the average income in the UK, but that average income is skewed by the stupid levels of income of the highest earners, and it’s a much bigger multiple of the modal income – the amount that most people earn. £150k pa is a lot more than the average earnings of GPs or Hospital Consultants (ie senior doctors), of Crown Court Judges (and not much less than High Court Judges), a lot more than the most senior head teacher of the biggest school – it’s an awful lot of money – a handful of very wealthy people.
As for the idea that ‘well, they will just find ways to avoid paying anyway’ which gets said over and over again on the news, why don’t journalists step in and say ‘well, then we should stop them!’. There are clear and detailed rules in place in the Benefits system to stop people disposing of assets in order to acquire benefits. It would be comparatively straightfoward to copy and adapt those rules across to the tax system and to treat people as having notional income and capital that they would have to pay tax on even if they’d squirrelled it away somewhere.
Essentially, I think what I’m saying here that people should shut the fuck up with their complaining about tax rates.
April 16, 2009
Stolen shamelessly from Rol at Sunset Over Slawit…
1) Which author do you own the most books by?
It used to be Ed McBain but in a fit of absolute madness I gave the set of 87th precinct books to oxfam. Dunno. Fuck, I hate to say this, I’m not just being an arse, but I think it might be Shakespeare.
2) Which book do you own the most copies of?
I own three copies of Flicker which I’m sure is going to pop up again down here somewhere so I’ll leave it at that for now, other than to say that I approve of the idea of having a spare copy of books you love so you can lend it out and not worry about getting it back.
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Absolutely not.
4) Which fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Ann Riordan, Paola Brunetti (obviously), Nicola Six (inevitably),
5) What book have you read the most times in your life? (Excluding picture books read to children.)
Dunno. There’s lots of things I’ve read quite a few times but I really couldn’t guess. I’ll copy Rol and name a few which are probably there or thereabouts – The Big Sleep, Leviathan, Breakfast of Champions, Flicker (ha!), Bloodtide.
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Swallows and Amazons (or one of them, anyway, probably Great Northern or Pigeon Post) or The Grey King (I’m reading The Dark Is Rising sequence to my elder daughter at the moment and really enjoying it again)
7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
I also give up on books if I’m not enjoying them unless it’s one of those where you feel some sense of duty to somebody else to stick with it. I read ‘The Secret River’ for a book group thing (and no fucker else did, they all decided they didn’t like it and stopped) and thought it was deeply dishonest and cowardly.
8 ) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
The Raw Shark Texts. Well, actually it might be one of the older things that I’ve re-read now but Raw Shark is the best new thing.
9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
The Raw Shark Texts, which is tremendously good fun. Or Flicker which is also tremendously good fun. Or ‘The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break’ which…
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Here I’m going to cheat and just copy Rol’s answer word for word.
Here I’m going to cheat and just copy Chev’s answer word for word. Because I couldn’t agree with him more if I tried. (And I do try.)
Probably someone usually seen as beneath the purview, like Stephen King. I’ve yet to read any author with his felicity for the creation and development of honest, human characters. In all frankness, I can’t quite see why Ray Bradbury hasn’t already won it.
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Watchmen. Or Taking Lives.
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
I’m tempted to steal Rol’s answer again
I’m tempted to steal Chev’s answer again…
Most of the rest of them. Books are books, and films are films. I like it when the crossover works, but mostly it doesn’t.
…but instead I’ll opt for The Catcher In The Rye. Because you just know they’d get someone like Josh Hartnett or Zak Efron to play Holden.
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I don’t dream a lot these days, or at least I don’t ever remember anything.
14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
I have a thing about books of tv shows which can be pretty dreadful and obvious.
15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
I read a lot of non-fiction at the moment, mainly sciency things, and some of those involve me running off to look other stuff up to make sure that I understand what I’m reading. I only made it through about five pages of ‘the emperors new mind’ before giving up because it was much too complicated for me. I read all of that maths book about the thing someone finally sorted (the fermat theorum? something like that… fermat’s last theorum, that’s it) and couldn’t decide whether it was just too difficult to understand or if it was just shit.
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
Coriolanus, maybe, which I like quite a lot.
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
I haven’t read a lot of either. Of other things that link up, Auster is quite French (I know what I mean here) so I might go with them.
18) Roth or Updike?
Roth definitely. I absolutely love The Counterlife, just the nerve of it.
19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
I really really should have read some David Sederis by now but I haven’t. I thought A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was an okay way to pass the time but I did used to like those short short stories that Eggers wrote for the guardian.
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare.
21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen although only because I’ve read pride and prejudice but no george elliot at all. I am aware that I don’t read many books by women.
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Don’t get embarassed about these things. I kind of feel the biggest gap is a strange one, because if I set my mind to it I could probably read it all in a couple of hours, and that’s Heart of Darkness, which turns up as a reference point in a number of other things I really like.
23) What is your favorite novel?
Can anyone honestly do a ‘top one’ of just about anything? I could do five, probably, but some at least of it would change a lot. Flicker, London Fields, Breakfast of Champions, The Lady In The Lake, Leviathan
24) Play?
The Dumb Waiter. Our Town. A Dolls House.
25) Poem?
’somewhere i have never travelled’, or ‘i shall come back’, or ‘words, wide night’, or ‘prufrock’
26) Essay?
Something from The Undertaking, probably ‘Tract’.
27) Short Story?
Malamud or Bradbury. The Magic Barrell, or The Bill, or Idiot’s First, or ‘Take Pity’. Or ‘The April Witch’, or ‘The Night’, or ‘The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl’, or The Pedestrian’.
28) Work of nonfiction?
The Ancestor’s Tale which I’ve just read again, or Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy (serious book about british tv, just go with the title) or one of the Bill Bryson books (I’m easy). Or Appetite by Nigel Slater. Or The Undertaking although it’s really a book of essays which is certainly non-fiction but has just had its own category.
29) Who is your favorite writer?
*sigh*. Dunno. Lots of the people I’ve already mentioned above.
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
JK Rowling. Harry Potter is tightly plotted vacuous nonsense about nothing.
31) What is your desert island book?
Rol put ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as a bit of a ‘are we near the end yet’ answer. I have to say that the last time I went to visit somewhere which is almost a desert island that was indeed what I took with me and really enjoyed. Otherwise it’s probably Flicker
32) And… what are you reading right now?
The River Cottage Fish Book, which is good but not as good as the Meat book, although I’m not absolutely sure why yet and it might just be differently organised. And ‘Seeing and Believing’ by Richard Panek about telescopes.
April 15, 2009
I’ve thought a lot about writing this. My links to what happened are, to say the least, extremely tangential, and I think it’s interesting that the online press (for which you can read ‘the stuff on the guardian’s site’) about this has attracted some comments this week which say ‘this is a story about personal loss on a massive scale, don’t try to use it to tell any other tale’.
Well. I understand this. I think in the end what comes to mind is the behaviour of football crowds in the aftermath of the deaths at Hillsborough – 94 people on the day, one a few days later in hospital, one after some years in a persistent vegetative state. We are told that football crowds always respond to the request for a minute’s silence before a game ‘impeccably’. After Hillsborough no crowds were silent for that minute, because silence is an unnatural state of affairs for a crowd, and they wanted to show their respect in their own way, so crowds everywhere spent that minute singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, a fact that I found, and I find now, tremendously moving’. I will here try to show my respect in my own way.
It’s the last Saturday of the Easter holidays and I’ve been back at University for a few days already – called back early for a funeral, Tim, my friend Tim, who died in a road accident just before Easter. The funeral has been and gone, I’m back on my own in halls, my grant cheque has pleasingly arrived early to meet me, and I figure I can treat myself on this last weekend. I go out on Saturday morning and buy myself something of a feast – pizza and salad and beer and chocolate cake. I get back home around twelve with the paper and by the time I’ve read that it’s around 2pm and I can turn on the radio – Radio 2 – for the Saturday afternoon sport. There’s 45 minutes of build up, commenters and commentators having their say, before the 3pm kick off for the two FA Cup semi-finals. We start at the Everton game, which is a bit of a surprise, and the commentators there are afraid to have to tell us that there seems to be crowd trouble at Hillsborough, and then we go to the commentators there who say they’re not sure what exactly is going on but there is clearly trouble (it’s generally the policy of the broadcasters not to report crowd trouble until they absolutely have to, not to call attention to it, not exactly pretending it’s not there but not giving it air time). But then after a few more minutes of the other game we’re back to be told that something more serious may be happening, and the players have been taken off, and there are people spilling over the stands onto the pitch.
And over the next hour or so it becomes clear that people, lots of people, are dying, crushed and asphyxiated in a crowd gone horribly wrong, and I sit on my own in my room and just don’t move, don’t react to anything, just listen, numb. The commentators are quiet and serious and straightforward, and the few Liverpool fans they manage to talk to are serious and straightforward and angry.
I go out onto the campus, there are no people around, and without really thinking about it I walk to the sports centre, somewhere I would never normally go, but of course that’s where people have congregated this afternoon. Everyone is seperate and alone and everyone is silent. There’s a guy standing across from me, he’s a real thug of a man, somebody you’d cross the street to avoid except that would just call attention to yourself, and I’ve heard him brag in the past about his exploits in the West Ham crowd, and he’s blank and pale.
And I wander back to my room, unconsumed food and drink littering the table, the radio left on, nobody else around. And I have absolutely no idea what to do.
Hillsborough happened for a number of reasons, and we should be very clear that more than anything it happened because of the appalling decisions and practices of the police on the day – and no police were prosecuted, or even internally disciplined, following what happened, and perhaps most astonishing of all one of the senior officers on the day moved on and up through the force to become Chief Constable of Merseyside. But if there was one other decisive factor it was the governing culture of the day that viewed football, and football supporters, with contempt. It’s astonishingly difficult to get your head around this idea today, with football a dominant pop-cultural force. The issue of the fanzine ‘When Saturday Comes’ which followed Hillsborough was clear and straightforward and true, there were four photographs, the police, the government, the FA and the crowd, the first three saying ‘it wasn’t our fault’ and the crowd saying ‘ah well, it must have been our fault again’.
If you want evidence of how far things were different, you can find them in the words of the head of ITV sport who in the late 1980s (and whilst ITV held the contracts for televised football, so this wasn’t just sour grapes) announced that football as a television spectacle was dead, killed by its odious followers and the controversy they created, and the future was snooker. Rupert Fucking Murdoch’s ‘Sun’ printed foul abusive lies about the behaviour of Liverpool supporters in the days following the disaster (and sales of The Sun on Merseyside have never recovered) but it was Rupert Fucking Murdoch’s ‘Sky TV’ which ultimately benefited from the aftermath of the disaster – Sky was losing money hand over fist and a dish on the wall carried the least aspirational connotations imaginable, but with Football gifted to Sky by the BBC (to get one over on the real enemy of ITV sport) Sky recovered and took off.
There was a powerful docudrama showing the events of the day and the following inquest, which was a masterclass in an emotionally absent, uncaring and unconcerned judicaiary (and which stood in stark contrast to the report into the disaster itself written by the late Lord Justice Taylow which was insighful, honest, thoughtful and clear) but even more powerful, and possibly the single most astonishing piece of British TV I can think of, was the Cracker episode ‘To Be A Somebody’, with Robert Carlyle as Albie Kinsella, and the speech he gives in interrogation about the contempt he felt from society.
Hillsborough torpedoed Thatcher’s plan to force football fans to carry ID cards (which is another astonishing idea – how the fuck did things ever come to that?). I know it’s a different club now than it was then and, well, with all due apologies to its supporters, but I can’t believe I’m the only person who had a small smile to see Luton Town relegated from the league this week – when run by vile right wing Tory MP David Evans Luton banned away supporters and viewed themselves as trailblazers for how things would be.
