Here we are again, and I’d like to start off by thanking all of you who got in touch to say they enjoyed last week’s mix; it seems Swiss Adam was right: make them shorter, and people are more likely to find time to listen to them. Truly, he is the Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams of the blogging world. (Somebody will get that reference, I’m sure.)
I really enjoy spending my Friday nights putting these together, although it has been to the detriment of the rest of the blog, I must admit. Hopefully I’ll get the balance right soon.
And so this week’s mix, Volume 6.2, the second hour (or so) of the six hour (or so) mix I originally put together before thinking better of it and splitting it down into six mixes, which should sound alright if you want to play them all in sequence. I guess you could say this is my equivalent of those collector’s magazines that seem to come out this time every year, where you buy one piece of a model per edition, glue it to the one you got last week and then wait until the next week when you can have your wallet lightened to the tune of a tenner in order to secure the next bit.
Except, with the Friday Night Music Club there is, in the words of Melba Montgomery’s mawkish 1974 hit (or J J Barrie’s 1976 hit, or Tammy Wynette’s version or Johnny Cash’s version or…aw you get the picture) No Charge.
And it’s more of the same this week, although perhaps a little less pop-heavy than last time, but essentially the usual formula of a real mixbag with a couple of unexpected 70s lost/over-looked/forgotten tunes thrown in (nothing as kitsch as an old one where I included The Dooleys, Guys & Dolls and The Nolans in the same mix, you’ll be relieved to hear), and where I momentarily slide off into what could loosely be called “a theme”. Fans of all things Gedge will immediately spot why The Wedding Present track follows the song it does, and how that started me off on the theme. Don’t worry, I manage to rein it in. Eventually.
If you are still dancing from last week’s mix, then this week’s definitely gives you plenty of time to have a nice sit down and get your breath back.
The first two records in particular remind me of people, if you’ll indulge me for a moment. The opening track is by The Kinks, and whenever I hear a Kinks record I’m always reminded of my mate Rob, because an old double album of their Greatest Hits, which I’d bought on vinyl from Britannia Music Club when I was a kid, would always make an appearance when he came back to my place after a night out clubbing.
The Kinks’ song I’ve selected also always reminds me of my old mate Richie. He was the first person to ever play it to me, and he insisted on performing a whole routine based around the lyrics of the song, which he mouthed as he pranced around. Truly, the spectacle of him acting out the line “…and when he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight…” was so funny it lives with me to this day, thirty-five (or so) years later.
He repeated the trick with the next song, the B-Side to Jilted John’s eponymous classic. You don’t hear Jilted John on the radio so much these days, as some of the phrases used in it are…let’s call them “of their time.” No such problem with GoingSteady, though, to my mind a much funnier song, which has does some “of their time” lyrics of its own, most notably when Double J mangles the word “butch” so that it rhymes with 70s police show stars Starsky & Hutch.
Anyway, I’ll waffle on no further, other than to slide my usual quality disclaimer in: any skips and jumps are down to the mixing software; any mis-timed mixes are down to me; all record choices are 100% mine.
Firstly, I wanted to do a mix unlike the Not Christmas one, which I thought strayed a bit too far into the territories of cheese or chart music. Whilst it served a purpose, it wasn’t really indicative of the sort of tunes which usually feature here.
This one, though is a corker, even if I do say so myself.
Regular readers may recall that way back in the late 1980s, I started DJ’ing at college because I was fed up with being able to guess what song the indie DJs would play next. So imagine my annoyance when my own brother told me that on a previous mix he’d been able to predict my next choice a couple of times. Grrr.
But this mix has proved to be such a pain to complete; when I came to do it today, it tells me that some of the tunes have been played 22 times, which gives you an idea of how many times I’ve tried to get this one right. Pretty much once a week, since Christmas.
What’s gone wrong all those times? Well, on more than one occasion professional pride kicked in: I’ve messed up a mix between tunes, so have elected to start again.
On more than one occasion, preoccupied with playing Solitaire or Candy Crush just to have something to do whilst recording the mix, there’s a sudden, irretrievable silence where the next record should be. Oops!
Once I forgot to stop recording until an hour later, and, triumphant at how the mixes had worked out, I couldn’t understand why the mix lasted over 5 hours, until I listened to it.
The other problem is booze. More than once, I’ve taken drink to such an extent that I’ve forgotten I was doing a mix until the silence after one record has finished hits home and startled me awake.
Last weekend, I got to the third record from the end, and suddenly woke up to silence and realised I’d messed up again. That’s not an indictment of the standard of the mix, by the way, more an example of how drunk I’d gotten.
Even last night, when I finally nailed it, it was my second attempt of the night, having got through most of the mix when I had a drink-spillage event, which I thought I’d sorted, until, four records from the end, suddenly the sound cut out whilst the tunes kept playing and I had no idea if it was still recording the sound or the sound of silence.
Anyway, we’ve got here, and this has been a real pain, so if you could take a listen, that would be great.
I will confess that I have broken the golden rule of not featuring the same act more than once in this mix; this wasn’t intentional, but as the various run-throughs progressed, I simply forgot said acts already appeared as “featuring” acts. One is deliberate. Sue me (Please don’t).
Time for the usual disclaimer: any glitches, skips or jumps are down to the software or the uploading/downloading process, and nothing to do with my limited mixing skills.
Oh, and the usual “effing and jeffing” warning applies; it seems I’m incapable of doing a mix which doesn’t include more than the occasional swear.
I’m not posting a link to download here, other than the one to Soundcloud, where you can either download or stream it.
I couldn’t be bothered with the last ones, but I’ve done it this time: you’ll see a list of all the acts featured in this mix at the bottom of the page, so you can check whether this one’s likely to be your cup of tea before going to the hassle of actually listening to it. If you’re particularly short of things to do, you can try to guess which song I’ve picked by which artist. There’s fun.
But by way of a description: pretty much all life is here, from indie rock to 60s California hippy-shtick, some Old Skool dance classics, some hip-hop and some soul classics via some Northern Soul belters via some TV show theme tunes (sort of); there’s some hoary old rock and some psychobilly, and a couple of tracks which should have featured in a New post by now, but the bands in question played the 6Music festival last weekend so you’ll probably know them intimately by now. And, of course, there’s The Fall.
Easy on the cheese this time, there’s even some poetry so we can all pretend we’re intellectual. You’ll have chance to dance, sit and recover for a few moments, before getting back on it again.
Available for a limited time (i.e. until I do the next one), you can download or stream this on Soundcloud here:
A week is a long time in politics, so the saying goes. And what a week we’ve just had.
First, Joe Biden was announced as the next President of the United States of America, having won control back from tantrum throwing Donald J Trump.
