26 November 2003
IS ALSO FOR…TA-tU
Just to say these pretend schoolgirl Russian lesbians are ridiculously offensive with their high pitched Pinky & Perky whinings which convince absolutely nobody of their personas basis in any sort of truth. I mean sure, there is a legacy of lesbians in pop but come on, are we really supposed to believe these two liars. After all, they worked with Trevor Horn who is used to covering up for other duplicitous types, see Frankie Goes To Hollywood. They can act all they like in the All The Things She Said video, but they will never convince me. There is no way that they are still at school.
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • No Comments
Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career is a little bit sad really, just when he started to make it big he stopped being able to do all the things that made him good in the first place. This does not mean that he does not still have great comic timing, but it does mean that he seems to be involving himself in some real lowest common denominator tosh. Hot on the heels of the pretty poor Tuxedo comes The Medallion (nee the Highbinders) where Jackie tries to work out the formula to his American hits and replicate it. The formula seems to be Team-Up With A Comedian. The failure here is that the comedian he teams up with is Lee Evans.
Don’t get me wrong, Lee Evans can be very funny. But there isn’t a single gag that works in this supernatural powered, poor special effects effort. The idea of pairing two gifted physical comedians drops the moment that we realise that Evans has been hired to do some sub Norman Wisdom schtick. Suffice to say the plot makes no sense, the characters make no sense and – even for £1.60 at an EasyCinema – we felt robbed.
Note to scriptwriterss (and comic writers since they suffer from the same disease). Merely pointing out an inconsistency in your plot, does not make it go away. Here when Jackie Chan is resurrected he comes back naked. Yet the other characters come back fully clothed. When Evans’s character points this out this is supposed to funny (and a bit smutty because he wants to see Claire Forlani in the nuddy). It just illustrates how bad the movie is.
By the way, Claire Forlani = Box Office Poison. Yes?
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
If you’re in a snackish frame of mind, have a look at Taquitos. I stumbled across it while searching for Turkey and Paxo Sage and Onion (note: no mention of stuffing anywhere on the packet, how odd). ‘We’re serious about snacks’ they say and there’s no arguing with that. Chipworld in particular is an invaluable addition to my life.
Tim in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Happily munching on some special edition Christmassy Walkers Roast Turkey with Paxo Sage and Onion flavour crisps (‘Merry Crispmas!’ indeed), ILx draws my attention to a nasty news story about parasites. And I’m thinking that if our crisp manufacturers keep pressing further and further towards authenticity and exoticism then surely tapeworm cyst flavour crisps aren’t far off. Mmmmm, tapeworm cyst’
Tim in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
IS FOR…BERNIE TAU-PIN
Elton John gets plenty of hate here. Rightly so, this pompidour is the chandelier in the toilet that is pop music, shining his shitty light wherever he goes. But wherever he goes, he has his wordsmithw ith him. Bernie Taupin. Many people have often wondered why Bernie Taupin, with such a gift for lyrics, never released any songs under his own name. In cannot be musical ineptitude; if he wanted decent music he would not have gone to Reg Dwight. No, there must be another reason.
The reason is simple. Bernie is an agent of the devil who exists solely infiltrate our charts with banal rhymes. He cannot be viewed by the naked eyes of a human, since we would detect the horns of a daemon on his bonce. Instead we are driven to madness by rhymes like this one from Daniel – I hit:
‘Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain’
But there are plenty of songs which weren’t hits, like this biting political piece Facist Faces:
“I read about how you’re slow with the truth
Like any old Aesop’s Fable
But when you’re turtlesque, I’m a hare’s breath
Into payment under the table”
Or even from the frankly frightening Christmas flop ‘Ho Ho Ho – (Who’d Be A Turkey At Christmas)’
“Ho ho ho, guess who’s here
Your fat and jolly friend draws near
Ho ho ho, surprise surprise
The bearded wierdy’s just arrived”
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • No Comments
It’s finally happened; a quick look at this weekend’s league tables for the Scottish and English Premier Leagues shows that the gap between those in with a shout of glory and the also rans is bigger in England; in Scotland, the third placed team are 8 points behind second place, whereas in England, it’s 9.
This is possibly the least surprising thing to happen in the Premiership ever, since it’s the entire point of the forces unleashed by its formation in 1992; let market forces lead to aggregating resources around a small number of clubs and end the elements of redistribution that maintain a competitive situation.
Everyone else is thus reduced to also-rans; the season boils down to the 6 games in England between the big three, and they expect to win against the others. The title is therefore decided by the outcome of the big games and who has an off day against a team they should beat. Every season has one team who look most likely candidates for ‘they might take a few points off the big teams and thus have a hand in deciding the title race’ but it’s a bit part and no more.
It’s speeding up too; a few years back, people commented on their being three leagues in the Premiership: those fighting relegation, those with a shot at the UEFA Cup and those with a shout of winning the whole thing. Those gradations still exist, but the group at the top has contracted – just as it did in Scotland as first Dundee United and then Aberdeen fell off the pace as the redistributive elements were removed allowing the Old Firm to make the most of their massive fanbases without any support to mitigate those factors for the rest.