Everyone has something which delivers a guaranteed emotional punch – the thing that you know will immediately make your eyes start to prick, your stomach lurch. I know what it’s always been fo rme…
The last thing I remember hearing that afternoon was from BBC Radio commentator Peter Jones, a wonderful commentator. He’d been trying to talk about the events of the afternoon but then said ‘I’m going to have to stop broadcasting now, because a young teenage boy has just come up to us and asked if he can use our phone to call his mum, and tell her that he’s okay. And of course he can. Of course he can.’ The idea of the terror in that house as the phone rang not knowing what news would be on the other end, of the number of houses waiting for that news, of the calls that would never be made, of the enormity of it all..
April 13, 2009
This is an extract from BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre Published by Harper Perennial 2009. You are free to copy it, paste it, bake it, reprint it, read it aloud, as long as you don’t change it – including this bit – so that people know that they can find more ideas for free at www.badscience.net
The Doctor Will Sue You Now
This chapter did not appear in the original edition of this book, because for fifteen months leading up to September 2008 the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath was suing me personally, and the Guardian, for libel. This strategy brought only mixed success. For all that nutritionists may fantasise in public that any critic is somehow a pawn of big pharma, in private they would do well to remember that, like many my age who work in the public sector, I don’t own a flat. The Guardian generously paid for the lawyers, and in September 2008 Rath dropped his case, which had cost in excess of £500,000 to defend. Rath has paid £220,000 already, and the rest will hopefully follow. Nobody will ever repay me for the endless meetings, the time off work, or the days spent poring over tables filled with endlessly cross-referenced court documents.
On this last point there is, however, one small consolation, and I will spell it out as a cautionary tale: I now know more about Matthias Rath than almost any other person alive. My notes, references and witness statements, boxed up in the room where I am sitting right now, make a pile as tall as the man himself, and what I will write here is only a tiny fraction of the fuller story that is waiting to be told about him. This chapter, I should also mention, is available free online for anyone who wishes to see it.
Matthias Rath takes us rudely outside the contained, almost academic distance of this book. For the most part we’ve been interested in the intellectual and cultural consequences of bad science, the made-up facts in national newspapers, dubious academic practices in universities, some foolish pill-peddling, and so on. But what happens if we take these sleights of hand, these pill-marketing techniques, and transplant them out of our decadent Western context into a situation where things really matter?
In an ideal world this would be only a thought experiment. AIDS is the opposite of anecdote. Twenty-five million people have died from it already, three million in the last year alone, and 500,000 of those deaths were children. In South Africa it kills 300,000 people every year: that’s eight hundred people every day, or one every two minutes. This one country has 6.3 million people who are HIV positive, including 30 per cent of all pregnant women. There are 1.2 million AIDS orphans under the age of seventeen. Most chillingly of all, this disaster has appeared suddenly, and while we were watching: in 1990, just 1 per cent of adults in South Africa were HIV positive. Ten years later, the figure had risen to 25 per cent.
It’s hard to mount an emotional response to raw numbers, but on one thing I think we would agree. If you were to walk into a situation with that much death, misery and disease, you would be very careful to make sure that you knew what you were talking about. For the reasons you are about to read, I suspect that Matthias Rath missed the mark.
This man, we should be clear, is our responsibility. Born and raised in Germany, Rath was the head of Cardiovascular Research at the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto in California, and even then he had a tendency towards grand gestures, publishing a paper in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine in 1992 titled “A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a Cause for Human Mortality”. The unified theory was high-dose vitamins.
He first developed a power base from sales in Europe, selling his pills with tactics that will be very familiar to you from the rest of this book, albeit slightly more aggressive. In the UK, his adverts claimed that “90 per cent of patients receiving chemotherapy for cancer die within months of starting treatment”, and suggested that three million lives could be saved if cancer patients stopped being treated by conventional medicine. The pharmaceutical industry was deliberately letting people die for financial gain, he explained. Cancer treatments were “poisonous compounds” with “not even one effective treatment”.
The decision to embark on treatment for cancer can be the most difficult that an individual or a family will ever take, representing a close balance between well-documented benefits and equally well-documented side-effects. Adverts like these might play especially strongly on your conscience if your mother has just lost all her hair to chemotherapy, for example, in the hope of staying alive just long enough to see your son speak.
There was some limited regulatory response in Europe, but it was generally as weak as that faced by the other characters in this book. The Advertising Standards Authority criticised one of his adverts in the UK, but that is essentially all they are able to do. Rath was ordered by a Berlin court to stop claiming that his vitamins could cure cancer, or face a €250,000 fine.
But sales were strong, and Matthias Rath still has many supporters in Europe, as you will shortly see. He walked into South Africa with all the acclaim, self-confidence and wealth he had amassed as a successful vitamin-pill entrepreneur in Europe and America, and began to take out full-page adverts in newspapers.
˜The answer to the AIDS epidemic is here,” he proclaimed. Anti-retroviral drugs were poisonous, and a conspiracy to kill patients and make money. “Stop AIDS Genocide by the Drugs Cartel said one headline. “Why should South Africans continue to be poisoned with AZT? There is a natural answer to AIDS.” The answer came in the form of vitamin pills. “Multivitamin treatment is more effective than any toxic AIDS drug. Multivitamins cut the risk of developing AIDS in half.”
Rath’s company ran clinics reflecting these ideas, and in 2005 he decided to run a trial of his vitamins in a township near Cape Town called Khayelitsha, giving his own formulation, VitaCell, to people with advanced AIDS. In 2008 this trial was declared illegal by the Cape High Court of South Africa. Although Rath says that none of his participants had been on anti-retroviral drugs, some relatives have given statements saying that they were, and were actively told to stop using them.
Tragically,Matthias Rath had taken these ideas to exactly the right place. Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa at the time, was well known as an “AIDS dissident”, and to international horror, while people died at the rate of one every two minutes in his country, he gave credence and support to the claims of a small band of campaigners who variously claim that AIDS does not exist, that it is not caused by HIV, that anti-retroviral medication does more harm than good, and so on.
At various times during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa their government argued that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, and that anti-retroviral drugs are not useful for patients. They refused to roll out proper treatment programmes, they refused to accept free donations of drugs, and they refused to accept grant money from the Global Fund to buy drugs. One study estimates that if the South African national government had used anti-retroviral drugs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape province (which defied national policy on the issue), around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007. Another study estimates that between 2000 and 2005 there were 330,000 unnecessary deaths, 2.2 million person years lost, and 35,000 babies unnecessarily born with HIV because of the failure to implement a cheap and simple mother-to-child-transmission prevention program. Between one and three doses of an ARV drug can reduce transmission dramatically. The cost is negligible. It was not available.
Interestingly, Matthias Rath’s colleague and employee, a South African barrister named Anthony Brink, takes the credit for introducing Thabo Mbeki to many of these ideas. Brink stumbled on the “AIDS dissident” material in the mid-1990s, and after much surfing and reading, became convinced that it must be right. In 1999 he wrote an article about AZT in a Johannesburg newspaper titled “a medicine from hell”. This led to a public exchange with a leading virologist. Brink contacted Mbeki, sending him copies of the debate, and was welcomed as an expert.
This is a chilling testament to the danger of elevating cranks by engaging with them. In his initial letter of motivation for employment to Matthias Rath, Brink described himself as “South Africa’s leading AIDS dissident, best known for my whistle-blowing exposé of the toxicity and inefficacy of AIDS drugs, and for my political activism in this regard, which caused President Mbeki and Health Minister Dr Tshabalala-Msimang to repudiate the drugs in 1999″
In 2000, the now infamous International AIDS Conference took place in Durban. Mbeki’s presidential advisory panel beforehand was packed with “AIDS dissidents”, including Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick. On the first day, Rasnick suggested that all HIV testing should be banned on principle, and that South Africa should stop screening supplies of blood for HIV. “If I had the power to outlaw the HIV antibody test,” he said, “I would do it across the board.” When African physicians gave testimony about the drastic change AIDS had caused in their clinics and hospitals, Rasnick said he had not seen “any evidence” of an AIDS catastrophe. The media were not allowed in, but one reporter from the Village Voice was present. Peter Duesberg, he said, “gave a presentation so removed from African medical reality that it left several local doctors shaking their heads”. It wasn’t AIDS that was killing babies and children, said the dissidents: it was the anti-retroviral medication.
President Mbeki sent a letter to world leaders comparing the struggle of the “AIDS dissidents” to the struggle against apartheid. The Washington Post described the reaction at the White House: “So stunned were some officials by the letter’s tone and timing during final preparations for July’s conference in Durban that at least two of them, according to diplomatic sources, felt obliged to check whether it was genuine. Hundreds of delegates walked out of Mbeki’s address to the conference in disgust, but many more described themselves as dazed and confused. Over 5,000 researchers and activists around the world signed up to the Durban Declaration, a document that specifically addressed and repudiated the claims and concerns–at least the more moderate ones–of the “AIDS dissidents”. Specifically, it addressed the charge that people were simply dying of poverty:
The evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV-1 or HIV-2 is clearcut, exhaustive and unambiguous… As with any other chronic infection, various co-factors play a role in determining the risk of disease. Persons who are malnourished, who already suffer other infections or who are older, tend to be more susceptible to the rapid development of AIDS following HIV infection. However, none of these factors weaken the scientific evidence that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS… Mother-to-child transmission can be reduced by half or more by short courses of antiviral drugs … What works best in one country may not be appropriate in another. But to tackle the disease, everyone must first understand that HIV is the enemy. Research, not myths, will lead to the development of more effective and cheaper treatments.
It did them no good. Until 2003 the South African government refused, as a matter of principle, to roll out proper antiretroviral medication programmes, and even then the process was half-hearted. This madness was only overturned after a massive campaign by grassroots organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign, but even after the ANC cabinet voted to allow medication to be given, there was still resistance. In mid-2005, at least 85 per cent of HIV-positive people who needed anti-retroviral drugs were still refused them. That’s around a million people.
This resistance, of course, went deeper than just one man; much of it came from Mbeki’s Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. An ardent critic of medical drugs for HIV, she would cheerfully go on television to talk up their dangers, talk down their benefits, and became irritable and evasive when asked how many patients were receiving effective treatment. She declared in 2005 that she would not be “pressured” into meeting the target of three million patients on anti-retroviral medication, that people had ignored the importance of nutrition, and that she would continue to warn patients of the sideeffects of anti-retrovirals, saying: “We have been vindicated in this regard. We are what we eat.”
It’s an eerily familiar catchphrase. Tshabalala-Msimang has also gone on record to praise the work of Matthias Rath, and refused to investigate his activities. Most joyfully of all, she is a staunch advocate of the kind of weekend glossy-magazine-style nutritionism that will by now be very familiar to you. The remedies she advocates for AIDS are beetroot, garlic, lemons and African potatoes. A fairly typical quote, from the Health Minister in a country where eight hundred people die every day from AIDS, is this: “Raw garlic and a skin of the lemon–not only do they give you a beautiful face and skin but they also protect you from disease.” South Africa’s stand at the 2006 World AIDS Conference in Toronto was described by delegates as the “salad stall”. It consisted of some garlic, some beetroot, the African potato, and assorted other vegetables. Some boxes of anti-retroviral drugs were added later, but they were reportedly borrowed at the last minute from other conference delegates.
