A Camp
Something soothing for the late hours – A Camp, solo side-project of Nina Persson, astonishingly not acquired from Kippers, not sure where I found these. I like them very much, especially the first one at the moment although these things come and go.
A Camp – Song for the Leftovers mp3
A Camp – Love Has Left The Room mp3
Scott’s Diary – 26th January 1912 “We must have fewer delays”
Little by Little
I played this on here last year when I found it unexpectedly on one of the ‘pooters in my classroom. I didn’t realise at the time, but really should have done, that as well as the offical video there is a seperate Garth Jennings/Adam Buxton video which is bloody great. Here ’tis.
Well I Wonder
A repost – well, a remembering and rewriting – of something long gone a long time ago – I wrote this originally for Fun and Heartbreak about four years ago (possibly exactly four years ago – it’s the right kind of time) – but I deleted everything I wrote there when everything went kaboom. (Deleting your posts from a communal blog is not a proper thing to do. Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.)
Her name was Jenny. I’d met her on the second night at University (I’d spent the first night passed out after not eating all day and drinking all early-evening) and we’d talked all evening, and I was all crushed up and eager, and then I didn’t seen her around at all and then when I did I went all shy boy and didn’t know where to look or how to say hi, and then there was that thing with the Mighty Lemon Drops, and now it’s nearly christmas, and we’re having a party in my residence block, and she’s turned up with her friends just as I’m playing music.
I’ve drunk a bottle of wine and a good bit of a second one and I’m in that ‘you know what you’re going to do but you can’t stop yourself’ place, so rather than say hello, or smile, I stay where I am looking all serious and earnest and I play this…
The Smiths – Well I Wonder mp3
… and she comes straight over to talk to me, and we’re both a bit smiley and red cheeked but it’s a happy little conversation about not much and we stay talking for longer…
… and from that we become, well, nodding acquaintances, passing ‘hellos’ and happy to sit next to each other on the bus if that’s what turns up. And one evening we sat up most of the night in the kitchen drinking a cheap bottle of brand and sharing the lowdown about everything in the world. And then we were back to hello again, and that was that.
Codes and Keys
I’ve failed to plug the Contrast Podcast Festive 50, which is out there in parts one two and three for your pleasure. I struggled more than ever to name a single song from last year (an exaggeration but not a very big one) and my very favourite things (Tiny Birds, Alex Turner) didn’t make the cut but I was very happy to introduce this song, here in a solo live version rather than the band’s studio version.
Ben Gibbard – Codes and Keys (live) mp3
Scott’s Diary “The weather seems to be breaking up”
Raised To A Harder Thing Than Triumph
When I was at primary school, ten and eleven years old, my teacher read to us at the end of every day. It doesn’t seem to happen quite as much now – it’s there as a once a week thing instead in my experience. I had the same teacher for my last two years of primary school, and he didn’t read us anything any of us had ever heard of before, or anything we might have read – he didn’t read us whatever the late 70s equivalent of Harry Potter was. He read us the journals of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, ten or fifteen minutes a day for two years. We didn’t know the whole story – we didn’t know how it was going to end. He certainly didn’t mention to us that the book was actually called ‘Scott’s Last Journal’.
Scott and his companions were on their way back from the South Pole towards their camp one hundred years ago. The final section of his journals starts around now and I thought I’d read for you, a day at a time a hundred years on. I’m just a little late starting so I’ll catch up here…
The story so far…
Captain Scott and his men got to the Pole to find that Amundson and his Norwegian team had already been and gone. They have to retrace their route across the continent, to the cairns and depots they’ve left on the way, to get back to their ship, the Terra Nova, and so away to England. They have been marching back from the Pole for about three weeks already.
19th January 1912 mp3
20th January 1912 mp3
21st January 1912 mp3
22nd January 1912 mp3
Old Friends
Two versions of the title track from a favourite album from way back when that I haven’t listened to for ages. I always love the simplicity of his songs when it’s just him and a guitar but it’s still a nice change to hear him on the few occasions he plays with a band.
Ted Hawkins – Watch Your Step (acoustic) mp3
Ted Hawkins – Watch Your Step (band version) mp3
Friday Dancefloor
Sometimes even an obvious link from one thing to another can be a tiny little bit tortuous – anyway I had been listening to Otis, and Drew had been stuck on Try A Little Tenderness and was off to watch Pretty in Pink, and I went looking for the Otis tribute song and accidentally downloaded a huge Atlantic collection and found this on there which just has to be played in all of those circumstances. Happy Friday all.
William Bell
Probably best known to passers by for A Tribute to the King, Bell was employed by Stax as a writer in the early 60s, recording his own composition ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’ (which I’ve always known as an Otis song) before being conscripted and sent off to war… his first album took years to come along but he has lasted and lasted as a performer and writer for years….
(… he even wrote this… Billy Idol – To Be A Lover mp3)
… but that first album, The Soul of a Bell, is pretty perfect, sweet soul with a hint of country, good Southern country boys that he and Otis were. Two ‘Otis’ songs and a wonderful single – his second.
William Bell – You Don’t Miss Your Water mp3
William Bell – I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now) mp3
William Bell – Any Other Way (alternate version) mp3
And then the title track from his fourth album, ‘Phase of Reality’ from 1973. There is something so early 70s about this – yeah, it’s a disco-inflected soul record, but there’s something almost proggy about it, that feel of ‘concept’ it has as a title track and the portent of it.
Thought for the Day
I know what I said yesterday, but we can wait for tomorrow for more from William Bell.
John Perry Barlow – A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Otis
Because I’ve been having a bit of an Otis Redding phase for the last few days, and was going to play ‘These Arms Of Mine’ which is lovely but kept listening without posting and have ended up here, with three songs that turn up wonderfully, perfectly, in wonderful perfect films (not always by him but still) and are all, somehow, like so many of his tracks are, songs which are in the public repertoire, the kind of thing that, if it were to start playing on a jukebox, or as piped music in a bar or a shop, or on the radio somewhere, anyone around you might start singing and it wouldn’t be in the least bit surprising. And an extra one, because tribute songs could so easily be terribly cheesey but this one is also so lovely, so sweetly sung and and so straightforwardly sad. And because it leads me into another post for tomorrow…
Otis Redding – Hard to Handle mp3
Otis Redding – Try A Little Tenderness mp3
Otis Redding – I Can’t Turn You Loose mp3
Friday Dancefloor
A quicky, whilst I’m on the run to help set up an exam…
Spacemen, Thin White Dukes and Bus Passes
David Bowie’s 65 today. I was thinking about him this afternoon, after hearing this news this morning, and considering how nearly I completely passed him by, even though I think of myself, in a quiet and undemonstrative way, as a fan. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a Bowie studio album right through. It was so easy to buy compilations and retrospectives, way back in the day, that I’ve spent more time reading about those 70s albums than listening to them.
Someone on my old favourite message board wrote that they didn’t like Bowie, and someone else replied ‘That’s like saying you don’t like music’ which I thought was very lovely.
Happy Birthday David. My relationship with your songs is so unoriginal that almost anything I choose to play will be obvious, so let’s at make sure that it’s something completely wonderful.
David Bowie – “Heroes” (live) mp3
The Magnetic Fields – “Heroes” mp3
Blondie – “Heroes” (live) mp3
Wallflowers – “Heroes” mp3
Peter Gabriel – “Heroes” mp3
Apocalypta ft Till Lindemann – “Helden” mp3
David Bowie – “Heroes” mp3
Snappish
I have two copies of this song tagged as being by two different artists which turn out to be exactly the same version of the same song. It’s something that popped up the other day (well, one of them did) as these things do and I’ve been listening to that a bit before noticing I appeared to have another version but then didn’t. It’s very good, though – it’s very Stephin Merritt whatever else it is and that can only be a good thing.
Snap 2
Like back here, this is another example of him releasing an early version of a song (‘Recorded in a van going from Oxford to Bristol, 16th October 2006′) which subsequently turns up under a different name in a more developed version on an album. The wordier-titled demo is on the B Side of ‘War of the Worlds’, the album for the album version is Searching for the Hows and Whys.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. – You Just Sit There In Silence As The World Cries Out In Vain mp3
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. – I Could Build You A Tower mp3
The Right Version
We had a conversation about this once before and I thought I’d get it sorted and sneak it in before the ‘three years since then’ mark came around (insert ‘doesn’t time fly / ‘how long?’ / ‘Oh My Fucking God’ comment here). This is the right version of this song – the one from the original vinyl release of ‘Poguetry in Motion – the one that really sings, and perfect for cold dark nights by fire and candlelight. ‘I took shelter from a shower, and I stepped into your arms’.
Friday Dancefloor – in memory again
We’ve all done it – you don’t think of a person for a few decades, then you mention them in a post, then they die.
Friday Dancefloor – to remember
Always.
The End of the Evening
I’ve said once or twice before that my uncle was a club DJ back in the 70s and 80s. He worked mainly in a nightclub in Basildon (and I’ve been trying to remember the name and it was a proper 80s nightclub in Basildon kind of a name but it won’t come to me) but whilst he talked about that I never went there – too young.
I listened as he played lots of records whilst I was visiting my grandparents (who he still lived with for much of this time) and he was always running the show when there was a family party, and there were quite a few family parties. My mum had five brothers and a sister who had all stayed around the same place and had all fitted into more extended families, my grandparents both had extended families further away who could be relied upon to turn up, and we had moved away but would always go back. There were significant birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, weddings and babies, even the odd funeral. They weren’t quite up there with the Quirke wedding at the beginning of The Commitments but there was something of that about those events.
Eventually I was allowed to help, and when it came to his wedding I was even put in charge (with a very long and very specific list of instructions – not so much in charge as in place), and I learned the rules – even back in the 80s the formula for ‘family party music’ – Motown and the 80s – seemed to be there. I knew there’d be two people who’d arrived from south Wales on motorbikes and would want some metal. I knew there would be lots of older relatives not satisfied until they’d had ‘Blanket on the Ground’ and someone else’s Uncle would tell the story of playing with Bill Hailey after dancing to ‘Rock Around The Clock’.
The other rule, though, was that this was the last song of the night. Always. And everyone knew it was going to be, and everyone knew when it was played that this really was it. At the earlier of these things I was young enough to equate this with real class, the kind of thing you would fall into liking as you grew older. At the later ones I toyed with alternative last songs that I’d never get away with and a few I might almost have done. I never dared, though.
Engelbert Humperdink – The Last Waltz mp3
…and this which I think I posted once before a long long time ago but it’s wonderful.
