Length: 57:45 Played: 1738

Update: Chart with groups info filled in

Thankfully that passed — if a little too slowly — and it became The Old Suffolk Punch once again. A reliable if unremarkable Greene King pub. Well I do have one remark, though I imagine it’s about Greene King food menus chain-wide: The Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding wrap with gravy (and chips). Behold:

Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud ... in a wrap

From the menu my colleagues and I were imagining a bread wrap around slices of beef and some tiny Yorkshire puds, but it was probably the IPA getting in the way of the obvious interpretation. A flat Yorkshire pud-style batter pancake was the wrap. Brilliant. You pick it up by the batter wrap with the beef and horseradish sauce trapped inside and dip it in the bowl of gravy. NOM, NOM, and three times NOM.

Well it was new to me. This update on a classic, I can get behind. And in to my tum.

Pop music’s not gonna die / It just has no direction / We need a plan of action

But what was their plan of action? The accompanying track Eurodisco (a worry about pop stagnating into inward-looking genres) had its best mix by Stuart Price — an Erasure-ish version that omits Manda’s vocals. Where has Manda gone? Price went on to be the main producer of Madonna’s 2005 Confessions album and the non-more Eurodisco Abba-sampling “Hung Up”.

Give me 80′s Madonna / (I just want some personality) / Give me action and drama

Meanwhile Bis – so the offifical story goes – broke up, reformed, formed under another name, broke up again. Ten years later, it’s the late 00′s. While Manda Rin supposedly makes badges for indie acts, we finally have a made-to-order, all-action all-drama, 80s Madonna in Lady Gaga.

I’m not saying Mr Price created Lady Gaga as a frankingstein creation out of Madonna’s DNA and the abnormal brain of a member of Bis. That would be ridiculous. I’m saying that the moral of the story is, don’t fret, pet, and let them find their own way. It could be that the acts of a pop commentator is contributing to genre-stagnation. But despite well intentioned interference, Pop will find a way.

You’ve played the freeform Line Rider, right? (And if not, this truly is the best double-dose flash game day of the advent for you.) It’s been given a tiny festive makeover on the original site, but nothing like SNOW LINE. Help Santa collect all the presents. Easy. And no drugs content at all.

HAPPY HOLIDAY AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

WarBear Missions Start with Mission 1, but it’s all good. Use the ‘quick start’ button to skip the intro.

Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart (Highest UK chart position: 13)

OK, so misanthrope is overstating it – he was a joy to drink with. It was only the constant skim reading of the ‘off-beat’ yet actually fashionable literature of pain and suffering, Ballard Hesse Gogol, and his own emotional insecurity that led him to vandalism – to take a watercolour chocolate-box confection and piss all over it. BLACK IT’S ALL BLACK. SO COLD, ALWAYS SO FUTILE!

Curtis, we know, was not to allow himself to mature as a writer, to progress beyond imitating the authors he worshipped and alluding to books, like Atrocity Exhibition, that he would never get around to reading. Not that any of this makes LWTUA less enjoyable on its own terms. Musically it’s paralysingly lovely, much like its antecedent though along a different axis of appreciation. Lyrically it’s a list song for Goths, “We Didn’t Start The Fire… But We Could Easily Have Done So And Maybe You Should Consider That When Your Loved Ones Are Sleeping”. But it is a more direct and honest sounding lyric — a step above a lot of his work that comes off like the internal narration of Batman, all brooding hurt, ‘the city is full of filth’ and fist-shaking at the injustice of the world.

Scooter – Ramp! (The Logical Song) (Highest UK chart position: 2)

They accentuated the positive “When i was young…beautiful magical” first half of the verse both by helium-voice ‘chipmunking’ of the vocal to kick things off distinctively and by literally eliminating the negative second half of amateur-emo in favour of bellowed motivational sound-bites. “GOOD MORNING!… are you ready…Peace, Love and Unity” and so on like Sportacus’s novelty alarm-clock stuck on ‘pumped’.

