9 February 2010
On Sunday afternoon (that’s real actual Valentine’s Day, chums) a selection of your Freaky Trigger friends will be taking over the Hangover Lounge (2-7 pm at London’s The Lexington, delicious food and drink available!) and showcasing the smoother side of our questionable taste in pop.
A convivial, if possibly somewhat blurry, afternoon is promised. All welcome, especially FT readers we haven’t met yet.
Tim in FT • No Comments
As you may or may not know I have been doing ANOTHER blog project, this time an MP3 blog over on tumblr: It Took Seconds.
The idea behind ITS is very simple – it’s a countdown: every day I post a song one second shorter than the day before. I started at the decadent stretch of 365 seconds and will gradually pare the tracks down to one second (the actual MP3 might be longer as I think there might be issues with files that short). There’s an informal one-track-per-artist rule too, and I usually have an ‘answer box’ where people can suggest their own favourites at each length.
I write stuff about the tracks too, but usually not very much. Anyway, here is an index of the first 35 entries: my blog design is intentionally very simple so I’ll be putting these indices here. You can still hear all the tracks at the links below. more »
Tom in FT • 7 Comments
An OLD MAN and a WISE MAN are sitting on a bench.
WISE MAN: Tell me, Old Man, if you had one piece of advice to give young students, what would it be?
OLD MAN: I would tell them to be neither too proud or too ashamed of their music taste. The music you hear when you are young will expand to fill the space you provide for it, regardless of how good or bad it is. Perhaps you will be lucky, and you will find that the music you hear at 18 remains excellent. Perhaps you will be unlucky, and your bloom of youth will be wasted on awful novelty indie records that if you screw up your ears sound a tiny bit like a Wedding Present B-Side. But do not congratulate or blame yourself – it is not your choice.
WISE MAN: Hmmm. more »
Tom • FT •
10 Comments
Andrew WK: I Get Wet: Pitchfork Review: Remarkable write-up of the Andrew WK album from Ryan Schrieber, Pitchforkmedia’s editor-in-chief.
Remarkable because it gets Andrew WK’s music so descriptively right – “Nothing could penetrate a sound that dense. I was overcome. I tried to remember the last time anyone dared to push rock so poppily over the top, and figured it must have been some time around Hysteria. I sat rapt by the simple barbarity of that sound, Andrew barking adamantly over the exploding plastic fury. The gall! WK demanded respect, whether he deserved it or not. His conviction was startling, and the sound so scrutinously polished it lapped itself back into rawness. Indeed, it was time to party.” more »
Tom • FT •
5 Comments
How Old Is Superman? One of the seemingly undefined aspect of the Superman mythos is that of his ageing. Those who fall on the side of his omnipotence in everything (the superhearing, superbreath, superhair bunch) probably think as a preternatural godhead he will live forever. Look, he has been banging around in the comics for seventy odd years, he hasn’t aged yet. Fine, but nor has Lois, or perennially annoying Jimmy Olsen. That’s what happens in comics.
The flipside is that Superman, like his Krypton forebears ages the same as us. This brings us stories of future Superman with those old greying temples (a fashion trend I bet Reed Richards wishes he had lost). Invents unstable molecules but not Just For Men). The spectre of ageing brings in tremendous story potential, as shown in Miller’s The Dark Knight Return more »
Pete Baran • The Brown Wedge •
2 Comments
THE GREEK ALPHABET OF PISS-POOR POP
I notice elsewhere, in my absence, some young scamp over on NYLPM has started a concept piece, some say think piece entitled the Alphabet Of Pop. Now no-one knows more than myself the beauty of lists, as my Week Of Wank and Breakfast Of Banality proves. Its cheap easy journalism and also gives one a built in deadline which battles stronger than the average slagging of Pavement with the Bombay Sapphire. So I have decided to counter such nonsense more »
Tanya Headon • I Hate Music •
No 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 •
66 Comments
8 February 2010
#583, 24th January 1987, video
Future shock? If you’d been told before the fact that a Chicago house record was going to hit number one in the UK, you might well have put your money on the showy, song-driven side of house providing it. A record like Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body (The House Music Anthem)”, maybe, with a big vocal hook to grab on to. But no: Steve “Silk” Hurley throws us in at the tracky deep end: repetition, repetition, repetition, the sweeping hiss of the hi-hat, the crack of the snare, that flexing and bucking keyboard line, and from out of the mix those snarls, cries and commands – “Jackitupoutthere!” more »
Tom in FT / Popular • 39 Comments
6 February 2010
The OSP on Fulham Palace Road has had a chequered past. In its glory days it was a boxer-owned pub “The Golden Gloves” but I first knew it as The Old Suffolk Punch and there was a great, if scuffed, geezer feel to the place — my favourite work boozer. Then it went through a refurb and a phase as the (initials only) OSP just when this review in 2003 [fancyapint.com] was written. The OSP at that time was an awful, soul-destroying place. There were light-box murals of grinning early 20-somethings having a GREAT TIME, looking like low-rent Tony Stone stock photos. It was enough to make the gods of the public house weep into their ports and lemons. A wretched attempt to create a terrible West End bar in the terrible West of Hammersmith.