Rip It Up And Start Again
A quick blast from the past, blogged at the old place 1st December 2006 to round off a Weller-week…
As is traditional, the final day of National Modfather Week is given over to a response from his royal foaminess, The Cappuccino Kid. He was as elusive as ever, suggesting various establishments in Venice. I countered with the Great Western and we ended up in the bar of The Lighthouse where, over the biscotti crumbs and the faint but unmistakable hint of 1983 in the air, he had this to say to me…
Understand, Crash, that there are times when age has wearied even the object of my unwavering attention. The desire to please, so scorned in the days of The Trio, has from tempo to tempo come to the fore in the form of pleasing ones own self, regardless of the views of the sound-buying public or the typewriters in their towers. You say your switch has turned to ‘no’ in recent years but you’ve been seen about town with your player tuned to ‘retro’ and your blackberry slung around your neck flashing the legend ‘How can I be a fucking revivalist when I’m only 38?’ So where is there to go? You cadres and your cadets can call for all the retreats in the countryside but the urban dwellers of tomorrow still need the Modfather. Laying down a new groove on old tracks is for now, and tomorrow is for the next re-invention. Maybe the old men of today will have finished their vinyl conversion projects by then and can slip the thousand things he wants to say to you into an otherwise inoffensive playlist. The soul kids and kidesses of the here and now will keep the faith throughout and that, you know, is why The Boy Wonder will never cease.
Pacifism be damned, I slipped a bead of Polonium 210 into his tall skinny decaff (which he deserved for that alone) and went on my way to the fileden to see the week off with a nod to the comment box.
It’s been a long time since I felt enthusiastic about Paulie’s doings but his new single is a lot more than really rather good – it’s the late 70s all over again, but a version of the late 70s where he took a different path, because it’s more Wire or Killing Joke than The Jam but it’s very very fine indeed for all of that. Here’s hoping for more of the same
Special
Ten years ago tonight I was sat in the parents’ room on the children’s ward trying to understand what my daughter’s diagnosis with a chronic medical condition might mean for her, for us. Ten years of blood tests and insulin injections, of never leaving the house without checking for glucose and biscuits, of always watching the clock getting near to very regular mealtimes, of the occasional bug that would be trivial without diabetes but is an emergency with it, ten years… and she’s happy, and healthy and fine, becoming more and more of an independent teenager by the day.
This song because I remember her dancing with her great-grandfather to it not much longer than ten years ago, and I’ve just noticed it on her playlist now.
The Best Worst-Titled Song In The World Ever
I always knew this wasn’t a Costello original but I could never find the original anywhere and only recently have I learned that this was because I didn’t know what I was looking for.
The Flying Burrito Brothers – Hot Burrito #1 mp3
There’s a lovely cover by Belly, with a great vocal by Tanya…
Belly – Hot Burrito #1 mp3
… and a great laid back version from Devotchka…
Devotchka – Hot Burrito #1 mp3
… and a live version by the Cowboy Junkies…
Cowboy Junkies – Hot Burrito #1 mp3
… and another live version, this time by the Black Crowes (but there are lots of taken down links for Black Crowes things out there so you can have a YouTube video of this one – you can buy it from their site)…
… but in a way which is so demonstrably untrue that I started this post by demonstrating it myself, I can’t help but think of the Costello version, on ‘Almost Blue’, as the original. It’s one of the most emotionally transparent, open and intense records I know, full of an honest and straightforward self-pity which is expressed so beautifully that it’s somehow admirable. And Costello had the good sense to give the thing its proper name.
Elvis Costello – I’m Your Toy mp3
… and a live version too…
Words to the Wise Guy
White boy rap – mad bad and dangerous to know. Unless you’re Pete Wylie. Really, this is nothing to do with rap. Really he’s just declaiming. Announcing. Presenting.
The Mighty Wah! – Yuh Learn mp3
(This came as four tracks on the album and then two on each side of a 12″ single, as an extra with the album along with a ‘lyrics and other things’ book. I’ve put it together in a ‘slightly shonky at some of the joins but doesn’t that just give it some charm’ kind of way)
Infinitely late at night…
… and this is as good advice as any. Happy Friday, all.
Smoking
I think it’s more than ten years since I last smoked, and that was just a one off. I was lucky, I know – I could kind of take or leave cigarettes, and it took me quite a while before it occurred to me that in that case it really would be sensible to just permanently leave them.
I was never a heavy smoker. Actually there’s probably some definition of ‘heavy smoker’ which involves just thinking about them more than once a week, in which case I was, but I don’t think I was ever more than a half-dozen a day man. No doubt one reason for this was my general laziness and lack of commitment but I did have one significant bit of help in not being a heavier smoker; my mum really hated it. When I was a teenager I was the only person I knew who got serious parental hassle about smoking, and this meant that whilst I started more regularly after going away to university I always stopped completely when I went home.
I stopped soon after graduating in 1990 and then briefly started again a few times – once after staring with what can only be described as lust at a smoke a friend was lighting in the pub, once when I was working in a jail, overseeing a gang of electricians, and they had their routine to start the day – a cup of tea, a smoke and a crap.
On the standards we work to for ‘illicit’ drugs, cigarettes should, without any question whatsoever, be banned. Won’t happen – it’s big business, selling death. It’s interesting to remember the quiet campaigns of the advertising industry serving the tobacco companies, working under the slogan ‘doubt is our product’ they set the standard for big businesses defying regulation and oversight to this day.
This song, because I like it, and because when he went to play it on a children’s TV show he was told he couldn’t sing ‘smoke a cigarette’ and would have to dub something over it, suggesting ‘Avocado Vinaigrette’ as an acceptable alternative. Of course now, with concerns about epidemics of childhood obesity….
Tom Robinson – Atmospherics: Listen to the Radio mp3
and a live version, which is the only other mp3 I have – I’ve got the 12″ single on vinyl but I’ve lost my converting mojo. It’s possible that I’d find it with my connecting wires, of course…
Tom Robinson – Atmospherics (Listen to the Radio) (Live) mp3
31 Songs #31 The Killing Mash
From here – and you may well hate this but it’s fun and it’s Halloween.
Markyboy – The Killing Mash mp3
I don’t promise to blog every day now but I have got back in the habit of looking at iTunes and thinking ‘what could I share’ and I like that.
31 Songs #30 I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish
I did my teaching qualification in 1999 and, in a way that didn’t surprise me in any way at all, developed a huge crush on another student in the group. I blame her, to be honest. She made me a tape. The defense rests.
I had to make one back, so I did immediately, that evening. I listened to it the following morning on the train and even I knew that I couldn’t possibly give it to her. I honestly don’t remember everything that was on it – I had it for a while but I think I gave it to a friend on the course – a very blokey friend who knew why I’d made it and laughed at me when he’d listened to it.
So I made another one the next night and it was a bit calmer and a bit more sensible (actually, further in my defense, the tape she’d made me was a Nick Cave tape and finished with ‘Are You The One That I’ve Been Looking For’, ‘Straight To You’ and ‘Into My Arms’. What’s a boy to do?) but it takes time to make a tape, and it got later and later and I drank more and more wine, and the next morning on the train I had that ‘oh bugger’ moment and knew again that I had to keep the tape and start again.
So I made a third version, which I gave to her. It was reasonably well behaved. Probably. It definitely had this on it. Then we all went off on teaching placements to different schools in different towns and that was pretty much that.
31 Songs #29 Backstreet
Amongst the countless things I fail to do, this week I failed to get out to the Coffeehouse’s ‘Vinyl Cafe’ – turn up with a few records, play them and talk about them – a kind of complement to the reading group idea. It’s a once a month thing and I might try to go next month although the only person I know who does go is a bit of a wanker and I don’t really want to spend too much time with him.
Anyway, although I didn’t go I did get as far as deciding that if I had gone this was one of the things I would have taken with me, and playing it now makes me realise that I’ve written 28 posts in a row without playing any Motown.
When I was an undergraduate there was a nomadic 6Ts and Northern Society night called ‘The Backstreet’ – and it’s a lovely song, inclusive and warm in it’s ideas. Of course, it’s nice to think that the backstreet is where we all belong.
Where people stick together
One for all and all for one
Where they don’t care how much money you got
As long as you’re havin’ fun
Edwin Starr – Backstreet mp3
31 Songs #28 Let Love Speak Up Itself
Encore songs. It’s a good time to pull out an apparently unlikely but clearly perfect cover – the best final song of the night I’ve ever heard was The Pogues doing Maggie Mae – and that’s certainly a better bet than just holding back the one song everyone knows you’re clearly going to play, like the Newman and Baddiel sketch of EMF going off at the end of the gig and discussing what to play as an encore before finally deciding on ‘Unbelievable’.
Of course, if you’re Billy Bragg playing A New England, that’s fine. One time when I saw him on the first night of a tour he played the whole of ‘Spy v Spy’ as an encore. The next time at the same venue he remembered it, saying it had happened because he’d got a bit excited after seeing West Ham winning an FA Cup semi-final that afternoon and after trying to sing songs he hadn’t touched in years he hadn’t been able to talk the next day.
What if you haven’t got that ‘one’ song? The Beautiful South could have made the crowd happy with any number of things to finish the night with but I do think there’s something about this which is pretty perfect – although now I look it’s not actually the last song of the show, that’s ‘My Father and I’ that we are now going to ignore because it gets in the way of a useful point… which is that the growth of the song is perfect for the occasion, a perfect encore song. Immediately recognisable from the first bar? Check. Singalong capabilities? Check. A grower that gets louder and feels faster as it moves, dragging the crowd always along with it? Check. A pausey bit in the middle to worry everyone that this might be it for the night only to gather again and carry on? Check. Potential to loop around the melody and keep things going when it’s going so well that nobody wants it to end? Check.
31 Songs #27 Shayla
A delicate little cover. ‘Parallel Lines’ is the first album I bought (okay, okay. PL is the first album I can remember going out and spending my own money on – it’s the first album I bought in the same way that Oliver’s Army is the first single I bought, and not like The Teardrop Explodes! are the first band I saw) and I had Eat to the Beat pretty early on as well. Playground whispers always said that Deborah Harry claimed to be the long lost daughter of Marilyn Monroe (a story the internet tells me is still and always will be out there) and even then I’d heard of her too and that was all very exciting.
In a not at all similar way but we all have to link paragraphs somehow, Voxtrot were one of the first new bands I listened to this century, being tremendously excited about some of those early online availables, particularly Wrecking Force and Missing Pieces. This is nothing like them, it’s a wonderfully stripped back version of what is already a pretty laid back song (Eat to the Beat’s ‘Fade Away and Radiate?) from a set of live covers that also touches on Felt, New Order and Talking Heads.
Voxtrot – Shayla mp3
31 Songs #26 I Wanna Be Loved
Always loved that video.
A bit like with Ian Dury, when the only time I saw him play was with the Music Students rather than the Blockheads, so the only time I’ve seen Elvis Costello live it was with The Confederates rather than the Attractions. Saw them in Bristol and stayed with a friend in Bath, and had to be back at the sixth form college the following morning in Winchester. I lived less then five minutes walk from my tutor room but got there very late with the genuine and real excuse that I’d been held up behind a tank on Salisbury Plain. I wrote this on the late note and was called in by my senior tutor to explain.
This is an incredibly simple song – it does some of what Town Cryer does in recycling lines in different styles although it doesn’t build the whole song around it as that one does. I know it’s all about self pity but, as with the video, it’s kind of a jolly self pity, a warm self pity reflected in the key changes in the song and the gorgeous tone of his vocal all the way through. Nice long version…
Elvis Costello – I Wanna Be Loved (Extended Smooch’n'Runny version) mp3
Keeping It Peel – 31 Songs #25 – A Lover Sings
Keeping it Peel – this is from Billy’s live performance at a party to celebrate John Peel’s 40th anniversary at Radio 1, with some enjoyably disconnected bits of talk at the beginning and end.
