4 August 2004
Tube Trouble
It’s curious the way people react when the underground has problems. Last night flash floods created mayhem and several stations closed. Bank station was also closed but this was due to ‘a fire’. These things amuse me. I saw two people crying because the Circle Line had stopped running.
The platforms at Liverpool Street were full of aggression. An announcer suggested bus routes to people. One man didn’t like this, “Why should I have to travel on a bus?”
I quite enjoy these situations, trying to work out alternatives in my head, listening to the groans as a Metropolitan line train comes in with people plastered to the windows. Those mobile calls to Essex, “Nah mate, it’s fucking fucked, I’m going for a pint.”
But I feel for the staff, such a difficult job.
Mike in Blog 7 • No Comments
#122, 5th August 1961
The more you learn about Eden Kane, the more you’re convinced that his whole existence was the twinkling imaginings of some later sixties satirist. He’s simply too fruity to be true. For a start there’s the name – Eden Kane, so evocative the era’s great self-creations, maybe Billy Fury matches its greasy hearthrob poetry but nobody else does. (The “Kane” came from Citizen Kane, further proof of Eden’s transparent ficticity). His first single – our satirist chuckling as he hits a target full on – was “Hot Chocolate Crazy”, an ad jingle from radio Luxembourg, product placement pop. Kane then went into films (of course – lots of good jokes to be found there) with the comedy Drinks All Round – another sharply observed title from the writer, though his name for Eden’s songwriter, Les Vandyke, is perhaps a little too comic.
This pop pastiche reaches a climax, of course, as Eden Kane gets to number one with “Well I Ask You” – that title, so faux-colloquial, so archly English, makes you almost gasp with admiration. What would that record sound like, if it had existed? An Adam Faith knockoff perhaps, full of pert orchestral flourishes and campy growling? Yes – something like that.
Tom in Popular • 8 Comments
No.1
The Grove Tavern, Walthamstow
I like the Grove for three reasons: 1) It has proper locals, 2) Sunday night is ‘song night’ and 3) I used to live opposite.
The Grove is a small square boozer on the corner of a late Victorian terrace. There was talk of ‘doing it up’ once but talk was all it was. I like the fact that nearly everyone in the pub has an armful of tattoos and claims to be on the fringe of east London gangland, “Ronnie was a nice guy, but with Reggie you had to be careful.” All pinch of salt stuff. If you ask the right questions to the right people it’s like a local history museum of east-end bullshit.
The Grove comes alive on Sunday night. The locals (including ‘Young Terry’ who is mid-fifties) sit around the edge sipping stout or sticky sherry. Pipes are puffed, cigars are sucked and visibility is at a minimum. The sound of coughing wavers in pitch, but never falters. A pianist tinkles away in the corner for a while and then asks for volunteers. It looks spontaneous, but there is a strict hierarchy. One by one the regulars clamber onto the tiny stage and belt out terrific music hall songs. Frank’s party piece is “Give Me a London Girl Every Time” which he sings with a lecherous grin. Joyce is revered among her peers for her vocal range. She sang “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” one night and I almost wet myself with excitement. In the summer I used to sit in my back garden and the songs would float across the road.
I remember going to the Grove the night the twin towers collapsed. The regulars were in and the telly was on. They looked at us as if to say, “see, we told you things had gone to pot.”
Mike in Blog 7 • No Comments
“You will worship dEUS”
Although I’m not the die-hard dEUS fans I used to be, I still keep track of all things gODly. So, after his film and his collaboration with CJ Bolland, Tom Barman has decided to produce a new dEUS single,‘iF You Don’t Get What You Want’, which will be availble for download this friday. Am I excited? Is belgian beer, the best alcohol in the world?
Stevie Nixed in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
This album grabbed me from the beginning: I have an article in progress on soul music in which I refer to “the peerlessly composed intro to Al Green’s ‘Love And Happiness’”, and that intro is sampled for the first track.
It’s unusual to find a CD marked down as low as £3.99 (HMV sale) so soon after it appeared, so I wondered if it would be terrible. Quite the contrary: I think this is a tremendous album, taking influences from a number of places (Eminem/Dre still, Gang Starr, the Wu) and melding them into a mighty whole. He has a dark and strong delivery, and matches his introspective, bragging lyrics to it, and adds lots of strong beats, thanks to a bunch of producers (Premier is the only one I know anything about), with strings and backing vocals and samples working together to create a powerful mood. Gangsta, featuring Cutty Mack, is among the strongest and meanest and punchiest hip hop tracks I’ve heard in a while, and the final track finds a great riff from somewhere (anyone know the source, if it isn’t original?), making for the strongest ending I’ve heard in ages. I am mystified as to why this was presumably a flop, given the publicity his friendship and falling out with Eminem got him along with as potent an album as this. Perhaps having one of the genre’s most rubbish names didn’t help – I could see highlighting your height if it’s unusual/extreme, but that’s hardly the case here.
Martin Skidmore in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
No way to run a comic: Al told me about this site at the weekend, it may have been linked here before but I don’t remember it. It’s an exhaustive (35 long pages) examination of the Spider-Man “Clone Saga” – the storyline that ran for two years in Marvel’s Spider-Man comics, revealing that Peter Parker had a clone, then that he was a clone, then that he wasn’t again. On its own this would be no reason to click the link.
