So The Body Shop have started selling Ice Blue shampoo again, along with lots of other things they discontinued a few years ago, which makes me a very happy bunny although they’re only selling all of these old things for a limited time and then they will withdraw them all EXCEPT the one that wins a poll that they are having in-store. You can vote online here and if you should be passing the body shop anywhere perhaps you could pop in and vote ten or twenty times (or more, I’m easy) for the nice minty blue bottle.

I am aware that The Body Shop is just a part of L’Oreal and no longer the nice feisty independent thing it once was but I don’t care.

When I was five one of my friends at school was Canadian, and his dad was still living and working in Canada whilst he was with his mum and sister at school in London, and I went to tea one day after school and was invited to go with them when they visited home at Easter, and I went home and told my mum and dad I was going to Canada with Richard, and they said “Well…”  and I went, for a month, and whilst I was quite young and don’t remember every single thing about being there I find I can slip backwards fairly easily to some of it, and I remember snow, an awful lot of snow, and I remember ice hockey and not having a clue what was going on, and I remember being told the passover story, as my hosts were Jewish, and I remember the beginnings of learning to play chess.  But most of all I remember Sesame Street, which wasn’t on in the UK at the time and which was entirely new to me, and was just great. And it’s 40 today, so I will wish it well and blow it a kiss and think again of a month in the deep deep snow of the Saskatchewan plains lightened by The Count and Oscar and all.

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra – Sesame Street mp3

Going through my quota of visits to live shows like there’s no tomorrow I’ve been off to see Franz Ferdinand this evening.  Support band, who I managed to catch about half a song of, were good, although I’ve forgotten their name but did realise that one problem support bands often seem to have is an unwillingness to engage with the three minute pop song.  Other than that the main event was tremendous.  I’m not sure if I’m being a little naive in being impressed with the lighting/imaging/video element of stage shows – I was impressed by the Bunnymen last week but even more tonight, it was great, and I just don’t recall having seen many gigs where people went to those efforts.

The band were absolutely full of energy, played almost everything that I especially wanted to hear and played it astonishingly well, had a nice simple rapport with the crowd, bit cliched sometimes but there you go, and always appeared to be having great fun themselves – it makes a huge difference when bands are obviously enjoying themselves on stage.

Not sure what’s next, I suspect there will be a bit of a gap now, but it’s been nice to get back into gig going.

Franz Ferdinand – Michael (live) mp3

I heard a fantastic theory in the pub at the end of last week and, unlike other fantastic theories heard in the pub at the end of the week, this one continued to work for me when I thought about it again later on.  It’s based around a simple matter of shared observation – none of us has ever known a New Romantic, nor have we known anybody who knew a New Romantic.

From this developed the above hypothesis. What if the idea of a pop-culture movement was in fact made up by a handful of people who were really the only ones ever involved? This created some wonderful opportunities for fancy dress.  It explains the make up and hair for one thing, as without those we would have realised that the bass player from Visage (yes, I know, I’m hypothosising) also drummed with the Spands and swanned on beaches with Duran Fucking Duran.   I think the whole lot was made up by George and Marilyn bored stupid because there were only the regular ten other punters with cloaks to check and once they were in there was nothing to do.

The best thing about this is that it proves that Duran Fucking Duran were not real and can be discounted entirely – in fact it’s clearly the case that it’s them who were rewriting history and us now who are putting things right.

I said twelve, actually of course there is the standard thirteenth man who is at the very least a fellow traveller in just about every youth cult ever.

For Steve Strange, who I am prepared to admit probably exists in some form or other.

David Bowie – Ashes to Ashes mp3

I may be a year out here, I’m not absolutely certain, but I’m pretty sure that it was twenty five years ago today that I got My First Record Player – one that was actually mine and lived in my room as opposed to the family one that I could monopolise.  It, most assuredly, wasn’t anything much and it was also, most assuredly, everything.  I’d also just bought this so it was the first thing I played on it and, having my own secret share of obsessive compulsiveness which I will general attempt to pass off as ‘tradition’, it’s been the first thing I’ve played on every music playing device I’ve owned since then.  And, for the first time, I’m going to see them tonight, a birthday treat of sorts.

