3 July 2009
#525, 13th August 1983
At first listen - and honestly at tenth listen - “Give It Up” seems like another disco carriage clock hit: thanks for all the hard work boys, now have a number one. On the other hand, if you want a splashy summer hit you could do far worse - this is a little rigid and lacking in bottom end perhaps, but full of bright carnival touches. It’s a marvellously airy record - good (as I’ve discovered this week) for clearing the head on a muggy day. The production aesthetic is “salad of all the trebles” - buzzy synths, high rhythm guitar, falsetto and brass all hustling for prominence. KC himself isn’t the intense central presence he was on “Please Don’t Go” - he’s upstaged by the backing singers, whose “Nana-nana-nanananananaNOW!” is the song’s most delightful (and enduring) element.
Tom • FT/ Pop/ Popular • 14 Comments
Things I have never really understood.
a) Pies at football
b) People going to the toilet during a movie
Both of these are predicated on the same issue really. Football matches take less than two hours. They take place, usually, in the afternoon - cannily timed between usual meal times. And yet at half time there are queues for the pie stall you cannot believe. You would think they were knocking out tubs of Ambrosia (foor of gods not rice pudding) for the stampede for a piss poor Pukka. Can’t you wait or do you have to graze at every opportunity?*
Ditto, films are usually about two hours long. I was taught, post potty training, how to hold it in for at least that long. Perhaps you had a few beers beforehand, perhaps you are drinking a VAT of coke. Perhaps this will add strain but you only have yourself to blame. Nevertheless for NAMBY PAMBIES with peanut sized bladders there is now a useful i-Phone App. Introducing RunPee: an application that tells you the best time in a film to have a wee. HAS IT COME TO THIS? more »
Pete Baran • FT/ Film/ TMFD • 5 Comments
British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972
“Sunday morning, up with the lark,
I think I’ll take a walk in the park,
Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …”
Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972
British bubblegum pop, circa 1968-1972 - as distinct from its more worldly and sophisticated American equivalent - is a pure insight into a country long gone. It’s simplistic, childish, over-excited, innocent, full of absolute certainties and safe knowledges.
It’s fabulous stuff.
It essentially bridged the gap between the poppier end of the mid-60s beat boom and glam rock more »
Robin • Essays •
4 Comments
The discerning televisual fan will be aware of the vacuum currently residing in the schedules between the 7.30pm end of Hollyoaks First Look and the 9pm commencement of Ghost Whisperer. There are only so many times one can flick between Puff Daddy jiggling next to the Lead Pussycat on TMF and the startlingly abhorrent animated pig on Hits!TV.
But there’s no need to wear out the remote! For a gleaming nugget of programming genius lies buried beneath the disappointing Dog Borstal on BBC Three. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Grime Scene Investigation. more »
katstevens • Do You See/ FT/ TV •
66 Comments
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS NOT A PIE?
i. shepherd’s/cottage pie
ii. cheese flan/pizza
iii. scotch egg
iv. boiled egg
actually i am not going to bother you w.all the ins and outs of the GREBT PIE DEBATE, as i wz not in on its inception, and besides the militia are now formed and a stiff crackdown ordered on heretics and dissidents. Hunting last night for back-up for solid new outlier positions - i naturally supported iv. but did not come up with any of these - i discovered that the linguistic origins of the word “pie” are entirely uncertain: best guess, apparently, being that more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør • Pumpkin Publog •
6 Comments
April 2000, Piccadilly
The sun comes out over London and the Summer starts: everywhere you look you see people in love, snogging on the tubes and holding hands on the escalators so you can’t get past them. Baggy shorts and halter tops all over the place, kids sitting together on Eros and choking on the traffic fumes, everybody walking slowly, tourist couples clogging doorways. You need a lover yourself to cope with it all: if they’re not there or not anywhere, then you need a walkman. You could play gloomy music all day again, I suppose, but the weather isn’t going to change on your say-so. It’s nearly May and the city’s coming to life: time to dust off those Saint Etienne albums. more »
Tom • Essays/ FT/ Pop •
1 Comment
#389, 2nd June 1976
I was aware of this song long before I heard it - as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I can find immense amusement and pleasure in this style of song - talking country with a sentimental edge - but this is far from a great example.
You might think, at first, that the style stands or falls on the strength of its concepts: not so. more »
Tom • FT/ Pop/ Popular •
272 Comments
2 July 2009
After last weeks skip week, Freaky Trigger finishes its epic run with a special double length episode coming LIVE from Glastonbury (sort of). Pete Baran is joined by Nick Dastoor, Magnus Anderson, Cecily Nowell-Smith and Mark Sinker to talk festivals and the end of the world. Which to some is the same thing. Music from Bowie, Young Marble Giants, The The, and many many more. Thank you for listening!
Two hour long podcasts here so we can maintain quality.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
freaky-trigger-june-27th-2009-part-1
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
freaky-trigger-june-27th-2009-part-2
Plays: 33 
Plays: 15 Pete Baran • Lollards Podcast • 5 Comments
Drag Me To Hell has been hailed as a return to horror for Sam Raimi, a break from the relentlessness of the Spider-Man films (thankfully post the annoying SM3). A chance for Raimi to go back to his roots and entertain without being slavishly devotional to comics or special effects. And it is terrific fun. But its still runs like a comics adaptation, albeit an adaptation of some for ur-horror comic of the fifties. Drag Me To Hell is a EC Comic brought to life.