Secondly, in the news that I think we’ve all been waiting for more than anything: a potential vaccine for Covid-19 has been found. Of course, it has been developed by one of those massive pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, so we can expect to be charged an arm and a leg for it: Tim Berners-Lee they most definitely are not.
Now I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but as it happens, I have some experience of Pfizer products. Back in the mid-2000s they manufactured a course of tablets designed to assist people wishing to quit smoking, as I did. I’d heard about this magic pill, asked my GP about it, and he prescribed me some. I was instructed to continue smoking my normal amount everyday for two weeks, taking half of one of the tablets for that same period. Then, stop smoking and increase dosage to take a whole tablet each day. The pill would, so the bumph said, quash the desire to smoke.
I utterly failed to give up as a result, soon sliding back to my bad old ways. To be fair, I don’t think that Pfizer had reckoned with quite how dedicated to smoking I was back then.
One of the reasons I failed to quit on that occasion was because the tablets made me feel really nauseous. Ordinarily, when I’d had a few too many drinks and felt pukey, I rarely reached for a cigarette, so I did wonder if that was the masterplan all along: make the patient feel unwell so they don’t want to smoke.
Shortly after this latest of many falls off the wagon, I decided to give them another go, and returned to my GP to ask for a new prescription, only to be told that they no longer prescribed this course of tablets. He was a little evasive as to the reasons, but I was told by a friend who worked in the NHS that there had been reports of multiple people, almost exclusively men, who had been prescribed the same drugs as I, and who it later transpired were vulnerable in terms of their mental health. Placed on a course of these pills, the rumour went, they either had violent, psychotic episodes or they committed suicide, or both. Although (I hasten to add) no link was formally identified, I gather there sufficient concern to lead GPs to refrain from continuing to prescribe them to anyone.
Now, I am not for one second saying that the Covid vaccine is going to have the same effect, in fact it seems extremely unlikely that it would, given the (anecdotal) history I’ve just outlined. I’m sure we’ve all noticed a much greater focus on people’s mental health during lockdown than I can ever remember happening before, and that’s to be welcomed; but – as with any new drugs rushed on to the market – we need to make sure all testing is done to ensure that there are, if not none, then very limited side-effects.
I guess what I’m saying is we should be cautiously optimistic. Let’s not all go wild and drop our guard: we should continue as I hope you all currently are: wearing our masks, socially distancing, washing our hands, and only leaving our homes for essentials. In other words: don’t get carried away, or, if you prefer, just play it cool :
Speaking of getting Carried away (see what I did there? No? Ok, we’ll come back to this…), thirdly, this:
I wrote in my recent post about the American elections that suddenly both social and the mass media appeared to have developed spines, and this seems to have spread to the UK as on Friday night Prime Minister Honey Monster booted out his right hand man and architect of all things dastardly Dominic Cummings.
I’ll admit that when the kernel of this story first surfaced on Thursday, I assumed it was a No 10 tactic to divert attention away from the most unwelcome news that the UK was the first country in Europe to pass 50,000 Covid-related deaths.
Yey! Go Us! Number 1!! Whoo-hoo!
It seemed such a non-story, a bit of in-house cat-fighting as Lee Cain quit after having his promotion from head of communications to chief of staff was blocked by Johnson’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds (OK, now do you see what I did there??).
First things first: who the heck is Lee Cain, and why should we give a monkey’s about him quitting? Well, he was the former Vote Leave campaign official who started out as a tabloid journalist with The Sun. After a short period of employment with The Mirror where he was employed to dress as a chicken to taunt David Cameron (surely a pig would have been better…), he went on to work for the Vote Leave organisation in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum. He was the Head of Broadcast for the successful push to quit the EU, working closely with campaign director Dominic Cummings.
Let’s back up a moment here. I’m sure you noticed it. He worked for (right wing rag) The Sun and the (left wing rag) The Mirror. This is not a man whose CV screams “consistent political allegiance”.
Let’s back up a bit more and just remind ourselves that Vote Leave, under Cummings and Cain’s supervision, were fined £61,000 and referred to police for breaking electoral spending laws.
At this point, I have to say I’ve made my mind up about Cain: he’s a flim-flamming charlatan, a law-breaker, seemingly more interested in progressing his own career than, say, doing what is best for the country. To me, he is absolutely not someone that I would want to have anywhere near power.
Not a view shared by those in actual power, it seems.
Having made the switch into Conservative politics, he then found PR roles at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under Spitting Image-puppet made flesh Michael Gove – presumably because he wasn’t one of those ‘experts1 Gove announced we were all so tired of – and very briefly at Downing Street under Dancing Queen Theresa May.
In 2017 he left to join Johnson as his spokesperson at the Foreign Office. When “Boris” walked out of the cabinet – he’d run out of countries to offend, if memory serves – Cain walked out with him, even working without pay for a short period, telling journalists that “the boss would come good”. What a martyr.
Note: if you can afford to work for a period, no matter how short, without pay, you were probably being paid too much to do the job you left. Just saying.
When Johnson made it to No 10 last July, Cain landed a key job – Head of Communications – in the inner circle. He was identified as the “evil genius” who put his old mate Cummings forward to become the PM’s most senior adviser.
His exit from No 10 followed Allegra Stratton’s appointment as the government’s spokesperson for new White House-style TV briefings. Cain is said to have had a hissy-fit and flounced out several days ago, insisting that he must get the job of Chief of Staff since he would be side-lined on communications by the arrival of Ms Stratton.
In a bid to keep Cain in a job, it was rumoured that Cummings had threatened to go too. And here’s the problem: after Cummings’ infamous drive to Durham, followed by a further drive to check his eyesight when the rest of the country was in Lockdown 1, in the face of popular public opinion, Johnson decided to stand by him. Consequently, the man thought he was bullet-proof.
Much as I love the Poppies, it’s incredible to think that band member Clint Mansell is now one of the most respected film score composers.
But I digress. Now in the middle of Lockdown 2 (“Corona’s Back…and You’re Still Dead”) it all kicked off again on Friday, when Cummings and Cain were summoned to Downing Street to explain themselves, Johnson having evidence – in the form of text messages sent by unidentified whistle-blowers to his partner Carrie Symonds (you’ve got it by now, surely?) – that they were briefing against him.
Who could possibly have foreseen that a pair with histories the likes of Cummings and Cain carried with them would prove to be scheming, duplicitous shits? Budding Iago’s, the pair of them (there, that’s a cultural reference you weren’t expecting!).
Of course, Machiavellian mastermind that he is, Cummings spoke to the press on Thursday night/Friday morning, saying that that it had always been his plan to be become redundant by the end of 2020.