Alternative therapists like to suggest that their treatments and ideas have not been sufficiently researched. As you now know, this is often untrue, and in the case of the Health Minister’s favoured vegetables, research had indeed been done, with results that were far from promising. Interviewed on SABC about this, Tshabalala-Msimang gave the kind of responses you’d expect to hear at any North London dinner-party discussion of alternative therapies.
First she was asked about work from the University of Stellenbosch which suggested that her chosen plant, the African potato, might be actively dangerous for people on AIDS drugs. One study on African potato in HIV had to be terminated prematurely, because the patients who received the plant extract developed severe bone-marrow suppression and a drop in their CD4 cell count–which is a bad thing–after eight weeks. On top of this, when extract from the same vegetable was given to cats with Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, they succumbed to full-blown Feline AIDS faster than their non-treated controls. African potato does not look like a good bet.
Tshabalala-Msimang disagreed: the researchers should go back to the drawing board, and “investigate properly”. Why? Because HIV-positive people who used African potato had shown improvement, and they had said so themselves. If a person says he or she is feeling better, should this be disputed, she demanded to know, merely because it had not been proved scientifically? “When a person says she or he is feeling better, I must say ‘No, I don’t think you are feeling better’? I must rather go and do science on you’?” Asked whether there should be a scientific basis to her views, she replied: “Whose science?”
And there, perhaps, is a clue, if not exoneration. This is a continent that has been brutally exploited by the developed world, first by empire, and then by globalised capital. Conspiracy theories about AIDS and Western medicine are not entirely absurd in this context. The pharmaceutical industry has indeed been caught performing drug trials in Africa which would be impossible anywhere in the developed world. Many find it suspicious that black Africans seem to be the biggest victims of AIDS, and point to the biological warfare programmes set up by the apartheid governments; there have also been suspicions that the scientific discourse of HIV/AIDS might be a device, a Trojan horse for spreading even more exploitative Western political and economic agendas around a problem that is simply one of poverty.
And these are new countries, for which independence and self-rule are recent developments, which are struggling to find their commercial feet and true cultural identity after centuries of colonisation. Traditional medicine represents an important link with an autonomous past; besides which, anti-retroviral medications have been unnecessarily – offensively, absurdly – expensive, and until moves to challenge this became partially successful, many Africans were effectively denied access to medical treatment as a result.
It’s very easy for us to feel smug, and to forget that we all have our own strange cultural idiosyncrasies which prevent us from taking up sensible public-health programmes. For examples, we don’t even have to look as far as MMR. There is a good evidence base, for example, to show that needle-exchange programmes reduce the spread of HIV, but this strategy has been rejected time and again in favour of “Just say no.” Development charities funded by US Christian groups refuse to engage with birth control, and any suggestion of abortion, even in countries where being in control of your own fertility could mean the difference between success and failure in life, is met with a cold, pious stare. These impractical moral principles are so deeply entrenched that Pepfar, the US Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has insisted that every recipient of international aid money must sign a declaration expressly promising not to have any involvement with sex workers.
We mustn’t appear insensitive to the Christian value system, but it seems to me that engaging sex workers is almost the cornerstone of any effective AIDS policy: commercial sex is frequently the “vector of transmission”, and sex workers a very high-risk population; but there are also more subtle issues at stake. If you secure the legal rights of prostitutes to be free from violence and discrimination, you empower them to demand universal condom use, and that way you can prevent HIV from being spread into the whole community. This is where science meets culture. But perhaps even to your own friends and neighbours, in whatever suburban idyll has become your home, the moral principle of abstinence from sex and drugs is more important than people dying of AIDS; and perhaps, then, they are no less irrational than Thabo Mbeki.
So this was the situation into which the vitamin-pill entrepreneur Matthias Rath inserted himself, prominently and expensively, with the wealth he had amassed from Europe and America, exploiting anti-colonial anxieties with no sense of irony, although he was a white man offering pills made in a factory abroad. His adverts and clinics were a tremendous success. He began to tout individual patients as evidence of the benefits that could come from vitamin pills – although in reality some of his most famous success stories have died of AIDS. When asked about the deaths of Rath’s star patients, Health Minister Tshabalala-Msimang replied: “It doesn’t necessarily mean that if I am taking antibiotics and I die, that I died of antibiotics.”
She is not alone: South Africa’s politicians have consistently refused to step in, Rath claims the support of the government, and its most senior figures have refused to distance themselves from his operations or to criticise his activities. Tshabalala-Msimang has gone on the record to state that the Rath Foundation “are not undermining the government’s position. If anything, they are supporting it.”
In 2005, exasperated by government inaction, a group of 199 leading medical practitioners in South Africa signed an open letter to the health authorities of the Western Cape, pleading for action on the Rath Foundation. “Our patients are being inundated with propaganda encouraging them to stop life-saving medicine,” it said. “Many of us have had experiences with HIV infected patients who have had their health compromised by stopping their anti-retrovirals due to the activities of this Foundation.” Rath’s adverts continue unabated. He even claimed that his activities were endorsed by huge lists of sponsors and affiliates including the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNAIDS. All have issued statements flatly denouncing his claims and activities. The man certainly has chutzpah.
His adverts are also rich with detailed scientific claims. It would be wrong of us to neglect the science in this story, so we should follow some through, specifically those which focused on a Harvard study in Tanzania. He described this research in full-page advertisements, some of which have appeared in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. He refers to these paid adverts, I should mention, as if he had received flattering news coverage in the same papers. Anyway, this research showed that multivitamin supplements can be beneficial in a developing world population with AIDS: there’s no problem with that result, and there are plenty of reasons to think that vitamins might have some benefit for a sick and frequently malnourished population.
The researchers enrolled 1,078 HIV-positive pregnant women and randomly assigned them to have either a vitamin supplement or placebo. Notice once again, if you will, that this is another large, well-conducted, publicly funded trial of vitamins, conducted by mainstream scientists, contrary to the claims of nutritionists that such studies do not exist. The women were followed up for several years, and at the end of the study, 25 per cent of those on vitamins were severely ill or dead, compared with 31 per cent of those on placebo. There was also a statistically significant benefit in CD4 cell count (a measure of HIV activity) and viral loads. These results were in no sense dramatic – and they cannot be compared to the demonstrable life-saving benefits of anti-retrovirals – but they did show that improved diet, or cheap generic vitamin pills, could represent a simple and relatively inexpensive way to marginally delay the need to start HIV medication in some patients.
In the hands of Rath, this study became evidence that vitamin pills are superior to medication in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, that anti-retroviral therapies “severely damage all cells in the body–including white blood cells”, and worse, that they were “thereby not improving but rather worsening immune deficiencies and expanding the AIDS epidemic”. The researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health were so horrified that they put together a press release setting out their support for medication, and stating starkly, with unambiguous clarity, that Matthias Rath had misrepresented their findings.
To outsiders the story is baffling and terrifying. The United Nations has condemned Rath’s adverts as “wrong and misleading”. “This guy is killing people by luring them with unrecognised treatment without any scientific evidence,” said Eric Goemaere, head of Médecins sans Frontières SA, a man who pioneered anti-retroviral therapy in South Africa. Rath sued him.
It’s not just MSF who Rath has gone after: he has also brought time-consuming, expensive, stalled or failed cases against a professor of AIDS research, critics in the media and others.
But his most heinous campaign has been against the Treatment Action Campaign. For many years this has been the key organisation campaigning for access to anti-retroviral medication in South Africa, and it has been fighting a war on four fronts. Firstly, TAC campaigns against its own government, trying to compel it to roll out treatment programmes for the population. Secondly, it fights against the pharmaceutical industry, which claims that it needs to charge full price for its products in developing countries in order to pay for research and development of new drugs – although, as we shall see, out of its $550 billion global annual revenue, the pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on promotion and admin as it does on research and development. Thirdly, it is a grassroots organisation, made up largely of black women from townships who do important prevention and treatment-literacy work on the ground, ensuring that people know what is available, and how to protect themselves. Lastly, it fights against people who promote the type of information peddled by Matthias Rath and his ilk.
Rath has taken it upon himself to launch a massive campaign against this group. He distributes advertising material against them, saying “Treatment Action Campaign medicines are killing you” and “Stop AIDS genocide by the drug cartel”, claiming–as you will guess by now–that there is an international conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies intent on prolonging the AIDS crisis in the interests of their own profits by giving medication that makes people worse. TAC must be a part of this, goes the reasoning, because it criticises Matthias Rath. Just like me writing on Patrick Holford or Gillian McKeith, TAC is perfectly in favour of good diet and nutrition. But in Rath’s promotional literature it is a front for the pharmaceutical industry, a “Trojan horse” and a “running dog”. TAC has made a full disclosure of its funding and activities, showing no such connection: Rath presented no evidence to the contrary, and has even lost a court case over the issue, but will not let it lie. In fact he presents the loss of this court case as if it was a victory.
The founder of TAC is a man called Zackie Achmat, and he is the closest thing I have to a hero. He is South African, and coloured, by the nomenclature of the apartheid system in which he grew up. At the age of fourteen he tried to burn down his school, and you might have done the same in similar circumstances. He has been arrested and imprisoned under South Africa’s violent, brutal white regime, with all that entailed. He is also gay, and HIV-positive, and he refused to take anti-retroviral medication until it was widely available to all on the public health system, even when he was dying of AIDS, even when he was personally implored to save himself by Nelson Mandela, a public supporter of anti-retroviral medication and Achmat’s work.
And now, at last, we come to the lowest point of this whole story, not merely for Matthias Rath’s movement, but for the alternative therapy movement around the world as a whole. In 2007, with a huge public flourish, to great media coverage, Rath’s former employee Anthony Brink filed a formal complaint against Zackie Achmat, the head of the TAC. Bizarrely, he filed this complaint with the International Criminal Court at The Hague, accusing Achmat of genocide for successfully campaigning to get access to HIV drugs for the people of South Africa. It’s hard to explain just how influential the “AIDS dissidents” are in South Africa.
Brink is a barrister, a man with important friends, and his accusations were reported in the national news media –and in some corners of the Western gay press–as a serious news story. I do not believe that any one of those journalists who reported on it can possibly have read Brink’s indictment to the end.
I have.
The first fifty-seven pages present familiar anti-medication and “AIDS-dissident” material. But then, on page fifty-eight, this “indictment” document suddenly deteriorates into something altogether more vicious and unhinged, as Brink sets out what he believes would be an appropriate punishment for Zackie. Because I do not wish to be accused of selective editing, I will now reproduce for you that entire section, unedited, so you can see and feel it for yourself.
The document was described by the Rath Foundation as “entirely valid and long overdue”.
This story isn’t about Matthias Rath, or Anthony Brink, or Zackie Achmat, or even South Africa. It is about the culture of how ideas work, and how that can break down. Doctors criticise other doctors, academics criticise academics, politicians criticise politicians: that’s normal and healthy, it’s how ideas improve. Matthias Rath is an alternative therapist, made in Europe. He is every bit the same as the British operators that we have seen in this book. He is from their world. Despite the extremes of this case, not one single alternative therapist or nutritionist, anywhere in the world, has stood up to criticise any single aspect of the activities of Matthias Rath and his colleagues. In fact, far from it: he continues to be fêted to this day. I have sat in true astonishment and watched leading figures of the UK’s alternative therapy movement applaud Matthias Rath at a public lecture (I have it on video, just in case there’s any doubt). Natural health organisations continue to defend Rath. Homeopaths’ mailouts continue to promote his work. The British Association of Nutritional Therapists has been invited to comment by bloggers, but declined. Most, when challenged, will dissemble.”Oh,” they say, “I don’t really know much about it.” Not one person will step forward and dissent. The alternative therapy movement as a whole has demonstrated itself to be so dangerously, systemically incapable of critical self-appraisal that it cannot step up even in a case like that of Rath: in that count I include tens of thousands of practitioners, writers, administrators and more. This is how ideas go badly wrong. In the conclusion to this book, written before I was able to include this chapter, I will argue that the biggest dangers posed by the material we have covered are cultural and intellectual. I may be mistaken.
