13 August 2004
Just in case a load of fireworks and O-Lympic flames and daft streamers and confetti and Audley Harrison and stuff have distracted you from paying your usual close attention to goings-on in the Conference, let me reassure you: there is still plenty of madness sloshing around.
Case in point: Farnborough Town. Went there last season: nice club, decent little ground, very friendly people, bad boozer near the train station, good solid Conference stuff. What’s up now? Well, it seems that a fellow who was under the impression that he had assumed control of the club from the previous fellow has apparently been gazumped in some underhand way. The poor gazumpee, who it appears has the support of the FTFC community, has (along with club staff and fans) occupied Club premises. They are reportedly surviving on food parcels sent over by the local ASDA. Court cases, injunctions, adjournments, Dean Austin, my word this story has everything.
Good luck to Farnborough’s fans.
Tim in TMFD • No Comments
Gordon Legge – A Little Appreciation
I lost my bank cards last week. Of course I found them in my other trousers when I got home, but it was too late, I’d cancelled everything. No new books for a week. So I consoled myself with re-reading Gordon Legge.
Legge has written two novels and two short story collections. Nothing since 1998 and from what I can Google, he seems quite content to leave it there.
His timing was spot on, a young Scottish novelist emerging in the late eighties. He contributed to the two Albion Rovers collections on Rebel Inc and wrote short stories for the Clocktower Press, bagging awards along the way. This was a time when living in Scotland and not being a writer was unthinkable. Early on he was inevitably lumped in with Irving Welsh, mainly because drugs drop in and out of his stories, but his voice is gentler, funnier and the drugs are minor props.
Legge’s characters spend their time commuting between the holy trinity of pub, football and music. Richard is cool because he has 3,000 singles, Fids is avoided because he’s dodgy in a small town way. A typical story will start, “So I went for this interview and the bloke said, ‘Right, you’ve got two minutes, name 50 singles by the Fall‘ and I only just did it.” Another concerns a group of friends taking ecstasy for the first time, “Rab came into the lounge saying ‘I understand the sixties.’”
Not all are like this. The story on Hillsborough is bitter and sad, from discovering the news at a Falkirk game to John Peel’s comments on the radio. Legge quotes from across the board, sussing reactions, trying to understand the implications, “The trouble with football is no-one ever agrees on anything.”
I saw him once at a book launch for Ianthe Brautigan’s memoirs. He’d organised a crate of beer for those who turned up and talked about the fortunes of Falkirk FC. The lady Brautigan looked bemused. He was his writing.
Mike in The Brown Wedge • 1 Comment
V – “Hip To Hip”
Popjustice’s pet boyband make – as you might expect – wonderfully infectious singles, and when I’ve seen them on TV the enthusiasm has crackled off the screen. But just what is it that makes V so different, so appealing? One thing that strikes me is the lack of an R&B influence. After East 17, the R&B element in British boyband music rose steadily. Five’s best singles were breezy pop (the gorgeous “Keep On Movin”) but they also put out things like “Slam Dunk (Da Funk)”, which were basically inconclusive experiments in whether a boyband could get away with a bit of rapping.* Bands like 911, Another Level and Blue all fancied themselves as more-or-less credible smoothies. The only early-00s group to find much success without off-the-peg soul stylings were A1 (who decided to write their own songs instead, but that’s another story).
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with doing R&B stuff, it’s just that when real actual R&B is so hot a British boyband needs to put in a titanic amount of effort to come up with any goods. Blue managed it on their first album – their bump’n'grind moves weren’t too embarassing and enhanced the pop core of songs like “All Rise” – but since then have gone the easy way into mic-hugging balladry and duets with cash-eyed oldies. So doing arsewaggling dancey pop like “Hip To Hip” is a way out of this sweaty quandary, a way of doing boybands without their members continually looking over their dipped shoulders at Usher et al.
The only thing is – will it float? Poor old Phixx did a ‘pure pop’ boyband thing and seem to have flopped, though their songs were worse and their eighties image more stylised than V’s. And V’s first single didn’t set the charts ablaze. It may be that there’s a rockist McFly in the ointment here, that the return of songwriting and instrument-playing to the boyband arena has shifted the game in directions the likes of V are unable to follow. Hope not, though.
*(The wayback prototype for boyband rap being Wham!’s peerless first three singles, but a lot had changed since ’83, i.e. the punters’ realisation that some level of ‘mic skillz’ might be expected of rappers, rather than the form being a novelty free-for-all. V remind me of Wham! with their energy and confidence and occasional wit and lo and behold “Hip To Hip” DOES have a rap on it but it’s that kind of loveable old-school not-really-rapping rapping you got on “Wham Rap!”, and after Cowboy Troy’s turn on “Rollin’” it’s the best example of same this year and makes me smile invariably.)
