This show baffles me a bit. Playing it—and I use ‘playing’ in the loosest sense; this is barely a game at all—involves no skill whatsoever. No intelligence (or, more specifically,no general knowledge), no memory-skills, nothing physical. In fact, the only ability you need to play it is the ability to choose between box x and box y or £x and £y.
This almost total lack of play-along-ability (unless you enjoy picking random boxes, too), for us at home, means that the only reason we’re really watching this is for the tension i.e. mainly, those LAME calls from THE BANKER. Which makes me think: has any recent game show required such a suspension of disbelief as this one? Surely there is NO-ONE the end of that telephone?*
I was puzzled, too, by the fact that these people seem to all know each other., day in, day out. How long are they holed up in D-O-N-D HQ? And surely this calls for a top new reality show (ahem), wherein we all get to see them interacting, bitching, “strategising”.
Oh, and also: Noel Edmonds. (Or is that too easy?)
*Apparently, says my flatmate, one occasion the contestant and not Noel actually spoke to THE BANKER, but I’m not sure I believe this, tbh.
or have the insults and heckles of teenaged hoodlums gone somewhat downhill recently? Here are some, entirely true, examples of abuse hurled at me recently on the streets of Glasgow.
4. “Here, mate, d’ye want a chip?”: This one puzzled me because, contrary to all expectation, it was not followed by a barrage of chips and gravy hurled in my general direction.
3. “Oooh, check out his sexy @rse”: Thanks!
2. 10 year old Ned, with posse of pals: “You got the time, mate?”
Me: “Yeah. Hold on (pause as I check my watch, in which we all wait patiently and silently) Ten past 4.”
10 year old: “Haha, sh1tebag!”
There goes my social conscience!
1. Ned One (to me): “Haw you! Get a haircut”
Ned Two: “Naw, ‘is hairs naw that bad” (thinks) (to me) “Haw, mate, your flies undone”
Ned One: “Aw, yeah, aye. Haha.”
Like many bipedal mammals, I walk. It is an activity that I enjoy and at which, over the years, I have come to display a certain amount of skill—I can now, for example, walk up stairs or steep inclines, where before this required great effort. Even this most simplest of tasks poses some problems, though. Thus, I present PART ONE of a continuing series for the month of November, from me to you, and for all your walking needs:
Stephen’s Walking Etiquette
1. Where possible (cf. 2), on clogged or narrow streets, pick a speed—be it a slow dawdle or a brisk march—and stick to it. Constant, pointless, acceleration and deceleration will only a) add unnecessary time onto your journey, b) aggravate pedestrians behind you with full control of their walking speed or c) make you look like a drunken mentalist or the star of a “hidden camera” televisual programme a la ‘Beadle’s About‘.
1b. If your walk requires the aid of certain props—a child in a pram for example or a shopping trolley leaden down the bags of old scrap—this rule applies tenfold.
2. Overtaking on foot is a perilous as overtaking in one of the new automobiles. This is especially true of walking at night. Often people will take offence to your overtaking them, the suggestion being that your overtaking implies a terrible breed of aggression on your part. A dilemma emerges.
Consider: it is late on a wet Wednesday night, you have missed the last bus and the street stretches ahead of you with just two other people on it. In order that you do not look like some sort of creepy stalker, keeping pace with the student/pensioner/drunk/ in front (P, for short), you have to speed up and overtake. This speeding up, however, will more often that not give P the impression that you are now going to put something sharp into their back and ask for their wallet.
Hence, our dilemma.
The solution here, rather than bellow “Fear not, late-night-pedestrian, I mean you NO HARM”, is to cross the street as necessary and overtake without fear on either part.
Continues….soon.
The most minor of all irritants, picture the scene: I, the consumer, have made my way to the till with my purchase. Having handed over my e.g. tenner, I am waiting for a receipt and some change in return. But how does the cashier present this to me, reader? Why, she forms a precarious CHANGE MOUNTAIN, of course, which she then artlessly balances on top my receipt and/or notes and THRUSTS ONTO MY PALM!