Please distribute
This work is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works License described here, you are free to copy it wherever you like as long as you keep it whole, and do please point people back here to badscience.net so that if they like it, they know where to find more for free.
April 7, 2009
‘whatever you do don’t let him blog after midnight’… I am tired, I am weary…I have no time spare to stop and do anything that I want to other than dead of night not really awake any more time…broken iPod means not disappearing into music as I go out, well, it doesn’t exactly but it does mean not having everything to hand as you need it (do you really need to carry 8000 songs around with you? it would seem the answer is ‘hell yes’)….I’m completely out of the habit of actually listening to stuff whilst sitting around at home and I should perhaps try to get back into that habit… i know I’ve posted this before somewhere but I don’t think there’s anything I might play which I or someone on the blogroll hasn’t posted before and I know I don’t have anything other than this automoton nonsense to say just now…but this is clearly what you would find if you were to look up ‘middle of the night music’ in a reputable dictionary.
April 2, 2009
Simon has a fine playlist of songs to float to today, and I would have had a listen to them all on a quick pop out this evening if my iPod hadn’t broken. I haven’t been listening to much recently but suddenly I’m listening to even less. Tonight, though, I dug out my sony walkman (‘megabass’!) and a compilation tape from an imaginary friend and this came on and it occurred to me that this was a fine thing to add to the floaty noises from before. ‘Songs that get going only at the end’ is a category I approve of.
March 29, 2009
Watching ‘The Filth and the Fury’ the other day I went and hunted down a list of the music videos that Julian Temple was responsible for, as I knew this was one of his major things, and was impressed by the range of things he’s produced – from Culture Club to Judas Priest and, well, all sorts of things. This is a very limited selection but an interesting one, I hope. The songs are there too…
The Sex Pistols – God Save The Queen mp3
March 26, 2009
It’s the third birthday of the Contrast Podcast this week and there is much rejoicing to be done – I’m not sure that I can think of anything better that I’ve ever been involved with online, and it’s good to see that there are always new people arriving and old people returning – I noticed (in a ’slow-on-the-uptake’ as ever kind of way) today that what used to regularly be a show that would fit nicely on an audio CD is now invariably much longer (although how many people stick to always listening to things on CD now? Or is it more than I would think because I don’t drive so don’t have to think about car players?)
Anyway I played a lovely song from Reality Bites which is a film I like a lot, and the soundtrack is one of the few musical things I bought myself during the long quiet years of the 1990s – and this isn’t the song I played on the podcast but it was another possible . Although not really a trio song. Actually not a trio song at all – I don’t think I mean I would have played it this week, just that I’ve thought of playing it a few times before. Anyway, this is great too.
March 26, 2009
Rol at Sunset Over Slawit has been doing some fine occasional days of the week posts and I thought I’d post some of the things I mentioned in comments at his place to catch up – a lovely quiet laid back cover, a nice dylanny bit of guitar and my swedish friends in one of their slightly heavier moments. More to come, I would guess…
Flunk – Blue Monday mp3
Andy White – Tuesday Apocalypse No 12 mp3
The Wannadies – Dreamy Wednesdays mp3
March 24, 2009
Just a song for now – stumbled across looking through an older iTunes library on another computer, me more than half asleep after a late night working but still set up for a nice straightforward Tuesday.
March 20, 2009
Imperial Bedroom is probably my favourite Costello album and therefore one of my very favourite albums of all. It’s one of those things that just looks beautiful (and I’ll post a picture with this later) – the cover is glorious, even the lettering is fun and interesting. It’s full of the most wonderful songs, although they’re all pushing it to be described as Pop Songs – I’ve written this before, (and somebody else, probably Garry Mulholland, wrote it before me) but this is the point at which Costello abandoned the idea of being a pop star and became a grown up, but all-grown-up songs always do it for me and Costello is better than anybody. Beyond Belief and Pidgin English and Human Hands and You Little Fool and on and on…
This is the playout track and it’s a perfect playout track – a song that repeats itself without ever appearing to repeat itself because the delivery of the repeated lines is so different – it becomes a song about ‘text’ and ‘performance’ and how it makes meaning. It’s defiant in its misery and it’s brilliantly wordy (‘the teddy bear tender and the tragically hip’ is a phrase that I find bouncing around my head from time to time looking for a home). And then it all fades away, leaving you wondering whether it will be back again…
Elvis Costello – Town Cryer mp3
(What with not posting much and the stuff I am posting at the moment I may seem a bit of a miserable shid. I’m not – well, only sad in a natural way… just don’t have much to say and don’t want to force it…)
March 17, 2009
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid…well, they’ve started to give me a little pang of something – not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret. There’s one of me in a cowboy hat, pointing a gun at the camera, trying to look like a cowboy but failing, and I can hardly bring myself to look at it now…I keep wanting to apologise to the little guy: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve let you down, I was the person who was supposed to look after you but I blew it: I made the wrong decisions at bad times and I turned you into me.’
Nick Hornby – High Fidelity
There’s always time, though, and there’s always advice out there to take. One of the things I like about this is the internet rumour that it was written by Kurt Vonnegut, and there are bits of it that are a bit like him, although really it’s much more cheerful than most of his commencement and graduation addresses that I’ve read. In fact it was written by a Chicago newspaper columnist, imaging the advice she might have given to her younger self. I forget about it, but I’ve been drifting randomly through songs recently and this was one that jumped out at me.
March 11, 2009
Amongst my complaints about this (which I did really quite like, on the whole) was the fact that the book provides you with a fairly detailed soundtrack which the filmmakers decided, to one degree or another, not to use. Nothing more to say about it here, I’ve written about the film over yonder.
Bob Dylan – Desolation Row mp3
Bob Dylan – All Along The Watchtower mp3
Elvis Costello – The Comedians (demo) mp3
March 9, 2009
Occasionally things from the past nudge me into paying attention for a bit, and if it happens whilst I’m sitting in front of a computer then I might run off and find them so I can remember what it is they are nudging me about. This happened with this album last week and although I don’t really listen to albums very much these days, not whole albums right through anyway, I’ve listened to this a few times and remembered why I’ve always kind of liked it – it’s big and busy and interesting, even if it is all floppy and meaningless in the end.
March 8, 2009
There is a school reunion going on tonight for my year group, and I’m here, a long way away. Although I have a bottle of Merrydown, so I’m trying, at least. There are dumb practical and circumstantial reasons why I’m not there and it’s a bit of a shame. Although, to be fair, I think this is the third reunion that’s happened and I haven’t managed to get it together to go to any of them. Ah well. Next time? There’s a big virtual reunion that’s been going on on facebook for a while, in fact during the last six months or so (*ahem* as everyone turns 40) more and more people I knew back then have been turning up there. Ah well.
March 6, 2009
What else do you need at the end of a long week? A mixture of instrumentals and vocals, deep beats and high notes, tall tales and low motives, finding yourself by losing yourself. Dance. With thanks to this.
The Leon Young Strings – Glad All Over mp3
Billy Harner – Sally Saying Something mp3
Wayne Gibson – Under My Thumb mp3
Young-Holt Unlimited – California Montage mp3
March 5, 2009
Okay, so this link is to drop.io rather than the usual fileden stuff, it seems to work a bit like mediafire so it will take you to another page at http://www.drop.io which will let you listen and/or download. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Other than ‘boring fucker?’. The song’s good anyway.
March 2, 2009
When Billy’s boxset came out he talked about the idea of calling it ‘A Lover Sings’ – I don’t think he was sick of the idea of always being thought of as an agitprop political songwriter but it’s very easy to understand, when you look at his back catalogue, why it would be just as reasonable to think of him as a loverman as it was to see him as a revolution waiting to happen. Sometimes, though, his songs completely collapse any distance that might exist between the political and the personal and this, the playout track of the difficult third album ‘Talking With The Taxman About Poetry’ is the perfect example of that, I think.
The Home Front seems at first glance to be simple anchored by the chorus line the lonely child looks out and dreams of independence from this family life sentence - the song verse by verse takes us through the quiet certainties of an everyman family, somewhere on the uppper working/lower middle class divide and at all of the disappointments and lack of ambition there appears to be for the child in the house. The targets are scattered and not always terribly obvious – is that Prince Charles unwatched on tv? – but the message is clear – something is missing, everything is too bland and dull, there is a great deal more than a suggestion that perhaps life isn’t actually worth it.
The chorus does have that anchoring line but it also opens the meaning of the song out to something much more general, because buried within this quiet despair we can find some hope…
And when it rains here it rains so hard…
But never hard enough to wash away the sorrow,
I’ll trade my love today for a greater love tomorrow…
…and written down that seems glummer that it sounds when he sings it, as his voice takes on some stridency and purpose and rather than regret or apathy these lines are a statement of intent.
The big deal with this comes at the end, though, as the last verse is one of the most downbeat and despairing I know…
In this land of a thousand doses
Where nostalgia is the opium of the age
Our place in history is as clock watchers,
Old timers, window shoppers…
…and that’s it, we just go back to cycling through lines from earlier verses whilst the vocal retreats into the back of the mix. But then, ah, but then…
This is a little bit of a leap, I know, but someone, either the director Paul Verhoeven or the writer Joe Eszterhas (who should have been humanely shot after ‘Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse’ and ‘Jagged Edge’ because everything else he’s been involved with has been shocking) said about Basic Instinct that although the narrative of the film is resolved before the end scene, and Jeanne Tripplehorn is caught, the film ever-so-cleverly offers viewers an alternate ending through the mise-en-scene of the very end, as Sharon Stone reaches for the ice-pick (What spoiler? You were planning on watching Basic Instinct for the plot? Sorry. And not for the spoiler.) This is clearly utter shash, a poor excuse for a ridiculous and confused ending to a terrible terrible film.
But there are ways to do things like this that do work and this song is one of them – the final verse of the song is dreadfully down and low but suddenly, out of the flugelhorn sound that comes to the fore in the fade out, something else comes in, and instead of this misery the song (and the album) end with a huge burst of pride and purpose and hope as the music that rises is rich and bold and inspiring, and the whole of the song becomes not a document of despair but a starting point, an acknowledgement of how bad things can be and a statement of intent that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Billy Bragg – The Home Front mp3
Goodness, I have bandwidth issues, I haven’t had bandwidth issue forever and a day. Older posts will be back soon, newer ones will be live.
February 27, 2009
I used to like reaching milestone posts or anniversaries on the old place, time to make a little more effort in putting together a longer playlist, maybe, or in finding something a little more personal to say. I have no desire at all to mark such things here – I don’t think the anniversary of starting this up is anything to shout about and post numbers are fairly meaningless when i spent a couple of months churning out instant responses to stuff on random every ten minutes just because I needed to be writing something in order to keep myself going.
Today, though, is quite a nice little anniversary which I do want to mention – five years ago today, I stumbled across a music forum whilst googling ‘compilation tapes’ and I joined up and started talking, and that was the very beginning of me as an online persona. I’d done bits and pieces before that but really all it was then was playing very simple little java games or entering channel 4 competitions. This was suddenly interactivity and engagement and opinion and writing and music all at once – it was, really and truly, the start of something. This was the first thing I talked about on there – the moment as one song fades out and just before the second one starts is one of my favourite things, so I’ve made an mp3 of the two songs one after the other and you get that moment from it. Happy birthday to me, five today.