Echo and the Bunnymen – Seven Seas mp3

There is a kind of song so full of soul that years later it shouts out to me still.  I hadn’t listened to Armed Forces for an age because of the oh so severely warped nature of my vinyl copy of the album, but finding a CD copy led me straight back to this song.  There is something big and glorious about it  (I would add in the adjective ‘camp’ but I have an inkling that ‘camp’ is a little like ‘irony’ in being terribly mis- and over- used) in part because of the scale of the production – there are things here that you will hear again on subsequent Costello albums which show us how quickly he was already moving away from the new wave model of the earliest albums. So, a torch song of sorts, a real high point on a very fine album for me, and it’s nice to finally hear it without the yodel through the hills and valleys of the vinyl.

Elvis Costello and the Attractions – Party Girl mp3

I remember being  the tiniest little bit unsure of ‘Workers Playtime’ the first time I listened to it and looking at it now I really can’t see why.  The only song on the original album that I’m not entirely sure about is ‘Rotting on Remand’ just because it’s a bit obvious – and actually the opening track, ‘She’s Got A New Spell’, would be fairly near the bottom if I were to rank all of Billy’s songs – but everything else on there is assured and confident and clever and straightforward, all at once.  I’d heard ‘Valentines Day Is Over’ before at a CND demo – he’d started to play it, stopped, admitted that he’d forgotten the first line, riffed about how if you’re in a band you can always sidle over and ask the drummer, then started over properly – but everything else was new to me.

That mixture of poetic lyricism and the prosaic everyday – ‘She said kiss me or would you rather / live in a land where the soap don’t lather’ – and the plaintive emotional payoff of ‘The Short Answer’ followed by the big pay off of ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’ (which he seems to rewrite for every new tour and one time came with the great lyric in the middle verses ‘For Doctor Robert Oppenheimer created the atom bomb / but who’s gonna take the blame for BCCI, not Joseph Stalin I’ll tell you that for nothing’).

You can write a track listing for the mini-album that exists within this larger frame – the Mary album…

1. Must I Paint You A Picture
2. The Price I Pay
3. Little Time Bomb
4. Life with the Lions
5. The Only One
6. The Short Answer

… and I wonder if, in the manner of Setting Sons, what you end up with here is a concept album that ends up overspilling its concept to fill out the packaging and if that was where my reservations came from.

And I wonder also whether that line at the end of this – ‘We used to be so brave’ – is actually what all of this stuff should be all about.

Billy Bragg – Must I Paint You A Picture (extended version)  mp3

You know how this kind of thing works, someone plays this and then someone else chips in with that (and then deletes it, and then it mysteriously reappears, and now it’s gone again, *sigh*, ‘r’ in the month?) but as it happens this one is one I was listening to in the way in earlier this week and I was reminded of it again, in a way, by Matthew’s last friday five because one of the records I really remember listening to perched over in the corner of my grandparents living room with stupidly big black headphones on was ‘Rappers’ Delight’ (which is surely about to turn up somewhere else sometime very soon, it can only be a matter of time) and I have a feeling that I was looking for that when I stumbled upon this instead.  Where on earth would the late 1970s been without Chic?

Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five – The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel mp3

I picked up ‘Mr Cool’s Dream‘ the other day (bumped up as featured non-fiction in the library display on pop culture books) which is  an all but day by day breakdown of the life of The Style Council.  I’ve rarely picked up a book which feels so strongly that it should be a website (253 is the obvious one but that was a website before it was a book so doesn’t really count) – it’s a collage of short bits and pieces by various councillors and hangers-on amidst set lists and life in a top people’s recording studio.

What struck me immediately  was the note in one of the opening pieces comparing ‘Confessions Of  A Pop Group’ with ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’.   Now, don’t get me wrong, I served with Don’t Stand Me Down,  I knew Don’t Stand Me Down, Don’t Stand Me Down was a friend of mine,   you are not Don’t Stand Me Down, but I get the comparison, and I’ve always liked ‘Confessions’, enjoying it far far more than ‘The Cost Of Loving’ which I still think I’ve never listened to all the way through.