And to support this, he says that he says that he wrote about it on his blog back in January 2020.
We’ve been here before, haven’t we?
You’ll recall that after his little jaunt up to his illegally built farmhouse earlier this year, he gave an interview where he said this: “For years I’ve warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.”
But according to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (which is a lot more credible than it sounds), sometime between 8 April 2020 and 15 April 2020 – just before his trip – Cummings’ 2019 blog on pandemics was updated to include a paragraph on SARS (which, along with Covid-19, is also caused by a coronavirus).
This is also confirmed by the website’s sitemap information. This shows that this particular blog post appears to have been edited on 14 April 2020. Prior to this, his blog made no mention of coronaviruses.
I wonder: has anyone checked whether his statement about wishing to be largely redundant by the end of the year made via his blog wasn’t added at a later date too?
And that’s where we are now: Cummings and Cain both booted out of Number 10 a month or so earlier than they say they intended to leave anyway. It’s like when you got dumped as a teenager, and were desperate to wrestle back control of the narrative: “No, I finished with her…”
Now: why would Cummings and Cain both want to extricate themselves from positions of power within the Government before the end of the year? You got it: because on January 1st 2021, we leave the EU and everything is pointing to that being an absolute shit-show. Nobody is going to buy the Covid excuse that will doubtless be rolled out, because that has been handled so ineptly too. Best you distance yourselves from it, eh lads, just as most of them did after the referendum.
Look, don’t get me wrong: I’m glad he’s finally gone. It’s the first thing Johnson has done in his feeble premiership that I’ve agreed with, as it goes. But I think it’s a case of too little, too late.
There’s a reason for that – and no, in case you’re concerned, it isn’t related to my Dad’s health (although at the time of writing he is still in hospital).
This is one of those posts which I’ve started writing and have no idea where it’s going, so bear with me.
I had a long chat on the phone the other day, and during that conversation the person I was chatting to mentioned they read this, and asked me how my stats were.
It was a trick question, for I had previously told them that I wasn’t interested in how many views or visitors this place has had anymore. And yet I was able to answer quite precisely. Which meant I was getting too fixated on that aspect of blogging, the chasing of numbers. And so I took some time out.
Saturday mornings, though, is almost traditionally where I have a rant about whatever’s going on in the world that yanks my chain. It used to be Brexit, but now it’s Covid-19, or more specifically the Government’s handling of it.
“Now is not the time to be apportioning blame!” howl the gammon-faced who habitually do just that. “Now is the time to come together to defeat the common enemy” they scream in a rare moment of lucidity, attempting to evoke some kind of Blitz-spirit, even though World War 2 and the current crisis are in no way comparable.
Ok. I won’t then. But let me know when it is okay to criticise the Government’s handling of the pandemic crisis and I’ll happily chip in. It’s clearly not the day when they missed their target of 100,00 tests a day by the end of April (goal posts moved: that was what the pledge was, but now it’s to have the capacity to test rather than to actually test).
And that’s why I’m slightly reticent about writing a political post today, for satirical behemoths – BBC1’s Have I Got News For You and BBC Radio 4’s The News Quiz – have both aired; I’ve watched/listened to them both, so I worry I may be inavertently nicking a gag or a point from one of the more famous participants.
But the Goverment’s position – that they had achieved or nearly achieved the target – is just laughable. For the stats they announced failed to take into account those who were tested more than once, and included testing kits which had been posted out, rather than those which had actually been returned and tested.
The adjusted figures I have seen suggest a figure of around 714,000 per day was actually being tested. And that’s fine, that’s good: that’s better than 713,000 per day.
But here’s the problem: we don’t believe politicians any more. I mean, you only have to look at who our Prime Minister is to see that’s true. Nobody believes a word that Boris says, because it’s Boris and we all know his history as a liar, a serial philanderer, a bully, a Brexit flip-flopper until the moment suited him, and the most shamefully incompetent and yet self-promoting Mayor of London in history (OK, for the latter part I’ll give you Dick Whittington: say what you like about BoJo, he hasn’t got a pantomime named after him. Unless you count the Cabinet, of course. Boom! Satire! ) and yet we – and by we, I do not mean me – voted the tousle-haired absentee Latin-quoting shagger into office.
It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Janet Street-Porter, but I saw this the other day and found myself nodding in consensual confirmation:
I mean, she’s right, isn’t she?
We may have a bull-shitting, bizarrely coiffured, absentee numb-nut in charge, but at least we don’t have this bull-shitting, bizarrely coiffured, (golfing) absentee numb-nut in charge:
I *love* the way he has to clarify the word “doctor” by prefixing it with the word “medical”. You know, like all those other kinds of non-medical doctors you might ask about this kind of thing.
The day after that press conference, there was a spike in the amount of people admitted to hospital in the US, having injected themselves with bleach in the hope of ridding themselves of any virus potentially coursing through their neanderthal veins. Cue the POTUS back-pedalling and claiming he was “being sarcastic” when he suggested it. Of course you were, Donny.
See, perhaps when you say something sarcastic that is no more ludicrous than many other things you say, you need to make it a bit more obvious that it wasn’t an instruction:
A thought: if someone is so stupid as to think that by injecting disinfectant directly into them is a good idea – and by which I actually mean not only believing but acting upon anything Trump says – aren’t these exactly the braying yee-haw rednecks we should celebrate being removed from the gene pool? (And a big hello to all my American readers!)
That’s why Trump back-tracked: not through any concern or remorse for people self-harming as a result of his *coughs* sarcastic words, but because he realised that only his supporters would be dumb enough to do it, and dead people can’t vote him back in. Although he’d probably find a way to allow it. As long as they weren’t black, obviously.
But I’m not talking about any of that today. (Yes, that was me not talking about it. Welcome to my world.)
Instead, let me take you back to November 2019, when regular readers may recall I had to decant from my flat into temporary accommodation in a Travelodge whilst some anti-subsidence works were done to my residence.
I always promised I would write about my time in this Partridge-esque setting, but truth be told nothing much happened which deserved comment. There was no breakfast and so no Big Plate – sorry, there was breakfast but it was “breakfast on the go”, so a scrambled egg bagel, a coffee and a fruity muffin (stop it!) all for the princely sum of £5.25 per day and nowhere to sit and eat it, so I declined it every day – and other than my key not working every now and then (actually, more now and also then), there was nothing much to report.
Look. Here’s the view from my room; this as exciting as my time there got:
Beautiful, right? If that’s not inspiring, then I don’t know what is.