Tom in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Here‘s something for use in the current discussion about the ‘state’ of the music journalism business.
On the Plan B forum, it prompted me to say that hating the NME was the new hating ‘manufactured chart pop’, even if that’s not strictly true. After a cursory glance at this week’s issue to find the tracklisting to the free CD I found a feature in which it said Annie* was going to ‘save the charts from all those Pop Idol wannabes’. If you want to refer back to Mr McNicholas’ article about bumping Franz Ferdinand (Take Me Out, No. 3 in the UK Charts) off the cover for The Streets (No. 1 album and single in the UK charts) then so be it…
*before you click on that, be aware get a horrible loop with faux-pounding bassbins and a smidgen of Timberlake in a sidebar advert for McDonalds. You can turn it off though. Just thought you might be interested. I know they’d cut word counts but this is ridiculous.
Jim in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
the gold to ciba-geigy, the silver to roche…
half-watching that c4 prog on doping last night, mark s and the “unspecified guests” solved the moral-philosophical problem of chemical enhancement viz like in grand prix, the teams shd be sponsored by the corp (or plucky underdog indie street lab) responsible for the enhancement technology
ie driving a ferrari in the 100 metres dash = cheating, unless everyone else has one, in which case it becomes a difft kind of race
event 1: roided 400m
event 2: clean 400m
event 3 = shoeless 400 m ect ect
(haha note ineffably feeble “hip” referencing open linked review: “The drugs don’t work, so the song says. But do they?”)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in Proven By Science • No Comments
BLIMEY! The olympics haven’t even started yet and already we’ve had world records, a footballing upset and a ferdinand-esque missed drug test. Stay tuned over the next three weeks for me waxing lyrical over keirin, synchronised diving and anything else Team GB almost gets a medal in…
CarsmileSteve in TMFD • No Comments
The Killers Press Posters.
This poster is labial pink, barbie pink, has the bands name in marquee lights, and the only image is a woman, cut off at the waist, back arched, stripper heels. It’s crass, it’s boring, it’s violent, it hates women, and it is the thing that seperates me most from rock and roll. I do not know how the music sounds, but it does not even try to change or be new.
It’s Mick Jagger singing casually about rape, and no one really paying attention.
Anthony Easton in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
All the talk downscreen about the ‘uses’ of music got me thinking. Thinking about shelving. Sure, I ‘use’ music as much as the next blogger but the music I actually ‘use’ is pretty much entirely dependent on storage. Being stupidly disorganised and pathologically unable to shelve things correctly acts as a kind of shuffle button, but one that is a bit broken, turning up the same things at certain intervals. You can’t rely on, say, Bert Kaempfert for listening to when you’re in the shower if you don’t know where that particular Bert Kaempfert record might be. Having just too many records, in too many formats, scattered too widely and in no particular order takes that difficult job of choosing music out of my unreliable hands. Whenever I attempt a major or minor reorganisation, often prompted by a DJ set or some whole-hearted response to some useful trend, new things turn up close to the stereo. They will then suffice, give or take, with the floor and two legs of my bed as the pending tray.
In this era of middle-aged men ranting about iPods, how music is stored seems to be very relevant. It looks like some of the attraction of the iPod – although I speak as someone who has never seen one from less than ten feet – is being able to access things quickly and efficiently, whilst allowing yourself to fall into the warm embrace of the random setting. Even without turning this into a muso version of that film about Iris Murdoch, it all seems awfully clinical compared to my romantic mess. My best mate has managed to get all his music on his hard drive and it looks beautiful if not oddly depressing. I realise lack of order is very quaint and cottagey but I like it. I find something very reassuring about not knowing where things are. In fact, it’s part of the reason I persist in buying vinyl. 12″, 7″ and LP lead to disorder: you can’t see their spines properly and, collectively, they’re just too big to take in at once. It’s also part of the reason I don’t particularly like downloads and P2P. Although I do dabble, having things at your fingertips is just too bloody easy. Add this to CDs (especially those in cardboard cases) and MP3s and you have a blissful, uncontrollable mess. Of course, there’s also something heartwarming about seeing records flailing off shelves and carpetting the floor. It’s like the geek equivalent of an artist’s paint splattered jeans.
I suppose this is part of what I actually like about music, its ability to be bigger than me. I like my record collection to be representative, not archival, like a 3D realisation of the blogosphere I suppose. In a non-High Fidelity sense, it owns me rather than vice versa. Disorganisation, my friends, allows practical transcendence. It allows you to reach some happy medium where you can embrace art in the Romantic, gushing sense and still use it like some high-quality instant coffee. Disorganisation is the third way. Or something.
Jim in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
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