Thankfully that passed — if a little too slowly — and it became The Old Suffolk Punch once again. A reliable if unremarkable Greene King pub. Well I do have one remark, though I imagine it’s about Greene King food menus chain-wide: The Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding wrap with gravy (and chips). Behold:
Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud ... in a wrap
From the menu my colleagues and I were imagining a bread wrap around slices of beef and some tiny Yorkshire puds, but it was probably the IPA getting in the way of the obvious interpretation. A flat Yorkshire pud-style batter pancake was the wrap. Brilliant. You pick it up by the batter wrap with the beef and horseradish sauce trapped inside and dip it in the bowl of gravy. NOM, NOM, and three times NOM.
Well it was new to me. This update on a classic, I can get behind. And in to my tum.
Alan in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Tomme de Fleurette
A soft unpasturised cow’s cheese, made in Switzerland and bought from KäseSwiss.
A round of soft white cheese, smattered with a bright white bloom, and striped with little ridges from where it’s been sitting on racks to mature. Inside it’s soft and pliable, the colour of cream.
This cheese is fantastically milky, and melts away to in my mouth. The thin delicate rind has a slightly crumbly texture, and tastes of heather, flowers and astringent herbs. This complements the utter drippiness of the inside of this cheese, which is smooth, creamy, gently sweet and nutty, and has just a hint of cocoa to it. more »
marna in FT / Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Of the thousands and thousands of words that have been written about The John Terry Situation this week, Louise Taylor’s ridiculously florid piece in the guardian on Wednesday which starts:
Fabio Capello’s still somewhat limited English vocabulary may not yet incorporate the term “invidious position”
must have been the turning point where Fabio decided that he had to go. Not because of Ms Taylor herself, but, I think, because of the following piece of genius from Freaky Trigger’s very own Patron Saint of Sport, Lord Harry of Bassett:
Dave Bassett endorsed [Glenn] Roeder’s view that a Rubicon has been crossed. “The problem is John Terry’s a wrong-un. He’s masquerading as one of the chaps but he ain’t because this shouldn’t happen,” the former Wimbledon and Sheffield United manager said. “Of course you have players misbehaving when they’re married. But they aren’t doing it to a team-mate’s missus. That’s off bounds.
“It sticks in the throat. There’s an unwritten rule that you don’t start messing with players’ missuses. I’ve had players who have left their missus or had bits and pieces on the side but they’ve not gone off with a team-mate’s bird. That’s crossing a line and where it comes unstuck with Terry. I don’t recollect it in all my years in football.
Gawd Bless yer Harry!
CarsmileSteve in FT / TMFD • 2 Comments
3 February 2010
AND ABOUT BLOODY TIME. Finally finished 1986 – I know there’ve been slower years but this one really has dragged – thanks for yr patience. Here’s a poll, and add your usual lists, reminiscences, discussions of the year etc in the comments box. As ever this is where YOU get your chance to say which tracks you’d have given 6 out of 10 or more to.
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My highest marks this year were 9s for “West End Girls” and “Papa Don’t Preach”, my lowest a brace of 1s for Nick Berry and the Horned Beast of County Wexford.
Tom in FT / Popular • 55 Comments
2 February 2010
#582, 27th December 1986, video
“Reet Petite” would have fit right in on an advert: I scratched my head for a while trying to remember which it came from. No luck – so I went and looked it up, and of course it wasn’t on one at all. It got to number one on the back of an animated short – played on BBC arts show Arena – in which a triangle-headed plasticine Jackie shook and jived while mouths on stalks quivered behind him in an angular landscape which reminds me a little of Krazy Kat. As an enactment of the song’s pop-eyed restlessness and vocal flexibility it works, and it’s more a fan video than an advert. All the giant caricature lips threw me at first but as a sung performance “Reet Petite” is a real celebration of the mouth with all its trills, twists, held notes and squawks of joy. more »
Tom in FT / Popular • 57 Comments
The main event.
It was a perishingly cold Saturday night on Mare Street, and the Empire was sold out.
Staff were taking photos of each other, old friends were hugging and saying hello, before saying goodbye. It was the last hurrah for the current staff and management. The gang of mates that had run the place since it rose from the ashes of Mecca Bingo’s stewardship in the mid-1980s was getting the heave-ho. But first there would be a show.
more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT • 1 Comment
31 January 2010
For a long, long time my Default London Pub was the Blue Posts on Newman Street. I’m a big fan of the Sam Smiths brand, and the BPNS had it all: cheap, cosy, usually full of people I knew and – most importantly – just around the corner from my office at 76 Oxford Street. When someone suggested going to the Champion one day, just to make a change, I was flabberghasted. Not ONLY would I have to walk a whole hundred yards further to my pub destination, but… well, it wouldn’t be the SAME, would it? I’d found somewhere I liked, and now it seemed that I would be untimely ripp’d from its warm, comforting embrace. I approached the Champion with a fair measure of resentment. more »
Katie G in FT • 7 Comments
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