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Reminisce (Part 2) / I Love You (Listen To This) mp3
February 26, 2009
I think my very first exposure to this lot was a student band doing a terrible cover of Ironmasters at a party, but not bad enough to stop me going out and buying ‘Night of a Thousand Candles’ which a couple of friends had started talking about. I saw them play at the GLC ‘Jobs for Change’ festival in the summer of 1985 and then got to see them a few more times over the next few years as I got to know this and their second album too. They’re still around, still touring a little.
Night of a Thousand Candles sounds like an album from a band who haven’t decided who they are yet – there are some big big differences in the styles of songs on there*, and even radically different voices coming out with the words – but the songs are almost uniformly great. I don’t know why this one stuck so fast amongst the others, but it’s a lovely quiet resigned pop song, perhaps the most conventional thing on here. For a band who spend a lot of time sounding a bit Poguesy suddenly you have something a bit AztecCamerish instead, and I like it a lot.
The Men They Couldn’t Hang – A Night To Remember mp3
*this is what watching Masterchef does to your syntax. Well, my syntax.
An aside – every now and then I click on the ‘automatically generated links’ that come up with these posts and stumble into a parallel universe of blogs doing all of the things ‘we’ do that I’ve never seen or heard of. Somtimes there’s a tiny point of intersection, they might link to one that I know and they often link to one or more of the real American biggies (I did that when I started, I think it’s just a phase, you need to find your level) . I’m slowly adding in the ones I find in the hope they come along and comment and all that. Yes, that means you! Well, maybe.
February 25, 2009
Simon Armitage…
I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.
O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn’t shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.
Don’t believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you if you would marry me.
It’s one of those things I imagine that everybody knows and then remember that in fact not everybody has taught the GCSE English anthology. Although maybe it is better known than I think it might be.
When I remember it’s there, I like Simon Armitage’s column in the weekend Independent – having thirty three and a third pounds to spend on records each week – although I’ve never been up to that but I’ve also fallen out of the habit of buying bits and pieces of whatever ever weekend that I used to have. Shame.
The Scaremongers – You Can Do Nothing Wrong (In My Eyes) mp3
(The Scaremongers are Simon Armitage’s band. You probably know this. Their site is here.)
February 23, 2009
I have a friend for whom this song was the end of something, a moment where they gave up and turned into something altogether else, and in fact claims that this led to the rise of fun pop pap punk and gave us Blink 182 and Busted. I love this , though, and the very fact that walls of noise can tweak to give us a punk take on the wall of sound always makes me smile. My Ramones listening for a long time started and finished with Bonzo Goes to Bitburg (anything working up angles on ‘Reagan – What A Wanker’ is gonna do it for me) but there are fine views if you turn either way from there.
February 19, 2009
I’ve been down south for a couple of days doing various bits and pieces with all of the folks including a couple of wanders around the British Museum including the parthenon galleries with the wonderful above thing (and should they go back? and if we send them back to Greece do we have to follow that up by returning everything from somewhere else to where we got it from? and if ‘yes’ is that really a reason not to? I don’t know about any of this. My dad, who worked in the BM, thought they should declare that the Parthenon gallery was Greek sovereign territory on the understanding that the pieces would stay there) and a wander around Chinatown where perhaps I bumbed into Mr H (how could we tell?) and went to see a play which was wonderful and had a couple of cab rides which allowed my younger daughter to read every single sign and label in the back of the cab including this one.
February 15, 2009
I trawl through the weekend papers and am more than a little disturbed to read that Annie Lennox is releasing a cover of this (just as, once upon a time, I was mildly and unnecessarily perturbed by the fact that the original rips off the opening of ‘The Milkman Of Human Kindness’). I don’t know exactly why I’ve never liked Annie Lennox. I quite liked The Tourists, actually, and obviously if I was running a night for the Student Union then if you failed to play ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ you’d find yourself reported to the Women’s Officer* but otherwise I’ve just never been interested at all. The original is wonderful, though, I often dip into a little Ash playlist for the walk to school, they’re all loud noises and beautifully screeching guitar solos. I don’t want to hear this new cover but, if I had synesthaesia, I would be sure to see the colour beige just from thinking about it.
*It’s twenty years later and yet I still feel incredibly guilty and nervous about making that joke.
I am aware that these photos are either completely and utterly irrelevant or worryingly literal. Stick with me, I’m working on it.
February 14, 2009
Or there’s this, Sonnet -by Christina Rossetti
I wish I could remember that first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me,
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or Winter for aught that I can say;
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand.–Did one but know!
Freely adapted by Billy for ‘The Fourteenth of February’ on William Bloke, but that seems a bit obvious so I’ll play this instead.
February 13, 2009
Five takes on nice indieish noises which include some of my very very favourite things – IWTOICH has always been a favourite Smith’s track, the Seachange song is a constant reminder that the dancefloor is somewhere I’ve always wanted to be alone, and then another fine Soft Cell song from The Art of Falling Apart. But it doesn’t all have to be that way and we can pick things up with a fine blast of Prince and a more hopeful playout, hi-speed soul for the masses:-
it’s getting late
i don’t care
it’s just you and me
let’s go anywhere
And a picture of a bear’s bum. Just because.
The Smiths – I Want The One I Can’t Have mp3
Seachange – Glitterball mp3
Soft Cell – Forever The Same mp3
Prince – I Wanna Be Your Lover mp3
Nada Surf – Hi Speed Soul mp3
February 12, 2009
This is a bit of a nerdy post.
I get a pleasantly regular small stream of visitors here – people from all of the site’s cousins and the occasional searcher I can help out. The visiting numbers have suddenly taken off a bit for a bit of an odd reason.
In the past, on blogger, I tended to link to pictures I wanted to use (in flagrant breach of the world and his wife’s copyright – I’ve yet to see anything much written in amongst all of the breach of copyright stuff about illegal or inappropriate use of other people’s photographs) but on wordpress it’s easier, somehow, to upload a copy of the photo so that I end up ‘hosting’ it myself. (Which is stealing somebody else’s image in a whole different way). Because of this, I’m suddenly turning up as a major hit on image searches, particularly for Malcolm X (I understand it’s Black History Month in the US), Natalie Imbruglia (obviously) and Tommy by The Who (wonderfully). (Edit - some time later – it’s clear that ‘not writing much’ isn’t sufficient to deter visitors, so I’ve also been going back and deleting any old photos which are attracting attention – knock out one and another comes along. I wonder if I’ve somehow reached some (rather pathetic) level of critical mass in google images?) Which means, from what I can see, that instead of the past gripes of people only turning up because they’d found a link to download an mp3 and not actually reading anything I wrote, now they don’t even turn up, they just download the image from the google images webpage and run on their way (a bit like I do when I find the images to start with).
I think perhaps I should resolve to stop using other people’s pictures and start using my own – it would make me think about taking more photos, if nothing else. Although I’ll carry on playing other people’s music because, as the whole ethos behind this kind of music blogging tells us, it’s my music too.
February 9, 2009
A bit of a ramble, riffing off some recent listening, viewing and linking.
I finally got hold of a DVD copy of ‘The Last House On The Left’ at the weekend and it was interesting to read, in the booklet that came with it, a reported quote from Cinefantastique magazine, that films such as this made the writer ashamed that cinema had ever been invented. Then there was Terry Gilliam’s comment in his interview on the weekly Mayo/Kermode film podcast (I like the adam&joe podcast, as I mentioned the other day, but the film show is ‘home’) ”I think offense is a very important thing to try to continue to commit”. And then there was this place which I noticed in a friend’s post the other day and the ridiculous and astonishing things it has to say.
What’s so offensive about Last House? Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham wanted to make a film which showed violence to be consequential, painful and profoundly unpleasant and disturbing – to reject the cartoonlike quality of ‘bang you’re dead’ screen violence but to show that being hurt actually hurt. For this their film was banned in the UK from its release in the early 70s until earlier this decade, and even then was only released with cuts. Craven has said that many of his later films show more violence and more death, but they play the game of making violence exciting, even glamorous, and they pass the censors without a blink.
I’m not suggesting that there’s great value in causing offense for the sake of it – but those who suggest that this is what people do are clearly just playing the straw man game, hypothesising arguments from ‘the other side’ which would never actually be put. Last House isn’t trying to be offensive for the sake of it, it takes a position about the media portrayal of violence as entertainment and of sexual violence as eroticism, it tries to confront people who want to be entertained and titilated by these things with just what it is they are getting excited about, which is I would suggest a profoundly moral position to take. It’s not meant to be anything other than unpleasant – it’s not fun, not exciting, not aspirational, it’s an anti-pop culture text.
I don’t believe that Gilliam wants to be offensive for the sake of it either – he manages to offend the film industry with the films he wants to make and the ways he wants to make them, and by speaking openly about his dealings with people within the industry who might otherwise expect quiet respect at the very least, but that’s because anything else gets in the way of him making the films he wants to make, the way he wants to make them, and ends up with him turning out films that are less than he imagined and less than he’d hoped for – or else it ends with him having to campaign to the production and distribution companies to release the films he’s made for them, as he had to with Brazil.
I think I find the ‘Gay Bands’ list more comical than offensive. Of all of the religious inspired bigotry there is on the extremes I don’t get homphobia at all – I don’t understand where it comes from. Why should homosexuality ever be so offensive? I can’t believe that population levels have been so low in the last ten thousand years or so that anything which put a limit on procreation would create a necessary taboo. Maybe it’s just a nice easy way for us to choose another group or individual to decide we are superior to,weak as we are. Nasty little bigots. One of my favourite ever comments made by a lunatic fringe far right online poster was the idea making gay marriage legal was just a stepping stone on the way to ‘their’ real goal which was, of course, to make homosexuality compulsory! Yes dear.
I bet I could undo any good work done with these words by playing the wrong song at the end.
Half Man Half Biscuit – Sealclubbing mp3
Although I very much like the fact that they seem to have forgotten The Communards from that list.
The Communards – There’s More To Love Than Boy Meets Girl mp3
February 6, 2009
Shall we lighten up a bit? There’s no ’shape’ intended in this list, just some nice songs to move to.
Stevie Wonder – For Once In My Life mp3
Shout Out Louds – Very Loud mp3
The Pipettes – One Night Stand mp3
The 22-20s – Why Don’t You Do It For Me mp3
Suede – Trash mp3
February 5, 2009
The picture is nothing to do with the rest of this, we’ll come back to it at the end. You can jump to the end, if you want.
As part of the celebration of Darwin’s bicentennial (which is on Tuesday, I think, same day as Abraham Lincoln’s, as it happens) a survey has been published showing that half of the country ‘don’t believe in evolution’. I love these things. I’ve never seen a survey where they ask whether people believe in theories of water displacement, or motion, or thermodynamics. The bollocks that gets written about this controversy which is not a controversy is painted as a religious issue but I think there’s a political answer to it, as well as the obvious intellectual answers.
It would be easy to have a go at the objections regularly raised to evolutionary theory (in a good old ‘Straw Man’ fashion, except that these really are arguments that get put against it, regularly and apparently seriously). And it would be fun. Let’s do it!
You honestly think we ‘re descended from apes? Nope. We are apes, and us and the other apes share a common ancestor.