It’s a lovely song, the play out track from the second album and a perfect little love song. If you were going to be really picky, you could argue that it’s a bit of a collection of brilliant one liners rather than something which actually flows, particularly in the second verse, but maybe that’s kind of the point – that by the second verse things aren’t exactly flowing any more. Love and pain.
31 Songs #24 Ramblin’ Man
I was going to write about dipping my toe into country music every now and then and about particularly enjoying the down-beat nature of a lot of the Hank Williams things I’ve heard – although none of them are as good as the unheard but possibly not apocryphal archetypal country song ‘My Wife’s Run Off With My Best Friend (And I Miss Him)’ – but then one of a number of adverts came on tv with a reasonably respectable chef extolling the virtues of something clearly shite and I’m left wondering just how much they’re being paid. They lose their reputations in these adverts and they gain nothing but cash so it better be a lot of cash.
Well. I bought ‘the best of Hank Williams’ when I was about 17 (on cassette) and like most things in the cupboard I have gone through stages of listening to it but generally when I want some country I go and listen to Nanci Griffith (although just how… it’s too late. You understand). But I get, when I listen to them, that this was the beginning of something significant – that you’re listening to the ancestor of a lot what is to follow.
Hank Williams – Ramblin’ Man mp3
(There’s a good song by Lemon Jelly called Ramblin’ Man too which is decidedly more cheerful).
31 Songs #23 – Sportsnight Theme
Of all the pieces of music that take me back I’m not sure there’s anything that does it quite like this one. Sportsnight was mid-week – it was the Wednesday night show, on after 10pm (often quite a bit after) and there was really only one tactic for watching it – lie still and listen. If I heard my mum go to bed before it started I knew I could sneak down and watch it with my dad.
Sportsnight was full of second-string stuff – greyhound racing and amateur boxing are the things I remember more than anything although you also got cup replay highlights or the occasional bit of international football. Once a year you got the really big treat, the five-a-sides, when lots of the top teams would put out decent squads for an evening’s knockout tournament.
Obviously more than anything Sportsnight really just meant sitting with my dad pretending to be a bit more grown up than I was. I could sip at some beer (actually at some barley wine which was what he’d taken to drinking. One sip of it was almost enough to knock me out) and he could tell me about Mick the Miller or Henry Cooper and we could watch whatever was on whilst he also routinely mentioned that I really should be in bed.
It was pulled in the 90s. I might be wrong, it might have become something else by then (and I could look it up but I won’t on some strange principle) but I have an inkling that one of the last ones I ever saw was with Cantona and that kick. A fine way to go out – I knew my dad’s view because he told me the next day – “You can’t behave like that when you’re a professional, but the bugger deserved it”.
31 Songs #22 I Am The Resurrection
Because I missed out completely when they were first around (in fact I think they were at just about the moment when I stopped listening, I remember friends in the pub talking about them and the fact that I just wasn’t interested at all) and whilst I don’t adore everything about them and didn’t get involved in the bun-fight over tickets I do think there are things better off not missed. I have to tell you, from my workday incursions into culture with the kids, that they are surprisingly popular amongst the young people nowadays and lots of their songs and videos have been surreptitiously turning up in the classroom whilst people should have been thinking about representations of gender in modern horror or the many failings of game to film adaptations.
31 Songs #21 Walkin’ Talkin’
I got to run a few club nights when I was at University, first as an entertainments officer in off campus halls, then as a union execcy, and I had one regular tactic that always worked, even if was one that was born out of necessity.
I didn’t have a record player with me at college – my parents didn’t drive and I couldn’t think of a way to get it there (and buying a new one was such a profligate financial idea that it never occurred to me for a second) which meant that I didn’t have any records with me, just lots of tapes. I’d prepared for this, I knew this was going to happen and I’d taped more or less everything and had been buying anything new on cassette for quite a white, but it’s awkward DJing from cassette (there wasn’t a cassette deck at all on the decks we had available to us and we had to plumb one in with a simple audio jack much to the annoyance of the Ents Tech Crew).
So, my tactic was always to tell people to bring things along for me to play. It worked surprisingly well – I didn’t turn up with nothing, I would run around and steal records from here there and everywhere and have various things cued up on cassette so I had a set ready, but lots of people bought lots of records with them and would then take over at least a little bit of the floor with their friends.
This was something I remember turning up this way – somebody bought along Night of a Thousand Candles and pointed to Ironmasters and I showed them the cassette already ready to play this instead. The Men are still touring and although I haven’t seen them for over twenty years I’d certainly jump at the chance of going again as they were even better live than on record.
31 Songs #20 My World
A friend who went to see Secret Affair said that they had so little material ready they ended up playing ‘Time for Action’ twice. I like Time for Action but I can see how that would be less than satisfactory even for me. I think this is my favourite Secret Affair song though – I like the B-side of the single, So Cool, very much too but My World is one of those songs that I can’t really imagine anyone not being a fan of, at least in a quiet way – one of the records where anybody can sing along with the chorus.
31 Songs #19 I Saw Her Standing There
Following on from yesterday… the first Beatles’ album I owned was ‘Rock and Roll Music Volume 1′ – the other red and blue compilations, this time of the early years. My one was a christmas present from my first girlfriend, it has ‘to adam love emma’ written on the label, nearly 29 years ago, a ‘relationship’ between 13/14 year olds which was destined to last a little more than another week.
This has always been one of my very favourite Beatles’ songs – it benefits, when you’re making lists of such a big and diverse body of work, from the idea that you have to make a representative list that touches on lots of different moods and times but I think it would still be nuzzling against the top spot if I was trying to be more strict – a perfect guitar/bass/drums blast without too many ideas and it’s a song about the dancefloor (as so many of those early songs are) and it just is pretty perfect.
31 Songs #18 Rock’n'Roll Music
The nicest PR email I’ve ever had arrived yesterday, inviting me to the Duke of York theatre in London to see Backbeat which is sadly impossible what with geography and life and all but it did make me think about the film and listen to the soundtrack again.
I saw Backbeat in the cinema when it first came out and remember loving almost everything about it – I was primed to enjoy anything with Sheryl Lee by Twin Peaks, obviously, but Ian Hart is gloriously good as John and it was wonderful to see a film which was really about the creation of cool – of what cool looked like and how it sounded, as well as how it behaved.
I loved too the fact that the film took a story you think you know and turned it on its head – a bit like The Last Party with Blur and Suede, Backbeat makes it clear that this is a story about John and Stuart and ultimately it’s Sutcliffe’s story more than anything else.
Mostly though, I loved one of the central conceit of the films, that it was necessary to give an early 90s audience the feeling that an early 60s audience might have got by being confronted with the vibrancy of the early Beatles’ music, and they did that by calling Seattle and putting a band together. The Backbeat Band features musicians from Nirvana, Sonic Youth, R.E.M. and more and this somehow helps to create that real vibrancy for the audience.
The stage play has got some very varied reviews but I love the idea that the band in the play are performing live, even if that means that things can be a bit clumsy and disorganised rather than beautifully polished performances some of the time, and I will certainly try to see it if the opportunity presents itself again.
31 Songs #17 For What Is Chatteris…
I have too much to do and very little conscious attention to go around today, sorry. I like this very much indeed – it didn’t take Half Man Half Biscuit very long at all to go from studenty pranksters singing edward lear nonsense with a bit of a dark heart to becoming the kind of band who really should be taken to the hearts of middle englanders everywhere for caring and for showing it so simply and beautifully.
31 Songs #16 I’m Not Like Everybody Else
(I’m saying nothing – I chose the band and random chose the song. Although I have used ‘Random’ as an online name before although not for a long term and definitely before it somehow became a thing to just say, oh yes.)
Because it occurred to me yesterday afternoon that I couldn’t remember the last time I listened to The Kinks, and that made me think of the other Oasis joke, about the warring brothers being sued by Ray and Dave for conceptual plagiarism. I listened to The Kinks a lot when I was a teenager, Lola (*whispers* which isn’t very good) and You Really Got Me (which is still brilliant and I love the idea that it invented heavy metal) and I have a feeling that once upon a time la Smuts used to play a version of ‘Apeman’ although I might be making that up. I remember singing it with the singer Rob after coming off stage.
Anyway I couldn’t chose what to play so I left it to fate and fate is an individualistic soul.
I’ll leave you today with a story – I had tickets to see The Kinks just the once, in 1985, supported by The Truth, but the gig was cancelled on the morning of the day, officially because Ray had laryngitis but allegedly because Chrissie Hynde had just run off with Jim Kerr.
The Kinks – I’m Not Like Everybody Else mp3
(Posted on October 15th my arse, it’s after one o’clock in the following morning!)
31 Songs #15 We Are All Colours
I have always been a very bad blogger when it comes to paying attention to things in the inbox. I know it’s a privilege to have dozens of things a week sent to you but I can’t think of more than about half a dozen times when I’ve actually written about anything I’ve received. This is one of the very few exceptions. I can’t remember why I went with this – as a rule I don’t even listen so it can’t be simply that it stood out on first listening, but I do like it very much, particularly the first album ‘Civil War’. They are busy doing all sorts of other things which you can find out about on their website and their bandcamp page, and you can try them out with this first.
31 Songs #14 – The Man With No Face
Storytime Friday, and another gig I went to very early in my gig-going life. One Sunday in the spring of 1984 a friend noticed that Ian Dury was playing about fifteen miles down the road that evening, so we called the venue to check it wasn’t sold out and we went. He was touring to promote ’4000 Weeks Holiday’ which has some moments of utter dross on it but which also has some really lovely songs and some good fun stuff (and Lord Upminster, which has some moments of genius, also has it’s share of terrible mistakes, now I come to think of it). I like the beginning and the end of the album particularly, and the great tribute piece to Peter Blake, but I like this too – perfect for Dury’s voice and a nice mix between spoken storytelling and the sung chorus.
31 Songs #13 Reward
In one of those ‘not entirely true’ memories, for a long time The Teardrop Explodes! were the first band I ever saw live. Giles Smith, in ‘Lost In Music’ says (and I’ve paraphrased this before somewhere, I know) that something as significant as the first single you ever bought should not be left to anything as arbitrary as the truth, and so it was with live bands – come the sixth form, it was Julian Cope’s gang who had been first with me.
There was an element of truth in it – they were a support band at the first gig I went to. If they’d been the first support band on then it would have been even closer to the truth but they weren’t – on those terms Canadian poodle-heads Heart were the first band I saw. It was actually a Queen concert, in June 1982 (I was thirteen years old. Thirteen! My parents let me go off to an all day and most of the night gig half way across the country when I was at the end of Year 8! They’d let me go on a walking holiday, in the middle of nowhere – aka the South Shropshire Hills, a very long way from home then, in the summer holiday at the end of Year 7! With the archangel!)