Many people dislike the enforced jollity of an aerobics instructor — the constant Up rubs the wrong way against their hard-earned Down. “A-and it’s all chemically enhanced and fake, right?” Such people are miserable, or idiots, or both. The joy here is as enforced as Joy Division’s misery, and is as genuinely felt. Scooter really do want you to have a good time all the time. It’s just the constant Joker’s grin that makes the sceptic presume idiocy. But The Joker’s grin hides an unhinged and eclectic intelligence bent on thievery on a grand scale.

Compared to Scooter, the Brinks-Mat job was a second-rater. Their appetite for mainstream and arcane music casts them as the stock villain who robs the world’s most famous museums of their priceless works of arts for the love of it. The Thieving Magpie with ADHD, they blur the distinction between cover, sample and homage, taking from folks songs and rock operas about dragons and lifting riffs and lyrics from films (the 60s Miss Marple films), rap (Talib Kweli), indie (Blur) and techno (Kraftwerk, RMB). Most head-spinning of all, they have based TWO of their songs on one track by UK 80s indie band Stump:

Seriously. Stump. Dude. Most often of all they swipe work from established master thieves The K, The L, The F and the -ology — a none-more appropriate appropriation used in this track. Scooter are the stick-up boys, the Omar Littles of pop, taking from the dope-hook pushers and working by their own paradoxical code of honour. In Ramp! they took a sad song and made it Harder Better Faster Stronger.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better…

– TS Eliot

Length: 59:09 Played: 2108

Length: 58:59 Played: 2987

Length: 59:51 Played: 2301

Length: 59:09 Played: 1829

An update on Kat’s work-in-progress, “Hollyoaks The Musical”, takes the Lollards from overture to immature, around Japanese digi-musicals and South Park, and the musical flops of Superman and Carrie. Chess makes them wonder if perhaps there’s any mileage in a musical based on the works of Abba. Hmm.

Length: 59:51 Played: 1251

Hotstreak ‘Bodywork’
Adam Ant ‘Goody Two Shoes’
PJ & Duncan AKA ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble’
Sun Ra ‘Love In Outer Space’
Toby Keith ‘I Want To Talk About Me’

Length: 58:28 Played: 1842

I’ve not, so far, seen people making the complementary complaint about cBeebies ‘Big Cook, Little Cook’. A long description of the show can be found on an old post on Richard Herring’s blog, but in short the eponymous cooks have to cook for a character from nursery rhymes or fairy tales (Snow White, Old Macdonald). The problem is that as a show meant to inspire children to cook, the options are limited to recipes involving mashing together cottage cheese, crushed up crackers, toast and food colouring, with specially shaped-cutters (stars, fish, etc) to theme it up a bit. Though there is some oven-action it’s limited as they have to keep reminding you to “Get your adult helper to do this as the oven is hot hot hot!”.

So here we have uninspired cooking by a couple of height-mismatched fools for a fabulous-character from myth/fable WHO YOU NEVER SEE. The cooks just get a nice message through the café hatch saying “I loved my mashed banana sandwiches cut in the shape of the Empire State Building, love Kong”.

FORMAT SWAP

If Heston’s childish-wonder-meets-Wilf-Lunn-science approach to cooking can make soup and a magical drink straight out of the pages of Alice in Wonderland, why not give HIM the fairy-tale guests. Leave Big Cook Ben and Little Cook Small to stuff their blue cottage-cheese sculptures into the faces of Kim and Aggie or whoever the hell else they dredge up.

Another difference will be that as a lot of the Heston show was in the presentation — the theatre — of presenting the food to the diners, the fabulous characters have to actually appear via CGI/animatronics. Even better, that means the celebrities wouldn’t appear on BCLC. They just leave their little card of thanks: ‘Food is nice – Matthew Fort’.

Orchestra Pie and the ancient art of the list, old recipes ( vintagecookbooktrials.wordpress.com) and superstitions.

Historical records: ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’, Rosemary Clooney, Candide and Noël Coward.

Length: 59:53 Played: 1144

“Bring home a dime, Make mine a 99″

No. It IS total nonsense. Awesome. It’s also the KLF’s last new single proper — although with the KLF, this is a blurry-line to define as the song is material recycled from not just other artists but also previous KLF productions. After this they did re-release a version of 3AM eternal with Extreme Noise Terror, performed with ENT at the Brits, and that was (sort of) that. (Full and proper details in William Shaw’s Select article from July 1992.)