What about the gaps in the fossil record then? There will always be gaps in the fossil record, every time you fill a gap you create two more, but more and more ‘missing links’ relating to all sorts of different species are always being found and all of them validate and revalidate Darwin’s ideas (and it’s worth remembering that Darwin knew nothing of the mechanics of inheritance, nothing of genetics, never mind DNA, but that all of those discoveries also provided further evidence of how evolution by natural selection happens)
la la la second law of thermodynamics la la la This is too ridiculous, go and do some GCSE physics.
Where is your time, the earth is only x thousand years old This is too ridiculous, go and do some GCSE physics/geography/entry level certificate basic skills etc etc (you have to descend into abuse at some point)
Perhaps evolutionary theory has something to say on a micro level but it fails to answer questions on a macro level and it fails to deal with first causes and in the absence of any other explanation it simply must have been God. Which is why what you’re talking about is not science, because science does not make that leap, it doesn’t produce final answers, and it doesn’t crowbar in what it wants to hear or say, justifying it by an (apparent) lack of evidence to the contrary. You simply can’t say ‘ah well then it must be this’. Science is about open-ended intellectual and practical curiosity. Religion isn’t.
Why evolution? Why do they grab at this one thing to object to? The Bible and the Christian churches tell us that, so far as the holy trinity is concerned, one plus one plus one equals one (or it equals both ‘one’ and ‘everything’) but there’s not talk of the Arithmatic Controversy, and the Bible is reasonably clear in talking about the Earth being at the centre of everything and the Sun moving around it but there don’t seem to be any churches demanding that we revert to a pre-Copernican view of Astronomy. Possibly, I suppose, because they know they’d look fucking ridiculous.
But they look fucking ridiculous when they jibe at evolution. There is no scientific controversy about evolution – there are healthy productive debates about details which will always continue to be investigated and challenged in order to be better understood, but the heart of it, that natural selection has produced (and produces) massive diversity is as close to a scientific paradigm as any of the other theories mentioned up above. To an extent it’s the fault of the press – there is an idea that to be ethical, journalism is supposed to back off from having opinions and has a duty to report on ‘different sides’ of a story – and so we have enormous journalistic outpourings about desperately marginal positions, about MMR or Global Warming. Did you know that of 928 pieces of peer-reviewed research published in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was not a single one which disagreed with the proposition that global warming was happening and was caused by us? How would you know that from the press, which insists on presenting us with ‘balance’ and ideas of controversy.
Controversial used to be cool, I’m sure it did. Now it just seems to be another tool of the tools who want to fuck us over and maintain their own positions. Never forget the words of the Company Man advising the Tobacco industry on how to deal with the Public Image Problems with a product that killed you – ‘Doubt is our product’ – and the tobacco company CEOs who stood before congressional committees in the 1980 and said ‘I do not believe that nicotine is addictive. I do not believe that cigarettes cause cancer’. That’s what this is all about, pretending that there is substantial disagreement when there isn’t, manufacturing dissent, pretending life is like an open debating chamber and not just run with lies told by these lying liers.
This evolution controversy bollocks is back in my mind as well because of the latest round of bus adverts about God. The newest ones are from The Christian Party (‘We’re standing candidates in the forthcoming elections so we want to get our name known’. I think we might recognise your name, I’m prepared to give you that.) The new ads say ‘There is definitely a God’. It’s going to be interesting to see how the Advertising Standards Authority deal with this if any complaints are made (ahem) as the rules say that you have to have definitive evidence in support of any claims you make in adverts before you make them. It will also be interesting to see what happens when somebody refuses to drive one on the grounds that they’re not a Christian, as a Christian bus driver refused to drive a bus with the athiest campaign ads on them (which you’re about to read about, in a fashion which makes it plain that this bit is an ‘add-in-edit) and was allowed to do so by the bus company. This ad is in response to the Guardian publicised ‘There Probably Isn’t A God’ poster campaign (which you can read more about here) and that ad was in response to adverts for the Alpha Course, promising enlightenment but actually leading you to a site warning you that if you weren’t a Christian you were going to Hell to burn in torment in a lake of fire (or ‘eternal suffering awaits anybody who questions God’s infinite love’, as Bill Hicks put it).
What I find really abominable about this, (and trying desperately to pull this around full circle) is the fundamental idea at the heart of judao-christian religion (and probably Islam as well, to be honest, although I don’t know as much about it, which is a failing, I know) that this world does not matter. These religions cast all of us here inside Plato’s cave, and the life we live is just shadows on the wall – so far as they are concerned the real stuff, the stuff that matters, will be going on elsewhere.
The best artistic expresison of what I think of all of this was in Russel T Davies’ ‘The Second Coming’, a TV film starring the very wonderful Christopher Ecclestone as the returned Jesus, and Lesley Sharp as his friend who realises what ‘The Third Testament’ is – that God has to die, and not be resurrected but just to come to an end, so that we can learn, finally, that we are responsible for ourselves, that this matters, now, because of now, and that any rewards or punishments we receive will come in this life and nowhere else. Because this life, just as it is, just us, is worth it. It matters. There’s a Douglas Adams line “Wasn’t it enough that the garden was beautiful, did he have to pretend there were fairies at the bottom of it as well?” The garden is beautiful. It’s all here because of descent and adaptation fuelled by natural selection, which is the most wonderful and metaphorically magical thing – but real, and observable, and it’s an idea which is always open to investigation and examination. We don’t need fairies. We do need to pay attention to the here and now – a religion that promises us that this place is not real, does not matter and is only a stepping stone to reality will destroy us, as the planet goes to ruin because, really, why should we give a fuck?
That picture is a photo I took this morning which I’m quite pleased with. What is it?
February 2, 2009
I don’t know exactly when it was that I started not believing in all sorts of things – not god and that, I’ve never been there, but all sorts of occulty and (in a fairly broad sense) alternativey things. I was thinking about this today after buying an X-Files CD Rom thing, Unrestricted Access, which is kind of interesting an okay. It’s an interesting idea, that here was a CD Rom resource which would give you all sorts of ‘extras’ from the TV show but which also would be updated from time to time with fresh content from the Fox website and which would take on some aspects of a ‘game’ which you could work your way through in synch with the progressing narrative of the show. All of that is shite now, obviously, but it’s still kind of interesting. I was never an X-Files geek (unlike, say, Buffy* or Twin Peaks – I even have the Twin Peaks board game. It’s crap, but I’ve got it) but it was well done, and interesting, and sometimes pretty scary. Like a lot of good things, what made it particularly good was writing and acting to generate characters who sparked off each other, and the genre in some ways is incidental if you have that going on.
The heart of the X-Files stuff, though, that so much of what Mulder wanted to believe was really there, and really going on, was always preposterous. Don’t get me wrong – do Governments lie to us, conceal information and then lie about concealing information? Hell yes. But this is nonsense – the idea that in a world as observed and recorded, both officially and casually, as ours is, and with the multimedia freedom of expression that the web provides we wouldn’t know, for sure, is just dumb. Funny, that free and open access to information can suggest that sometimes nobody was hiding anything they didn’t want us to know.
What I will tell you about, instead, is an imaginary friend from some time back who hated the first song below so much that when they came on Top of the Pops and started to sing it he put his foot through his girlfriend’s tv.
Catatonia – Mulder and Scully mp3
Moby – Go! mp3
Four Star Mary – Pain mp3
Four Stary Mary play ‘Dingoes Ate My Baby’ in Buffy and they play this at the party to welcome her back to town in Series Two. You really should know all of this already but just in case…
January 30, 2009
Stiff Little Fingers were another band who I decided not to like for quite a while – this time for that old classic reason, that somebody else at school who I didn’t particularly like really liked them. Foolish boy, as ever. I finally got over it at university, spending an evening with a friend’s record collection and making myself a compilation tape which included half a dozen of their songs threading through all sorts of other things, including this which I think was probably my favourite. Actually, now I think about it I think my very first favourable exposure to them was spending time with a friend of a friend when they made a compilation tape with another friend’s record collection, and put “Johnny Was” on as their first track, but it was still this session that got me properly started with SLF – with ‘The Price of Admission’ and ‘Wasted Life’ and ‘Guitar and Drum’ and their great cover of ‘Love of the Common People’.
I feel wary in principle of the reunion band, the people back on tour with the old stuff after all of those year, but in practice, well there’s no denying the fact that Stiff Little Fingers are one of the best live acts I’ve seen in the last few years, and I would jump at the chance of going to see them again immediately.
This song – playing live Jake Burns said he was house-sharing in London with some teachers who would come home and talk about the kids they were teaching, trying to cope whilst their families were farmed out to B&Bs and crumbling houses and crumbling lives… and this was 1982. People will always have things to say about how difficult things are and often will want to make comparisons with how things were once upon a time, and songs like this are a good reminder of what a lot of bollocks that can be. I’m also reading this at the moment which is wonderful and has a lot to say about the idea of golden ages and the like and which I’d recommend.
January 29, 2009
This is something of a cheat but John Q doesn’t have a blog (yet) although he always has good things to say and fine things to play on the Contrast Podcast, and this week, on the theme of Football, he played this fine fine song which I’ve been listening to a lot ever since and wanted to play again here – a football song about football and about watching football and about arguing and about gender all at once, and a great song anyway too.
Also, this is completely unrelated, but click here
January 27, 2009
There’ll be a new podcast sometime in the early hours of tomorrow morning but amongst the not very much I’ve been listening to at the moment I’ve been listening to a few other nice things without guitars, in the manner of last week’s episode, particularly these three which each, in their own way, are pretty wonderful.
Actually the one thing that I have been listening to, which I’d recommend hugely and enormously although you probably already listen, is the Adam and Joe podcast, which is an abbreviated version of their Saturday morning 6music show, and which is great, which you can subscribe to here.
Suzanne Vega – Tom’s Diner mp3
Bronski Beat – Puits D’Amour mp3
Billy Bragg – Honey I’m A Big Boy Now mp3
January 23, 2009
I started this 1983 business with a song from here and whilst it was meant to be an end of the year thing I think I’ll just use it as another occasional series for a while, and whilst the song I listen to most of all from Punch The Clock is ‘Shipbuilding’, and whilst I do rather like ‘Let Them All Talk’ (I remember a particularly smarmy-arsed Clive Anderson one week saying on his chat-show how they should spread the net wider then the usual celebrity and instead interview some of the ‘little people’ in the background of television production, starting with the man who did the theme music,which was ‘let them all talk’…)
Anyway, I like this record a lot, a clever lyrical single, and I like the Afrodiziak backing vocals (Caron Wheeler!) on the original although I like this live version too, heavier and a bit less poppy though it is, and I also thought of it today because of this article in the Guardian about libraries which I like very much too (especially when my local library is very lovely and gets to be in a wonderful old building).
January 22, 2009
I’d been looking for a copy of this song for ages, not sure that I ever actually had one, I’d just seen her singing it live, and if I’d got organised in time I think this is what I would have played on the Contrast Podcast’s ‘guitar free zone” episode that’s gone out this week, but I didn’t, so I thought I’d play it now instead. It was one of the ones I thought somebody else might play (along with the album version of Smithers-Jones) but when it comes down to it everyone is more interesting and wide ranging that you might think. Well, everyone else, anyway.
I know it’s not her song but I can’t imagine hearing a more powerful or heartfelt version anywhere. Wonderful song.
January 20, 2009
I don’t believe that one person, one event or one, er, ‘thing’ can change everything, but nevertheless surely sometimes we’re allowed to sit back, kick back and enjoy winning for once, enjoy the prospect of a step in the right direction after years of spite and bluster and selfish arrogance. What do I want out of all of this? I want to see America step back from the ‘we can do what the fuck we want so fuck you’ school of diplomacy and just venture down the path of being multilateral, being part of the community instead of an old friend increasingly scorned by the rest of us as a deeply misguided outsider retreating into medievalism.