It’s a summer album, which makes it perfect for the feel of this week, September warmth, a soundtrack to the desire to be somewhere else.  Someone described ‘Interiors’ as a film the studio had to let Woody Allen make – it might not be succesful but he would be the better for having done it.  I’d like to think that Confessions is, in a similar way, a fitting end to The Style Council, that it’s this, not the rejected ‘Modernism’ that allowed them to leave with their heads held high – (and certianly not the very dancey but ethically ‘interesting’ Promised Land) and it’s the commercial suicide of most of Side One that I particularly go for, drifting through, rather than the slightly forced poppiness of Side Two.

It’s all about wit, in the end – the message from everyone I’ve read so far in the book is that The Style Council were all about having fun, not being afraid to be a bit clever clever, bending those pretention lines until they break and rejoicing in the rather elegant mess of it all – bringing an underlying  lightheartedness to what was still a great deal of singleminded political and personal songwriting.

The Style Council – It’s A Very Deep Sea mp3
The Style Council – The Garden of Eden (A Three Piece Suite) mp3

Fellow Americans, citizens of the world: Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

We cannot see inside the head of a terrorist, and yet today we understand clearly what it is he demands. A terrorist demands hate. He demands fear. Above all else, a terrorist demands war.

But a free people does not bend to the demands of terror.

Our friends and family members have died in the thousands, their bright lights of life made suddenly, brutally dark. To the world tonight I say that not one more innocent person will die in the name of this terrorist act. Not one more mother’s son in America. Not one more beloved father in Afghanistan. Not one more infant child in Israel or in Palestine.

To the men and women in uniform I say: We all must hope that your soldiering days are done. Today you are our officers of law and our keepers of precious peace. You have been challenged by a terrible crime and make no mistake, this nation’s hunger for justice is as strong as its love of peace. We look to you, to our police forces and our troops, to the elected representatives of our citizens, and to our friends and allies in the international community, to bring the full weight of law and of human dignity against the wrongdoers and criminals.

America is ever prepared to act, and to act alone if we must. Tonight, we know that we can instead act in concert with every nation on Earth. The citizens of 80 other nations died with our own in New York and Washington. The murder of innocents has been carried not only to America, but to Iran and Saudi Arabia, to Mexico and El Salvador, to Japan and South Korea, to Canada and Great Britain, to India and Pakistan. The world has been stunned into silence, but only to emerge with a voice more unified and sure than ever before in our history.

We will convene a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. We ask for the establishment of a world tribunal with authority to seek out, extradite or arrest and try those responsible for the September 11 attack, and any who conspire to commit similar crimes in the future. We call on our partners and friends within the United Nations to establish an international force to carry out this mandate. Let their work reach with unrelenting certainty into the shadowy world of terror and into the network of criminal finance, but above all else let them reach toward the diplomacy of cooperative effort. We join all the world in our expectation that this mandate will be swift and certain. We have encountered an unprecedented crime against humanity; we demand unprecedented action.

And so to the hawks I say: We salute you.

And to the doves I say: This is your moment. We leave behind us a century of war; we see ahead a century of peace. Already, this new century is stricken by the deepest of challenges. We look to you, to the peace builders, the peace makers and peace keepers, for your wisdom.

We cannot comprehend terrorism, and yet today we understand clearly that its aim is to remake the world. Let us not fulfill the prophecy of terror by providing it with martyrs and justifications. Even as we wipe the blood from our brows and the tears from our eyes, we cannot forget that we are the world’s fortunate citizens. We must take extreme care not to provide the movements we deplore with gratuitous fuel for self-regeneration.

We know that we, too, can remake the world. Let us closely examine our actions on those fertile grounds from which terror grows. Is there more to be done to bring peace and justice to Israel and Palestine? Surely there is. Is there more to be done to ease poverty and suffering in the Middle Eastern nations so rich with oil? Almost certainly, there is. Is there more we can do to hear the reasoned and gentle voices of the many who are struggling to be heard and understood? We cannot doubt that there is.

Let these, too, be our unrelenting pursuit. And let us be clear: These shall be our goals because these are not the goals of terror. Terror demands extremism, fanaticism and war. We will redouble our efforts for peace because we are a people that does not bend, does not buckle in the face of fear.

And so to the doves I say: We salute you. Fellow Americans, citizens of the world, we will meet violence with patient justice — assured of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may he watch over each one of us. Thank you.

With thanks to Adbusters.