Completely oblivious to the fact that this veritable Everest is out of thumb-securing reach AND that my other hand (of TWO) is occupied with my purchase, this cashier has dropped me right into a dillemma: Do I attempt to make it out of the shop, no doubt spilling coppers all over the floor and, thereby holding up the queue and suffering total embarrassment OR do I drop everything onto the counter and attempt to stuff change into my wallet in a panic, thereby holding up the queue and suffering total embarrassment??
Life is full of such trials. But what is the solution?
Jerry the Nipper on broken hearts, epic soundtracks and the immortal majesty of Baxendale
When your heart is not so much broken as subject to a spectacular compound fracture… When the plans you conscientiously drafted for months now seem as grandiose and daftly ruined as, yes, a cake, left out in, yes, the rain… When you find yourself cut adrift and washed ashore on the out-of-season seaside resort of your mid-30s… Well, when all that happens, there is nothing to do but to work out which pop song is going to soundtrack the latest scene in that long-running fiasco, your life.
As I type this I worry… this must all sound very Hornbyish: Emotionally Distant Man of a Certain Age Seeks Refuge in the Foul Second-Hand Shop of his Heart. But I’ve never been very good at compiling lists, being blokeishly anal about being analytic, stitching up a wound with surgical precision.
It’s just that I feel that so many of us, plugged into scenes and screens before we walked, now make sense of our lives as movies or tv shows, forever being re-edited. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean to suggest epic delusion or monstrous egotism. But I’d like to consider how we now have a sense of memory as not so much a passive recording, but rather something that is actively composed. Entire reels rustle forgotten on the cutting room floor, hoping for reinstated afterlife in expanded editions on undreamt-of media (with voice-overs and complaints from minor characters and notable critics). Directors and writers who handled several runs with immaculate professionalism are ruthlessly dismissed mid-season, their material reworked by ambitious newcomers, their scripts doctored to rude health.
And somewhere amid this frantic post-production, the re-casting and re-shooting, the hopeless, retrospective quest for continuity, The Studio must find time to commission the soundtrack. It’s a serious business: you can’t be slapdash. The daily rushes might be cut to a tune that later proves unavailable or unaffordable, though this can create its own dippy serendipity (think how much poorer the dawning dream of ‘Donnie Darko’ might have been if Richard Kelly had sufficient budget for his first choice of song: INXS’s ‘Never Tear Us Apart’).
Those legendary first seasons, my teenage years, have remained unaltered for a while now. They were directed, for union rates, by Hal Hartley, Bill Forsyth and the Phil Redmond of early ‘Brookside’, and were blessed by a soundtrack from Morrissey, Marr, Tennant and Lowe. You may notice that the film stock was specially chosen by Derek Jarman for its sensitivity to the very pantone blue of the cover of ‘Hatful of Hollow’.
Die-hard snobs maintain that this was classic Nipper and the show should have been quietly discontinued, before it jumped the shark, to live on in syndicated immortality with those perfect episodes of ‘Fawlty Towers’. Many feel that the ‘University Years’, complete with a gimmicky exchange season in the United States, were messy and unsatisfying, and point to the turnover of directors – including disastrous stints by Leo Carax and a young Richard Linklater – as the prime culprit. Nevertheless the soundtrack – a baggy mix of New Order, The Sundays, The Stone Roses, MBV and Mary Margaret O’Hara – continues to sell healthily.
Since then, some would say, the show has lost the plot as definitively as the post-school seasons of ‘Buffy’. But who now would give up those Mike Leigh scenes on the council estates of Stevenage? That gorgeous tracking shot down the Westway on the first drive into London, skillfully cut to Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’? The epically bleak year when the only thing on the soundtrack was the first Portishead album? (In a classic case of internet contrari-wisdom, a breakaway clique of hipsters maintain that the 1998-2000 ‘Café Years’ are as good as it gets, and a significant part of Michael Winterbottom’s wayward oeuvre.)
Critics have dismissed this latest mid-season V2 of melodrama as a typically desparate attempt by a fading show to claw back sliding ratings. But the soundtrack poses its own problem.