This is one of the great records of the 1980s although it’s a slightly odd version of it. When I started listening to things again in the middle of the last decade one of the things I did was pinch a teetering pile of CDs from a friend and rip the lot of them and this was in there, a Mojo freebie called ‘Beloved’. Unlike the single which has a fade in and a slightly cheap and rough production feel, this feels like an exercise in diction, for the brass as much as for him, but it’s still a good take on the song, and some of the background melodies come through even stronger in this than in the original single.
31 Songs #12 Enjoy Yourself
The Specials – Enjoy Yourself mp3
I always give up on the idea of seeing them now as the gigs they play, in the West Midlands particularly, sell out before you can read the poster. They played in Wolves last night and I only learned at about 5pm that there were tickets, no problem, but it was too late, especially as I spent the weekend traveling to and from the south coast and beyond. This one particularly? Or this version?
The Specials – Enjoy Yourself (reprise) mp3
31 Songs #11 – Deadwood, South Dakota
Storytelling in songs can be clumsy or elegant. The longest time-spanning ballad is often empty and substanceless, whilst a snapshot of a situation can be pregnant with meaning. Archibald MacLeish said it in his poem ‘Ars Poetica’ (stop giggling).
For all this history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea
I’m working with students on short film-making at the moment – five to seven minutes to capture everything you want to say – and this idea of a moment in time, a short short story, is captured in this song. I’m sure I’ve said this before, if not about her about others, but I could listen to Nanci Griffith sing anything quite happily (even ‘From A Distance’)(well, probably), though it doesn’t help that so much of what she sings is so wonderful.
Often so wonderfully simple, as this is, a perfect example of a narrative song – paint a picture of a scene, sketch some broad characteristics of who’s there, introduce something new and let them react (as much as they ever react to anything), and yet this is one history of the settlement of America, in a few minutes and a few words. Perfect.
31 Songs #10 Radiation Ruling the Nation
And I know there’s another Hornby link with this one despite what I said at the end of the last one.
Chosen in a kind of organised random – this song has ten plays on the iTunes library I have in front of me – but this is, to all intents and purposes, a dub version of ‘Protection’ which is undoubtedly one the best songs in the world ever, released as part of a dub remix of the entire ‘Protection’ album, which has a wonderful dreamlike feel to it. Do I like it more than the original song? No, of course not but it’s still a wonderful thing for what it is and there is something about the idea of deferred pleasure – the original song has a different kind of dreaminess which I’m just as happy to run to once I’ve listened to this version.
31 Songs #9 Shout To The Top
1985, Saturday, late Spring/early Summer. My slightly dangerous friend from London is down for the weekend (we’ve kept doing this since I moved out of London nine years earlier, first weekends away organised by mums, now we just turn up, him particularly). We go out into town with a few other people and meet more there, including my last girlfriend who I split up with… not really, nothing so dramatic as that, splitting up with someone demands a moment in time – my last girlfriend before we drifted apart a year or so ago. We’ve been dancing the dance a bit again recently, nothing happening but spending a lot more time talking and just hanging around together (although there was an evening earlier in the Spring that involved five friends, everyone but me being drunk and… nope, that’s it, I have buried that evening deeply and it just knocked. It can stay buried for now).
I’ve been talking to my dangerous friend about things and he knows how it stands with me (essentially I don’t want to be her ex any more) and we’ve been talking about it this morning, and he smiles at me as we bump into her. We wander around in a group and we wander back and I’m talking to other people and I turn a corner to go towards a friend’s house – and they’re in each others’ arms, and they’re kissing – you know, kissing.
I live two minutes away but I get there in one. I don’t remember three flights of stairs but I took them. I find, as I wave my hands around and have a bit of a shout, that I have a new record with me and I put it on… and on, and on and on. I spend the rest of the day listening to it, and listening to it and listening to it. It feels bitterly ironic (I don’t think I would have even thought that word – I certainly wouldn’t have known how to use it accurately, this is a Pip-like grown-up-looking-back knowingly layered narration) and it feels like it’s laughing at me and it feels like it’s just life and it feels okay and it feels like pride, however pride might be feeling. I listen to it until the early evening when I go out and bump into people and have to meet him because he’s staying with me (and we’re not old enough for him to just disappear without parents getting worried) and he’s annoyingly straightforward but there’s really nothing I can do about it. I feel a bit better now, anyway. Because of the song.
The Style Council -Shout To The Top mp3 (live, from Home and Abroad, not from the bedroom)
There is a postcript to this story, and a note about it, and another note.
The postscript. A bit later that summer, when things had gone wrong for them as things do, my ever more dangerous friend needed to see her and talk to her but couldn’t risk the wrath of her father. It was okay, though, because he had a plan. You know the kind of plans you realise are just perfect, without noticing that they’re perfect because you’re drunk, or high, or utterly desperate? He used to have those kinds of plans as a matter of course (“We’ll steal some whisky” “I’m sure they’re only blues” “Nobody will notice it’s gone”). This plan was to borrow a ladder from me and climb up to her window, her room being at the front of her house and her dad’s being at the back. My folks were away that weekend (I can’t believe my mum knew he was staying. She knew. She never would have allowed it.) So he waited until he was sure she’d be asleep and set off with the ladder (we’d had a long talk in which I’d told him seventeen reasons why it was a terrible plan and he’d brushed them all aside perfectly politely). It was about midnight, and it was Saturday, and he had to walk straight down the High Street to get there. I went to bed. I was woken an hour or so later by some very persistent banging on the door. There were just the two policemen with him. I confirmed his story (I’ve never been more tempted to go with “Officers, I’ve never seen this gentleman before in my life” but it just wasn’t me) and they shook their heads and warned him to leave town (not really but you could see they meant it), and I put the ladder away.
The note. If you’re reading this (not dangerous friend) I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about all of this at some point before so I hope it’s okay to post it here.
The other note. I know Nick Hornby’s ’31 Songs’ was an attempt to pull together things that were particularly important to him, for one reason or another. I’ve borrowed the name but really it was just because I wanted to encourage myself to listen to a more varied diet of things, and to think about them as I listened, and to post more often. There is no list in my head, absolutely no countdown, no running order. I usually know what I’m probably going to play tomorrow (I don’t just at the moment) but that’s about it.
31 Songs #8 Breadline Britain
If you divide the last 80 years in two at around 1980, you can look at fifty odd years of Keynesian intervention – high levels of taxation providing impetus for the state to prime the market during downturns, and welfare spending funded by a well running state-backed economy to provide a safety net – followed by thirty odd years of Friedmanite monetarism – low regulation, low tax, low intervention and let the market take care of itself.
There are two key pieces of information about these systems, and one back up tale in the middle about one of them. The first thing is that growth in the developed world’s economies during the Keynsian years was higher than it has been in the Friedmanite years – that higher taxes and more intervention are better, long term, for the economy and for the creation of wealth.
The back up tale- The Friedmanite model has been pushed hard in the third world, by academic economists exporting their views from Chicago to South America and South East Asia. How do you get people to vote for higher prices and lower wages in order to fund more wealth for the rich? You don’t. Monetarism is imposed at the point of a gun; in Chile, with thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of torture victims, in Brazil where the government prepared for the changeover by building prisons in the Amazon and throwing the labour leaders into them, and in Indonesia where even his friends accept that Suharto murdered half a million political opponents to seize power (the rest of the world know it was about a million).
So what does modern econmonic policy do to us? Well, by 1980, if you divide the British population in two by wealth you find a situation where the richer half own about 78% of what’s there, and the poorer half about 22%. Now? Thirty years of less regulation and lower taxes for the wealthy means that now that divide has shifted to 99%-1%.
We are sitting back and watching whilst the greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of western society is going on under our noses, and the only answer we are told will work is ‘more of the same, harder, harsher and quicker’.
We need to close libraries and care homes so we can abolish the 50% tax rate for earnings about £150kpa. We need to make it harder for employees to have any redress against mistreatment or wrongful dismissal in order to free business from the burden of regulation. We need to take everything from those who have least because those who have everything already want more.
31 Songs #7 – One Better Day
The starting point for this was that it was Friday and it would be nice to play something to dance to and maybe that self titled Madness song which I always think is a real go-er, a good way to start the final phase of a night on the dance floor, maybe.
I’m not convinced this is that much of a dance floor song although it does work. I do think it’s the finest thing Madness every did, their quintessential song, despite some other very very high points along the way.
There is a stereotypical and very wrong-headed view of Madness as nothing but nutty boys – inconsequential silliness and having fun and pantomime videos – a perfect sideline to disposable pop music more generally. Even amongst some of those apparently inconsequential pop moments though there is always an undercurrent to Madness songs, and sometimes it’s not an undercurrent, it’s a tide in full flow. I tend to play this as the end of a trio of songs – Grey Day, Yesterday’s Men and then this, but there are lots of other songs that fit too, My Girl and Embarrassment and Take It Or Leave It and… almost everything, really.
What I particularly love about this is that it finds so much pure joy buried amidst the everyday. It’s lyrically so beautiful – Walking ’round you sometimes I feel the sunshine 
– and those lyrics are met by a burst into a major key in the music, particularly with that ‘moment of arriving’ at the end – but that joy only works as well as it does because the minor moments of the verses are crafted so well and the lives they sketch are so easy to imagine in full bloom.
31 Songs #6 – Evil
Because I don’t think I’ve ever posted it before and because it’s always kind of comforting to go back and post your favourite song by a band.
There are contextual reasons – this turned up on a compilation tape from an old imaginary friend and because of the name (Rosemary, not Evil) it makes me think of another old imaginary friend who I’ve completely lost touch with – but I think this is a song that would glow for me even if I first heard it now.
Those movements in the music always seem to me to be about working at the illusion of being in control – pulling back from the energy of the fastest sections into quiet restraint before just letting it go – and it’s a movement towards despair in the loss of control, ‘why not…why not…why not’.
31 Songs #5 – Higher Than The Sun
Was going to play some Interpol today but then this happened.
Primal Scream are totally disgusted that The Home Secretary Theresa May ended her speech at the Tory party conference with our song Rocks.
How inappropriate. Didn’t they research the political history of our band?
Hasn’t she listened to the words? Does she even know what getting your rocks off means? No. She is a Tory; how could she?
On the one hand this is another in a long line of politicians not having the faintest fucking idea what the music that accompanies them has to say but beyond that… ‘Rocks’…Theresa May… What? No, really. What?
We can hope that rather than hide the fact that she built her nasty little racist conference speech around a story she had been told in advance was untrue, and that she was criticised for this afterwards by another member of the cabinet and by a High Court judge, it will help keep it in the public eye.
Rocks? Conservative Party Conference. Rocks? I can’t being to understand how this happened.
Primal Scream – Higher Than The Sun (Higher Than The Orb Mix) mp3
31 Songs #4 – Bullets
There are people that I forget about completely from time to time and then wonder how on earth I can ever have forgotten. Editors turned up the other night because there was an old playlist that for some reason we always put on in the background during open evening for the new Year 6 kids and I had a pleasant trip home listening to them afterwards and again last night.
Sometimes these things are going to be rushed, it’s inevitable, but at least they’re here.