Here’s THAT ToTP performance (via ToTP2 sadly):

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F0EsFv1M8lM

Tammy bless her. But It was all about the ice-cream van, first seen with my personal favourite It’s Grim Up North (only no 81 in out top 100), and the dancing ice-cream cones with mickey-mouse gloves (for it is THEY). Isn’t it? Read nothing more into it.

(The context of the question, best forgotten, sadly is from plugging an unusually shit and unncecessary book by a DJ of similar qualities.)

Pop cultural candidate #1 has to be Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Demons’ which features a finished LHC (as did Brown imitating ‘Decipher’ by Stel Pavlou). I have not read it, but it sounds particularly bonkers — I look forward to the forthcoming film. CERN even have a page for A&D fans explaining the reality. But that (appears) to be largely about a large bomb — it’s not the source of end-of-world-ism.

It’s got a sort of negative echo of Y2K about it all — those who know that there is little (i.e nothing) to worry about, are actually going out of their way to stress that this is the case, as it might lose them funding. The Y2K fear and uncertainty was, by contrast, a great source of cash.

It also feels like — finally an end of the world i can relate to! A bang not a whimper! A Statham/Cage blockbuster firecracker of doomscience instead of the media drip-feed namby-pamby melting ice caps and ‘won’t someone think of the polar bears’ editorials. Like boiling frogs, we can only get agitated when the threat is instant but fictional, not incremental and more likely.

And here’s another interesting trace — a serious article in a proper science journal — going back to 1999. Will relativistic heavy-ion colliders destroy our planet? The answer is no, but look at the step up in downloads of the PDF around 2004/2005. What happened then?

Like the physicists, I have no final answers, only more questions. Such as: assuming there really were people who thought there was a threat — what did they think the scientists working at, and presumably more knowledgeable of, the LHC were thinking? “Oh at least it’ll be over quickly for me”

What I want to know is, how will they replicate the experimental results? What if this piece of apparatus is faulty? 10 years in, they get an interesting result — “We think we saw a Higgs Boson but we can’t be sure… we’re going to need another 10 billion pounds plz”. Or, finally they do catch site of the great white shark whale god particle: “… we’re going to need a bigger colllider”

And when the Larger Hadron Collider was turned on it spoke of the existence of the one that would come after it — the Largest Hadron Collider. And with Humanity’s help, it would design one for us…

*OK, Cracked.com’s “Scientific experiments most likely to end the world” made me laff.

WATCH THIS VIDEO. It’s a LOVE STORY. It’s like REMAINS OF THE DAY 2.0. The greatest love story ever blogged. erm, set against an epic backdrop of the deep south and the american civil war CSS standards compliancy and web-browser wars.

However, to make the your perhaps-momentous discovery more possible, you may need preparing.

If you have not heard Stina’s voice it’s because you’ve never seen an Ariston washing machine advert, and it’s her voice that could be the deal breaker. There are songs you cannot persuade people they will like, and often it’s because of the vocal. If a voice is like nails on a blackboard to you, you won’t get past that. Similarly if it’s like being repeatedly limply patted on the shoulder by a wet teddybear, you’re going to get fed up quite quickly. Still, I made an effort to like Neil Young and Morrisey, so you could have a go with winsome Stina, eh? She’s Swedish — you love Swedish pop right?

In a way this is the song to get past her twee etiolated voice. Like the little star, her voice might feel initially weak, but it’s got a hidden and precise power, and it’s set among such glory — contrasting simple and luxurious instrumentation, a rising-bird-song clarinet melody and a tasteful amount of latin chanting. Well, it is a eulogy — and there should be generous room for tasteful at a funeral. The lyrics supposedly recall a friend who killed themselves (those crazy Swedes), which explains the extreme bitter-sweet feeling it conveys.