The wry, disillusioned classicism of The Shins’ ‘A Call to Apathy’ was an early favourite, though ever since James Mercer took the McDonalds and Gap shilling I fear he may have priced himself out of the market. The rights to ‘Goodbye Lucille No. 1′ were sadly unavailable. That damned Sophia Coppola beat me to ‘More than This’. Stephin Merritt, with the characteristic hauteur of the auteur, has failed to return my calls. And the Scissors Sisters’ ‘Comfortably Numb’ was deemed ‘too ironic’.
So, provisionally, subject to full Studio approval, I have plumped for Baxendale’s ‘I Built this City’. From the chuckles at the back, I realise that this may seem a quixotic choice. Older viewers may remember the band’s guest appearance in a 1999 club scene – much-mocked at the time as a new nadir.
But I continue to love the band, in the tender way you love your own lost causes. They showed up on the toilet-circuit at the fag-end of the nineties, with a handbag full of songs that suggested a Southern Jarvis Cocker had been rummaging through the Pet Shop Boys’ bins. But they put their swag together in a way that was all their own. They raged against the twee retreat of their spacetime, but their pop entryism owed just as much to the eponymous Leo as it did to the Human League. ‘Top Deck’ cheerily promised that they were going to ride a routemaster to the top of the Pepsi Chart. If you triangulate a point between Jonathan Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’, the Smiths’ ‘There is a light’ and the PSB’s ‘Paninaro’ you will find ‘I love the sound of dance music’, neglected and forgotten, waiting for you to kiss life into it. The videos they never made were directed by the Phil Redmond of ‘Hollyoakes’ and scripted by the Kevin Williamson of early ‘Dawson’s’.
And, in my circles at least, they mostly met with the special disdain reserved for failed wannabees. I would see them sometimes around London, with a watery mix of duty and expectation, half hoping they might, like a stopped clock, or Pulp, chime with the times by sheer persistence and accident. They made a defiant anthem from their situation: ‘Ghetto Fabulous’, the only time Belle and Sebastian are likely to be sampled in a song that hymns Rodney Jerkins. And, just when my faith was guttering, they brought out ‘Your Body Needs my Sugar’, which, in a kinder world, was the song Kylie chose to follow up ‘Can’t Get You out of My Head’.
So… not the obvious choice to represent the mix of bitterness, regret and distant hope I need for my soundtrack. But when I came across ‘I Built this City’ - available now on the new Robopop compilation, or, in blatant violation of international copyright laws, from your favourite p2p - I fell in love all over again. Perhaps I’m just being especially sentimental, overpraising an old friend, but right now the track seems perfect for my needs. In its defiance and surprise, it warns us against the temptation of growing prematurely wistful, writing off the possibility of novelty and adventure.
It begins, choppy with funk guitar, in familiar territory: Tim Benton is out of his mind in love with a new girl. But this time he’s not content with the Spector route of building a cathedral of sound around her. He’s going to build a metropolis.
I scattered paving stones
The first night you took me home
I made a street on that first love feeling
I built the airport the following evening.
The song builds, block by block, purposefully piecing together the architecture of desire…
Carparks and traffic lanes
Connecting motorways
Follow the curving of every new bridge
Oh, I created them in your image!
…ascending, through three-part harmonies, into the title and best chorus of their career. Where they used to seem technologically dated, they’re now pro-tooled-up, if not quite in the premier league. This is a sleeker, more competitive Baxendale, but nothing we haven’t heard before.
But the song is driving on, the urgency of the pulse promising that the conceit of the chorus isn’t its final word.
The skyline in summertime
The sunset in your design
How can you say that you didn’t want this?
I stole the blueprints from your office!
Well, by now the fanfare of the chorus is less confident, not so much a proud boast as a reprimand. And then, as you listen, with your own heightened sense of the deceit of desire, keenly attuned to the potholes lying unmended in what seemed such a smooth road to the future, Alex Mayor, previously a stylish but underused player in Team Baxendale – in the way that Eric Cantona was underused at Leeds United – storms the microphone, seemingly channelling the livid falsetto of Curtis Mayfield and playing a guitar that hasn’t been touched since an early Benitez/Madonna session, and sings.