When I finally returned to my flat, I found that the workmen had literally done as little as possible. They had started painting my kitchen, but gone no further than painting the borders. They had been instructed to obtain new lampshades for the Big Lights in the living room and bedroom, but had elected to just swap them in the hope nobody would notice. They installed a new curtain rail and curtain which left about six inches between bottom of curtain and bottom of one window. They didn’t bother covering anything when painting the rooms, so now my belongings – a fridge/freezer, a coffee machine to name but two – have paint spattered on them, as does the bathroom and kitchen floor.
Along with the spattered paint, several clues had been left throughout the flat to confirm they had ever even been there: numerous fag ends tossed on the floor; paint on the windows – not just close to the window frames, but sloshed across the pane like blood at a crime scene; sandpaper, paint and rolling trays nonchalantly left on top of the cooker, a box of black rubber gloves left on the mantlepiece.
Wait, what?
Truth be told, that box of black rubber has subsequently saved me a couple of quid, since for the last month or so, the wearing of latex gloves has been demanded whenever leaving the boundaries of my residence.
Keen to observe goverment directives, (when they finally came) I ordered a surgical face mask, and was delighted when it arrived, for finally I could go outside without attracting the sort of glances usually reserved for serial killers and sexual deviants (I imagine).
Which was ironic for now I actually looked like a serial killer. Rocking the black latex gloves and surgical mouth-mask look gave me the appearance of popular 80s murderer Denis Nilson; whenever I ventured out I felt like I was en route to a serial killer-themed party.
Plus, I also found that every breath from my Covid-19 defiant, mask-covered mouth and nose caused my glasses to steam up. Any spectacles wearer who has walked into a crowded pub on a winter evening will know what I mean. Faced with the choice of inadvertently passing on a virus I don’t think I have or accidentally walking out into the middle of the road and the path of an oncoming bus, I chose the former.
And let me tell you ladies and gentlemen, that if there’s one thing worse than the disapproving looks you get for not wearing a surgical mask at all in public during pandemic times, it’s the looks you get for obviously having a mask but electing to wear it slung casually loose around your neck, rather than in place in front of your wheezing breath orifices.
I’m reminded of Rhod Gilbert’s encounter with the travelling chef on a train:
Time for an appropriate tune: Tina Turner’s Steamy Windows springs to mind, but I bloody hate that song, so instead, this:
You know the schtick round these parts by now: post a song within a series, or drop a vaguely amusing story (and link it to a song), or bang on about politics (and link it to a song) blah blah blah.
But the songs I post are generally older ones that you all know already, or maybe have forgotten about; as historically I have never been first to discover a band, I prefer to leave all that “breaking new acts” to those with a better ear for that kind of thing, and a better turn of phrase for describing it than I.
But this morning: something different. The story of a band who peaked in the mid-to-late 1980s then promptly vanished without a trace, amid animosity, violence and even rumours of death and murder.
And I know for a fact that you won’t have heard of them, or anything by them.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the magnificent:
I mention Third Light now because today the three founder members, Rob, Phil and “Swing” will be reconvening. It is the first time they have laid eyes on each other in over thirty years.
Let’s get the admin out of the way first: Third Light is one of the coolest band names ever. Fact. But what does it mean? Well, Wikipedia tells us that Third Light is supposedly a superstition among soldiers during the Crimean War to World War II. Since then it has been considered bad luck for three people to share a light from the same match. The superstition goes that if three soldiers lit their cigarettes from the same match, the man who was third on the match would be shot. The enemy would be alerted to their presence by the first light, able to take aim by the second, and by the third…well, you get the idea.
It would turn out to be a most prophetic name.
The trio first met at school, but had little to do with each other until one Friday night in their final year when a “disco”, for want of a better word, was held in the school hall. But this was no ordinary school disco, it was open to locals too. And more importantly, it had a fully licensed bar. And even more importantly than that, one of the more senior teachers worked behind the bar and he was perfectly happy to serve alcohol to his pupils, even when he recognised them out of uniform, so to speak. (Indeed, it was this teacher and this act of generosity which inspired the first band name suggested: Cliff and the Babes, a name rejected for sounding too much like a novelty act. As if Cliff would have anything to do with children. Take heed, BBC!)
The three found themselves at the bar together, supping pints of snakebite and black, all suddenly aware that they were rocking a very similar look: dressed all in black, hair spiked-up, skinny tight jeans. It was to become a look adopted by their many fans over the next few years; indeed you sometimes spot them to this day. You might know them as goths, or Emo, but back in the day they were known as Lighters.
And it was in this crowded bar on that Friday night that the three of them looked each other up and down and all came to the same decision: it’s not my round. And then they came to another one: these two geeks are my ticket out of here.
They didn’t need a ticket out of there that night though; they were chased out by a group of local thugs who didn’t appreciate people turning up looking a bit different. That night they were forever united as the pitchfork brandishing and flaming torch waving lynch mob kicked seven bells of shit out of them on the village green. Apparently it’s quite hard running away from danger when you’re in skinny jeans, a flouncy blouse and winkle-pickers. If there was any justice in this world, which we know there isn’t, but if there was, then there would be a blue plaque to them there now. But there isn’t.
The next day, the freshly bandaged three amigos met up again, and their master plan was hatched. They would buy guitars and maybe even learn to play them. The group was split on the need to actually learn how to play their instruments: Phil thought it was important, Rob said he wasn’t going to bother unless the other two definitely were going to, “Swing” pointed out that Sid Vicious couldn’t play his bass guitar and it never did him any harm, Rob and Phil agreed that was a fair point, but the heroin addiction and propensity to murder his own girlfriend didn’t exactly do him much good either.
They did agree that the first step in their march to world domination was to gain notoriety. And so it was that they went to the pub, played some pool and politely agreed with the regular customers that you don’t get two shots on the black, put loads of money in the juke box, programmed it to play Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11 on repeat until all of their money had run out, then left mid-way through the first rendition.
But the cracks were already appearing. Phil did buy a guitar and set about learning some basic chords. Rob told him to let him know once he could play A7, and he’d think about trying to. But several months later, when Phil had mastered that chord, Rob sent him away again, with the same instruction, but this time for F#, but as a bar chord, mind, not the easy way. The chain of command had been established.
“Swing” meanwhile got hold of an electric guitar which, rather than make any attempt at learning to play, he set about taking apart to see how it worked. And after he’d done that, he realised he didn’t know how to put it back together again, so that was the end of that. Back to being the Sid of the band it was, then.
And still the music, the sweet, sweet music kept not coming. The trio worked hard on their “difficult first album”; they designed a logo (as above) and came up with a title: “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing.”
And then, the irony-o-meter went off the scale as suddenly the band no longer had Swing. He disappeared without a trace. Many said that he was dead, some said he was murdered. Then came the usual Lord Lucan-esque rumours that he had been spotted. In much the same way as conspiracy theorists said that Paul McCartney was dead because he appeared on the cover of Abbey Road with no shoes on, so the whispers grew that Swing had been spotted on a zebra crossing wearing nothing but his shoes.