You see, us liberal with a small ‘L’ folk over here, with our films and our music and our books, our dirty little secret is that we LOVE America. Absolutely love it, and we don’t like it when America is unfaithful to us, when it runs off with it’s strange theories and mad isolationist friends, but we are very forgiving, we can always spot the light burning bright out there amidst the clouds of misery, our own very real city upon a hill. It’s ours, that America, and it’s on days like today that we can smile because it feels like it’s coming back to us.
January 19, 2009
This was one of the only new movies I got around to seeing last year. Most of the online reviews and comments I’ve read about it say similar things – that it’s a state of the nation / feral children / I blame the parents / Daily Mail headline waiting to happen of a film, and isn’t the way young people behave today terrible, and isn’t the end terrible, that poor woman.
Eden Lake is a film about a nice youngish couple who are almost overloaded with the iconography and signifiers of the lifestlyle of the comfortable middle class – she’s a primary school teacher with a floaty dress, he’s a … it’s not clear what he is but he’s another comfortably off action man, with a bright shiny 4×4, with Kylie on the sat-nav and a vibrating seat, and they’re off for the weekend to a flooded quarry about to be regenerated as luxury homes, him with the hope of proposing whilst they’re there.
It’s never entirely clear where they are but it’s certainly not somewhere nice down south. They stay in a town which is full of kids running wild and parents clouting them and threatening each other until late into the night and the idea of a rural idyll starts to be stretched. They get to the lake, through the sign for the new Gated Community (on the back of which someone has graffitied ‘fuck off yuppie scum’) and Kylie helpfully says ‘at the first opportunity, turn around’. And then they find they’re sharing the lakefront with a very small gang of teenagers, with a big dog who starts to bother them (particularly her) and loud music which bothered me too, and our Big Man goes to deal with them and is completely faced down (actually one route through the first half of the film is just spotting the number of different ways he’s completely faced down – his negative bar presence, the kids, the waitress). And then things accelerate quickly from a fairly mild belligerence to outright terror, extreme violence, and the classic modern horror trope of the last girl.
What I think is so interesting about Eden Lake, and what raises it far above being a nasty little exploitative bit of torture porn, is that as the narrative develops, particularly in the final third of the film, there are a lot of very obvious moral routes the film could take which, time and again, it ignores, until ultimately Jenny is transformed, as in the poster above, into a classical film Zombie who delights in the death and destruction she brings to people who, the film repeatedly reminds us through the narrative and also more subtly through cinematography and performance, are just children – and I honestly think the finale leaves you wondering what exactly you would have done, not just if you were her but if you were them, those parents confronted with her at the end.
It’s out on DVD now and I’d recommend it, for all of the really really horrible stuff in there (and there’s plenty) but also just as a film that makes you think about what you think.
January 19, 2009
See what I did there (other than come up with an excuse for another picture)?
Well first there was this post and then I wake up sunday to find that lovely louise has only gone and reviewed Luke Hain’s autobiography for The Observer with a strapline about Blur and mention of Suede and suddenly everything seems to be bleeding into everything else (er, strange on-the-hoof link but another film post coming soon) and, I mean, just imagine if some bombshell of a bandleader started covering songs by some bombshell of a bandleader, where would we be then?
(this is the version they dance to in Trainspotting, today’s useless trivia that you probably knew anyway).
January 17, 2009
I’ve gone from me being under the weather to both my girls being poorly (better now) and haven’t had the energy to think about writing anything at all (or even of listening to much). I sat down this evening wondering if I could think of anything to post and started listening to this soundtrack whilst noodling about online and it took me a good third of the way through before it occured to me to write something about this.
A Zed and Two Noughts was the first Peter Greenaway film I saw, at the local film society that me and a friend joined as oh-so-grown-up sixthformers. There was a rumour, afterwards, that the projectionist had shown two of the reels in the wrong order and that nobody had noticed, but I think that’s just a nice small-scale urban myth – in fact the film is about (amongst other things) an investigation into death and decay (no, don’t stop…) and the animals they investigate get bigger and more complex as the film goes on. It’s incredibly beautiful, in a sometimes dark and strange way. It has the most wonderful piece of unlikely but very succesful casting (Jim Davidson) (no, really), and it has the most wonderful soundtrack. I sometimes use it with the kiddies to teach about narrative space, and colour, and also because, to be honest, I tend to use my course as a chance to watch films I want to see (although I’m a nice man and we also have things like votes on exam films. They voted for ‘Drowning By Numbers’. They really did! They read the IMDB keywords list and it was all ‘naked woman / vagina / full frontal nudity’. They didn’t realise it was going to be middle aged fat people).
Some nice soundtrack bits from this, then.
Michael Nyman – Time Lapse mp3
Michael Nyman – Up For Crabs mp3
January 13, 2009
I have a lousy cold which has been hanging around for ages and which doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and whilst it really isn’t very bad at all (I’m still at work, for example) it’s a pain and a drag and I want it to go away. I’ve been listening to not very much at all recently, mainly stand up stuff, Bill Hicks and Steven Wright, but this morning I wanted one of those things you can just drift away on and so I chose this which I think is lovely. It’s not as nice as the version on ‘Poguetry In Motion’ which I will try to vinyl rip but don’t hold your breath.
January 9, 2009
Goodness, where did the last week go? Anyway, still living a quarter of a century ago, and this is another real winner, and the opener – Got To Have You Back – is one of my very very favourite of their songs, brilliant brilliant organ stuff and lovely driving lyrics, and the title track is a fine thing too, and I do still go back and listen often to lots of Undertones things and enjoy them very much ALTHOUGH back in those golden days before the advent of the DMCA I have to say that their manager was nice enough to email me when I posted one of their songs and say ‘no we don’t want you to give our music away for nothing, please take that link down’ (I’ve longago deleted the email but I think that’s pretty much word for word) so I Don’t Play Undertones Songs On Here and you’ll just have to hum along on your own.
January 1, 2009
I’ve written about this or things from this so often that the only way to do it again now is to find an alternative take on one of the songs. This is perfect – the original album version of the song is so quiet and resigned, terribly sad but what else is there to do? This is loud and proud and defiant and, given what he’s singing, that makes it even sadder. I think this is wonderful, a fairly rare example of a new version coming along and stealing your affections from the old one.
Billy Bragg – The Man In The Iron Mask (alternate version) mp3
December 31, 2008
Who’s in for a NYE knees’ up? You can make up your own words for the verses, he usually does these days, lets just make sure we all come together for the end.
Happy New Year.
December 24, 2008
Because it’s all heart and soul and it’s one of the great rhetorical questions although how could it be anything but rhetorical when all you are doing is giving yourself a good talking to and I know I’ve vacillated recently and at one point my ’staring in the mirror’ hero was Michael Angelis in No Surrender ‘Do Something Do Something Do Somthing Come On Do It Just For Once Eh’ but then was the much more straightforward and easy to aspire to Jimmy’s ‘Fuck It’ on the train back to Brighton for the end and ‘Fuck It’ is what laughs away at the rhetorical question here (because it’s true, however much shite there is in there, that one of the great ways to kill something stone dead is to laugh at it, destroy its self-respect and let it try to find something else to cling to and fail and drown) and it is a fact that the time has not long past when this song would have been just laughing at me. But it’s all heart and soul now. Don’t worry, I’m not in the mood to be precipitous, not any more, I’m not going to ruin anybodies’ christmas, but ‘things’ (you know ‘things’, like ’stuff’) made me just want to listen to this one again. Because it’s all heart and soul now.
The Style Council – Strength Of Your Nature mp3
If you want my slightly more considered view of the album click here
December 17, 2008
Another cheat, in a way, ‘Geno’ was an album of singles and b-sides released after ‘Soul Rebels’ and ‘Too-Rye-Aye’, including songs (or sometimes versions of songs) that are on those albums and some that you’d only had if you’d got the singles. It was released under a special ‘Pay No More Than £2.99′ cover and, as a Dexy’s album, is bloody great and is full of stuff which is bloody great. Full of wonderful soul covers and some great original songs and all for so little money.
And time, too, to get out and play something obvious, because of all of the Dexy’s songs I’ve played online along the way I’ve never played this, too obvious, too many other things, and for the benefit of anyone not from around here the obvious is not that one, it’s this one, the band’s first number one single and the thing that first brought them to most people’s attention. Even as a brand new band leader Kevin Rowland had the presence and confidence to produce, firstly, a song which acknowledged that for all of his newness he wasn’t necessarily all that young, but had been around a little at least and seen something of life, and acknowledging his sources and heroes, even if they were all the way back from ‘68, and the arrogance of the post punk scene to tell this hero that his time had passed and it was our turn now.
‘Geno’ is a wonder of a song, bursting out of itself with life and energy and power, constantly running forward and then dragging back again. Everything, from the drum breaks in the chorus, to Rowland’s rolled ‘Rs’ at the end of the second verse, to the huge bridge that we go to just after that, this is a song to make you sit up straight and notice, to lengthen your stride and move forwards, always forwards.
And it’s worth remembering too that for all of Rowland’s childhood memories of such a memorable first night out forty years ago, Geno Washington, the man himself, is still touring – his site is here with tour dates listed from January 2009.
December 16, 2008
I’ve never been more tempted to just post the whole album.
Thinking about these albums, twenty five years on, something I’ve often found is that intense emotional kick I get from ’songs that matter’ is missing, or at least isn’t as pronounced as I expect it to be. There’s a good reason for this – I was 14 years old for most of 1983, just becoming more than a kid, and whilst it’s true that January 1983 saw my first ever break up (yeah, right. My first ever ‘being chucked’) I don’t recall linking that experience very closely with music, can’t think of anything I was listening to to deal with it, and in fact it’s when I think of 1984 that I can immediately start to feel songs resonating with experience and connotation.
High Land, Hard Rain came out in April but I didn’t listen to it until the end of the year and somehow by then these things had just about started to matter. From the word go it was perfect and it’s still perfect twenty five years later. It’s sequenced perfectly, with three bouncy pop songs, to two guitar ballads, to a pick up again at the beginning of side two, slowing down again and then going into a lovely simple guitar and voice piece to finish. I was going to play just the last two tracks but they blend into each other so I’ve put them together as one track to listen to – Because even after all these words I want you for my own / touch me when the sun comes up and tell me that we’re home - and the album is so full of wonderful songs that it all wants to be listened to, so I will choose ‘The Boy Wonders’ in memory of Roddy introducing it as ’some Scottish music’ live.
I will be honest again here and say that, whilst I like ‘All I Need Is Everything’ and the title track, and love ‘The Birth of the True’, I’m really not very keen on the rest of ‘Knife’, which came out towards the end of 1984, nor on most of ‘Love’ a few years after that (it has it’s moments, but it has some terrible terrible moments too) although I think things come back together really well for ‘Stray’ – and other than catching up later that was the end of me and music for quite a while. But I’ve never stopped listening to High Land, Hard Rain and if I was really really pushed, you know, forced at knifepoint to limit myself to just one album for ever and ever more, I think it would probably be this one.
Aztec Camera – The Boy Wonders mp3
Aztec Camera – Back On Board / Down The Dip mp3
December 15, 2008
‘My friends say I’m dying but I do it so well’.
More than just the obvious boys things, then. The Art of Falling Apart is one of the great unsung albums of the 1980s – Soft Cell are justifiably famous for the earlier singles (and for all sorts of contextual reasons aside from the all important textual ones) but should really be famous for this – eight songs and a few extras which showed a band turning down the opportunity to follow a more obviously commercial route and exploring instead a little more of the mood of the unreleased album tracks from ‘Non Stop Erotic Cabaret’. (This is not to deny that even those headliners were pretty edgy – they were – but there is so much more when you scratch below their surface).