The song is from an album of equally moody jazz-blues soaked and sullen songs that manage to avoid being passive-aggressively ‘sensitive’. Her other albums have varied in tone a lot — she’s done dreampop guitar-noise, collaborated with Mew and Vangelis (the washing machine ad!), and had Brett Suede guesting on one of her own tracks. So if this piques your interest and you want more, you’ll find she’s got quite a range. Just not as a vocalist.

Man I love her voice.

The success of 2 Tone was rapid — their first release, by founding band The Specials, had only been in the summer gone of 79 when the band ‘The Selecter’ didn’t yet exist. They were the label’s first manufactured band, put together from Coventry’s ska scene and given the name of that first release’s (ambiguously attributed) instrumental B-side.

It’s a template pop-ska song, all insistent speed-reggae hooks that get you up and dancing. Elbows and heels. Fun fun fun. Not the overly conscious genre of ska associated with this wave. But it’s not ‘nutty’ Madness either which luckily means it endures beyond adolescense, and (well done them) gets into FT’s legendary top 100 tracks of all time. So listen again. This is the ska version of Tina Charles’ “I Love To Love” — their respective babies just love to dance, and that’s just not enough for a relationship, now is it gents? And you don’t want to be dumped by (Selecter vocalist) Pauline — she’s been in The Bill and everything.

Listen to a recorded live performance on Last FM
Articles on 2 Tone

Anyway… COME DINE WITH ME. Last night’s was more than awesome. This show has grown — a day-time staple, it’s gathered celebrity editions, and now it comes in a new format. No longer a short show every day of the week covering 5 people — they now compress 4 people in to a one hour show. It’s a sensation. Well for something that’s come from day-time. (It even has a rip off version on the beeb hosted by Simon Rimmer who seems to be trying to be on telly every day of the week for an entire year.)

But then having established a regular format, with often witty and interesting people who occasionally come to verbal blows, it goes HAYWIRE. Remember that first edition of Wife Swap with the foul mouthed racist woman — it was well train wreck. This was much the same but written by Mike Leigh.

The point of the show, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is to impress strangeres with your culinary skill and hosting ability. Remember that.

We’re in Newcastle. (oh the shame of it all). And we have (mis)matched up a pompous Tory with aspirations to become an MP, a harpy, an oversize child and a quiet studious looking woman. Just guess who won? Go on. Run with that prejudice.

The Tory boy is Brian Moore. No not that one. This one reminded me of a less suave David Van Day. Throw away lines that were painful. Dinner-party question: “If you had a thousand pounds to spend, what would you get?” “Well I do have a thousand pounds…”.

For some reason Brian is making a point about cheap super markets and bought everything from Netto – intending to wow everyone with the sumptious 3 course meal and then reveal his secret. But he can’t keep his powder dry and blurts it out before the dessert. Which is a shame as the dessert is a killer – half bananas and tinned mandarin segments on a plate. Oh with squirty cream on it. “Check the website for the recipe” says the narrator (one of the ‘writers’ in Moving Wallpaper).

Brian does not get on with Brenda. Brenda has already explained, over the first meal of the week, that red-meat ‘isn’t digested it just rots inside you’. She later reveals that Brian’s meal has made her sick. A meal that she was augmenting with enormous quantities of Tabasco. Oh and extra fried chillies made for her on request. And she continues to mention this while they are eating another meal.

Brenda didn’t really like anything, managed to make faces at all the food presented to her, yet actually produced… well a very ordinary meal. The most uncomfortable meal I have ever seen on reality television. No on television full stop. Scripted drama has nothing on it. I might have to rewatch it to transcribe some of the exchanges. The studious lady and the overgrown child shrink into the background — ‘let it be over soon’ all over their faces. “Phenomenal” as Brian says. Repeatedly.

The drunk scoring and bitching in the cab on the way back from the dinner was just unbalanced. I actually had to stop watching at one point, from the pain.

Perhaps you have to have seen other editions to see how unusual and agonizing it all was. Nobody here seemed out to make any effort — like an extra filler episode with people pulled off the street at the last minute. These people had not thought “I have a killer signature dish and my parties are legendary, i should go on that telly show! Now where’s the application form”

The winner was the studious lady (Rebecca).