Don’t tell me that my highrise has to end
That you’re never going to be my only friend
Don’t try to tear it down to the floor
Cos it’s happened before
I’m going to build this city again.
It is – I’m afraid you’re going to have to take my word on this – a stunning moment. Not so much a band moving up a gear as discovering a gear they never even suspected they had. And as a private pop moment, happening at a certain time, in a certain mood, to a certain person, it’s IT, the reason we all keep buying and filing and downloading and listening: a piece of secret public art, out there, floating around on the airwaves and on the file servers, waiting for you to complete it, so it can read your mind and – for a moment at least – frame the very possibilities of life.
This is heady stuff, and Tim seems a bit taken aback by it himself. So much so, that he’s moved to take a breather in a classic Baxendale spoken interlude (no one since Oakey has carried these off with such rueful aplomb).
I’ll meet you at the top of the tallest building, with the sunshine on my back. I’ll be working hard to make up for that interest that I’ve lacked. Oh it’s such a boy thing, focussing on something you can see, instead of giving back the good things that you gave to me. Oh, I’ve built so many cities that have collapsed into the mud, and sung so many songs for girls I never understood, but you come up here and tell me that you’re only passing through, but I… I built this city for you.
And here’s the final melody in the song’s jarred harmony: after the pride, the anger and the denial, right here at the calm eye of the song is a terrible loneliness, the eerieness of the financial district early Sunday morning or the evacuation simulation. The relationship planned and blueprinted and built… and then deserted. A ghost town of the heart. In this part of the city, Baxendale are the number one pop group of all time, but only because I’m the only one still here, the only one still listening.
But the song can’t stop here, as much as it’s run out of fuel and hope, just as the endless agonising reel at the raw end of a relationship doesn’t stop when you’ve ticked off all those classic stages of grief. All the hurt and anger and pride and loss just have to keep whirling around, none of your moods believing in each other. It can only wind back on itself, revolving like a locked groove you’re powerless to lift the needle from. The only real way it can end is in a slow fade, drifting out until… Until it’s magically superceded by new song, a song that really understands you, that was waiting all this time for the perfect moment to teleport into your life and onto your definitive soundtrack.
I’m confident that my endorsement will be just the thing to give Baxendale that final push into the stardom they deserve. And I’m equally confident that there is still life in this old show, despite the doleful rumours that it won’t be recommissioned, that the actors and situations are tired, that the lead has seen better days. There are always new seasons, new stories, new songs. And if a romantic lead feels typecast and walks out for a better role? Well, there are always spin-offs.
WORDS AND MUSIC
A HISTORY OF POP IN THE SHAPE OF A CITY
BLOOMSBURY, £12.99, ISBN: 0747557780
If an ideal pop journal were to give me 1,864 words to take a tour of Paul Morley’s new ‘history of pop in the shape of a city’, there might be any number of routes I could take.
a) I could write the latest chapter in my ongoing essay on the embarrassment of fandom, titled, in the fashion of Nicholson Baker’s ‘U & I’, ‘Em’n'Me’. Following chapters where I creep-out Morley on an LBC phone-in in the 1980s, write him a betrayed-fan letter about his column in ‘Esquire’ in the 90s and interview him following publication of his memoir in 2000 (only to fail to write the interview up), this might be the chapter where we have a tiff.
b) I could chart a list of co-ordinates in the irresistible Morleyian cartography, locating W&M as the missing link between Chuck Eddy’s ‘Accidental Evolution of Rock and Roll’ and David Thomson’s ‘Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes’; between Camden Joy’s ‘The Last Rock Star Book or Liz Phair: a rant’ and Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Post Card’; between Lester Bangs’ ‘Blondie’ and Chris. Marker’s ‘Immemory’ or between Charlie Gillett’s ‘The Sound of the City’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Labyrinths’.
c) I could write a dutiful consumer report sensibly explaining how W&M is an idiosyncratic history of avant-pop from Satie to Kylie via John Cage, Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, which you might like if you were already a fan of the music writing of Richard Meltzer and David Toop.