31 Songs #3 – This Is A Low
John Harris’ ‘The Last Party: Blair, Britpop and the Demise of English Rock’ headlines as a book about pop culture and the Labour Party but that’s really peripheral to its real business of documenting the rise and fall of some of Britpop’s main players in the early 90s. It has a few really interesting positions – that at heart the history of Britpop was the history of a race-to-the-top rivalry between Blur and Suede, that like Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ there are seriously regressive representational issues involved in a story that deteriorates into two leading men fighting over the girl, and that whilst the London heart was pushed ever upwards by some comparatively old timers from Sheffield (opening of Wiki article “Pulp are an English Britpop band from Sheffield formed in 1978″) the arrival of the rough boys from Manchester really didn’t help at all (“A band who went from She Loves you to Let It Be in two albums and then turned into Wings – or possibly Slade”).
As an afterthought, Harris lists his top three Britpop songs and surprised me at the time by ending with This Is A Low at number one (instead of Common People which is what I thought it was going to be) and as time has passed since I first read this book I’ve increasingly come to agree with him – that there is something very English about Britpop but that the Shipping Forecast is instead something very British, and isn’t regional or class-ridden in any particular way despite its home on thoroughly middle class Radio 4. This is a Low speaks of a quasi-mystical Britain, a place of pseudo-geography, of distances that collapse into the gap between two lines and where small landmarks signify big ideas.
A quick recommendation – Charlie Connelly’s ‘Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round The Shipping Forecast”
31 Songs #2 – Bizarre Love Triangle
There are a good number of songs I have that are here because of you, well, one of you for each of the songs, I guess, and sometimes I know exactly where things came from but usually I just can’t remember, and I’ve just been and had a look around for the source of this one but can’t find it. So, as I said about another song a little way down the page, thank you. I made a compilation cd for a music teacher friend the other day, ‘the rough with the smooth’; laid back covers of heavier songs and vice-versa, and this might be my favourite thing on there, just now.
31 Songs #1 – In the Crowd
A bit like taking an idea an idea about blogging for a month that other people have already done better elsewhere, so this year at work we have a rule – if you make an announcement in staff briefing (we have a full staff meeting every morning and quite right too, I can’t really imagine how schools, or indeed workplaces generally, manage any other way and on top of that it’s a really democratic thing, anyone can say anything. I digress…) if you make an announcement in staff briefing it has to include the name of a song by The Jam. The easiest of the easy way to start was with Start!, obviously,and I breezed through that, following it up the next day with a announcement I didn’t know I was going to have to make until the very last second but which I managed somehow to sneak ‘I Changed My Address’ into, and then this. The Vicar got ‘News of the World’ into a prompt to staff about the school newsletter which was rather good. Another friend knows we’re up to something but has yet to work out what it is.
In The Crowd, from ‘All Mod Cons’ feels lyrically like somebody not quite up to it trying to be clever clever – the product placements jar now, and the wordier bits – ‘an equilibrium melting pot’? – sound odd against the more prosaic stuff surrounding it. I don’t care about this, though, when you put it up against that Quadrophenia-like idea which turns up often in Jam songs – of how you balance wanting to be yourself with wanting to be one of the gang.
Musically the song’s worth it just for the bridge verse before the end, ten bar blues and urgency – the movement from the quiet slow opening to this sudden take off moment is the biggest thing in the song.
This is the version from the beautifully titled Dig The New Breed, recorded at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 6th April ’82.
Late
I always liked being up half the night, and it’s something that’s never really left me, even though when you’re young you’re both more resilient (or so you tell yourself) and are (as a rule) able to compensate for sleeping half the day (and resilience may actually have very little to do with it) except these days I still find myself sitting here at just after 1230 knowing full well that firstly I have to be up in about five hours and that I then have to go to work for the day (although I have no kids to worry about tomorrow, just a lot of stuff to do). Ah well, I can doze on the train.
I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing today, (been far enough to go to Whitby, which would have been nice), work, and home for hospital appointments for the girlies (fine), and work for open evening and home to mess and work and tidying up and then being here.
I listened to this album through all of the morning’s travels (whilst finishing reading ‘Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern’ which got me some filthy looks) and then just to her on random more generally for the afternoon and evening, and it’s a nice middle of the night song too.
Just Because
You Must Be Joking
So work is surprisingly busy (shouldn’t be surprising but somehow is) and so is everything else and sleep is (still) a thing of the increasingly distant past but there are some things I manage to hear before I drop off walking traveling in and this was one of them the other day, a nice soundtrack to or merry times just now.
Not Perfect
I don’t know why I’ve had so little time when I’ve apparently been on holiday for the last six weeks. Ah well. I saw this when I caught the very end of the Comedy Proms the other week by mistake and meant to share it more widely. Back to work Monday.
Thuggery
I’m not sure whether the station cafe always plays the same mix or if whatever radio station they have on always plays exactly the same thing at the same time (which strikes me as entirely possible). It’s usually Hard Fi’s “Tied Up Too Tight” which always sounds like a complete mess of a song to me, largely because I really quite like this stripped back acoustic version…
Hard Fi – Tied Up Too Tight (acoustic) mp3
… and the threat level which just doesn’t sound quite right in that sounds ridiculous in the ‘full’ version of the song. But then, Hard Fi are really just Campag Velocet for people who aren’t serious.
This is one where I know I’m in danger of grievously ripping off Garry Mulholland’s ‘This Is Uncool’ so will just quote him on their 1999 single To Lose La Trek –
Pop was full of macho black Americans who looked as if they wanted to blow your head off. But that was a distant threat, a vicarious thrill. [Lead singer] Voss is the hostile in your local pub, the Stanley knife and the Glasgow Kiss. Too close to home.
This is true of the first of these- the first two from 1999 album ‘Bon Chic Bon Genre’ – but the second is the kind of thing that Colin might introduce us to – its melodious shoegaze-inflected guitars, even with Voss’ unpolished voice. The third is from 2004′s ‘It’s Beyond Our Control‘ and is back in thug territory but, you know, kind of summery somehow still.
Campag Velocet – Cacophonous Bubblegum mp3
Campag Velocet – Vito Satan mp3
Campag Velocet – Motown Clic mp3
en français
(This was on a group-task summer compilation I made a year or two before blogging days began and is a nice summer feeling song, even if it is called ‘Your Pain’. Every song on the album had the same tone running in the background and lots of people sent it back, or so I read).
Tunes
Is it less crass to play the songs now?
Jerry Dammers – Riot City mp3
Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) mp3
Read.
Unashamedly copied in full from… The Daily Telegraph. The Daily Fucking Telegraph.
David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.
But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.
I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.
It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.
Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.
Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.
I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.
Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?
Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low‑paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.
A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.
Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.
Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.
The Prime Minister showed no sign that he understood that something stank about yesterday’s Commons debate. He spoke of morality, but only as something which applies to the very poor: “We will restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility – in every town, in every street and in every estate.” He appeared not to grasp that this should apply to the rich and powerful as well.
The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that “everybody deserves a second chance”. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters.
These double standards from Downing Street are symptomatic of widespread double standards at the very top of our society. It should be stressed that most people (including, I know, Telegraph readers) continue to believe in honesty, decency, hard work, and putting back into society at least as much as they take out.
But there are those who do not. Certainly, the so-called feral youth seem oblivious to decency and morality. But so are the venal rich and powerful – too many of our bankers, footballers, wealthy businessmen and politicians.
Of course, most of them are smart and wealthy enough to make sure that they obey the law. That cannot be said of the sad young men and women, without hope or aspiration, who have caused such mayhem and chaos over the past few days. But the rioters have this defence: they are just following the example set by senior and respected figures in society. Let’s bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life.
Something has gone horribly wrong in Britain. If we are ever to confront the problems which have been exposed in the past week, it is essential to bear in mind that they do not only exist in inner-city housing estates.
The culture of greed and impunity we are witnessing on our TV screens stretches right up into corporate boardrooms and the Cabinet. It embraces the police and large parts of our media. It is not just its damaged youth, but Britain itself that needs a moral reformation.
Half thought thoughts and fears
There is more to be said about what some of these last days mean and I’ve started to read bits and pieces of it and started to try to pull bits and pieces together for myself although I’m really not there yet.
The sense of community, of responsibility and of loud and expressive dignity in a group of Turkish Kurds who stand armed in front of their stores is not the sense of community felt by drunk white men shouting EDL slogans in Eltham not because Turkish Kurds are good and drunk white men are bad but because the threats the Turkish community were responding to are tangible and immediate and because there is no other response possible once the police have stood back. And the drunk white men are talking shit.
I couldn’t do it, and I say what I say with that in mind, but having spent the last few years being roundly criticised for treating what have been, on the whole, peaceful demonstrations as though they are riots, the Police seem to have taken an opportunity to sulk – “Well this is what you wanted from us” and treat ‘riots’ (I know – look at the inverted commas, the word is necessary in this sentence) as though they are peaceful demonstrations.
We need more discipline, and where are the parents and what have teachers been doing. Apparently. I’m generalising and assuming now, I have absolutely no specific knowledge of this at all and I might be wrong (which would be good and I think the point that follows would still hold in its own way), but I strongly suspect that I will have known a number of the young men who tore up Wolverhampton City Centre the other night and so, for them as an example out of everyone else in the country… well, what of these unpoliceable, unmanageable young men? Three weeks ago they were sat quietly in classrooms making progress towards good A Level grades. In September I’ll sit with them and help them plan University applications. They have clear and specific purposes with us and they work clearly towards them but I make no claim at all to understand their lives outside of school – we have lost students to gunshots and car chases, to prison and suicide, as well as the many we’ve seen on to education and employment. But now the people who have benefited for the whole of their adult lives from free access to higher education and who are moving towards collecting their pensions are looking down a few generations and saying ‘nothing for you here’. Graduate debt is talked about at around ten to twenty thousand pounds before you start factoring in another twenty seven thousand of fees. Bettering yourself, moving on, and taking the educational opportunities you’ve been raised to feel you’re entitled to by your intelligence and your efforts (and quite right too) is now going to give you a lifetime of debt. There’s nothing for you here. Move along. Where to?
“We cannot live in a society where the banks are too big to fail but whole neighbourhoods are allowed to sink without trace …Following the race riots 10 years ago, the Cantle report warned of white and black communities living parallel lives. Today the same is true, but the polarisation is not between black and white. It is between those who have a stake in society and those who do not; those who can see a future through education and those who cannot; those who can imagine doing a job that is respected and well-paid and those who cannot; those who might one day own their own home and those who do not.”
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, in the House of Commons today.
My slightly blase, guardian-reading-liberal-at-a-distance feeling about things is that this started with the kind of Political (with a capital P) response in Tottenham that was similar to the bursts of disorder in the 80s and somehow quickly became people nicking stuff. Somewhere in there a bell is ringing about levels of inequality, of the absence of a future – but these are general and larger political concerns about inequality that are not answered, in any way, by stealing a bike, a phone or a pair of trainers.
In themselves, these riots may indeed be about inequality: the concentration of wealth and power may simply have become too unwieldy, regardless of what the rioters think is going on. But for themselves, they are about power, hedonism, consumption and sovereignty of the ego. Anyone who disagrees with that is simply not crediting the participants with being able to make sense of what they’re doing. And if there’s one thing likely to incite even more rioting, it’s treating the participants as lacking independence of thought. In many ways, blame is what they each individually deserve, because recognition of their own individual agency is what they most desire.