We see in Scotland what the end result is; the TV rights suffer as no-one wants to pay the money for a season of games that don’t affect the outcome too much, and want to concentrate on those matches with will have a major impact on the title race. Those big clubs start to suffer from not getting a decent run-out often enough, and they’ll want to clamber aboard a European Super-League proper, as opposed to the lite version in the form of the Champions League. And the rest, bored by a season in which mediocrity is the best they can hope for, will support them, just as most non-Old Firm fans can’t wait to see the back of them.
What’s sad is the utter inevitability of it all. This isn’t an unforseen consequence but something people have been arguing for years. But no. The Premiership is the best League in the world, apparently, and like british fascism, the Scottish League scenario couldn’t happen here. Well it has. Well done to the ostriches concerned.
Dave Boyle in TMFD • No Comments
IS ALSO FOR…THE SIGMA SOUND STUDIOS
What do you think of when I say the word Philadelphia. Is it the lush, orchestration of Philly soul classics, timeless songwriting buffed up by the exemplary studio work of the Sigma Sound Studios. Or a particularly bland cream cheese. Yep, it was the cheese wasn’t it?
The Sigma Sound Studios, opened in 1968, were responsible for the supposedly iconic sounds of Philadelphia Soul (remember, bland cream cheese soul). Almost instantly the studios formed an unique partnership with Philly songwriters like Leon Huff and Thom Bell (warning, use of the first name Thom). Unique of course because no other studio would work with such Middle Of The Road chancers. Artists of the calibre, and I use that word purely in the selecting the right bullet sense, of Teddy Pendergrass and the O’Jays passed through its doors, so much so that it resembled a holding cell for musical criminals. A factor finally proved when that arch criminal David Bowie recorded the Young Americans album there, the first recorded time that someone had actually killed someone with a saxophone.
Anti-vivsectionists bomb the labs of the scientists plying their trade – unfortunately taking out the animals sometimes in the process. I think it follows that I can spread my campaign against recording studios. If I take out Patti LaBelle on the way, well that would be a bonus.
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • No Comments
Regarding chants, myself and mrs carsmile were commenting last night on the universality of the tunes used. The Inter fans were singing something to the tune of “glory, glory man united”/”who the fucking hell are slipknot” and it took me about 5 minutes to work through the layers of words to this tune in my head (“he jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute” anyone? “stop the bus I want a weewee” even?) to get back to “John Brown’s Body”…
Possible Top Five Most Used Songs For Football Chants:
1. Bread of Heaven
2. Go West
3. John Brown’s Body
4. Guantanamera
4. Que Sera Sera
CarsmileSteve in TMFD • No Comments
25 November 2003
What a Waste of Money!
According to the Guardian, Barclaycard are spending ten grand on funding some poor soul to go round to football grounds and help us with making up songs. Thanks Barclaycard! If you made a list of all the different bits of football which need work or money or research, the songs fans sing would likely be somewhere very near the bottom.
The absence of obscenities is a mild disappointment: as any composer of terrace anthems will tell you, the odd bit of swearing can do wonders for your scansion and often add a cheap laugh along the way. But the real point-missed in this story is simply that fans very, very rarely accept songs written for them by someone else. There’s plenty of adaptation, sure, but I could count the examples of fans adopting songs foisted on them from outside on the fingers of a one-fingered hand. That single digit would be pointing at Leeds. ‘Marching On Together’ was first a dodgy Leeds United record, now it’s the key song in the Leeds fans’ repertoire. Each club already has its own laureate(s), with a built-in understanding of what’s important or potent or funny or relevant, external help isn’t wanted or needed. Particularly if it’s not sweary.
Tim in TMFD • No Comments
IS FOR…..SIGMA SIGMA SPUTNIK
Okay, its better than Sigma Ros or the insane suggeston of Losig Ma Religion. I could talk about the Italian heavy metal band Sigma, but frankly the most I could do to insult them is to point out that they wear leather trousers and since they do this on purpose they would just stare on uncomprehending my oh so witty barbs. At least Sigue Sigue Spuntnik speak English. They understand when I tell them that their concept, their music and their very selves were crap.
Love Missile F-11 was a record with so little wit behind it that it is shocking that it was supposed to usher in a new age. A new age, mark me, where people wore ridiculous Mohican haircuts and had adverts in-between the tracks on their records. Imagine being in the ad sales for the SSS album. Actually the ads are the only successful thing on that disc, unsurprisingly having heard the paltry quality of the actual tracks any punter stupid enough to buy it found the ads to be some kind of respite. Far from being the future of rock’n'roll, Sigue Sigue Sputnik were uncannily like the past, tawdry and crap with very little going on behind some designer clothes.
The ultimate insult was to happen after they split up. Pop Will Eat Itself covered one of their songs. It is impossible to say if it improved it or not, we’ll just call it symptomatic.
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • 1 Comment
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