Rob and Phil soldiered on, arranging publicity shots to send out as missives to the likes of the NME. Only one photo survives from that shoot:
In a rare interview in 2015, Phil added a further layer to the mystery, when he was quoted as saying: “It’s an interesting story. Being only weeks after Swing died, Rob and I decided to push on with the new single release. This publicity shot was the first one since his death. Imagine our surprise when the picture was developed with Swing’s face in between us.”
But the band could not recover from the loss of their most enigmatic, if musically ungifted member, and they disbanded just as the major labels were forming orderly queues to sign them up (it says here).
But now they’re back, Back, BACK! And who knows, maybe this time around they may get around to actually recording something. If they do (they won’t) I suspect it will sound like a hybrid of these five bands, all of whom were cited as influences in early interviews:
I’ve not written one of these for a while, and a couple of things prompted me to dig out today’s compilation CD.
Firstly, on this week’s edition of The Chain, Alex G suggested a track by All About Eve, which reminded me that I had bought a compilation album entitled CD88 back in 1988 that had a track by them on it.
Secondly, I found that the ever wonderful Cherry Red Records have released a triple CD of Indie tracks from 1988, entitled C88, which, looking at the track-listing has just entered my list of must-get albums at number one.
CD88 was one of a long series of Indie Top 20 albums released by Beechwood Music Ltd which started back in 1987 and ran into the mid-1990s. There’s a pretty wonderful and comprehensive blog which focuses on these albums here.
The albums were released two or three times a year, with the occasional Best of the Year editions thrown in every now and then for good measure. CD88 was one such volume, sort of. For it’s important not to be misled by the title: it’s not a Best of the Indie tracks which were released in 1988, it’s a Best of Indie tracks which was released in 1988. Confused? Let me put it another way: it covers the first five volumes of the Indie Top 20 compilations, which were released in 1987 and 1988.
Here’s what it says on the booklet that accompanies the CD (which, I have found when writing this, also got a vinyl release):
“CD88 is a testament to the vital role played by the independent chart. Many of these hit singles have never been and might never be available on CD elsewhere.
CD88 is a collection of outstanding singles that have since become indie classics, and for many, subsequently served as the springboard from their Independent roots to major label and Gallup chart status.
Each track is chosen from the successful Indie Top 20 compilations, plus four classic tracks previously not included in the series. Indie Top 20 is released every three months to highlight the best of the new singles which have made a high impact on the National Independent Chart.”
It’s funny when you find yourself getting all wistful and nostalgic at the mere mention of the Gallup charts, isn’t it?
Anyway, I was going to just post the songs that I love from this compilation – a Best of the Best, if you will – but, on reflection, have them all, along with their original artwork. Perversely, for an album celebrating the Indie Top 20, there are only nineteen songs on it:
I’m not a massive fan of All About Eve (the band, not the film, or The Wedding Present track), but this is okay enough, and definitely fits the “before they were famous” mould that defines many of the acts/songs here, for this record reached the giddy heights of #87 in the UK charts in 1987.
If you’ve ever wondered where Chain Gang regular The Robster got the inspiration for the title of his excellent blog, then look no further.
As well as making me think of Rob, this record always reminds me of my first year at college, when me and my buddies would traipse along to the Student’s Union every other Tuesday to attend “Funk Off”, the Indie Night, and it was here that I first heard this tune.
This was before I started DJing there myself – I wrote about how I started DJ’ing at college, and how the chap who taught me to DJ had introduced me to quite a few records (here) and this is one of them – and one of the resident DJs, Jolly Jim, had played it; generally someone in our gang would be able to tell you what a record was if you didn’t know, but this one drew blank looks from everyone. I couldn’t not know, so I nervously shuffled up to the DJ booth which would soon become practically my second home.
“‘Scuse me mate,” I called to Jim. “What’s this record?”
Jim looked at me with some mixture of surprise and joy; surprise because admitting you didn’t know a record was definitely not considered a cool thing to do at Funk Off, and joy because he was able to impart some wisdom.
So the Cardiacs track was probably the one most responsible for me buying this album in the first place. If you’ve never heard this one before, I urge you to give it a listen (Part 1 of 2).
This, on the other hand, is another absolute belter of a forgotten track. Although, having said that, a few years ago, Hel and I DJ’d a couple of times at the now defunct Mucky Pup bar in Islington. I happened to be there on a night when we weren’t playing, and was staggered when the DJ played this, partly because I was annoyed that I hadn’t played it the week before, but mostly because I genuinely didn’t think anyone else remembered it, much less did I expect to meet anyone else who did. As it played, I spoke to the DJ, commending him on his choice. He looked at me with an air of bafflement. “You know this record??” he asked. Oh yes. If you’ve never heard this one before, I urge you to give it a listen (Part 2 of 2).
This lot cropped up on my Replenishing the Vinyl series a couple of weeks ago, and The Robster left a comment about how this was his favourite track by them. Mine too, mate, mine too.
In the late 1980s, no Indie compilation worth it’s salt was without a track by The Wedding Present, a band who I still love to this day, as I have mentioned many, many times on these pages. This is one of their greatest (early) singles. Take it away, Grapper!
Ditto: The Soup Dragons, whilst they were still in their playful pop mode, as they were here. Many happy memories of pogoing around the Students Union dancefloor to this one.
Thankfully, the version lifted from The Texas Campfire Tapes, rather than the (nowhere near as good) rock version which crops up as a bonus track on Short Sharp Shocked.
My old mate Rich got in touch after I last posted a track by this lot to tell me that this tune reminded him of when we were kids listening to records in my bedroom. I’m not sure there’s a finer definition of late 80s jangly indie pop than that.
I’d never heard of Wire before I picked this CD up, but this is great. Not as great as similar period Eardrum Buzz and nowhere near as good as their earlier stuff, but a bad Wire record is still a pretty good Wire record in my book.
This lot were, not least because of the blessing they received from one Steven Patrick Morrissey, once tipped to be the next big thing, but it never happened for them. Mostly because every other record of there’s seemed to sound almost exactly like this, but not as good.
Perhaps the surprise inclusion on this compilation. Nowadays, this would doubtless attract sneery comments about diversity targets being met, but that would detract from the fact that this is a brave and beautiful political record, latterly covered by Billy Bragg.
Manchester legends, who I’ve never really got into for some reason. My loss, I’d imagine. And having just listened to that for the first time in god knows how many years, it is pretty ace.