All of these journeys would be more or less scenic, but I’m not sure how useful they would be, in the context of this particular journal, this particular conversation. And because W&M is about, among other things, negotiating the exhausting vertigo of The Arbitrary, usefulness might be our best guide. So I’ve resolved to spend my words thinking about the point of writing pop histories.
W&M begins with two tracks: Alvin Lucier’s obscure ‘I am sitting in a room’ and Kylie’s lucid ‘Can’t get you out of my head’. Morley’s history is the tale of falling down – or digging – the timetunnel that connects the two.
Well, you might lose patience with this story right here: it’s clear it isn’t going to be any straightforward, plausibly causal trip down memory lane. More like being taken for a ride by an errant cabbie via the spooked suburbs of some joker’s soundhoard. If we’re used to the idea these days that histories make sense through genre (and pop histories, from ‘The Sound of the City’ to ‘The People’s Music’ most often partake of tragedy or elegy), then Morley is making a pitch for sci-fi. This is a story that wants to go down rabbit-holes, through looking-glasses, via wormholes to possible futures – pop history as written by Lewis Carroll, Phil Dick and Steve Erickson.
Except it’s not so far-fetched. The best review of W&M would be if some clever bastard tracked down Lucier’s 1969 recording and mashed it up into a 21st century deconstructed Kylie instrumental. Don’t the best bootlegs make vivid what is implied in the most interesting criticism: that meaning or value is less a question of weighing up, marking and filing, but rather… making unlikely introductions across space-time and genre, seeing what chafes, what rubs up the right way, what sparks fly? Maybe if such a bootleg existed it might make clear whether W&M is formulating a genuinely fruitful equation or is just so much dry humping.
While we can enjoy even the most frivolous bootlegs for their daft novelty or disposable cheek, Morley has to gamble on our investment in his story, our suspension of disbelief, for over 300 pages. So he spends a lot of time talking up the tale he is about to tell, trailing a mysterioso mix of murder, magic and the weather, ‘an adventure in sound, in history, in love, in legend’. Our establishing shot finds Kylie, pretty much as she is styled in the video to ‘Can’t get you of my head’, cruising down an autobahn of dreams towards her – and our – destiny. It’s a classic noir beginning: you might think of Janet Leigh, full of high hopes at the start of ‘Psycho’, Oedipa Maas swept along into the paranoia of San Narciso or even lovely Rita’s route down Mulholland Dr.
You might… and you might be disappointed. From a provocative premise, the story takes a turn as listless as its chapter headings (’Chapter 2: The journey continues’, ‘Chapter 3: The journey continues, ‘Chapter 4: The journey continues’). The compelling knots of narrative are smoothed over and the book becomes a kind of blog of recorded and unrecorded time, as linear as a motorway, as inevitable as teleology. To illustrate how up to her ears she is in history, Morley reveals a tattoo on the nape of the Kylieneck, a microdot in which is inscribed the history of words and music, from the first rumblings of the trogs to the release of ‘Now… 50′. Kylie meets some interesting folks along the way (John Cage, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Kraftwerk, Merzbow), there are some good jokes (1963: the White Stripes release ‘Elephant’) and there are some marvellous set-pieces (Morley on Tangerine Dream, on Simon Fuller, on ‘Metal Machine Music’), but the story lacks lustre, grows thin with list. If this essay were to have a soundtrack, the song for this paragraph would be St Etienne’s ‘Like a Motorway’: ‘dull, grey and long’.
It dawns on us that the terminus of Kylie’s teleocruise is Popopolis, as we now dream it: an eternal city which has forgotten how to forget, where all that was solid has fractured into frisky pixels, where someone is inventing postmicrohouse at the same time as someone else is discovering Son House, a city where geography is history and history is geography. Where the tunnel between Kylie and Alvin is a curious tube ride across town rather than cryptohistorical causality.
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