There is, undeniably, a strain of misogyny in gay popular culture, and I think that starts to come through fairly clearly in parts of This Last Night…In Sodom,. but here there is nothing so gender specific, and Numbers (released as a single in 1983 and reaching the top 30) manages to exist within a pop idea of gay subculture and and leering and disdainful look at an aging woman (although you can sense this is a young person’s version of ‘aging’, anyone over about 23 being ancient) and also as a general fear that everything, absolutely everything, is just running down, and there is self-analysis as well as other-focus going on, particularly as the music drags along with the lyrics and then slightly discordantly launches into the bridge.
And the album came with a 12″ 45rpm bonus disc which includes this medley of Hendrix songs and shows again that, just as a metal band can often put out a damn fine cover of an electropop wonder, so a few keyboards and a torch singer can also turn guitars into synthgold.
Soft Cell – Numbers mp3
Soft Cell – Hendrix Medley mp3
(I know, I know, I mentioned back at the beginning of this 1983 business that I would be repeating myself, certainly in terms of the albums I wrote about. These are different songs to before though. I think. Probly.)
December 11, 2008
‘Tis the season for greatest hits albums. Snap! is a pretty straightforward and comprehensive singles, b-sides and the odd extra compilation, with perhaps the most fabulous sleeve notes on anything ever (‘I’m on my way. Lonsdale shirts and bowling shoes’ – in fact if you want a fun game of literary appreciation go back and re-read Absolute Beginners (the novel) after having a read of those Jam and Style Council sleeve notes and you’ll see where Paolo’s head had been at) and a great live EP to prove you bought it first, which is also an easy way out of choosing what else to play. Shall I bore you once again with the fact that the perfect pop song that is ‘But I’m Different Now’ is one of my very favourite Weller things? Do you recall what ‘apophasis’ means?
The Jam – Move On Up (live) mp3
The Jam – Get Yourself Together (live) mp3
The Jam – The Great Depression (live) mp3
The Jam – But I’m Different Now (live) mp3
Whilst we’re here this is a link to a series of photos of Weller hosted on The Guardian today, taken from Shout To The Top: The Jam and Paul Weller which you can buy here.
December 8, 2008
Another chance to sing the praises of Greatest Hits albums (even where, as is the case with The Beat, they’ve released more Greatest Hits etc albums than original studio albums, although, now that I think about it, I’m sure that’s true of quite a few people). The Beat’s three album career was already over when this came out but it’s a reminder of how blessed we were for wonderful singles back in the early 80s.
Listening to this also demonstrates something I’d forgotten which is how very different the bands that came out of Two Tone all sounded. The Beat constantly feel like they’re about to lose it – even when the music is tight the lyrics and the things that they are singing about are straining at the leash – Rankin’ Roger’s toasting does some of that, but they also just sing songs that are pushed to the edge – they don’t have the focussed anger of The Specials and they certainly don’t have the quiet melancholy of Madness, but it’s not the fun of Bad Manners either – perhaps their closest cousins from this time were The Selector?
Three songs that I don’t automatically choose first with them – I think the middle one is the most emblematic of what I’m talking about here although the runon of the lyrics in the first is a fine thing too, and the last is an idea that many people seem to turn to eventually, a nasty little piece of work couched in jollier colours.
The Beat – Too Nice To Talk To mp3
The Beat – Twist and Crawl mp3
The Beat – Best Friend mp3
December 6, 2008
I kept myself awake to listen to the election results in 1983 until about half two, when Tony Benn lost his seat in Bristol. After that election, well, take three points on the classic north/south divide – John Garrett in Norwich South, Andrew Smith in Oxford East and Dawn Primarolo in Bristol South West, and there were no other Labour MPs south of that outside London. It wasn’t a good night.
Amidst the sweet sounds that were informing the first days of The Style Council this (wholly expected) bomb can be heard more than anything in their second single, an A side / B side part one / part two affair, released in full on the 12″ single and on the album (and with another slightly different full version here). Feel yourself feeling quietly and personally despairing because of the terrible truths of Long Hot Summer – because it didn’t matter what I do, I just end up hurting you, and the long hot summer really had just passed me by, although I knew what to do about that – well, the only thing to do is load yourself up with that different frustration and get proudly pissed off with politics all over again. Money Go Round borrows a little from before the very latest days of The Jam – it’s more bass-heavy and driven than the stuff Weller started experimenting with virtually as a soloist with backing musicians – but lyrically it hits a vein that TSC would continue to mine through the next few years, spinning into metaphor on top of plain speaking music.
And Introducing… also gave us the first bite at Mick’s instrumental cherries, and it’s not my favourite of them (the opening and close of Cafe Blue are perfect) but it’s good, a lot better than ‘Party Chambers’ which we’d already had on the flip of Speak Like A Child (and which wasn’t an instrumental, obviously). (edit – although I’m not a bit fan of Party Chambers you can get the opposing view from Simon over here.)
So. Pay no more than £2.99 for this seven track LP, most of which you’ve already got on the singles. It was worth the money for Headstart for Happiness anyway, but we’ve been there before and not long ago.
The Style Council – Money-Go-Round (full version) mp3
The Style Council – Mick’s Up mp3
December 3, 2008
I do know how little this mattered, I knew even at the time, but when I deleted my old blog in June, and then when I was just keeping ticking over with the beginning of this place during the summer, one of the things that kept occurring to me was that I wouldn’t be able to do an ‘albums of the year’ post again – 1984 last year, 1986 the year before that. Initially I couldn’t imagine doing any more of this stuff at all, and even when I started again (very quickly, admittedly) I couldn’t choose what to play, couldn’t imagine being able to choose or even wanting to, and so knew I wouldn’t be able to do another nice look back come December time.
I can though – things change, and, as Woody Allen said back long before he became a fuckwit, the heart is a very resilient little organ (he didn’t know his physiology even then, mind) and as I started to think about writing a year’s list 1983 swum up into my mind. Having had a good look around, what I’ve realised is that doing a single post on the best albums of 1983 would be, frankly, criminally wasteful. Well, either that or really really long. Goodness me but wasn’t it a very good year. So instead of that I’ll write a series of posts about an album at a time. To be honest I’ve written about almost all of them before (to be very honest most of you probably have too) but that’s no matter, it just means I can dig a little deeper into the track listings and think of other stories to spin off of them.
So I’ll start here, with a cheat, because I’d forgotten this was on this album as it was released under a pen name (alright, a pen name for what was already a stage name, layers of protection springing up around him) and I will come back to this album again, but for the moment a stunning piece of vitriol and cynicism which masks will and desire and hope, all of which would be held subordinate to that vitriol and cynicism for too many years after this song. The phrasing of this is wonderful, lines tumbling into each other, and the staccato piano drilling away into us, the discordant music clashing with the perfect delivery.
December 3, 2008
This week’s contrast podcast is full of mashups and I played this, which I rather like but which kind of sums up the problem I have with these, I can’t imagine anyone ever saying ‘You know, I like Wonderwall but I wish I could dance to it’
Oasis -v- LCD Soundsystem – Tribulations/Wonderwall mp3
Although if I’d thought about it I would have played this which is my favourite one of these by a million miles, better even than the originals, I think, although there is something wonderfully sentimental and absolutely perfect in every sad and awful way about the performance of No Fun in San Francisco by the Pistols -
2 Many DJs – The Stooges -v- Salt’n'Peppa – No Fun/Push It mp3
November 29, 2008
A live album places just a little bit more of a burden than usual on its playout track – this is the final moment of the night, something to see you on your way with a smile and make you think of all that’s been good and right and proper about the last hour or two. I think this is probably my favourite live album, and I’ve been listening to it a lot again in the last few days after posting the second to last track (which I’ve just reposted in a tidier and altogether more crisp version instead of the ‘ripped from cassette’ one that was there before) and I think this is a perfect final song.
Like most of the album it’s mainly her and her guitar, although the band are there in the background making sure things tick along, but with just a guitar she comes up with a wonderfully swinging singing dance-a-long. A bit like Council Meetin’ it really is difficult to keep still, it demands a physical response from you. And it’s yet another song about dancing and I’ve always had a thing about songs about dancing, just have, there you go.
And on top of all of that you get another one of her wonderful little intros before the song itself, and, I say again, it’s worth buying the album for these alone.
November 27, 2008
Where are we going to get our pick’n'mix? Where will we go to fill up our bags with unnecessary plastic objects? Where can I find to make sure I can still avoid toys’r'us? Bugger.
Nanci Griffith – Love at the Five and Dime mp3
November 25, 2008
Okay, it’s reasonably likely this time that I will actually have a course to go to during the day unlike last time when I got there to find it had been cancelled but I have another early Friday evening near Euston to kill coming up soon, Friday 12th December – any gang members free and easy drop me a line and maybe we can make a plan.
November 22, 2008
And someone said to me
You’ve taken this too far
But I can’t be arsed to change
I more or less missed the whole manchester etc baggy britpoppy whathaveyou time. I was aware there was stuff happening and there were songs I can remember hearing but, as I said somewhere down below, I may have heard but for a very long time I didn’t listen. When I started listening again this CD was one I found at a Sunday morning car boot – I remember it was a toss up and this between something vaguely similar on what to spend my last money on, although I can’t remember what the other thing was. I knew I liked ‘The Only One I Know’ from it having been around and around and that was probably it, but I put this on when I got home and liked the first track and loved the second. I love the keyboards on White Shirt, the lazy but really right there vocal, the half moment between the fall out of the chorus and the all in again of the next verse, and I absolutely loved the line quoted above, loved it more and more as time went on and listening to music again made me listen to myself again about all sorts of things I’d just burried.
I love these songs, full of passion and hope and a bit of knowing but a willingness to believe, all at the same time.
The Charlatans – White Shirt mp3
… and a few more favourites whilst we’re here…
The Charlatans – Up At The Lake mp3
The Charlatans – Loving You Is Easy mp3
The Charlatans – For Where There Is Love There Will Always Be Miracles mp3
November 20, 2008
I don’t think I’ve watched Pretty in Pink for twenty years but I think, if pushed, that it’s probably my favourite of these 80s teen movies. I know I’ve seen The Breakfast Club more often and I know, as well, that this interest now has come from the fact that I’m going to be teaching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as an exam film later this year (to compare with Election as two examples of American High School movies, with Matthew Broderick as the link).
This was the best one, though. Molly Ringwald is the poor kid instead of the princess this time, but she’s still daddy’s girl (we watched ‘The Stand’ just before the summer, anything to keep the kids quiet for a whole day, and I loved the fact that she played just exactly the same role at the beginning of that). Horrible hateful James Spader is pitch perfect as the rich kid Steff, and Andrew McCarthy is completely useless as only Andrew McCarthy can be (“His name is Blane? Oh! That’s a major appliance, that’s not a name!”). Annie Potts as Iona and, particularly, Jon Cryer as Duckie are the best things here, though. Even Andrew ‘complete fucking wanker’ Clay is spot on.
As can be the way of things, the first mp3 of the theme tune I turned up was a cover, and it was the version I got used to all over again once this was how I listened to almost all of my music, so when I did get an mp3 of the original it sounded quieter and a little more down. I like it more again now, though – both versions have good things going for them. The best bit of all in the film is the bit with ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’, obviously.
The Psychedelic Furs – Pretty In Pink mp3
The Dresden Dolls – Pretty In Pink mp3