A side project of the Sonic Youth gang, plus Firehose and Minutemen member Mike Watt and J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr, taken from a tongue in cheek tribute to Madonna which I’m not going to name as I have a sneaky feeling that if I did, it might crop up again on these pages quite soon….
The sound of another band, soon to be quite large indeed, still honing their musical sound. The deliberate mis-spelling of America is, I suspect, making a point still relevant today.
Taken from Box Frenzy, their first album where they stepped away from their grebo sound and started using samplers.
One last thing before I go: this compilation holds a special place in my heart, for it was the first record of many that I ever bought in the oldest record shop in the world, Cardiff’s “Spillers Records”, a store which became a regular haunt for me over the following twenty years. It’s moved premises since I last lived in Cardiff, but this is how I remember it:
Now that’s a proper record shop. And now I’m getting all wistful and nostalgic again.
You can read about it here, or, better still, go here and spend a few quid to keep them going.
I bet you all thought I’d got bored of writing this series already, didn’t you? Well, truth be told I’d decided I would try to go through this list of compilation albums that I’ve bought in the same way as the main theme of this blog (is supposed to), that is in the chronological order in which I bought them. Not that any of you will know what I bought and when, of course, but I have standards, godammit.
But truth be told, I found today’s selection quite tricky to write about, as there seems to be so little info out there on that there interweb thing on a couple of the bands featured.
But what the heck, here goes anyway.
“Take the Subway to Your Suburb” is a ten track sampler released in 1986 for The Subway Organization, an independent record label founded a year earlier in Bristol by Martin Whitehead.
In the mid-1980s, if you were a new jangly guitar indie pop band you needed to be from Manchester so that you could pretend to be friends with The Smiths. If you weren’t, then Bristol was the next best thing, and if you weren’t from there either (or the west country generally), then having some affiliation to the city was essential.
Step forward The Subway Organization. (And yes, it does annoy me they chose to spell it with a Z, since you’re asking.)
Some great bands released records on Subway: Shop Assistants, The Charlottes (I went to school with the guitarist’s brother, name drop fans!), The Groove Farm, Bubblegum Splash!, Rodney Allen (who went on to join The Blue Aeroplanes), and The Soup Dragons (their wonderful 3-track Buzzcocks-sound-a-like “Whole Wide World” 12″ was released on the label).
But none of those feature here. Instead, the ten songs are divided between six bands, four of them (The Chesterfields, The Flatmates, Razorcuts, and Pop Will Eat Itself – when they were still a grebo band, and long before they had discovered the joys of sampling) getting two tracks each, and two bands (The Clouds and The Rosehips) getting one track apiece.
Oh, and just in case none of those names mean anything to you and you want an idea of what they all sound like: think of the bands on Subway’s roster as the less winsome, more shambolic brother to Sarah Records. Hope that clarifies.
I bought the album on the strength of it featuring The Chesterfields, whose “Kettle” album I was, and still am, profoundly in love with (it’s one of those albums that has “stayed with me” since the day I bought it), but this compilation introduced me to the delights of The Flatmates, who I went on to buy several records by (the two songs featured here convinced me that they were the new The Shangri-Las, and nothing I’ve heard since dissuades me from that view), and to a stone cold classic of the jingly-jangly C86-ish genre by The Clouds (a song I consider to be on a par with the blooming wonderful “Therese” by The Bodines, which featured in #2 of this series).
When I used to prepare a new mix-tape to play in the sixth form common room – something which, as I’ve mentioned before, I used to do pretty much every other evening – I would always be annoyed if there was too much silence at the end of one of the cassette sides of the C90, Side One in particular. Leave too much of a gap there, and somebody might stick the radio on instead, and then all of my Side Two handiwork would go unappreciated.
This would often lead to furious rejigging of the running order, a time consuming feat back in those days when you had to re-record them all. Luckily, one of the songs by The Chesterfields on this album is so short (0:54) that it would often feature at the end of Side One of any mix-tape I compiled with such a gap (where either “Velocity Girl” or “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want This Time” didn’t quite fit.)
As with many great record labels – Factory, 4AD – you can tell it’s a Subway record just by looking at it, so distinctive were the designs by The Terrible Hildas, who created the sleeves for much of the label’s output.
I couldn’t decide which songs to post and which to miss out from the ten featured, so I figured, I’d post the lot, especially bearing in mind the brevity of the aforementioned track.
Now, I’ll be honest, most of these are very much “of their time”. Which is precisely why I still love them, 31 years after I first bought this album:
Side One (or, as they put it on the album sleeve: “On One Side of This Record”)
And before any of you write to tell me, yes, I know that at some point or another, in the world of CDs, this album got a make-over and an expanded twenty-two song version was released. I didn’t buy that, I bought this ten track vinyl version. And no, I don’t feel cheated by that.
Particularly as I’ve subsequently brought the all encompassing double CD ‘The Best of The Subway Organization 1986–1989’, released, somewhat predictably, by the wonderful Cherry Red Records in 2005. Which will feature at a later date, of course.
It’s a very special Friday Night Music Club this week for two reasons: firstly, in the UK it’s Easter Weekend, so a long weekend (No work til Tuesday!); secondly, as I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m going to see Underworld tonight.
In my younger days, I was always quite resistant to dance music. If a tune didn’t have guitars on it, I wasn’t interested.
But over the years, my resistance got chipped away, and so I thought tonight I’d play you a selection of dance tunes which were milestones for me.
So, first up is a stone-cold classic, the biggest selling 12″ of all time:
Now I wish I could say that I bought this when it first came out. Well, I could say that, but it’d be a big fat whopping lie. In 1983, I had no idea who Joy Division were, or that New Order had risen from their ashes, but I did see the now legendary appearance on Top of The Pops where they insisted on playing Blue Monday live, and after which, famously, the single went down in the charts.
In 1988 I went away to college, and by 1989 I was DJing the Indie Night every other Tuesday. The night was, frankly, dieing on its arse. Some weeks we were lucky to get 20 people through the door. And then three things happened:
Rave culture kicked in
Closely followed by “Madchester”
A load of Indie bands that I liked suddenly started messing around with dance beats and getting their records remixed by respected DJs.
And so suddenly, we were able to play all of these great records (not the rave ones, though) at our little Indie Night and so for a very short while these records moved centre stage and we had our finger right on the pulse.
Did you manage to get the “Oh Yeah!” bit in the right place? I always feel so chuffed when I do. The simple pleasures that life brings, eh? Pathetic really.