From this blog:-
There’s always a really really stupid response buried somewhere in amongst everything else and this time I think it’s the idea of evicting people who are convicted of rioting and looting. Sorry, no, it’s only about evicting council tenants – not of putting mortgagors summarily in default and allowing the lenders to take possession, not allowing private landlords to evict without notice. In the wider political picture it’s about saying “These people are disenfranchised and disconnected from everyone to the extent that they feel content shitting on their own doorstep – so they can just fuck off” – but where to? We don’t exclude kids from our school, ever, because that just means dumping the problem on someone else and telling the student they no longer matter at all. Very occasionally, with the agreement of families, other schools and even the kids themselves, we will ‘swap’ a student in real trouble with another from a different school so they both get a chance of a fresh start but that’s all. What will happen when council’s evict families with young children because one of them was involved in looting? Will they present immediately as homeless? At that council? At the one next door? Are they just somebody else’s problem?
And The Shock Doctrine tells us to be wary of what those hedonistic individualists in power might do in response to all of this. One of the great hopes of the right, in the media and in parliament, seems to be some masturbatory fantasy about the glory of self defense, of the right to violent response to threat, and the need to beef up the law and tell people they are secure in behaving as they need to. Cameron made a statement about this the other day – homeowners and business owners (tenants and licensees? maybe not) shouldn’t worry about the niceties of how much danger they were in before taking the law into their own hands. But the law is already pretty clear, and very well developed through lots of cases over many many years, on these points. Acting in proportionate self defense is a defense to a criminal charge – a defense, not a mitigation – and quite right too. The glee you see in the pages of the Mail and the backbenches of the government (and other) parties is all about the idea of ‘proportionate’. The poster boy for this was Tony Martin, who was told first by a jury and then by the Court of Appeal that shooting an unarmed man in the back as he was leaving your property (after breaking in) was not ‘proportionate’ (and Martin’s Murder conviction was reduced to Manslaughter on appeal, but only on the grounds of diminished responsibility because he suffered from a paranoid personality disorder that hadn’t been considered by the lower court, not because of any question of proportionality). It’s a disgrace that the Prime Minister in the middle of several nights of such fear should be telling people to shoot first and ask questions later – but it’s also a disgrace that the Police took such a light approach for as long as they did. The faults lie with those in power, not those on the ground who decided to stand up and protect themselves.
Almost the defining characteristic of an active sense of community is that it is only aroused when people perceive that the established structures of control are failing. And while that might result in a lot of engagement, it is too volatile to be trusted. Big society might look like people on the streets with brooms or doner knives; but that’s not what functional society looks like.
From this piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams
No songs. I’ve had a few things in mind but for one reason or another they all seem crass and unnecessary.
Not A Series
I’ve deliberately not posted this for ages thinking that if I worked at it I could come up with a comprehensive series of ‘Dubliners’ posts but I’ve finally given up on that idea, for now at least, so here is a good folky wordy angry resigned song, but then you’d be angry and resigned if you were trying to play a gig and a police officer attacked you with a taser.
Two Gallants – Nothing To You mp3
The Movie Meme
1. Movie you love with a passion.
Pan’s Labyrinth – the first time I saw it I happened to be really ill and kept missing bits because of running out to be sick but it was still completely wonderful.
OST – Pan and the Full Moon mp3
2. Movie you vow to never watch.
Scooby Doo – I saw the first few minutes because a student was doing some work on it and it was considerable worse than my very very low expectations of it. Also Cars 2 which I may have to go and see with my nephew sometime soon but I’m working hard on getting out of.
3. Movie that literally left you speechless.
The Last Broadcast – I turned on the TV as it had just started not knowing anything about it at all.
4. Movie you always recommend.
The Last Broadcast. Pan’s Labyrinth (I have a copy in school and kids turn up at breaktime demanding to watch it). The Times of Harvey Milk (a contender for question 3). City of God.
5. Actor/actress you always watch, no matter how crappy the movie.
Catherine Keener (should be in lots more things in bigger roles). And Bill Murray, obviously.
6. Actor/actress you don’t get the appeal for.
Tom Hanks – I can see how he’s a working actor but not how he’s one of the most successful stars in the whole wide world.
7. Actor/actress, living or dead, you’d love to meet.
The Marx Brothers and Woody Allen – I started watching their films when I was about 15 and fell in love with them all – Allen was in the middle of a run of completely brilliant films (Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors amongst others).
8. Sexiest actor/actress you’ve seen. (Picture required)
9. Dream cast.
Bill Murray and almost anyone.
10. Favorite actor pairing.
Laurel and Hardy – they managed to stretch perfect short features into perfect full length features, to move from silent to sound perfectly. And Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who I managed to forget when I wrote this earlier and have just added in now, along with the songs.
Laurel and Hardy – On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine mp3
Julie Delpy – A Waltz for a Night mp3
11. Favorite movie setting.
I think the Rear Window courtyard is pretty perfect. The Restaurant and its surroundings in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The village in Local Hero.
Mark Knopfler – Going Home mp3
12. Favorite decade for movies.
Dunno.
13. Chick flick or action movie?
Dunno.
14. Hero, villain or anti-hero?
Alan Rickman’s Sheriff in the brilliant Robin Hood – The Pantomime is one of my favourite characters so Villain.
15. Black and white or color?
Both. But don’t bother about the bread.
Louder Silence
I’d never heard the original version of this song – this remix (I think it’s the ‘Jackknife Lee’ remix from the original 10″ single release, if you want a proper name for it, although I’m not entirely sure) was on a compilation made for me by an imaginary friend a long, long time ago now.
I’d heard the Leona Lewis cover which was every bit as bland and ordinary as you might imagine and found it difficult to really equate it with the song I knew. Bugger me if the original single, which I’ve finally got around to listening to, isn’t just as bland.
This version is not the same thing at all. Here it becomes a song about spaces, gaps in the world. There is just enough going on for the silence to be disrupted and for there to be an echo somewhere deep in the distance reaches of the noise. Here the emotion of the song, the words of the song, stop being cliched, stop being ordinary, and feel like a fierce last stand amidst the emptiness, and the occasional burst of noise – as trumpets cry and beats resonate – adds to that meaning, demands your attention not because it’s all that’s going on but because here it’s personal and real and honest.
declan
I had a bit of a Costello session on the way home today – digging around for demos and alternates of some favourites, and found this one which I didn’t remember ever having listened to at all. I love how lively the song is, given what it’s about, and I think the demo, just guitar and voice and without the ooomph of the band, still has all of that life to it.
Happy weekend – hot bath and cold sauvignon blanc for me please.
I’ll Protect You From The Hooded Claw
Christmas Day 1984, I’m 15. We are gathering at my Aunt’s house which is about fifteen minutes walk from mine. We get there mid morning and my dad realises he’s left some bottles at home that he meant to bring with him. I fancy the walk, so head back out. There are lots of different routes back from where I am to where I have to go but the one I take leads me along to the high street and then up over the top of the hill that the town centre slopes down, and down the other side to home.
I’m about half way up the hill when I see two people on the other side of the road come out of a house, shake hands and go their separate ways. The one walking down towards me has not long left my school, a hard as nails giant who missed half a year because of youth detention. He looks across at me as we pass and I don’t like it, and then I realise that he’s crossed the road and he’s walking behind me and he’s quietly chanting “wanker wanker” and I just keep walking and I look down at the floor and I just don’t get what’s happening and he gets closer and is walking behind me still chanting wanker wanker and I can hear his breath as loud as his voice and then his footsteps pattern changes and he punches me on the back of the head just below my left ear and I stumble forward and then feel this sweet pain sweep across my head my eyes my ear is throbbing blood pulses in my eyes I see in white and in red I wonder if I can feel blood on my neck I know all of a sudden that I’ve started to piss myself in fear and he hits me again and I stop walking and there’s no sweetness this time just a dull ache of terror and this could go anywhere and I don’t get it I don’t understand and I turn around and he swings full at my face and I don’t know how why where when but I duck the punch and I just start talking I’m sorry I don’t know what I’ve done I’m sorry I’m sorry and his name is in there sorry I’m sorry and he looks shocked and he holds his fist, his right fist, in his left hand, and his face shows concern, and time slows down, and he asks me how I know his name and I tell him with words tumbling seeing the light in another way now that I went to his school, that I know his youngest brother well don’t know him know who he is and know his middle brother a bit better used to play football for the youth club with him and he puts his hand out. Suddenly he’s back like he was when I first glimpsed him ahead of me, with a friend. He says sorry. He never would have bothered me if he knew I was friends with his family. He’s sorry again. I, of course, say it’s okay, don’t worry about it. I don’t recall saying “I understand” although it’s not impossible that I did. He walks away and I wish him a happy christmas. I turn and walk on. I don’t look back. I don’t dare.
When I’m sure I’m out of sight of him I put my hand up to feel the back of my head – it feels like there’s a dent and a lump but no blood. I get home, undress, wash, change. I look myself in the mirror and I wonder why I walked that way home. I wonder how often I’ll make a decision like that again, how often it will lead to me getting beaten up. I wonder if I’ll get as lucky next time as I did this time.
I find the bottles that brought me back here and put them in a bag ready to go. I will go back a very different way, and I won’t tell a soul about this for a year – and then I’ll tell my friends and they’ll find it hilarious and laugh long and hard, which I have to say I do understand.
I go into the living room and my sister’s Christmas present to me is sat on the turntable. I put it on and sit on the sofa and wish the world would just go away.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power of Love (12″ single) mp3
Songs from the Shows
I teach A Level Film Studies, amongst other things, and I try to change the things we do from time to time – to bring fresh material in rather than drag through the same films again and again.
Since I’ve been teaching this course, though, there are two films that I’ve taught as exam texts every year – La Haine and City of God. Recently they’ve been joined by a thematically similar third film, Tsotsi, to make up ‘Urban Stories: Power, Poverty and Conflict’.
I haven’t tired of these films at all. It’s fun – you tell a class they’re going to watch a black and white French film with English subtitles and they moan and groan, and then they refuse to leave at the end of the lesson because they want to see the end.
Home made trailer for La Haine (look for Nicholas Heller on Vimeo)
US Trailer for City of God (with terrible voiceover, but I can’t find an English one, none of the others are subtitled and I don’t want you to strain your Portuguese muscles).
Trailer for Tsotsi (which is every bit as melodramatic as the trailer makes out, but in a very good way)
From La Haine
Bob Marley – Burnin’ and Lootin’ mp3
Isaac Hayes – That Loving Feeling mp3
KRS-1 -Sound of Da Police mp3
From City of God
Ed Cortes and Antonio Pinto – Vida de Otario mp3
Raul Seixas – Metamorfose Ambulante mp3
Tim Maia – No Caminho do Bem mp3
From Tsotsi
Friday Smoothie
I had kind of thought that when these came along the would be soul/reggae things but this popped up today and, well, it works for me. Happy weekend, all.
