Ananova Poll
Ananova Poll: for mercy’s sake STOP DIDO!
11 December 2001
Poor Brian Harvey
Poor Brian Harvey, just been attacked in Nottingham by YOOFS with a machete. Where does one find machetes in Nottingham, I wonder? How puzzling. Is a machete usually the scalping instrument of choice in the Midlands? Either that or there is a MULTINATIONAL CONSPIRACY (hoo-ha!) against Harvey. Take this demoralising example, when
“Harvey suffered an embarrassing moment in October when no-one turned up for a record signing in his native Walthamstow, London. The singer pulled out from the event moments before it was due to start because of a ‘television appearance’.“.
Did no-one turn up because the MAFIA HAD BARRICADED THE RESIDENTS OF WALTHAMSTOW INSIDE??
“Harvey has recently had a top 20 hit”.
Bless. Flowers to Nottingham City Hospital, Brianfans. (NB, this hospital is shaped like a SWASTIKA!!! What is the deal with THAT eh??)
10 December 2001
Dreams: Propaganda 1985
Dreams: Propaganda 1985: I’ve been listening to Propaganda all day. Here’s some articles and reviews from their time (’85) – here’s an excellent Tangents piece on them.
Martin Creed
Martin Creed just won the Turner Prize (ILE is discussing it here). He was the lights-going-on-and-off guy. He’s also got a band, Owada, who are kind of Art too. Here are the words to the songs on their CD.
8 December 2001
I’m here for ALE, not GALLIANO!
I’m here for ALE, not GALLIANO! Blimey charley I must say that my Local Pub (the Hero of Switzerland just across from our flat which is the nearest pub is local ‘local’, if you know what I mean) is a seething mass of contradictions. Is it a BOOZER or a Trendy Bar? Does it attract the Luffbra Estate lot or the posher lot who live in the nice buildings round the corner with the SE5 postcode? Is it Young Trendy Camberwell or Raw London Edge Brixton? And more importantly, if you’re going to call yourself a pub, WHY DO YOU NOT SERVE ANY ALES! I turned up and arsked for a pint of bitter. The bitter was off. Alright then mate, let’s make it a Guinness. We Haf No Guiness. Okay, ANY bitter please. UMmmmm, all we’ve got is LAGER and BOTTLES. Que ce que c’est as they say in FURRIN? In the end I get a whiskey and coke in a glass tumbler. We are the only two people in the pub apart from a mang parked at the bar. We sit down on a very cosy sofa, shunning the leopard print chairs. I know it’s dark in there, but you can still see them.
So! It’s called The Mucky Duck. That is certainly the name of a pub, not a bar, unlike the other Coldharbour Lane example of The Living Room – most certainly a bar if EVAH I saw one. But they are severely down on ales, but regularly they do have ITS A MANG THING ie Worthingtons and Guinness. Just not when we visited. But the sofas and leopard print chairs remind me of nothing more, nothing less, than the Goff Caff back in Preston town. But instead of NIN on the old stereo system, they seem to be playing some Early Nineties Dance hurrah! But then it all goes bit PETE TONG (and his Deep Funk collection) and my companion and I make a list of things we want. Being the only two people in a pub always makes me feel strange. Is the pub dodgy? Are we making a total faux pas and simply NO-ONE goes to the pub at EIGHT, my darlings! Just before our second round, two hip looking kids turn up. I feel a little more reassured but we stay no longer.
6 December 2001
DURAN DURAN – “The Chauffeur”
DURAN DURAN – “The Chauffeur”
1. The Title: “The Chauffeur”. This song, you know, is going to be cod-elegant and faux-decadent and as icily pretentious as anyone could wish. You think, perhaps, of Pinter. You think, maybe, of Ballard. You think, why not, of Scott Walker’s “The Electrician”.
2. Which is apt, since this song is the exact halfway point between Walker’s cold torture-tronica and the embarrassed, serious, Europhilia of, oh, Ultravox. Halfway grand, halfway ridiculous.
3. Though you’ll like it more if you can admit to yourself that “Vienna” is grand like a politician, and that “The Electrician” is ridiculous like a uniform.
4. (Scott Walker was mobbed so often and so badly by teenage fans that he considered suicide, that he ran off to become a monk. Simon Le Bon would have dressed as a monk if the video required. Midge Ure surely did.)
5. Hear that? It’s started. Tiny high keyboard touches, with a little echo. At 0’15″-0’16″ there’s the skronky sound of a guitar pretending to crack.
6. “Out on the tar planes, the glides are moving”: I looked those lyrics up because I thought they were so good. I think “tar planes” are meant to be roads, actually, and “glides” might be cars. Simon Le Bon sings with the absolute conviction allowed a man who is worth several thousand cars: so you can, if you like, convince yourself he’s singing about some future architecture of shattering elegance.
7. Meanwhile the bass rears, buzzes, purrs. Between 1’00″ and 1’08″ it glitches, too.
8. Simon Le Bon is singing about the front of a woman’s dress. Here, again, is a subject he knows about. Simon is for real in an airbrush world.
9. At 2’15″ a synth-flute solo begins and the song becomes a march. It sounds rather like Jona Lewie’s “Stop The Cavalry”, with Lewie’s smackable downtrodden mateyness switched in favour of the art-rock aloof. A big favour, as it happens.