One Tuesday night, a couple of lads from Nottingham, decked out in hooded tops and flared jeans, pressed their faces up against the shatterproof glass which surrounded the DJ booth in the Students Union and mouthed “Got any Mondays?” at me. I hadn’t (my finger wasn’t quite on the pulse at this point, more tapping to see if I could find a good vein) but said if they wanted to bring some in I’d be happy to play it. 10 minutes later, after they had bombed back to their flat to collect, I had the next record held in my hands. The title intrigued me. I played it. The dance floor didn’t exactly fill, but quite a few joined the two lads Daints and Peetey (the former of which I would form a band with shortly afterwards) as they started to frug away in what I learned sooner after was a fair approximation of Bez:
Many years later, when I had finally started going to club nights, we went to see Jon Carter play in The Emporium in Cardiff. I remember I was just leaving the dancefloor when the vocal part of “24 Hour Party People” kicked in and I found myself scrabbling to get back to the dance floor sharpish. One of the biggest, non-checmically induced, rushes I ever had.
There was another band who ditched their early sound to start producing records which were neither Rave nor Madchester, a band I loved when they were Grebo, and loved even more when they started messing around with loops and samples. This is one of their last singles, probably one of my favourites, which always takes me back to a basement indie club in Cardiff called G.W.’s that Daints and I often frequented after we’d left college:
The success in reviving the Indie Night, for which I naturally took all the credit, led to me being asked to co-DJ the Saturday night slot with a lad who we nick-named Dave Doubledecks on account of him running his own mobile DJ outfit, but whose name was actually Phil. This night exposed me to a great many other dance records which were by now, circa 1990, the main staple of the UK Charts, and there were some that, much as I absolutely no way on earth would have admitted to liking at the time, I secretly did, and love to this day. I make no apologies for their inclusion here. So there.
The first time I heard the next record, I was at the club night at the Students Union, in all honesty cribbing up on what I could play the following Saturday night. The DJ dropped this and I was stunned. Not because of the saucy “Je T’aime”-ness of the vocal track, but because a record that slows down that much in the middle just shouldn’t work. It did though; the place went fucking apeshit for it.
Much as you might hate this next record, deride it for pinching the vocals from Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation” and then getting a model to mime to it, in 1989 (and surprisingly often these days) if you wanted to get everyone in a Students Union chart night to dance, this was your weapon of choice:
Not really a “dance” record as such, next is one of the greatest records ever made, a guaranteed floor-filler, and the subject of one of the biggest travesties in UK Chart history:
I say travesties because this record only ever got to Number 2 in the UK Charts. It had sold exactly the same amount of copies to be the joint number-one , along with “The Joker” by The Steve Miller Band, a record which had been re-released due to its use in a Levi Jeans ad. “Groove…”‘s placing second was due to a rule instituted in the 1980s, which stated that in the event of a tie, the single with sales that had increased most from the previous week would reside above the other. The week before, “The Joker” had been one position lower in the chart the previous week than “Groove Is in The Heart”, and thus “The Joker” was therefore deemed to be the bigger-selling of the two.
This was the first and only time the rule was ever implemented, and it’s since been ditched. Not that anyone pays attention to the Charts anymore.
Right, I could literally sit here and post hundreds of these until well into the wee small hours, but if I don’t get moving soon I’ll be missing the gig tonight.
So I’m going to sign off by breaking the golden rule of any mix-tape, CD compilation, or playlist: by playing three records by the same artiste.
So, from the first Underworld album I ever bought at the time it was released, “Beaucoup Fish”, their third with Darren Emerson having joined their ranks (but fifth overall), and which swiftly led to me going out and buying the previous two:
Hopefully, we’ll get some, if not all, of them tonight.
And I’ll leave you with their latest single, the opening track from their “Barbara, Barbara, We Face A Shining Future” album, and which has first song of the night written all over it.
I had a lot of fun doing the sweary edition of Friday Night Music Club last week, so much so that, devoid of anything approaching an original idea, I thought I’d simply repeat the same trick tonight. If it works for the Quo, then why can’t it work for me?
So – be careful where you read this or listen to tonight’s post, for it is definitely NSFW, as I believe they say in some of the slightly bluer areas of the internet which I have definitely never visited and have only heard about, honest Officer.
But we’ll take it gently for a start. Well, gentle sounding anyway.
Darren Hayman is perhaps best known as the main man from Hefner, who gained a whole lot of airplay and blog-inches a couple of years ago because of their track “The Day Thatcher Dies”. Just as Prince wrote “1999”, Jarvis wrote “Disco 2000” and whoever it was that used to write Robbie Williams’ songs wrote “Millenium” all played the long-game and wrote singles about, end of the world excepted, fixed points in time in the future that would definitely happen (and their record would be played) so Hayman knew his ker-ching day would come soon enough.
But I’m not posting that song. I’m posting this rather lovely sounding track from his “January Songs” album, featuring Elizabeth Morris from indie-pop darlings and inverted comma users nightmare “Allo’ Darlin'”:
Keeping it in a similar vein, here’s Jenny Owen Youngs from her debut album “Batten the Hatches”, which implies a pending storm, whirlwind, or hurricane, and is, I’m sure you’ll agree once you hear this, rather mistitled:
Now it’s not often you get a song with a four word title where three of the four words are swears. But here’s one from a rather unlikely source: daughter of Canadian American folk rock singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III (who older readers might recall used to have a guest slot on one of Jasper Carrott’s TV shows in the 1970s/1980s), daughter of folk legend Kate McGarrigle and brother of Rufus, here’s Martha Wainwright at her potty-mouthed best:
This gives me an excellent excuse to post the time that she appeared as a panellist on “Never Mind The Buzzcocks” where she met the man with both the mind and the cock of a horse, Dappy, and…well, let’s just say it’s a little awkward (head to 11:24 of the clip):
Moving on, a song which surely needs no introduction:
Two memories from this: firstly, of the time the video appeared on Beavis and Butthead which rather annoyingly has been blocked on that there YouTube, but which I’ve managed to track down here. Actually, make that three memories, as watching that has just brought back lots of dial-up experiences of “buffering” (it works better the second time you try to watch it, honest). “If they didn’t have a part of the song that sucked, then the rest of the song wouldn’t be as cool.” Genius.
Secondly, or thirdly depending how you want to look at it, I was working in a video shop in Cardiff in the early 1990s when this came out, and I had, you’ll be totally unsurprised to hear, prepared a load of mix-tapes to play in store, one of which included this, but the clean, radio-friendly version. One of the chaps who worked in the store with me was unaware of this, and was at the front of the shop one evening helping someone pick a movie, when he heard the opening bars of this come on and thought to himself “There’s a very good reason why this should not get played in the store” but couldn’t quite remember what that reason was. The penny dropped just as it got to the bit where chainsaw guitars get cranked up (the cool bit), and he ran the length of the shop, vaulted over the counter, crashed into the bank of TVs and slid down to where the tape player was, just in time of the sanitised “…so very special…” came through the speakers.
