Don’t let any perfectly sensible distaste for indie music let my terminology here deter you. I’m using it to collect a few creators I want to mention who can’t be pegged into a genre easily, perhaps more akin to modern underground comics than anything else.
Daniel Clowes gained fame when Ghost World was made into the best comic book movie ever. His work generally focusses on odd outsider characters, alienated and often kind of grotesque, written and drawn with a cool clarity, with a huge enthusiasm for pop culture. I find his work compelling and often shocking (he edges towards horror at times), with genuinely memorable characters. As well as Ghost World, any of his collections (mostly previously serialised in his Eightball comic) are worth reading - I’d particularly recommend David Boring and Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron.
… read on …
(#428, 18th November 1978)
“Rat Trap” is billed - in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less - as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it - my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite expectation. Geldof tore up a picture of John’n'Liv on Top Of The Pops, didn’t he? So “Rat Trap” - great title, Sir B - was surely something tight and angry, a sliver of nimble menace in the shadows of 1978’s poptopian monsterhits.
Five minutes later my expectation had turned to shock and laughter. Whatever I’d anticipated it wasn’t this: five woeful minutes of scraggy street-rock pastiche, Born To Run with the melted-down Crystals records replaced by stolen chip fat. Far from the first punk No.1, this risible track sounded like an early warning of one of indie’s less palatable side-effects: a deadly combination of overreach and the feeling of virtuous entitlement that being (relatively) outside the mainstream would lend to mediocre bands.
… read on …
I managed to avoid all of the Olympics yesterday. It seems a little insensitive to say it, but thanks Russia and Georgia for pushing swimming champs and posh horse riders off of the front pages of even the tabloids.
Of course if Tanya was here she would also be praising the Russians, though I imagine on the spurious grounds that this international incident was sparkeds by the fact that the B-52’s and R.E.M. all hail from Georgia. Her grasp of geo-politics was always shaky.
OLYMPIC MINUTES SO FAR: FIVE
Site powered by