The (rather wonderful) Uncut Bowie special has a 1983 NME interview where he says “some of it makes me cringe a bit, but he obviously came round to it.

http://www.bcb-board.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=100864

Also, in local news, a quick FUCKING HELL!!! Lady Gaga is headlining the Radio One 1 Big Weekend, from Carlisle! Foo Fighters, Tinie Tempah, Plan B and Nicole Scherzinger also performing. Unfuckingbelievable. Hands down the biggest gig in the locality that I can think of, probably ever – though my memory doesn’t go back much beyond 1990.

I agree completely that the non-league scene is far more pleasant. Eastbourne Borough, as has been pointed out, is really just a sports club house with a wee footy ground next to it. The club house, of course, contains a bar whereas the ground does not. Lewes FC, our Sussex rivals, on the other hand, does have a fully-functioning drinker on site as do many other clubs. And there is not the slightest hint of trouble.

Rosie hints on Barrow’s travelling support and it is indeed magnificent. I once saw them at Lewes for a midweek game and there were about forty of them bouncing around cheering their guys on. These bloody Bluebirds, alas, definitely have the Indian sign over Borough. But for me, the latest twatting we got from them saw the Swede and a buddy viewing this from the “Legends Bar”, a result of a Swedish win of a raffle at a previous game. Since I had provided the ticket, my mucker provided the transport and it was thus glug-glug-glug for a thirsty Swede in a delightful little box, which contained about ten patrons, SKY sports on the wall and a smily old girl behind the bar. We lost two nil but by the time I was tipped back into my bungalow, I was well on the way to not carry a flying foxtrot.

I’ve been to Brunton Park three times with Chelsea, btw. Two draws and a defeat. On one occasion, I stayed in Dumfries overnight and I had a bit of drama persuading the local plod that I was travelling north and did not want to get bundled on the London train with all the rest of the herberts.

Happy Days!

When Carlisle finally got relegated into the Conference (after years of trying/near misses), I think most of us quite enjoyed it. Of course, we wanted to get promoted and get back into the Football League, but it was fun going to places that we’d never been before (due to the old one up, one down system between the League and the Conference more than anything else) and the fans of the opposing teams, with one or two odd exceptions, were generally all really great – there was no real sense of animosity like you get with some in the League. To an extent, I think we all wished that the atmosphere from those away games could be replicated in the League.

Shame for Eastbourne Borough – I’d agree that geographical location is a real inhibiting factor; even being fully pro, Carlisle can’t get some people to go up there and it’s a real bitch. Here’s hoping you bounce back in short order.

I did once have a dream that Linus, the UK riot grrl act, was actually a new Man Utd winger who looked a bit like Gary Bailey.

Alas my heroes, poor old Eastbourne Borough, are about to fall off the coupon. No more will James Alexander Gordon concern himself with our results after the playing of the historical “Sports Report” military march. It will be a terrible day when relegation is finalised. “CAB TO BEACHY HEAD FOR THE SWEDE!”

Come on you ‘Leafe!

As for “Mondays”, presumably the repeat of the first verse was cut from the album version to make the single more radio-friendly in length, and these days the album version is easier for radio to get hold of.

I had a peculiar dream last night in which I was at a Rats gig and they had a power cut just as they were about to do “Mondays” and “Rat Trap” as the encore, so everyone was slinking off grumbling just as my alarm clock went off. No doubt the strange effect of reading this site!

One hit that springs to mind, though not a no.1, is the Four Tops’ Walk Away Renee. Radio always plays a version which I first heard on the Super Hits comp in the early 80s – it drove me nuts because there’s an intrusive piano pounding all the way through it that isn’t on the original single. Still drives me nuts! Lose that freakin piano!!

Rat Trap is similar – maybe even the same. Again it’s an incredible memory you’ve got about the “pus and grime ooze” lines, and you’re correct they were never played. But was the butchering done at radio or was the 7″ itself so much shorter? I’ve got the 7 inch, but not to hand. I’m fascinated.

Unfortunately, I’m less sure about “I Don’t Like Mondays” – though it’s true about the competing versions, the radio version we got to know is on enough various artists compilations for the radio stations to pick up the original edit.

More generally, there was definitely a kind of a run on baroque but very major-key/diatonic pop anthems after the Buggles album, and both UP and R&J seem to me to me to be part of that.

There was also a bit of run in 1980-1981, perhaps especially down under, of songs about people in the streets, people laughing. A band called Mi-Sex had a song in 1980 called People (you can track it down on youtube) that has this as its theme. Rupert Hine had a song that was a decent hit down under early in 1981 called Misplaced Love (also trackdownable on youtube) whose somewhat haunting chorus is something like ‘I wonder if some joker laughs when he sees us, when he sees all our misplaced love’. I don’t want to accuse Bowie and Queen of theft in any of these cases, but there was a musical climate in common that UP bears the traces of.

Anyhow, UP is a pretty jolly nifty record – 8/10 easy from me, more on the right day. It was brilliantly used by Spike Jonze in his trailer for his movie Adaptation (possibly the best movie trailer ever made – the film itself could never live up to it. If you don’t know the trailer, go ASAP to youtube and check it out, you won’t regret it!)

Yet, bizarrely, it does work. They wave goodbye to the assumed warmth of the seventies and dread the forthcoming cold rationalism of the eighties – or is this necessarily renewed with every decade as a result of rosy retrospection? The singers spit out disjointed memes – “Burns a building down,” “Splits a family in two,” “Watching some good friends screaming let me out!,” all as indelibly 1981 as “Ghost Town” in its slightly reserved penthouse way – but the group work hard to maintain musical tension and release, and thereby provoke by far the most passionate of Bowie’s four number one vocal performances. He is straight, Freddie the foil, though really they are two barely differing degrees of camp; but Queen’s inherent monolithic tendencies fit Bowie nearly perfectly, and in turn he uses their tricks to his advantage, builds them up and makes them seem even bigger, and perhaps slightly meaningful.

Thus in the hushed, hymn-like bridge, Bowie conspires with Freddie in the corner to stammer out: “Turn away from it all like a blind man” before Bowie forces Mercury’s face to face the camera, their listeners, ourselves, with his agonised “Keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed and torn.” Mercury immediately responds with his tripartite “WHY?” wail, and as Roger Taylor’s drums thunder behind both of him, Bowie screams “Insanity laughs, under pressure we’re BREAKING!”

Then the major key sun bursts in to flood the room as Freddie regally rides the rainbow with his “Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?” and retreats in an echoing “give love” before both Bowie and Mercury, in low key, take the song to its final climax, building up gradually to the catharsis of “This is our last chance! This is our last dance! This is ourselves…under pressure.”

The last line turns into the original whisper and the piano fades out to repeated finger snaps; perhaps a warning of a ticking bomb hidden in the drawer of indifference. With “Under Pressure” both Queen and Bowie resolve each other (because what they individually don’t possess, the other has in spades), lay down their warning to their generation not to let everything go…and then vanish into the corporate eighties of “Let’s Dance” and “Radio Ga Ga,” their important work largely done, their ghosts already being ground into the machine.

“a stunning strike from the Queen frontman whose over-the-top goal celebration (“why can’t we give love, give love, give love”) just prolongs the joy.”

that I raced through reading it.

After reading the comments, I re-read the review and was struck by how like the song it was. Grand, sweeping, epic – and I mean this in a good way – ultimately inconsequential, as pop music so often is.

I’ll be back, for sure.