Anyway, Radiohead recorded a clean version of “Creep” to ensure it finally got airplay, but there’s another way to ensure you get a single with a swear word on it played: have just one swear word, sung once, right at the end, when radio DJs are concentrating more on what they’re going to say next than on what is being played.
Step up to the mic Michael Stipe and his R.E.M. chums for this, the lead single and opening track from their 1994 “Monster” album. The final departing lyrical salvo, in case you don’t quite catch it, is “Don’t fuck with me”:
A short non-musical interlude now. The relationship between Black Francis and Kim Deal of Pixies fame was notoriously fractious, and nowhere was that better illustrated than with this sound-clip which features as a track on the glorious “Surfer Rosa” album.
Moving on, I mentioned Jarvis Cocker earlier, so here’s something from his second solo album, “Further Complications” where Jarvis goes down the R.E.M. route of steadfastly not swearing until right at the end, but kind of misses the point by a) putting the offending word in the title, and b) not actually releasing it as a single anyway so it didn’t really matter:
Now: a band I adore, who John Peel loved, who are vastly under-rated, have never achieved anything like the commercial success they deserve, and have produced a whole host of songs which will unquestionably feature in my “Name That Tune” thread. I speak, of course, of none other than Half Man Half Biscuit, and this features as one of three songs on the “Dickie Davies Eyes” EP:
And in case you were wondering who Dean Friedman is:
Dean is the one playing the piano. Quite the dish, eh ladies?
If you think Half Man Half Biscuit have a daft name, then you’ll probably not be much of a fan of Pop Will Eat Itself’s name either, but that’s where we’re heading next, so tough titties. No swears in the title this time, but if you ever want to hear two former crusties/UK sampling pioneers from the Black Country bellowing the word “Motherfuckers!” then this is your go-to record:
And since we seem to have strayed into kinda dancey territory, here’s some pure filth courtesy of John Creamer, a name which always makes me giggle like a naughty schoolboy, same as when anyone ever mentions the band “Tool”. We’re back in Beavis and Butthead territory I’m afraid, or more specifically, this chap:
Anyway, I digress. The next song is without doubt the filthiest thing I will be posting tonight, so please do not listen if you are under 18, easily offended, or sitting at your desk at work:
There was a trend on club records about 10 – 12 years ago or so – probably still is for all I know, it’s that long since I’ve been to one – for the vocal part to just be just a deep voiced bloke spouting all sorts of sauciness. There is one in particular that I’d love to track down, which I won’t bore you with here, but if you know someone who really knows their dance tunes that fit that vague description, I’d really appreciate it if they got in touch.
Public service request dispensed with, here’s someone neither you nor I ever expected to pop up here:
No wait, come back! This is lifted from her 2015 album where she collaborated with The Flaming Lips, and you can spot their wonderfully weird influence all over this. Plus, it’s only 50 seconds long so…y’know…suck it up and give it a go.
Time for a classic. This next song was the first ever song to get into the UK Top 40 that had the word “Fuck” in the title. The BBC banned it, of course; when they simply had to refer to it, they did so as “Too Drunk To…” and Top 40 host Tony Blackburn, who the BBC also banned from their airwaves last week just said it was a “a record by a group calling themselves The Dead Kennedys”. It is, of course:
Which reminds me, I must watch the movie sometime.
Anyway, thank goodness for Adam Buxton’s cleaned up version:
Some of you may recognise the driver as Kerry Godliman, perhaps best known as playing Hannah in the Ricky Gervais comedy “Derek”, but a fantastic stand-up in her own right:
Back to the music, and a band much loved by Super Furry Animals, who they sampled on their indie-club classic “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” single, the sample being lifted from this very song:
Personally, I’m not all that fussed about that; I find myself not really paying attention until it gets to the bit that SFA sampled, at which point I suddenly perk up and start listening again.
On to a band whose debut eponymous album I was introduced to at college by a friend ringing me up, saying “You have to hear this” and playing this track down the phone to me:
This is one of my favourite albums ever, all killer no filler, but most people only seem to know “Blister in the Sun”, the opening song from the album. For me, though, “Add It Up” is the best thing on there, partly because of that phone call, but mostly, if I’m honest, because it pretty much describes my life at the time. And a disappointingly large amount of it afterwards too, now I think about it.
Which makes the next song title rather apt. The B-side to their wonderful and without peer 7″ single “What Do I Get?” – which we used to do a cover of in the band I was in at college:
Penultimately, a song by a group – no, by two groups – no, by a super-group that I waxed lyrical about after seeing them at Glastonbury last year. The amalgamation of Franz Ferdinand and Sparks into FFS:
And finally a song by an artiste/band that I own only this by, and even this I only own on “Sharks Patrol These Waters”, a CD featuring the best of those “Volume” compilations that came out in the 1990s (you remember them – they always came with a quite meaty book which talked about all of the acts contained therein and without fail had a picture of tropical fish on the cover)
All I can tell you about them (him?) is that they (he?) released one album in 1997 called “Don’t Take Ecstacy” which sounds like a terrible idea to me, and probably explains why I never bought anything else by them (him?)
When I was DJ’ing at the end of the 80s/start of the 90s, I bought this on 7″ single, only to find that I had inadvertently picked up the “Radio Edit”, which substitutes the phrase “Big Mac” for the phrase “Milk Shake” (it may actually be Big Shake, I’m not sure).
The reason for this alteration was that the Poppies (for it is they) doubtless wanted their record to be played on the BBC (particularly Radio 1 although I doubt they would have sniffed at it being played on Radio 2, 3 or 4 or…that’s the lot. Pre-digital days, see) and the BBC – to it’s eternal credit and possibly detriment – doesn’t do advertisements.
See, the publicly funded BBC is supposed to be impartial, to not show bias or preference to any person, party, corporation or company.
I say supposed there like I think they don’t manage it. Let me clarify: The BBC may have many faults (failing to commission a third series of Sharon Horgan’s “Pulling” for example), but lack of impartiality isn’t one of them.
The BBC, as ever, is under attack from the UK Government. This seems to be an ongoing situation, and sadly isn’t restricted to the current regime. The Conservatives are constantly baying for it to be either closed down or privatised (their “answer” to everything, it seems), and Labour were no better when they were in. Generally, the given reason for this is that it is biased one way or the other.
Is it fuck.
As Simon Blackwell, writer/producer with a fine pedigree (Veep, The Thick Of It, In The Loop, Peep Show, Four Lions, Have I Got News For You) recently tweeted:
A BBC that's regularly accused of both bias against the right and bias against the left is, it seems to me, a BBC doing its job correctly.
A History of Dubious Taste 