Laura Gibson – Hands In Pockets mp3
(Um. I don’t know where I got this from and it’s entirely possible that it was one of you. Thank you, my darling, whoever you are, I’m sure you know where to call for some gratitude).
Submarine
Went to see this last night (film/book club thing) and liked it very much – it’s not a ‘wow’ film (or book) but it was good – it’s fun and funny, and sad and poignant and miserable, and clever clever some times (which is good, obviously).
It ignores some pretty big chunks of the book, including some really good bits, but the central narrative of Oliver and Jordana, 15/16 years old and knowing it all is there and is really well done. It has some of that boy’s fear thing, that acknowledgement that girls are in charge, really, whatever we might think. This was probably the strongest link to Gregory’s Girl which has been mentioned in several reviews – the mood of the film is nothing like Gregory’s Girl, though – it has none of the flippancy (good flippancy) or frothiness (good frothiness) of that film. The book’s cover makes links to The Catcher In The Rye which I don’t really agree with at all (other than it’s a first person story of a boy at that age). Some people at the book club thing didn’t like it much at all, saying it was terribly unrealistic and not as good as Adrian Mole which strikes me as the dumbest fucking argument I can even try to imagine. I will go into this in more detail if you really need want me to.
The book has a late-90s setting – dial-up internet and no mobiles. The film shifts that to sometime earlier without being at all specific – his parents’ costumes are the biggest clues and they feel more 70s than anything. Wonderfully the film featured songs specially written and performed by Alex Turner which helped to give it an ‘anytime’ feel away from the tyranny of time-specific tunes, and it’s another very good little soundtrack album I’d really recommend.
Alex Turner – Piledriver Waltz mp3
Alex Turner – It’s Hard To Get Around The World mp3
TMT♥TBMG
New York has become the latest and largest US state to legalise same-sex marriage in a move which gay rights campaigners hope will be a turning point for recognition of such unions across the country.
Full story in The Guardian
The Communards – There’s More To Love Than Boy Meets Girl mp3
Oh, one more thing….
Peter Falk, rest in peace.
Friday Smoothie
Conceived of earlier, when it was nice, like.
Sly and the Family Stone – Hot Fun In The Summertime mp3
The Support Band
I’ve been to see Fleet Foxes tonight, who I like but I don’t feel any connection to and don’t … love. They were very good, beautiful voices, songs coming over as bigger louder and angrier on stage than the do in recordings.
The support band were The Bees who I really really liked. They reminded me, a little, of a modern version of The Christians without the music having any of The Christians’ very 80s affectations – they had a similar kind of feel to them. I liked the fact that they shared so many responsibilities too – they kept moving around, drums to bass, trumpet to keyboard, used four different lead vocalists…
But mainly they just sang some really good songs.
The Bees – (This Is For The) Better Days mp3 (from Octopus)
The Bees – These Are The Ghosts mp3 (from Free The Bees)
The Bees – I Really Need Love mp3 (from Every Step’s A Yes)
(In the US they are known as ‘A Band Of Bees’ for what are known as ‘English Beat’ reasons)
Soundtracks On Repeat
Prompted by looking at the most played songs on this work computer (which was my main iTunes account for quite a long time for one reason and another) it occurs to me that I’ve been listening to quite a lot of OST things recently – Michael Nyman and Gil Evans and so on, partially I guess, because of the Film Podcast’s 10 year celebrations which included a live show with the BBC Phil doing movie themes. The song that I used to listen to a lot on here but haven’t listened to for ages was this one from The Sopranos…
Nick Lowe – The Beast In Me mp3
…although if you listen to the film podcast you’ll know there is a link to that too. Mostly though I’ve been listening to this, more or less every night for the last week or so and whilst you’ll know from this, if you know, that I’m still in the first series nevertheless I can’t help but say that it’s every bit as good as everybody had said it was. I’ll write more about it when I’ve got to the end.
The Blind Boys of Alabama – Way Down In The Hole (theme from The Wire) mp3
Love is in our hearts
One of our classes has an exam about youth culture and the media in a couple of days and I find out today, of all days, that nobody has read them this yet (it’s not my class, like you need me to tell you that) so I thought I should put it right straight away.
Colin MacInnes – Absolute Beginners (opening) mp3
There’s always this too
Friday Smoothie
Because I’d dearly love to be busy doing nothing.
Location Location Location
Some songs have co-ordinates. Oblivious is the corner of the road as I turn into the last bit of the walk to school when I was 15/16. Town Called Malice, curiously, is about fifty yards back down the street, far side of the junction, a route that I very rarely took. Ob-La-Di is middle floor room of my house in Hackney when I was 6, the front part of a room that stretched the depth of the house, played on a Pye Black Box. C’Mon Everybody and Something Else, those two Pistols singles released with The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, are Carnoustie. The whole of that ‘Big Wheels Of Motown’ compilation album is my teenage bed. A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours is my student room in Norwich, Might Be Stars is the distance between my front door and my seat on the train in the morning, Ceremony is, of course, not the bus, and Accidents Will Happen is an almost, but not quite, perfect suburban home in the States visited by magic.
Green Shirt is the Royal Winchester Golf Club. No, I don’t play off anything, never have. Seaside crazy golf, yes please (read this) but never otherwise, I think I’d do myself an injury. But this was where I walked as a teenager when I wanted to get away for just a short while – it was a walk up the hill and then along the road and then I was off the road and on the footpath as this came on and I’d usually rewind and listen a few times, partially to further anticipate the great pleasure of Party Girl but also just because it’s such a good song. Now my mum’s moved so she lives opposite that path but now I have an iPod so I don’t have to worry about getting the tape in the right place.
Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Green Shirt mp3
Elvis Costello and the Attractions- Green Shirt (demo) mp3
Playing Around
Okay, so this started by thinking back and looking around again at things from my undergraduate first year and finding this…
Erasure – Victim of Love mp3
Erasure – Victim of Love (live and acoustic) mp3
…which I liked very much although it was later when Erasure got involved in something even more playful that I really loved them.
Erasure – Lay All Your Love On Me mp3
Now, Abba produced some real dross. There are some awful, bland, dull and embarrassing moments in their catalogue. But there are some really lovely pop songs too so we all forget the dross and just celebrate, and Erasure’s ‘Abbaesque’ EP in 1992 was a wonderful celebration.
Although really I’m sure they did the whole thing just so they could dress up…
Erasure – Take A Chance On Me mp3
I find it hard to watch any of those Abba videos without remembering this…
(Not The Nine o’Clock News doesn’t entirely stand the test of time although there are some bits which are still very funny indeed – Gerald the Gorilla is a favourite.
My favourite of the cover versions is this one…
…and there was Voulez-Vous as well which was the least interesting of the four and you can go and find somewhere else BUT what made the whole thing even more wonderful was that this release was followed up by Australian Abba tribute band Bjorn Again releasing ‘Erasure-Ish’ – covers of Erasure songs in the style of Abba, which was one of pop music’s really great works of genius.
Bjorn Again – A Little Respect mp3
Bjorn Again – Stop mp3
And it’s that which is my favourite Erasure song
Erasure – A Little Respect mp3
Erasure – A Little Respect (live and acoustic) mp3
Although this cover is probably my favourite version of it…
Wheatus – A Little Respect mp3
We should probably finish with a look back at the original…
Pay no mind to those who say the world is unkind
Stuck in a little first year groove (and, by the way, ‘langley park’ and ‘viva hate’ did indeed come out on the same day, march 14th ’88 – nice to triangulate exactly where you were with exactly when). Anyway, around about now was the only time I ever saw these live and this is just ridiculously lovely and sometimes, sometimes ridiculously lovely is just the thing.
Everything But The Girl – These Early Days mp3
What is it that we do makes us what we are?
Browsing through iTunes, finding what appears, according to the listing here, to be Prefab Sprout covering ‘Since You Been Gone’ by Rainbow (which is also a cover, I know, but still…) which I think I probably would have noticed at some point in the past although you never know, I only noticed that ‘Cowboy Dreams’ was one of theirs very recently and I remember only discovering that The Jam’s ‘Get Yourself Together’ from that live EP was a Small Faces cover when I write about it and posted it at the old place, and it does get me interested, although a quick listen and it’s definitely Rainbow, in fact I think it’s a vinyl rip I did a long time ago.
But I stuck with Prefab Sprout again knowing that I wanted to write and post something and found this which takes me back to another day as a first year undergraduate, Spring 1988, living in halls at the northern edge of Norwich, about four miles from campus in one direction and two or three miles from town in another. It was Saturday and this Saturday took me to Andy’s Records, jut a few shops along from Waterstones, (spending Saturday wandering around town alone was very much my first year experience – finding a few regular haunts, Mad Hatters coffee shop and cafetieres of ‘Royal Italian’ , moving to Nightingales after Mad Hatters suddenly closed, which had a lovely if very simple blend of breakfast and Earl Grey tea,) wandering homeward at the end of the day and picking up the bus somewhere on route. That Saturday Andy’s presented me with two just released albums (which I bought as cassettes – that was all I could play at the time) -’From Langley Park to Memphis’ and ‘Viva Hate’ and I spent the evening listening to the two of them in rotation, constantly changing my minds about favourite albums and about favourite songs. These are two that jumped out straight away and have always stood out (and not only because of the coffee shop, although I’m sure that helped).
Prefab Sprout – Nightingales mp3
Morrissey – I Don’t Mind If You Forget Me mp3
*sigh*
Poet of American Freedom
Gil Scott-Heron
April 1st 1949 – May 27th 2011
Walking Out
I’m 19 years old and I’m standing at the bus-stop in the rain, feeling the kind of alone you can only feel when the only two other people there are there together. One of them is her, who I haven’t had the nerve to speak to since the second night I was here. The other is at least the second bloke she’s been out with since then. I get on the bus and hide away somewhere non-descript, knowing full well that they are going exactly where I’m going, pretending otherwise.
I get to the campus and decide to disappear somewhere else for a few minutes rather than go straight into the gig. I go down to the cashpoint to pass the time and, after I’ve been dancing the dance with the bank for the previous few weeks, it retains my card leaving me with no choice but to actually go and talk to them. Or starve. I will go and talk to them.
I go back upstairs and into the gig. There aren’t enough people there for me to ignore the two of them, although the lights going out and the support act coming on helps but the fact is, I don’t want to be here. I bought this ticket the first day I arrived and this is one of the things I’ve been looking forward to for weeks but I just don’t want to be here….
So I leave. Just turn around and walk out. And then, for the next 24 years, I don’t listen to them again.
Things got a bit better after that night – I didn’t pull things together enough to really get through the first term as I should have done but I did enough to make sure I wouldn’t have to leave and that night became a little totemistic, the low point, the moment I turned things around. I even went to talk to the bank and, for a little while, sorted things out with them.
I think I prefer a different template with a prominent blogroll to a lovely template, even one as lovely as that Saul Bass Vertigo one, with the blogroll hidden at the bottom of the screen. Can somebody be nudged to redesign that theme into a two column affair?
Never mind, we’ll always have Paris San Francisco.