10. Here’s what you have to realize about “The Chauffeur”: it’s a dub record.
11. The bass drops out, the beats drop in, the skinny digital tick-tock start-stop of them is interweaved with found sounds (casino chips dropping, the creak of metal, looped and warped speech) and more beat hiss, the last two minutes bring the flute back, echo it.
12. (At the time, only Abba were making more ominous chart music.)
13. It’s finished, with a cursory fade. This song is dated, yes. There is no other time and place when it could have been made, when the big bad biz would have let it be made. Does that diminish it? Hardly. This is experimental exploitative peacock music, absurd but lovely. Right now, with authenticity and camp, art and pop so rigorously patrolled, it’s kept that rarest of qualities – the element of surprise.
5 December 2001
Just to counter the Scrit-Bit below
Just to counter the Scrit-Bit below, heres Kevin Pearce on them, from Tangents. He tears into Songs To Remember, Scritti Politti’s just-reissued 1982 album, essentially accusing it of a kind of treachery, and asserts that history has judged what Green and co. were doing wrong. I – you won’t be astonished to learn – don’t agree: for a start I feel appeals to ‘posterity’ are dubious, especially coming from a writer who has championed the forgotten so eloquently. For another thing I think what Scritti Politti and their (heh) ‘fellow travellers’ were doing is subtler than Pearce does – I think in fact that the Scritti of Songs (and of Cupid And Psyche 85, their peak) is very much engaged in the same game as the Scritti of “Skank Bloc”. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll get around to talking about why.
End Of An Era!
End Of An Era! “You know how the Beatles broke off, they all did their solo projects and they came back together and they were even stronger.”
“The sound of Scritti Politti 1978 to 1985 is essentially the sound of Green Gartside getting better in bed.”
“The sound of Scritti Politti 1978 to 1985 is essentially the sound of Green Gartside getting better in bed.”
Evidence:
1978-1979: lived in horrible communal squat. Would probably have presented you with itemised bill (sorry delineation of means of production and exchange) for shag. Unable to keep a steady rhythm – great if producing spasmarxist doubt-beat, less great in other circs.
1982: Writes song called “Sex”. Somewhat gauche but shows willing.
1985: Inner sleeve pic in executive washroom showing Green now familiar with the finer points of personal hygiene. Music now highly danceable wink wink. (Also gets in outside producers – kinky!)
(further popcritsexlife hypotheticals here)
THE ESSEX GREEN MING
THE ESSEX GREEN MING
I can SMELL it coming and it honks like a bastard. It smells a little bit like a very old pair of corduroy flares bought from what those crazy Americans call a thrift store. They’ve seen a lot of action and the bottom is rather rubbed away due to sitting down cross-legged on sticky wooden floors watching yore MATES hahahaha playing choons on their acoustickal geetars. They’ve had shandy spilt on them a few times but hey! Don’t tell Mom! We’re in a ROCK BAND and ROCK BANDS DRINK!! But hold on, don’t they also play Rock Music?
Doh! I knew the Essex Green had forgotten SOMETHING!
You know the times when you feel completely at ODDS with the surrounding world? For me, it’s often brought on by excessive facial hair. Imagine the height of Diana Ross’s plumage crossed with the glamour of Wurzel Gummidge and that’s what they look like. BUT! Image is not important in rock, howl the sore oppressed masses. It’s all about the music! Right then, let’s FORGET the fact that they look like hippies (it matters, it matters) and talk about the music. Although the fact is I’d rather not due to the overwhelming stench that gets recalled in my BRANE each time I try to think about it. PONG! The whiff of “our influences are Jethro Tull”! BIFF! “My vocal style is reminiscent of Mouldy Ould Dough”! STINK! “Why don’t we have a nose flute solo”!
Actually if they DID have a nose flute solo they might be possibly be more entertaining but no, just a boring regular old MOUTH FLUTE. Which is played by a GURL. Now, not that I am making character assassinations based on the cumbersome, uninspired chaff that the Essex Green churn out, but I bet they have the GURL in to play the flute because it makes the boys feel all squiffy about her BLOWING on a large INSTRUMENT. Hur hur. Heh heh. Snigger. What would their parents say? I only ask this question of my gentle reader as it occurred to me whilst standing at back of Essex Green GIG !strikemedown! that my gentle 2001 thoughts were being WASTED on this ponderous pastiche of pastoral PAP! and that in fact, I was my daddy-yo and I should be putting my finger in my ear. Incidentally, perhaps what is wrong is that the Essex Green only sound tolerable after many a tankard of MEAD.
Pop music isn’t SUPPOSED to do “what it says on the tin”. The Essex Green tin marks them as vaguely 60s, vaguely psychedelic, vaguely hinting at understated melody. They don’t tend to get comparisons to OTHER ROCK BANDS which of course is good! However! What do they get compared to instead? Trees and flowers?! It’s enough to provoke me to nick a knackered old Ford Escort, take it over to Brockwell Park and take a JOYRIDE whilst pumping out something, anything that is not at all vague. Perhaps VOGUE, the soundtrack to many a CRIMINAL YOOF (NB this could be a lie). I throw lemons at the back of their greasy heads and my final verdict is thusly: THE ESSEX GREEN MING and 0000 out of TEN.