But the writer has access to one of the then-editorial staff on the Spider-Man books, who provides behind-the-scenes information about what exactly was going on – and this is interesting if you remember the mess that ‘event-driven’ storytelling became in the 90s. The overall impression is of a completely rudderless ship, veering from place to place on editorial whim and the directives of Marvel’s sales department. The number of occasions where a plot development (usually an extra clone, I mean why not eh?) shows up in one Spider-Man comic and is simply not communicated at all to any of the other writers is eye-opening even if you were fairly cynical about the competence of people at the ‘House Of Ideas’.
Tom in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Caribbean cover versions with the wrong words
Among the many pleasures in reggae cover versions is that they don’t take a great deal of trouble to get the lyrics correct. This was spurred by listening to yet another Trojan Box Set, this the Reggae Brothers one, with plenty of covers. The best in the terms under discussion is Delroy Wilson’s version of ‘This Old Heart Of Mine’, which isn’t a hard song to understand, but Delroy sings “You’ve got me never knowing if I’ve got it all by myself,” which isn’t even close. Ken Boothe’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ tends to leave words out if he doesn’t know them.
But reggae’s king of this is Pat Kelly, a fine singer who has done loads of covers, and who enunciates very precisely, so you can hear the wrongness very clearly. The highlight is his ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’, admittedly beyond anyone’s ability to make sense of, but I always grin when I hear him start with “You skip a light and dangle,” and the line “as the mirror drove its chair” is another winner.
Reggae isn’t the only Caribbean style where you can get this. My favourite mangled lyrical performance ever is from the great Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence. He offers ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ without having a clue as to most of the lyrics. The chorus is therefore “You better look out / You better look out / You better look out / You better look out / Sandy Glaw is coming eurghhhhh.” It’s fantastic.
Martin Skidmore in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
As mentioned almost a year ago, probably my favourite artist is Ed Ruscha. But, until last weeked, I had never seen any in the flesh. I had survived pretty much on They Called Her Styrene by Phaidon and a few web covers. One of the appeals to me of the art was how good it looked in reproduction, how the pont of the artwork came through clearly.
Well maybe I was wrong. Not in liking Ruscha, but in not considering the physical presence of the work. At the ICA there is part two of the Artists Favourites show, where current artists pick their favourite works from the last fifty years. I am not convinced by the show itself (part one had some decent bark bitings and a schematic of Disney’s Matterhorn amongst a lacklustre collection). But they do have a copy of Ed Ruscha’s “Oily”.
The key point is, that Ruscha’s “Oily” is exactly that. Not only is the word painted to look like oil, not particularly clever in itself, but the canvas glistens with its oil paint. The copy above looks rather flat, there are no reflections on the surface. Yet sudden a new dimension of Ruscha was introduced to me. Texture. The exhibition was worth it for that (and showing “La Jetee” looped that Janet Cardiff picked). The catalogue, which I will get on to later, and the flowery reasons people gave for their picks shows that in areas of art appreciation, artists lag behind most of their punters.
Pete Baran in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
VANISHING LONDON…
1: Mole Jazz
(Part one in an occasional series, done partially under protest because one of the best things in London is the constant renewal – good and bad.)
Mole Jazz used to be right at teh bottom of the Gray’s Inn Road as it turned into King’s Cross. It was there as long as I remembered and I used to think, “hmm – if I liked jazz, I reckon that might be a favourite”. Then it moved.
Across the road. To a slightly larger premises with a basement. I know this because when the new shiny store opened I went in. I was toying with buying some jazz, because if I liked jazz then I could go to Mole Jazz (this was probably not my thought processes at the time, but in the cold light of day seems utterly plausible). However a beginner should never go into a specialist shop to make their initial purchases. After toying with the odd Miles Davis CD I got scared and scarpered never to return.
And it is never now because this Mole Jazz closed down about three months ago. A Subway sandwich shop (sub shop) has popped up in its place. Perhaps the new retooled Kings Cross has more need of sangers that singers (cheers) but I’m sorry to see the sax blowing mole leave Kings Cross. Except of course he hasn’t. Because over the road, where the original shop was, there is still the banner saying “Mole Jazz Has Moved”.
Pete Baran in Blog 7 • No Comments
HOORAY FOR ACID RAIN. Okay so the pH3 drizzle might not be so good for your car paintwork over time (though not a bad as the throwaway culture we live in eh readers), but it might be saving us from global warming. I love this kind of science. It is all about equilibrium after all, pollutant A actually sorts out pollutant B – for a bit. Then we might need pollutant C to sort out pollutant B. But there’s a hole in our bucket.
All that said, it still has not been made clear to me why we have to sort out global warming. Yet again the global climate is constantly in flux. Just because this flux is partially the upshot of human action, doe snot mean that the world cannot cope with it. And frankly if it means nice sunny days, or entertaining disaster flicks like The Day After Tomorrow, I’m all for it.
Pete Baran in Proven By Science • No Comments
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