EC (Entertaining Comics) Horror comics were stuffed with short, horro tales which would often involve
a) moral conundrums
b) stupendously ugly gypsys
c) a unsettling if obvious twist
Drag Me To Hell does all of this, with 2009 nobs on (EC Comic would have balked at the vomiting scene). But the grey morality of the story is what really marks it out. Alison Lohmann’s lead is not a bad person, but she does something which leads her to be cursed. We feel for her a bit, though reserve a touch of judgement because she does after all work for a bank. And so the film goes, Raimi has difficulty balancing the needs of having an attractive lead, with trying not to make her too heroic. It is not clear if he succeeds, that depends on how you feel about the ending, but it is unlikely that in the Manichean morality of most modern films he could succeed. more »
Pete Baran • FT/ Film • 2 Comments
1 July 2009
It’s halfway through 2009, and for once I’m going to be completely shameless: here are links to the best dozen things I’ve written so far this year. Almost all of them are quite long: if you don’t like long pieces, click no further!
more »
Tom • FT • 1 Comment
30 June 2009
Hundreds of posts now hang off Steven Wells’s intensely moving farewell article at the Philadelphia Weekly, which ends with an atypically cryptic Swellsy in prophet mode, quoting Michael Jackson, before the thread-flood of sad affection and bafflement from readers and colleages, bafflement that such a chaotically vivid force of self-willed nature is stilled; bafflement perhaps too that such deep fondness can well up out of the fury he loved to work to spark in one and all. I’ve read it declared a dozen times now that Steven alone is the reason such-and-such took up writing as a trade — all the little fires he started in all these hot little hearts, what’s that come to? The consensus (correct) that he was just a big bald huggable pussycat at heart, a friendly and a kind man behind the shoutiness; the gnarly and rather unacceptable sense that his lifelong war on the useless has somehow left us with more of it not less (which may be our fault not his); and huge great gobs of the feeling — utterly conventional and surely utterly bogus — that times and possibilities aren’t what they were. more »
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør • FT • 2 Comments
29 June 2009
 |
| Andy Murray chastises a tennis ball |
During Wimbledon’s inaugural set of night-time tennis on Monday night, played under what’s become the most famous roof since the Sistine Chapel, I found that I loathe every particle of Andy Murray.
Now, I realize Andy Murray is a professional athlete. Macho theatrics and being as interesting as a pile of firewood come with the territory. But Wimbledon is not just a collection of freakishly fit young adults whacking things between each other, it’s a drama, and in this drama he pushes buttons I didn’t even know I possessed. more »
Tracer Hand • FT/ TMFD • 33 Comments
#524, 23rd July 1983, video
In the mid-90s I worked in the Music And Video Exchange chain in Notting Hill Gate. Paul Young’s No Parlez holds a special place in my affections from those years - not because we ever knowingly played it, but because it was the undisputed number one landfill vinyl “penny each for these, mate” champ. Browsing the 20p albums down in that malodorous Pembridge Road basement, it seemed like every fourth flick would bring you face to face with Paul’s teased-up hair, quizzical expression and sweaty leather suit. more »
Tom • FT/ Pop/ Popular • 47 Comments
So I listened to the UK Top 40 on Radio 1 for the first time in - oh, I don’t know, years. Like a lot of the audience, I was ambulance-chasing: I wanted to see how the download-led charts would cope with a superstar death. I was hoping - for partly selfish reasons - that Michael Jackson would get to number one, maybe even with a song that hadn’t got there before.
As it happened the Jackson thing was kind of an anticlimax. Scott Mills - the stand-in DJ running the show - started off by playing up the prospects of a Jacko clean sweep, but gradually began dropping hints that the album chart was where the real action would be. When “Billie Jean” limped in at 25 the game was up. In the end the closest Michael Jackson got to the Top 10 this week was Kanye West’s shout-out to him on Keri Hilson’s “Knock You Down” (#5). more »
Tom • FT/ Pop • 3 Comments
There is a remarkably unremarkable piece of news on the BBC website. Apparently according to that old favourite “A MEDICAL EXPERT” the appearance of so many fat people on TV normalises obesity. Or as BBC News Health section put it: Fat Stars ‘Make Obesity Normal’ (their scare quotes). One assumes this is much like the way that thin stars normalises thinness and causes anorexia VIA THE SAME MEDIA. Nevertheless the EXPERT is an EXPERT, which we can prove by a few pull quotes from him:
Professor McMahon, a expert on keyhole surgery, said: “The increasing profile of larger celebrities, for example James Corden, Eamonn Holmes, Ruth Jones and Beth Ditto, means that being overweight is now perceived as being ‘normal’ in the eyes of the public.
“We talk about the dangers of skinny media images, but the problem actually swings both ways.”
Hold up. Eammon Holmes? Since when has he been seen as a crusader for corpulence? more »
Pete Baran • FT/ Proven By Science • 6 Comments
« Older
Powered by