Warmth
It’s the end of May and many, many days seem to pass with blue skies and the sun shining so why the fuck is it so cold? This is not some angsty metaphorical question, I’m fine thanks, but something far more literal. I did at least manage to dodge both of the sudden out of nowhere crazy downpours this afternoon but still.
We need something to warm the cockles, remind us that there are fine things. This is one of my favourite live recordings, even though it’s one of those live recordings which is technically a little bit iffy (though it’s a proper one, not like that ‘Such Great Heights’ cover recently). I’ve seen him do this live once and it was even more wonderful then – it’s a song a bit like The Pogues doing ‘Dirty Old Town’ when you are suddenly in love with the world and everyone in it and brothers and sisters we’re all in it together.
That’s better.
Tom Robinson Band – Martin mp3
Also, I’d like to thank Marks and Spencer for using that ‘…and life is like a song’ music in their advert. To anyone turning up looking for it it’s ‘At Last’ by Etta James.
machine random
I have no idea why this one song from this album is on this machine – there’s almost nothing on here at all, the only thing from me is that terrible horror metal album I found for the broccoli podcast (an aside – I can’t believe the spell check just pulled up ‘podcast’, suggesting a hyphen. Have I fallen into an alternate universe?) and some film discussion things. Ah well – this is the opening track of 2002′s ‘Before and After’ which was also released as a single which didn’t chart anywhere. Bastards, the lot of them. It’s quite boppy and dancey, too, which is always good for this time of the week.
Browsing
Having a nice new ipod has coincided with the busiest few weeks of the year with coursework deadlines and exam dates and all and I was meaning to do a happy rambling ‘i can just listen to stuff again’ post almost every day for the last two weeks and just haven’t had the time, too busy at work, to busy until late into the night and in fact yesterday after 12 years of the commute, I finally managed to sleep through my stop on the way home. Now, well, the coursework’s gone, the exam is first thing Monday morning, nothing more to do. Time to rest. Let’s pause and have a what’s come up browsing playlist from the last couple of weeks.
Special Needs – Francesca mp3
The Spinto Band – Did I Tell You mp3
We Are Scientists – It’s A Hit mp3
Seal/Adamski – Killer mp3
Tobe Hooper – Haddonfield Fear Factory mp3
Kate Nash – I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You mp3
Tiny Birds – Ariadne mp3
Sheila Nichols – Fallen For You mp3
The Tacticians – HP mp3
Wheat – Closer to Mercury mp3
The first three kind of go together for me from when I was first listening to them and I couldn’t tell you when that was other than that it was just a few years ago and was all part of the indiesoc forum thing. The video for Killer is completely brilliant and the song’s pretty wonderful too, and the next one has such a fine similar sound to it. I like Kate Nash a lot and I think this is a very lovely cover. I’ve listened to the Tiny Birds album more than anything else since directed towards it by Greer the other week, and in fact now have several kids at school listening to it a lot to go with their fandom of Mumford and Sons and Stornaway, the Sheila Nichols song just swoops and glows like almost nothing else at all. The Tacticians for the hit count, obviously, but it’s a very lovely song. No really. You know you wanna. And that Wheat song is one of the first things I ever played on the CP. There you go.
Brilliant
The ‘rally against the deficit’ is happening in London today. Organised by UKIP, the Tax Payers Alliance, the Freedom Association and the right wing of the Conservative Party it’s been trailed for months, had celebrity endorsements and loads of press coverage.
The TUC protest rally against the government earlier in the year had about half a million people in London.
Today, to support the government, they had…..
350
Three hundred and fifty people.
I reckon there were more people than that in the supermarket when I was shopping this afternoon.
This.Is.Very.Funny.
Even Toby ‘I’m a Cunt’ Young, who was one of the prime movers of the thing, wasn’t there because he had to go to an event at a museum. A publicly funded museum. Tosser.
Meanwhile…
…I got a new iPod.
To AV or not to AV
Before the General Election last year I posted a little wish-list:-
* The Conservatives don’t win (whatever way you want to define ‘win’). I find it difficult to imagine any circumstances more suited to them running away with things in the way that Labour did in 1997 but there is absolutely no sign of that at all, and I find that very funny. Really hilariously funny. The incredible bounce that everybody except the Tories, but especially those on the left, got with the 1997 election result is not something the right are going to experience now and I think that’s just lovely.
* The Greens at least come close in their main target seats (in Brighton in particular but also in Norwich which would be just lovely)
* The BNP continue to be a complete irrelevance even in their target seats.
* Esther Fucking Rantzen is publicly humiliated as a symbol of celebrities who’ve lived a life of wealth and privilege trying to cash in on public outrage about expenses to further their own image.
* The next election takes place under a system of Proportional Representation. Ideally with compulsory voting, linked with a public holiday on election day, opportunities where needed to vote in advance and the option to abstain. Why should you be allowed not to bother to vote? At the very least I’ll turn up this year on May 6th and spoil my paper.
That was a pretty good hit-rate for an election that produced such a disastrous outcome. Now this Thursday we have a chance to vote in a referendum on changing our electoral system.
The first and biggest problem with the referendum is that it’s doesn’t let you vote for Proportional Representation. AV is just First Past The Post with the post moved – it produces a result that the majority of people are prepared to say they’re okay with. It doesn’t produce a result that reflects the votes parties achieve and is therefore unfair and wrong, even if it’s a bit less unfair than the present system. The failure to get a proper PR referendum on the agenda was a terrible failure by the Liberal Democrats going into coalition.
The second and even bigger than the biggest problem, though, is that there would be one direct consequence of a ‘Yes’ vote, and that would be a happy smiling Nick Clegg saying that it has all been worth it, that the Liberal Democrats have got what they went into coalition for and that it was time to get on with supporting the Government’s program.
There is a lot of talk about separating Clegg from how you vote, that he will be gone long before the effects of this are really felt and shouldn’t be allowed to muddy the waters – that we should treat this as a vote on the electoral system in isolation from the rest of our current politics. I think this is very naive. There is no question, none at all, that a ‘Yes’ vote would be a victory for Clegg and would therefore secure him in his leadership and would secure the Liberal Democrats as active members of this coalition.
There is also a lot of talk about ‘my enemy’s enemy’ in the debate – “You have to vote Yes because the Tories / the BNP / the Devil wants you to vote ‘No’” – this is no argument at all although it’s constantly thrown out by the Yes campaign. I understand that the Tories don’t want AV but the idea that a yes vote will upset them enough to damage the current coalition goes against everything we know about them – they are interested in exercising power and they are there, in power, until 2015 at least. They are behind in the polls, in a worse electoral position than this time last year when they failed to win. They have yet to gerrymander the commons. (This is a fun sleight to make but it should be acknowledged that everyone in power does this, it’s just the way it goes). They are not going to upset the present situation (and an awful lot of them would have to get upset enough to do something about it for it to make any difference anyway – the coalition have a big majority in the House of Commons).
My earlier instincts were to vote for anything but FPTP. Now my instincts are to vote No because (1) AV is ‘a miserable little compromise’ (quote Nick Clegg in The Independent during the election campaign) and (2) ‘Yes’ will validate the Liberal Democrat’s position in the coalition.
I don’t think we will have an election before 2015. I think it would take a real generational event – like the Labour /SDP split thirty years ago – for enough Liberal Democrats to want to end the present situation and I think we’ve already had a real generational event in the forming of the coalition. A change would mean a lot of the current Liberal Democrat parliamentary party knowing that they were probably voting themselves out of the commons and historically MPs simply don’t do that. But I do think that the only possibility of an earlier change, (and I think it’s a very very small possibility), is for the Liberal Democrats to perform disastrously, in every way, electorally until then – nothing else will even make change a possibility.
So I think I’m going to vote ‘No’, although I might spoil (I’ll turn up and do something, obviously, you have to). It appears to be very very clear from the polls that ‘No’ is going to win very comfortably.
Two other things – firstly, the press are already spinning what is happening as a decisive victory for the current system. I think this is nonsense and I hope very much that one outcome of this is a Labour Party going into the next election with a manifesto commitment to a wider referendum on PR.
Secondly the downside of all of this is that the collapse in the Liberal Democrats’ support is good electoral news for the Conservatives because they, and not Labour, are in competition with the Liberal Democrats in an awful lot of their seats.
Chris Huhne, in Eastleigh, is a good example. He has majority of about 5,000 over the Conservatives with a Labour vote last time of about 6,000. Eastleigh used to be a safe Conservative seat – the Liberal Democrat’s won it in a memorable by-election after the sitting Tory MP killed himself in an auto-erotic asphyxiation accident – and it has become a reasonable safe Liberal Democrat seat because the Labour vote has slumped from over 10,000 in the past. Huhne wins comfortably because Labour supporters vote tactically.
Appointed to the cabinet as the coalition’s Energy Secretary, Huhne marked himself out by deciding to take the stage with Baroness Warsi a few days after the coalition was formed to give a joint Conservative Party and Liberal Democratic Party press conference on how awful Labour were – not a talk on government business, not a policy statement but a nakedly party political event showing us our new right wing political bloc. He specifically, and the Liberal Democrats more generally, are not going to be able to rely on that tactical vote – just as, if the referendum were to be successful, they would not be able to rely on Labour transfers.
And this will help the Conservatives win seats back from the Liberal Democrats. I can’t quite be bothered to look through the Liberal Democrat seats to see how many are likely to fall each way at the moment (although I definitely will at some point) but across the South and South West, where the Liberal Democrats are pretty strong, it is the Conservatives who will benefit from the Liberal Democrat collapse.
So it’s kind of all shit, and that’s before the electoral map has been rewritten for the Conservative’s benefit.
I still think I’ll vote no.
Snap
I should have noticed this before, the song rang a bell when I listened to the album and in my defense the earlier one was a single B-Side with a very different name. Although that’s not much of a defense. I think I prefer the album version with the shorter title.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. – White Lines, Road Signs and Vacuous Minds mp3
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. ft Kate Nash – Better Things mp3
More Heroes
Just dropping by – it’s a nice day to just drop by and say something – to comment on the furore caused by a church creating a ‘killing the dragon’ mural with a black hero in charge of the scene (the vicar was then advised by the bishop to ‘reply to those who complain personally’ which, given the complaints were run and organised by the BNP and so on, was a fairly saintly thing to say and raises my opinion of the church a little notch) although even better were the comments on the story (I can’t even remember where it was, sorry, it’s not the grauniad) which ran to the happy compromise that if they’d shown the knight with his helmet visor down nobody would have known his colour and everyone would have been happy.
‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’
That’s St George of Palestine, patron saint of his middle eastern homeland and of Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Lithunaia, Catalonia, Serbia…..
Heroes
So there I was at ‘spokesperson for a new generation’ evening classes and the teacher said to me ‘Adam’ and I said ‘Yes Billy’ and he said ‘Adam, if you’re ever to get anywhere in this world you need to understand the impact of layering* – your heroes can produce the goods for you time after time, but when your heroes combine with their heroes and when their heroes are your heroes too – well, the effect is exponential and all bets are off.”
I grinned foolishly and tried to think of something interesting to say.
Pete Townshend and Paul Weller (live at the Royal Albert Hall) – So Sad About Us mp3
* This is definitely the right word, necessarily 80s.
